SOURCE: “Western Critics (I): To 1973,” in Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, Regnery Gateway, 1993, pp. 46-71.

In the following excerpt, Ericson discusses the publication and critical reception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by both Russian and Western readers, noting the difficulty in separating the novel's political and literary attributes.

From Great Britain, in 1974: “Solzhenitsyn, I am afraid, is not one of us. That is to say he is not a liberal. I don’t know what exactly he is, but whatever it is it is most peculiar.”¹ From West Germany, in 1975: “He is no liberal. Let us make no mistake about that.”² From the United States, in 1974: “… he is not the ‘liberal’ we would like him to be.”³

It was not always so. It was an exaggeration to say, referring to the date of Solzhenitsyn’s forced exile from his homeland, “Until February 13, 1974, Western opinion...