SOURCE: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Matryona's Home" in Solzhenitsyn, Oliver & Boyd, 1973, pp. 28-49

In the following excerpt, Moody analyzes One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, comparing it with "Matryona's Home. " He concludes that the works "together . . . provide a picture of goodness and truth at the mercy of evil and falsehood."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been described by different critics as both an old-fashioned writer and a genuine innovator. Paradoxically, both of these views are correct. In the early 1930s, when his fame in the Soviet Union was at its height, the official aesthetic of socialist realism, with its emphasis on optimism and education, was beginning to give way to a more candid and exploratory approach to Soviet life. Writers were being admitted to those dark areas of social and political evil which they had hitherto been obliged to by-pass. They were acquiring...