Contesting the paradigms of de-Stalinization: readers' responses to 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' was published in the literary journal Novyi mir in November 1962 and provoked excited debate across the Soviet press in subsequent months. In this article, Miriam Dobson uses unpublished letters to the editor to examine readers' responses to this work of literature and as a means to explore attitudes towards the process of de-Stalinization more broadly. While many historians have tended to see the Nikita Khrushchev period as a battleground between liberals and conservatives, these letters suggest a rather more complex dialogue over the legacies of Stalinism. They show that even those readers who embraced the de-Stalinizing rhetoric of the Twenty-Second Party Congress found Solzhenitsyn's text highly disturbing. Distressed by the appearance of camp slang and 'vulgar' language within a literary work, readers took the opportunity to express their concerns over the large numbers of criminals released from the gulag, rising crime levels, and the perceived threat they presented to 'respectable' Soviet culture.