Editing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (section)

=== After prison ===

After [[Khrushchev's Secret Speech]] in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and [[Rehabilitation (Soviet)|exonerated]]. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his [[Nobel Prize]] acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1970/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041204155242/http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1970/ |url-status=dead |archive-date= 4 December 2004 |year=1970 |title=Laureates |work=Literature |publisher=Nobel prize |access-date=14 February 2010 }}</ref>

In 1960, aged 42, Solzhenitsyn approached [[Aleksandr Tvardovsky]], a poet and the chief editor of the ''Novy Mir'' magazine, with the manuscript of ''[[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]''. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of [[Nikita Khrushchev]], who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a [[Stalinism|Stalinist]] in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."<ref>{{Citation | last = Benno | first = Peter | year = 1965 | chapter = The Political Aspect | editor1-first = Max | editor1-last = Hayward | editor2-first = Edward L | editor2-last = Crowley | title = Soviet Literature in the 1960s | place = London | page = 191}}</ref> The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit.<ref name=Wachtel2013>{{cite journal|last=Wachtel|first=Andrew|year=2013|title=''One Day'' – Fifty years later|journal=Slavic Review|volume=72|issue=1|pages=102–117|doi=10.5612/slavicreview.72.1.0102|jstor=10.5612/slavicreview.72.1.0102|s2cid=164632244}}{{limited access}}</ref> In the 1960s, while Solzhenitsyn was publicly known to be writing ''Cancer Ward'', he was simultaneously writing ''The Gulag Archipelago''. During Khrushchev's tenure, ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "[[Matryona's Place|Matryona's Home]]", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.

''[[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]'' brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West.  It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of [[Russian literature|Soviet literature]] since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw, exposing works came to an end.<ref name=Wachtel2013 />