I have read One Day before, in Estonian, I think, but couldn’t get hold of an Estonian copy this time, so I ended up reading it in English.

One Day describes one day in the life of a prisoner in a Siberian forced labour camp in the 1950s. It’s important and worth reading mostly for its historical value. It’s in the same league as Anne Frank’s diary: a matter-of-fact inside report of a horrible life that affected millions.

The gulag is cold, depressing and hardscrabble. All of life is reduced to acquiring food, staying warm, and avoiding punishment. But the human spirit endures and adapts, rejoices over warm mittens and an extra piece of bread, and even finds happiness in a job well done. And that’s the brilliance of this book: that it is not a day of tragedy, nor even a day of depressing misfortunes, but a fundamentally happy day.

It is simply and straightforwardly written – Ivan Denisovich is a simple peasant – and thus makes for easy reading, so the horror almost slips past you. But then I stop and think, and try to imagine 3653 such days. Or the rest of one’s life. For millions of people.

The translation (I read Ralph Parker’s 1962 translation) was OK but definitely clunky in places. Some parts were translated too literally, ignoring the cultural “baggage” that the readers have. Expressions which would be colloquial in Russian come across as contrived and formal in English, and some similes felt very unnatural in English.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.