World: THE WRITER AS RUSSIA'S CONSCIENCE

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resources of that difficult, plastic language. Ivan Denisovich's speech is essentially free of foreign-derived words, as is the entire book. One of the prisoner-scientists in The First Circle insists on attempting what he calls "plain speech," in which non-Russian words are banished, even if puzzling archaisms must be substituted. For example, he replaces the Latin-root word kapitalizm with the old Russian word for usury, tolstosumstvo (literally, "moneybaggism"). Solzhenitsyn himself has proposed that Russian be purified in this way. His strongly held views on language not only contribute great power and control to his writing but are also typical of other attitudes that pervade his work and his life: he is profoundly attached to all things traditionally Russian, is indeed a patriot of an old-fashioned kind, an instinctive Slavophile who distrusts all things Western.

Irreparably Deluded. Solzhenitsyn escaped his prison hell on March 5, 1953, when he was released after serving his eight-year sentence. On the first day of his freedom, the local radio carried the bulletin announcing Stalin's death. Even though out of the camp, he still had to live in exile in Siberia. He began putting down on paper the stories he had worked over in his mind during his imprisonment.

While in prison he had undergone a rough-and-ready operation for cancer. The disease now became acute again. Near death, he made his way to a hospital in Tashkent, where the tumor was arrested. The experience gave rise to Cancer Ward, a weaker book than his others. Yet the book rises toward the end to Solzhenitsyn's most direct statement of the complicity of everyone in the guilt of the past: "It's shameful, why do we take it calmly until we ourselves or those who are close to us are stricken? ... If no one is allowed for decade after decade to tell it as it is, the mind becomes irreparably deluded, and finally it becomes harder to comprehend one's own compatriot than a man from Mars."

Though his cancer was arrested by modern methods, he has an abiding nostalgia for old Russian peasant remedies, and a distrust of medical intervention as destructive of the organic relation of man to nature. He was officially rehabilitated in 1957. He found a job teaching mathematics in Ryazan, 120 miles southeast of Moscow. It was harder finding a house. Finally he built one atop a garage, using three walls of surrounding buildings for his own walls and adding a front and a roof.

There he continued to write. One Day went through four drafts, becoming leaner and simpler in each. The agony of One Day comes from the spectacle of a simple man, laboring and suffering with naive good humor, and all for nothing. For Russian readers this agony is redoubled. Russians have always loved innocents in literature, and the carpenter Ivan is a peasant innocent in direct descent from Tolstoy's Platon Karataev in War and Peace. His meekness is in jarring contrast to the degradation of the camp—where an extra bowl of mush makes a day "almost happy," and where your most important possessions are your felt boots, a spoon you made from aluminum wire, a needle and thread hidden in your cap.

In the fall of 1962, an editorial associate put the manuscript of One Day in with a portfolio of others for the editor in chief of the literary magazine Novy Mir, the adept