Abstract
This is the first ever publication in English of verse by Solzhenitsyn. The passage in question is an extract from a longer autobiographical poem composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan. This camp formed the setting of Solzhenitsyn's celebrated novel. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The verse was quoted in a samizdat article on the novel called Ivan Denisovich and the Writer's Spiritual Mission by Venyamin Teush, a former schoolteacher colleague and close friend of Solzhenitsyn. Teush signed it with the psuedonym D. Blagov.