One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been completed in manuscript form in 1958, but Solzhenitsyn did not submit it for publication until 1961, when Nikita Khrushchev's continued policy of "de-Stalinization" gave the author some hope that the political climate was right for getting his short work printed. He sent the novel to Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor-in-chief of the influential literary magazine Novy Mir, who made the bold decision to bypass the official Soviet censorship authorities and to submit the work directly to Premier Khrushchev. This astute politician immediately recognized the potential propaganda value which the novel could provide for his "de-Stalinization" policies and had twenty copies of the work sent to the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party.
Khrushchev later claimed that it was his personal decision — against some so-called "opposition" in the Politburo — to let Novy Mir proceed with the publication of the novel. Thus, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the literary journal on November 21, 1962, in an edition of 100,000 copies. It created a literary sensation and sold out on the first day, as did a second printing a short time later.
In spite of the limited scope and the relative simplicity of the novel, Khrushchev — through the persona of Tvardovsky — did not want to leave any reader in doubt about the intention and meaning of the work, and so the editor of Novy Mir added a preface to the first edition, entitled "Instead of a Foreword," which has been reprinted in almost all editions of the novel.
Tvardovsky explains that the topic of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is unusual in Soviet literature because it describes the "unhealthy phenomena" of Stalin's personality cult (Stalin's name, however, is never mentioned explicitly) — thus saying, in effect, that it is now possible to deal with any and all aspects of Soviet reality "fully, courageously, and truthfully."
