A cross-curricular exploration of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ with Year 12

Peter Turner, along with his colleagues, wished to design a cross-curricular activity for post-16 students in history and English. The enquiry they devised addressed the issue of the changing reception of the classic novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the immediate aftermath of its publication, and later. His students learned to differentiate between the ways in which an historian might make use of the novel and the ways in which English students or literary scholars might approach it. Most importantly, they engaged with a classic piece of twentieth-century literature – and enjoyed it...