Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, first published in 1962 in a newspaper in Moscow, heralded a period of "thaw" in Soviet cultural policy. The author spared no details in giving an autobiographical account of the "Gulag System" – the Stalinist penal and work camps in Siberia. From the early morning wake-up call to the nightly extinguishing of the barrack lanterns, he tells of one day in the life of the prisoner Denisovich. Both the book and the film take his subjective perspective to depict the everyday humiliations, but also the little pleasures, of camp life. The authentic backdrop provided by a wintery Norway, the insistent images by Swedish cameraman Sven Nykvist and the reserved mise-en-scène by Finnish theatre director Caspar Wrede ensured that this Norwegian-British-American coproduction was unanimously praised by the critics as a successful attempt at adapting Solzhenitsyn's most personal oeuvre as conscientiously and realistically as possible.