Based on his own recollections and on documented sources the author reconstructs the history of how A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s short novel «One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich» was perceived by the members of Saratov University literary club of the first half of the 1960s, under the supervision of a wonderful philologist T. I. Usakina, Assistant Professor of the Chair of the Russian literature of Saratov State University.