- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Penguin; New impression edition (Dec 31 1969)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140020535
- ISBN-13: 978-0140020533
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 10.8 x 1.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 100 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #212,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 1962. It is painfully apparent that Solzhenitsyn himself spent time in the gulags--he was imprisoned for nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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Review
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich yields, more than anything else, a beautiful sense of its author as a Chekhovian figure: simple, free of literary affectation, wholly serious."--The New Republic
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Extraordinary Book,
By
This review is from: Modern Classics One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Paperback)
The Gulag swallowed millions of human beings, it was a machine designed to dehumanize, demoralize and debase anything that it touched. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was thrown into this machine after being charged with making disparaging remarks about Stalin while serving with the Red Army during the Second World War. His arrest led to this book, a look at just one day of just one of the millions thrown into the maw of the machine known as the Gulag."One Day..." begins when Shukhov, a prisoner who had been sent to the Gulag as punishment for being captured by the Germans, is woken by the clanging of a metal bar, the wake up call in the camp he is in. The book ends when he lies in bed that night reflecting that he had had "almost a happy day" because he hadn't been sent to the punishment cells, he'd gotten some extra gruel and bread for himself and his work team had gotten a relatively cushy job building a brick wall in minus 27 degree weather - a good day for a zek (a prisoner)! In between the reader follows Shukhov around the camp and the work site as he manages to survive another day. Solzhenitsyn's writing style flows easily and I sometimes felt that I was being drawn into that hellish world created by Lenin and perfected by Stalin. I couldn't help comparing the treatment and living conditions of Shukov with that of Dostoyevsky's prisoner in The House Of The Dead. I think Russian prisons, as harsh as they were under the Tsars, were nowhere near as bad as they were under the Bolsheviks. Finally, another book that I can recommend to help people understand the horrors of the Gulag is The Forsaken. Read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and be thankful that you have the freedoms that you have and marvel at the resilience of the human spirit.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Terror of Pathocracy,
By
This review is from: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Mass Market Paperback)
Solzhenitsyn distills his voluminous Gulag Archipelago into his magnificent novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". The book is almost mundane in its account of the dreary, repetitive, and dehumanizing life in a Soviet "work" camp. The circumstances leading to the arrest of thousands were doctrinaire and naive, corresponding perfectly with the personalities of those writing and enforcing such laws. The Soviet rule which first made use of such "concentration" camps can be accurately described, and is demonstrated perfectly by Solzhenitsyn, using the following analogy.Imagine a social system in which the leaders are colour blind--they cannot distinguish between ripe and green tomatoes. However, they are not content to accept this fact; they must unrealistically force those who have functional vision to become like they are. They must cease to distinguish between green and ripe tomatoes. Under such leaders' supervision, they must even eat green tomatoes, pretending they are ripe. Such leaders, however, cannot rule without those who have some ability to distinguish colour. These are the middle men, caught between two worlds. The phenomenon of Communism can be accurately described as pathocracy, a term created by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology. In such a system psychopaths are the Daltonists; those who cannot understand the emotional inner life of the vast majority of humanity. They thus attempt the impossible, to stamp the conscience out of the rest of us. Solzhenitsyn masterfully captures the essence of life under pathocracy. It is absurd and horrific, and without knowledge of its true nature, it will continue to periodically destroy large portions of humanity.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Required reading,
By SCOTT DIXON (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Mass Market Paperback)
It is difficult to imagine a more horrific ordeal than life in a Soviet prison camp as described by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. While classified as fiction, many millions of people really were sent to such camps and of those most perished. From this book, it is not hard to see why: little sleep, back-breaking labour, horrible food and intense psychological stress. That anyone could conceive a system so terrible, and then consign innocent people to it, testifies to the brutality inherent in Man. That anyone could live nine years under such conditions and survive to tell about it, as Solzhenitsyn himself did, testifies to the power of human endurance and faith. I recommend this book to everyone, especially those who find reason to admire or otherwise support our modern Socialist dictators in China, the Middle East and elsewhere.
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