Customer Reviews

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first book, a classic of modern Russian literature and the title that propelled him onto the literary world stage. As for the plot - well, the title itself serves as a synopsis. The story, such as it is, describes a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov who is serving a term in a Stalinist labor camp for offenses against the state. That they were never clearly described is surely Solzhenitsyn's method of making his readers aware of the fact that millions of prisoners were suffering the same fate on meaningless charges fabricated from thin air with nothing by way of evidence to support them. The novel, clearly built on a foundation of Solzhenitsyn's personal experiences spent in a gulag, is a courageous (and, under the circumstances, perhaps almost foolhardy) critique of the tyranny that was the Russian experience under the dictatorship of Stalin.

The story that Solzhenitsyn tells could hardly be categorized as compelling. In fact, it's anything but. Solzhenitsyn has expertly portrayed an overwhelming atmosphere of dreary darkness, hopelessness, despair and exhaustion through the banality of the prisoners' daily existence - the hunger, the cold, the de-humanization, the repetitive grinding work, the isolation, and the stark paucity of everyday living in a setting without joy. It wasn't so much that there were physical punishments, cruelty or the terror that one reads about in other prison stories such as "Papillon", "The Shawshank Redemption" or "A Tale of Two Cities", for example. The punishment in Shukhov's camp arose more obviously out of the deprivation and unutterable tedium of an inhumanly spare existence devoid of pleasurable experience. Indeed, it was clear that even the guards and prison staff were probably suffering only a scant degree less than the unfortunate inmates.

On hunger:

"How often had Shukhov in his youth fed oats to horses! Never had it occurred to him that there'd come a time when his whole soul would crave for a handful of them."

On sleeping in the inhumanly cold Siberian winter:

"He must make his bed now - there wasn't much to it. Strip his mattress of the grubby blanket and lie on it (it must have been '41 when he last slept in sheets - that was at home; it even seemed odd for women to bother about sheets, all that extra laundering). Head on the pillow, stuffed with shavings of wood: feet in jacket sleeve; coat on top of blanket and - Glory be to Thee, O Lord. Another day over."

As I said, spare writing that is itself a metaphor for the very things it so powerfully describes.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Solzhenitsyn, himself, said, "Literature that is not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of literature...the pain and fears of society must be held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers which threaten it."

Hisotry, to Solzhenitsyn, as it was to Tolstoy, is the theatre and arena in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale.

For Solzhenitsyn, however, the tragedies of individuals are not decreed by fate, as they were for Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn sees instead tragedies as parts, packets or "knots" (uzly) of an even larger tragedy. The very things that debase their victims are, for Solzhenitsyn, not the result of "historical necessity," but rather a part of a larger evil, e.g., Soviet society.

Solzhenitsyn is not a revolutionary, however, he is an artist. At times his retelling of the history of twentieth century Russia is stark, bleak and unadorned, however in relating the results of events, Solzhenitsyn always seeks out the causes which have brought about the historical consequences. The major actions occurring in history, as Solzhenitsyn sees it, are due to the consciously-defined motivations of human beings.

For Solzhenitsyn, tragedy is distinctly non-classical and non-Tolstoyan. Heroic characters are not tragically-flawed, innocent victims as they are for Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn's works are, instead, populated with persons who are either intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. For him, the intrinsically evil certainly outnumber the intrinsically good, although they do not necessarily defeat them. This is a distinctly non-classical, non-nineteenth century view.

For Solzhenitsyn, men create their own tragedy and history and they are the ones who must shoulder the blame.

Solzhenitsyn's style of writing is economical and unadorned. His motto might well be "wie es eigentlich gewesen," or "tell it like it is." As such, he writes in the everyday language of the labor camps. This causes much confusion in translation although it reads perfectly well in the original Russian.

In fact, many "unprintable" Russian words can be found in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, all rendered with the frankness of a Henry Miller novel. Solzhenitsyn, however, uses obscenities, not to shock, but to show how debased human beings can become.

The blunt language used by Solzhenitsyn lends an "immediacy and sincerity of tone" to his work. His scenes are enhanced by this device, whether it be a scene in the barracks, at a construction site, or during friskings and body counts.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is told in the "skaz" or folktale manner in the Russian tradition of Pilniak, Zamyatin and Babel, not to mention prerevolutionary writers like Leskov and Gogol. In the skaz tradition, the storyteller, or narrator, shares the same level as the main character in the story. The skaz strategy for storytelling permits the author to insert much "local color" into the story as well as humorous or ironic observations and commentary.

The narrator in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch allows the reader to participate in situations and to listen to conversations as if he were really there. This is further enhanced by the fact that the language employed is, at times, quite simple and slangy and filled with "zek argot."

Solzhenitsyn, however, established no clear dividing line between Shukhov's speaking and his own speaking. At times, this device necessitates that the reader take great care in untangling an unspoken monologue of Shukhov from an external observation made by the author through the third person narrator.

Additionally, when Shukov, himself, is speaking in dialogue, it is difficult to know whether he is speaking to the reader or to another character.

It is obvious that Solzhenitsyn has employed a number of literary techniques in the telling of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. His message in this book, as well as in other books is to convey the raw truth in all its bleakness. In avoiding lengthy sentences and ornamental descriptions (a la Dickens or Dostoyevsky), Solzhenitsyn accomplishes a stoic austerity in style equal to the stoic austerity of his scenes in a Siberian labor camp.

"One Day" appeared early on in Khrushchev's "De-Stalinization" program, but it has outlasted him and the whole USSR. The book is timeless and in the post Cold War world bears reading again. The USSR may be dead, but totalitarianism is still alive, just waiting for the right moment to return in horrible force. I can never eat vegetable soup without thinking of Ivan's day.

This book would be horribly depressing if the main character wasn't so strangely calm about the entire thing. In its way, as a result, it's actually a little bit uplifting and (maybe this is just me) kind of darkly humorous in some places. The description on the back of my copy called it "shattering" and "terrifying," which I guess it is, but Ivan Denisovich's calm and defiance in the face of it all really do make it inspiring in a sense. Still, a fascinating, eye-opening, and only somewhat depressing read.

Perhaps Russia's greatest living writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn painted the picture of Stalin's gulag in this gut-revealing book that catapulted him in the West and became the harbinger to international recognition. In certain aspects , it reminds me of Dostoyevski's HOUSE OF THE DEAD with the extra political touch and spells out what humainity should avoid in the name of ideology that has been perverted.Mirrored in other books like UNION MOUJIK, DR ZHIVAGO, the underlying lesson is that Stalinism like other systems before destroyed faith in the Russian soul and sowed that post Soviet reality also wrecked havoc on and which Russia is yet to recover from.

This is an interesting little book regarded by many as a classic. It gives a picture of a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in a Russian labour camp under Stalin. As I read this book I found myself thinking, "Sure this is good. It's well written and interesting, but so far it's not powerful or impactful." However this is a book that kind of sneaks up on you and hits you with it's powerful impact right at the end. It's almost like you need to see the whole picture of the day to realise the profound theme which runs through all the little things that happen. You read through the whole day waiting for a climax which never comes. And then at the end of the day you are compelled to look back and realise the focus on the simple things - the joy to be had in work, the value of a crust of bread, a bowl of soup, a good pair of shoes, a favour done for a friend, and a favour received, the value in having one's freedom, even when living in a prison camp, the thankfulness of not becoming sick. It really makes one appreciative of what we have.

"A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day."

I love this book. Ivan Denisovich is a symbol of bravery of the human spirit in despair. This story is necessary for all of us who used to the living in a society that supports freedom. The images of the Siberian camps in the Stalinist era are disturbing but impressive. There are many powerful outlines that express what a prisoner has to do in order to survive. Solzhenitsyn captures the society's dehumanization masterly. I was arrested in this story, making me feel as if I am Ivan Denisovich's cellmate. This is a masterwork on the psychology of continued existence. Reading about Ivan's life changed how I live each day. My uncle met Solzhenitsyn in CT. Great man. I wish I met him. He is one of my idols.