One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What I said then:
What I say now:
Well, my Russian kick is officially over: this is the last Russian book I own. And I've sure ended it on a downer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had first hand experience of the gulag system. He had been fighting for the Russian army in 1945 when he criticised the way Stalin was conducting the war in a letter to his brother. Arrested for treason, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Siberia. When those eight years were up, he was not released; instead he was given a life sentence on a new charge. It was only after Stalin's reign ended and Kruschev took control of Russia that he was finally freed.
This experience is obvious in his writing: every moment and every minute detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich rings with truth. It is a very simple book, which merely details one day, from waking to sleeping, of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov's term inside a forced labour camp.
There is no story, as such. Nothing really happens that could be considered dramatic. The power of One Day comes from its accumulation of arresting, hideous detail. Every prisoner, at every moment, is on the lookout for a chance to scrounge or steal anything that they can. Every movement is watched by guards, every bit of food or firewood or tobacco is haggled over and contested, and all of it takes place in cold that would, to most people, be unendurable. Allegiances can switch in an instant: a toadie can be hated at one moment, but if he's part of your work team, then he's as close as a brother the next.
One of the most striking sequences of the book has Shukhov's team racing back to the camp from their worksite, the guards running as just as desperately as the prisoners, to try and beat another group from another worksite to the gate: whichever group gets there first will be counted through the gate and get to the mess quicker. In the race through the snow, suddenly the guards and the prisoners are allies, everyone racing to beat the other work team. And yet as soon as they're through the gates, the hostility resumes. Your head reels just thinking about how adaptable those guys needed to be to judge where they stood at every moment, when a single false step would lead to ten days confined in unheated cells, with no work to keep them warm ... which in that climate, was very nearly a death sentence.
But look, there's really not much to say about this book. Its value is less that of a novel, and more that of an important historical document, for without it, the day-to-day reality of the gulags would be less well known. It's not a book to enjoy, but it is a book to appreciate.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
books to go: 109
nice review JC. think I'll add it to my list.
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