One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alexander SolzhenitsynIntroduction: Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Afterword: Eric Bogosian
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-06
ISBN: 0451531043
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Signet Classics
Book Reviews of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)
Book Review: A Survival Story
Summary: 4 Stars
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" ~Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This book details the fictional day of Shukhov Ivan Denisovich in a Stalinist work camp in Siberia. Many of the prisoners in these work camps (Gulags) were political prisoners who had in some way voiced their concerns/frustrations against the communistic Mother Russia. Rather than kill these so-called rebels, they sent them to Gulags as slave laborers and gave them just barely enough to keep them alive.
The title character had been captured by the Germans and placed in a POW camp. He and one other Russian soldier escaped and upon returning to their homeland were accused of being spies. This innocent man was sent to the gulags for ten years. This is a book of fiction; however, it is based on the author's personal experiences in the work camps. There were in fact innocent prisoners sent to the gulags for much longer and for much less than that.
The two words that encapsulate this book for me are frozen and hungry. I get cold just reading the first paragraph of the book:
"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."
The prisoners were forced to work from sunup to sundown in below zero weather. The only time they weren't marched out to work were in conditions fourty-one below or worse. The title character spends his entire day working, trying to stay warm, and fanagling additional food from his fellow prisoners. They were given less than a ladleful of slop each meal--just enough to keep them alive. I think this paragraph from the book vividly describes the importance of this slop to the prisoners:
"Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold, and an empty belly, the zek (prisoner) longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in time of drought. He could knock it back in a single gulp. For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him."
For some reason the Gulags of the Soviet Union do not receive much publicity in the US. I can't think of one movie about the suffering in the Soviet Gulags. However, this book has piqued my interest, and I am determined to learn more about them. There is a bulky book on my to-read list called Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. I look forward to reading it, and hopefully it will give me a little more of the history and real life stories.
In my opinion, the book does not really try to get too political. The book is meant to give you a glimpse into a day in the life of a Gulag prisoner. Sadly, it was actually one of his better days. The book is only 159 pages and only took me two days to read. I heartily recommend it
Summary of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)
One of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia, this novel is both a graphic picture of World War II work camp life and a testimony to the human spirit.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.
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