"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 The breakthrough novel by the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book does what it says on the title: it records a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner in a 'special' work camp in Siberia. It was first published in November 1962; Soviet leader Khruschev had to give permission for publication. 

Shukhov's day is controlled by the prison guards and by all the little tricks and trades that a prisoner must do to stay alive, such as cheating the cook into providing an extra bowl of skilly for breakfast, and hiding a discovered hacksaw blade (a turning point for the day, occurring at the 50% mark of the book), and buttering up his team leader so her gets an extra ration for lunch, and borrowing tobacco. Throughout his day he is in constant peril of being caught by the guards breaking a regulation and being sent to the cells. The main part of the day involves the prisoners being marched out to a building site and, in sub-zero temperatures, building a wall.

Every moment is described in meticulous detail, told entirely from Shukhov's point of view, unchaptered, and in the third person past tense. The reader is told his thoughts, rather than being left to infer them. This technique added a certain distance and made it more difficult to empathise with the character; I couldn't feel him from the inside but then, as he says on page 23: "How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?" But if I wasn't inside his skin, I was watching from a close distance and admiring and learning how a man with his attitude could survive even such a terrible environment. 

At the end of the day, when he reflects on all that has happened, he decides that it has been a good day. Some critics think this shows the that the human spirit can triumph over the most appalling circumstances. I don't agree. Triumph is the wrong word. The word I would use in its place would be 'endure'. 

But it is a miniature mesmerising masterpiece.

I suspect that a lot of the power of the book comes from the decisions that Solzhenitsyn made while planning it. The decision to write in the third person meant that he was unable to describe the feelings and emotions of his character from the inside, avoiding the possibility that the intensity of those emotions might almost inevitably spill over into melodrama. The decision to restrict the action into a single day, as it were conforming to the Aristotelian unity of time (and pretty much the the other Aristotelian unities , of place and action, as well), focused and concentrated the drama. The setting is bleak which both contrasts with and reflects the protagonist: on the one hand he is warm and human, retaining his individuality despite his surroundings, on the other his use of the third person and his limited opportunities are mirrored by the sterility of his environment. 

Fundamentally, what I believe that Solzhenitsyn was trying to do was to use the day in the prison camp as a microcosmic metaphor for the situation of an ordinary man within a wider society.

Some people are tempted to regard the book as a condemnation of a particular political philosophy but it should be pointed out that political prisoners and slave labour have existed over a wide range of societies. Apart from the environmental temperature, is Shukov's condition much different from that of a slave in the southern United States in the first part of the 1800s? Or a forced labourer in one of Albert Speer's Nazi work camps? And it should also be remembered that Siberian prison camps with forced labour were inherited by the Soviets from the previous Tsarist regimes. 

Selected quotes: (page references for the AD 2000 Penguin classics edition)

NB: 'zeks' are political prisoners

• "Pay short money and get short value." (p 39)
• "How time flew when you were working! ... The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say 'knife'. But the years, they never rolled by: they never moved by a second." (p 56)
• "Moments like this ... were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he'd been sentenced to." (p 68)
• "This was according to the rule: one man works, one man watches." (p 84)
• "There are loafers who race one another of their own free will round a stadium. Those devils should be running after a full day's work, with aching back and wet mittens and worn-out valenki - and in the cold too." (p 92)
• "It's pretty steep being imprisoned here with Bendera's men ..." (p 101) The fictional Shukhov was imprisoned because, in WWII, he was captured by the Germans and then escaped and made his own way back to his lines, at which point he was suspected of treason, something that really happened to Russian soldiers. The real-life Stepan Bandera was a right wing Ukrainian nationalist who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Even Shukhov, a victim of the Soviet system, is anti-Bandera. This helps to explain the Russian PoV regarding the present war with the Ukraine. 
• "Nothing seems to make the authorities madder than zeks kipping quietly after breakfast." (p 112)
• "The belly is a rascal.It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday, it'll cry out for more tomorrow." (p 122)
• "Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em." (p 138)
• "There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. ... The three extra days were for leap years." (p 142; last lines)

November 2023; 162 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God