One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to ten years to a forced labor camp in the Soviet gulag system. He was innocent and was accused of becoming a spy after being captured by the Germans as a prisoner in World War II.
The day begins with Shukhov waking up sick. For waking late, he is forced to clean the guardhouse, but this is a comparatively minor punishment.
The rest of the novel deals mainly with Shukhov's squad (the 104th, which has 24 members), their allegiance to the squad leader, and the work that the prisoners (zeks) do in hopes of getting extra food for their performance.
Shukhov reflects on his day, which was both productive and fortuitous for him. He did not get sick, his group had been assigned well-paid work, he had filched a second ration of food at lunch, and he had smuggled into camp a small piece of metal he would make into a useful tool.
In this book, I find many connections between the behavior of camp guards and today’s so-called leaders in most organizations. The principles are very similar to them: if you need to show rudeness to a squad, you just choose the calmest person who won't cause problems after you beat him, quarrel the prisoners with each other so they will be more manageable, snitching is very profitable, etc.
It’s not clear to me how people don’t realize that this is neither good nor humane. I guess everyone is just trying to keep the head above water. Is that life? Mere survival.
"Who is the greatest enemy of a prisoner?" Another prisoner. If the detainees did not quarrel with each other, the administration would not be able to do anything to them.Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, and short story writer. Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (now Stavropol Krai, Russia). Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University and at the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of the Soviet Gulag forced-labor camp system. After serving in the Red Army during World War II, he was sentenced to spend eight years in a labor camp and then internal exile for criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Although the reforms brought by Nikita Khrushchev freed him from exile in 1956, the publication of Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) angered the Soviet Union authorities, and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship in 1974. He went to West Germany, and in 1976 he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until he died in 2008.
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