One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
The tale of one day in the life of a simple man, once a soldier, who’d been an enemy prisoner during WWII for a matter of days and therefore classified as spy. He’s spent eight years of his 10-year sentence for such the terrible crime of being an overpowered, under-prepared pawn of his country’s army in Soviet work camps, during the time of the book in a gulag in Siberia.
With the typical bluntness of many Russian authors — but none of the complex sentence structure and pretense of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, for instance, IMHO — the reader climbs into Shukov’s (as he’s called) shoes. His cold, cold boots stuffed with rags, which he is allowed to dry on the stove every third night. We put on his scanty and ragged clothing (anything more than regulation will be taken away) against the chill, and our muscles ache from the hard work of laying bricks in weather so frigid that the mortar freezes if the work’s not completed quickly. The turnip broth turns cold on the table and the bread freezes solid.
Did I mention it’s cold? Siberian cold? Yes? Perhaps I stress this fact because I read this book, the WHOLE book, during a very slow day of volunteering for the El Paso County primary elections, held in a room whose AC was powerful enough to personally contribute to global warning. The volunteer next to me pulled up his hood. I rubbed my hands between my legs as I read. I felt Shukov’s pain.
As, of course, the reader is meant to. The book was one of the first that told the inside story of the Soviet work camps, and was therefore quite shocking and influential. Today, it remains so, but for different reasons. Yes, the gulag depicted is an awful place to be: I’d chose hell over this place, because I’d rather sweat to death than feel ice crystals forming in my blood. But what I found amazing was Shukov and his fellow prisoner’s attitudes toward their imprisonment. Illustrating the ultimate in human adaptation, they don’t rail against their unjust treatment. There’s nothing to be done, after all. They get by, they trade cigarettes, they finagle extra meal portions, they stamp their feet in the cold, they pester the guards. Although I’m hardly an expert, their attitude of basic survival — even cheerful survival when they can — seems so very Soviet. They allow themselves to be molded be the camp, accepting what they cannot change. They work the system when they can, but they sigh and let the system work them when they can’t. They’ve seen what disobedience causes, and it’s often not worth the high price. In other words, they accept that they’re pawns in a machine that eats pawns for breakfast, so they squeeze joy out of camaraderie, nicotine and the absence of pain.
Read in honor of the author, who died Aug. 3, 2008. I’m sorry only his passing caused me to take up his work, which I find clean, concise and cutting. Oh and cold. Very, very cold. Brrr.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection
Book Reviews, Classic Lit, Fiction |