Book Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn #1962Club

That’s just what they said—“home”. You didn’t have any other home to think about when you are out there, working.

When Karen and Simon announced the #1962Club earlier this year and I was looking up possibilities, this was the first book I was sure would be among my ultimate picks. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Solzhenitsyn’s doorstopper The Gulag Archipelago have been on my ‘to read’ list for ages but I was always very reluctant to pick them up (since I wasn’t sure how hard they would be to read) but the club gave me the perfect chance to change this.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich turned out very different to what I expected—while it is in its own way a powerful and scathing look at the Soviet gulags, it does so in an understated way—there is no drama (or melodrama), no striking events, no protests—just the description of an ordinary day in the life of one prisoner in one such camp—in frozen, sub-zero conditions—from day break to the end of the day. Yet despite its ordinariness, and having nothing particularly remarkable, it manages to highlight the whole gamut of the ills of the system.

Our journey begins at reveille, with the gong going off at 5 am. Our prisoner Shukov (who we refer to by this name throughout, though it emerges along the way that it is he who is Ivan Denisovich Shukov) has woken up a little unwell with fever and body pain, reluctant to be up and about like his usual routine. After his attempt to get on the sick list fails (he is later with his request than he should be, and eventually we can gauge that they could be other considerations too), he must start off with the rigours of the everyday from breakfast to a trudge through the frozen ground to their assigned work site for the day—tough but satisfying, and the march back to a meal, and in between numerous counts and recounts, roll calls, and checks and such.

Yet in this relatively uneventful day, we see the hard and harsh realities of the system. Many, perhaps most of the ‘prisoners’ (including Shukov himself) have been arrested on flimsy pretexts (one wonders if this was merely a show of power or the result of some serious insecurities, probably both). In the camps, they must wear only issue clothes (needless to say, dreadfully inadequate) in temperatures of 16 below (even few comforts like two sets of boots being done away with and any extra clothing anyone might have being confiscated). The work can be hard (like digging frozen ground), but the leader of each gang takes care of his men. There is minimal contact with families, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet in their homes. Repeated counts and roll calls mean having to often stay out in the cold longer than necessary. Corruption is rampant and pervades everything—whether meals skimmed off, resulting in each gang receiving far less than what is allotted (of already watered down, inadequate food) to having to ‘pay’ in cash or kind for each cog to move.

Amidst this, it seems though that while there are prisoners who find the work hard and whose health and bodies are breaking down (this is the case for all in one or the other way), there is also resignation and an acceptance of their fate. On the one side, this would seem like a thread of hope in that in none of the prisoners we encounter (especially Shukov) is there any depression, instead he seems to take each thing as it comes and even finds a semblance of dare I say ‘happiness’ in the day we follow him on; he is good at the brick-laying work he is assigned and finds in it much satisfaction. In the gangs, much like ‘ordinary’ labour ‘gangs’, there is a camaraderie between members, with the ‘boss’ looking out for his group, ensuring the best work and best pay that he can for them. Shukov himself and some others also always help each other in whatever ways they can (sometimes earning themselves an advantage—an extra ration of bread for instance, and certainly goodwill, but not doing so necessarily for it). These attitudes towards things in a sense give them something to hold onto and move forward with, from one drudge-filled, frozen day to another. For some there isn’t much of their sentence left to go, yet they are equally aware of the possibility that another can easily be slapped on, so their actual home while a possibility is never really thought of as real—it is the camp that is ‘home’. On the other side, their resignation and acceptance are also unsettling in that one knows there is no other way, no other option but to endure what has been imposed—attempts at escape (though these are made) are futile, and protest or revolt (never mentioned at all) unthinkable.

Reading the book, one can see that this is the experience of one who has been in such a camp (camps in fact for Shukov’s experiences from camps where he served previously are mentioned), Solzhenitsyn having spent 8 years in camps himself for some derogatory comments on Stalin in a private letter to a friend.

This is certainly a remarkable book in that it is a strong indictment of the gulags, yet it is quiet; it portrays the harsh realities of life in the camps, and yet while it is clear that there is no chance of escape or anything different, it oddly does not leave one feeling entirely in despair either (in fact, one is almost ‘pleased’—as far as one can be in such circumstances—for Shukov, in how his day turns out).

(edition read: Bantam books, 1976, translated by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley in 1963)

p.s. Thinking back, the prisoners do manage to protest, but also in a quiet way—dragging their feet and walking back slowly after being forced to go through an unnecessary recount, thereby using a tactic the guards couldn’t compel them to stop and ensuring the guards too froze for longer than necessary.