One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is a novel about survival. As soon as the narrator is awoken by the military reveille, in the freezing cold lice-infested bunk, he recalls some advice he has been given:

‘A man can live here, just like anywhere else. Know who pegs out first? The guy who licks out the bowls, puts his faith in the sickbay, or squeals to the Godfather.’

As such, there are to be no heroes and villains. Instead the story, meticulously documents the monotony of life in a Russian labour camp. 

In fact, in a canon that rests between the twin giants of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn’s novel is unusual in its restraint. The scope is myopic, style plain, and the theme subtle. The protagonist, is a witness rather than interpreter, and he only focuses on the daily task of living, hour-by-hour. 

Nevertheless, the deprivation is striking and the starvation unforgiving. Coupled with manual labour and sadistic overseers, it is incrementally devastating. By degrees, the reader becomes aware, just what a struggle it is, to pass twenty-four hours in such a camp.

Most of all, there is the banality of hunger. Denisovich notes: ‘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 longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in a time of drought [...] For a moment the ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him.’ Inevitably, the notion arrives, ‘Damn this life of ours.’  

Solzhenitsyn’s shows the Gulag, as distinctly apolitical. The significance of the prisoners sentence is lost in the task of staying alive. There is however, a basic economy.

 A prisoner: ‘Could stitch covers for somebody’s mittens from a piece of old lining. Take some rich foreman his felt boots [...] Rush round the store room looking for odd jobs.’ Despite this, ‘there were too many volunteers, swarms of them.’ Bribery is the result: ‘A bit for the warder, a bit for the team foreman [...] There’ll be a little something for the bathhouse man [...] Then theres the barber [...] then they’ll be someone in the CES [...] You’re bound to give some to your neighbour.’ ‘Thieving on the site, thieving in the camp, and there was thieving even before the food left the store.’ A Darwinian struggle and hierarchy, and although unremarkable, some prisoners often end up on the loosing end, with their throat cut in the night.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an important book. Written by a former Red Army commander, and Soviet prisoner, it is an authentic testimony of the Russian Gulag and its banal horrors. Furthermore it is a stunning read.

Despite the title, the novel isn’t really about a prisoner called Ivan. His story, like that of his fellow inmates, is swallowed up by the dehumanizing beast which has locked them down and reduced them to animals. 

The brutality of its twenty-four hours, is enough to last an eternity.