From back cover: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a forty-four-year old physicist and mathematician, served in the army until February, 1945, when he was arrested and condemned to eight years in prison. He was subsequently sent to a concentration camp, from which he was released in 1956. Rehabilitated in 1957, he now teaches mathmatics and physics in a secondary school in Ryazan.

Customer Rating:
Summary: One day in a Siberian prison camp
Comment: A mathematics professor pointedly declared to the Dean of Liberal Arts at the local university that her literature courses should be dumped because fiction is just made up stuff. Tell that to Alexandre Solzhenitsyn. Tell that to Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a searing FICTIONAL indictment of Stalin's Soviet Union during the early days of communism. Shukhov was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian work camp for spying for the Germans, when in reality he was an escaped prisoner of war. Solzhenitsyn himself spent ten years in a similar situation for writing criticisms of Stalin in a letter.

As a high school English teacher, I assigned this novel for reading and discussion. One particular girl took her reading seriously and tried an experiment. For the duration of the reading, she did not bathe and ate only soup and bread, the point being to match--sort of--that one day in Ivan's life in the gulag. It was an experience she will never forget.

Life, broken and twisted, limped on in the camps. Even guards lived just a level above the prisoners. From waking up with one-inch frost on the windows--on the inside--to putting his feet in the sleeve of his jacket and his head on a pillow containing shaved wood at night, Shukhov found life anything but good. But Ivan had learned to make a satisfactory life--given his circumstances. After all, his sentence was ten years, while many others had 25 years.

Although readers justifiably focus on the horrors of the camp--subsistent food of thin soup and rationed bread, freezing temperatures outside and inside, a strictly controlled life for eighteen hours of the day, Solzhenitsyn also shows how one man, just an ordinary man, can survive.

The story, of course, does reveal the barren conditions of a Siberian camp, but it also exemplifies what Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "Man will not only endure: he will prevail." When Shukhov works hard and feels pride in his work, when he finds a bit of hacksaw blade and smuggles it back into camp, when he is rewarded with a bite of sausage from the captain's goody box from home, he has not only conquered his circumstances, he has prevailed. It was a good day.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn also was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. These two sentences from his acceptance speech are directed--pointedly--at that mathematics professor: "Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The meaning of freedom
Comment: You'll be chilled by the descriptions of barbed wire, guard dogs, subzero temperatures and gulag sadism. You'll be exhilarated by Ivan's joy and pride in building a simple brick wall. Anyone who has ever wondered how hope can exist in seemingly hopeless conditions should read this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A genuine masterpiece
Comment: There are occasional moments of grace that make life worthwhile. In 1967, when I was barely thirteen, my family moved into a house (we were renting) whose previous occupant had left behind a handful of paperback books. Already an inexhaustible bookworm, I quickly nosed through them. One of them was Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich (older readers will remember it as the largish, black-covered, "Only Authorizied Edition" printing). Reading it changed my life, opening up for me a love of Russian literature that's remained to this day.

I've re-read Ivan several times since, and just finished going through it yet another time. What increasingly strikes me is Solzhenitsyn's ability to convey so much through such a sparing use of words. Through short paragraphs, minimal interior exploration, and few lines of dialogue, S. paints a portrait of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the eponymous character, that leaves the reader with the certainty that he or she knows Shukhov intimately. Other characters, drawn with even fewer strokes, are equally portrayed in strangely complete ways: the Estonian companions, inscrutable and inseparable, who lend Shukhov tobacco; Tsezar, the young intellectual who at times barely seems to know that he's in a gulag camp; Alyosha, the pious baptist whose religious conviction contrasts so starkly with the cynical conniving of Fetiukov; the stoical Tiurin, Ivan's squad leader; and the robust--and, one fears, doomed--Captain Buinovsky, former naval captain whose career was demolished by a thoughtless gesture of foreign goodwill.

There's no doubt that S.'s depiction of life in a Soviet gulag is accurate. But there's also no doubt that he intended to do more than merely chronicle Stalin's inhumanity. The book is also an acute psychological exploration into what near impossible conditions do to the characters of men, as well as a biting social commentary: the camp has as definite a pecking order as does the outside world, something which simply ought not to exist in a communist culture.

S. would go on to write several great novels, as well as his unsurpassable history of the gulag years. But I'm not sure that any of his later works surpass Ivan Denisovich. It remains, I think, his supreme artistic accomplishment.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: only one day in the gulag
Comment:
No study of the Soviet Union could be complete without reading "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", By Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Unlike Solzhenitsyn's later novels "The First Circle" or "The Gulag Archipelago" that explore the life of a zeck (political prisoners) in depth, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a simple straight forward narrative of a single day in the life of a zeck. Solzhenitsyn captures the unchanging hopelessness and brutality of life in a gulag with both brevity and startling guileless narrative. Even the length of less than 200 pages is a transformation of the usual Russian novel.

Prior to publication of Solzhenitsyn's work in 1962 by Novy Mir (New Life) Magazine and its publication in the West being little was known about the details of the Stalinist Repression Prison Camp System. The very existence of the gulag system came as a surprise, but the size and brutality of these camps was a breathtaking revelation. Not all zecks were political prisoners most were confined for violation of Article 58; weakening of the power of workers' and peasants'... or undermining... the external security of the U.S.S.R., literally covering everything from littering to treason.

As additional reading I recommend "The Trial" by Kafka to get a unique if somewhat parallaxed view of Soviet Jurist Prudence. A narrative of Joseph K. who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime, or "The First Circle" a narrative of the life of high-valued zecks working on an encrypted telephone system for Stalin's use.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Icy, Enduring, Classic ...
Comment: This book has been reviewed over and over again. I doubt I can add much that has not been mentioned. I read this book (the first time) in 1978. It is one of the few books that sticks in my mind like I read it yesterday.

First, it is short, only about 150-160 pages. For all its brevity it packs the impact of and 800 pager by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I enjoyed this book more than the much longer "Cancer Ward".

Solzhenityn's descriptive and narrative power are in absolutely top form here. It captures perfectly, the futility, hopelessness, and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit undergoing 10 years of unjust imprisonment. Chilling and descriptive in its captivating imagery. It is simply written by a master at the top of his game with unparalleled subject matter to work with. Considering that the story captures only one day, the density and power of the imagery are amazing.

There are so many little snippets that stick with you, bone chilling cold so frigid that cement must be heated or it freezes before it can be used,searching for soup with "fish eyes" in it because it fills you up better and is more nutritious,and of course the last sentence of the book has a chilling and desolate finality to it that I will probably remember until I am dead.

This book made me hate the Soviet Union enough to become a soldier.

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