An understanding of ‘One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich’
It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s brief yet dense novel ‘One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich’, that brought about the comment from Leonid F. Illyiehev urging the writers of Russia to write about something other than ‘the camps’.
The story which is centred around a simple prole named Ivan is a tour de force into the horror, the endlessness (this is made explicit by the fact that the inmates are barred from having a watch, or a clock anywhere), the cruelty and inhumanity of these internment camps. Ivan is sent to one such camp for the sole reason of escaping capture from the Germans. If Ivan had just lied and not mentioned the capture by the Germans he would have received a medal. This sort of justice was not uncommon, rather it was the norm.
Throughout the brief one-hundred and forty-page book, there is constant reference to the inmates having their sentences increased by ten or so years for minor trivialities. The level verisimilitude that Mr Solzhenitsyn is able to hold his story too is in part due to his lucid prose, allowing us to feel every bit of ice falling from the roof of their barracks onto their sodden faces, or that hole in their already mangled boot filling with snow as they are forced to march in formation; but it is also in part due to the fact that Mr Solzhenitsyn had to spend part of his life in a gulag.
Within this camp, it is a battle with, not just the guards, but other prisoners to survive, it is what one pictures when reading Thomas Hobbes view of a state of nature, though I would argue far worse. To survive each day in these camps is a victory, and Alexander can inject this feeling into the reader. Rarely does an inmate look ahead to the future, nor does he picture freedom outside of the camp, that will merely demoralize him. The inmates are forced to look no further than the immediate future or more specifically, their next meal. The story attempts to add no light at the end of the tunnel, nor to give the impression such end of the tunnel is even within sight. Most prisoners have the expectation to die within these camps, as their time is constantly increased by ruthless emotionless guards.
The idea of happiness no longer fills the inmates, but sadness does not take over, rather a nothingness. To be sad one must have the energy or the will to feel such an emotion, but when all one can think about is their next bite of stale bread (in which the prisoners are amazed it is still ‘white bread’), or the porridge consisting of a range of different mostly un-edible animals, to feel these complex emotions is merely a drain on your energy.
As Ivan says “A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch….”, this man does not feel happy at the end of the day, rather it was almost a happy day. What exactly that means I am not sure, but I suspect is shows how beaten down these people are and how rejected they feel, the ability to feel any strong emotion such as happiness was lost within the first year or so in the camp.
To capture this extreme injustice, without an inch of self-pity being shown within the prisoners, is to allow the reader to feel everything. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel is a terrifying read for the fact of how real he is able to capture every feeling within the camp, forcing the reader to share in this struggle to get through each day. Every feeling he pushes burns into the reader’s minds.
