One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Devastating Novel About Life in the Gulag
I lead a monthly, in-person reading group called Short Great Books. Our book for April was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and we discussed it last night. This book is a work of fiction that follows a typical day for a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag system. It’s a harrowing account not because of a shock and awe of the tortures but more so due to the mundanity of the horror.
For example, when discussing the time of the prison sentences, one prisoner says this:
“He himself was serving twenty-five years. In happier days everybody got a flat ten. But in ‘49 a new phase set in: everybody got twenty-five regardless. Ten you could just about do without turning up your toes. But twenty-five?”
A few pages later, we meet the camp hygienist, who has no special training. He’s merely a prisoner appointed to the camp hospital, ignorant of the basics.
Perhaps the most diabolical aspect of the Gulag system was that many of the prisoners had been POWs during World War II, some having suffered greatly in Nazi concentration camps. They were promptly moved from that hell to a new Gulag hell because the Soviet’s considered them to be spies for having met the enemy.
Connections to The Gulag Archipelago
There were a number of connection points to The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s influential work of non-fiction:
Both works talk about the requirement of forgetting your former life upon entering the Gulag. In “Ivan Denisovich,” the main character asks his wife not to write to him anymore. We hear little about his family. He says he now has more in common with his fellow prisoners.
Both works highlight that behavior and attitude within the Gulag are determined well before arriving at the Gulag. One’s prior daily decisions set a path for how one survives in a hell camp.
The soul - “Here you have time to think about your soul.” That’s a statement from Alyoshka, the Baptist who exhorts Ivan to “be glad you’re in prison.” (His name is quite similar to Alyosha Karamazov from Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov). In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn thanks the Gulag as being a place where he developed his soul.
The Gulag Archipelago was such an influential book for me. I read it in 2018 and think about it often. I actually had trouble getting into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Gulag has more grit. But the more I consider One Day, the more I realize that there is a special horror in seeing the terrible mundanity of one day in the life of a prisoner.
The Soviet Philosophy
John Bayley wrote the introduction for the Everyman’s Library edition of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In it, he wrote the following:
“Ordinary reportage about the real nature of the camp system would have had some effect on the reading public, of course; but the shock achieved by Solzhenitsyn was a literary shock as well as a social one. Literature had, as it were, abruptly come to terms with the unique horrors of this form of slave economy, and showed that it could master what it really signified, presenting graphically the kind of world on which the Soviet political philosophy ultimately rested.”
The Gulag was the end game of the Soviet political philosophy. It was the manifestation of the supposed utopia.