One day

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich was almost a cult, certainly a set text of liberal values, in the Cold War.  Published in 1962, I read it at school when I was sixteen or so (about 1972) as a description of the contemporary Soviet Union.  In fact, though it might have reflected some aspects of that time very well, it was much more based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in one of Beria’s ‘special’ camps in Karaganda in Kazakhstan in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  He was released on Stalin’s death, but although this story was published with Khrushchev’s consent, he was deported after the European publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, eventually returning to Russia twenty years later.

Re-reading One Day after about thirty-five years, I was struck by the fact that I enjoyed it and raved about it as a teenager.  It focuses very much on the little things of life – getting some food, how to keep your boots dry, staying warm when being frisked for smuggled goods, how to keep your food parcel to yourself – and these don’t seem the kind of things to appeal to me when I was so much younger.  I suppose I was much more caught up in the bigger picture – man’s inhumanity to man, the denial of free speech, and the spiritual and economic poverty of communism. 

 

What I had completely forgotten that the One Day (and it is literally a single day, from reveille to lights out) is actually a pretty good one by camp standards.  All through the book, you are told about he ceaseless struggle to get enough food, to stay warm, to avoid the brutality of the guards, that the get out of perspective what is a bad day.  At the end, about to fall asleep, Ivan Denisovich puts you right, as he enumerates the events of the day (or some of them, I have edited a bit, to shorten it, and to obviate the need for explanations in some cases):

 

Shukov (Ivan Denisovich himself) went to sleep fully content.  He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner …  and he hadn’t fallen ill.

 

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 … the three extra days were for leap years.

 

This is a fine book, written by a brave man.  In both respects, it reminds me of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man about surviving Auschwitz, and  also of J M Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K about survival of a black man in apartheid South Africa, which seems to me a deliberate, careful tribute to Solzhenitsyn.  All three books are marvellous, powerful, compelling  - and shaming - reads.

Comments

[glo]

I read this book when I was a teenager too, and I only remembered that I was very impressed by it. Like you, I didn't remember how much he focused on small things of daily life. However, it makes sense to keep one's attention on the present when they have no possibility of deciding for themselves, no freedom of any kind, and little perspectives for the future. I guess it is the condition for survival. Then it also makes sense to try and protect the body first and keep alive; this is the only goal they have.
Now, I am wondering if people still read this book now that the Berlin Wall and its political consequences are over (just 20 years ago).
Of course, there are the books you mention, but we shall not forget that there still are people on this earth who live in, or under the threat of, similar camps.
Anyway, enjoy your visit in Saint-Petersburg, it should be grand!

To Dark Puss
I just want to say hello to you, Dark Puss, I am glad to talk to you now and then. If you are on the continent, you may have suffered from the hellish heat lately. Happy holidays to you too!