“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. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.”
That's how One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ends. And despite a warm morning, those words made me shiver. This classic, one of the 1000 books to read before you die, has such starkness, such cold distress in the words that for a moment I forgot my petty concerns, and was glad that I had had a filling breakfast, lots of milk, a wonderful bed to lie on, and all the sleep I want on a Sunday, without worrying about wardens bearing down on you, and without thinking which action of yours might land you in the 'cooler,' a miserable concrete cell with NO heating, imagine, NO heating in the Siberian winter. Say your prayers that you are probably alive and well, most probably in a democratic country, without spending a lifetime in a day as Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a wrongly-accused convict in the Soviet penal camp does. It is hard enough to find material in a lifetime to fill a book but what Alexander Solzhenitsyn has done is to take a day - just a day - in the barracks of the Stalin-era Soviet camps, and fill us with enough dread to last a lifetime.
Written in unsentimental prose, Solzhenitsyn takes us through the early morning call at 5AM on a freezing winter morning when Shukhov wakes up feeling slightly ill. He can't make it to the sick bed, not considered sick enough, is caught by a warden for being late but escapes with a relatively light punishment, has his thin breakfast, feels happy that he can store a little bread away, sewed in to the sawdust in his mattress, and runs all day to work for the power plant, trying to lay bricks before the mortar freezes in the sub-zero conditions. In the evening, Shukhov runs around helping Caesar, a fellow convict who escapes harsh labor by virtue of him being an intellectual, and manages to win himself Caesar's dinner in the process, two bowls of gruel on evening, and more bread! Heaven! That is the condition of life that Stalin imposed. Shukhov is supposedly serving only 10 years in the camp but the book indicates that those who are here never get out. Home is where the prison is.
Solzhenitsyn writes from personal experience - he spent almost a decade in a Soviet camp himself for derogatorily referring to Stalin as the 'whiskered one.' Not that it stopped him for in One Day, he refers to Stalin again as "Old Man Whiskers." There is intense courage in this book. The men here, despite the almost inhuman conditions they have to endure, live for the day. None epitomizes this more than Shukhov who goes to sleep "very happy." "Nothing had spoiled the day, and it had been almost happy." His happiness? He hadn't been put in the cooler, he had finagled an extra bowl of mush at lunch, he had felt good making that brick wall, he had bought some tobacco, and he had gotten over that sickness. Life was good. And that is where the book hurts. If only human beings ever learn from history. If only.
Verdict: Searing. This is cast in the mold of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel.
Rating: 5/5
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