Old Stories: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Solzhenitsyn's matter of fact, terrifying story of life in a gulag - a Soviet labor camp in Siberia
Thank you for reading False Choices. Every Friday I publish a review of film, literature, music, etc., that is relevant to who we are and who we want, or should want, to be. Comments are welcome, I like the banter.
As soon as the warm spring sun hits the frigid water of Grand Traverse Bay, the mist begins to rise; and with an eastern breeze the cold damp air will roll over and fall into the orchard momentarily; a worthy scene to view as I write about Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Most of us will never have the time or the stomach to read Solzhenitsyn’s three volume The Gulag Archipelago, (I could only make it through the 350 pages of the abridged version) but if you want to understand the depths of depravity and suffering enjoyed by millions of Soviet citizens during the reigns of Lenin and Stalin, then One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a useful introduction. It will not tear your guts out completely like The Archipelago will; it will provide however an approachable tale for a reader unfamiliar with the inhumanity of socialists prisons. And therein lies its greatness.
Solzhenitsyn understood that to describe the experience of Soviet gulags in immense detail would not find a large audience. The millions who experienced it themselves would not be able to read it and for others it was simply incomprehensible. So with the genius of a great writer he made it a single day, and a day like many of our own: We wake, we eat, we dress, we work, we have social contacts good, bad or indifferent, we eat, we deplore the elements and take refuge, we eat, we relax and we sleep. But what if we lived this day, like so many days, in a Siberian winter, under the exhausting discipline and punishment of a Soviet gulag with desperate men and desperate guards and soldiers at our throat. How would we survive? What would keep us going?
The old truism “one day at a time” would be the answer. No past except the survival instincts and ingrained lessons, no future either - it’s better not to think of it. Just supreme concentration on the present, always thinking, learning, concluding how to survive. That’s life in the gulag. It’s interesting to understand what helps a man survive. Would he take pride in the work he performed? Would he find some small dignity in his work and how he treated, and was treated by, his fellow inmates, the other Zeks?
What happens to a person when confronted with an existence where he is completely distressed, mentally and physically, every minute of the day. To what island of being does he retreat? He learns to adjust his envious vision from the bakery displays and restaurant menus others will enjoy and instead find a measure of gratitude for what he has to eat now.
Since he’s been in the camps Shukhov thought many a time of the food they used to eat in the village - whole frying pans full of potatoes, porridge by the cauldron, and, in the days before the kokholz, great hefty lumps of meat. Milk they used to lap up until their bellies were bursting. But he knew better now he’d been inside. He’s learned to keep his whole mind on the food he was eating. Like now he was taking tiny little nibbles of bread, softening it with his tongue, and drawing in his cheeks as he sucked it, Dry black bread it was, but like that nothing could be tastier. How much had he eaten in the last eight or nine years? Nothing. And how hard had he worked? Don’t ask.
A kokholz is a collectivized farm under communism.
How did Ivan Denisovich find himself in a prison camp? He was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1941 when Stalin’s former friend Hitler decided he wanted all of eastern Europe including Russia, When he escaped back to his own Russian line several days later he was accused of being a spy and sent to the camp. This was the same story of most of the others, including Solzhenitsyn himself who was an artillery captain and taken off the line in the middle of a battle because he had made a joke about Stalin in a letter to a fellow officer. It was all madness. During Lenin’s reign people were arrested because they belonged to the wrong class; doctors and scientists were arrested, many murdered, for being educated; others were arrested because they or their family owned a horse or a cow on their farm - they were ‘kulaks’, successful peasants.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, and held in prison until 1953, his last two years at hard labor as a bricklayer, like Ivan. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, he was released to internal exile in Kazakhstan. He wrote One Day after his formal rehabilitation in 1957. An edited version of the novel appeared in a Soviet literary magazine in 1962, during Khrushnev’s short thaw, and of course the full version was published in the West a year on. He published The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. He later was exiled again, this time to the Zurich, and later Vermont.
He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a documentary about the publication of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn recounts how One Day led to the later work. He had only his own experience in the gulag; he needed more content. After One Day he received 1000’s of letters from former inmates like himself, both men and women, who related their stories. They became the characters of The Gulag Archipelago. Several of these people became Solzhenitsyn’s accomplices in the writing and publication of The Gulag Archipelago. It’s a fascinating story and documentary (free on Youtube).
The images here are from a 1970 film made from the novel One Day. It’s quite good, depicting the novel very accurately. But it does not approach the novel’s breadth and depth of humanity. I’m also not sure the movie makes sense if you had not read the book first?
On Monday, in honor of Ivan and Solzhenitsyn, I’ll publish a little tutorial or ‘how to’ on the best way to fry potatoes.