One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Khrushchev handpicked the novel to expose Stalin’s cult of personality,

People said nationality didn’t mean anything, that there were good and bad in every nation. Shukhov had seen lots of Estonians, and never came across a bad one.

According to his dossier, Shukhov was in for treason. He’d admitted it under investigation—yes, he had surrendered in order to betray his country, and returned from POW camp to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What the mission could be, neither Shukhov himself nor his interrogator could imagine. They left it at that—just “a mission.” The counterespionage boys had beaten the hell out of him. The choice was simple enough: don’t sign and dig your own grave, or sign and live a bit longer. He signed.

What had really happened was this. In February 1942 the whole northwestern army was surrounded. No grub was being dropped by planes, and there were no planes, anyway. It got so bad that they were filing the hooves of dead horses, sousing the horny shavings in water, and eating them. They had no ammunition either. So the Germans rounded them up a few at a time in the forest. Shukhov was a prisoner in one such group for a couple of days, then he and four others escaped. They crawled about in the woods and marshes till they found themselves by some miracle among friends. True, a friendly tommy-gunner stretched two of them, and a third died from his wounds, so only two of them made it. If they’d had any sense they’d have said they’d got lost in the forest, and nothing would have happened to them. But they came out in the open: yes, we were taken prisoner, we’ve escaped from the Germans. Escaped prisoners, eh? Like hell you are! Nazi spies, more like! Behind bars is where you belong. Maybe if there’d still been five of them their statements would have been compared and believed. Just the two of them hadn’t a chance: these two bastards have obviously worked out this escape story of theirs together.

Alyoshka smiled humbly. “We can go faster if you like. Whatever you say.” They trudged down the ramp. A meek fellow like that is a treasure to his gang.

a free employee, was with him. The mechanic was tinkering and the free man was watching him. Normal, that: one working, one watching.

Some people with nothing better to do run races in stadiums of their own free will. Silly devils should try running for their lives, bent double after a day’s work. In this cold, with wet mittens and worn-out boots.

Who is the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict. If zeks didn’t squabble among themselves, the bosses would have no power over them.

It had been easier for Shukhov to feed his whole family as a free man than it was to feed just himself in the camps, but he knew what those parcels cost, and you couldn’t go on milking your family for ten years on end. Better to do without.

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.