One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Their owners were chilled not so much by the frost as by the thought that they would be outside all day in it.

The Russians don’t even remember which hand you cross yourself with.

Apart from sleep, an old lag can call his life his own only for ten minutes at breakfast time, five at lunchtime, and five more at suppertime.

Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually.

In the year just beginning—1951—Shukhov was entitled to write two letters. He had posted his last in July, and got an answer in October. In Ust-Izhma the rules had been different—you could write every month if you liked. But what was there to say? Shukhov hadn’t written any more often than he did now.

Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like. Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.

In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?

The senior site manager, so they said, was always threatening to give each gang its assignment the night before, but they could never make it work. Anything they decided at night would be stood on its head by morning.

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.

The work gang was invented to take care of that. It isn’t like a work gang outside, where Ivan Ivanovich and Pyotr Petrovich each gets a wage of his own. In the camps things are arranged so that the zek is kept up to the mark not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus or else they all die together. Am I supposed to starve because a louse like you won’t work? Come on, you rotten bastard, put your back into it!

Amazing how time flew when you were working. He’d often noticed that days in the camp rolled by before you knew it. Yet your sentence stood still, the time you had to serve never got any less.

“It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.” “If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.” “How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime.” “Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.” “Who decreed that?” “The Soviet government.”

If you can do two things with your hands, you’ll soon pick up another ten.

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

So Shukhov could play it smart and choose which of the two warders on the right to approach. He ignored the young one with a high flush and chose the older man with a gray mustache. He was more experienced, of course, and could easily have found the blade if he had wanted to, but at his age he must hate the job like poison.

For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him.

For a little while Shukhov forgot all his grievances, forgot that his sentence was long, that the day was long, that once again there would be no Sunday. For the moment he had only one thought: We shall survive. We shall survive it all. God willing, we’ll see the end of it!

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

Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital. Fifteen days in there and you’d be six feet under.

“Because, Alyoshka, prayers are like petitions—either they don’t get through at all, or else it’s ‘complaint rejected.’”

Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn’t been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn’t been dragged off to Sotsgorodok.