One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

stucco

billowed

radiators

soirées,

Only when I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich did I begin to understand what the oldest generation of Russians had lived through and how those ordeals now help them stay afloat. The first work of literature to speak openly and honestly about the Gulag, the novel was published in 1962 in the literary journal Novy Mir, launching not only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brave and distinguished career, but also a brief Thaw. More than forty years after Khrushchev handpicked the novel to expose Stalin’s cult of personality, Solzhenitsyn’s story of one peasant’s day in a labor camp enlightens us about lives cornered again and again by history.

incontrovertible

We do feel as if we experience Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s cold, hunger, fear, and exhaustion, as well as the flashes of comfort he snatches in the present—“The smoke seemed to reach every part of his hungry body, he felt it in his feet as well as in his head”—or remembers with disbelief: “great hefty lumps of meat. Milk they used to lap up till their bellies were bursting.”

reveille

Shukhov never overslept. He was always up at the call. That way he had an hour and a half all to himself before work parade—time for a man who knew his way around to earn a bit on the side.

zek

kolkhoz.*

scurvy

There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings—make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man—just make it look good.

skilly

Fetyukov, a workmate of Shukhov’s, sat by one, looking after his breakfast for him. Fetyukov was one of the lowliest members of the gang—even Shukhov was a cut above him. Outwardly, the gang all looked the same, all wearing identical black jackets with identical number patches, but underneath there were big differences. You’d never get Buynovsky to sit watching a bowl, and there were jobs that Shukhov left to those beneath him.

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.

nettles

trot.

lag’s

Work, he reckoned, was the best medicine of all. Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. If he ever had to bust a gut bricklaying, he’d soon quiet down.

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

sentries

girded

There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech. You haven’t the slightest desire to talk to each other.

nipped

The guards weren’t allowed to tie rags around their faces, mind. Theirs wasn’t much of a job, either.

A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually. Will they poke around in my mattress and find my bread ration? Can I get off work if I report sick tonight? Will the captain be put in the hole, or won’t he? How did Tsezar get his hands on his warm vest? Must have greased somebody’s palm in the storeroom, what else?

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.

kolkhoz

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?

Your foreman matters more than anything else in a prison camp: a good one gives you a new lease of life, a bad one can land you six feet under.

It was hard starting a day’s work in such cold, but that was all you had to do, make a start, and the rest was easy.

ramshackle

Why, you may wonder, will a zek put up with ten years of backbreaking work in a camp? Why not say no and dawdle through the day? The night’s his own. It can’t be done, though. 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!

Just think, though—who benefits from all this overfull-fillment of norms? The camp does. The camp rakes in thousands extra from a building job and awards prizes to its lieutenants. To Volkovoy, say, for that whip of his. All you’ll get is an extra two hundred grams of bread in the evening. But your life can depend on those two hundred grams. Two-hundred-gram portions built the Belomor Canal.*

stool pigeons

steppe,

cudgel

kulak!*

OGPU,

Stakhanovite!*

bungler

Now he’d be standing behind the layers, watching. If there was one thing Shukhov couldn’t endure, it was these spectators. Trying to wangle himself an engineer’s job, the pig-faced bastard. Started showing me how to lay blocks once. Laughed myself sick. Till you’ve built one house with your own hands, you’re no engineer. That’s how I see it.

Now he was freezing with the rest, and fuming with the rest,

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

Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold, and an empty belly, the zek longs for his ladleful of scalding-hot watery evening soup as for rain in time of drought. He could knock it back in a single gulp. 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.

He began eating. First he just drank the juice, spoon after spoon. The warmth spread through his body, his insides greeted that skilly with a joyful fluttering. This was it! This was good! This was the brief moment for which a zek lives. 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!

bread would come in useful tomorrow. The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.

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. He’d swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He’d enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn’t been caught with the blade at the search point. He’d earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. He’d bought his tobacco. And he hadn’t taken sick, had got over it. The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.