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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichby Alexander Solzhenitsyn Review:courtesy desicritics.orgby Vinod Joseph ~ September 05, 2008 I should confess that I had never read any of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works while he lived. The flurry of obituaries and articles that followed his death at the age of 89 motivated me to start with his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A little less than 200 pages, this translated work is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in a Soviet gulag. One Day was originally published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir after receiving approval from Khrushchev and the Communist Party Central Committee who felt that Stalinist excesses had to be exposed. Six years ago, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin as a brutal dictator. The protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukov, is a soldier who had the misfortune to be captured by the Germans and the double misfortune to be able to escape from captivity. One would think an escaped PoW would be welcomed with open arms. At least, in Mikhail Sholokov’s The Fate of a Man, one of my all time favourite short stories, the hero escapes from German captivity and gets, well, a hero’s welcome. Shukov (as Solzhenitsyn’s hero is referred to throughout One Day) is not so lucky. He is suspected of being a German spy and is given a ten year sentence in the gulag. We are told that from 1949 onwards, the standard sentence was raised to twenty five years. I read this book during the long train commute I have each day to get to my place of work. Nothing could have prepared me for One Day. Sure, like all of you, I too had heard of the horrors of the gulag. But there is something about Solzhenitsyn's matter of fact narration that takes you to the coal face, in a way that melodrama could never have done. As I read One Day, every ten minutes or so I would jerk up and look out of the train window at the green Surrey countryside rushing past in order to assure myself that all was well with my world. Award:1970 - Nobel Prize for Literature (specifically mentioned) |