One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)

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One of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia, this novel is both a graphic picture of World War II work camp life and a testimony to the human spirit.

Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 1962. It is painfully apparent that Solzhenitsyn himself spent time in the gulags--he was imprisoned for nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend.

Customer Reviews:

A brief comment

Although I enjoyed this novel, I didn't think it was up to the standard of the The First Circle or The Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn's style even seems somewhat dry and uninspired here, compared to the other books. The book seems more a matter of fact portrayal of the life in the camps, with little of the drama of the other books. Although probably his best known book at the time, I found I preferred the other volumes. Perhaps this one had the advantage that it was much shorter and so people were reading it because of that. Still, it could easily be said that a mediocre effort by Solzhenitsyn is better than most others best books, and the book is certainly far from mediocre.

I just had one brief further comment to make about Solzhenitsyn, not just about One Day in the Life, but all his novels. He was probably at the height of his cold-war fame when I read The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and these books made an indelible impression on me. I thought him a great novelist who deserved a Nobel for his novels about what it really was like to live in Stalin's Russia.

Although a mathematician by training, Solszhenitsyn has a great way with characters, which are memorably drawn, fully realized, and very human. He writes novels of human suffering as vast as mother Russia herself, and he is a worthy successor to the great Russian literary tradition of such writers as Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Sholokov, and Boris Pasternak, to name a few.

In the 80s, when I was still in grad school, Solzhenitzyn came to the U.S. and accepted a visiting scholar post at Harvard. He was forbidden by the Communist government to accept his Nobel Prize in literature. I don't know what happened to him since, but it being now 25 years since that time I suppose he has passed away by now, but for me he was both the greatest writer and the most memorable critic and icon who stood opposed to the Soviet system during the Cold War years.

In fact, in a newspaper article back during those years, Solzhenitsyn was once referred to as the "greatest man alive," certainly a tribute to the esteem in which he was held outside of the USSR....more info

Just Another Day

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first book is a look into his own past, though we see it all through the eyes of the fictional Ivan Denisovich. In 1945 Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a concentration camp. Even after his release he was made to live in exile for three years. It wasn't until 1957 that he was "rehabilitated." He moved to Ryazan, married, and became a teacher. In 1962 he made his entrance onto the literary stage with One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.

Ivan is serving a ten year sentence in a concentration camp. He lives day to day with little thought for the future or the past. It is this day that matters. Survive this day and worry about tomorrow when it comes. This is the story of one day in his life.

This is a story of survival. In a place where it is impossible to get warm, where food is scarce, where no one can be trusted, where hard physical labor in terrible weather is a daily requirement, here in this place Ivan and his fellow prisoners find the will to live despite the odds against them. And the odds are stacked high against them. The shortest term in such a place is ten years. Escape is not an option for there is nowhere to run to except the frozen steppe and certain death.

Above all this is a story of the power of the spirit in the face of utter hopelessness. When forced out into sub zero temperature to work at a construction site nearby, Ivan takes pride in doing his assigned task well. Ivan knows that his ten year sentence could stretch on endlessly. He's seen it happen to others, seen their release dates approach only to be given another ten years in the camps. Still, Ivan is determined to survive and take whatever joy he can out of living.

This is a sad book in its way but also inspiring. And we, the readers, can read with a touch of hope for we know now that men like Ivan were eventually released from the camps. Stalin's terror died with him and Russia freed its imprisoned sons and daughters. And along came Solzhenitsyn to write about it. Lucky us.
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A Cold Day in Hell

"Hell" is a pre-Christian concept, adopted and adapted from the religion of Odin and Thor. In Old Norse, Hel was an underworld deity as well as a place of bleak afterlife. Hell was not an inferno, a fiery punishment for sinners, but rather an icy cold limbo. The various Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin words in the King James translation of the Bible that are translated as "Hell" chiefly have the more fundamental meaning of "the grave."

The forced labor camp for 'special' politically tainted prisoners, in which Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has spent 8 years of his 10 year sentence, is Hell at its icy worst, a kind of limbo from which no one will ever truly be released except into another kind of exile. Shukhov himself, in his conversation with his Baptist workmate Aloysha, explicitly rejects the Christian notions of Hell as punishment and Heaven as reward. That's the longest and most 'philosophical' conversation in the book, and it occurs at the very end of Ivan's emblematic "day" like every other day. This little book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been canonized as an expos¨¦ of the absurd brutality of Soviet Communism -- of the hellish conditions in the archipelago of labor camps that made a mockery of communist ideals -- and it certainly played that role historically. But, as the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko argues in his introduction, there's a deeper level to Ivan's experience than the mere political, and western readers have been too quick to interpret the book just as a political indictment of the unnamed Lord of Hell, Joseph Stalin. Yevtushenko also asserts that the raw language of Solzhenitsyn's writing in Russian has allusive and descriptive strengths that are scarcely conveyed in English translation. That's not hard to believe; most translations fall somewhat short, but sadly enough I doubt that I'll be learning Russian soon.

Ivan Denisovich's "will to survive" -- his stubborn defiance combined with sly subservience, his pride in his own endurance -- has a universal meaning. "Do Your worst to me, God," he seems to be saying, "but I will persist. I will survive Your capricious cruelty. I scorn Your power to degrade me for arbitrary offenses. I will outlast Your Hell if I can." At least in his first published book, Solzhenitsyn above all is proclaiming the supreme value of human life against all forces of nature, religion, and the state....more info

One day in a Siberian prison camp

A mathematics professor pointedly declared to the Dean of Liberal Arts at the local university that her literature courses should be dumped because fiction is just made up stuff. Tell that to Alexandre Solzhenitsyn. Tell that to Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a searing FICTIONAL indictment of Stalin's Soviet Union during the early days of communism. Shukhov was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian work camp for spying for the Germans, when in reality he was an escaped prisoner of war. Solzhenitsyn himself spent ten years in a similar situation for writing criticisms of Stalin in a letter.

As a high school English teacher, I assigned this novel for reading and discussion. One particular girl took her reading seriously and tried an experiment. For the duration of the reading, she did not bathe and ate only soup and bread, the point being to match--sort of--that one day in Ivan's life in the gulag. It was an experience she will never forget.

Life, broken and twisted, limped on in the camps. Even guards lived just a level above the prisoners. From waking up with one-inch frost on the windows--on the inside--to putting his feet in the sleeve of his jacket and his head on a pillow containing shaved wood at night, Shukhov found life anything but good. But Ivan had learned to make a satisfactory life--given his circumstances. After all, his sentence was ten years, while many others had 25 years.

Although readers justifiably focus on the horrors of the camp--subsistent food of thin soup and rationed bread, freezing temperatures outside and inside, a strictly controlled life for eighteen hours of the day, Solzhenitsyn also shows how one man, just an ordinary man, can survive.

The story, of course, does reveal the barren conditions of a Siberian camp, but it also exemplifies what Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "Man will not only endure: he will prevail." When Shukhov works hard and feels pride in his work, when he finds a bit of hacksaw blade and smuggles it back into camp, when he is rewarded with a bite of sausage from the captain's goody box from home, he has not only conquered his circumstances, he has prevailed. It was a good day.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn also was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. These two sentences from his acceptance speech are directed--pointedly--at that mathematics professor: "Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience."...more info

All classics

I have read most of Solzhenitsyn's books both in English and German, each time forgetting time and space when I was reading. Then I traveled Russia and stayed in the hotel in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East where he stayed upon his return to Russia, and I cruised the Amur River along which the Gulags he so vividly described existed. Alone near the front of the boat in the early morning hours, I pictured his prisoners in the bitter cold, totally isolated in a huge area that is cut off from the world except for the winters because of the marshes, but also escape-proof in winter because no one can survive those temperatures.

What literature, what landscape, what a country!...more info

In the mainstream of Russia's great literary traditions

In this novel, the first published by Solzhenitsyn in 1962, the author chose to portray one ordinary day of Ivan Denisovich Shukov at a camp from reveille to retreat based on what he himself experienced in the year 1937. The work impresses so much because it is a portrayal with extraordinary vitality and thoughtfulness of its characters. One feels that only the author's personal experiences can lend the story its sense of authenticity. As a result of the violation of Soviet legality, people were put to camps and had to undergo severe physical and moral tests under extreme circumstances. That's why Shukhov's "ordinary" day arouses in the reader the feeling of pain for the fate of the people who rise up before us so vivid and so near. Yet the author's unique skill lies in the fact that the bitterness and pain are not rendered by a feeling of hopeless depression but by the profound humanity and solidarity of the inmates. The author shows that even in such a grim place as a Soviet camp there is room for humour, hope and feelings. Finally Solzhenitsyn being a first class stylist, his novel is written in the colourful and lively language in which folk metaphors are mixed with camp jargon....more info

A genuine masterpiece

There are occasional moments of grace that make life worthwhile. In 1967, when I was barely thirteen, my family moved into a house (we were renting) whose previous occupant had left behind a handful of paperback books. Already an inexhaustible bookworm, I quickly nosed through them. One of them was Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich (older readers will remember it as the largish, black-covered, "Only Authorizied Edition" printing). Reading it changed my life, opening up for me a love of Russian literature that's remained to this day.

I've re-read Ivan several times since, and just finished going through it yet another time. What increasingly strikes me is Solzhenitsyn's ability to convey so much through such a sparing use of words. Through short paragraphs, minimal interior exploration, and few lines of dialogue, S. paints a portrait of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the eponymous character, that leaves the reader with the certainty that he or she knows Shukhov intimately. Other characters, drawn with even fewer strokes, are equally portrayed in strangely complete ways: the Estonian companions, inscrutable and inseparable, who lend Shukhov tobacco; Tsezar, the young intellectual who at times barely seems to know that he's in a gulag camp; Alyosha, the pious baptist whose religious conviction contrasts so starkly with the cynical conniving of Fetiukov; the stoical Tiurin, Ivan's squad leader; and the robust--and, one fears, doomed--Captain Buinovsky, former naval captain whose career was demolished by a thoughtless gesture of foreign goodwill.

There's no doubt that S.'s depiction of life in a Soviet gulag is accurate. But there's also no doubt that he intended to do more than merely chronicle Stalin's inhumanity. The book is also an acute psychological exploration into what near impossible conditions do to the characters of men, as well as a biting social commentary: the camp has as definite a pecking order as does the outside world, something which simply ought not to exist in a communist culture.

S. would go on to write several great novels, as well as his unsurpassable history of the gulag years. But I'm not sure that any of his later works surpass Ivan Denisovich. It remains, I think, his supreme artistic accomplishment.

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You will see bleakness yet signs of life in the Gulag.

If you have never read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, then perhaps you should. It is not a thriller. It will not keep you on the edge of your seat.

It will hold you captive however when you realize that for those caught in the Gulag system, every day, moment or second was one lived on the edge, and fraught with danger. The myriad of little details could only come from one who had lived under this system.

You can feel the hunger and desperation in the book, when one man goes missing at the work-site, his fellow prisoners wondering how it will all shake out, and will they all be punished.

The Captain's story is especially poignant. Once a man of power and prestige, now a Zek like the rest. When he is taken to the cells at the stories end, we like the Zeks do not know why or for what infraction. Although likeable he will soon be forgotten as the focus is on getting through the next day.

The book is mild, as it only shows one day, and is not even horrific. Rather it is tense and terse.

Cheers....more info

A Cold Day in Hell

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

Good story. Really gives you a look inside the Russian Gulag. Gives the reader an intimate look at the spirit of one man. I highly recommend this short book. It is well worth reading. ...more info

THE classic gulag tale

No author can better master the tale of the Gulag than Solzhenitsyn. The fact that he personally spent time in one may be considered by many to be the reason for this, but in truth there were many people who could both write and were thrown into one of these concentration camps. Solzhenitsyn's account is the best because his skill as a writer is superb. I highly reccomend this read for anyone of any age, it is a quick, enthralling, and informative book....more info

Required reading for any study of the Soviet Union

At the height of his power in the 1930's and 1940's, Joseph Stalin sent millions of the citizens of the Soviet Union into forced labor camps. All it took was a chance word heard by the wrong person and you were sent to a camp. It is not an exaggeration to say that at the time, the entire economy was based on slave labor. This book is about Shukhov, one of the inmates in a camp located in the frozen north. The day described here is a typical day, as he and his fellow prisoners all engage in the daily struggle to survive.
Simple things such as managing your food allotment, keeping your clothes and footwear intact and just keeping warm are the primary focus of his life. Yet, there is still humanity in him, his pride in doing a good job, having friends and his thoughts for the future. Much of Shukhov's life can be summed up by his trip to the infirmary. After speaking to an attendant there and being judged fit for work, Shukhov thinks to himself, "How can a man that's warm understand a man that is cold."
This book was a major part of the effort by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's program of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. It was a sensation in the Soviet Union and also made the reputation of Solzhenitsyn in the west. A basic novel of survival, it also contains a much more powerful message, that of a state policy of economic success through slave labor. The Soviet Union under Stalin was a brutal regime and some of that is captured in this novel.
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Almost a Happy Day

Now that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is remembered as a formidable opponent of Communism and the Soviet system, it is strange to think that "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which deals with the controversial subject of life in a Soviet labour camp, was first published (in November 1962) in an official literary magazine with the blessing of the Soviet authorities. Indeed, its publication is said to have been authorised by Nikita Khrushchev himself. Khrushchev's motives were, of course, self-interested. He saw the book as a useful tool in his campaign of de-Stalinisation, a campaign which served to justify his own rule and his disposing of rivals such as Lavrentiy Beria and Viktor Abakumov who had been more closely associated with Stalinist repression. (Khrushchev's own complicity in Stalin's crimes was, of course, airbrushed out of history). Nevertheless, the publication of the book was an unprecedented event; never before had so critical an account of Soviet rule, even Stalinist rule, been openly distributed.

The action of the book takes place on a single day in January 1951, a day seen through the eyes of the central character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who is in the eighth year of a ten-year sentence. Shukhov's sentence was imposed after, as a soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans. Although he managed to escape and make his way back though the Soviet lines, he was accused of being a spy. The novel is autobiographical and reflects Solzhenitsyn's own experiences in the gulags after he was imprisoned for writing derogatory comments about Stalin in a private letter.

Shukhov is innocent of the accusations of espionage, but this does not really matter to the Soviet authorities as the purpose of the labour camps was less to punish the guilty than to deter the populace from uttering any criticisms of the regime and to act as a source of slave labour for Stalin's grandiose construction projects. The prisoners (known as "zeks" in Russian) are organised into squads of around 20 men each. (Shukhov's squad is the 104th). As an incentive to work, the zeks are fed according to how much work their squad accomplished the previous day, forcing them to work as hard as possible to survive. Any slackers will be pressurised into working by their fellow squad members.

On the day in question, the 104th are set to work building a power station, even though it is bitterly cold and the mortar used for bricklaying will freeze if not applied quickly enough. (Regulations state that the men will only be excused work if the temperature drops below -41¡ãC). We get to know a number of Shukhov's fellow squad members, including the foreman Tyurin, respected by his men for his fairness and his skill in bargaining with the camp authorities, the deeply religious Alyosha who is supported by his faith, the shameless scrounger Fetyukov and Buinovsky, a former naval captain (imprisoned for accepting a gift from a British colleague) who finds it difficult to adapt to the camp after his previously privileged life. We also learn of the hardships faced by the zeks- the harshness of the weather, their inadequate clothing and equally inadequate food, consisting (unless they are lucky enough to receive parcels from home) of black bread, thin porridge and watery cabbage soup. They also face bullying from the guards, who are obsessive about enforcing petty regulations, although Solzhenitsyn does remind us that the guards are human too. Their attitude stems mainly from their own resentment at the hard conditions and at the harsh discipline imposed upon them. Should any of the zeks succeed in escaping, those guards deemed responsible will be forced to take their places in the camp.

The book ends with Ivan reflecting that he has had a good day. He hasn't fallen ill; he hasn't been sent to the punishment cells; he managed to obtain an extra bowl of porridge at dinner; he found a broken hacksaw blade which could serve him as a knife; his friend Tsezar received a parcel and shared some of its contents with him. "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day". This passage is, of course, deeply ironic. If this day, with all its hardships, counts as a good day in Ivan's life, we are left to reflect on what a bad day must be like.

Even in the West this book was an influential one, forcing many people to reassess their view of Soviet Communism; to Russians in the sixties, trying to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinism it must have come as a shattering revelation. Solzhenitsyn never explicitly denounces the Communist system in the book; had he done so, the book would doubtless have been banned. He simply provides a description of what life in the gulag was like, but in the long run his stark, spare prose was to prove as damaging to the system as any amount of political rhetoric. It is hardly surprising that after Khrushchev's fall his successor Leonid Brezhnev did all he could to muzzle Solzhenitsyn, eventually expelling him from the Soviet Union.
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Gulag description

This was published in NOVY MIR in 1962. According to Marvin Kalb, Krushchev's approval was necessry to print this take on the Stalinist era. It created a sensation.

Ivan Shukhov was put to work cleaning the guardroom by the guard the inmates of the camp called The Tartar. Another zek, prisoner, had saved Ivan's stew for him at the mess hall. After vegetable stew, black cabbage, there was magara, oatmeal. It was seventeen degrees below zero and windy. Ivan's squad, the one hundred fourth, was in its normal position for the work detail. There was, unusually, a search conducted before the men set out. A former Navy commander mentioned the Criminal Code and was given ten days in the guardhouse. The prison, eighteen cells, was brick. The camp for forced labor was logbuilt.

It was 1951. Ivan Shukhov had a right to two letters that year. He had left home in 1941. There was now little sense in writing. The collective farm, the Kolkhoz, where Ivan and his wife had resided was now being kept going by women and children. Ivan's fellow villagers now engaged in the craft of carpet painting. His wife assured him that using stencils he could do the same.

Ivan's squad leader was serving a second term in the Gulag and knew all the ways of the system. In camp a man can cheat anyone but not the squad leader. Snowstorms were no use to anyone. The prisoners were locked in and the days were counted as holidays. The work had to be made up. Their squad's work was being transferred to a half-completed building, the power station. They were to lay cement blocks. They needed to figure out how to make the machine room warmer. The machine room was to be used for mixing mortar.

More depended on the work report than the work itself. A clever squad leader kept the men fed. Ivan Densovich Shukhov, according to his dossier, had been sentenced for high treason. He had already served eight years. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans. His confession to the Soviet authorities was false. He had taken the path of least resistance.

The meal in the middle of the day was real oatmeal. Ivan managed to score several extra servings for his group through a sleight of hand. This straightforward narrative remains a moving and emotional experience to the Western reader. Solzhenitsyn explains how not wages but the good of the fellow squad members served as a goad to produce work from the prisoners. On the day of the book, Ivan had built a wall and enjoyed it. He had almost had a happy day. ...more info

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

Good story. Really gives you a look inside the Russian Gulag. Gives the reader an intimate look at the spirit of one man. I highly recommend this short book. It is well worth reading. ...more info

An awesome expression of life.

I find it interesting to sometimes ponder, just how extreme can humanity go? What conditions can we put ourselves in and through and still come out on the other side? Solzhenitsyn takes this question and puts it into literary form, if only for the period of one day. Thankfully, unlike the author, many of us will never have to endure something brutal as the Siberian gulag.
The book follows the psychological perspective of Ivan Denisovich, who is a "zek"(prisoner) who has been condemned to a 10 year stretch for merely having the misfortune of becoming a POW. You get to imagine the siberian cold(they are allowed to not work if it hits -40, which even when it does they just lie and force them to work anyway). You see the internal politics which are part of the means of survival, and just what a piece of hard bread and a bowl of cold, wet oats can mean to a man that is already in hell. It's also fascinating to see how he can still has pride and dignity in his work while trying to make sure each brick is set properly while under the intensity of forced labor. Make no mistake about it, this is a book with strong masculine tones, that i'm suprised doesn't enjoy more popularity under such a banner. The book itself is only around 130 pages or so, and can be read quickly by the determined reader, who would be cheating themselves not to read it....more info

One day in a Siberian prison camp

An Offering By The Russian Master Of Modern Literature

I had to read this book in my Final Year at High School and now 25 years later I reread it and once again was impressed by the narrative. This book is beautifully translated and the reader is intruduced to Ivan, a Political Prisoner in a Siberian Labor Camp.Ivan has to endure illness, terrible food, appalling working conditions and the brutality he finds in other inmates. This book goes into such detail that one is easily led into thinking that all of this happened to him in the space of about one week instead of one typical day in his life.This book is a semi autobiographical account by the Master Of Modern Day Russian Literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.Read this book and you will get the chills and shivers as you are with Ivan working in the freezing snow....more info

Heartbreaking

Since I had never read anything by Solzhenitsyn, I ordered this book when he died. It is so bleak and hopeless that I could not read it straight through - I could only take it in small doses. I am absolutely stunned that Breshnev allowed it to be published. I have learned more than I ever thought possible about the USSR, that time in history, evil, and courage. ...more info

The Day I spent with Ivan

This book is about a young man Named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. It takes place during the communist oppression. He has to fight for his servival in a concentration camp. This book really takes hold of your intension because of how it is written, as told in the title it is written as one day of ivans life. This is a unique way of writing because of this style you get to know the characters. Overall this book was excellent I personaly recommed this book to all ages....more info

The meaning of freedom

You'll be chilled by the descriptions of barbed wire, guard dogs, subzero temperatures and gulag sadism. You'll be exhilarated by Ivan's joy and pride in building a simple brick wall. Anyone who has ever wondered how hope can exist in seemingly hopeless conditions should read this book.
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Boorrring!-David

First of all I am an 13 yr old who was told to read this book for my Ad English class, I found this book to be very boring. Keep in mind that i am 13. I think this book is for people over 20 at least unless they don't want to get bored out of their wits!...more info