Shipping was a bit fast but the book was a great price and brand new.

This was as awesome novel which I read for a World History class in college. I strongly recommend this book to those interested in Russia, World War 2, Stalin etc.
I love history, and this book was amazing.

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" ~Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

This book details the fictional day of Shukhov Ivan Denisovich in a Stalinist work camp in Siberia. Many of the prisoners in these work camps (Gulags) were political prisoners who had in some way voiced their concerns/frustrations against the communistic Mother Russia. Rather than kill these so-called rebels, they sent them to Gulags as slave laborers and gave them just barely enough to keep them alive.

The title character had been captured by the Germans and placed in a POW camp. He and one other Russian soldier escaped and upon returning to their homeland were accused of being spies. This innocent man was sent to the gulags for ten years. This is a book of fiction; however, it is based on the author's personal experiences in the work camps. There were in fact innocent prisoners sent to the gulags for much longer and for much less than that.

The two words that encapsulate this book for me are frozen and hungry. I get cold just reading the first paragraph of the book:

"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."

The prisoners were forced to work from sunup to sundown in below zero weather. The only time they weren't marched out to work were in conditions fourty-one below or worse. The title character spends his entire day working, trying to stay warm, and fanagling additional food from his fellow prisoners. They were given less than a ladleful of slop each meal--just enough to keep them alive. I think this paragraph from the book vividly describes the importance of this slop to the prisoners:

"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 (prisoner) 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."

For some reason the Gulags of the Soviet Union do not receive much publicity in the US. I can't think of one movie about the suffering in the Soviet Gulags. However, this book has piqued my interest, and I am determined to learn more about them. There is a bulky book on my to-read list called Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. I look forward to reading it, and hopefully it will give me a little more of the history and real life stories.

In my opinion, the book does not really try to get too political. The book is meant to give you a glimpse into a day in the life of a Gulag prisoner. Sadly, it was actually one of his better days. The book is only 159 pages and only took me two days to read. I heartily recommend it

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°C). 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.

"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 exposé 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.