One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962 ★★★★

Life Under Article 58

The usual superlatives one wishes to bestow upon One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich fall away after one finishes reading it. Is it fair to describe as a statement to hidden hope, or of the irreducible dignity of man?

It sure doesn't feel that way when you finish it. Hardship is endured, yes, but hardly the ennobling kind.

What One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich does get across rather well is the human instinct for survival. It's all our protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, has left to him as we join him in his Soviet prison camp on a winter day early in 1951.

Sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code as an enemy of the state because he had the misfortune of running from German tanks in the first days of Operation Barbarossa, Shukhov makes his way through a typical day, scrounging for food and keeping away from the harsh discipline that can land on you out of nowhere.

"It's the law of the jungle here, fellows," he remembers a former gang boss telling him when he first arrived. "But even here you can live. The first to go is the guy who licks out bowls, puts his faith in the infirmary, or squeals to the screws."

Later on, the situation is described more bluntly, after the protagonist tries and fails to get himself excused from his daily labors on the basis of a seemingly legitimate claim of sickness: "When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm."

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was a guest of the state at a Soviet prison camp in Kazakhstan, S. S. R. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner from 1950-53. Image from https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Nobel-Prize-Winning-Author-Alexander-Solzhenitsyn-During-the-Gulag-Years-1945-1950-Posters_i5146588_.htm

You can't read Denisovich without thinking about about the cruelty of the system behind it. Indeed, one of the main themes of the book is how unjustly imprisoned just about everyone at this camp seems to be. One of Shukhov's fellow prisoners was freed from Buchenwald concentration camp but still convicted of treason with the Germans, while another was jailed when sent an unasked-for gift from a British naval officer.

Denisovich dared to criticize the Soviet Union at a time when exposed dissidence, as author Alexander Solzhenitsyn well knew, could carry a heavy price. This novel is based on his own experience in such a camp, after he was exposed as a critic of Joseph Stalin in personal correspondence. But by 1962, Stalin was not only dead but unpopular in his former regime. Denisovich was submitted to Soviet authorities and published with minimal edits.

By then, it was seen as a way of acknowledging Stalin's heavy-handed dictatorship and its human cost, proving that yes indeed, Moscow really did believe in tears.

I should mention that this review is of the Max Hayward/Ronald Hingley translation. There are several translations, and people tend to have their favorites. I have been told on Amazon that my review is worthless because the translator was not Ralph Parker or H. T. Willets. Even if Russian literature seems to bring out the literary snob in people, there could be something to this.

Translations are tricky things; often costing much in the way of nuance. But when you read this book, it doesn't seem like it would be so vulnerable to a clumsy translation. Everything in the setting and the descriptions, and the characters who interact with Shukhov, are written in such a deliberately bare-bones way as to suggest either Solzhenitsyn was going the minimal route, or Hayward and Hingley were two of the laziest translators ever known.

I can't say I loved reading Denisovich. I found it a dry, enervating experience. Solzhenitsyn is a real detail-maven, going through the rote experience of his typical day in mind-numbing fashion. He writes at length about what amounts to the high point of this day, building a wall, so much so I wondered if I could go outside and build one myself.

A more imaginative mind might see in this a metaphor for the society that creates Shukhov's experience, but I think Solzhenitsyn was at least as much carried away by the concrete realization of this fictive world he knew so well from his own prior imprisonment.

It can be exhausting, this little book with no plot and no chapters. But it makes its case well, which is that when a society reduces one's life to such a scale as this, it has failed in a very basic way. It's no wonder Solzhenitsyn fell out of favor with the Soviet regime so soon after Denisovich's publication; you can't give voice to human dignity in a small way and not expect the floodgates to open.

Does the book still matter? I think it does. It's a powerful read, all the more for its lack of incident or memorable characterization. It suggests the value of humanity by negative example, and also in the nooks and crannies of simple freedoms and small-scale happiness where Shukhov finds them. He is content because it’s all he knows; can we be as content knowing what we do?