One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.”
— “Work”, Denis Johnson
1. Introduction
Several years ago, before I realized I had played an inadvertent role in the grand global roll-out of clickbait, I worked on the editorial team of a digital media company where we decided—collectively and consciously—to put together a list (“Ranked!”) of the top 250 footballers on the planet. To each attractively laid out photo, heading and blurb was added the most important design feature of the lot: the back and forward arrows that would keep the dazed and the (ahem) listless moving through pageview after pageview, giving the backend devs and bean-counters and ad salesmen exactly what they needed: this MPU ad, and this one, and this one too, displayed to the poor souls who had just become what they forever now be known: eyeballs.
As the world was slowly waking up to the transformation-of-everything wrought by the perfect storm of smartphone technology and social networks, Buzzfeed, Upworthy and other upstart digital media outlets discovered in lists the possibilities of a new business model in the age when information would be free. Until everyone copped on to the ruse, the easily influenced (read: all of us) would find ourselves absent-mindedly pausing and tapping when something disarmingly ridiculous—“11 Delightful Poems Found in Pornhub Comments”, say—was thumbed up from the bottom of the Facebook screen. Lists, and their bastard cousin, rankings, were everywhere. In the new language of the Internet, lists and rankings created disagreement, and disagreement equalled “engagement”, and “engagement” was the life-blood of every so-called new media company that needed to generate the spare inventory and traffic that might generate the ad sales that might keep the ship sailing for one more quarter.
There are many ludicrous and pointless debates in the world of lists and rankings. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in four decades of mild to debilitating confusion at the world around me, it is this: superlatives are the last word in stupidity. Does comparing Messi and Maradona do anything for anybody? If you’re an energetic participant in a debate about the relative merits of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, what does that really say about you? If somebody were to argue forcefully that Proust was greater than Joyce, or that Joyce was an artist to Hemingway’s brute, does that say more about Proust, Joyce, Hemingway or the idiot doing the arguing?
Nevertheless, for all the rank obsequiousness of the preceding paragraphs, let me draw a line in the sand here and triple-underscore it furiously to make the point.
Hemingway had style. Joyce had invention. Proust had conviction. Leave them and everyone else aside. I’ve left the business of Rankings and Lists firmly behind, but allow me one last indulgence. In the past 100 years there has been no writer more courageous or important, none more relatable, more accessible and more influential, and none who has been through the hardship he suffered not just for his art but for life itself—and, maybe, for all our lives, than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
And while many among the Listers and Rankers might argue that his The Gulag Archipelago is The Greatest Novel of the Century, a book that inflicted the mortal blow on the murderous ideal that was the Soviet Union, this review is about his first book. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 140 pages long and readable between lunch and dinner, is as accessible as Archipelago’s 2000+ pages is intimidating. His account of 17 hours, morning reveille to night-time shuteye, in a Gulag prison camp is something everyone should read, and read more than once.
This review will try to outline why.
2. Historical Context
Let’s get this out of the way straight up, for it’s important to understand and just as important not to dwell on, especially if dwelling on it threatens to overshadow our relationship with the text and the narrative that follows.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in the city of Kislovodsk in the warm climate of southern Russia, sandwiched between the Black and Caspian Seas not far from Armenia and Azerbaijan. A mathematics graduate, he was enlisted in the Russian army and served at the front during what would be known to the world as World War II and to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. He was a gunner and artillery officer, was decorated twice and rose to the rank of captain, but all that was swept aside when he was arrested in East Prussia and accused of making critical comments about Stalin. He spent the next eight years in various prison camps, the so-called Gulag camp network in which approximately 18 million people were imprisoned between 1923 and its dissolution in 1961, and which caused the deaths of at least one million, and possibly as many as six million, of those.
The camp described in One Day is believed to have been in the region of Karaganda in modern day Kazakhstan, where tens of thousands of ethnic Germans were imprisoned by Stalin primarily for their ethnicity, and which saw many of those people and their descendents emigrate to Germany after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
If all of this might be good to know, it’s also good to leave it now to one side, for the book itself should not be overshadowed by its historical context. Solzhenitsyn’s courage brought him a vast influence in the macro, but his vast gift was in the micro. His story of those 17 hours—of petty squabbles and generosity, of violence and fear, of pride and resourcefulness—deserves to be read for the power of the telling as much as the importance of the context.
You don’t need to understand the vagaries of 1950s America to understand Catcher in the Rye or the creep of totalitarianism to understand Nineteen Eighty-Four. The opposite applies. Salinger helps you understand 1950s America. Orwell teaches you about totalitarian creep. So it is with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If you want to understand the ugly nature of collectivized power and the invincibility of the free human spirit (if not the human body) against such power, don’t reach for dry thousand-page histories when you can get just as much or more from a couple of hours in the presence of someone who was there and the characters he drew out of the experience.
3. An Argument for Literature as Self-Help
Self-help is one of the most popular categories in any bookshop. The self-help industry—for it is an industry in its own right, standing alongside the industry of publishing itself—presents for the despairing lost masses an endless array of strategically seductive, attractively packaged fad diets, fad mindsets and fad workout regimens. The paradox of the self-help industry is that it must never, ever, achieve its mission. Like cancer charities and pharma companies, it is an organism that must survive, feeding itself by extending treatment while steadfastly avoiding prevention or cure.
This is not to say that self-help literature is not a thing. It is to say that the best self-help literature is not to be found on the self-help shelves. Literature—real literature, with its observations of personal hardships and professional turmoils and inner strifes, and the occasional breakthrough successes that bring with them a new series of confounding problems to be overcome—offers a more potent recipe for self-help than anything out of Hay House.
With no more than a lukewarm commitment, short books and a snail’s pace, you can get through five excellent works of fiction every year. Each one will allow you to see the world, its complexity and its challenges, through the eyes of at least one other person. While the personal development industry tries to point you to this affirmation or that routine, this enduring strength of fiction—the capacity to broaden one’s worldview by seeing the world through the eyes of another—is the essence of personal development. Soon, we find that we see the world, and see ourselves, and see ourselves in the world, differently. We inhabit the mind and body of a crippled war veteran in 1920s Paris, or a bombardier in the nose of a plane over 1940s Italy, or a little dude with a hefty appetite and a wizard for a friend in Middle Earth, and we are changed by that experience.
Without leaving the couch, we travel everywhere in the world and everywhere through time, armed with our personal DeLorean and a lifetime’s supply of plutonium. Repeated over time, this becomes a superpower. We are no longer alone, trying to figure out the world and how to bend it to our will. We are together, beset with the same foibles, fears, weaknesses and desires as Jake Barnes, Heathcliff, Yossarian, Emma Bovary. With no more than a mildly inquisitive mind and a willingness to take enough time out of our world’s endless distractions to sink in, the great bulk of self-help “literature” becomes immediately redundant.
With all that in mind, when we slip into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, what might we learn?
4. A Life in One Life
On the face of it, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich offers exactly what it says. One day, from morning till night, in the life of a prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. He wakes, or is awoken, as he is every morning, by the 5am prison camp reveille: the blows of a hammer on a length of rail. He’s feeling unwell, and instead of jumping out of bed as he usually does (for no other reason than the fact that the first 90 minutes of the day, before the long workday starts, is his time, as close as it gets to freedom of thought and freedom of action in the camp), he pulls the blankets around him to ward off his shivers. This indiscretion gets him a punishment, although the promise of three days’ penalty without work soon gives way to the lesser punishment of mopping the floor in the officer quarters. That task done, he tries the sick-bay but is informed that as his temperature is not too extreme and the day’s full allocation of sickness—two men already signed off—has been doled out, he may as well join the rest of his squad at work. Breakfast is a small portion of rationed bread, the rest sewed into the lining of his blanket to avoid both mice and the prying eyes of officers.
Then follows the march to work, with its tortuous sequences of counts and checks, threats on punishment of death interspersed with little humiliations. All are inspected for extra garments, which are both illegal (no man is allowed more than a shirt and undershirt) and essential (it’s 27 below zero and the snow and ice are hard on the ground). Later, the squad builds a wall, is held out in the cold for an extra hour while until an errant prisoner is located, returns to camp, has a dinner of vegetables and fish stew during which Shukhov manages—joy of joys—to pilfer an extra serving by confusing the cook. He helps a fellow inmate for the promise of some good tobacco, talks briefly about the merits of freedom with his neighbor in the next bunk, a Bible-smuggling Baptist, and settles down for the night.
Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he;d smuggled that bit of hacksaw-blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it.
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
Each small detail, layered upon the last, adds to the power of the reading experience. But look a little deeper, and we see the outline of something perhaps even more profound. We see the shape not of a day within a life, but of a life within the day.
We see the stirrings and sickness of morning, mirroring the childhood weaknesses and dependencies that we end up muddling through. We see, throughout, the endless unpredictable petty punishments, the violence and the ever-present threat of violence, the need for fear and the danger of hope and the random strokes of luck that add up, one by one by one, to what looks like a life.
We see—in 15 astonishing pages that house the true beating heart of the book, as Shukhov and the rest of his squad build a wall, taking pride both in the strength of their bodies and the precision of their workmanship—the intrinsic value of work, even against the wider sweep of grand meaninglessness, reflecting perhaps the central challenge of every human life. We see the resourcefulness of the human spirit and its occasional heroic refusal to die, or even bow, in even the most difficult of circumstances.
And in the end of a one day deemed, despite it all, to have been a good day amid the general bleakness, perhaps the end of one life amid the expanse of black nothingness, the day’s end showing us that this—this experience, this existence, this unbearable difficulty that we must cherish because its absence means we are dead—is meaningful in and of itself.
5. Work as Your Only Salvation
Even against the backdrop of punishment and servitude, threat and violence and fear, work contains the seeds of meaning, and meaning makes everything bearable. Without further embellishment, three short segments:
Shukhov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance: they wanted to shift the 104th from the building-shops to a new site, the ‘Socialist Way of Life’ settlement. It lay in open country covered with snow-drifts, and before anything else could be done there they would have to dig holes and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them. Wire themselves in, so that they wouldn't run away. Only then would they start building. There wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month. Not even a doghouse. And fires were out of the question. There was nothing to build them with. Let your work warm you up, that was your only salvation.
*****
And now that he had been given work to do, Shukhov’s aches and pains seemed to have gone.
*****
Slap on the mortar. Down with the blocks. Press it home. See it’s straight. Mortar. Block. Mortar. Block… Wasn’t it enough that Tiurin [the squad leader] had told them himself not to bother with the mortar? Just throw it over the wall and bugger off. But Shukhov wasn’t made that way: eight years in a camp couldn’t change his nature. He worried about anything he could make use of, about every scrap of work he could do—nothing must be wasted without good reason. Mortar. Block. Mortar. Block…
6. What Happens Next?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008 at the age of 89. In his final years, he could have been forgiven for indulging himself in reflecting on the century he’d lived through, a century whose worst traumas and excesses he had done as much as anybody to bring into sharp focus. If he did so reflect, he could have been forgiven for thinking humanity may well have found some level of maturity in its own collective One Life, recovering from our long decades of violence and injustice to carve out “almost a happy day”.
But maybe, given all he had seen, he would have been less naive and more pragmatic than all that.
He might have noticed that the capacity for the collective to force itself on the individual had not died, just changed shape.
He might have recognised in the new technologies sweeping the world some of the sharp edges of the old: the centralization of information, the appeal of a compelling narrative, the power of a dominant voice.
He might have encouraged all of us to put our heads down and get to work, telling us that even if our work seems to be fully contained within power structures established by our overlords, or feels meaningless in the moment, we should not give up.
He might have said to us that even when we are hungry and sick, when we are driven—figuratively or literally—from our beds and frog-marched across barren ground, when we cannot find the strength to hope for some future tomorrow, that the act of work today, undertaken in a spirit of precision and pride and collaboration, could one day make some seemingly powerful force pause a moment and wilt a little.
He might have said to us that such an outcome—getting the tormentor to pause—is all the nourishment we need to keep going, and that keeping going is the best we can ever hope to accomplish in our own one life.