One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Rating:
Summary: Never a better political protest book has been written
Review: This book was a protest book about Stalin and the terror that he inflicted the land with. This was a book that never would have been written with out Khrushchev's apporval and the CCCP's go ahead. This was an attempt to show the world that the Russian people were people and not shady, shifty eyed people bent on world occupation and subjecting the world to Stalinistic views. That all this was and all it will ever be. It doesn't try and change the literuary landscape with his description of one day in the life of a man. It is a protest book! It proclaims to the world and to its nation of birth that the man Stalin was just as evil as Hitler was and it was a shame that this nation had to live in fear of thier own neighbors.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I would read this book if you want to understand what life was like for men who had to spend time in Siberian prison work camps while Russia was under communist rule. It is shocking some of the things these men go through. You will come to realize how we take things for granted like food, shelter, friends, etc. once you read this disturbing book.

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Summary: How we all should live our lives.
Review: This is a short, engaging and beautifully written book about the horrors of life in a Siberian Gulag. What is best about the book is that, in the words of Oscar Wilde "although we are all in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars". This a book about hope, about getting the best from a bad lot.

It does not matter if you are in a Gulag or in a boring job, or struggling with a marriage or family or what ever. You personally have the ability to see things as good or as bad, and how you perceive your life determines how you will enjoy it.

The protagonist in this book does his best, he works for the simple joy of a job well done, he delights in an extra bowl of porridge, and as a result his day is a good one. The full horror of his sentence is kept at bay by taking it one day at a time.

If you want an introduction to Solzhenitsyn this is the book for you. Don't believe all the stuff about political satire, don't try to work out if the boots are a metaphor for something in Russian Government, just read the words and revel in them.

Word for word this is one of the greatest books ever written.

Rating:
Summary: enter a new world...for a day
Review: what makes this book worth four stars is as much what is says as what it does not. going into painstaking detail about one day in the life of a prisoner in the gulag - one of like 10,000 days of his prisoner life - this book conjures up a whole world.

at points it was a little tedious and hard to follow, but the main thrust of the roughness of his life just made the journey from cover to cover one worth following.

main plus of the book and thing making it worth reading: snapped me out of my little world for a few hours and made me grateful about how my life is...about my freedom. that guy was a modern slave. and i'm not. like bob marley says: emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. well, this book helps.

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Summary: Stoic Austerity
Review: Solzhenitsyn, himself, said, "Literature that is not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of literature...the pain and fears of society must be held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers which threaten it."

Hisotry, to Solzhenitsyn, as it was to Tolstoy, is the theatre and arena in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale.

For Solzhenitsyn, however, the tragedies of individuals are not decreed by fate, as they were for Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn sees instead tragedies as parts, packets or "knots" (uzly) of an even larger tragedy. The very things that debase their victims are, for Solzhenitsyn, not the result of "historical necessity," but rather a part of a larger evil, e.g., Soviet society.

Solzhenitsyn is not a revolutionary, however, he is an artist. At times his retelling of the history of twentieth century Russia is stark, bleak and unadorned, however in relating the results of events, Solzhenitsyn always seeks out the causes which have brought about the historical consequences. The major actions occurring in history, as Solzhenitsyn sees it, are due to the consciously-defined motivations of human beings.

For Solzhenitsyn, tragedy is distinctly non-classical and non-Tolstoyan. Heroic characters are not tragically-flawed, innocent victims as they are for Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn's works are, instead, populated with persons who are either intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. For him, the intrinsically evil certainly outnumber the intrinsically good, although they do not necessarily defeat them. This is a distinctly non-classical, non-nineteenth century view.

For Solzhenitsyn, men create their own tragedy and history and they are the ones who must shoulder the blame.

Solzhenitsyn's style of writing is economical and unadorned. His motto might well be "wie es eigentlich gewesen," or "tell it like it is." As such, he writes in the everyday language of the labor camps. This causes much confusion in translation although it reads perfectly well in the original Russian.

In fact, many "unprintable" Russian words can be found in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, all rendered with the frankness of a Henry Miller novel. Solzhenitsyn, however, uses obscenities, not to shock, but to show how debased human beings can become.

The blunt language used by Solzhenitsyn lends an "immediacy and sincerity of tone" to his work. His scenes are enhanced by this device, whether it be a scene in the barracks, at a construction site, or during friskings and body counts.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is told in the "skaz" or folktale manner in the Russian tradition of Pilniak, Zamyatin and Babel, not to mention prerevolutionary writers like Leskov and Gogol. In the skaz tradition, the storyteller, or narrator, shares the same level as the main character in the story. The skaz strategy for storytelling permits the author to insert much "local color" into the story as well as humorous or ironic observations and commentary.

The narrator in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch allows the reader to participate in situations and to listen to conversations as if he were really there. This is further enhanced by the fact that the language employed is, at times, quite simple and slangy and filled with "zek argot."

Solzhenitsyn, however, established no clear dividing line between Shukhov's speaking and his own speaking. At times, this device necessitates that the reader take great care in untangling an unspoken monologue of Shukhov from an external observation made by the author through the third person narrator.

Additionally, when Shukov, himself, is speaking in dialogue, it is difficult to know whether he is speaking to the reader or to another character.

It is obvious that Solzhenitsyn has employed a number of literary techniques in the telling of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. His message in this book, as well as in other books is to convey the raw truth in all its bleakness. In avoiding lengthy sentences and ornamental descriptions (a la Dickens or Dostoyevsky), Solzhenitsyn accomplishes a stoic austerity in style equal to the stoic austerity of his scenes in a Siberian labor camp.

Rating:
Summary: not one of the greatest russian writers but good
Review: true to greek rules of narrative, this takes place in one day, one day in the life of an imprisoned man in siberia. vivid images (still seeing flashes of the line up and the sheet of tin) that will, obviously, stay with you long after you've closed the book. short and sweet. worth the time.

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Summary: This makes up for the shoe-banging incident.
Review: Ivan Shukhov is a soldier, trademan, and prisoner in Stalin's Gulag. One Day is the chronicle of a single, more-or-less successful winter day of his term in prison. Ivan awakens, eats slop, runs errands for other prisoners to supplement that slop, and works with his team to build a wall. Among his fellow prisoners Solzhenitsyn has placed individual representatives of the various types that inhabited the Gulag: members of inconvenient nationalities, intellectuals, communist hacks (unflatteringly incarnated in the parasitical figure of Fetiukov), a few genuine criminals, and an evangelical Christian named Alyosha. (If the views of the latter on suffering seem a bit different from those you hear from American Christians, especially of the health-and-wealth variety, so much the worse for us, perhaps.)

In this, his first published work, Solzhenitsyn revealed the brilliance of a great Russian novelist. Human nature is tested by the most adverse conditions and comes alive. Ironically, tyranical policies often did have the positive effect both in Russia and in China, of breaking down barriers between intellectuals and the plebes to reveal the common humanity of both -- in the end, to the sorrow of the regime. One subtle and ironic example of Solzhenitsyn's realism is the pleasure his presumable "enemy of the working class" hero finds even in work in a Siberian slave labor camp.

While First Circle is my favorite of Solzhenitsyn's books, and Gulag is one of the most powerful works of our time, One Day is a small gem, a perfectly realized portrait. Actually it is not a picture of slave labor, or even communism; like all great literature, it is about life itself, and what it means to be a moral being. For an interesting contrast to Solzhenitsyn's bitterly ironic but ultimately life-affirming chronicle, read One Day in tandem with The Plague, written by fellow Nobel Prize lauriette Albert Camus. Camus' novel about a town that has become prisoner to bubonic plague takes place in a larger camp, but in my opinion a smaller universe, than the world of Ivan Denisovich, still less of Alyosha.

Krushchev may have threatened us over Cuba, and banged his shoe on the table in the UN, but he also permitted publication of this novel. Here's to his health, wherever he is.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: a good book
Review: I recommend this book to anyone who likes history. I appreciated Solzhenitsyn's direct style of writing. Just the diet of the prisoners was a shock. But the overall thing that came across was that these people seemed to have no reason to live another day, except for looking forward to getting out.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Work
Review: _Ivan Denisovich_ is by no means light reading, nor is it particularly notable for its entertainment value. Solzhenitsyn's detailed descriptions of the horrors of life in the Gulag, though, give the reader a glimpse into an otherwise unknown life, a life filled with desperation, starvation, frozen tundra, and injustice. Although I did not particularly enjoy the book as I read it, I am glad that I did--Solzhenitsyn's story is worth being heard, and the novel's ultimate value surpassed my initially negative feelings about the book. It is truly amazing and thought-provoking to realize what sort of a day is good in the eyes of Ivan Denisovich and his fellow prisoners.

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Summary: I was fascinated with A Day in the Life...
Review: Solshenitzyn portrays with lucidness and realism the horrors that took place in the Soviet Union's prison camps. Many of the tactics used by the USSR are depicted in the novel. What intrigued me the most was how labor was used to eliminate any sense of time and contact with the outside world. It demonstrates how Soviet psychology, which delved in mind-manipulating techniques, implemented its horrid program of human conditioning. The book, above every thing else, depicts the endurance of the human spirit in the midst of the most horrid conditions that man is capabale of creating. A Day in the Life... is a must read.