Ivan Denisovich: One Horrible Day

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn details the life of a Russian prisoner for exactly one day, but what a day it is.

We “meet” Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner or a zek, in a Soviet Gulag (hard-labor camp) in the early 1950s. Ivan has served part of his ten-year sentence of exactly 3,653 days. The unnamed camp in this book is located in the steppe, a brutally barren and frozen land located in far Eastern Europe or Central Asia. Despite this book covering only one day in Ivan’s prison life, it is a day of extraordinary hardship, humiliation, competition, luck, boredom, horror, and eking by to survive.

Perhaps the most important element in One Day in the Life is the psychological game that prisoners suffer day to day and minute by minute: the mind obsesses over tiny and momentous things at the same time. Every morning at about 7 am, a hammer is struck on a metal rod. That is reveille, and for the next 90 minutes zeks wait until the guards open the doors to let them outside. When the zeks assemble for work, they do it in an orderly manner, much like soldiers. They are marched to a separate area where they are instructed to build rudimentary structures. After they work all day, the zeks return to camp, again in a march, to get their dinner rations and sleep. This sounds simple, but this is only what the guards see. Much more goes on behind the guards’ backs.

Here’s a description of what typically goes on in the mind of “the prisoner”: “The thoughts of a prisoner—they’re not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they [the guards] feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he [Ivan] have any luck at the dispensary? Would they put Buinovsky [the former naval captain] in the cells [the guardhouse]? And how did Tsezar get his hand on that warm vest? He’d probably greased a palm [bribed someone] or two in the warehouse for peoples’ private belongings. How else?” (47).

Every event in a typical day revolves around how to find enough resources for the body and the mind to survive. Food, or the lack of it, is at the top of everyone’s mind. People only receive a few ounces of bread, vegetable stew, and a little bit of what they call magara or “Chinese oatmeal” every day, leaving them constantly hungry. However, this is not all the food the zeks get, as they play a few very clever tricks to get more, such as Ivan hiding and sewing bread in his sawdust mattress, or Tsezar smuggling food in by mail. Food, in fact, becomes greater than the feeling of freedom itself: “That bowl of soup— it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future” (123). This stew scene comes after a long, horrible day of work, plus a lineup of hundreds of zeks willing to take your food by any means possible. The prisoners have been reduced to mere animals who fend for themselves for survival.

They also rely on tobacco to keep themselves from going insane. Shukhov’s squad, the 104th, relies on the Lett, a Latvian, who runs the “dispensary,” and smuggles in tobacco. Alyosha “the Baptist” copied half of the New Testament to read to his fellow squad members. One very dangerous threat to these tricks for survival is inspection from the terrible camp guards. If they find anything, they will throw you in the guardhouse for solitary confinement, which is the worst case scenario in a Gulag. Why? Nobody makes it out of a ten-day sentence alive because the food rations are far under the minimum for survival.

Another important element of this book is monotony and sheer boredom. Every day, even though we only see one day in this story, seems to be identical to the last: get up, work, eat, sleep, repeat—but all of this under incredible stress. Without variation, without hope of change, the mind dies as it needs to focus on doing just enough to survive. “Burning out” would mean something very different to zeks than they would to us today. They need to focus on not doing too much because they would actually starve or die of exhaustion. Completing a ten-year sentence means surviving every single day on extremely limited rations, harsh conditions, and the tyranny of camp guards and bullying prisoners.

Combined with the monotonous tedium is the intense fear of being thrown in the guardhouse. The most harrowing moment in the novel is the point where Ivan realizes that he accidentally brought a tiny piece of a broken sawblade from the construction site. He knows that if they find it in the evening inspection, he will go to the guardhouse. He stores in in his left mitten. The guard checks the right mitten first, and is about to check the left, but luckily the guard is called away.

Solzhenitsyn teaches us the horrors of the Gulag, but also the horror of Stalin’s regime and dictatorship in general. Extreme measures were taken to get “rid” of all the “enemies of the state.” This means exile from society for millions of people, but the camps are themselves a type of society. Ivan has been successful as a camp society member because he shows some generosity to his fellow prisoners. He does favors like picking up parcels and portions out the bowls of stew for his squad. In return, he wins a cigarette here and a bowl of stew there. Much of the novel describes what it takes to survive, which is enough care of your fellow prisoners without appearing weak. As stated by Ivan’s first squad leader, Kuziomin, “Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The ones that don’t make it are those who lick other men’s leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on the buddies” (18).

Reading this book was strange because it is repetitive and slow, yet full of jump scares that are somehow regularly occurring. Solzhenitsyn describes in fantastic detail the thoughts of a prisoner who is determined to survive by being hard and paranoid, but still has feeling for his fellow prisoners. His descriptions of hunger and cold remind me of my incredibly good fortune in not suffering from basic want. I have the luxury of going to school, thinking about things, and not doing hard labor. I have the freedom to be bored and to be excited, without anyone threatening me.