ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN,

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

What was camp life like? What work did they do? What work did Shukov do?

What were the rules of the camp?

What was Shukov’s crime?

How often was food mentioned? Why?

How often was the weather mentioned? Why?

What kind of day was this, according to the author?

A good day? A bad day?

Why write a novel about a single day?

“A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.” (167)

What does that tell us?

Was there any resistance in the camp?

Was it only the body that the Gulag controlled or also the mind? Did prisoners own their thoughts?

PARALLELS WITH PRIMO LEVI, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ

Primo Levi wrote the following: “I read Ivan Denisovich with a red and blue pencil in my hand, marking in red the things that had been the same for us and in blue the things that were different.” (Conversations with Primo Levi, page 46)

When Levi was finished reading, was there more blue or red pencil in his copy of this One Day…?

“There are many things in common. In the first place, the lack of solidarity. There the prisoner is called a zek. And who is the zek’s worst enemy? Another zek—and this completely corresponds to my experience. Then, Ivan Denisovich has been selected by Solzhenitsyn as one who’s already been through the mill; he’s the equivalent of what among us was called ‘a low number,’ someone who knows how to organisieren, which means to operate illegally.”

One of the key differences between these two systems is that one was engineered to maintain life at the margins while instructing a fallen citizen and one was engineered to extract as much labor from an illegal person while ushering him to his death.