One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

This was a quick, interesting read. But I just…didn’t really vibe with this book. It wasn’t bad, it was just slow and kind of mundane in my opinion for something that’s 100 pages. Maybe it was just the writing of the time, but I just didn’t really like it. As I said, it was an interesting read. Just not for me. ( )

classic russian lit. Gulag life. ( )

Excellent bok about the absolute despair of the Soviet gulags, it was used by Nikita Kruschchev to denounce Josef Stalin. Who knew how such mundane things such as food, sleep, and a smoke could take such a role in such desolate circumstances? ( )

A short book - 144 pages that literally traces the events of a single day. The premise is that everyday is no different than this. Just more of the same, over and over. It traces the way the prisoners endured their unpredictable stays in the prison camps of Joseph Stalin in post war Russia with just a hint of it being the early days of the Korean war. They endure freezing cold constructing camps for others to eventually live in in an area no one would likely choose to come to on their own. Their coping mechanisms are extremely well thought out, they have nothing but time on their hands. There are endless counts to see if anyone has tried to escape even though escape in this area is likely to lead to death just from the cold. They work from dawn til dusk and often even on Sundays. What jumps out is the inhumanity that abounds. Almost everyone knows how and when to be cruel to another. Punishment is severe and not infrequently leads to death, but not today. The author clearly speaks from experience. It is hard to imagine that the coping mechanisms are just something he made up. Ivan has a good day, extra gruel, extra bread, created a wall of bricks with his gang mates, overcame obstacles such as non-working equipment, boot legged ways to cover windows to help keep warm, smuggles in some steel to make a knife to cut food, gets some tobacco, talks with gang mates, avoids making the guards angry, gets food from a gangmate package after showing him the ropes, yells at others occasionally, in short lives the good life for yet another day. ( )

Hard work does not always pay off. More so when you are a prisoner in a Gulag labour camp. And like some kind of a secret known to us all, it's cope with a mind-over-matter mindset. This pays off despite the harsh and unfair game of survival of the fittest under a temperature of -14 °C. A day may feel like an eternity but this one day in Ivan Denisovich's life, amidst the small hiccups through ordinary display of abuse and power, is slow and mostly okay. Interestingly, if not for its unforgettable setting, this may all seem eerily familiar and frightening. All the toiling, the exhaustion, the futile efforts of working to live and living to work—minus the visible prison bars, camp guards, and explicit rules—are synonymous to a prison themselves. But there's got to be a way out, isn't it? ( )