Rereading Review: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I've probably written about this book before and well, here I am reading it again. Why? Well this is another one of the cheap used books I picked up from that book fair I went to (see my review of The London of Dickens for more information on that). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a book that always struck me as strange. It tells the story of a man in a prison camp in Russia under Stalin. The descriptions are lengthy and graphic and more than often, we get references to violence and mental torture. But the book itself is so short it just feels like if you went back to the beginning, the character pretty much lives this day again and again. I think the shortness of the book therefore is key. It's one day. Repeated into oblivion. The torture is therefore a constant. It never stops.

Sentenced to ten years in a forced labour camp, we slowly start to find out details of the Gulag from our protagonist's life there. One of the things we find out is that he might just be innocent of what he's being accused of but we aren't interested in that part - what we're interested in is the way this guy is being treated. Meal times are kept to minutes in length, he wakes up way before his alarm just so he can have some respite from the torture and have some moments to himself as it is all he gets, the food is horrifying and doesn't sustain the prisoners. They could be eating carrots for months at a time - but then again, some of the food is basically inedible, such as fish bones. This is a camp designed to work you down to the bone and finish you off. We see something similar is Arthur Koestler's book Darkness at Noon in which we see inside a prison camp albeit, a fictionalised version of one where characters become symbols of things. Ivan Denisovich has always felt more raw and terrifying.

Cleaning and doing other acts of forced labour may not sound bad at first but when you factor in all the horrific mental torture that these people are going through all the time, then it starts to look even more scary. We are also met with reward and punishment systems in which rewards are for working at maximum capacity in very dangerous conditions. I cannot lie, if I was in these camps I would have literally not survived. The more I read about this stuff, the more realistic it became. I have to admit, when I first read this book I was also in the midst of this author's book Cancer Ward and so I was between ideas. But reading it on its own at 2am is definitely more threatening and holds more weight. In those dark hours, the real essence of the language breaks free of its constraints and flows directly into the brain stem of the reader. Brutal. Powerful. Terrifying.

One thing I was most concerned about is the fact that many of these people must have been wholly innocent of the crimes they were being accused of. Not only this, but the torture they endured would have meant that yes, some of them did not survive to tell the story but the ones who did would have been scarred for life, and that's an understatement. Those who were left to wander the earth after the closure of the Gulags weren't really rescued, they were just physically set free. In their minds though, I could not possibly imagine what was still going on - I couldn't possibly imagine the terrors that would haunt them day in and day out until they died.

If you haven't read this book then I cannot recommend it enough. It's short, dark and powerful, it has some very graphic passages and some stuff that is downright psychological horror - but one thing is certain, this is what really happened in these camps. We should not forget about the suffering that so many people endured under Stalin when he basically threw whomever he felt like into these torture chambers for what would have seemed like eternity. It makes me shiver to this day.