Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling & thought provoking- Solzhenitsyn at his finest, 14 Feb 2001
By A Customer
First and foremost, this book conveys the barbarity of Stalin's concentration camps. By writing the novel from the perspective of an uncomplicated utilitarian, Solzhenitsyn's message is conveyed in a simple but extremely effective way. By drawing on his own experiences in such a camp, his account of this single day is both authoratative and compelling. Beyond that though, he makes numerous attacks on the state of Russian politics at the time and indeed on Russian society, which he weaves elegantly into the text. After reading this book one is left in no doubt as to the horror of a life in Siberia's camps, or to the author's personal opinion of the state of the land of his birth. In short, this is probably Solzhenitsyn's finest work, and as such must be read by all.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solzhenitsyn’s Bombshell, 17 Jan 2006
‘One Day…’ is possibly the most important book published in post-Stalinist Russia. During the 1960s Kruschev was rapidly backing away from Stalin’s legacy (a period known as ‘the thaw’), and the Soviet authorities allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s book to indicate a new openness about Stalinism. People who lived under Stalin were aware that many of their fellow citizens had been ‘disappeared’, but had no idea what had become of them. ‘One Day…’ was the first written account of the labour camps they were sent to.
The book follows Ivan Denisovich Shukhov through a single day in his life in a labour camp in a freezing winter. It is filled with the minute details about the day, the little things that make life bearable for a few hours. The picture it paints is of men hung out to dry by the state, sent to camps for non-existent crimes, brutalized by guards (and each other), freezing to death or slowly wasting away from malnutrition and overwork. Life in the camps is unfathomably hard, and it becomes clear that the men sent to them had been sent there by the state in the hope that they would never return.
The genius of ‘One Day…’ is that we start to realise that Ivan is having a good day, because he doesn’t fall foul of the guards, and actually scrounges a little extra soup. This make the book a fairly pleasant read, or at least not a relentlessly grim one, but at the back of the reader’s mind is the thought that, if this is a good day, I would hate to read about a bad one. Subsequently, ‘One Day…’ is a strangely upbeat book about a terrible, terrible place, making it an easy read while simultaneously ramming home the horror of the camps. It is deservedly recognised as a classic, both because of its historical importance and writing style, and should be read by anyone interested in great twentieth century writing.
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Eyewitness Account of Life in Russian Labour Camps, 9 Aug 2003
Solzhenitsyn’s first novel reconstructs a typical day during the ten-year sentence of an inmate in a forced labour camp during the Stalinist era. Although narrated from the perspective of a soldier falsely charged with being a German spy, the autobiographical implications are clear: Solzhenitsyn himself had been arrested for criticising Stalin in a letter, and consequently spent eight years doing hard labour in three different camps. The third and final term of his imprisonment was spent in a camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan, and it is generally considered that this is the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book created a literary sensation, thanks to its being one of the first works of the post-Stalin age to convey to an international readership the experience of political imprisonment and repression under the ancien régime; moreover, its direct and unimpassioned style made it a worthy newcomer to the Russian canon, preoccupied with realism and social representation.Perhaps the most insightful aspect of this novel is the way it charts the change of an inmate’s mentality and personality as he begins to adapt to the rigours of his new existence – a necessary adaptation, since those who pine for their former lives in the outside world, and its normalcies (like Fetyukov) will not last their sentence. Shukhov (Denisovich) is a case in point: he understands that one can only survive by ingratiating oneself in the system of reciprocity that exists among the prisoners; a world where you constantly scratch other peoples’ backs in the hope that they will generally scratch yours in return. He also understands when to be humble (in front of the camp authorities or the gang leader) and when to be aggressive (in the food hall, or when labouring). Crucially he has come to realise that survival under such inhuman conditions hangs on a ‘blanking out’ of reality or notions of justice. Keeping his boots in good condition, avoiding the cells, beatings and the worst jobs, getting himself extra portions of food – these are the minor ‘victories’ by which, if achieved, he is able to convince himself that he has had a good day. Denisovich opines that a prisoner must get everything he can from his free moments – early in the morning, at the end of the day, and during the very brief pauses for meals. These moments of liberty become sacred, the days are manageable because one is constantly aware of working towards them. Thus a bowl of soup is to the starved and oppressed inmates ‘more precious to them than freedom, more precious than their previous life and the life that the future held for them.’ Yet at the same time, the constant roll calls, searches and fear of punishment pervade the inmate’s mind, creating an unceasing paranoia that is perhaps the most terrifying ordeal of his camp existence, since it robs him of freedom even in his free moments:
‘Even the thoughts of a prisoner are not free, always returning to the same thing, the individual turning it over in his mind again and again: would they find that piece of bread in his mattress?’ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a compelling, incisive account of an existence that might now seem inconceivable to us, so far from our notions of human rights and individual freedom of choice. As such it is a vitally important means of not forgetting the many appalling labour and concentration camps that crossed the face of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. There are aspects of the book I did not like – it seemed to lack a literary style at times, and could be slow-paced and tedious in parts (although this is perhaps not inappropriate given the setting), but it unquestionably still merits reading, being both a seminal account of an inglorious chapter in Russian history and a psychological investigation of how one could best survive such circumstances – a testament to the resistance of man stripped of his freedom.
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