Total Page : 72
Publisher : SparkNotes
Publication Date : 2003 06 13
>> One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
This is a world renown story of a regular man s regular day only in the setting of a Russian Gulag in frozen Siberia Denisovich wakes up works talks with his fellow prisoners eats a little and goes to bed What makes the book such is a success is the way it subtly gets under your skin making you empathize with him while acknowledging the futility of feeling in such a remote and barren world Life is tough cold and monotonous which is exactly how you feel while reading it However its detachment is one of its strengths as it keeps emotion at bay and focus attuned to denser themes of futility and the effects of totalitarianism and brutality on the normal psyche It is written in a simple style and is always detached from its characters in a way that makes their little moments of sympathy all the more impactful Short lean and fascinating this is necessary reading for anyone
>> Mint condition
My wife requested this book It arrived as expected While it had been a library book it had never seemingly been opened Mint condition Thank you
>> One day in a Bigger Tragedy
As its title suggests One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich covers a twenty four hour period within one of the prisons of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and his struggles within a day from sunrise to lights out
By most respects this is harrowing story of man s inhumanity to man A mass of humanity struggles in the Siberian winter to perform thankless construction tasks with no heed for the needs of the individual Warders are relentless The individual is ground down even to the point where death seems to be a release
Yet for all the obvious truth that sits within this short novel I feel that time has diminished its impact In the 21st century we are very well aware of the horrors of the Soviet state and there are few people who regret its passing When the book was first published in 1959 I suspect that it would have had more impact At that time the world was just beginning to understand the inherent corruption and evil of the Soviet state Today we are more aware Indeed we have seen other horrors that would match it or even exceed it Here I am thinking of the Chinese Cultural revolution the killing fields of Cambodia and the genocide in Rwanda I could of course name many more examples Such is modern history
However even though the great waves of history have moved on there remains something haunting about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Just because other evils have occurred does not mean that the evils of the Gulag Archipelago can be swept aside Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a masterful story teller The tragedy is that this story was simply so real
