Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn who breathed his last on 03 August 2008 was one of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th century. He was born on 11 December 1918 and died of cardiac arrest aged 89. His books chronicled the horrors of the Russian prison camps – the gulags. He was the first to speak aloud about the inhuman Stalinist regime. He served in the Soviet army as an Artillery officer during the world war and spent eight years in the prison camps shortly after 1945. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1970. His first novel ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ was published in 1962 and was based on his own experiences. Though he was better known for books like ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and ‘The Cancer Ward’ this short novel is also a little known classic and was the only novel to be published in Russia.
I had written a ‘Book Review’ on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” when my battalion was stationed at Fort William, Calcutta in 1980, which I am reproducing here:
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is an absorbing portrayal of human depravation perpetrated in Russian concentration camps under the regime of Joseph Stalin. The writer who was an inmate of such prison camps, found and preserved enough authentic material to reveal human suffering and subjugation under a certain political order of the post war era. “One Day…” thus found its way at a proper time as a dramatic and absorbing literary epic forcefully recording the ever changing political acrobatics and its stigma on human behaviour in labour camps.
The book throws light to reveal prison life in its totality, that is, the mode and conduct of its inmates as well as that of their masters husbanding the prison affairs under a despotic rule. It meticulously depicts various backgrounds of the inmates and the staff coming from different strata of both political and social bearings, the type and measure of food and accommodation they receive, the unending volume of labour they have to put in under strict terror-ridden surveillance of a lot of unfeeling robots trained to persecute the inmates to extreme limits.
The book gives a graphic account as to how human potential is gradually decimated and ultimately destroyed in the labour camps. How the prisoners’ faith in God if any, faith in human values, faith in religion and even faith in their own selves is shaken off and their existence reduced to mere nothingness. The governance, the food, living conditions, working conditions and other aspects of life in the prison camps are so minutely depicted by the author in their enormity that the reader does not fail to get a fascinating understanding as to how human life comes to a stage of void and waste that so many like Ivan in these camps have no feelings, emotions, sensations, desires and anxieties whatsoever other than a desire to survive with animal instinct until life is suddenly extinguished.
Ivan’s belief that “The stars keep on falling down, so you have got to have new ones in their place” when he tells the ‘Captain’, his prison mate, about his faith in God (page 119) is a precise epigram of the described prison camps as well as an epitaph of those who have gone into oblivion through the sufferings in such camps. In a nutshell, the book is intellectually educative and may take a long time to become obsolete, if at all.
I had written a ‘Book Review’ on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” when my battalion was stationed at Fort William, Calcutta in 1980, which I am reproducing here:
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is an absorbing portrayal of human depravation perpetrated in Russian concentration camps under the regime of Joseph Stalin. The writer who was an inmate of such prison camps, found and preserved enough authentic material to reveal human suffering and subjugation under a certain political order of the post war era. “One Day…” thus found its way at a proper time as a dramatic and absorbing literary epic forcefully recording the ever changing political acrobatics and its stigma on human behaviour in labour camps.
The book throws light to reveal prison life in its totality, that is, the mode and conduct of its inmates as well as that of their masters husbanding the prison affairs under a despotic rule. It meticulously depicts various backgrounds of the inmates and the staff coming from different strata of both political and social bearings, the type and measure of food and accommodation they receive, the unending volume of labour they have to put in under strict terror-ridden surveillance of a lot of unfeeling robots trained to persecute the inmates to extreme limits.
The book gives a graphic account as to how human potential is gradually decimated and ultimately destroyed in the labour camps. How the prisoners’ faith in God if any, faith in human values, faith in religion and even faith in their own selves is shaken off and their existence reduced to mere nothingness. The governance, the food, living conditions, working conditions and other aspects of life in the prison camps are so minutely depicted by the author in their enormity that the reader does not fail to get a fascinating understanding as to how human life comes to a stage of void and waste that so many like Ivan in these camps have no feelings, emotions, sensations, desires and anxieties whatsoever other than a desire to survive with animal instinct until life is suddenly extinguished.
Ivan’s belief that “The stars keep on falling down, so you have got to have new ones in their place” when he tells the ‘Captain’, his prison mate, about his faith in God (page 119) is a precise epigram of the described prison camps as well as an epitaph of those who have gone into oblivion through the sufferings in such camps. In a nutshell, the book is intellectually educative and may take a long time to become obsolete, if at all.