For the 4th Quarter Independent Reading project I chose to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows Ivan, a Russian soldier who is interned in a gulag as a result of his capture by the German’s during the Second World War. As we follow Ivan through a day in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn reveals the perils of wrongful conviction and a poor legal system. Many of the inmates encountered throughout the book did not commit crimes that would warrant incarceration today; in many cases, these men didn’t commit any crime at all. For example, Shukhov, the protagonist of the novel, is incarcerated for espionage simply because he was in the presence of Germans while he was in a Prisoner of War camp. The Soviet government had no proof that he had committed any crimes, but he is imprisoned “to be safe”. In some ways, the novel reveals the complete lack of compassion that the Soviet government had for its people, imprisoning young people for 20-30 years for little to no reason, in the hope that removing all discourse would yield a much safer and more controllable country.
As a result of reading this book I am researching the gulags of the Soviet government, as well as wrongful imprisonment elsewhere. Over the past week I read 2 stories from survivors of the gulags concerning their time in the camps, as well as looked at multiple images of camps and the conditions that inmates lived in. The gulags were horrendous places; working conditions were terrible, and Siberian winters were terrible. Not only was it cold, but the ground would shift from being frozen to thick mud. Those who were imprisoned often went without meals in order to save up their bread ration, and slept in cabins with forty other workers all while being poorly equipped for the Siberian winters.
I am currently four fifths of the way through the book, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. While I have read this book twice before, I find that after each reading of the book I get something new from the text; a small detail, or part of the plot that I completely missed before. As stated before, I am now reading this book with the intention of looking at the discussion of imprisonment, which will hopefully reveal details that I did not notice before.
I used to teach this book and so many of my students felt it too grueling. Shukhov's mind, however, always fascinated me. How to survive that existence? I wonder if you also want to read about the North Korean gulags of the present day. I just finished The Orphan Master's Son, a work of fiction, and my husband just read a first-person account of the experiences there. I could get the name of the book and author for you. I think what is important about the NK experience is that we understand this didn't go out with the Soviet's -- this isn't an antiquated institution, it is alive and well in the world. Something to think about. What, by the way, led you to Solzhenitsyn?
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