One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Summary

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot. He has served eight years of a ten-year sentence and is known in camp by his number, Shch-854. This morning he feels feverish and stays in his bunk a few minutes too long, so a warder makes him wash the guardroom floor. He tries the infirmary, where the orderly Kolya Vdovushkin, a former literature student, finds his temperature too low to excuse him from work. After a breakfast of thin skilly and a body search in the freezing dark, Shukhov marches with the 104th brigade to a half-built power station. The brigade, led by the shrewd and protective foreman Andrei Tyurin, is its own small society: Pavlo the Ukrainian deputy; Kilgas the joking Latvian; deaf Senka Klevshin, a survivor of Buchenwald; Gopchik, a boy who reminds Shukhov of his own son; the former naval captain Buynovsky, sent to the punishment cells for protesting the search; the scavenger Fetyukov; Tsezar Markovich, a film man who receives food parcels; and the Baptist Alyoshka, who reads a copied-out Gospel. The men nail roofing felt over windows, light a stove, and haul mortar while Shukhov and Kilgas lay cinder blocks on a wall with the absorption of good craftsmen; Shukhov stays after the signal to finish his row. At the gate the count comes up one man short, and the column waits in the cold until a Moldavian who fell asleep on the site is found. Shukhov smuggles in a scrap of hacksaw blade hidden in his mitten, keeps a place in the parcel line for Tsezar, earns Tsezar's supper ration, and buys tobacco from a Latvian in another hut. At night Alyoshka tells him to pray for his soul rather than for parcels or release, and Shukhov, unconvinced but moved, gives him a biscuit. He falls asleep content: he was not put in the cells, he got an extra bowl of porridge, he finished the wall. It was a good day, one of the 3,653 of his sentence, the extra three for leap years. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in 1959 under the title Shch-854; the editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky won Khrushchev's approval, and it appeared in the journal Novy Mir in November 1962.

Plot or Argument

• Before dawn: reveille and the guardroom

  Shukhov wakes ill, lingers in his bunk, and is set to wash the warders' floor instead of being sent to the cells; the camp's rules, numbers and petty corruptions are introduced.

• The infirmary and breakfast

  Vdovushkin takes Shukhov's temperature and turns him away; Shukhov eats his skilly, hides half his bread ration in his mattress, and joins the brigade for the morning count and the search at the gate.

• The march and the power station

  The column marches out under guard in the bitter cold; Tyurin secures the brigade's work at the power station, and the men make a warm room before starting.

• Midday meal

  At lunch Shukhov wangles two extra bowls of porridge for the brigade; Tsezar and an old prisoner argue about Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible.

• Building the wall

  The afternoon's bricklaying, with Shukhov and Kilgas racing the setting mortar, Tyurin's story of how he was thrown out of the Red Army as a kulak's son, and Shukhov finishing his course after the others leave.

• The count and the return

  A missing Moldavian holds the whole column in the frost; on the way back Shukhov hides a hacksaw blade through the search, and Buynovsky is taken to the cells.

• Evening in camp

  Shukhov holds Tsezar's place in the parcel queue, eats a double supper, buys tobacco, survives the last count, and talks with Alyoshka about prayer before sleeping.

Characters

• Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, protagonist, prisoner Shch-854

  Peasant and former soldier serving ten years on a false charge, a skilled and careful survivor.

• Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, foreman of the 104th brigade

  Experienced camp veteran who fights for his men's rations and work.

• Alyoshka, Baptist prisoner

  Gentle believer who reads the Gospel and welcomes suffering for Christ.

• Tsezar Markovich, favoured prisoner

  Educated film director who receives parcels and works in the office.

• Captain Buynovsky, former naval officer

  Proud newcomer who protests the search and is sent to the punishment cells.

• Fetyukov, scavenger

  Former official reduced to begging, licking bowls and stealing.

• Kilgas, Latvian bricklayer

  Good-humoured fellow craftsman who lays the wall with Shukhov.

• Senka Klevshin, brigade member

  Deaf prisoner who survived Buchenwald and helps Shukhov at the wall.

• Gopchik, youngest of the brigade

  Ukrainian boy imprisoned for carrying food to nationalist partisans.

• Kolya Vdovushkin, infirmary orderly

  Literature student given a medical post who writes poems on the job.

• Pavlo, deputy foreman

  Ukrainian assistant to Tyurin who looks after the brigade's bread.

Lessons

• Dignity in work

  Shukhov is forced labour, building a power station for a state that wronged him, yet he lays his cinder blocks straight and stays after the signal to finish his row. Solzhenitsyn shows that doing a job well can remain a person's own act even when the work itself is compelled.

  • Why does Shukhov care whether the wall is straight?
  • Is his diligence a kind of freedom, or a sign of how much the camp has shaped him?
  • What separates Shukhov's work from Fetyukov's scavenging?

• Small goods held fast

  The book measures a good day in small things: an extra bowl of porridge, a scrap of metal, a pinch of tobacco, not being sent to the cells. By narrowing to one ordinary day, Solzhenitsyn lets the reader feel both how much the camp has taken and how much a man can still keep.

  • Why does Shukhov call it an almost happy day?
  • Why did Solzhenitsyn choose an ordinary day rather than a day of great cruelty?

• Faith in the barracks

  Alyoshka the Baptist thanks God for prison as a place to think of the soul, and urges Shukhov to pray for spiritual things rather than for parcels or release. Shukhov is a half-believer who keeps his own counsel, but the conversation is the book's closing word before sleep.

  • What is Shukhov's own view of God and prayer?
  • How does Alyoshka's freedom differ from Tsezar's comfort?
  • Why does Shukhov give Alyoshka a biscuit?

• The brigade as a society

  The camp's system makes the brigade answer collectively for its output, so the men police and protect each other. Tyurin's leadership, Pavlo's fairness with the bread, and Fetyukov's isolation show a whole range of human responses to the same pressures.

  • What makes Tyurin a good leader in a bad system?
  • Why do the men despise Fetyukov but respect Senka?

Context

Under Stalin millions of Soviet citizens were sentenced to the Gulag, the network of forced-labour camps, many under Article 58 of the criminal code for counter-revolutionary crimes. Returning prisoners of war were often treated as traitors or spies. From 1948 special camps held political prisoners under harsher regimes and numbers sewn onto their clothing. Solzhenitsyn served at the special camp of Ekibastuz from 1950 to 1953, the setting he gives Shukhov's camp in all but name. After Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956, many prisoners were released and rehabilitated.

Composition

Solzhenitsyn wrote the story in 1959 while teaching in Ryazan, giving it the title Shch-854, and later revised it. Through the critic Lev Kopelev it reached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, who sought approval from Khrushchev; Khrushchev authorised it as part of his campaign against Stalin's legacy, and it appeared in the November 1962 issue under the title chosen by the editors. Several English translations appeared in 1963, including those of Ralph Parker and of Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley; H. T. Willetts's 1991 translation, made from the restored text, was authorised by the author.

Reception

The issue sold out at once, and the book became the first widely read Soviet account of the camps. Former prisoners wrote to Solzhenitsyn in great numbers, testimony he later used in The Gulag Archipelago. After Khrushchev's fall in 1964 the book was withdrawn from Soviet libraries; it was restored to Russian readers in 1989. It has been taught across the world and filmed in 1970 with Tom Courtenay.

Comparisons

• mans-search-for-meaning

  Frankl and Solzhenitsyn both describe how prisoners kept or lost their inner life in camps, with close attention to hunger, cold, rations and the small decisions that preserved dignity.

• the-hiding-place

  Corrie ten Boom's Ravensbrück, like Shukhov's camp, contains a believer reading Scripture to fellow prisoners and finding the barracks a place of faith.

• letters-and-papers-from-prison

  Bonhoeffer's prison writings and Alyoshka's barracks prayers show Christian faith tested by a totalitarian state from inside its prisons.

• animal-farm

  Orwell satirised Soviet tyranny from the outside by fable; Solzhenitsyn shows its human cost from inside by one realistic day.

• the-brothers-karamazov

  Alyoshka the Baptist recalls Dostoevsky's Alyosha Karamazov, a gentle believer among sceptics, and both books place hope in quiet holiness rather than argument.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The way Shukhov eats: how he takes off his cap, how slowly he spoons the skilly, and where he hides his bread.
• The bricklaying at the power station, and why Shukhov stays after the signal to finish his row.
• The searches at the gate, morning and evening, and the scrap of hacksaw blade in Shukhov's mitten.
• The difference between how Tsezar lives in camp, with parcels and an office job, and how the rest of the brigade lives.
• Alyoshka's talk with Shukhov about prayer at the end of the day.

Key terms and names

Zek

Camp slang for a prisoner. Every zek in Shukhov's camp wears a number on his cap, jacket and trouser knee, and is called by it.

Brigade (the 104th)

The work team in which prisoners are fed and judged together. Its output decides its rations, so the men's fortunes rise and fall as a group.

Skilly

The thin gruel or soup served at camp meals, often made of cabbage or oats, around which much of Shukhov's day revolves.

Article 58

The section of the Soviet criminal code for counter-revolutionary offences, under which Shukhov and most of his fellow prisoners were sentenced.

The cells (the hole)

The camp's punishment block, where Buynovsky is sent for ten days on reduced rations in a cold stone room.

Power station

The building site where the 104th brigade works, laying cinder-block walls in the frost.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why is Shukhov in the camp, and how long has he served of his sentence?
2. Comprehension What happens to Captain Buynovsky at the evening search, and why?
3. Comprehension What small things make Shukhov call this a good day as he falls asleep?
4. Interpretation Shukhov works hard on a wall for the state that imprisoned him. Is his care for the work a victory for him or for the camp?
5. Interpretation Why does Solzhenitsyn give so much space to food, and what does Shukhov's way of eating reveal about him?
6. Interpretation Shukhov tells Alyoshka he does not pray for release. What does he believe, and how is it different from Alyoshka's faith?
7. Big Question Can a person keep their soul in a place designed to reduce them to a number?

Faith Connections

• 1 Peter 4:15-16 (Scripture)

  Peter tells believers to suffer as Christians and not be ashamed. Alyoshka, imprisoned for his faith, treats his sentence in exactly this way and urges Shukhov to see the camp as a place to attend to his soul.

• Colossians 3:23 (Scripture)

  Paul tells servants to work heartily as for the Lord and not for men. Shukhov is no saint, but his honest bricklaying under compulsion shows something of the dignity Paul gives to labour done for its own sake.

• Matthew 6:11 (Scripture)

  Give us this day our daily bread. In a book where every ration is weighed and every crust is saved, the petition for one day's bread has an exact and literal force.

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (1970; delivered in writing 1972) (Great Conversation)

  Solzhenitsyn argued that art can carry the experience of one people to another and that one word of truth outweighs the whole world. One Day was his first attempt to carry the experience of the camps to readers who had never been there.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The camp is designed to reduce men to numbers, appetites and fear. Yet within a single ordinary day Shukhov keeps his craft, his cunning, his honesty with his brigade and a measure of contentment, while others such as Fetyukov lose themselves and Alyoshka finds his faith deepened. Therefore the human person cannot be wholly abolished by the system, and the decisive struggle in the camp is inward; but the very smallness of what counts as a good day measures how much the camps took from those held in them.

Rhetorical device: understatement (litotes). The closing paragraph sums up a day of hunger, frost, searches and fear as an almost happy one, then adds the number of such days in the sentence, letting the reader supply the outrage the narrator never voices.

Debate: Resolved: Shukhov's devotion to building the wall is an act of inner freedom, not submission.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose three moments in Shukhov's day when he makes a small choice that preserves his dignity, and argue what these choices together reveal about Solzhenitsyn's view of the human person.

Comparison with Man's Search for Meaning: Frankl argued that a prisoner's attitude toward suffering was the last freedom left to him. Test Frankl's claim against Shukhov's day, and argue whether Solzhenitsyn's peasant survivor confirms or complicates it.

Medical Lens

The book is a precise record of chronic hunger and cold as conditions of daily life. Shukhov eats slowly and with full attention, saves bread in his mattress, counts grams of ration, and judges his day by food; readers interested in starvation physiology and its psychology will find the attention to calories and the narrowing of thought to food closely observed. The infirmary scene shows camp medicine as a gate: Vdovushkin, a literature student put in charge because the camp doctor favours him, can excuse only a quota of prisoners each day, and a temperature just above normal is not enough. Shukhov's fever and aching body, the danger of the punishment cells for Buynovsky, and Shukhov's memory of illness in his earlier camp at Ust-Izhma show how sickness and death were measured against labour norms. The work offers no diagnoses; its value for a clinician is as testimony from a writer who lived the conditions he describes.

• Morning, the infirmary

  Shukhov, feverish, asks to be excused from work; Vdovushkin takes his temperature, finds it too low, and sends him out.

  Fever Infection Physicians Doctors
• Morning, breakfast

  Shukhov eats his skilly and fish bones with careful ritual and hides part of his bread ration for later.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Midday, the canteen at the work site

  Shukhov obtains two extra bowls of porridge, and the narration dwells on the value of each mouthful.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Evening, the return search

  Buynovsky is sent to the punishment cells, where the narration notes that ten days of strict regime can ruin a man's health for life.

  Pain Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Shukhov, Tsezar, Fetyukov and Alyoshka as four ways of living in the same camp, and argue which one the book admires most.

• Fiction

  Write the same day from the point of view of Tyurin, the brigade foreman, as he bargains for work and rations.

• Classroom

  Make a timeline of Shukhov's day from reveille to lights-out and mark every moment at which he gains or loses something.

Further Reading

• The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov

• Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum

• Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, Michael Scammell