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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Morning, breakfast

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

• Midday, the canteen at the work site

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

• 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.