aleksandr solzhenitsyn a day in the life of ivan denisovich

On a typical day, Shukhov and his team members are scheduled to perform some tasks in a nearby power station and since he is sick, he tries in vain to obtain a sick leave. This compelled the prisoners to work hard so as to survive and a group could not tolerate slackness from any of its members.

In order to encourage the prisoners to work, the authorities gave them food depending on the amount of work they were able to complete the previous day. The inmates (also called “Zeks” in Russia) were organized into groups of about twenty individuals each and the main protagonist, Shukhov, belonged to the 104th (Sollars and Jennings, 580). Moreover, it was meant to provide slave labor for Stalin’s ostentatious construction projects. The prison sentence was mainly meant to prevent the people from criticizing the government. As a result, the readers see the injustices that the Soviet regime carried out.Īlthough Shukhov is not guilty of the charges leveled against him, the country’s authorities do not consider this as important. And most of them had been falsely accused of being spies. Other prisoners in the camp are also depicted to be jailed for the same reasons. He was sent to prison for his dissident views about the Soviet gulag system. The book gives an autobiographical account of the late Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the labor camps. Therefore, Shukhov is being punished for an offense he did do.

In a cruel irony of twist, he was accused of spying and thrown into the labor camp to serve the ten-year sentence. As one of the soldiers of the Second World War, the Germans captured him as a prisoner of war, but he was able to run away and get back to the Soviet lines. The jail sentence of the central character was imposed after. The action of the novel occurs in one of the days of the life of the prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who is serving a 3,653-day sentence in a labor camp.

The novel examines the corrupt Soviet prison structure, the politics associated with it, and the philosophical difficulties involved when the freedom of someone is taken away. The Soviet authorities acknowledged the publication of the novel even though it was addressing the controversial subject of the bad state of their prison camps. Therefore, it is strange to note that this great and masterful work was first published in November 1962 in an official literary magazine.

Aleksandr solzhenitsyn a day in the life of ivan denisovich