One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Genre: adult fiction

Ivan Denisovich. Prisoner. Gulag resident. Builder of cinder block walls and Procurer of any useful object. For Ivan, life in a Soviet Gulag is about seeing what’s in front of you and giving your energy to only those things that you can at least try control: your place in line in the mess hall, making sure you keep your tools from being stolen, doing enough favors for your wardens that you might be able to get something later on. All the rest: your sentence, the horrible weather, the ridiculous expectations, are best to just let go of.

It’s not an easy read. It is slow and dark. We are frustrated FOR Ivan as he’s forced to do pointless tasks with too few materials and in the freezing cold. And yet, Ivan has gotten to the point where the barest of boons can make the difference between happiness and despair. You get to sit by a tiny fire for three minutes? You find a piece of scrap metal on the ground? You manage to bum the butt of a cigarette? The gulag will shift and distort your happiness gauge to the point where a day of hard labor with actual gruel and a slice of bread will be enough. Life, being alive, it alone can be enough.

I had to push myself to read it, but when I did, I found myself feeling for him, disgusted by the brokenness and horror of the Stalinist communist system. Prison life is like another world, like a dystopian horror film and yet, I kept remembering, people really lived this way. Countless thousands of innocent (and yes, some not so innocent) citizens lived and died in Soviet gulags and so this book is such an important piece of history.