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A review by connorlangham
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4.0
I now know what a day in a gulag was like.
The writing is not romantic, nor should it be - there is little romance in forced hard labour. The language is so cold that the whole book reads with an icy blue hue, transforming to pockets of bright orange in the scarce moments of literal and figurative warmth.
The characters are great, and the relationships between prisoners is where this book shines the most - the hierarchies and dynamics are obvious, and it gives you a great insight into gulag social currency, how it is spent and earned.
I can imagine that when this was first published, it was utterly shocking. I think it has been a victim of Hollywood and other modern portrayals of the Gulag, ones that paint pictures of constant solitary confinement and sentences that only a very small minority ever completed. Which is inaccurate.
This, and the (I'm sure intentional) laborious descriptions of the methods and tools of work used each day are why I'm giving it 4 stars.
The writing is not romantic, nor should it be - there is little romance in forced hard labour. The language is so cold that the whole book reads with an icy blue hue, transforming to pockets of bright orange in the scarce moments of literal and figurative warmth.
The characters are great, and the relationships between prisoners is where this book shines the most - the hierarchies and dynamics are obvious, and it gives you a great insight into gulag social currency, how it is spent and earned.
I can imagine that when this was first published, it was utterly shocking. I think it has been a victim of Hollywood and other modern portrayals of the Gulag, ones that paint pictures of constant solitary confinement and sentences that only a very small minority ever completed. Which is inaccurate.
This, and the (I'm sure intentional) laborious descriptions of the methods and tools of work used each day are why I'm giving it 4 stars.