One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

This is a 115 page story written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, concerning a man named Shukhov, a political prisoner in a Siberian camp. The story encompasses a single day in prison life, with only brief moments in which the man remembers events or people outside the scope of his present reality. The cold is a constant presence in his telling, but takes on an inscrutable predictability which proves almost comforting compared to the unplanned cruelties of the camp.

The story begins with Shukhov's recollection of an old "camp wolf" who gave him three nuggets of wisdom in some earlier time. Indicative of the learned practicality he displays throughout the tale, he dismisses one piece of advice. The first, ignored, is an admonishment against being a snitch.

But he observes the other two with fervor, like a way to salvation, and in fact, as the way to exist in a place that attempts to displace the spirit. They are a warning to refrain from licking bowls and pinning hopes on the medical department. Each one can lead a person to lose their self-sustaining pride and succumb to the unrelenting personal violence of the prison camp.

One of his bunk neighbors is a Christian who offers his faith as a source of sustenance, but Shukhov rejects the symbolic religion of his camp mate and instead finds a self-sourced grace in his own actions. He says he believes in God, but not in either heaven or hell. Instead he follows a creed forged in the unending days of unrelenting discomfort of the prison camp; to not be a "jackal."

His existence is constrained physically by violence and psychologically by the wrenching uncaring and uncertain restraints that squeeze the temporal sense from camp dwellers' thinking like a rag twisted until it holds no more moisture. Shukhov instead relies on an "internal wristwatch" that allows him furtive intervals in which he can evaluate his condition and design his strategy for survival.

This is a tale from a Siberian political prison camp that was first published in 1961. In other words, a contemporary reckoning of repression that invokes violence as a means of terror and violations of thought process as a tool to inflict mental imbalance. It reduces men to living like a wolf, removed from a considered morality, left to a life of small decisions whose outcomes risk destruction from their environment or leave them prone to succumb to self destructive actions.