one day in the life of ivan denisovich by aleksandr solzhenitsyn

The Outrage of a Punishment that is Unjust The fact that he continues to fight for his own dignity essentially amounts to a covert declaration of war against the state that is holding him captive.

Even though the Soviet camp system treats Shukhov like an animal, he gently fights back and refuses to surrender to the system’s authority. He looks down his nose at Fetyukov’s behaviour, which he considers to be below human. No matter how hungry he is, he will never resort to Fetyukov’s behaviour of picking through rubbish and begging for morsels of food. Because Shukhov was brought up with this custom, he always has the impression that he is behaving in a respectable manner whenever he engages in it. No matter how hungry he is when mealtime rolls around, he invariably takes off his headgear before beginning to eat. He demonstrates that the method to preserve human dignity is not by overt defiance but rather through the cultivation of one’s own set of core beliefs. Shukhov, on the other hand, does not take this attempt to dehumanise him lying down and accepts it quietly. For instance, the guards at the concentration camp refer to Shukhov as “Shcha-854.” The removal of these names is a symbol of the erosion of individual personalities by administrative processes.

The camp eliminates any and all indications of the inmates’ individuality by substituting the inmates’ names with arbitrary officialistic combinations of letters and digits. The spiritual well-being of the detainees is also harmed by the labour camp. Sheets are not provided for the mattresses, inmates are limited to eating two hundred grammes of bread at each meal, and guards require inmates to disrobe for body searches in temperatures that drop below forty degrees below zero. The conditions of living are almost beyond bearable. The Stalinist work camp in which Shukhov is being held is constructed in such a way as to violate both the bodily and the spiritual dignity of its inmates. Main Theme The Fight for the Dignity of Human Beings Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, penned a brief introduction for the issue that was titled “Instead of a Foreword.” The purpose of this opening was to prepare the readers of the journal for what they were about to encounter. The narrative takes place in the early 1950s at a Soviet work camp and follows an average prisoner named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov through a single day of his incarceration there.īecause there had never been a previous instance of an account of Stalinist repressions being made publicly available, the release of the book was an extraordinary event in the annals of Soviet literary history. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, is responsible for the short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which was initially released in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World).

One day in the life of ivan denisovich by aleksandr solzhenitsyn