Word: denisovich
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...first novel. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicts just a part of this endurance. Accused of being a spy after escaping from German occupied territory. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sentenced to ten years in a special Siberian labor camp for "class dangerous elements", like the camp Karaganda where Solzhenitsyn spent eight years. Solzhenitsyn considers only the day of one victim of Stalin's forced industrialization and intensification of totalitarian control. But it is estimated that about four million people died in the labor camps between 1927 and 1940, not by premeditated genocide but from the disease, fatigue...
...writes Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a postscript to his new novel, August 1914, which was published last week in Russian by the small YMCA Press in Paris. It is the only one of his books, aside from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, that Solzhenitsyn has agreed to have published in the West...
...white nightmare; Elie Wiesel, the ghost of Auschwitz; and, to an unmatched degree, of Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, survivor and permanent victim of Stalin's prison camps. In 1962, during Khrushchev's brief destalinization period, readers were suddenly introduced to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a dark, spartan account, it told of the wretches who peopled the slave labor camps of Siberia, cleaved from society for uncommitted political sins, filled with what the author called "the fearlessness of those who have lost everything...
...suffocating grayness of the film, the personal dimensions of suffering tend to vanish. The tribulations of the hero were almost unendurable for the reader; the viewer, like a tourist, can only survey degradation held at arm's length. But One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich does occasionally convey a tragic sense of life discarded by politics: in the high, empty gossip of the Muscovite prisoners; in the pathetic scramble for a few shreds of tobacco; in the epic wasteland of ice and snow. More illuminating than either the performances or the screenplay is Sven Nykvist...
...Solzhenitsyn affair, however, is potentially far more serious. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was less a political novel than a lyrically philosophical view of the effects of the Revolution on the lives of people. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn's main works (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle) are explicit descriptions of the day-by-day degradation that some 16 million Russians unjustly underwent in prisons and concentration camps during Stalin's regime. His books indirectly raise the question of the complicity of Russia's present rulers in the old tyrant...