Word: ivans
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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...
...particular problems of a heroin addict, are not like any other predicament they are especially difficult to portray. Solzhenitsyn conveys the prisoners' destitution by alternating between dead pan description of bodily pain and cowering before nameless authorities, and emphasis on the miniscule occurrences that bring relief from suffering. Ivan finds a hacksaw blade, gets a little tobacco, and uses his favorite spoon. These few moments in Ivan's day when he feels he can do something that he wants to do punctuate the bleak narrative description of camp routine...
...Ivan's moments of joy are always only diversions from his desperation. He sits down to dinner and takes off his hat: "The sacred moments had come...He tasted one bowl, he tasted the other. Not bad--there was some fish in it...He dug in. First he only drank the broth, drank and drank. As it went down filling his whole body with warmth, all his guts began to flutter inside him at their meeting with the stew. Goo--ood!" It is explicit that Ivan is locked into a fate from which he cannot return home. "No one ever...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about this predicament so successfully it is a shame that Casper Wrede perverts it for such useless motives in his film. The rare moments of joy in One Day are the most consequent in telling of Ivan's character. In Solzhenitsyn's novel they arise from an innate hope which constitutes Ivan's endurance. In the film Ivan appears to rasie himself above his suffering by a superhuman effort of will. He becomes a willful hero rather than Solzhenitsyn's enduring stoic. But there is no possible point of departure for his courage and his emotional moments...
...concurrent brutality of nameless authority and unceasing Arctic frost define Ivan's world. Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cameraman, has filled Siberia with beautiful winter horizons of shining white snow, deep blue sky, and soft yellow prison search lights. The harshness of the sub-zero temperatures seem more like the sting in the air of a winter carnival. The beautiful landscapes are totally inappropriate. Wrede's depiction of the guards may be more accurate, but everything is so beautiful one can hardly be bothered to notice them...