Word: shukhov
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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...
Dryly and precisely, Solzhenitsyn describes life at the camp, piling horror on top of horror, until the place seems too monstrous to be believed. One day in the life of the peasant hero Ivan Denisovich Shukhov seems a lifetime...
...murder. Outside on the windy steppes the average winter temperature was 17° below. Inside the barracks, the ceilings were always coated with frost. Every day the prisoners were sent out to do senseless, back-breaking labor. Meals were always the same watery gruel with chunks of rotten fish (Shukhov was jeered because he refused to eat fish eyes when they were floating free in the soup). The guards made the prisoners undress outside to be frisked, beat them with birch clubs, threw any who talked back into a barely heated "cell," where a ten-day sentence meant a probable...
...Triumph of a Sausage. The plot of the novel is simply how many prison rules Shukhov will get away with breaking in a single day. After eight years in the camp, he has an animal cunning for finding food and avoiding punishment. He knows when to press forward, when to hang back, whom to be near, whom to avoid. In a complex series of maneuvers, any one of which could land him in the cell, he wangles an extra bowl of soup, some tobacco, and-his triumph-a slice of sausage, which he exultantly swallows in bed: "the brief moment...
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