One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

-          “Be happy that you are in prison!”

Aleoska is happy to be in jail! And he is part of that small number of people that I have read about and are happy in the toughest, most terrible circumstances: Rosa Luxemburg, Louie Ramire (created by Somerset Maugham) and Robinson Crusoe.

“There are people who make hell out of heaven and others who make Heaven out of Hell!”

 

-          What does a Day in the Life of Ivan looks like?

-          Hey man, what do you think?!

-          Terrible!

 

 Ivan Denisovich is an inmate of a labor camp in the Soviet Union.

Reason enough for me to avoid this book, until a few days ago, even if I had started it some years ago and withdrew from the perspective of reading about misery and ordeal.

Once in a while I put down in my notes, bad feelings about the communist regime I had to endure. By the way, these notes are as much if not more about my thoughts and impressions as they are about what I get from the books in question.

Having lived through a tyranny I am not much inclined to read about other people going through the same or worse trauma on other meridians.

Rule number Six in The How of happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about Dealing with Adversity and Trauma, and one way to do that is to think of other things and avoid ruminating and thinking about what caused the trauma.

In other words, without knowing it, I had applied the technique of avoiding remembering about the communist trauma, by putting aside books that talk about it.

The case of Ivan Denisovich is different.

-          If I complain about the “trauma” of the communist regime, what can he and the other prisoners of the labor camps say?

Reading about happened to him and his fellow inmates, makes you want to cry at times, unless you are in the same mould as the guardians, apparatchiks and perhaps Putin, their descendant.

That life is so terrible, that by comparison I could say that I lived in sunny, liberal and free California.

The weather is so cold that it gives one a headache just to read the temperature that they have to endure and work in!

There are a series of paradoxes, one of which is that they wish the temperature to be really hellish! Because below- I forgot, was it minus 30 degrees Celsius?- a certain point, the tyrants of the barracks decide to keep the prisoners inside, since the rules were designed to pay no attention to human rights, dignity, but to have a labor force which can lose every day a few, but try to keep most alive to do the work.

The work is slavish, incredible and often useless- some wretched souls are made to dig holes in the frozen earth, which is stupid, since it takes forever and sometimes cannot be done, no matter what the effort is.

They live for the little bad food that they receive, even if there are some rare cases where there is a calling even for being imprisoned.

There are some interesting characters inside the camp, where one has to guard his back, against all and in particular his neighbor.

Aleoska strikes me as a kind of rare saint, who is satisfied- I repeat, satisfied in the middle of Hell on earth- “and you could see it in his eyes”…

-          “Be happy that you are in prison!”

Aleoska is happy to be in jail! And he is part of that small number of people that I have read about and are happy in the toughest, most terrible circumstances: Rosa Luxemburg, Louie Ramire (created by Somerset Maugham) and Robinson Crusoe.