Book- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

A grim book, about the Soviet gulags, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an account of what one day, from waking to sleeping, is like to a prisoner in that prison system.

The gulags are a staple of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself an unwillingly participant, as the USSR did not like what he wrote. His Gulag Archipelago series is non-fiction narrative of the atrocities that took place in the gulags. But One Day is a more intimate look, through the eyes of Ivan Denisovich, a man imprisoned because he escaped from the Nazis during WW II, and so was suspected of being a spy for them.

The book is dark, and I got a feeling of hopelessness, as Ivan can't allow himself to even think of getting out one day...it would drive him crazy. So he thinks only about surviving one day...no... one hour at a time. How to get some extra food...how to get a couple of more minutes of sleep...how to be out of the freezing weather for a couple of extra minutes---this is what occupies Ivan Denisovich's mind and existence.

Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of keeping that tension, of hour by hour living, and yet, I always felt that part of the work Ivan did was to keep himself from thinking of the outside. Those thoughts would come unbidden, and he would have to try to keep them away, so as not to succumb to abject sorrow.

One of things that stood out to me was that our freedoms are on a fine line. We cannot let government decide what we can read and write. We can't give in to the fear that may shackle our minds, in the hope that we may be only a slight bit safer. Reading One Day, you realize we have come perilously close to many of the abuses of the USSR system.

And so, however grim this book may be, it also re-ignites the hope for freedom, the wish that we may remain free to read and write what we wish, without government censorship. And that these types of political prisons, however we may feel they keep us safer, ultimately lead to abuses and the killing of the freedoms we strive for.