One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ( Russian Version Один день Ивана Денисовича, Odin the ' Ivana Denisoviča ) appeared in November 1962 in the Moscow magazine Novy Mir as the first work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in 1970 received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The novel portrays a day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet gulag. The publication in Solschenyzins home was only possible because the Soviet Union in 1956 on XX. Congress of the CPSU had detached from the personality cult of Joseph Stalin. But raves - the Stalinist purges, mass forced labor and prison camps - it was like trivialized and attributed to the excessive zeal of people on the edge of the area of ​​responsibility, so that even those members of the new leadership of the Soviet Union, which had taken responsibility even in the days of Stalinism, of any debt could be acquitted. Solzhenitsyn's novel fell so in a time that was marked by the climate of cautious working up the crimes of the Stalin era.

The novel was soon known in the West. Just one year after its publication appeared his American translation, also quickly followed by a German version. In 1970 the book, directed by Caspar Wrede, with Tom Courtenay was in the title role, filmed.

Content

Drawing from the personal experience of the author, the novel is in the tradition of Russian realism. The scope of the action seems arbitrary - any day, from reveille to delete the lights, in the life of any Gulag prisoner, representative of the nameless hordes of political prisoners. The main focus is on the realistic depiction of the hardships and injustices of the prison life in frosty Siberia, the focus is the personal being of Ivan Denisovich, whose weal and woe depends on apparent trifles - a hunk of bread, which he can hide, a small piece of metal, which can be rightly grind to a knife, a pair of boot lined for warmth, which he mourns. The daily center of his existence is the hungry waiting for the next meager meal, usually no more than a thin watery soup and yet the only bridge to survive. Another focus of the story is on the interaction between the individual prisoners - loquacious and taciturn, honest and dishonest, work-shy and hard-working - as well as on the relationship between the prisoners and the guards, both forced together in an inhuman system.

Features

What the novel stands out from the crowd of prisoners literature, is the humanity that he radiates. The inner world of the protagonist is described with thrilling vitality. The way as he tries to come to terms with his circumstances, his inner happiness that is portrayed when he lands an extra bowl of soup, the reader touch more than it could have done the mere description of humiliations and cruelties. Solzhenitsyn, the harshness of life in the camps without any allegations dar. Despite all the inhumanity of this life remains, discreet and yet indicated impressively still room for a radical charity among the prisoners.

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