Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- A Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- A Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Every day, when I go out in the morning for my daily 5 kilometer run in the middle of December cold, I get the chance of watching the beautiful morning moon still shinning in the dark skies, as Solzhenitsyn says on his novel A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, is the wolves` sun, or as Dead in his days with Mayhem before he shot his head, sang, it’s the “Freezing Moon”, a beautiful view, that only I have the chance of appreciate long before everybody else wakes up in the city.  

I have always truly admired Russian literature; I consider it to be the best one written in the last centuries, whether is the painful and transcendental poetry of great Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, the monumental epic writings of Dostoyevski, the masterful short stories of Anton Chejov, the powerful prose of Pushkin, the fluent writings of Pasternak or the absurdist tales of the GREAT Gogol, so add the GREAT Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the list, as I recently finished reading A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and I have no words for it except MASTERPIECE, as Solzhenitsyn takes us on a wild and detailed hardcore ride into the brutal Russian gulags, describing us in the eyes of Ivan, what Solzhenitsyn himself lived during the harsh soviet times, once some of his words against Stalin came out and he was sent for several years, like most free thinkers in soviet times, to a gulag in Siberia.

By the way, one of my favorite recently read novels written here in Mexico, Mis Mujeres Muertas, by Guillermo Fadanelli, a writer who I truly enjoyed when I was young, then I grew tired of him, and now I have started to appreciate his recent work again, is full of Russian literature quotes, and I can fully understand why, as the epic writings of these immortal masters of literature leave really deep marks in our hearts and souls, as we Mexicans and Russians seem to share the same tortured souls, oppressed minds and hearts, deceived so many times, with rebellion lying close to our hands.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was written by Solzhenitsyin in the sixties and it describes a day of hard labor in a Gulag by Denisovich in the fifties, it describes in ample detail the suffering of the prisoners of this camp in the oppressive times of Stalin, a book that put Solzhenitsyin life in great peril after it was published outside the USSR secretly sent by Aleksandr and provoking big anger in the government in the USSR, Aleksandr became and enemy of the Soviet State first, then under the more open Khruschev rule, he was used as part of the process of de-Stalinization of the country, just to be once again harshly treated by the again oppressive government of Leonid Brezhnev, in the meantime Solzhenitsyn won the Noble Prize in Literature and became one of the visible heads in the USSR dissident movement along the GREAT Andrei Sakharov, in separate stances both men denounced the oppressive and brutal regime that was happening behind the so called “iron curtain”, and finally managed to plant the seed of the future collapse of communism in the USSR.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a painful tale of a man imprisoned in a gulag, supposedly for being an spy, along with other prisoners, most of them innocent, political prisoners, they are stripped from their names and known only by numbers, they are forced to work under the extreme conditions of the Siberian winter, mainly construction labor done in squads, meaning that if one man in the squad doesn’t work hard enough, the whole squad is severely punished, all this done with poor clothing, poor feeding and under the command of cruel military forces, a place where surviving of the fittest becomes the only objective of the prisoners.

By this immortal writing, Solzhenitsyn denounced the hypocrisy of the soviet regime, that promised the perfect society and ended up being a bitter dictatorship that hurt its people and destroyed some of the best minds of its time, Solzhenitsyn proved that a single man could face the iron fist of the Soviet rule and be successful in his own terms, it proved how cruel can be man to man, but at the same time it proved that freedom, at least inner freedom can never be taken away from us.