One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

Words: 686
Pages: 3

Depicting one day, in a sentence that is to last 3,653 days the reader of Alexander Solzehnitsyn’s story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is exposed to the harsh conditions and frigid cold the workers in the Stalinist labor camps had to endure just to make it one more day. Solzhenitsyn is able to express the feelings of hunger, cold, fear, suffering, and restlessness the prisoners would experience throughout the day. Accurate to history, the prisoners in the novel who would serve alongside the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich, are all convicted of unknown crimes or for crimes in which they were not guilty of. Ivan Denisovich received a ten year sentence after being accused of spying for the Germans during the great patriotic war, when in reality he was an escaped prisoner of war. Nonetheless, Ivan …show more content…
As the novel progresses weather and the cold become more and more prominent as major themes. The harsh climate of Siberia with its extreme temperatures, not to mention the limited rations the prisoners would consume all contributed to a more than exhausting experience for the individuals going through it. Ill equipped to be working in these conditions, having holes in their boots turning their feet to ice blocks and coats so thin that they did little to shield against the wind. Despite the conditions, prisoners pray for it to get colder, “Shukov looked out of the corner of an eye at the milk-white tube if it had shown -41 they ought to not be sent out