Rating: 
Summary: excellent
Review: This was an awesome book--and only a chapter long!
:)
excellent example of fine Russian literature. I read this in high school, so it wasn't too intimidating a read, either.
An average soldier gets put into a work camp during the "do so much as scratch your hand wrong and get sent to a work camp" phase of Russian history. He simply tells what goes on during an average day of his life there. The story begins when he wakes up, and end when he goes to bed. In between, you are introduced to characters who are normal, interesting, and have just as much reason to be in the work camp as Shukhov, the protagonist.ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH was wonderful. Solzhenitsyn did an excellent character study and did a fine job of portraying the senselessness of the work camps and the simplicity of surviving in hopeless circumstances. Really, really a great read. It's short, sweet, easy to read--and a quality read at that.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the Read.
Review: This book is a well-written tale of life inside a prision camp. It is written from one prisoner's perspective and it pulls you into his world both mentally and visually. I found it quite interesting. I would now be inclined to read other books by this author.
Rating:
Summary: Praise for Ivan Denisovich!
Review: Solzhenitsyn's novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is five star reading for many important reasons. For one, it offers a real account of Siberian prison camp life but also gives the reader a good dose of fiction that is in perfect sync with fact. This book never tries to over-exagurate or over-dramatify events that are just simple tasks (like F. Scott Fitzgerald does). It is artfully written and short, but complete. BUT, the title does not accuratly explain the book. It is not just one day, it is many of them, but that was a logical step. Such a mistake is excusable. When you read this, keep in mind you're getting history, and a brillant story. MOST ENJOYABLE!
Rating: 
Summary: A better read for history buffs than literature fans
Review: I'll give it this - the novel is an interesting and informative account of the hardships endured in Soviet workcamps. It illustrates a stripped-down existence in which survival is the chief concern and paranoia and irrational abuse of power are dominant. As historical record, it is important. As a novel, it lacks a great deal. Characters are poorly defined and two-dimensional, interacting seldomly and incapable of complex emotion. The plot is slow and languid. The work is little more than a protracted description (vivid though it may be) without any moments of heightened tension or development. I respect the author's experience leading to this work, but surely he must have witnessed some greater conflict, some change of emotion, something to make for a better story. This novel wants badly for artistry. I found myself wondering throughout why he bothered fictionalizing this account at all before going on to write his non-fiction opus on the same subject. To Solzhenitsyn's credit, I suppose it is necessary to say that he must have known what he could get away with and what he couldn't, in order to obtain clearance from Khrushchev's censors. This anxiety likely forced him to steer clear of more controversial elements that might have made this novel a stronger work of art.
Rating:
Summary: a masterpiece
Review: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is just that - a detailed description of one day in the gulag: the humiliation, the struggle to survive the elements, the mindless labour, the petty indignities one suffers and the mistrust one has for your fellow inmates. It is a quick read - it really only takes an hour or two, but the mental and psychological toll it takes is tremendous - especially after you realize that what you have read is only one day of many, one day of perhaps years that will be spent in an identical manner. After reading the book, you are literally drained emotionally; this above anything else makes it a masterpiece. There are no riveting characters, the plot is simply survival. Yet you empathize with Ivan and his fellows, as you empathize with Solzhenitsyn, who wrote this book largly based on personal experience. While I heartily recommend this book, I caution you not to read it if you are in a sunny disposition.
Rating:
Summary: Superb grim account of life of Soviet political prisoners.
Review: This short novel is much more readable than many of Solzhenitsyns other works. I have read all three volumes of Gulag as well as The First Circle; this is by far the most approachable. Gulag is, of course, a work of non-fiction with a scattered encyclopedic style. The First Circle is like many other Russian novels with a huge cast of characters whose lives intertwine in ways that are difficult to keep straight. One Day in the Life, on the other hand, is short and to the point. The unrelenting hopelessness of the prisoner's lives and the bestial conditions they try to survive are described in a matter of fact way. Life for Ivan Denisovich and his fellow prisoners consists of a struggle to survive. Nearly every minute of their waking hours are spent occupied in getting enough food to keep from starving and with staying warm enough to keep from freezing while working as slave labour from dawn to dusk. All the while they must take care to avoid the random punishments and brutalities of prison life. It is as if this hopeless situation is all that exists in the world. Solzhenitsyn imples that there is no hope for improvement in the future. The prisoners have lost their faith in better days to come; they can't even look forward to the end of their terms. Prison sentences are frequently arbitrarily extended. Those who are released are more often than not condemned to exile in Siberia and cannot return to their homes. This makes for a reality much bleaker than the fictional horrors depicted in such novels as Nineteen Eighty Four.
Rating:
Summary: shivering!
Review: THEME: Personal struggle for survival in a Stalinist concentration camp. A more literal translation of the title from the Russian would be "The Day Of Ivan Denisovich". This "one day" is seen through the eyes of the hero Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a humble peasant who during WWII was captured by the Germans. After his escape he came back to the Russian lines where he was arrested, accused of being an enemy spy (forced by Soviet counterintelligence officers to sign his own "confession"), and sentenced to ten years hard labor. The story follows the routine details of Shukhov's life: jolted out of a frozen slumber at 5 a.m.; a breakfast of slop and boiled gruel with fish skeletons floating next to rotten cabbage leaves; roll call in the polar frost, followed by a ravenous-dog-escorted march to work where prisoners mix cement and build walls in the utter desolation of the Northern steppe. The author's depiction of this ceaseless slavery is literally mind-numbing. On the way back to the barracks the men are meticulously searched for anything they may be attempting to smuggle in. Shukhov privately revels over a piece of wire and a string that he has managed to sneak past the guards. After all, who knows how vitally necessary these items may be "one day"! At the end of this particular day's near-deathly labor, Shukhov actually feels fortunate that he has managed to finagle an extra bowl of skeleton soup, get some shreds of tobacco, and keep from being thrust into solitary confinement for any one of the million minor offenses of the camp. The story ends: "The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years." The final point reminding us of the Gulag system's merciless punitive accuracy. A world of no parole... and no reprieve. The reader is chilled by this book. It is shivering. Do we pick up anything by Solzhenitsyn for its "warmth and fuzziness"? Most definitely not. We pick him up to come face to face with mankind's capacity to methodically inflict cruelty and despair upon others. In the process, we are always afforded a very important glimpse of what those "others" can endure. And we set Solzhenitsyn down, thankful that we are none of his characters... even as we realize that some very real people (including the author himself) did not have that luxury.
Rating:
Summary: a towering figure of the 20th Century
Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) (Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn 1918-)
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the
following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God;
that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history
of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal
testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing
away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as
possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,
I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has
happened."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Over the course of his long and brilliant career as a gadfly to both Russia and the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn managed to pull off a remarkable trifecta: he was exiled by the USSR, banished from the Cold War dialogue by Western political and cultural elites and then banished from the discussion over Russia's future by the intelligencia there. He has truly made a career as a voice crying in the wilderness, launching one jeremiad after another. In 1945, Solzehenitsyn was sent to the Gulag for ten years after writing derogatory comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as the title suggests, describes what just one day would have been like behind the barbed wire. The story is set in the forced labor camp where he was imprisoned from 1950-53. That the system that perpetrated such crimes was evil is obvious, but it is through the sheer accumulation of mundane indignities and small triumphs (over hunger, cold, ill health, etc.) that the horror of the camps is really brought home. One of the most dramatic moments in the book, nicely illustrative of the small scale but enormous stakes of the victories won, comes when Ivan manages to secrete a spoon that he had forgotten he was carrying. In the end, simply surviving this barbaric system becomes the greatest victory. With the publication of this book, in 1962, during the brief Kruschev thaw, Solzhenitsyn became an international sensation. In 1974, when the first sections of The Gulag Archipelago were published in Paris, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, tried for treason and forced into exile, eventually settling in Vermont. I suppose folks must have expected him to be so grateful for his asylum that he would express undying gratitude to the United States. If so they underestimated the moral tenor of the man. He proved to be nearly as outspoken a critic of the West as he had been of the USSR, culminating in his 1978 Harvard Commencement speech, where first he excoriated Western intellectuals in general (...)
Rating: 
Summary: Goodness does prevail
Review: The setting in which experience takes place effects the mood and quality of the experience. It's natural for most people to judge the amount of meaning is in their lives, by the quality of the setting in which they live. If this is the case, then how do people keep the will to live when the setting of their life becomes completely destitute? When one is forced to live in harsh surroundings, he will only find value in his life by keeping his will to live unbreakable, as seen in One day in the Life if Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn , when Ivan, the main character in the book is forced to live in a Stalinist work camp for eight years, and never loses his will to live .
The beginning of the book is the beginning of one day that Ivan Denisovich spends in a Stalinist work camp. The ending of his book is the ending of this same day in the camp. However he is subject to constant dehumanization by the guards he works for from the moment that he wakes up, to the moment that he goes to bed. He is expected to perform heavy physical labor, despite being deprived of any real nourishment. He lives in one of the coldest, harshest, and most evil enviroments that can be imagined, but he never gives up. Ivan never loses his will to live, even when the setting in which he is forced to live in, attemps to break him apart.
The reader might be naive to the history of the Soviet Union or may not be aware of the relationship between Stalin and the Russians. This information would be very helpful to know to further the reader's understanding of the struggles that Ivan Denisovich goes through in the book and why. It will help the reader to understand why the setting of the book is so dark. If the reader wishes to learn about The Soviet Union or the relationship between Stalin and the Russians, there is a lot of information available in most libraries. The more knowledge the reader has before the reading the book, the better they will understand the reasons that Ivan is forced to live in such a destitute enviroment.
Ivan never loses his will to live throughout the book, but he is by no means content. In the the third to last paragraph of the book, the reader senses a shift in Ivan. He is content. He is relieved to feel his unwashed blanket cover the length of his body, because this means that he has made it through another day. Until he feels that blanket cover his body, he can't be sure that he will make it through the day. The guards might kill him in his sleep but he is satasfied because he at least made it through this one day.
When the setting of one's life doesn't encourage one to thrive, he must make his will unbreakably strong. Only then will he survive. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ivan is forced to live in conditions that most people don't dare to imagine. He lives in bitter cold with little food, and he is in constant danger of being killed. The setting of Ivan's life doesn't project anything that resembles goodness or hope, yet he hangs on to his will to live for one more day. The will of a person must be stronger than the conditions that they are subject to. Ivan Denisovich is a perfect example. He lives in a cold and evil Stalinist camp, yet never loses his will to live. The setting of One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich is in deed very dark, but the individual that is portrayed is not. Ivan is able to defy the dismal setting in which he lives, and keeps his will intact.
Rating:
Summary: Suffering in Siberia
Review: The thing that marks this work out as brilliant is the sense of inner dignity in Solzhenitsyn's protagonist. He does not dwell on self-pity; his life is pitable enough in the gulag. He does not bemoan his predicament: in fact, he recalls the story of his incarceration matter-of-factly (as a Red Army soldier he was temporarily detained behind German lines, therefore according to Stalin's twisted logic he was a spy). At one stage in the day he learns of a new law re-setting the time zone; he ingests the knowledge without undue reflection on what the outside world is doing. The very quietness of Ivan Denisovich makes him an all the more powerful witness to the disgrace of his captivity. The most dramatic moment, for me, was the prisoners' skirmishing over who would get to eat the fish-eye floating around in the disgusting "soup" served in the camp mess. Readers might care also to read Benson Bobrick's "East of the Sun", which gives the history of Siberia and informs us that Solzhenitsyn himself coined the expression "The Gulag Archipelago."
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