ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (Reissue)

author:
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

Fiction
176 pages
Signet Classics

I love being depressed.  Not not-getting-off-the-couch depressed or being-unable-to-get-a-haircut depressed, but a powerful case of melancholy can go a long way for me. A little OK Computer on a rainy day? Yes. Some Mark Rothko in dim lighting? More, more, more. There Will Be Blood? Heaven. So when I came across the obituaries of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a few weeks ago, I was piqued.
 
I had managed to hit many of the Russian greats in school and since, but had never read the Gulag Archipelago or any of his others. And I still can’t read the Gulag Archipelago. I tried to get it, I really did. I thought, A thousand pages of suffering? Sure. I am in. But I caved at its heft. I wept at its aura, even. I might get to it sometime in the future but right now I am glad that I chose its younger brother, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

This is the work that shot Solzhenitsyn to fame and a long literary career (one of exile and embarrassment and, yes, suffering). And it is gorgeous. In the literary sense, it is stunning. His words just lilt and tumble and turn on your tongue. They take you to the gulags of mid-century Russia; you feel the frostbite and the blisters. You actually get hungry as Denisovich pockets his scraps of crust for the evening gruel. There is suffering and power and false pride and misty breath in each paragraph. He was a master. But somehow it all feels a bit heavy handed right now. The state of the world is depressing enough. The cover of the New York Times and its images of Abu Ghraib and festering souls in Darfur are, though not as lyrical, just as shocking. I feel better for having read the book, I really do, but I don’t want to do it again. I just want to take a shower.

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