Majic.iE

by Eoin Ryan

Can you imagine working a fourteen hour shift digging holes? In temperatures well below zero? And with nothing more than a small bowl of porridge in your belly? Now imagine doing it every day for ten years, and maybe another ten if someone doesn’t like the look of you.

“A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is the story of an inmate of the camps for political prisoners in Stalin’s Russia. We follow the aforementioned Ivan, aka Shukov, on his daily routine, scrambling to survive and using his wits and skills to earn the extra crust of bread that might make all the difference.

Written by the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself a camp survivor, the simple yet powerful prose tells a story of our capacity for casual inhumanity to each other. The book won Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but in today’s world of Guantanamo Bay it has renewed relevance as an examination of the ethics of punishment.

Buy it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Ivan-Denisovich-Signet-Classics/dp/0451531043/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237477987&sr=8-1

Solzhenitsyn’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html

Read the story of a Gulag survivor:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/highlights/001027_siberia.shtml