“One Day in the Life . . .”

[ShoutGrace]

This thread is meant for the discussion of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Alright . . . a couple of things:

I read the H.T. Willetts translation, purportedly the “Only English translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn.” Has anybody read this translation as well as another? I have also the Ralph Parker translation and I'm looking forward to discovering the differences between the two, though I think I will wait some time before re-reading it ;). The Willetts translation had some rather modern slang, etc.

I found this work to be hopeful and uplifting, amazingly enough. Towards the end (maybe it was the number of "good" things which happened to Ivan during the day) I wasn't feeling entirely abhorred or disgusted with the situation. :confused: Of course, merely having (one) bite of sausage is a great occurence in Ivan's book.

I liked that Solzenitsyn addressed one of my main ponderings - I wondered why the zeks wouldn't just dawdle away the day, doing as little work as possible, instead of working so hard, and taking such pride in their work . . .

What were your reactions to it? What did you think?

[Idril]

It's been awhile since I've read it so all I'm left with is general impressions, my recall of details is long gone but...

I read a translation by Ronald Hingley and Max Hawyard and this version includes a letter of protest by Solzhenitsyn against censorship which was quite fascinating.

I too, thought it was a more hopeful book than I was expecting. It's a dreadful life, certainly but they manage to establish some sort of home there nonetheless. You and I talked, SG, about how someone told me if I read One Day in the Life... I could skip The Gulag Archipelago and having read both of them, well, I still have a couple hundred pages to go in Volume 2 of Gulag, I don't think one can stand in for the other at all. One Day... doesn't have near the depth of despair or utter devastation that Gulag has.

I was just reading through my little book journal to see what notes I had taken about One Day... and as usual, I was pretty abbreviated in my notes but I did make the comment that it was interesting to compare this book with Dostoevsky's House of the Dead which I had read just a short time before and was written almost 100 years earlier and to compare the differences in the Tsarist and Soviet prisons. In some ways, they weren't all that different.