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Plot Kernel - A political prisoner in a Soviet work camp is followed during a single, regulated day in the winter as he works conscientiously as a bricklayer.Note: The narrative and characterization are on the level of a young adult novel. It is a short but very tedious book. There are no complex minds in this book: everyone is simple. Conversation follows in kind. It portrays a bleak world, certainly (besides the unsurprising lack of adequate food and clothing which in itself would create deep suffering, in this case the world of the camp is also intellectually empty, although no one in the novel seems to notice this, nor therefore suffer more because of it), but the novel cannot possibly, because of its psychological simplicity if nothing else, be representative of the real degradation and brutality of the camps. Solzhenitsyn followed this book with The First Circle, which looks to be a much better novel.
Very sobering view of life in a Gulag. The whole book is a metaphor for the Soviet Union. I was kind of sad that the book was not longer - it literally is just one day in his life. Great book.
Shipping was a bit fast but the book was a great price and brand new.
This was as awesome novel which I read for a World History class in college. I strongly recommend this book to those interested in Russia, World War 2, Stalin etc. I love history, and this book was amazing.
There were in fact innocent prisoners sent to the gulags for much longer and for much less than that. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart." ~Aleksandr I. Many of the prisoners in these work camps (Gulags) were political prisoners who had in some way voiced their concerns/frustrations against the communistic Mother Russia. I look forward to reading it, and hopefully it will give me a little more of the history and real life stories. I can't think of one movie about the suffering in the Soviet Gulags.
The title character had been captured by the Germans and placed in a POW camp. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering." The prisoners were forced to work from sunup to sundown in below zero weather. He and one other Russian soldier escaped and upon returning to their homeland were accused of being spies. I think this paragraph from the book vividly describes the importance of this slop to the prisoners: "Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold, and an empty belly, the zek (prisoner) longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in time of drought. This is a book of fiction; however, it is based on the author's personal experiences in the work camps. The book is meant to give you a glimpse into a day in the life of a Gulag prisoner. The only time they weren't marched out to work were in conditions fourty-one below or worse. Rather than kill these so-called rebels, they sent them to Gulags as slave laborers and gave them just barely enough to keep them alive.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. They were given less than a ladleful of slop each meal--just enough to keep them alive. If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. The title character spends his entire day working, trying to stay warm, and fanagling additional food from his fellow prisoners.
This innocent man was sent to the gulags for ten years. I get cold just reading the first paragraph of the book: "The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. "If only it were all so simple. He could knock it back in a single gulp. For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him." For some reason the Gulags of the Soviet Union do not receive much publicity in the US. However, this book has piqued my interest, and I am determined to learn more about them. There is a bulky book on my to-read list called Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum.
Sadly, it was actually one of his better days. Solzhenitsyn This book details the fictional day of Shukhov Ivan Denisovich in a Stalinist work camp in Siberia. The book is only 159 pages and only took me two days to read. The two words that encapsulate this book for me are frozen and hungry. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. In my opinion, the book does not really try to get too political. I heartily recommend it
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