The theme is unjustifiable punishment and suffering. A man tries to hold himself together in the face of dehumanizing mistreatment and perpetual incarceration at a thousand strong Soviet labour camp in Siberia. He has only rags to wear, sews hunks of bread into his sawdust mattress and lives for his ration of watery gruel. When it comes to his work, however, - today, the back-breaking job of bricklaying in subzero temperatures - he takes pride: 'his eye was true as a level, the wall straight as a die.' Ivan was a POW accused of being a spy. He got ten years. When that's up, they slap ten more on. No one that he has heard of has ever completed their sentence. Men have only the moon to warm themselves by, they have no clocks, just a metal hammer sounding reveille, roll call, noon break and lights out. They cadge, scrounge and finagle for scraps of food, butts of cigarettes, a postage stamp of steel to craft a knife from. It's day-to-day survival, it's absolutely brutal and based on Solzhenitsyn's own experience in a labour camp in Kazakhstan.