After reading the Master and Margarita I felt I wanted to read more about the Stalinist era in the USSR. I settled on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

It is exactly what the title says, just an average day in one of Stalins hard Labour camps (gulags), one of 3,653 days of an 10 year sentence.
It isn’t a dramatic story of exciting events, break outs or otherwise, it is just a normal, bleak, day. The inmates were worked into the ground in temperatures of -42oC wearing just rags and felt boots, they ate watery gruel. Sometimes their only crime was that they fought in WW2, were captured by the Germans and when released Stalin considered them to then be spies and sent his own innocent citizens to the gulags.

BUT, this book is surprisingly wonderful. As one reviewer notes, Ivan somehow takes pride in his work, he wants to taste every tiny bite of a rare sausage, sucks the marrow out of the fish bones in his watery soup, enjoys the puffs from the dregs of a dog end, basks in sunsets, watches the moon cross the sky and thinks about how God breaks up the old moon to make stars. In spite of appalling conditions Ivan lies in his bug ridden bed at the end of the day and thinks he is pleased with life, his day has been ‘almost a happy one’. And anyone reading those last lines surely feels humbled.

It reminds me of Walt Whitman’s line…
‘It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy, whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.’