Ivan Denisovich

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Special Camp 104 represents the entire Soviet Union in microcosm, as a kind on anti-Utopia or dystopia. In other words, Special Camp 104 is Stalin's Soviet Union, a totalitarian police state in which the population is mostly slave labor, except for those who manage to obtain slightly more privileged positions as overseers through luck, cunning, bribery or connections. As the title indicates, the entire story is told through the eyes of the narrator, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, Special Prisoner S-854, from the time he wakes up in the morning until he goes to sleep at night. Shukhov is not a great hero or political dissident, but an ordinary Russian peasant who was sent to the camp because he was taken prisoner by the Germans in World War II, contrary to Stalin's orders. As soon as these men...
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