But even with all these pleasures, the thought of being isolated in a world were insubordination was met with violence or, worse, disappearance, became my mental reality, trapping me in this world that you created.ĭark thoughts permeated throughout my mind like a giant shark searching for prey and ate my happiness. I have a wife I love and adore and two beautiful children, a house, a career (at times I would trade this), always a full stomach, clothes, cable, thousands of books, and countless friends. To think that every morning is going to be bleak when one awaits sleep, mortified and numbed and haunted my thoughts as I read this novel.Īdd in the fact that Ivan never knew if more time was going to be added on his sentence or if he was going to die in this desolate gulag, I had a real hard time distancing myself from this character. This ability to create (which you lived for a time) a life of perpetual recycling was heartbreaking, and so real that it made me think of not only Russian dissidents (political or otherwise), but of all the people incarcerated now in prisons, relationships (marriages, dating), loneliness, jobs, or, to a certain degree, aimless lives. And this made me yearn for a day when Ivan would awaken and see that it would be different. Afternoon: the same as yesterday's afternoon.
Think about it: Morning, the same as yesterday. But you have done something magical in ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH that eclipsed this reader's ignorance: you have transmuted what it was like to live a life day-in and day-out in much the same fashion. I am not a Russian scholar, not even in the armchair variety.
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