Couple of weeks ago I decided to crack on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Needless to say that to set into this kind of novel is always matter of momentary mood. That mood actually came one day after a short thought on how comfortable life we actually live without appreciating it properly. "What lives do we live? Aren't we happy enough? Do we really need more?" were questions coming up to my mind straight away after reading breathlessly the back side summary of the "One Day". Driven by the desire to find some answers to my questions I got the book the same day and set on a sorrowful journey full of hopelessness and suffering.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is a hard-to-believe story about one typical day in a Stalinist labour camp from a prisoner's point of view. It gives us an invaluable account on the harsh and miserable life of mostly innocent victims of an ill ideology and shows us how fragile the freedom of an individual in a totalitarian regime can be.
