aleksandr solzhenitsyn one day in the life of ivan denisovich

Mr Khrushchev, in a still-secret speech to the Communist party central committee last Friday, is said to have given his personal approval for more literary freedom in Russia, according to reports from usually well-informed sources. In the same wooden barracks lived a 16-year-old boy jailed for taking milk to supporters of Stepan Bander, a leader of the extreme Ukrainian nationalist organisation, and a student who wrote “false verses.” Most of them were originally jailed for 10 years – but the story repeatedly makes the point that the terms were really “10 years unlimited …” More literary freedom?: Mr K’s breath of fresh air “The souvenir surprised – and damned me,” the captain told his fellow prisoners.

He met a British admiral who later sent him a souvenir of their times together. Another character is a former naval captain, Buynovsky, who served with British seamen on the convoy runs to Russia. He escaped and was then imprisoned as a traitor.

Shukhov, the hero of the story, served in the Soviet army during the war and was captured by Nazi troops. The prisoners get up at 5 am to a breakfast of “very bad soup or a small fish and rotten cabbage or carrot and some oats.” Their supervisors are not guards, but hardened criminals to whom they are ordered to “take off their caps five paces before passing, and to keep them off two paces after.” His story tells of a camp surrounded by barbed wire and lit by searchlights with prisoners sleeping on sawdust mattresses without sheets but with thin blankets in the cold winters.

Aleksandr solzhenitsyn one day in the life of ivan denisovich