Russian literature - Essay Example

It clearly showed that the very "simple Soviet man" by whose name all the Stalinists sworn suffered from Stalinism most of all. The main character of Solzhenitsyn’s story is Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the ordinary prisoner of Stalin's camps. In this story the author on behalf of his hero tells on just one day out of three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of term of Ivan Denisovich. But that day will be enough to understand what conditions prevailed in the camp, which law existed, learn about the lives of prisoners to get terrified by all this.

Camp is a special world that exists separately, in parallel to that of other people. Here there are other laws that differ from our usual ones; everyone here survives in its own way. Life in the camp is shown not from the outside, but from inside by the person who knows about it firsthand, from his personal experience. That is why the story is startling in its realism. The question is whether it is possible to survive in these terrible conditions, to survive not only as a being, but as a personality.

The main character with all his life proves that it is possible. "Thank you, Lord, another day is gone!" - Ivan Denisovich concludes his story, - "A day passed, unalloyed, almost happy". On this day, Shukhov was really lucky: a team was not driven to Sotsgorodok to pull wire in the cold without heat, passed through the cooler, got off with just washing the floors in the guard room, received an extra portion of dinner meals, the work was familiar to him – he had to put the wall in the TPP, he worked lively, passed the jail shakedown safely and carried the saw to the camp, earned some money in the evening at Caesar's and bought two glasses of Latvian home-grown tobacco, and, which was most important, he did not get sick, he coped the cold.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov was sentenced to ten years on trumped-up case: he was accused that he had returned from captivity with the secret German job assignment, and nobody could state exactly what exactly this job was. As a man he cannot help causing respect: in spite of all the conditions he managed to keep kindness and friendly attitude to people, he has not got bloody-minded, has not lost humanity. Shukhov is willing to share the latest with a good man, even just to please him. Ivan Denisovich gives cookies to Alyosha-Baptists to pamper and support him, because he "caters to all, and can not earn.

" And how well Ivan Denisovich treats Gopchik! For him Gopchik is almost as a native son. I feel deep respect to this man, unlike, for example, to the jackal Fetyukov, a former high chief, accustomed to command, who does not even hesitate to get butts out of the spittoon. This is a real jackal, who lives at the expense of other’s leftovers. To lick someone else's plates, to look into someone’s mouth in anticipation that he would get something - for him it is quite common. He causes only disgust, even convicts refuse to work with him.

In the camp he had not left even a drop of male pride, he openly wept when he was beaten for licking plates. Indeed, everyone chooses a lifeline for himself, but the most undignified way is the way of an informer Panteleev living through squealing to other prisoners. These people are hated in the camp, and the fact that the three were killed, did not surprise anybody. Death here is common, and life turns into nothing. It scares the most. Unlike them, Ivan Denisovich "was not a jackal, even after eight years of