One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Summary

A wake-up call sounds in a Stalinist labor camp in 1951, on a bitterly cold winter morning. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in Camp HQ, is usually up on time, but this morning he suffers a fever and aches, and yearns for a little more time in bed. Thinking that a kindly guard is on duty, he rests past the wake-up call a while. Unfortunately, a different guard is making the rounds, and he punishes Shukhov for oversleeping with three days in the solitary confinement cell, which the characters call “the hole.” Led off, Shukhov soon realizes that the sentence is just a threat, and that he will only have to wash the floors of the officers’ headquarters. Shukhov removes his shoes and efficiently completes the job, proceeding quickly to the mess hall, where he worries he has missed breakfast. He meets the sniveling Fetyukov, a colleague who has saved Shukhov’s gruel for him. After breakfast, Shukhov heads to sick bay to get his fever and aches examined. The medical orderly, Kolya, tells him he should have been ill the previous night, since the clinic is closed in the morning. Shukhov’s fever is not high enough to get him off work.

Shukhov returns to the hut in time for the body search and body count, in which the prisoners are searched for forbidden articles and counted to make sure none have escaped. He carefully hides the bread he has taken at breakfast, sewing it into his mattress. The men undress in the freezing cold for the search. One inmate, Buynovsky, is wearing a flannel vest. He is sentenced to ten days in the hole for this infraction. Shukhov is happy not to have any forbidden things on him. He has neither food nor letters to his family, which he does not write anymore. He reflects on his wife’s recent letter urging him to take up carpet-dyeing when he gets out of prison. But Shukhov is not interested in this opportunity, despite the easy money.

After the search, Shukhov’s group, Gang 104, is marched off for work at the Power Station, a building site