One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich Essay

Settings are often constructed to expose suffering and injustice. Discuss with reference to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

The novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" illustrates the horrors of life in Russia under the Joseph Stalin. The novel portrays the repression of human rights at that time and it also shows the importance of freedom. "Freedom is found only when a person has been stripped of everything". This is true because during Stalinist Russia, people were stripped of their simplest human rights, such as freedom and family. Under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prison camps for criminals or political dissidents were built in barren lands in Siberia and run by secret police. These Stalinist labor camps were used to industrialize the Soviet Union in a short period of time. Without these camps Stalin would have never been able to industrialize the Soviet Union. Most of the political prisoners were innocent Soviet citizens, who were accused of being spies, terrorists, Rightists, nationalists and anarchists. The prisoners were assigned very hard labor such as construction work, which was the most common form of labor. Solzhenitsyn chose the
The "hole" is the fear of all prisoners. It was the punishment block at the labor camp. The prisoners were sent there for various reasons such as getting out of bed a minute too late. The hole meant death to the prisoners because if you spent more than fifteen days in there you were dead. "Ten days in that cell-block if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in hospital. Fifteen days in there and you'd be six feet under." The extremely inhumane conditions of the "hole" which were worse than normal living conditions on the camp, emphasize that the hole exposed human suffering on the