Finished: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn). Compelling book based on Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn's real time spent in a Russian prison camp. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is just what it says...one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov...a Russian prisoner in a Russian prison camp. Shukhov fought for the Russians in World War II. He was captured by the Germans as a prisoner of war, but escaped with four other men. By the time he made it back to the Russian front line, only Shukhov and one other man remained. (The other three were killed as they approached the Russian front line by their own army!) The Russians, suspicious that the two could have escaped so easily, decided that they must be spies for Germany! Shukhov was then sentenced to ten years in the Russian gulag, the Soviet labor camps of the Stalin era that were used for Russian political prisoners.

The story begins with the freezing cold morning that Shukhov is awakened in his bunk in the early morning hours by the harsh clanging of a pipe against the metal rail of the bunk house. We follow him through his harrowing day of jockeying for position to get his gruel at breakfast before being marched in the snow to his work assignment with his regiment. His clothes and shoes are worn and he must be clever to save scraps of food and do favors for other prisoners to earn extras like cigarettes or more substantial foods they receive from home. He has instructed his wife not to waste any food that she could feed their children, by sending it to him. All of the packages that get sent to the gulag are opened and sifted through, anyway. Prisoners receive maybe half of what is actually sent to them. So, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov relies on his good graces and willingness to wait in cold lines for other more "privileged" prisoners, etc., to get his extra "comforts". The work day is exhausting under armed guard the entire time, and dinner (lunch time) is a mere bowl of soup and slice of bread. The prisoners are returned to the camp in the dark where they again jostle for dinner rations and then go to their cold bunks to sleep, just to get up and do it all over again the  next day! They spend hours during every day standing in the freezing snow just being counted by the dull-witted guardsmen to make sure no one has tried to escape. At the time we meet Shukhov, he's been in the gulag for eight years. He makes it through the one day we see, and calls it a good day, because he is lucky enough to earn the soup and dinner of another prisoner who he does favors for. The ending passage of the book:

    A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
    There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
    Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.
    The three extra days were for leap years.

When I read that it made it hit all the more home that Solzhenitsyn was sentenced for eight years to a prison for anti-Soviet propaganda. He was only 27. It's hard to believe that so many of these stories I read are based on real and personal experiences!