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Powell's Q&A: Norberto Fuentes

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   $19.56 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   The Autobiography of Fidel Castro

   Norberto Fuentes

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history 244, August 4, 2008 (view all comments by history 244)
Unbuttoning wasn’t too terrible now they were nearly home.
Yes—that’s what they called it, “Home”.
Their days were too full to remember any other home.

The “home” that Shukhov refers to is camp HQ, a forced labor camp in Siberia. It was part of the Gulag penal system instituted under Stalin and populated by the victims of that dictator’s purges. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gives an account of a typical daily routine for Gang 104, a work crew tasked with building a power plant in the dead of winter where the temperature reached thirty degrees below zero. The story of Ivan (Shukhov) and his crew is as much about the dehumanizing labor as it is about the triumph of the human spirit in such horrid conditions.
Solzhenitsyn, himself, had been a convict in the labor camps. Published in 1962, Ivan Denisovich, was one of the first literary accounts of the Gulag system. Its release signaled a temporary relaxation of Stalin’s policies by Kruschev. Such policies had led to the suppression of subversive literature and the imprisonment of millions of Russians; one of the most memorable aspects of the novel is Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of why the characters were in the camp.
Shukhov landed in a labor camp simply because, as a prisoner of war, he escaped the Nazis during the early days of the Second World War. His reason for being in the Gulag system was no stranger or more random than the rest of Gang 104. Tyurin, the foreman, was there because his father was a rich peasant, a kulak. The captain, Buynovsky, had served as a liaison to the British navy during the war, and had been put in the camps simply for receiving a gift from a British officer. Solzhenitsyn’s description of how all members of Soviet society were subject to arbitrary imprisonment is perhaps one of his harshest criticisms of Stalinist rule.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780374521950

Subtitle:

A Novel

Translator:

Willetts, H. T.

Author:

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

Author:

Willetts, H. T.

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Location:

New York :

Subject:

General

Subject:

Literary

Subject:

Novels and novellas

Subject:

Continental european fiction (fictional works

Subject:

Communism

Subject:

Soviet Union

Subject:

Forced labor

Subject:

Soviet Union Fiction.

Edition Number:

1st ed.

Series Volume:

1

Publication Date:

19920201

Binding:

TP

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

188

Dimensions:

8.24x5.49x.52 in. .46 lbs.