Один день Ивана Денисовича, Александр Солженицын
A book I read rather a while ago that depressed the shit out of me. It follows titular character Ivan Denisovich as he lives the Kafkaesque nightmare of one average day in a Soviet gulag in Siberia.
Most strangely to me was that, at the end of the book, Ivan feels his day has been productive, even "almost happy". He "went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day." It's a real testament to how people can overcome misery. Perhaps the book is meant to be a triumph of the will, but mostly I came away from reading this with a dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach about how people can be so cruel and malicious towards other human beings. – Not a easy beach read, to be sure.
I get the feeling that a lot of older Russian literature tends to be in this same vein of one person suffering through intolerable circumstances; think of Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, etc. I'd be quite interested to read something more contemporary to see if the literary undertones have changed with the times as Russia has changed. I see that Ann Morgan also read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for her Russia selection, but she also lists many contemporary writers for me to check out in the future.
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