this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
30 points (96.9% liked)
Books
5941 readers
266 users here now
A community for all things related to Books.
Rules
- Be Nice. No personal attacks or hate speech.
- No spam. All posts should be related to books.
Official Bingo Posts:
Related Communities
Community icon by IconsBox (from freepik.com)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Did you finish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? Or still reading it?
Yes, I finished it. It's not a long story, given that it's just a typical day from one prisoner's perspective. It was a good book, but also didn't have a lot to sink your teeth into. In this sense, even if it was written a 100 years earlier, The Dead House gives a more in-depth look into Russian/Soviet prison camps. Anyway, turns out prison camps are miserable places, where you have to scheme to get enough (and still too little) food and clothes and pretty much everything else you need. Russian winters are cold, and prison personnel cruel and prone to make arbitrary decisions. Yeah. Though I have to say, how this got published in Soviet Russia is a bit of a mystery to me, since it's pretty critical of the state.
I do intend to read more on Gulags, but I'll save that for another time.
It was during a brief thaw of destalinization. After Kruschechev's removal, the writer was persecuted and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union.