How to be happy in a Gulag: Lessons from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of a man who has a lovely day while interned in the feared Soviet Gulag. It teaches us that the secrets to a happy life are to take pride in whatever work you do, and to savour the small things which bring small happiness. Happiness arises through the discipline of awareness.

Today, a bit of crackling made me happy.

At the refectory, I fronted up for my pork roll and in spite of the usual clamour of voices preaching existential dread in my head mustered up a smile and cheery demeanour. The lady who made my pork roll gave me some extra crackling. Happiness.

As I was munching on it, and reflecting on my happiness at this tiny little thing which made my day, my thoughts strayed to one of my favourite books of all time. I highly recommend it to you. It’s a novella and can be finished in a single sitting in a late afternoon: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by the famous Soviet dissident and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

I first came across this particular work of Solzhenitsyn when reading David Malouf’s wonderful Quarterly Essay The Happy Life. Malouf drew heavily on Solzhenitsyn’s novella to form an argument about how to be happy. I can see why.

Solzhenitsyn’s story tells the story of a man who has a lovely day while incarcerated in the Gulag, the feared network of forced labour camps spread across Siberia where the Soviet authorities sent their political dissidents. The moral of his story is that you can be happy even in a Gulag. It’s not easy, but it’s possible as long as you take pride in your work (even if it’s slave-work) and if you savour the small things which bring small happiness — “suck out all the marrow of life” as Thoreau said.

Reading this novella (I suspect I must have been little more than 19 at the time) a few episodes gripped my imagination (the Penguin translation was wonderful; almost none of Solzhenitsyn’s Dostoyevsky-esque prose was lost). I might not be remembering this entirely faithfully, but this is what I remember and it serves its purpose for me.

The novella opens in the grey dawn of a freezing Siberian winter with Ivan Denisovich in his sleeping hut, having woken up a few minutes before the reveille of the camp authorities. In the silence (all is quiet) he is meditating on his bleak situation and making an effort to savour these few private moments of rest and reflection snatched secretly from the authorities. The reveille of course does sound, and it’s off to a day of hard labour in unimaginable conditions fed on water and meagre rations.

First, what I might call the “meditation on bread”. I think it’s in the breakfast mess before he goes off to work, Ivan Denisovich narrates to us his meditation on how he’s learned to savour bread now that he gets at best a small roll a day. Most people scoff it down, but in the Gulag you learn chew it and move it around your mouth at length until it becomes a paste. Only then do you swallow it down in small parts, savouring every last crumb knowing you’ll get no more for hours on end interspersed by hard labour in one of the most isolated, harsh places on earth.

Next, in what I might call the “meditation on bricklaying”, Ivan Denisovich narrates to us his reflections on his work. He’s working as a slave for the Soviet authorities building a sort of warehouse. In the freezing half-night of Siberia he works up warmth while laying brick after brick with great deliberation and concentration, conscientiously ensuring they’re perfectly aligned and evenly spaced. There’s even a moment when the workday is over, but Denisovich wants to make sure he finishes off a little bit of the wall, and stays at work longer than required, risking a late arrival at the camp and a meagre dinner.

He doesn’t have to do this; he could easily do the work poorly and seek to sabotage the outcome his masters are hoping for. That’s one option — recall the story of Mandela on Robben Island doing his quarrying work as slowly as possible. But instead of taking this political route, Ivan Denisovich seeks to do his job well and with despatch.

I hope you’ve had a chance to do some bricklaying in your life like I did when I was a boy helping my Dad and Grandad build some wall or other. You’ll oddly get immense enjoyment from this part of the novella as you recall the small excitement you felt as each brick went into its place next to the aligning string, and the wall slowly took its shape.

Finally in what I might call the “meditation on soup”, Ivan Denisovich narrates to us the leap of joy he gets when, having handed across his bowl for ladling out of the broth, he finds it handed back with a potato in it! Luxury of luxuries! If you’re unlucky and you get back too late or too early, or the guy ladling the soup doesn’t reach deep into the cauldron either because he doesn’t like you or you’re just unlucky, you’ll get little more than watery broth, which can lead to weakness, sickness and death.

The novella has a striking ending as Ivan Denisovich goes to bed. The last words are something to the effect (in English) of “he smiled as he stretched his arms behind his head; he had had a good day”. It’s stunning because the whole novel has been full of Ivan Denisovich narrating the hardships he’s facing, and yet it makes sense because of the way Ivan Denisovich has narrated it. He’s had a few moments to himself to rest and reflect, he’s maximised his enjoyment of a roll of bread, he’s done his work well, and he got a potato in his soup.

It’s an incredibly moving story. It’s evolved in my mind over these years since I read it first such that calling it to mind now brings a little mist behind my glasses. Even in the midst of one of the great crimes against humanity in all history, here is this man finding happiness and meaning, however small. A small candle is lit in the freezing, windswept, long dark nights of Siberia.

Don’t think that this work is mere speculation written easily by a man living in relative comfort. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is at least partly autobiographical. Solzhenitsyn, a highly intelligent teacher of mathematics, was incarcerated in one of the Gulag camps for eight years for having confessed to a rather dim opinion of Stalin.

I think Solzhenitsyn is offering us two lessons here and a third conclusion.

First, happiness comes from doing your job well, even if it’s menial slave-work. Solzhenitsyn is not without theory here; he’s rediscovering Aristotle on the steppes of Siberia. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics teaches that “happiness” (or a better translation of eudemonia would be “euphoria of spirit”) arises from the exercise of “excellence” (arete, a sort of amalgam of “despatch” and one sense of “skill”) in “work” or “skill” (techne, the root of “technology”). If there’s a skill involved in your work (and there almost always is) and you focus on exercising that skill as best you can, you’ll find happiness in so doing it.

Second, I think Solzhenitsyn is showing us how happiness comes in savouring the small things which bring small happiness. It’s in even the smallest things you couldn’t even believe. Ivan Denisovich finds a sort of happiness in chewing a piece of bread, in doing some good bricklaying and a potato. These small joys, when he seizes them and fully immerses himself in their enjoyment, together make his life not only bearable, but even meaningful.

These two things come together in what I might call the “discipline of awareness”. The common thread throughout One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is Ivan Denisovich’s consistent awareness of his world and his reaction to it. Not fighting it, but merely being aware of it. Accepting it even. He is disciplined in the way he is reflective in all he does and in that he finds a sort of peace, grace and happiness.

There are other great works of literature which have similar conclusions. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, to some extent Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, even Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Aldous Huxley argued that this conclusion underlies all the major religions in The Perennial Philosophy. In the modern era (though I usually swear off self-help books) Eckhart Tolle has given a rather wonderful practical guide in The Power of Now to practicing the discipline of awareness. But none of these make the point so powerfully or poignantly, I think, as does the story of Ivan Denisovich having an almost lovely day in the Gulag.

Now of course most of us aren’t in a literal Gulag. But we all have our own versions of the Gulag that we have to live in. We all suffer those small tyrannies and evils which weigh us down, at times unbearably. Catholics would say “we all have our own cross to bear”. In a great homily, Patrick Richards likens all those little tyrannies and evils to the tiny cords which easily breakable alone, together bind Swift’s Gulliver to the ground helpless.

What I think Solzhenitsyn is teaching us in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that even in the face of the greatest tyranny, indeed when we are the helpless victim of one of the greatest crimes in history, we can find a form of happiness which can’t be extinguished while we draw breath. He teaches us that the secrets to a happy life are to take pride in whatever work you do, and to savour the small things which bring small happiness. Happiness arises through the discipline of awareness.

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Brendan Markey-Towler

Written by

Researcher in psychological and technological economics at the School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia

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