Alexei Navalny’s Memoir Is Being Compared To This Classic
A few words on ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’
Alexei Navalny’s just-published memoir hasn’t yet arrived here in Mayberry on the Bay, but an Associated Press news story today gives a good nuts-and-bolts overview of what’s in the late Russian dissident’s new book.
A paragraph in the AP report is likely to interest fans of Russian literature:
“The final 200 pages of Navalny’s 479-page book … have the characteristics of other prison diaries or of such classic Russian literature as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He tracks the boredom, isolation, exhaustion, suffering and absurdity of prison life, while working in asides about everything from 19th century French literature to Billie Eilish. But Patriot also reads as a testament to a famed dissident’s extraordinary battle against despair as the Russian authorities gradually increase their crackdown against him, and even shares advice on how to confront the worst and still not lose hope.”
I love One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and, by coincidence, had just written a couple of paragraphs on it for a story for my Substack newsletter that reviews 50 novels I like in fewer than 100 words each.
