Published by Bantam books (wtg, BANTAM!) and 203 pages long, it also includes a letter AS wrote to the Congress of Soviet Writers. This is the first book by AS I'v read since I read the Gulag trilogy in high school. The intro says it's the only novel of AS's that's been published in the soviet union. Now that the empire has crumbled it's doubtful that's true any more.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is prisoner S-854 in gang 104 at a soviet prison camp. The book's title corresponds exactly with its contents. The book chronicles the events in a solitary day of prisoner S-854. Of course, there are flashbacks and parenthetical dialogues to explain a few things -- like how Shukhov got in prison in the first place. He was fighting the germans, got captured, but worst of all, had the temerity to escape from them. So the authorities assumed he must be a spy.
Ivan's just a normal guy, not a polician or a writer or a scientist. He's a carpenter and is just trying to live his life as nobly as he can and still survive. He wants to be noble - to do the right thing. But the insane machine, the machine that never thinks, the machine with as much momentum as a planet keeps grinding away at him. Still, he doesn't despair. Maybe that's why he's survived for so long. He didn't give up. He resolved to survive despite the clear understanding that, regardless of the fact that his sentence was almost up, he would live the rest of his days as a prisoner.
Ivan is a survivor, a worker, a man, a human being possessing human foibles and yet more nobility than the whole of England's royal family. Even in prison he wants to do a good job, and feels the pride of accomplishment when he succeeds. He also feels compassion for his fellow prisoners, and especially those in his gang, his surrogate family. He has compassion for them despite the fact that he can't really trust them completely. The environment is extreme and even a small piece of bread hidden away in a mattress for later feast, might be stolen by a barracksmate driven by hunger to steal from his comrades.
It's a bold book and it astonishingly has a happy ending ...of sorts... of course, happy endings have a different flavor in a book about suffering in a prison camp. Still, the reader is left, like Ivan, if not with a sense of hope, at least with the good sense to savor every small pleasure he can before becoming the least collation to the machine.
