Finished this last night and have been trying to put together a post on it since.
For me, there’s a hopefulness about human nature in this story. Ivan (Shukhov) is living under cruel conditions in the prison, and yet he has it better than many of his fellows. There is a truth underlying the narrative that reveals a willingness to adapt over mere survival, and that from this comes a new society that brings with it some of the conscience of normality as well as a compassion and agreement to the new terms.
He crawled to the beam. He fished the knife out. He handed it over. Tsezar nodded and ducked below.
That knife’s a breadwinner too. After all, you can be put in the cells for keeping it, and only a man without a conscience would say: lend us your knife, we’re going to slice some sausage, and you can go fuck off. (p. 145)
There is a system of trade that develops–and one I’m sure that is present in today’s prisons as well. Everything has a value. Everything can be traded for something else. But for the new men, and for those who can’t seem to adjust to the harsh life, there are those who help them along, share bits of bread, a cigarette.
Life in prison has replaced life of freedom so that the barracks is home. Hard labor is a job. Pride remains intact by adapting. There is even an allowance of happiness, as Ivan ends his day:
Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day. (…) A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. (p. 158)
But then it comes back to the counting of days–though useless as a prisoner’s sentence appears to be governed by the same inequality and injustice that brought him to the camp.
What, one wonders, will these men when finally freed, bring back to the world outside their prison. Do we, as fish grow to the size of their aquarium, grow into our worlds?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology