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In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn attempts to indirectly attack and insult Stalin as well as the Union of Soviet Writers by using a comparative setting. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a story about a man, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who is in a Russian Siberian prison-labor camp for expression of anti Stalinist ideas. The story describes the events of a single day in this man's life and his struggle to survive. I feel that the main theme of this book is survival.
However, Ivan shows the reader that survival on your own is not always possible. You can only provide so much for yourself on your own. People must work as a team, helping one another, in order to get things accomplished, overcome challenges, and survive. He does this by making the setting as realistic as possible while injecting Shukhov, who plays as the average man being cheated, taken advantage of, and put in the camp for a dishonorable and wrong reason. Shukhov's view of the camp is not realistic, but rather, understanding. By making the camp appear manageable and forgiving through Shukhov's eyes the actual horror of the camp is intensified.
Such was the case when discussing food: Shukhov sewing bread into his mattress and feeling impressed with himself at his ingenuity, getting two bowls of oatmeal at lunch break with incredible luck and engineering, and the fact that along the line of power everyone takes a piece of everything until it eventually trickles down to him. The fact that these acts occur is not nearly as frightening as the fact that Shukhov is completely comfortable with them, and that he knows that in order to succeed, or even survive, an inmate has to be cunning, quick, and extremely generous to higher ups. Another fact to consider is why Solzhenitsyn made Shukhov the way he is. One argument is that Solzhenitsyn had become cross after attempting to have censorship banned in the Soviet Union. Having had his request to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers denied, and being imprisoned in a camp himself for eleven years for the exact same reason as Shukhov (accused of surrendering to the Germans and serving under them thusly betraying his country). After such ordeals Solzhenitsyn may have found it necessary to, in some way, retaliate both towards Stalin and the Congress of Soviet Writers.
This was how Shukhov and the strong setting were created. Solzhenitsyn could by no means attack openly as that would have been stricken and never published, however, by these means the setting would present a horrible, disgusting, corrupt camp but through a character who sees the camp as something not all that terrible when the right decisions are made. This creates a sense of sarcasm about the camp; and every time Shukhov explains some aspect of it, the reader feels nearly sick only to experience a greater degree of sickness once Shukhov shares the backdoor approach. Such was the case when working at the power plant: Shukhov hid the tools which he deemed the best, prisoners collected whatever materials that could be found and either smuggled them back to the camp (such as wood) or used the materials illegally in order to quicken the job.
Because of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the camp being so terrible as well as Shukhov's calm methodical explanations, the reader begins to believe that some of the acts commonly associated with criminals (such as: swindling, smuggling, networking through bribery) may have actually been taught as a means of survival from within the camp. Thus, Solzhenitsyn succeeds in his attack; showing the people that Stalin has created these camps to rehabilitate criminals while benefiting the community, but in fact is slowly killing them off or otherwise refining them into perfect content and sneaks. All of Solzhenitsyn's messages were conveyed through setting; he wrote nothing that appears to attack any Soviet body whatsoever. However, when the reader compares the realism of the narrative to Shukhov's descriptions and explanations, the reader has only the government to blame for the atrocities of the camp.
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