Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

A piece of old bread or a spark of humanity

Are the last bastions of hope in human made hell
Just one day can feel very long if one is in a Russian labor, optional death and extermination, camp. Solzhenitsyn describes the autobiographical impressions of how prisoners, guards, and incredibly incompetent bureaucracy work together in a mass murdering machinery with unknown millions of victims. The personality traits of the angels and devils of this purgatory are the main focus besides the

Appreciation of the small things in life
As so often, the Western reader realizes how precious and privileged one can be with food, a home, and especially peace in a, not always given, democracy. Because works like this can still bring many people around the world into prisons similar to the camps described in this work, if not death and terror squads already did the killing job with even less subtility before. What always, subjectively, comes to mind when confronted with the biggest atrocities humans are able to orchestrate, is that

Labor, concentration, and extermination camps
Around the world are, were, and will be always the same. But the big difference is if there is anyone like Solzhenitsyn describing them and an audience reading it and spreading the word. Because talking about the dark aspects of a nation's history is often primarily seen as unpatriotic nest fouling, especially in the country that committed the crimes and if it won the war. Contrast for instance German/Japanese/ Russian/Chinese history and how much is known about it nowadays thanks to history written by the winners. Nobody knows how many million Russian and Chinese civilians were killed by their own governments. And because close to each other big, especially colonial, nation built its wealth on exploitation, war, and crimes against humanity, optional against its own people too, this topic often will be avoided like the plague. No country is interested in that, and combined with the mentioned

Winners writing history
what should nowadays people do? They didn´t commit crimes centuries and decades ago and what´s making it even more unsolvable are the economic and territorial interests that are still directly related to it. Colonialism and later fascism and communism made some nations incredibly rich superpowers, some even stayed at that level.
Historical revisionism, some more truth in history books, may even be tolerated as a great greenwashing, corporate responsibility, and public relation stunt. But giving back land, wealth, and products thanks to superior industrial and technological capabilities? Not so much, imagine how the US would look if it would just give back some of all the land that once belonged to the indigenous people. Because

After institutionalized mass murdering and genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_...
saying sorry is fine, but everything else just too cost expensive, and no real cheap, economic alternative in the spirit of the holy shareholder value.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
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