Mill, Shelley, and Freud as a Foil to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The central themes in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich include survival, cruelty of punishments and those in power, and the loss of humanity. The treatment the prisoners receive and the world they live in is opposed by Mill’s On Liberty, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. The amount of power the government and prison management has over the prisoners is constantly being exercised throughout the book. Every action and thought Ivan has is shaped or planned by the prison management.

Even the possibility of getting out is a hopeless though, “So you just went on living like this, with yours eyes on the ground, and you had no time to think about how you got in and when you’d get out.” (Solzhenitsyn 78), rather Ivan just tried to go through the motions. The complete control the of every aspect of the prison (and the government’s ability to imprison someone indefinitely for any reason at any time) is contrary to much of the works on liberty and duty of government, Mill states “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (13).

The prisoners in Ivan’s labor gang are imprisoned for various offenses, including feeding the opposing Ukrainian forces and other mildly treasonous acts that the government saw as threatening. Ivan in particular is imprisoned for captured by German forces, escaping, and being accused of treason.

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A lack of reasonable trial meant that Ivan is imprisoned potentially indefinitely when he didn’t cause harm to anyone. The Soviet government of the middle of the 20th century is in opposition to the ideas of liberty and authority presented by Mill, “By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers” (5). As a consequence of having a strictly scheduled and enforced daily program, the thoughts of the prisoners are no longer their own, an idea also in contrast to works on liberty and freedom. For Ivan, every thought was concerned with survival or how he would be getting his next piece of bread, “Even a prisoner’s thoughts weren’t free but kept coming back to the same thing, kept turning the same things over again” (Solzhenitsyn 45). And as far as day to day work and even minute-by-minute tasks, “The fellows at the top thought about everything for him, and it was kind of easier like that.” (49). The relinquishing of one’s own thoughts is almost the last portion of freedom to give up.

Freud places man’s thoughts and mental achievements at the forefront of civilization, “No feature, however, seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of man’s higher mental activities—his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements—and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life” (79), as many of the prisoners lose or give up the control of their thoughts, they give up an essential part of civilization. Freud’s ideas about man’s drives in life including pleasure is almost absent in One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, because the desire for pleasure is completely replaced by the desire to survive and minimize suffereing. Even when being physically controlled, the mind is thought to be one’s own, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (Mill 13). After a constant daily breakdown of emotions and hope, even one’s thoughts are reduced to imprisonment. Following the loss of freedom over one’s thoughts is the loss of one’s humanity.

Without liberty, possessions, family, or happiness, there is little left to enjoy in life. However, at the end of the novel, Ivan considers his day a success because he had survived, gotten his rations, and was satisfied with meager concessions, “Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy” (Solzhenitsyn 210). The conditions the prisoners suffered that day included temperatures at 20 below (with no regard to the warmth of the prisoners), felt boots (and at one point shoes made of tire scraps), and just enough rations for sustenance. They are fed gruel and mush for meals, along with a pittance of bread to last them throughout the day, and provide them energy to complete the labor assigned. Ivan’s daily acceptance of these conditions and quest for survival drastically lowered his expectations for his life. He tries to find meaning in his life through the dull tasks and little jobs he manages to earn more food, no longer taking pleasure in even writing to his family or hearing about his village, “Ivan Denisovich had gotten out of the habit of worrying about the next day, or the next year, much less how to feed his family” (Solzhenitsyn 49). His life is reduced to drudging through each day at the mercy of those who have authority over him in the prison.

In Frankenstein, the monster comes to learn that for those other than the wealthy and powerful, life is difficult and can seem meaningless, I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were, high and usullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without vantages, but without either he was considered…as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of a certain few (Shelley 123). People without any power, or prisoners, develop a sense of hopelessness and inability to be anything more than a pawn for those in power. Like the proletariat in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the prisoners exist solely to conform to the will of authority, the prison and on a larger scale the government. The absolute control over the lives of the prisoners in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the central theme to the novel. Through a daily schedule of every moment of each prisoner’s life, one’s own thoughts and sense of humanity becomes warped. The ideas of liberty, freedom from tyranny, and the purpose of humanity is a foil to the novel and the suffering of the characters.