. Spinning .

This relates back perhaps to an earlier posting, but there’s a thread of story I’m following beneath the story of Ivan (Shukhov) and the routine of his day in this prison camp, regardless of the backstory information we get.

People are basically alike in their needs and their response to fulfilling those needs.  People adapt. They seek a certain level of comfort–not creature comfort, but rather comfort that in some way comes through compromise and attitude to allow them to survive, if survival is all they can hope for.

Shukhov stood there just as long as was decent for a man who had brought a bowl of kasha.  After all, Tsezar might offer him a smoke.  But Tsezar had quite forgotten his presence.

So Shukhov turned on his heel and went quickly out.  The cold is bearable, he decided.  The block-laying wouldn’t go too badly.  (p. 84)

After finagling a few extra bowls of oatmeal, Shukhov takes one for himself and has just delivered one to the squad leader, a prisoner of higher ranking.  There is a pecking order established, and the squad leader was sitting in an office talking art and literature with another man.  Shukhov notices immediately how warm the rooms are, how red the stove burns. 

One reaction to the better position of others is often resentment and envy.  Another, like Shukhov’s, is to convince yourself that  you have it pretty good yourself.  There are those below you who may suffer more; the captain, new to the camp and not knowing yet how to survive; the men who were not allowed near the stove to warm themselves until those of higher "ranking" or experience were ready to leave. 

Though compassion for their lesser fortunate has driven some to share, there is also a need to feel superior.  Why are we only secure, do we only feel magnanimous, when we are feeling at least partway up the ladder and see others standing on the ground.

While the story is told in third person pov, with the protagonist Ivan Denisovich a.k.a. Shukhov, there is what seems like narrator intrusion but which Solzhenitsyn uses as a tool to bring the reader into the cold world of Ivan’s prison camp:

In a corner near the door an orderly sat lazing on a stool.  Beyond him, like a bent pole, stooped Shkuropatenko–B 219.  That fathead–staring out of the window, trying to see, even now, whether anyone was pinching some of his precious prefabs!  You didn’t spot us that time, you snoop!  (p. 83)

It is delicately done and while we’ve been watching over the shoulder of Ivan the whole time, it makes us wonder who the narrator is and if indeed he cannot help but comment on what he sees and what he is revealing to us. 

There is a slowly building world of the camp that mirrors the outside world.  Human nature, despite environment, remains, adapts itself to any situation to allow human dignity.  And part of that dignity or nature, I suppose, is in a need in establishing a social strata that adjusts to circumstance.

The column passed the wood-processing factory, built by prison labor, the workers’ settlement (the huts had been assembled by prisoners too, but the inhabitants were civilians), the new club (convict-built in entirety, from the foundations to the mural decorations–but it wasn’t they who saw the films there), and then moved out into the steppe, straight into the wind heading for the reddening dawn.  Bare white snow stretched to the horizon, to the left, to the right, and not a single tree could be seen on the whole expanse of steppe.  (p. 48)

Yes, surely an accurate image of the labor camp environment; bitter cold as the prisoners troop out into the work day.  But the imagery may represent as well the moral and mental circumstance above the physical.  These are Stalin’s political prisoners, most in there for no good reason and for indeterminate (regardless of imposed sentence) time.  Both stretch out beyond their reach like the snow-covered land.  What good they put into the environment will never by reaped by them.  And no hope; not even a single tree.

I see them living in a parallel world that may represent what they’ve lost.  The snow, though a natural part of these worlds is a separation made of innocence; a blankness that reveals that no matter what they did or didn’t do, they had no way of knowing or saving themselves.

I’m currently further along in the book, coming to a part that seems to explain Ivan’s (Shukhov’s) own reason for becoming a part of this lost world of prisoners.