SOURCE: “Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” in The Explicator, Vol. 45, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 53-5.

In the following essay, Yarup discusses the spiritual dimension of Denisovich's struggle in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, drawing comparison to the religious faith of Ivan and Alyoshka and correlations to The Gulag Archipelago.

In the very disciplined dramatic form of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devises a structural arrangement which illuminates the thematic meaning of Shukhov’s survival in the Soviet labor camp. He constructs a vital frame¹ from the theologies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul based on Christian sacrifice of body and the consequential resurrection of soul:

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters. Yet if any man suffer as a...