Solzhenitsyn And Nature

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The theme of nature is reinforced with the motifs that are employed by Solzhenitsyn. The cold is a physical manifestation of the coldness with which the managers of the labor camp treat the prisoners. Body searches that would be humiliating in the best of climates are physically torturous in temperatures of forty degrees below zero. Wearing ratty prison clothes would be degrading enough for the inmates even in summer, but wearing them in the biting Siberian winter makes constant suffering a part of their prison sentence. The column went [...] out onto the open steppe, walking into the wind and the reddening sunrise. Not so much as a sapling to be seen out on the steppe, nothing but bare white snow to the left or right. (Solzhenitsyn 221) Not …show more content…

No one ever considers trying to escape from the camp, for the obvious reason that the intense weather would cause a quick death. The combination of the hard camp life and the forbidding weather creates the sense that the whole universe is against Shukhov and his fellow inmates—their lives are hindered by both humans and nature. This sense of oppression highlights the anguish of the human condition. The world is inhospitable, and yet it is the fate of humans to carry on, one day at a time. Another motif is The prisoners’ lives show how the Soviet regime makes private events public in order to exercise control over individuals. One important quote in Section 5 of the text shows how the Soviet government controls the prisoners” “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”Who decreed that? ”The Soviet government.”(Solzhenitsyn,222) The inmates have no space to call their own, and their every move is monitored. At one point, the system decrees that a walk to the latrine cannot be made alone; even this has become a public event. The camp has replaced prisoners’ names, which represent their private identities, with letters and numbers. Prisoners are no longer private individuals, but rather symbols in a public system. The state’s elimination of privacy is not totally successful, however, one example where the claim is justified is what Shukov is named in prison, Shcha-854”( Solzhenitsyn ,Page

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