A Typical Day

As all studious job seekers know, the smart candidate will be ready with questions of his own for the interviewer, at least at the appropriate moment. It shows interest in the job and the organization, and is an opportunity to demonstrate you've done your homework, usually by not asking a question the answer to which can be found on the organization's web site. A frequent question I hear in these interviews is, "What's a typical day like for you?" I never know how to answer, as every day is different. Some are ho-hum, nothing surprising, nothing unusual, no meetings to go; just answer a lot of emails and review a few documents, pushing the paper forward. Other days are filled with dread, anxiety, stress or regret, as the case may be, depending on what's happening. And plenty of days feature joy, satisfaction in a task well done, or a sense of achievement (usually when a large invoice payment comes in, but as often when a client seems genuinely grateful for quality service). I usually just say "Lots of emails and phone calls, some stress, some good things, but usually something pretty interesting."

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov's days were quite different from mine. First, each day was all too typical. Essentially, every day was the same for the ten years of his sentence in the gulag. Get up early, don't get enough to eat, cold all the time, long days of hard physical labor, often bordering on futile, and being alert on ways to cheat the system all the time, just to be able to stay alive. The sense of something akin to hope, but not hope -- maybe resigned determination to stay alive -- pervades the book, all the way down to the reason he's there in the first place. As a solider in the Red Army on the western front, Shukhov was captured by the Germans, but then managed to escape with some fellow prisoners. On the way back to the Soviet lines, some of the escaped prisoners were shot by Red Army fire before they could be identified, and only Shukhov and one other made it in. Whereupon they were promptly arrested and accused of being spies for the Germans. Shukhov, sensing he'd be shot if he didn't confess, "confessed" to being on a secret mission for the Germans, and immediately was sent to one of Stalin's work camps in Siberia. For ten years.

I understand this was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first novel. It's a good place to start for the great project of reading Solzhenitsyn. Its great irony for me is that this novel, unlike his later work, was warmly welcomed by the Soviet establishment when it was first published in 1962. Khrushchev, you see, was on his kick to tear down the image of his predecessor, Stalin, and this book was a tremendous tool for demonstrating the inhumanity of Stalin's system. But all too often, the problem with using a great artist's work product as a tool to advance your political agenda is that the artist won't cooperate in the long term, or at least won't continue to cooperate once your agenda moves in a different direction, as the Soviet establishment later saw in the case of Solzhenitsyn.