Why does shukhov avoid the tartar

One of the guards gets mad at him and yells, "How much water are you going to use, idiot? Didn't you ever watch your wife scrub the floor, pig? I've forgotten what she was like," he replies. Ivan Denisovich is well aware of how things function in the camp. A prisoner has to learn when to work hard and when to take it easy:.

It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash. Otherwise, everybody would have croaked long ago. They all knew that. After scrubbing the floors, Ivan Denisovich runs to the mess hall where Fetiukov , the jackal, is keeping his breakfast of vegetable stew and magara , the unsubstantial "Chinese" oatmeal. Fetiukov is considered the lowest in the hierarchy of the th.

Sitting down, Ivan Denisovich goes through the ritual of taking his spoon his little baby out of his boots, removing his cap, and carefully concentrating on every bite. Ivan Denisovich takes eating seriously because mealtime is important to a prisoner: "Apart from sleep, the only time a prisoner lives for himself is ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five minutes over dinner, and five at supper.

After breakfast, Ivan Denisovich makes his way to the dispensary, careful to avoid the Tartar and other authorities.

With the introduction of new regulations, some guards vigilantly look to catch prisoners breaking a rule. On his way he ponders whether to buy tobacco from the tall Lett in Barracks 7 , but decides to go to the dispensary first. At the dispensary, a young medical assistant, Kolya Vdovushkin , is writing something.

He is not a medical trainee; he is a writer, given the job by the head doctor, Stepan Grigorych , so that he can write in his spare time. Stepan Grigorych is a loud-voiced doctor who believes that work is the best therapy for illness. Ivan Denisovich's temperature is Ivan Denisovich walks out, knowing he has to tough out another day.

The cold stung. A murky fog wrapped itself around Shukhov and made him cough painfully. Another guard yells at him not to breathe on the thermometer because that will push the temperature up. The guard reports that the thermometer reads seventeen and a half degrees. It must be below negative forty for work to be canceled. Another guard complains that the thermometer is crooked and never tells the correct temperature. Shukhov fills the bucket and brings it back to the guardroom.

The arbitrary rules around the cancelation of work only when the temperature is below negative forty shows the way in which power leads to unjustified oppression. This wish connects the guards to the prisoners, showing that the oppressive powers that be effect all of the inhabitants in the camp, including the guards. The Tartar is gone when Shukhov returns, but there are four guards in the guardroom arguing over how much food they will get in January.

Food is scarce in the camp, but the guards have access to certain articles sold to them at discounted prices that are not available to the prisoners. Although the guards enjoy many pleasures the Zeks are denied, they are hungry and worried about attaining food. Shukhov decides to take his boots off to do the washing to avoid getting them wet.

There wouldn't be another pair for him to change into when he returned. Things had grown better after Pavlo had provided Shukhov with a pair of boots big enough for a double layer of rags inside, and in December the valenki arrived. His good fortune, however, was stifled when the commandant made a rule that prisoners are only allowed to have one pair of footwear.

As an experienced Zek, Shukhov knows the challenges of camp life, which leads to his decision to remove his boots. One of the guards berates Shukhov for using too much water. The guard asks him if he ever watched his wife wash the floors. Shukhov reveals that he has been imprisoned since , and doesn't really remember his wife. Shukhov, who is later revealed to be a good worker, does a poor job on the floor because he is working for the guards, not for his gang or himself—it is not a job he can take pride in.

Shukhov is pleased to find no crowd at the mess hall. Two or three men from each gang get the bowls of food for their group. Shukhov makes his way to the table quickly, and the narrator notes that standing in the aisle between tables, looking for food to wipe off of the plates of others is dangerous. Because the men compete for food, standing in the aisle looking for food to swipe can lead to retaliation from other Zeks.

Competition vs. Shukhov notices a young prisoner at the table cross himself before beginning to eat. He notes that the habit will fade after some time in the camp. The rest of the men sitting at the table were already eating with their hats still on. They eat slowly, spitting fish bones onto the table. It is considered bad manners to spit them onto the floor.

All of the prisoners look the same at the table, wearing identical clothing with white numbers painted on them, but there are great distinctions in the squad. Fetyukov , the lowest ranking member of the gang, gives Shukhov his food, telling him he almost ate it thinking Shukhov was in the cells.

Although the men live in terrible conditions, they maintain their dignity through small actions, such as spitting the bones onto the table, not the floor. The camp attempts to strip their identities by making them dress the same, but as Shukhov notes, they maintain their identities in other ways. He eats slowly, as the only time a prisoner has for himself is while he is eating. His breakfast consists of magara , a grass-like, tasteless grain, and soup with cabbage and small fish—mostly bone and fin.

Shukhov does not eat the fisheyes that have fallen out of the eye sockets, for which the other prisoners laugh at him. After eating, Shukhov heads to the sick bay. Shukhov hides from the Tartar as he makes his way to the sick bay—it is against the rules to be seen walking alone in the camp. The prisoners must also take their hats off if a guard passes. This could be his last opportunity to buy any for a month because parcels are only allowed once a month and the supply is limited.

He decides to go the dispensary instead of getting the tobacco. He is grateful for them, for there are times he has only had rope sandals or galoshes made of tire treads, but this past October he had received a pair of hard leather boots. When the valenki were handed out in December, he was thrilled, but it was decreed each prisoner could only have one pair of footwear, and he'd had to return the boots and keep the valenki for the winter.

Pouring lots of water on the floor because it is so dirty, Shukhov angers the guards, who ask if he ever saw his wife scrub the flooor. Shukhov says he hasn't seen his wife since and barely remembers her. Knowing these guards don't want and wouldn't recognize quality, Shukhov merely wets the floor with a damp rag rather than giving it a thorough washing. Though he wants to find time to go to the dispensary, Shukhov first heads to the mess hall, where he is relieved to find no line or crowd outside.

Inside, he pushes past crowds of men eating their oatmeal and stew to find that Fetiukov , who is lower than him in the unofficial hierarchy of their squad, saving his meal for him. The few minutes that mealtimes take are the only times, except sleep, when prisoners live for themselves, and Shukhov takes his time eating his cold stew of black cabbage and bony fish and his magara, Chinese oatmeal that is more like yellow grass than cereal.

He eats all this with a spoon that he cast himself in , which he carries in his boot for safekeeping, but avoids fish eyes floating loose in the stew and saves his bread for later. Leaving the mess hall, it is still dark, but Shukhov can tell that it is near roll call. He avoids the Tartar, knowing that it is best to be inconspicuous and seen only in groups, to avoid extra tasks or punishment.

Though he realizes he had planned to meet the Lett to buy some tobacco, the dispensary is nearby and he continues on to there. But Shukhov insists that he feels "ill all over" and didn't last night, and the medical assistant gives him a thermometer, which he puts in his armpit to take his temperature.

Shukhov finds sitting still and quiet for five minutes a strange experience. He remembers back during the war when his jaw was smashed and he had the opportunity to stay in the hospital on the banks of the River Lovat for five days but instead volunteered, like an idiot, to go back to the front. Now, he dreams of being sick enough to lie in bed for two or three weeks, but suddenly remembers that the new doctor, Stepan Grigorych , devises tasks for all the patients who can stand on their feet, seeing work as good medicine for illness.

Stepan Grigorych had advised Vdovushkin, who was actually a literature student, to identify himself as a medical assistant to therefore give him the opportunity to do the writing in prison he had no chance to do in the outside world.

Shukhov's temperature is Shukhov leaves to go work, returning first to the barracks, where Pavlo gives him his break ration with a spoonful of sugar on top. He sticks half the bread in a pocket he has sewed under his jacket, and rushes to hide the rest of the bread in a hole in his mattress, which he quickly sews up with a needle he keeps hidden in his hat. He has just finished when Tiurin calls the squad to go out.

The men trample out slowly and deliberately, into weather so cold no one even wants to speak. One of the tasks which Solzhenitsyn undertakes in representing the life of a political prisoner in a forced labor camp - a life he himself endured under an eight-year sentence under Stalin - is a demonstration of the camp's effect on the prisoner's humanity. Solzhenitsyn's book was published in , at a time when Khrushchev, then premier of the Soviet Union, was actively seeking to break with Stalin's legacy and to condemn the system of his predecessor.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , while based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, was therefore also a propagandistic tool in Khrushchev's campaign for "destalinization. Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, through repeated examples, the ways in which internment in a "special" camp robs the individual of his humanity.

The power of these examples is increased by Solzhenitsyn's repeated use of understatement. For Shukhov and his fellow prisoners, this loss of humanity has become so commonplace as to cease to outwardly upset them. For example, when the guard taunts Shukhov about the way in which he washes the floor, saying, "Didn't you ever watch your wife scrub the floor, pig? I've forgotten what she was like.

The understatement and admission that he has forgotten what his wife was like is more disturbing than any depiction of Shukhov missing his wife because it demonstrates the ways in which his long prison sentence has altered him and robbed him of basic human responses.

Similarly, we see an example of stolen humanity in the mess hall scene. A West Ukrainian, that meant, and a new arrival too," Solzhenitsyn writes. Solzhenitsyn's morality, as appears in his books, was based on deeply held religious beliefs - beliefs which under the Soviet government he was unable to make known.