I have revisited “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” by Alesandr Solzhenitsyn and without in any way detracting from the suffering of those incarcerated in the Gulags, as I read it my mind seemed to be taken back to my days at boarding school. It wasn’t the punishments or the starvation or the filth, but there was something about the psychological isolation of the individual, that seemed remarkably similar. The learned trait of keeping one’s head down, the bullying and the necessity to shut down one’s mind and just try and get through one day at a time, not noticing the mindless things one was often asked to perform, leading eventually to a numbing emotional sterility, which can last, as it did in my case well into middle age.

The book itself is a remarkable piece of work, and if you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do. It is one of the essential pieces of literature to read before you die. Just twenty four hours in the life of a gulag prisoner are written with painstaking attention to detail, and from first hand experience. The book is extremely short, almost novella length, and not in the slightest arty or pretentious, and if there is any lingering nostalgia for the soviet system, reading this will soon put you right.