Most worthwhile pieces of literature operate on multiple levels of meaning. One of these is the literal level — that is, a level on which one requires only an understanding of the basic denotation of the terms and concepts employed by the author. Expressed simply, on this level the author communicates with the reader in a "realistic," non-symbolic fashion. The reader has to transfer very few terms and concepts to a non-literal, symbolic or allegorical level.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is literally a prison story, and thus, it takes its place in a long list of similar works which deal with conditions in prisons, labor camps, concentration camps, mental hospitals, or POW camps. As such, it deals with many of the same problems that works like The Survivor by Terrence des Pres, Pierre Boulle's The Bridge on the River Kwai, Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Henri Charriere's Papillon, and many German, French, and British POW novels attempt to come to grips with.
Like all of these works, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich deals with the struggle for survival under inhumane conditions. What must a man or a woman do to get out of such a camp alive? Is survival the only and most important goal, or are there limits to what a person can and should do to stay alive? Is religious faith necessary or vital for survival? All of these are questions which this work attempts to answer on a literal level.
Solzhenitsyn, who has first-hand experience of the camp conditions which he describes in this story, relates the actual experiences of millions of his compatriots, and his Russian readers could not help but ponder the real possibility of their being confronted with Ivan Denisovich's situation.
