In this novel, Solzhenitsyn rarely gives us lengthy descriptions of a person's character or of his background. Instead, information about the protagonist and his fellow prisoners is given in small installments as the story progresses and as it becomes important for the reader's understanding of the protagonist. Thus, we have found out so far that Ivan has been away from home for ten years, that he has a wife, that he has spent some time in a camp near Ust-Izhma (where he was sick with scurvy), that he has a vitamin deficiency disease, and that he has lost some of his teeth. But we still do not know why he is a prisoner.
In this episode, we are told that Ivan is now in a "special" camp, a prison camp with particularly harsh conditions. This is Solzhenitsyn's phrase for camps which are designed mainly for opponents of the Soviet regime; these men were sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet penal code (see "The GULAG System").
Ducking behind some barracks to avoid being caught unsupervised, Ivan makes his way to the prison hospital. On the way, he considers buying some tobacco from a Latvian prisoner who has received a package from home, but he decides to try the hospital first. The young medic, Nikolay Semyonovich Vdovushkin, has no medical background at all; he is a student of literature whom Stepan Grigoryevich, the new prison doctor, has taken under his wing.
As Ivan enters, Vdovushkin is copying out a long poem he had promised to show the doctor and from which he does not want to be distracted by Ivan. After explaining that the maximum daily number of prisoners (two) have already been put on the sicklist, he puts a thermometer into Ivan's mouth and continues to write.
