Summit Ministries

By J. F. Baldwin

What keeps you from committing suicide? Dr. Viktor Frankl, a world-famous psychiatrist, often asks his patients this question. Their answers, he believes, provide the key to helping them: find out what people consider the purpose of their lives, and then encourage them to stay true to that purpose. In that way, they will find reason to continue living productive lives.

Frankl develops this idea in Man's Search for Meaning—probably the only psychology book ever written that intrigues people who aren't psychologists. It isn't so much Frankl's theory that makes the book exciting, as the fact that the theory is based on experience; specifically, Frankl's experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps.

In detail as horrible as any Stephen King novel, Frankl recounts the grisly suffering endured by prisoners in the Nazi system: beatings, starvation, exposure, and the constant specter of sudden death. Frankl paints the gruesome picture, and then asks the obvious question: what made these prisoners go on with their lives? What made them fight for survival, when survival only meant more suffering?

In other words, what gave their lives meaning? What makes any life worth living?

Frankl, ultimately, is uncertain. But another author is not. Alexander Solzhenitsyn also endured tortuous prison camps. He knew, firsthand, the desperate yearning for another ounce of bread, and the stunned pain caused by blows from a club. And he knows what makes life—even a life of suffering—worth living.

Solzhenitsyn's novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is not "just" fiction. When we open the book, we do not step into a make-believe world. Tragically, we step into a part of the real world—a part Solzhenitsyn experienced first-hand.

When Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, any hint that a citizen disliked the Stalinist system could lead to death. Sometimes the execution came quickly, and sometimes the death was measured in painful increments: 25 years of hard labor in the gulags (the Soviet prison camps). Solzhenitsyn, like so many others, fell prey to the system and suffered mightily. In 1945 he was accused of making a derogatory remark about Stalin. Whether or not he was guilty is debatable, but Stalin and his minions weren't interested in a fair trial. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to ten years in the gulag.

Fortunately, he served "only" eight years of his sentence, and was set free after Stalin's death. He was never set free, however, from the memory of that bitter experience. And out of the experience arose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

One Day delivers exactly what it promises: an average day viewed through the eyes of an average zek (Soviet prisoner) in the gulag. But it also delivers more: a profound understanding of worldviews, and an answer to man's search for the meaning of life.

The book is subtle on a number of levels, but it is probably most subtle when comparing worldviews. Who would expect a story that seems to be concerned with mere survival to address the deepest questions of philosophy? How can one worry about the tiniest detail—the contents of the day's soup or the chance to buy tobacco—and answer sweeping questions about the meaning of life?

This subtlety is enhanced by the fact that the worldviews contrasted by the author are not given equal time. Indeed, one type of worldview—the rejection of God—hogs the stage for 99% of the novel. The other worldview, Christianity, flits across the stage and is gone. If you blink, you miss it. How can such a comparison do justice to the worldview that's almost completely ignored?

Well, it wouldn't do justice to the worldview if the worldview were a lie. But suppose that worldview—Christianity—were the truth. Suppose, in fact, that it is a drastically, desperately shining truth. Then the question becomes, How can it fail to shine?

As always, Jesus said it best: a city on a hill cannot be hidden. Solzhenitsyn's genius is simply this: he surrounds us with the bankruptcy of the anti-God worldviews—literally fences us in with barbed wire and spiteful guards and forces us to work long hours on a drab, bitter-cold day—and then he sends us glimpses of the supernatural, of life, of freedom from sin. Everything about the bankruptcy of anti-God worldviews makes us yearn for something else—and then he shows us something else: something real, something majestic, something true.

It works like this: we, the readers, know that everything Ivan suffers is ultimately made possible by the injustice of Marxism. All the dreariness and bankruptcy of the day—even the mild, aching fever that haunts Ivan—we understand as symptoms of men rejecting God. We see why men would choose to end their lives rather than live a life without God.

At this point, the reader, like Frankl, begins his search for meaning. He considers, and quickly rejects, a man-centered view (such a view put us in this mess in the first place). Where else, then, might we find meaning?

Some might argue that the struggle for life provides meaning enough. In other words, the purpose of life is to survive. This view is modeled by many prisoners in One Day, including Ivan—most notably when he shoves another prisoner and takes his serving tray. But even Ivan ultimately recognizes that this attitude contributes to the bankruptcy of existence, rather than granting it meaning. In one of the most poignant passages in literature, Ivan concludes, "Who's the zek's main enemy? Another zek. If only they weren't at odds with one another—ah, what a difference that'd make!"

What a difference, indeed. But responding in love to fellow prisoners seems beyond the capacity of those imprisoned—it seems impossible for the men to rise above the harsh reality of their living conditions.

At least it seems that way until we meet Alyosha. Here we find a character who serves his fellow prisoners in love. When told that a job is progressing too slowly, Alyosha smiles meekly and responds, "If we have to work faster then let's work faster. Anything you say," and then follows through by working harder. He sparkles in that drab gulag like the truth.

One Day focuses on Ivan Denisovich. Other characters play other roles, with Alyosha appearing only infrequently. But it is Alyosha that holds the key.

The reader suspects this almost as soon as we are introduced to him: "Alyosha, who was standing next to [Ivan], gazed at the sun and looked happy, a smile on his lips. What had he to be happy about? His cheeks were sunken, he lived strictly on his rations, he earned nothing. He spent all his Sundays muttering with the other Baptists. They shed the hardships of camp life like water off a duck's back." Here, it seems, is a man who has discovered the meaning of life. Here is a man who is free even in the starkest slavery.

Alyosha only winks at us occasionally throughout the story. But his winking is enough; we have seen the city on a hill. Earlier in the story we were introduced to the fruit of godlessness, and now we meet its antithesis: the man who is set free in Christ.

This meaning in Alyosha's life puzzles and sometimes infuriates Ivan—but he cannot deny it. At the end of the day, just before lights out, Ivan confronts Alyosha with the puzzle: "You see, Alyosha, somehow it works out all right for you: Jesus Christ wanted you to sit in prison and so you are—sitting there for His sake. But for whose sake am I here?" Alyosha's life has meaning; Ivan's does not. But the fault is not Alyosha's; Christ offers abundant life to every man.

Solzhenitsyn teaches us a profound lesson as we watch Ivan scrape by in the barest form of existence: life is hard, and made more difficult by the lies of false worldviews. But life need not be meaningless. Christ died to set men free—free from sin, and free from despair.

In Mark 8:36, Christ asks, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" Solzhenitsyn says the same thing in reverse: What matters it if a man loses the whole world, if his soul is secure in Christ? Alyosha has nothing, and he has everything: eternity with Christ. Life has meaning only in one context—eternal life.

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