Summarizing Details and Ideas

  1. Explanation
  2. Excerpt: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    1. Foreword
    2. Beginning
      1. Question 1
      2. Question 2
      3. Question 3
      4. Question 4
  3. Answers

Explanation

We summarize everyday in common speech. To summarize is to restate the main point in our own (and often shortened) way. If a peer asks us what we did that day, we wouldn’t delve into every detail of the day in most cases. We would state the key points: I went to the market, hiked up a hill, and read a book. Within literature, a summary includes main ideas, assertions, findings, and any other significant information provided by the author. Who, what, when, where, why, and how are questions that help us decipher what should be included when summarizing.

Below, read the excerpt from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Before the story begins, read the brief context provided below. As you read, answer the checkpoint questions situated between the passage. At the end, answer the remaining questions to complete the module.

Excerpt: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Foreword: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer known for his critique of the Soviet Union and their forced-labor camp system known as the “Gulag.” Before becoming a writer, he served in the Soviet Red Army during World War 2. After a private letter he wrote criticizing the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was intercepted by undercover police, he was sentenced to eight years in the labor camps. This first-hand experience was the base for his historical fiction novel: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This explosive indictment of the Soviet Gulag was the first time a piece had been published even referencing the camps (which was typically blocked by the Iron Curtain of censorship). It’s influence was so powerful that an officer of the Union of Soviet Writers declared that “the Soviet Union was destroyed by information – and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn’s One Day [in the Life of Ivan Denisovich].” In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Story Begins:

In the year just beginning — 1951 — Shukhov was entitled to write two letters.  He had posted his last in July, and got an answer in October.  In Ust-Izhma [the labor camp Ivan Shukhov previously occupied] the rules had been different — you could write every month if you liked.  But what was there to say?  Shukhov hadn’t written any more often than he did now. He had left home on 23 June 1941.  That Sunday, people had come back from Mass in Polomnya [his home town] and said, “It’s war.”  The post office there had heard the news — nobody in Temgenyovo had a radio before the war.  Shukhov knew from letters that nowadays there was piped radio jabbering away in every cottage.

Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool.  They sank without trace.  No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like.  Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.

  • What best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov is permitted to write home less frequently than in the past camp he attended. He didn’t write much in the past anyhow because he has more in common with his fellow prisoners than his family due to how long he’s been in the Gulag camps.
    2. Shukhov left home, wrote two letters back to home, then returned to defend against an upcoming war.
    3. Shukhov wrote two letters home. When radio news became prominent, he was able to hear about his families situation. This invention made writing letters useless.
    4. Shukhov heard that war was coming through the radio news. This transformed his life into one of military focus rather than of family. He only wrote two letters a year back home as a result.

Story Continues:

They wrote twice a year as well, and there was no way in which he could understand how things were with them.  So the kolkhoz [a forcibly collectivized farm in the Soviet Union (owned by the state and not private)] had a new chairman — well, it had a new one every year, they never kept one any longer.  So the kolkhoz had been enlarged — well, they’d enlarged it before and cut it down to size again.  Then there was the news that those not working the required number of days had had their private plots trimmed to fifteen-hundredths of a hectare, or sometimes right up to the very house.  There was, his wife wrote, also a law that people could be tried and put in jail for not working the norm, but that law hadn’t come into force for some reason.

One thing Shukhov couldn’t take in at all was that, from what his wife wrote, not a single living soul had joined the kolkhoz since the war: all the young lads and girls had somehow wangled their way to town to work in a factory, or else to the peat works.  Half of the men hadn’t come back from the war, and those who had didn’t want anything to do with the kolkhoz: they just stayed at home and did odd jobs.  The only men on the farm were the foreman Zakhar Vasilievich and the carpenter Tikhon, who was eighty-four but had married not long ago and had children.  The kolkhoz was kept going by the women who’d been herded into it back in 1930.  When they collapsed, it would drop dead with them.

  • What best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov’s wife wrote him two letters about growing farms as a result of economic boom. Kolkhoz’s only required a few workers thanks to the technological advancements brought from the war.
    2. Shukov’s wife had a new boss every year. As the company grew, so did its land monopoly. Eventually, the company owned so much land that residential spaces had no free yard of their own.
    3. Shukhov’s wife wrote him two letters explaining the complications and failures of the kolkhoz. Not working enough hours on the farm could lead to their land being stripped away by the government or even jailed. Seemingly no one wanted to work these lands, leaving only the towns women and two men to cultivate their food supply.
    4. Shukhov is jealous that his wife hardly writes to him while he is in the camp. He also thinks that more effort should be put into the war rather than simple farm matters.

Story Continues:

Try as he might, Shukhov couldn’t understand the bit about people living at home and working on the side.  He knew what it was to be a smallholder, and he knew what it was to be in a kolkhoz, but living in the village and not working in it was something he couldn’t take in.  Was it like when the men used to hire themselves out for seasonal work?  How did they manage with the haymaking?

But his wife told him that they’d given up hiring themselves out ages ago.  They didn’t travel around carpentering anymore either — their part of the world was famous for its carpenters — and they’d given up making wicker baskets, there was no call for them.  Instead, there was a lively new trade — dyeing carpets.  A demobbed soldier had brought some stencils home, and it had become all the rage.  There were more of these master dyers all the time.  They weren’t on anybody’s payroll, they had no regular job, they just put in a month on the farm, for haymaking and harvest, and got a certificate saying that kolkhoz member so-and-so had leave of absence for personal reasons and was not in arrears.  So they went all around the country, they even flew in airplanes to save their precious time, and they raked the money in by the thousand, dyeing carpets all over the place.  They charged fifty rubles to make a carpet out of an old sheet that nobody wanted, and it only took about an hour to paint the pattern on.  His wife’s dearest hope was that when he got home he would keep clear of the kolkhoz and take up dyeing himself.  That way they could get out of the poverty she was struggling against, send their children to trade schools, and build themselves a new cottage in place of their old tumble-down place.  All the dyers were building themselves new houses.  Down by the railroad, houses now cost twenty-five thousand instead of the five thousand they cost before.

Shukhov still had quite a bit of time to do — a winter, a summer, another winter, another summer — but all the same, those carpets preyed on his mind.  It could be just the job if he was deprived of rights or banished.  So he asked his wife to tell him how he could be a dyer when he’d been no good at drawing from the day he was born?  And, anyway, what was so wonderful about these carpets?  What was on them?  She wrote back that any fool could make them.  All you did was put the stencil on the cloth and rub paint through the holes.  There were three sorts.  There was the “Troika” — three horses in beautiful harness pulling a hussar officer — the “Stag,” and one a bit like a Persian carpet.  Those were the only patterns, but people all over the country jumped at the chance to buy them.  Because a real carpet cost thousands of rubles, not fifty.

He wished he could get a peek at them.

  • Which best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov’s wife writes that she has taken a strong passion into rug making and design.
    2. Shukhov’s wrife writes about rugs being made through a standardized stencil cutout. Though anyone could make them, they were making enormous profit compared to what you could make working on a kolkhoz.
    3. Shukhov is ashamed that he was never a good artist as a boy. If he was, he could have created these intricate carpets to support his family.
    4. Shukhov’s wife writes about how no one has a need for baskets anymore. Carpentry was the new craze and money maker back home.

Story Continues:

In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year.  The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier.  But what would it be like when he got out? He knew from what free workers said — drivers and bulldozer operators on construction sites — that the straight and narrow was barred to ordinary people, but they didn’t let it get them down, they took a roundabout way and survived somehow.

Shukhov might have to do the same.  It was easy money, and you couldn’t miss.  Besides, he’d feel pretty sore if others in the village got ahead of him.  But still…  in his heart of hearts Shukhov didn’t want to take up carpet-making.  To do that sort of thing you had to be the free-and-easy type, you had to have plenty of cheek, and know when to grease a policeman’s palm.  Shukhov had been knocking around for forty years, he’d lost half his teeth and was going bald, but he’d never given or taken a bribe outside and hadn’t picked up the habit in the camps.

Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it.  What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right.  He still had a good pair of hands, hands that could turn to anything, so what was to stop him getting a proper job on the outside?

Only — would they ever let him go?  Maybe they’d slap another ten [years] on him, just for fun?

  • Which best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Though Shukhov didn’t have to scheme to make money in the camp, he would have to once he got out. He would do anything to support his family no matter how hard the task. Yet, ‘easy money’ went against his principles and held no weight in his mind. This whole potentiality was contingent on if he would ever be released from the prison camp in the first place.
    2. Shukhov would do the work of the free workers: bulldozing and construction. If that didn’t work, he would become a policeman and never take a bribe.
    3. Shukhov is adamant on picking up carpet making to make a living for his family. In his forty years of live on this planet, there wasn’t a task he couldn’t learn.
    4. Shukhov realizes that he’s condemned to his prison forever. Through this thought, he begins to conjure up ways to send his family money while he’s still in the camp. His gang bosses ultimately help him scheme to make this dream possible.

Answers:

  • What best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov is permitted to write home less frequently than in the past camp he attended. He didn’t write much in the past anyhow because he has more in common with his fellow prisoners than his family due to how long he’s been in the Gulag camps.
    2. Shukhov left home, wrote two letters back to home, then returned to defend against an upcoming war.
    3. Shukhov wrote two letters home. When radio news became prominent, he was able to hear about his families situation. This invention made writing letters useless.
    4. Shukhov heard that war was coming through the radio news. This transformed his life into one of military focus rather than of family. He only wrote two letters a year back home as a result.
  • What best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov’s wife wrote him two letters about growing farms as a result of economic boom. Kolkhoz’s only required a few workers thanks to the technological advancements brought from the war.
    2. Shukov’s wife had a new boss every year. As the company grew, so did its land monopoly. Eventually, the company owned so much land that residential spaces had no free yard of their own.
    3. Shukhov’s wife wrote him two letters explaining the complications and failures of the kolkhoz. Not working enough hours on the farm could lead to their land being stripped away by the government or even jailed. Seemingly no one wanted to work these lands, leaving only the towns women and two men to cultivate their food supply.
    4. Shukhov is jealous that his wife hardly writes to him while he is in the camp. He also thinks that more effort should be put into the war rather than simple farm matters.
  • Which best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Shukhov’s wife writes that she has taken a strong passion into rug making and design.
    2. Shukhov’s wrife writes about rugs being made through a standardized stencil cutout. Though anyone could make them, they were making enormous profit compared to what you could make working on a kolkhoz.
    3. Shukhov is ashamed that he was never a good artist as a boy. If he was, he could have created these intricate carpets to support his family.
    4. Shukhov’s wife writes about how no one has a need for baskets anymore. Carpentry was the new craze and money maker back home.
  • Which best summarizes the above passage?
    1. Though Shukhov didn’t have to scheme to make money in the camp, he would have to once he got out. He would do anything to support his family no matter how hard the task. Yet, ‘easy money’ went against his principles and held no weight in his mind. This whole potentiality was contingent on if he would ever be released from the prison camp in the first place.
    2. Shukhov would do the work of the free workers: bulldozing and construction. If that didn’t work, he would become a policeman and never take a bribe.
    3. Shukhov is adamant on picking up carpet making to make a living for his family. In his forty years of live on this planet, there wasn’t a task he couldn’t learn.
    4. Shukhov realizes that he’s condemned to his prison forever. Through this thought, he begins to conjure up ways to send his family money while he’s still in the camp. His gang bosses ultimately help him scheme to make this dream possible.