“The Banality of Evil”: Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Impressions of Soviet labor camps through Hannah Arendt’s concepts

Concentration and labor camps are spaces of systematic punishment that have become the means of social liquidation in 20th century political history of the world. They are founded where the individual conflicts with the regime or the danger of conflict is assumed. In the predicament of camp life, human beings, detached from their social position establish a tie with their “bare life”, in other words their purely biological needs. This connection takes place in the memoirs of authors such as Primo Levi, Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg, who were liberated from concentration camps. This tie has also been the subject of philosphers such as Hannah Arendt, who investigated the breaking points at which biological life is incorporated into the horizon of politics. This study aims to examine Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970) autobiographical novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” referring to one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century Hannah Arendt’s interpretations of concentration camps and the sources of totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn’s novel tells the one-day story of an inmate in the Soviet corrective labor camps called Gulag. The study tries to analyze the historical conditions that created the camp organization and the actions of the political actors who are the founder of the system through Arendt's conceptualization “the banality of evil”. Thus, it focuses on compelling camp practices, transforming life into a struggle for purely bodily needs alienating prisoners from themselves, and reflections of this negative experience inside the novel