Trekhprudny Lane

Put the finishing touches on living room curtains, and then the rods broke and fell down. But the apartment is coming along nicely. 

EB coughs often and says each time, "That was a bless you." 

Saw Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky tonight. His usual great kindness is there throughout, personified in fact, though this film did not feel quite as fresh and original as his previous work. 

Almost finished with Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962, English trans. 1963), a grim and concrete account of prison camp life that I should have read long ago. Survival in Siberia was a much less solitary endeavor than I thought; prisoners had to negotiate with each other and their keepers constantly, over every detail of daily life, and solitude was in fact a luxury. The commonest threat to a prisoner's sanity and well-being came not from violent guards or the cold or a sense of outrage over political injustice, but from his fellow prisoners, who were forced to scramble for inadequate resources. Scarcity (of time, food, space, necessities) was cunningly used in the camps to occupy the prisoners' minds, to make the guards' jobs a bit easier. When forced to compete for scant resources I tend to flinch, retreat, and invent reasons for not wanting what everyone else wants. But how terrifying if survival depended on finagling a porridge bowl or securing a place in line, and opting out of the fray was not a possibility.