The novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn may be used to perfectly compliment the author's controversial speech, entitled A World Split Apart. Both works underline the strong theme of freedom, ultimately providing a strong argument that the greatest amount of personal freedom exists only when coupled with responsibility and obligations. In other words, in order to be truly free, one must learn to appreciate and live with one's shackles and setbacks, whether the setback in question is long-term imprisonment in a labor camp, or the simple constraints of every-day life as we know it.
The first consideration essential to the argument is the definition of freedom. In the West, and especially in the United States of America "a nation created solely for the sake of the preservation of freedom "Solzhenitsyn says "destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space- (Speech 4). The degradation of society to which he refers cannot be denied even by the most loyal patriots this land has to offer in her defense. In a relatively abrupt change from standards of the past, the West has begun to classify what Solzhenitsyn called "human decadence- (Speech 4) as a form of freedom. This includes, the author says, "misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror- (Speech 4). Many would argue that censorship of these ideas is intrusion upon their rights to enjoy them, that to merely make them feel guilty about indulging their perverted fantasies is an imprisonment. But in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the religious prisoner Alyosha offers the following counter to a similar argument presented by Ivan Denisovich Shukhov: "Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul- (Ivan 134).
