Zone

"Zone. Notes of a Guard" — an autobiographical story by Sergei Dovlatov, consisting of fourteen episodes about the life of inmates and guards.
The main character — Boris Alihanov, a literary double of Dovlatov, a conscript soldier among the guards of a labor camp in one of the settlements of the Far North. He recounts true tragicomic stories about camp life, describes the daily routine and scant leisure, compares the guards and the inmates, hinting at the absence of clear differences…
"Solzhenitsyn describes political camps. I describe criminal ones. Solzhenitsyn was an inmate. I am a guard. According to Solzhenitsyn, the camp is hell. I think that hell is ourselves".