The first work about the Stalinist camps, published in the USSR. The description of an ordinary day of an ordinary prisoner is not yet a complete account of the horrors of the Gulag, but it still has a deafening effect and strikes at the inhuman system that gave birth to the camps.
What is this book about?
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, aka Shch-854, has been in the camp for nine years. The story (in terms of volume - rather a story) describes his usual day from wake-up to lights-out: this day is full of hardships and small joys (as far as one can talk about joys in the camp), clashes with the camp authorities and conversations with comrades in misfortune, selfless work and little tricks that make up the struggle for survival. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was, in fact, the first work about the camps to appear in the Soviet press - for millions of readers it became a revelation, a long-awaited word of truth and a brief encyclopedia of the life of the Gulag.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 1953
Laski Collection/Getty Images
When was it written?
Solzhenitsyn conceived a story about one day of a prisoner while still in the camp, in 1950-1951. Direct work on the text began on May 18, 1959 and lasted 45 days. By the same time - the end of the 1950s - was the work on the second edition of the novel "In the First Circle", the collection of materials for the future "Red Wheel", the idea of the Gulag Archipelago, the writing of "Matryonin Dvor" and several "Tiny"; in parallel, Solzhenitsyn teaches physics and astronomy at a Ryazan school and is being treated for the consequences of an oncological disease. In early 1961, Solzhenitsyn edited One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, softening some of the details so that the text would at least theoretically be “passable” for the Soviet press.
The house in Ryazan where Solzhenitsyn lived from 1957 to 1965
In the summer of 1963, "One day ..." appears in a secret CIA report on the cultural policy of the USSR: the secret services know that Khrushchev personally authorized the publication
How is it written?
Solzhenitsyn sets himself a strict time frame: the story begins with a wake-up call and ends with going to bed. This allows the author to show the essence of the camp routine through many details, to reconstruct typical events. “He didn’t build, in essence, any external plot, he didn’t try to start the action more abruptly and unleash it more effectively, he didn’t stir up interest in his narrative with the tricks of literary intrigue,” noted critic Vladimir Lakshin 1 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, note. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M .: LLC "Agency" KRPA Olimp ", 2004. P. 118. : the reader's attention is held by the courage and honesty of the descriptions.
"One day ..." adjoins the tradition of the tale, that is, the image of oral, non-bookish speech. Thus, the effect of direct perception through the "eyes of the hero" is achieved. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn mixes different linguistic layers in the story, reflecting the social reality of the camp: the jargon and abuse of prisoners side by side with the bureaucracy of abbreviations, the popular vernacular of Ivan Denisovich - with various registers of the intelligent speech of Tsezar Markovich and katorranka Captain of the second rank. Buinovsky.
How did I not know about Ivan Shukhov? How could he not feel that on this quiet frosty morning, he, along with thousands of others, was being led out under escort with dogs outside the camp gates into a snowy field - to the object?
Vladimir LakshinWhat influenced her?
Solzhenitsyn's own camp experience and the testimonies of other camp inmates. Two large, different traditions of Russian literature: essay (influenced the idea and structure of the text) and skaz, from Leskov to Remizov (influenced the style, language of the characters and the narrator).
In January 1963, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published in "Roman-gazeta" with a circulation of 700,000 copies.
The first edition of the story in the "New World". 1962
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published thanks to a unique set of circumstances: there was a text by an author who survived in the camp and miraculously recovered from a serious illness; there was an influential editor ready to fight for this text; there was a request from the authorities for support of anti-Stalinist revelations; there were Khrushchev's personal ambitions, for whom it was important to emphasize his role in de-Stalinization.
At the beginning of November 1961, after much doubt whether it was time or not, Solzhenitsyn handed over the manuscript to Raisa Orlova Raisa Davydovna Orlova (1918-1989) - writer, philologist, human rights activist. From 1955 to 1961 she worked in the journal Foreign Literature. Together with her husband Lev Kopelev, she defended Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1980, Orlova and Kopelev emigrated to Germany. In exile, their joint book of memoirs “We lived in Moscow”, the novels “Doors open slowly”, “Hemingway in Russia” were published. Orlova's book of memoirs "Memories of the Past Time" was published posthumously. , the wife of his friend and former ally Lev Kopelev Lev Zinovievich Kopelev (1912-1997) - writer, literary critic, human rights activist. During the war, he was a propaganda officer and translator from German, in 1945, a month before the end of the war, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison "for promoting bourgeois humanism" - Kopelev criticized looting and violence against the civilian population in East Prussia. In "Marfinskaya Sharashka" he met Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Since the mid-1960s, Kopelev has been involved in the human rights movement: he speaks and signs letters in defense of dissidents, and distributes books through samizdat. In 1980 he was deprived of citizenship and emigrated to Germany with his wife, writer Raisa Orlova. Among the books of Kopelev - "Keep forever", "And he created an idol for himself", in collaboration with his wife, memoirs "We lived in Moscow" were written. , later introduced in the novel "In the First Circle" under the name of Rubin. Orlova brought the manuscript to the "New World" editor and critics Anne Berzer Anna Samoilovna Berzer (real name - Asya; 1917-1994) - critic, editor. Berzer worked as an editor at the Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Writer publishing house, the Znamya and Moscow magazines. From 1958 to 1971 she was the editor of Novy Mir: she worked with texts by Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Dombrovsky, Trifonov. Berzer was known as a brilliant editor and witty critique. In 1990, Berzer's book Farewell, dedicated to Grossman, was published. , and she showed the story to the editor-in-chief of the magazine, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky, bypassing his deputies. Shocked, Tvardovsky launched a whole campaign to get the story into print. A chance for this was given by the recent Khrushchev revelations on XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU On February 14, 1956, at the XX Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a closed report condemning Stalin's personality cult. At the XXII Congress, in 1961, the anti-Stalinist rhetoric became even tougher: words were publicly heard about the arrests, torture, crimes of Stalin against the people, it was proposed to remove his body from the Mausoleum. After this congress, the settlements named after the leader were renamed, and the monuments to Stalin were liquidated. , personal acquaintance of Tvardovsky with Khrushchev, the general atmosphere of a thaw. Tvardovsky secured positive reviews from several major writers - including Paustovsky, Chukovsky and Ehrenburg, who was in favor.
This band used to be so happy: everyone was given ten a comb. And from the forty-ninth such a streak went - all twenty-five, regardless
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The leadership of the CPSU proposed to make several changes. Solzhenitsyn agreed to some, in particular, to mention Stalin in order to emphasize his personal responsibility for terror and the Gulag. However, throw out the words of Brigadier Tyurin, “You are still there, Creator, in heaven. You endure it for a long time and hit it painfully.” Solzhenitsyn refused: “... I would give in if it were at my own expense or at the literary expense. But here they offered to give in at the expense of God and at the expense of the peasant, and I promised never to do this. do" 2 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted with an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. C. 44. .
There was a danger that the story, which was already out of copies, would “leak” abroad and be published there - this would close the possibility of publication in the USSR. “That it didn’t happen in almost a year after sailing to the West is a miracle no less than the printing itself in the USSR,” Solzhenitsyn noted. In the end, in 1962, Tvardovsky was able to convey the story to Khrushchev - the secretary general was excited by the story, and he authorized its publication, and for this he had to argue with the top of the Central Committee. The story appeared in the November 1962 issue of Novy Mir with a circulation of 96,900 copies; later, another 25,000 were printed - but this was not enough for everyone, "One Day ..." was distributed in lists and photocopies. In 1963 "One Day..." was reissued "Roman newspaper" One of the most widely circulated Soviet literary publications, published since 1927. The idea was to publish works of art for the people, in Lenin's words, "in the form of a proletarian newspaper." Roman-gazeta published the works of the main Soviet writers - from Gorky and Sholokhov to Belov and Rasputin, as well as texts by foreign authors: Voynich, Remarque, Hasek. already with a circulation of 700,000 copies; this was followed by a separate book edition (100,000 copies). When Solzhenitsyn fell into disgrace, all these publications began to be withdrawn from libraries, and until perestroika, One Day ..., like Solzhenitsyn's other works, was distributed only in samizdat and tamizdat.
Alexander Tvardovsky. 1950 Editor-in-Chief of Novy Mir, where One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was first published
Anna Berser. 1971 The editor of Novy Mir, who gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript to Alexander Tvardovsky
Vladimir Lakshin. 1990s. Deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, author of the article Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes (1964)
How was it received?
The highest goodwill towards Solzhenitsyn's story became the key to favorable responses. In the first months, 47 reviews appeared in the Soviet press with loud headlines: “Being a citizen is obliged ...”, “In the name of a person”, “Humanity”, “Harsh truth”, “In the name of truth, in the name of life” (the author of the latter is an odious critic Vladimir Ermilov, who participated in the persecution of many writers, including Platonov). The motive of many reviews is that repressions are a thing of the past: for example, a front-line writer Grigory Baklanov Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov (real name - Fridman; 1923-2009) - writer and screenwriter. He went to the front at the age of 18, fought in the artillery, and ended the war with the rank of lieutenant. Since the early 1950s, he has been publishing stories and novels about the war; his story A Span of the Earth (1959) was sharply criticized for its "trench truth", the novel July 1941 (1964), which described the destruction of the Red Army high command by Stalin, was not reprinted for 14 years after the first publication. During the years of perestroika, Baklanov headed the Znamya magazine, under his leadership Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and Zamyatin's We were published for the first time in the USSR. calls his review "May this never happen again." In the first, “ceremonial” review in Izvestia (“On the Past for the Sake of the Future”), Konstantin Simonov asked rhetorical questions: “Whose evil will, whose boundless arbitrariness could tear these Soviet people — farmers, builders, workers, soldiers — from their families, from work, finally, from the war against fascism, put them outside the law, outside society? Simonov concluded: “It seems that A. Solzhenitsyn showed himself in his story as a true assistant to the party in the holy and necessary work of combating the cult of personality and its consequences" 3 The word makes its way: Collection of articles and documents about AI Solzhenitsyn. 1962-1974 / entry. L. Chukovskoy, comp. V. Glotser and E. Chukovskaya. Moscow: Russian way, 1998. C. 19, 21. . Other reviewers inscribed the story in a great realistic tradition, compared Ivan Denisovich with other representatives of the "people" in Russian literature, for example, with Platon Karataev from War and Peace.
Perhaps the most important Soviet review was the article by the Novomir critic Vladimir Lakshin "Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes" (1964). Analyzing “One Day ...”, Lakshin writes: “The time of action is precisely indicated in the story - January 1951. And I don’t know about others, but when I read the story, I kept thinking about what I was doing, how I was living at that time.<…>But how did I not know about Ivan Shukhov? How could he not feel that on this quiet frosty morning, he, along with thousands of others, was being led out under escort with dogs outside the camp gates into a snowy field - to object?" 4 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, note. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M .: LLC "Agency" KRPA Olimp ", 2004. P. 123. Anticipating the end of the thaw, Lakshin tried to protect the story from possible harassment, making reservations about his "party spirit", and objected to critics who reproached Solzhenitsyn for the fact that Ivan Denisovich "cannot ... claim the role of the folk type of our era" (that is, does not fit into normative socialist realist model) that his “whole philosophy is reduced to one thing: survive!”. Lakshin demonstrates - right in the text - examples of Shukhov's steadfastness, which preserves his personality.
Prisoner of Vorkutlag. Republic of Komi, 1945.
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
Valentin Kataev called "One Day ..." fake: "the protest is not shown." Korney Chukovsky objected: “But this is the whole Truth story: the executioners created such conditions that people lost the slightest concept of justice ...<…>... And Kataev says: how dare he not protest at least under the covers. And how much did Kataev himself protest during the Stalinist regime? He composed slave hymns, as All" 5 Chukovsky K. I. Diary: 1901-1969: In 2 volumes. M .: OLMA-Press Star World, 2003. T. 2. C. 392. . An oral review by Anna Akhmatova is known: “This story is about to be read and memorized - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union" 6 Chukovskaya L. K. Notes about Anna Akhmatova: in 3 volumes. M .: Consent, 1997. T. 2. C. 512. .
After the release of "One Day ...", mountains of letters of gratitude and personal stories began to come to the editors of the "New World" and the author himself. Former prisoners asked Solzhenitsyn: “You should write a large and equally truthful book on this topic, where you can display not one day, but whole years”; “If you started this big business, continue it and further" 7 "Dear Ivan Denisovich! .." Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. C. 142, 177. . Materials sent by Solzhenitsyn's correspondents formed the basis of The Gulag Archipelago. Varlam Shalamov, the author of the great Kolyma Tales and in the future - Solzhenitsyn's ill-wisher, enthusiastically accepted "One Day ...": "The story is like poetry - everything is perfect in it, everything is expedient."
The convict's thought - and that one is not free, besides, it keeps coming back, stirring everything up again: won't they feel the soldering in the mattress? Will they be released in the medical unit in the evening? will the captain be imprisoned or not?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Of course, negative reviews also came: from the Stalinists, who justified terror, from people who were afraid that the publication would damage the international prestige of the USSR, from those who were shocked by the rude language of the heroes. Sometimes these motivations overlap. One reader, a former free foreman in places of detention, was indignant: who gave Solzhenitsyn the right to “blamelessly slander both the order that exists in the camp and the people who are called upon to protect prisoners ...<…>These orders do not like the hero of the story and the author, but they are necessary and needed by the Soviet state! Another reader asked: “So tell me, why, like banners, unfold your dirty trousers in front of the world?<…>I can’t accept this work, because it humiliates my dignity as a Soviet human" 8 "Dear Ivan Denisovich! .." Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. C. 50-55, 75. . In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn also cites indignant letters from former employees of the punitive organs, up to such self-justifications: service" 9 Solzhenitsyn A. I. The Gulag Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M .: Center "New World", 1990. T. 3. C. 345. .
In emigration, the release of One Day ... was perceived as an important event: the story was not only strikingly different in tone from Soviet prose available in the West, but also confirmed the information known to emigrants about Soviet camps.
In the West, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was met with attention - among left-wing intellectuals, according to Solzhenitsyn, he raised the first doubts about the progressiveness of the Soviet experiment: shocked." But this also made some reviewers doubt the literary quality of the text: “This is a political sensation, not a literary one.<…>If we change the scene to South Africa or Malaysia ... we get an honest, but crudely written essay on completely incomprehensible people" 10 Magner T. F. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1963 Vol. 7. No. 4. Pp. 418-419. . For other reviewers, the politics did not overshadow the story's ethical and aesthetic significance. American Slavist Franklin Reeve Franklin Reeve (1928-2013) - writer, poet, translator. In 1961, Reeve became one of the first American professors to come to the USSR on an exchange; in 1962 he was the translator of the poet Robert Frost during his meeting with Khrushchev. In 1970, Reeve translated Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel speech. From 1967 to 2002 he taught literature at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Reeve is the author of more than 30 books: poems, novels, plays, critical articles, translations from Russian. expressed his fear that "One Day" would be read solely as "another performance at the international political Olympiad", a sensational exposure of totalitarian communism, while the meaning of the story is much wider. The critic compares Solzhenitsyn with Dostoevsky, and “One Day” with “Odyssey”, seeing in the story “the deepest affirmation of human value and human dignity”: “In this book, an “ordinary” person in inhuman conditions is studied to the very depths" 11 Reeve F.D. The House of the Living // Kenyon Review. 1963 Vol. 25. No. 2. Pp. 356-357. .
Dishes of prisoners in a forced labor camp
Prisoners of Vorkutlag. Republic of Komi, 1945
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
For a short time, Solzhenitsyn became a recognized master of Soviet literature. He was accepted into the Writers' Union, he published several more works (the most notable is the long story "Matryonin Dvor"), the possibility of awarding him the Lenin Prize for "One Day ..." was seriously discussed. Solzhenitsyn was invited to several "meetings of the leaders of the party and government with cultural and artistic figures" (and left caustic memories of this). But since the mid-1960s, with the curtailment of the thaw that began under Khrushchev, censorship stopped letting Solzhenitsyn’s new things pass: the newly rewritten “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” did not appear in the Soviet press until perestroika itself, but were published in the West. “The accidental breakthrough with Ivan Denisovich did not in the least reconcile the System with me and did not promise an easy movement further,” he later explained. Solzhenitsyn 12 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted with an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. C. 50. . In parallel, he worked on his main book - The Gulag Archipelago, a unique and scrupulous - as far as circumstances allowed the author - study of the Soviet punitive system. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize - primarily for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", and in 1974 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship and sent abroad - the writer will live in exile for 20 years, remaining an active publicist and increasingly speaking in annoying many the role of teacher or prophet.
After perestroika, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was reprinted dozens of times, including as part of the 30-volume collected works of Solzhenitsyn (M.: Vremya, 2007), the most authoritative to date. In 1963, the work was filmed in English TV play, in 1970 - a full-fledged film adaptation (co-production of Norway and Great Britain; Solzhenitsyn reacted positively to the film). "One Day" has been staged in the theater more than once. The first Russian film adaptation should appear in the coming years: in April 2018, the film based on Ivan Denisovich began to be shot by Gleb Panfilov. Since 1997, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" has been included in the compulsory school curriculum in literature.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 1962
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"One Day" - the first Russian work about the Great Terror and the camps?
No. The first prose work about the Great Terror is Lidia Chukovskaya's story "Sofya Petrovna", written back in 1940 (Chukovskaya's husband, the outstanding physicist Matvey Bronstein, was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938). In 1952, a novel by a second-wave emigrant, Nikolai Narokov, Imaginary Values, was published in New York, describing the very height of the Stalinist terror. Stalin's camps are mentioned in the epilogue of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Varlam Shalamov, whose Kolyma Tales is often contrasted with Solzhenitsyn's prose, began writing them in 1954. The main part of Akhmatova's "Requiem" was written in 1938-1940 (at that time her son Lev Gumilyov was in the camp). In the Gulag itself, works of art were also created, especially poems that were easier to remember.
It is usually said that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first published work about the Gulag. A caveat is needed here. On the eve of the publication of One Day, the editors of Izvestia, who already knew about Tvardovsky's struggle for Solzhenitsyn, published the story George Shelest Georgy Ivanovich Shelest (real name - Malykh; 1903-1965) - writer. In the early 1930s, Shelest wrote stories about the Civil War and partisans, and worked in Transbaikal and Far Eastern newspapers. In 1935 he moved to the Murmansk region, where he worked as the editorial secretary of the Kandalaksha Communist. In 1937, the writer was accused of organizing an armed uprising and sent to the Lake Camp; 17 years later he was rehabilitated. After his release, Shelest left for Tajikistan, where he worked on the construction of a hydroelectric power station, where he began to write prose on a camp theme. “Nugget” is about communists who were repressed in 1937 and were washing gold in Kolyma (“At the editorial meeting of Izvestia, Adzhubey was angry that it was not his newspaper that “discovered” an important topic" 13 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted with an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. C. 45. ). Tvardovsky, in a letter to Solzhenitsyn, complained: “... For the first time, such words as “opera”, “sexot”, “morning prayer”, etc. were introduced into use on the printed page. how" 14 "Dear Ivan Denisovich! .." Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. C. 20. . Solzhenitsyn was upset by the appearance of Shelest’s story at first, “but then I thought: what’s stopping him?<…>"First discovery" of the topic - I think that they did not succeed. And the words? But they weren’t invented by us, we can’t take a patent for them costs" 15 "Dear Ivan Denisovich! .." Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. C. 25. . The emigrant magazine Posev in 1963 spoke contemptuously about Nugget, believing that this was an attempt “on the one hand, to establish the myth that in the camps, good Chekists and party members suffered and died from the evil Uncle Stalin; on the other hand, through showing the moods of these good security officers and party members, to create a myth that in the camps, enduring injustice and torment, Soviet people, by their faith in the regime, by their “love” for him, remained Soviet people" 16 The brigade commander of the Cheka-OGPU "remembers" the camps ... // Sowing. 1962. No. 51-52. S. 14. . At the end of Shelest's story, the prisoners who found the gold nugget decide not to exchange it for food and shag, but to hand it over to the authorities and receive gratitude "for helping the Soviet people in difficult days" - Solzhenitsyn, of course, has nothing similar, although many prisoners of the Gulag did remain orthodox communists (Solzhenitsyn himself wrote about this in The Gulag Archipelago and the novel In the First Circle). Shelest's story went almost unnoticed: there were already rumors about the imminent publication of "One Day ...", and it was Solzhenitsyn's text that became a sensation. In a country where everyone knew about the camps, no one expected that the truth about them would be expressed publicly, in thousands of copies - even after the XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU, which condemned the repressions and Stalin's personality cult.
Correctional labor camp in Karelia. 1940s
Is life in the camp true in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
The main judges here were the former prisoners themselves, who rated "One Day ..." highly and wrote letters of thanks to Solzhenitsyn. Of course, there were some complaints and clarifications: in such a painful topic, Solzhenitsyn's comrades in misfortune were important every little thing. Some prisoners wrote that "the regime of the camp where Ivan Denisovich was sitting was from the lungs." Solzhenitsyn confirmed this: the special allowance in which Shukhov served his last years of imprisonment was not like the camp in Ust-Izhma, where Ivan Denisovich reached, where he developed scurvy and lost his teeth.
Some reproached Solzhenitsyn for exaggerating the zek’s zeal for work: “No one would, at the risk of leaving himself and the brigade without food, continue putting wall" 17 Abelyuk E. S., Polivanov K. M. History of Russian literature of the XX century: A book for enlightened teachers and students: In 2 books. M .: New Literary Review, 2009. C. 245. , - however, Varlam Shalamov pointed out: “The enthusiasm for the work of Shukhov and other brigadiers is subtly and truly shown when they lay the wall.<…>This enthusiasm for work is somewhat akin to that feeling of excitement when two hungry columns overtake each other.<…>It is possible that this kind of passion for work is what saves people.” “How can Ivan Denisovich survive for ten years, day and night only cursing his work? After all, it is he who must hang himself on the very first bracket! - wrote later Solzhenitsyn 18 Solzhenitsyn A. I. The Gulag Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M .: Center "New World", 1990. T. 2. S. 170. . He believed that such complaints come from "former jerks Assholes in the camp were called prisoners who got a privileged, "non-dusty" position: a cook, a clerk, a storekeeper, a duty officer. and their intelligent friends who have never been incarcerated."
But none of the survivors of the Gulag reproached Solzhenitsyn for lying, for distorting reality. Evgenia Ginzburg, the author of The Steep Route, offering her manuscript to Tvardovsky, wrote about One Day...: “Finally, people learned from the original source at least one day of the life that we led (in different versions) for 18 years” . There were a lot of similar letters from camp inmates, although "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" does not mention even a tenth of the hardships and atrocities that were possible in the camps - Solzhenitsyn does this work in the "Gulag Archipelago".
Barrack for prisoners of Ponyshlag. Perm region, 1943
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Why did Solzhenitsyn choose such a title for the story?
The fact is that it was not Solzhenitsyn who chose him. The name under which Solzhenitsyn sent his manuscript to Novy Mir was Shch-854, the personal number of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the camp. This name focused all attention on the hero, but was unpronounceable. The story also had an alternative title or subtitle - "One day of one convict." Based on this option, the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Tvardovsky, proposed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Here the focus is on time, duration, the title is almost equal to the content. Solzhenitsyn easily accepted this successful option. It is interesting that Tvardovsky proposed a new name for Matryonin Dvor, which was originally called "A village is not worth without a righteous man." Here censorship considerations played a role in the first place.
Why one day and not a week, month or year?
Solzhenitsyn deliberately resorts to a limitation: in the course of one day, a lot of dramatic, but generally routine events take place in the camp. “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell”: it means that these events, familiar to Shukhov, are repeated from day to day, and one day is not much different from the next. One day turns out to be enough to show the whole camp - at least that relatively "prosperous" camp under a relatively "prosperous" regime in which Ivan Denisovich had to sit. Solzhenitsyn continues to list numerous details of camp life even after the climax of the story - laying cinder blocks at the construction of a thermal power plant: this emphasizes that the day does not end, there are still many painful minutes ahead, that life is not literature. Anna Akhmatova remarked: “In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the details irritate me. The leg was numb, one shark died, put the hook in, did not put the hook in, etc. And all to no avail. And here every detail is needed and road" 19 Saraskina L. I. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. M.: Molodaya gvardiya, 2009. C. 504. .
“The action takes place for a limited time in a closed space” is a characteristic essay technique (one can recall texts from "physiological" collections Collections of works in the genre of everyday, moralistic essay. One of the first “physiological” collections in Russia is “Ours, written off from life by Russians”, compiled by Alexander Bashutsky. The most famous is the almanac "Physiology of Petersburg" by Nekrasov and Belinsky, which became the manifesto of the natural school. , individual works by Pomyalovsky, Nikolai Uspensky, Zlatovratsky). “One Day” is a productive and understandable model, which, after Solzhenitsyn, is used by “review”, “encyclopedic” texts that no longer adhere to a realistic agenda. Within one day (and - almost all the time - in one closed space) an action is performed; obviously with an eye on Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Sorokin writes his "Day of the Oprichnik". (By the way, this is not the only similarity: the hypertrophied “folk” language of “Oprichnik’s Day” with its vernacular, neologisms, and inversions refers to the language of Solzhenitsyn’s story.) In Sorokin’s Blue Fat, lovers Stalin and Khrushchev discuss the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, written by a former prisoner of the "Crimean forced love camps" (LOVELAG); the leaders of the people are dissatisfied with the insufficient sadism of the author - here Sorokin parodies the long-standing dispute between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. Despite the clearly travesty nature, the fictional story retains the same “one-day” structure.
Map of labor camps in the USSR. 1945
Why does Ivan Denisovich have the number Shch-854?
The assignment of numbers, of course, is a sign of dehumanization - prisoners officially do not have names, patronymics and surnames, they are addressed like this: “Yu forty-eight! Hands back!”, “Bae five hundred and two! Pull up!” An attentive reader of Russian literature will remember Zamyatin's "We" here, where the characters bear names like D-503, O-90 - but in Solzhenitsyn we are faced not with dystopia, but with realistic detail. The number Shch-854 has no connection with Shukhov's real name: the hero of One Day, captain Buynovsky, had the number Shch-311, Solzhenitsyn himself had the number Shch-262. Prisoners wore such numbers on their clothes (in the well-known staged photograph of Solzhenitsyn, the number is sewn on a padded jacket, trousers and cap) and were obliged to monitor their condition - this brings the numbers closer to the yellow stars that Jews were ordered to wear in Nazi Germany (other persecuted had their own marks Nazi groups - gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses ...). In German concentration camps, prisoners also wore numbers on their clothes, and in Auschwitz they were tattooed on their arm.
Numerical codes generally play an important role in the camp dehumanization 20 Pomorska K. The Overcoded World of Solzhenitsyn // Poetics Today. 1980 Vol. 1. No. 3, Special Issue: Narratology I: Poetics of Fiction. P. 165. . Describing the daily divorce, Solzhenitsyn speaks of the division of campers into brigades. People are counted by head like cattle:
- First! Second! Third!
And the fives separated and walked in separate chains, so look at least from behind, at least from the front: five heads, five backs, ten legs.
And the second watchman - the controller, stands silently at the other railings, only checks whether the account is correct.
Paradoxically, these seemingly worthless heads are important for reporting: “A person is more valuable than gold. One head behind the wire will be missing - you will add your own head there. Thus, among the repressive forces of the camp, one of the most significant is the bureaucracy. This is evidenced even by the smallest, absurd details: for example, Shukhov’s fellow prisoner Caesar was not shaved off his mustache in the camp, because in the photograph in the investigation file he is wearing a mustache.
Punishment in Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1930–40s
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Numbered padded jacket worn by inmates of forced labor camps
Lanmas/Alamy/TASS
What camp was Ivan Denisovich in?
The text of "One Day" makes it clear that this camp is "hard labor", relatively new (no one has yet served a full term in it). We are talking about a special camp - the name of the camp, created for political prisoners, was received in 1948, although hard labor was returned to the penitentiary system back in 1943. The action of "One Day" takes place, as we remember, in 1951. From the previous camp odyssey of Ivan Denisovich, it follows that for most of his term he was in Ust-Izhma (Komi ASSR) along with criminals. His new fellow campers believe that this is still no worse fate The purpose of the special camps was to isolate the "enemies of the people" from ordinary prisoners. The regime in them was similar to that of a prison: bars on the windows, barracks locked at night, a ban on leaving the barracks after hours, and numbers on clothes. Such prisoners were used for especially hard work, for example, in mines. However, despite the more difficult conditions, for many prisoners the political zone was a better fate than the household camp, where the “political” was terrorized by the “thieves”. : “You, Vanya, spent eight years - in what camps? .. You were in household camps, you lived there with the women. You didn't wear numbers.
The indications of a specific place in the text of the story itself are only indirect: for example, already on the first pages, the “old camp wolf” Kuzemin says to the new arrivals: “Here, guys, the law is the taiga.” However, this saying was common in many Soviet camps. The temperature in winter in the camp where Ivan Denisovich sits can drop below forty degrees - but such climatic conditions also exist in many places: in Siberia, the Urals, Chukotka, Kolyma, and the Far North. The name “Sotsgorodok” could give a clue (since morning Ivan Denisovich has been dreaming that his brigade would not be sent there): there were several settlements with this name (they were all built by convicts) in the USSR, including in places with a harsh climate, but it was a typical name and "depersonalizes" the place of action. Rather, it must be assumed that the camp of Ivan Denisovich reflects the conditions of the special camp in which Solzhenitsyn himself was imprisoned: the Ekibastuz hard labor camp, later part of Steplaga A camp for political prisoners, which was located in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. Steplag prisoners worked in the mines: they mined coal, copper and manganese ores. In 1954, an uprising took place in the camp: five thousand prisoners demanded the arrival of the Moscow commission. The rebellion was brutally suppressed by the troops. Steplag was liquidated two years later. In Kazakhstan.
Hall of Fame of the Forced Labor Camp
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Why was Ivan Denisovich imprisoned?
Solzhenitsyn writes openly about this: Ivan Denisovich fought (he went to the front in 1941: “I was dismissed from a woman, citizen chief, in the forty-first year”) and fell into German captivity, then broke through from there to his own - but the stay of the Soviet a soldier in German captivity was often equated with treason. According to NKVD 21 Krivosheev G. F. Russia and the USSR in the wars of the XX century: Statistical study / Ed. G. F. Krivosheeva. M.: OLMA-Press, 2001. C. 453-464. , out of 1,836,562 prisoners of war who returned to the USSR, 233,400 people ended up in the Gulag on charges of treason. Such people were convicted under article 58, paragraph 1a, of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR ("Treason to the Motherland").
And it was like this: in February of the forty-second year in the North-Western, their entire army was surrounded, and they weren’t thrown anything to eat from the planes, and there weren’t even those planes. They got to the point that they cut the hooves from the horses that had died, soaked that cornea in water and ate. And there was nothing to shoot. And so, little by little, the Germans caught and took them through the forests. And in a group of such one, Shukhov spent a couple of days in captivity, in the same place, in the forests, and the five of them ran away. And they crept through the forests, through the swamps - miraculously they got to their own. Only two submachine gunners laid down their own on the spot, the third died of wounds, and two of them reached. If they were smarter, they would say that they wandered through the forests, and nothing would come of them. And they opened: they say, from German captivity. From captivity?? Your mother is! Fascist agents! And behind bars. There would have been five of them, maybe they would have compared the testimony, they would have believed it, but two could not: they agreed, they say, bastards, about escaping.
The counterintelligence agents beat Shukhov to force him to sign a statement on himself (“if you don’t sign it, you’ll have a wooden pea coat, if you sign it, you’ll live a little longer”). By the time the story takes place, Ivan Denisovich has been in the camp for the ninth year: he should be released in the middle of 1952. The penultimate phrase of the story - "There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell" (let's pay attention to the long, "words", writing out numerals) - does not allow us to say unequivocally that Ivan Denisovich will be released: after all, many camp inmates who served their term, instead of being released, they received a new one; Shukhov is also afraid of this.
Solzhenitsyn himself was convicted under paragraphs 10 and 11 of Article 58 for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation in wartime conditions: in personal conversations and correspondence, he allowed himself to criticize Stalin. On the eve of his arrest, when the fighting was already going on in Germany, Solzhenitsyn withdrew his battery from the German encirclement and was presented with the Order of the Red Banner, but on February 9, 1945, he was arrested in East Prussia.
Gate of the Vorkutlag coal mine. Republic of Komi, 1945
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
Prisoners at work. Ozerlag, 1950
What position does Ivan Denisovich occupy in the camp?
The social structure of the Gulag can be described in different ways. Let's say, before the establishment of special services, the contingent of the camps was clearly divided into thieves and political, "58th article" (in Ust-Izhma, Ivan Denisovich belongs, of course, to the latter). On the other hand, prisoners are divided into those who participate in "general work" and "morons" - those who managed to take a more advantageous place, a relatively easy position: for example, get a job in the office or a bread cutter, work in a specialty needed in camp (tailor, shoemaker, doctor, cook). Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago: among the long-timers from the Fifty-Eighth - I think - 9/10. Ivan Denisovich does not belong to the "morons" and treats them contemptuously (for example, he calls them in a generalized way "fools"). “Choosing the hero of the camp story, I took a hard worker, I could not take anyone else, because only he can see the true ratios of the camp (as soon as an infantry soldier can weigh the entire weight of the war, but for some reason it is not he who writes memoirs). This choice of hero and some harsh statements in the story puzzled and offended other former fools, ”Solzhenitsyn explained.
Among the hard workers, as well as among the "morons", there is a hierarchy. For example, "one of the last brigadiers" Fetyukov, in the wild - "a big boss in some office", does not enjoy anyone's respect; Ivan Denisovich calls him "Fetyukov the Jackal" to himself. Another brigadier, Senka Klevshin, who had been in Buchenwald to a special extent, had, perhaps, a harder time than Shukhov, but he was on an equal footing with him. Brigadier Tyurin occupies a separate position - he is the most idealized character in the story: always fair, able to shield his own and save them from murderous conditions. Shukhov is aware of his subordination to the brigadier (here it is important that, according to the camp unwritten laws, the brigadier does not belong to the “morons”), but for a short time he can feel equal with him: “Go, brigadier! Go, you are needed there! - (Shukhov calls him Andrei Prokofievich, but now he has caught up with the foreman in his work. It’s not that he thinks like this: “Here I’ve caught up,” but he just senses that it is.)”.
Ivan Denisich! It is not necessary to pray for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel. What is high among people is an abomination before God!
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
An even more subtle matter is the relationship of the “common man” Shukhov with convicts from the intelligentsia. Both Soviet and uncensored criticism sometimes reproached Solzhenitsyn with insufficient respect for the intellectuals (the author of the contemptuous term "educated" actually gave a reason for this). “I am also concerned about the attitude of the common people, all these camp hard workers, towards those intellectuals who are still worried and still continue, even in the camp, arguing about Eisenstein, about Meyerhold, about cinema and literature and about the new play by Y. Zavadsky. .. Sometimes one feels the author's ironic, and sometimes contemptuous attitude towards such people,” wrote critic I. Chicherov. Vladimir Lakshin catches him on the fact that not a word is said about Meyerhold in “One Day ...”: for a critic, this name is “only a sign of especially refined spiritual interests, a kind of evidence of intelligence" 22 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, note. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M .: LLC “Agency “KRPA Olimp”, 2004. S. 116-170. . In relation to Shukhov to Tsezar Markovich, whom Ivan Denisovich is ready to serve and from whom he expects reciprocal services, there is indeed irony - but, according to Lakshin, it is connected not with Tsezar's intelligence, but with his isolation, all with the same ability to settle down, with preserved and in the camp with snobbery: “Caesar turned around, extended his hand for porridge, at Shukhov and did not look, as if the porridge itself had arrived through the air, and for his own: “But listen, art is not what, but how.” It is no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn puts a "formalistic" judgment about art and a dismissive gesture side by side: in the system of values of "One Day ..." they are quite interconnected.
Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1930–40s
Ivan Denisovich - an autobiographical hero?
Some readers tried to guess in which of the heroes Solzhenitsyn brought himself out: “No, this is not Ivan Denisovich himself! And not Buynovsky... Or maybe Tyurin?<…>Is it really a paramedic-writer who, without leaving good memories, is still not so bad?" 23 "Dear Ivan Denisovich! .." Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. C. 47. His own experience is the most important source for Solzhenitsyn: he entrusts his feelings and ordeals after his arrest to Innokenty Volodin, the hero of the novel “In the First Circle”; the second of the main characters of the novel, the prisoner of the sharashka Gleb Nerzhin, is emphatically autobiographical. The Gulag Archipelago contains several chapters describing Solzhenitsyn's personal experience in the camp, including attempts by the camp administration to sway him into secret collaboration. Both the novel Cancer Ward and the story Matryonin Dvor are both autobiographical, not to mention Solzhenitsyn's memoirs. In this regard, the figure of Shukhov is quite far from the author: Shukhov is a “simple”, unlearned person (unlike Solzhenitsyn, a teacher of astronomy, he, for example, does not understand where the new moon comes from in the sky after the new moon), a peasant, an ordinary, and not kombat. However, one of the effects of the camp is precisely that it erases social differences: the ability to survive, to save oneself, to earn the respect of comrades in misfortune becomes important (for example, Fetyukov and Der, who were free chiefs, are one of the most disrespectful people in the camp). In accordance with the essay tradition, which Solzhenitsyn voluntarily or involuntarily followed, he chose not an ordinary, but a typical (“typical”) hero: a representative of the largest Russian class, a participant in the most massive and bloody war. “Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, “malicious”, hardy, jack of all trades, crafty - and kind. Brother of Vasily Terkin, ”wrote Korney Chukovsky in a review of the story.
A soldier by the name of Shukhov really fought together with Solzhenitsyn, but he did not sit in the camp. The camp experience itself, including construction work BUR High security barrack. and the thermal power plant, Solzhenitsyn took from his own biography - but admitted that he would not have fully endured everything that his hero went through: sharashka".
Exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a camp padded jacket. 1953
Is it possible to call "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" a Christian work?
It is known that many camp inmates retained their religiosity in the most cruel conditions of Solovki and Kolyma. Unlike Shalamov, for whom the camp is an absolutely negative experience, convincing that God No 24 Bykov D. L. Soviet literature. Advanced course. M.: PROZAIK, 2015. C. 399-400, 403. The camp helped Solzhenitsyn strengthen his faith. During his life, including after the publication of "Ivan Denisovich", he composed several prayers: in the first of them he thanked God for being able to "send to Humanity a reflection of Your rays." Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann Alexander Dmitrievich Schmemann (1921-1983) - clergyman, theologian. From 1945 to 1951, Schmemann taught the history of the Church at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. In 1951 he moved to New York, where he worked at St. Vladimir's Seminary, and in 1962 became its leader. In 1970, Schmemann was elevated to the rank of protopresbyter, the highest priestly rank for married clergy. Father Schmemann was a famous preacher, wrote works on liturgical theology, and hosted a program on religion on Radio Liberty for almost thirty years. , quoting this prayer, calls Solzhenitsyn a great Christian writer 25 Schmemann A., Protopresv. The Great Christian Writer (A. Solzhenitsyn) // Shmeman A., Protopresv. Fundamentals of Russian Culture: Conversations on Radio Liberty. 1970-1971. M.: Publishing House of the Orthodox St. Tikhon Humanitarian University, 2017. S. 353-369. .
Researcher Svetlana Kobets notes that “Christian topoi are scattered throughout the text of One Day. There are hints of them in images, language formulas, conditional designations" 26 Kobets S. The Subtext of Christian Asceticism in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1998 Vol. 42. No. 4. P. 661. . These allusions bring a “Christian dimension” to the text, which, according to Kobets, is ultimately verified by the ethics of the characters, and the habits of the camper, allowing him to survive, go back to Christian asceticism. Hard-working, humane, the heroes of the story who have retained the moral core, with this look, are likened to martyrs and righteous people (recall the description of the legendary old prisoner Yu-81), and those who are comfortable, for example, Caesar, “do not get a chance for spiritual awakening" 27 Kobets S. The Subtext of Christian Asceticism in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1998 Vol. 42. No. 4. P. 668. .
One of Shukhov's fellow campers is the Baptist Alyoshka, a reliable and devout believer who believes that the camp is a test that serves to save the human soul and God's glory. His conversations with Ivan Denisovich go back to The Brothers Karamazov. He tries to instruct Shukhov: he notices that his soul “asks to God to pray”, explains that “it is not necessary to pray for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel.<…>We must pray for the spiritual: so that the Lord removes the evil scum from our hearts ... ”The story of this character sheds light on Soviet repressions against religious organizations. Alyoshka was arrested in the Caucasus, where his community was located: both he and his comrades received twenty-five-year sentences. Baptists and Evangelical Christians In 1944, Evangelical Christians and Baptists living on the territory of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus united into one confession. The doctrine of Evangelical Christians - Baptists is based on the Old and New Testaments, there is no division into clergy and laity in the confession, and baptism is carried out only at a conscious age. actively persecuted in the USSR since the early 1930s, during the years of the Great Terror, the most important figures of Russian Baptism died - Nikolai Odintsov, Mikhail Timoshenko, Pavel Ivanov-Klyshnikov and others. Others, whom the authorities considered less dangerous, were given the standard camp terms of the time - 8-10 years. The bitter irony is that these terms still seem to the campers of 1951 feasible, “happy”: “This period used to be so happy: everyone was given ten a comb. And from the forty-ninth, such a streak went - all twenty-five, regardless. Alyoshka is sure that the Orthodox Church “departed from the Gospel. They are not imprisoned or they are given five years, because their faith is not firm.” However, the faith of Shukhov himself is far from all church institutions: “I willingly believe in God. But I don't believe in heaven and hell. Why do you think we are fools, promise us heaven and hell? He notes to himself that "Baptists like to agitate, like political instructors."
Drawings and comments by Euphrosyne Kersnovskaya from the book "How Much Does a Man Cost". In 1941, Kersnovskaya, a resident of Bessarabia captured by the USSR, was transferred to Siberia, where she spent 16 years
On whose behalf is the story being told in One Day?
The impersonal narrator of "Ivan Denisovich" is close to Shukhov himself, but not equal to him. On the one hand, Solzhenitsyn reflects the thoughts of his hero and actively uses improperly direct speech. More than once or twice what is happening in the story is accompanied by comments, as if coming from Ivan Denisovich himself. Behind the cries of captain Buinovsky: “You have no right to undress people in the cold! You ninth article According to the ninth article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1926, "measures of social protection cannot be aimed at causing physical suffering or humiliation of human dignity and do not set themselves the task of retribution and punishment." you don’t know the criminal code!..” follows the following comment: “They do. They know. It's you, brother, you don't know yet." In her work on the language of One Day, linguist Tatyana Vinokur gives other examples: “The foreman of everything is shaking. It shakes, it won’t calm down in any way”, “our column reached the street, and the mechanical plant behind the residential area disappeared.” Solzhenitsyn resorts to this technique when he needs to convey the feelings of his hero, often physical, physiological: “Nothing, it’s not very cold outside” or about a piece of sausage that Shukhov gets in the evening: “By her teeth! Teeth! Spirit of meat! And meat juice, real. There, in the stomach went. This is what Western Slavists say, using the terms "indirect internal monologue", "depicted speech"; British philologist Max Hayward traces this technique to the tradition of the Russian skaz 28 Rus V. J. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Point of View Analysis // Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. Summer Fall 1971 Vol. 13. No. 2/3. P. 165, 167. . For the narrator, the tale form and folk language are also organic. On the other hand, the narrator knows something that Ivan Denisovich cannot know: for example, that paramedic Vdovushkin is not writing a medical report, but a poem.
According to Vinokur, Solzhenitsyn, constantly shifting his point of view, achieves "the fusion of the hero and the author," and by switching to first-person pronouns ("our column reached the street"), he rises to that "highest step" of such a merger, "which gives him the opportunity to especially insistently emphasize their empathy, again and again to remind them of their direct involvement in the depicted events" 29 Vinokur T. G. On the language and style of A. I. Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" // Issues of speech culture. 1965. Issue. 6. S. 16-17. . Thus, although biographically Solzhenitsyn is not at all equal to Shukhov, he can say (as Flaubert said about Emma Bovary): "Ivan Denisovich is me."
How is the language arranged in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
In One Day of Ivan Denisovich, several language registers are mixed. Usually, the first thing that comes to mind is the "folk" speech of Ivan Denisovich himself and the narrator's own narration, which is close to it. In "One Day..." readers for the first time come across such characteristic features of Solzhenitsyn's style as inversion ("And that Socialist town is a bare field, in snowy ridges"), the use of proverbs, sayings, phraseological units ("test is not a loss", "warm chilly unless when will he understand?", "In the wrong hands, the radish is always thicker"), colloquial compression In linguistics, compression is understood as a reduction, compression of linguistic material without significant damage to the content. in the conversations of the characters (“guarantee” - a guarantee ration, “Vecherka” - the newspaper “Vechernyaya Moscow") 30 Dozorova D.V. Compressive derivational means in the prose of A.I. Solzhenitsyn (on the material of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich") // The legacy of A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the modern cultural space of Russia and abroad (to the 95th anniversary of the birth of the writer ): Sat. mat. International scientific-practical. conf. Ryazan: Concept, 2014. S. 268-275. . The abundance of improperly direct speech justifies the sketchy style of the story: we get the impression that Ivan Denisovich does not explain everything to us on purpose, like a guide, but is simply used to explaining everything to himself in order to maintain clarity of mind. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn more than once resorts to the author's neologisms, stylized as colloquial speech - linguist Tatyana Vinokur names such examples as "half-smoker", "sleep", "breathe", "recover": "This is an updated composition of the word, many times increasing its emotional significance, expressive energy, freshness of its recognition. However, although “folk” and expressive lexemes in the story are remembered most of all, the main array is still “general literary vocabulary" 31 Vinokur T. G. On the language and style of A. I. Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" // Issues of speech culture. 1965. Issue. 6. S. 16-32. .
In the camp speech of the peasant Shukhov and his comrades, thieves jargon is deeply eaten (“godfather” is a detective, “knock” is to inform, “kondey” is a punishment cell, “six” is one who serves others, “ass” is a soldier on the tower, “ moron" - a prisoner who settled in a camp for a profitable position), the bureaucratic language of the punitive system (BUR - a high-security barrack, PPC - a planning and production unit, nachkar - head of the guard). At the end of the story, Solzhenitsyn placed a small dictionary with an explanation of the most common terms and jargon. Sometimes these registers of speech merge: for example, the slang “zek” is formed from the Soviet abbreviation “z / k” (“prisoner”). Some former camp inmates wrote to Solzhenitsyn that in their camps they always pronounced "zeká", but after "One day ..." and "The Gulag Archipelago" Solzhenitsyn's version (perhaps occasionalism Occasionalism is a new word coined by a specific author. Unlike neologism, occasionalism is used only in the work of the author and does not go into wide use. ) has become established in the language.
This story must be read and memorized - every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union
Anna Akhmatova
A separate layer of speech in "One Day ..." - curses that shocked some of the readers, but met with understanding from the camps, who knew that Solzhenitsyn did not exaggerate here at all. When publishing, Solzhenitsyn agreed to resort to banknotes and euphemisms A word or expression that replaces a harsh, uncomfortable statement. : replaced the letter “x” with “f” (this is how the famous “fuyaslitse” and “fuyomnik” appeared, but Solzhenitsyn managed to defend the “laughs”), somewhere he put outlines (“Stop, ... eat!”, “I won’t I'm with this m ... com to wear it! ”). Swearing every time serves to express expression - a threat or "removal of the soul." The speech of the protagonist is mostly free from swearing: the only euphemism is not clear whether it was the author’s or Shukhov’s own: “Shukhov quickly hid from the Tatar around the corner of the barracks: if you get caught a second time, he will rake again.” It's funny that in the 1980s, "One Day ..." was withdrawn from American schools because of the curses. “I received indignant letters from my parents: how can you print such an abomination!” - recalled Solzhenitsyn 32 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted with an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. C. 54. . At the same time, writers of uncensored literature, such as Vladimir Sorokin, whose Day of the Oprichnik was clearly influenced by Solzhenitsyn's story, just reproached him - and other Russian classics - for being too modest: “In Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, we observe the life of prisoners, and - not a single swear word! Only - "butter-fuyaslitse." The men in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" do not utter a single swear word. It's a shame!"
Camp drawings by Hulo Sooster. Sooster served time in Karlag from 1949 to 1956
"One day of Ivan Denisovich" - a story or a story?
Solzhenitsyn emphasized that his work was a story, but the editors of Novy Mir, obviously embarrassed by the volume of the text, suggested that the author publish it as a story. Solzhenitsyn, who did not think that publication was possible at all, agreed, which he later regretted: “I should not have given in. We are blurring the boundaries between genres and there is a devaluation of forms. "Ivan Denisovich" is, of course, a story, although it is a long, loaded one. He proved this by developing his own theory of prose genres: “Smaller than a story, I would single out a short story - easy to build, clear in plot and thought. A story is what we are most often tempted to call a novel: where there are several storylines and even an almost obligatory length in time. And the novel (a vile word! Is it possible otherwise?) differs from the story not so much in volume, and not so much in length in time (it even got conciseness and dynamism), but in the capture of many destinies, the horizon of looking back and the vertical thoughts" 32 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted with an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. C. 28. . Stubbornly calling "One Day ..." a story, Solzhenitsyn clearly has in mind the sketchy style of his own writing; in his understanding, the content of the text matters for the genre name: one day, covering the characteristic details of the environment, is not material for a novel or short story. Be that as it may, it is hardly possible to defeat the correctly noted trend of “washing away” the boundaries between genres: despite the fact that the architecture of “Ivan Denisovich” is indeed more characteristic of the story, because of its volume, one wants to call it something more.
Potter in Vorkutlag. Republic of Komi, 1945
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
What brings One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich closer to Soviet prose?
Of course, according to the time and place of writing and publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, there is Soviet prose. This question, however, is about something else: about the essence of the “Soviet”.
Emigrant and foreign critics, as a rule, read "One Day ..." as anti-Soviet and anti-socialist realist work 34 Hayward M. Solzhenitsyn's Place in Contemporary Soviet Literature // Slavic Review. 1964 Vol. 23. No. 3. Pp. 432-436. . One of the most famous expatriate critics Roman Gul Roman Borisovich Gul (1896-1986) - critic, publicist. During the Civil War, he participated in the Ice Campaign of General Kornilov, fought in the army of Hetman Skoropadsky. From 1920, Gul lived in Berlin: he published a literary supplement to the newspaper Nakanune, wrote novels about the Civil War, collaborated with Soviet newspapers and publishing houses. In 1933, having been released from a Nazi prison, he emigrated to France, where he wrote a book about his stay in a German concentration camp. In 1950, Gul moved to New York and began work at the New Journal, which he later headed. Since 1978, he published in it a memoir trilogy “I took Russia away. Apologia for emigration. in 1963, he published an article “Solzhenitsyn and socialist realism” in Novy Zhurnal: “... The work of the Ryazan teacher Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as it were, crosses out all socialist realism, that is, all Soviet literature. This story has nothing to do with her." Gul assumed that Solzhenitsyn's work, "bypassing Soviet literature ... came directly from pre-revolutionary literature. From the Silver Age. And this is her signaling meaning" 35 Gul R. B. A. Solzhenitsyn and socialist realism: “One day. Ivan Denisovich” // Gul R. B. Odvukon: Soviet and emigrant literature. N.-Y.: Most, 1973. S. 83. . The tale, “folk” language of the story, Gul even brings together “not with Gorky, Bunin, Kuprin, Andreev, Zaitsev”, but with Remizov and an eclectic set of “writers of the Remizov school”: Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Shishkov Vyacheslav Yakovlevich Shishkov (1873-1945) - writer, engineer. Since 1900, Shishkov has been conducting expeditionary studies of Siberian rivers. In 1915, Shishkov moved to Petrograd and, with the assistance of Gorky, published a collection of short stories, The Siberian Tale. In 1923, "Vataga", a book about the Civil War, was published, in 1933 - "Gloomy River", a novel about life in Siberia at the turn of the century. For the last seven years of his life, Shishkov worked on the historical epic Emelyan Pugachev. , Prishvin, Klychkov Sergey Antonovich Klychkov (1889-1937) - poet, writer, translator. In 1911, Klychkov's first poetry collection "Songs" was published, in 1914 - the collection "Secret Garden". In the 1920s, Klychkov became close with the "new peasant" poets: Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Yesenin, with the latter he shared a room. Klychkov is the author of the novels Sugar German, Chertukhinsky Balakir, Prince of Peace, and translated Georgian poetry and the Kyrgyz epic. In the 1930s, Klychkov was branded as a "kulak poet", in 1937 he was shot on false charges. . “The verbal fabric of Solzhenitsyn’s story is related to Remizov’s love for words with an ancient root and for the popular pronunciation of many words”; like Remizov, “in Solzhenitsyn’s dictionary there is a very expressive fusion of archaism with ultra-Soviet colloquial speech, a mixture of fabulous with Soviet" 36 Gul R. B. A. Solzhenitsyn and socialist realism: “One day. Ivan Denisovich” // Gul R. B. Odvukon: Soviet and emigrant literature. N.-Y.: Most, 1973. S. 87-89. .
Solzhenitsyn himself wrote all his life about socialist realism with contempt, calling it "an oath of abstinence from truth" 37 Nicholson M. A. Solzhenitsyn as a "socialist realist" / author. per. from English. B. A. Erkhova // Solzhenitsyn: Thinker, historian, artist. Western criticism: 1974-2008: Sat. Art. / comp. and ed. intro. Art. E. E. Erickson, Jr.; comments O. B. Vasilevskaya. M.: Russian way, 2010. S. 476-477. . But he resolutely did not accept modernism, avant-gardism, considering it a harbinger of "the most destructive physical revolution of the 20th century"; philologist Richard Tempest believes that "Solzhenitsyn learned to use modernist means in order to achieve anti-modernist goals" 38 Tempest R. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - (anti)modernist / transl. from English. A. Skidana // New literary review. 2010. S. 246-263. .
Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, "malicious", hardy, jack of all trades, crafty - and kind
Korney Chukovsky
In turn, Soviet reviewers, when Solzhenitsyn was officially in favor, insisted on the completely Soviet and even "party" character of the story, seeing in it almost the embodiment of the social order to expose Stalinism. Gul could be ironic about this, the Soviet reader could assume that the "correct" reviews and prefaces were written as a distraction, but if "One Day ..." was stylistically completely alien to Soviet literature, it would hardly have been published.
For example, because of the climax of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - the construction of a thermal power plant - many copies were broken. Some former prisoners saw falsehood here, while Varlam Shalamov considered Ivan Denisovich's labor zeal to be quite plausible (“Shukhov's passion for work is subtly and truly shown ...<…>It is possible that this kind of passion for work saves people. And the critic Vladimir Lakshin, comparing One Day... with "unbearably boring" production novels, saw in this scene a purely literary and even didactic device - Solzhenitsyn managed not only to describe the work of a bricklayer in a breathtaking way, but also to show the bitter irony of a historical paradox: " When a picture of free labor, labor from an inner urge, seems to overflow into the picture of cruelly forced labor, this makes one understand deeper and sharper what people like our Ivan Denisovich are worth, and what a criminal absurdity it is to keep them away from their home, under the protection of machine guns. , behind the prickly wire" 39 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, note. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M .: LLC "Agency" KRPA Olimp ", 2004. P. 143. .
Lakshin subtly captures both the relationship of the famous scene with the schematic climaxes of socialist realist novels, and the way in which Solzhenitsyn deviates from the canon. The fact is that both socialist realist norms and Solzhenitsyn's realism are based on a certain invariant that originates in the Russian realistic tradition of the 19th century. It turns out that Solzhenitsyn is doing the same thing as semiofficial Soviet writers, only much better, more original (not to mention the context of the scene). The American researcher Andrew Wachtel believes that “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” “should be read as a socialist realist work (at least based on the understanding of socialist realism in 1962)”: “I in no way belittle Solzhenitsyn’s achievements by this ...<...>he ... took advantage of the most obliterated clichés of socialist realism and used them in a text that almost completely obscured its literary and cultural Denisovich" 41 Solzhenitsyn A. I. Journalism: In 3 volumes. Yaroslavl: Upper Volga, 1997. T. 3. C. 92-93. . But even in the text of The Archipelago, Ivan Denisovich appears as a person who knows camp life well: the author enters into a dialogue with his hero. So, in the second volume, Solzhenitsyn invites him to tell him how to survive in a hard labor camp, “if they don’t take him as a paramedic, as an orderly too, won’t they even give him a fake release for one day? If he has a lack of literacy and an excess of conscience, to get a job as a moron in the zone? Here is how, for example, Ivan Denisovich talks about the “mostyrka” - that is, deliberately bringing himself to disease 42 Solzhenitsyn A. I. The Gulag Archipelago: In 3 vols. M .: Center "New World", 1990. T. 2. C. 145. :
“Another thing is a bridge, to be crippled so that you both live and remain disabled. As they say, a minute of patience is a year of turning. Break a leg, and then to grow together incorrectly. Drink salty water - swell. Or smoking tea is against the heart. And drinking tobacco infusion is good against the lungs. Only with the measure you need to do, so as not to overdo it and not to jump into the grave through disability.
In the same recognizable colloquial, "fantastic" language, full of camp idioms, Ivan Denisovich talks about other ways to escape from murderous work - to get into the OP (in Solzhenitsyn - "rest", officially - "health center") or to achieve activation - a petition for release for health. In addition, Ivan Denisovich was entrusted to tell about other details of camp life: “How tea in the camp goes instead of money ... How they chifir - fifty grams per glass - and visions in my head," and so on. Finally, it is his story in the Archipelago that precedes the chapter on women in the camp: “And the best thing is not to have a partner, but a partner. Camp wife, convict. As the saying goes - get married» 43 Solzhenitsyn A. I. The Gulag Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M .: Center "New World", 1990. T. 2. C. 148. .
In the "Archipelago" Shukhov is not equal to Ivan Denisovich from the story: he does not think about the "mostyrka" and chifir, does not remember women. Shukhov of "The Archipelago" is an even more collective image of an experienced prisoner, who retained the speech manner of an earlier character.
Letter of review; their correspondence continued for several years. “The story is like poetry—everything is perfect in it, everything is expedient. Every line, every scene, every characterization is so concise, clever, subtle and deep that I think that Novy Mir has never printed anything so solid, so strong from the very beginning of its existence,” Shalamov wrote to Solzhenitsyn. —<…>Everything about the story is true." Unlike many readers who did not know the camp, he praised Solzhenitsyn for using abusive language (“camp life, camp language, camp thoughts are inconceivable without swearing, without swearing with the very last word”).
Like other former prisoners, Shalamov noted that Ivan Denisovich’s camp was “easy”, not quite real” (in contrast to Ust-Izhma, a real camp, which “breaks into the story like white steam through the cracks of a cold barrack”): “ In the hard labor camp where Shukhov is imprisoned, he has a spoon, a spoon for a real camp is an extra tool. Both soup and porridge are of such a consistency that you can drink over the side, a cat walks near the medical unit - unbelievable for a real camp - a cat would have been eaten long ago. “There are no blatars in your camp! he wrote to Solzhenitsyn. — Your camp without lice! The security service is not responsible for the plan, does not knock it out with rifle butts.<…>Leave the bread at home! They eat with spoons! Where is this wonderful camp? If only I could sit there for a year.” All this does not mean that Shalamov accused Solzhenitsyn of fiction or embellishment of reality: Solzhenitsyn himself admitted in a response letter that his camp experience, compared to Shalamov's, "was shorter and easier", in addition, Solzhenitsyn from the very beginning was going to show "the camp is very prosperous and in a very happy day."
In the camp, this is who dies: who licks bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to the godfather to knock
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Shalamov saw the only falsity of the story in the figure of captain Buinovsky. He believed that the typical figure of the debater, who shouts to the convoy "You have no right" and the like, was only in 1938: "Everyone who shouted like that was shot." It seems implausible to Shalamov that the captain did not know about the camp reality: “Since 1937, for fourteen years, executions, repressions, arrests have been going on before his eyes, his comrades are taken, and they disappear forever. And the katorang does not even bother to think about it. He drives along the roads and sees guard towers everywhere. And don't bother thinking about it. Finally, he passed the investigation, because he ended up in the camp after the investigation, and not before. And yet he didn't think of anything. He could not see this under two conditions: either the captain had spent fourteen years on a long voyage, somewhere on a submarine, fourteen years without rising to the surface. Or for fourteen years he thoughtlessly surrendered to the soldiers, and when they took him himself, it became unwell.
This remark rather reflects the worldview of Shalamov, who went through the most terrible camp conditions: people who retained some kind of well-being or doubts after their experience aroused suspicion in him. Dmitry Bykov compares Shalamov with the prisoner of Auschwitz, the Polish writer Tadeusz Borovsky: “The same disbelief in man and the same refusal of any consolations - but Borovsky went further: he put every survivor under suspicion. Once he survived, it means that he betrayed someone or something forfeited" 44 Bykov D. L. Soviet literature. Advanced course. M.: PROZAiK, 2015. C. 405-406. .
In his first letter, Shalamov instructs Solzhenitsyn: "Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone." Not only Shalamov's correspondence with Solzhenitsyn, but - first of all - "Kolyma Tales" can convince anyone who thinks that "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" shows inhuman conditions: it can be much, much worse.
All bibliography
Solzhenitsyn's Spiral of Treason Rzezach Tomasz
The story "One day of Ivan Denisovich"
In the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a truly great day has come.
In 1962, one of the leading Soviet literary magazines, Novy Mir, published his story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The action in it, as you know, is played out in a forced labor camp.
Much of what for many years resonated with excruciating pain in the heart of every honest person - the issue of Soviet forced labor camps - which was the object of speculation, hostile propaganda and slander in the bourgeois press, suddenly took on the form of a literary work containing an inimitable and unique imprint of personal impressions. .
It was the bomb. However, it did not explode immediately. Solzhenitsyn, according to N. Reshetovskaya, wrote this story at a rapid pace. Its first reader was L.K., who came to Solzhenitsyn in Ryazan on November 2, 1959.
“This is a typical production story,” he said. “And overloaded with details.” This is how L. K., an educated philologist, “a storehouse of literary erudition,” as he is called, expressed his competent opinion about this story.
This review is perhaps even stricter than Boris Lavrenev's long-standing assessment of Solzhenitsyn's early works. Typical production story. This means: the book, which in the Soviet Union of those years came out in the hundreds, is extreme schematism, nothing new either in form or in content. Nothing amazing! And yet it was L.K. who achieved the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The story was liked by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, and although he considered the author "a talented artist, but an inexperienced writer", he still gave him the opportunity to speak on the pages of the magazine. Tvardovsky belonged to those representatives of his generation, whose path was not so simple and smooth. This remarkable man and illustrious poet, by his nature, often suffered from the fact that he complicated some of the most ordinary problems of life. A communist poet who won the hearts of not only his people, but also millions of foreign friends with his immortal poems. The life of A. Tvardovsky, in his own words, was a permanent discussion: if he doubted anything, he simply and frankly expressed his views on objective reality, as if testing himself. He was true to fanaticism to the motto: "Everything that is talented is useful to Soviet society."
Tvardovsky supported the young author Solzhenitsyn, convinced that his work would benefit the cause of socialism. He believed into it, completely unaware that this experienced hack writer had already hidden several ready-made libels on the Soviet socialist system in different cities. And Tvardovsky defended it. His story was published - the bomb exploded. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was quickly published in the Soviet Union in three mass editions. And it was a hit with the reader. Letters came to Ryazan from Solzhenitsyn's former comrades in prison. Many of them recognized in the protagonist of this work their former foreman from the Ekibastuz camp. L. Samutin even came from distant Leningrad to personally meet the author and congratulate him.
“I saw in him a kindred spirit, a person who knows and understands the life we have lived,” L. Samutin told me.
The story was immediately translated into almost all European languages. It is curious that this story was translated into Czech by a fairly well-known representative of the counter-revolutionary movement of 1968-1969, and one of the organizers of the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia, the son of a white émigré, a writer, especially enthusiastically welcomed its publication.
Solzhenitsyn immediately found himself where he had dreamed of climbing since Rostov times - on the top. Again first like at school. Malevich. His name was inclined in every way. It first appeared on the pages of the Western press. And the Solzhenitsyns immediately started a special folder with clippings of articles from the foreign press, which Alexander Isaevich, although he did not understand because of his ignorance of foreign languages, nevertheless often sorted through and carefully kept.
These were the days when he reveled in success.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was invited to the Kremlin and had a conversation with the person who brought the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" to life - N. S. Khrushchev. Without hiding his benevolence to Solzhenitsyn, he gave him a car, which he gave the nickname "Denis" in honor of his story. Then everything was done so that the writer, whom he believed, could move to a more comfortable apartment. The state not only provided him with a four-room apartment, but also allocated a well-maintained garage.
The path was open.
But was it a real success? And what caused it?
Prone to scientific analysis, L. K. makes the following discovery: “It is simply charming to find that out of 10 readers of Novy Mir who asked about the fate of Buinovsky’s captaincy, there were only 1.3 who were interested in whether Ivan Denisovich lived to be released. Readers were more interested in the camp as such, living conditions, the nature of work, the attitude of "prisoners" to work, the rules, etc."
On the pages of some foreign newspapers, one could read the remarks of more freely and critically thinking literary critics that attention is not yet a literary success, but a political game.
But what about Solzhenitsyn?
Reshetovskaya in her book describes that he was very upset by the review of Konstantin Simonov in Izvestia; disappointed to such an extent that Tvardovsky simply forced him to finish reading the article of the famous writer.
Solzhenitsyn became angry that Konstantin Simonov did not pay attention to his language. Solzhenitsyn should not be considered a literary dropout. In no case. He read a lot and understands literature. Therefore, he had to conclude: readers were interested not in the main character, but in the environment. A fellow writer with a sharp flair paid no attention to Solzhenitsyn's literary abilities. And the press focused more on the political aspect than on the literary merits of the story. It can be assumed that this conclusion forced Solzhenitsyn to spend more than one hour in sorrowful reflections. In short: for him, who already imagined himself an outstanding writer, this meant a catastrophe. And he was in a hurry to "go out into the light" at an accelerated pace. Having completed Matrenin Dvor and The Incident at the Krechetovka Station, he said to his wife: “Now let them judge. That first one was, let's say, a topic. And this is pure literature.
At that moment, he could become "a fighter for the cleansing of socialism from Stalin's excesses," as they said then. He could also become a fighter against "barbarian communism." Everything depended on the circumstances. At first, everything indicated that he was inclined to choose the former.
After the undeniable success that his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” had among readers, it was even rumored that Solzhenitsyn would receive the Lenin Prize. A broad discussion has unfolded around this issue in Pravda. Some were for, others against, as is always the case. But then things took a slightly different turn.
For Solzhenitsyn, this meant not only disappointment, but also - above all - a new choice of life path.
Everything spoke for the fact that he could safely go in the direction where the “arrow” was pointing.
As the daughter of the famous Soviet poet Solzhenitsyn stated, authoritarianism does not get along well with morality. She wrote indignantly: “Affirming the primacy of morality over politics, you, in the name of your personal political plans, consider it possible to transcend all limits of what is permitted. You allow yourself to unceremoniously use what you have overheard and peered through the keyhole, cite gossip that is not received first hand, do not even stop to “quote” A.T.’s nightly nonsense, which you assuredly recorded verbatim.” [The fact is that Solzhenitsyn in one of his "creations" allowed himself to portray Alexander Tvardovsky in a very unattractive light, slandering him, mixing him with dirt and humiliating his human dignity. - T. R.]
“Calling on people to “live not by lies”, you, with extreme cynicism… tell how you made deceit a rule in communicating not only with those who were considered enemies, but also with those who extended a helping hand to you, supporting you in difficult times, trusting you... You are by no means inclined to open up with the fullness that is advertised in your book.
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A blow with a hammer on the rail near the headquarters barracks at 5 in the morning meant a rise in the camp of prisoners. The protagonist of the story, the peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, imprisoned under the number Shch-854, could not force himself to get up, because he was either shivering or breaking down. He listened to the sounds coming from the barracks, but continued to lie until the warder, nicknamed Tatar, pulled off his quilted jacket. He told Shukhov, for not getting up on the rise, “three days of condea with withdrawal,” that is, a punishment cell for three days, but with a walk and a hot dinner. In fact, it turned out that it was necessary to wash the floor in the guard's room, so they found the "victim".
Ivan Denisovich was going to go to the medical unit, but after the "punishment cell" he changed his mind. He learned well the lesson of his first brigadier, the camp wolf Kuzemin: he claimed that in the camp "he is dying", "whoever licks bowls, who hopes for the medical unit" and "knocks" to the authorities. Having finished washing the floor in the guards' room, Shukhov poured water onto the path where the camp authorities walk, and hurried to the dining room.
It was cold there (after all, it was 30 degrees below zero), so they ate right in their hats. The prisoners ate slowly, spitting out the bones from the fish from which they cooked the gruel on the table, and from there they were thrown onto the floor. Shukhov did not go into the barracks and did not receive a ration of bread, but this made him happy, because then the bread can be eaten separately - this is even more satisfying. Balanda was always cooked from fish and some vegetables, so there was no satiety from it. For the second, they gave magar - porridge made from corn. She also did not add satiety.
After breakfast, Ivan Denisovich decided to go to the medical unit, but his temperature was not high (only 37.2), so the paramedic advised Shukhov to go to work anyway. He returned to the barracks, received his ration of bread and divided it into two parts: he hid one in his bosom, and sewed the other into a mattress. And as soon as he managed to sew up the hole, the foreman called the 104th brigade to work.
The brigade went to their previous work, and not to the construction of Sotsbytgorodok. Otherwise, we would have to go out into a bare snowy field, dig holes and string barbed wire for ourselves. This is in minus 30 degrees. But, apparently, their foreman made a fuss, took a piece of bacon to someone who needed it, so now other brigades will go there - dumber and poorer.
At the exit, a search began: they checked that they did not take out food with them. Here, at the entrance to the zone, they searched more rigorously: they checked that no pieces of iron were carried. Today it turned out that they are checking everything down to the bottom shirt: is there anything superfluous. The captain Buinovsky tried to appeal to conscience: he said that the guards did not have the right to undress people in the cold, that they were not Soviet people. For this he received 10 days of strict regime in the BUR, but in the evening, so as not to lose an employee.
In order not to freeze completely after the shmon, Shukhov covered his face with a cloth, turned up his collar, lowered the front lapel of his cap onto his forehead, and together with the column moved towards the piercing wind. After a cold breakfast, his stomach rumbled, and Shukhov, in order to distract himself, began to recall the contents of the last letter from his wife. She wrote that young people strive to leave the village and get a job in the city at a factory or peat extraction. Only women are dragging the collective farm on themselves, and those few men who returned after the war did not work on the collective farm: some work on the side, while others put together an artel of “dyeers” and paint pictures on stencils right on old sheets. For 50 rubles goes for such a picture, so "the money is rowing in the thousands."
The wife hoped that Ivan, after his release, would become such a “dye” so that they could then get out of poverty, send their children to a technical school and build a new hut instead of a rotten one, because everyone had already set up new houses for themselves - not 5 thousand, as before, but 25 each. Shukhov, on the other hand, seemed dishonorable to such an easy income. Ivan Denisovich understood that easily earned money would just as easily go away. For his forty years, he was used to earning money, though hard, but honestly.
He left home on June 23, 1941 for the war. In February 1942, he was surrounded, and then captured by the Nazis - only two days. Soon, five of them managed to escape, but let it slip that they were in captivity. They, supposedly fascist agents, were put behind bars. Shukhov was beaten a lot in order to confess what assignment he had received, but he could not say this, and the investigator never came up with an idea. In order not to be beaten to death, Shukhov had to sign a slander on himself. He served seven years in the north, almost two years here. I could not believe that in a year he could go free with his own feet.
Following his reminiscences, Ivan Denisovich took out a loaf of bread and began biting and chewing little by little. Previously, they ate a lot - from the belly, but now only the former peasant understood the real price of bread: even raw, black, it seemed so spirited. And there are still 5 hours before lunch.
They came to the unfinished thermal power plant, the foreman parted in fives so that they would urge each other on. With their small team, they equipped the place of work: they closed the windows with roofing paper so that the cold would not penetrate, they kindled the stove. The captain and Fetyukov carried the solution on a stretcher, but it worked slowly. At first, Buinovsky could not adapt, and then Fetyukov began to tilt the stretcher and pour out the solution, so that it would be easier to carry it up the ladder. The captain got angry, then the foreman ordered Fetyukov to shift the cinder blocks, and sent Alyoshka the Baptist to the solution.
Shukhov hears screams below. The construction foreman Der came. They said that he used to be a minister in Moscow. He saw that the windows were covered with tar paper, and threatened Tyurin with a third term. All the members of the brigade approached here: Pavlo raises a shovel with a backhand, healthy Sanka put his hands on his hips - it's scary to look at. Then the brigadier Daru quietly said that if he wants to live, let him be silent. The foreman turned pale, stood further away from the ladder, then attached himself to Shukhov, as if he were laying a thin seam. You have to unleash evil on someone.
In the end, the foreman shouted to Daru to fix the lift: pay for a wheelbarrow, but they carry mortar and cinder blocks on a stretcher, the work is moving slowly, there is not much money to earn. The brigadier always tried to close a good percentage - the ration for at least a week depended on this. For lunch, there was the best porridge - oatmeal, and Shukhov managed to "mow down" two extra servings. One went to Caesar Markovich, a young film director. He was on special terms: he received parcels twice a month and sometimes treated his cellmates.
Shukhov ate one extra portion himself with pleasure. Until dinner was over, Brigadier Tyurin talked about his difficult life. Once he was expelled from a military school for his father-fist. His mother was also exiled, and he managed to arrange for his younger brother to be with the thieves. Now he regrets that he did not stick to them. After such a sad story, they parted ways. Shukhov had his own trowel hidden away, with which he easily worked. And today, building a wall brick by brick, Ivan Denisovich was so carried away by this process that he even forgot where he was.
Shukhov had to level the walls, so only five rows were raised. But they mixed a lot of mortar, so he and Sanka had to continue laying. And time is running out, all the other brigades lined up to return to the zone. The brigadier managed to explain their delay, but one person was missing. It turned out that this was in the 32nd brigade: the Moldavian hid from the foreman in the scaffolding and fell asleep. He took time from five hundred people - and he heard a lot of strong words, and received a blow from the pombrigadier, and the Magyar kicked him in the ass.
Finally, the column moved towards the camp. Now ahead of the evening shmon. Jackets and pea coats need to be unbuttoned, arms raised to the sides to make it comfortable to clap on the sides. Suddenly Ivan Denisich thrust his hand into the pocket on his knee, and there was a piece of a hacksaw. In the afternoon I picked it up “out of housekeeping” in the middle of the working area and did not even intend to bring it into the camp. And now it’s necessary to throw it away, but it’s a pity: later it will come in handy to make a knife, either a tailor’s or a shoemaker’s. If I had immediately decided to pick it up, I would have figured out how to carry it, but now there is no time. For a hacksaw, they could get 10 days in a punishment cell, but it was earnings, there was bread!
And Shukhov came up with an idea: he hid the cut in his mitten, in the hope that the mittens would not be checked, and obsequiously lifted the hems of his pea coat and quilted jacket so that they would “smear” faster. Fortunately for him, the next brigade approached, and the guard did not feel the second mitten. It had already been shining high in the sky for a month when the 104th entered the camp. Shukhov went into the parcel room to find out if there was anything for Tsezar Markovich. He was on the list, so when he appeared, Shukhov quickly explained who it was his turn for, and ran to the dining room to slurp while it was hot. Yes, and Caesar graciously allowed him to eat his portion. Lucky again: two servings for lunch and two for dinner. I decided to leave four hundred grams of my bread and two hundred grams of Caesarev for tomorrow, because now satiety has come.
It became good for Ivan Denisovich, and he decided to get hold of tobacco from the Latvian. His long-earned money was sewn into the lining. The tobacco turned out to be good: “both potato pancake and perfume”. In the barracks, many had already laid down on the bunk, but then they came for the captain's rank: for the morning incident with the warden - 10 days of punishment cell in the cold, on bare boards, and the gruel was hot only on the third, sixth and ninth days. You will lose your health for life. Caesar laid out his parcel: butter, sausage, biscuits. And then there's the evening check. Shukhov again suggested to Caesar how best to hide it so that they would not be taken away. For this I received two cookies, sugar and a circle of sausage.
Ivan Denisovich fell asleep quite satisfied: today turned out to be an almost happy day. A lot of luck fell: they didn’t put him in a punishment cell, they didn’t send him to Sotsgorodok, they closed the interest rate well, Shukhov didn’t get caught on a shmon, he ate two portions, earned extra money. And most importantly, he didn't get sick.
Among the works of Russian literature there is a whole list of those that were devoted to contemporary authors of reality. Today we will talk about one of the works of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn and present its summary. "One day of Ivan Denisovich" - this is the story that will serve as the topic of this article.
Before describing the summary of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, I would like to dwell on some information from the writer’s personal life in order to understand why such a work appeared among his creations. Alexander Isaevich was born in Kislovodsk in December 1918 into an ordinary peasant family. His father was educated at the university, but his life was tragic: he took part in the bloody First World War, and on his return from the front, by an absurd accident, he died without even forcing the birth of his son. After that, the mother, who came from a "kulak" family, and little Alexander had to huddle in corners and rented huts for more than 15 years. From 1926 to 1936, Solzhenitsyn studied at a school where he was subjected to persecution due to disagreement with certain provisions of the communist ideology. At the same time, he became seriously interested in literature for the first time.
Studying at the correspondence department of the Faculty of Literature at the Institute of Philosophy was interrupted by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Despite the fact that Solzhenitsyn went through it all and even rose to the rank of captain, in February 1945 he was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in camps and life exile. The reason for this was the negative assessments of the Stalin regime, the totalitarian system and Soviet literature, saturated with falsehood, found in Solzhenitsyn's personal correspondence. Only in 1956, the writer was released from exile by a decision of the Supreme Court. In 1959, Solzhenitsyn created the famous story about a single, but not at all the last day of Ivan Denisovich, a summary of which will be discussed later. It was published in the periodical "New World" (Issue 11). To do this, the editor, A. T. Tvardovsky, had to enlist the support of N. S. Khrushchev, the head of state. However, since 1966, the author has been subjected to a second wave of repression. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent to West Germany. Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland only in 1994, and only since that time his creations began to be appreciated. The writer died in August 2008 at the age of 90.
The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, a summary of which could not be presented without an analysis of the turning points in the life of its creator, tells the reader about the camp existence of a peasant, worker, front-line soldier who, due to Stalin’s policy, ended up in a camp, in exile. By the time the reader meets Ivan Denisovich, he is already an elderly man who has lived in such inhuman conditions for about 8 years. Lived and survived. Such a share went to him because in the war he was captured by the Germans, from which he fled, and after that he was accused by the Soviet government of espionage. The investigator who examined his case, of course, could not only establish, but even figure out what the espionage could be, and therefore simply wrote a “task” and sent him to hard labor. The story clearly echoes other works of the author on a similar topic - these are “In the First Circle” and “The Gulag Archipelago”.
The work opens with the date 1941, June 23 - it was at this time that the main character left his native village of Temgenevo, left his wife and two daughters in order to devote himself to defending his homeland. A year later, in February, Ivan Denisovich and his comrades were captured, and after a successful escape to their homeland, as mentioned above, they were classified as spies and exiled to a Soviet concentration camp. For refusing to sign the drawn up protocol, they could be shot, and so the man had the opportunity to live at least a little more in this world.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov spent 8 years in Ust-Izhma, and the 9th year he is sitting in Siberia. Around - cold and monstrous conditions. Instead of decent food - a vile stew with fish leftovers and frozen cabbage. That is why both Ivan Denisovich and the minor characters surrounding him (for example, the intellectual Tsezar Markovich, who did not have time to become a director, or the naval officer of the 2nd rank Buinovsky, nicknamed Kavtorang) are busy thinking about where to get food for themselves in order to stretch at least one more day. The hero no longer has half of his teeth, his head is shaved - a real convict.
A certain hierarchy and system of relationships has been built in the camp: some are respected, others are disliked. The latter include Fetyukov, a former office manager who avoids work and survives by begging. Shukhov, like Fetyukov, does not receive parcels from home, unlike Caesar himself, because the village is starving. But Ivan Denisovich does not lose his dignity, on the contrary, on this day he tries to forget himself behind the construction work, he only devotes himself more diligently to the cause, without overstraining and at the same time not shirking his duties. He manages to buy tobacco, successfully hide a piece of a hacksaw, get an additional portion of porridge, not end up in a punishment cell and not be sent to Sotsgorodok to work in bitter cold - such results the hero sums up at the end of the day. This one day of the life of Ivan Denisovich (the summary will be supplemented by an analysis of the details) can be called truly happy - the main character himself thinks so. Only now there are already 3564 such “happy” camp days on his account. The story ends on this sad note.
Shukhov Ivan Denisovich is, in addition to all of the above, a man of word and deed. It is due to labor that a native of the common people does not lose his face in the prevailing conditions. Village wisdom dictates to Ivan Denisovich how to behave: even in such debilitating circumstances, one must remain an honest person. Humiliating himself in front of others, licking plates and denunciating his fellows in trouble for Ivan Denisovich seems low, shameful. The key settings for him are simple folk proverbs and sayings: "Whoever knows two things with his hands, he will also pick up ten." They are mixed with principles acquired already in the camp, as well as Christian and universal postulates, which Shukhov truly begins to understand only here. Why did Solzhenitsyn create the protagonist of his story just such a person? “One day of Ivan Denisovich”, a summary of which was analyzed in this material, is a story that affirms the opinion of the author himself that the driving force behind the development of the state, one way or another, was, is and will always be ordinary people. Ivan Denisovich is just one of its representatives.
What else allows the reader to establish both the full and summary content? “One day of Ivan Denisovich” is a story, the analysis of which cannot be considered complete without parsing the time component of the work. The time of the story is still. Days succeed each other, but this does not bring the end of the term closer. The monotony and mechanicalness of life were yesterday; they will be tomorrow. That is why one day accumulates in itself the entire camp reality - Solzhenitsyn did not even have to create a voluminous, weighty book to describe it. However, in the neighborhood with this time, another thing coexists - the metaphysical, the universal. Here, it is no longer bread crumbs that matter, but spiritual, moral and moral values, unchanged from century to century. Values that help a person survive even in such harsh conditions.
In the space of the story, there is a clear contradiction with the spaces described by the writers of the golden age. The heroes of the 19th century loved freedom, expanse, steppes, forests; the heroes of the 20th century prefer cramped, stuffy cells and barracks to them. They want to hide from the eyes of the guards, to get away, to escape from the wide expanses and open areas. However, this is not all that allows you to determine both the full and brief content. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is a story in which the boundaries of imprisonment remain extremely blurred, and this is already a different level of space. It seems that the camp reality has swallowed up the whole country. Taking into account the fate of the author himself, we can conclude that this was not too far from the truth.
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