"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was written during the period when Solzhenitsyn was at camp work. A day of harsh life is described. In this article, we will analyze the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", consider the different aspects of the work - the history of creation, problems, composition.
The work was written in 1959, during a break in writing another major novel, in forty days. The story was published by order of Khrushchev himself in the journal Novy Mir. The work is classical for this genre, but the dictionary of slang words is attached to the story. Solzhenitsyn himself called this work a story.
Analyzing the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, we note that the main idea is the problem of morality. In the description of one day in the life of a camp prisoner, episodes of injustice are described. In contrast to the hard everyday life of the convicts, the life of the local authorities is shown. Commanders are punished for the slightest duty. Their comfortable life is compared with camp conditions. The executioners have already excluded themselves from society, because they do not live according to the laws of God.
Despite all the difficulties, the story is optimistic. After all, even in such a place you can remain a man and be rich in soul and morality.
The analysis of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" will be incomplete if we do not note the character of the main character of the work. The main character is a real Russian man. It became the embodiment of the author's main idea - to show the natural resilience of a person. It was a peasant who found himself in a limited space and could not sit idle.
In the story, Solzhenitsyn showed Shukhov's ability to survive in any situation. Thanks to his skill, he collected wire and made spoons. His manner with dignity to stay in such a society is amazing.
The camp theme was a forbidden topic for Russian literature, but this story cannot be called camp literature either. One day reminds the structure of the whole country with all the problems.
The history and myths of the camp are brutal. Prisoners were forced to put bread in a suitcase and sign their piece. The conditions of detention at 27 degrees of frost tempered people who were already so strong in spirit.
But, not all heroes were respectable. There was Panteleev, who decided to stay in the camp in order to continue to hand over his cellmates to the authorities. Fetyukov, who had completely lost at least some sense of dignity, licked bowls and finished smoking cigarette butts.
"One day of Ivan Denisovich"(original title - "Sch-854") - the first published work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which brought him world fame, the publication of which, according to historians and literary critics, influenced the entire further course of the history of the USSR. According to the author's definition - a story, but when published in the Novy Mir magazine, by the decision of the editors, it was called a story "for weightiness"578.
It tells about one day in the life of a Soviet prisoner, Russian peasant and soldier Ivan Denisovich Shukhov:
It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and I thought how I should describe the whole camp world - in one day. Of course, you can describe here your ten years of the camp, there the whole history of the camps - but it’s enough to collect everything in one day, as if by fragments, it’s enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be 574.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, after reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, said to Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:
This story is about-bya-zan to read and learn by heart - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union.
The story was conceived in a camp in Ekibastuz, northern Kazakhstan, in the winter of 1950-1951, written in 1959 (begun on May 18, completed on June 30) in Ryazan, where in June 1957 Alexander Isaevich finally settled on his return from eternal exile. The work took less than a month and a half.
In 1950, on some long camp winter day, I was dragging a stretcher with a partner and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest hard worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And you don’t even need to escalate any horrors, you don’t need it to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day that years are made up of. I conceived this way, and this idea remained in my mind, for nine years I did not touch it, and only in 1959, nine years later, I sat down and wrote. ... I wrote it for a short time at all, only forty days, less than a month and a half. It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and not only do you not have to guess something, try to understand something, but only fight off excess material, just so that the excess does not climb , but to accommodate the most necessary.
In 1961, a "lite" version was created, without some of the harsher judgments about the regime.
After Khrushchev's speech at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, a typewritten copy of the story on November 10, 1961 was handed over by Solzhenitsyn through Raisa Orlova, the wife of Lev Kopelev's cellmate friend, to Anna Samoilovna Berzer, the prose department of the Novy Mir magazine. The author was not indicated on the manuscript, at the suggestion of Kopelev, Berzer wrote on the cover - “A. Ryazansky" (at the place of residence of the author).
November 18 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - the most famous, and, in the opinion of many, the best literary work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The fate of the story reflected Russian history. During the years of the Khrushchev thaw, it was published and raised to the shield in the USSR, under Brezhnev it was banned and removed from libraries, and in the 1990s it was included in the compulsory school literature curriculum.
On November 6, on the eve of the anniversary, Vladimir Putin received the writer's widow, Natalya Solzhenitsyna, who shared her concern about the reduction in the number of hours allotted for the study of literature in the school curriculum.
Solzhenitsyna's phrases that "without knowledge of history and literature a person walks like a lame man" and "forgetfulness is a disease of a weak person, and a weak society, and a weak state" were included in the TV program. The President promised to "talk to the Ministry of Education."
Solzhenitsyn is considered a literary classic, but was, rather, a great historian.
The main work that brought him worldwide fame, The Gulag Archipelago, is not a novel, but a fundamental scientific study, and even carried out at the risk of life. Most of his literary works today, to put it mildly, are not read.
But the first attempt at writing, "One Day", was extremely successful. This story strikes with colorful characters and juicy language and is disassembled into quotes.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a mathematics teacher by education, an artillery captain in the war, was arrested in East Prussia by SMERSH in February 1945. The censorship censored his letter to a friend who fought on another front, containing some kind of critical remark about the Supreme Commander.
The future writer, according to him, who dreamed of literature since his school years, after interrogations at the Lubyanka received eight years in prison, which he served first in a Moscow scientific and design "sharashka", then in one of the camps in the Ekibastuz region of Kazakhstan. His term ended in one month with the death of Stalin.
Living in a settlement in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn experienced severe psychological trauma: he was diagnosed with cancer. It is not known for sure whether there was a medical error or a rare case of healing from a fatal illness.
There is a belief that the one who was buried alive, then lives a long time. Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89, and not from oncology, but from heart failure.
Image caption On the eve of the anniversary, Vladimir Putin met with the writer's widowThe idea of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was born in the camp in the winter of 1950-1951 and was embodied in Ryazan, where the author settled in June 1957 after returning from exile and worked as a school teacher. Solzhenitsyn began writing on May 18 and finished on June 30, 1959.
“I was dragging a stretcher with a partner on some long camp winter day and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it’s enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest hard worker. some horrors, it doesn’t need to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day that years are made up of.I thought like this, and this plan remained in my mind, for nine years I touched and only after nine years sat down and wrote," he later recalled.
“I didn’t write it for long at all,” Solzhenitsyn admitted. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and not only don’t you have to guess something there, try to understand something, but only you fight off excess material, just so that the excess does not climb, but to accommodate the most necessary.
In an interview in 1976, Solzhenitsyn returned to this idea: "It is enough to collect everything in one day, as if by pieces, it is enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be."
Solzhenitsyn made the Russian peasant, soldier and convict Ivan Denisovich Shukhov the main character.
The day from getting up to going to bed turned out well for him, and "Shukhov fell asleep, completely satisfied." The tragedy lay in the last stingy phrase: "There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell. Because of leap years, three extra days were added ..."
The story owed its meeting with readers to two people: the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, and Nikita Khrushchev.
The Soviet classic, order bearer and laureate, Tvardovsky was the son of a dispossessed Smolensk peasant and did not forget anything, which he proved with the posthumously published poem "By the Right of Memory".
Even at the front, Solzhenitsyn sensed a kindred spirit in the author of Terkin. In his autobiographical book "A Calf Butted an Oak," he noted "peasant delicacy, which allowed him to stop before any lie at the last millimeter, he did not cross this millimeter anywhere, nowhere! - that's why a miracle happened!"
“But behind the poetic significance of Tvardovsky today, not only is it forgotten, but it seems to many that his significance as the editor of the best literary and social journal of the last century is no longer so significant. Of course, the significance of Novy Mir is wider than one publication by Solzhenitsyn. It was a powerful educational journal, who opened for us military prose, "village people", printed the best examples of Western literature as possible. It was a journal of new criticism, which, unlike the criticism of the 30s, did not separate "sheep" from "goats", but spoke about life and literature " , - writes the modern literary historian Pavel Basinsky.
"Two magazines in the history of Russia bear the author's name - Nekrasov's Sovremennik and Tvardovsky's Novy Mir. Both had both a brilliant and a bitterly sad fate. Both were the beloved, most precious offspring of two great and very related Russian poets, and both became their personal tragedies, the heaviest defeats in life, undoubtedly bringing their death closer," he points out.
On November 10, 1961, Solzhenitsyn, through Raisa Orlova, the wife of his fellow cellmate on the "sharashka" Lev Kopelev, handed over the manuscript of "One Day" to Anna Berzer, editor of the Novy Mir prose department. He did not indicate his name; on the advice of Kopelev, Berzer wrote on the first page: "A. Ryazansky."
On December 8, Berzer showed the manuscript to Tvardovsky, who had just returned from vacation, with the words: "The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing."
Tvardovsky read the story on the night of December 8-9. According to him, he was lying in bed, but was so shocked that he got up, put on a suit and continued reading while sitting.
"The strongest impression of recent days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solzhenitsyn)," he wrote in his diary.
Every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union must read this story Anna Akhmatova
On December 11, Tvardovsky telegraphed Solzhenitsyn, asking him to come to Moscow as soon as possible.
The very next day the first meeting of the author with the editors of Novy Mir took place. Solzhenitsyn considered his work a story and initially titled "Sch-854. One day of one convict." "Novomirtsy" proposed to slightly change the title and "for weight" to consider the story as a story.
Tvardovsky showed the manuscript to Chukovsky, Marshak, Fedin, Paustovsky, Ehrenburg.
Korney Chukovsky called his review "A Literary Miracle": "Shukhov is the generalized character of the Russian simple man: resilient," wicked ", hardy, jack of all trades, crafty - and kind. Vasily Terkin's brother. The story is written in HIS language, full of humor, colorful and sharp."
Tvardovsky understood the censorship obstruction of "Ivan Denisovich", but on the eve of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev was preparing to pass a decision on the removal of Stalin from the Mausoleum, he felt that the moment had come.
On August 6, he handed over to Khrushchev's assistant Vladimir Lebedev the manuscript and an accompanying letter, which contained the words: "The name of the author has not yet been known to anyone, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names of our literature. If you find an opportunity to pay attention to this manuscript, I I will be as happy as if it were my own work."
According to some reports, Tvardovsky also handed a copy to Khrushchev's son-in-law Alexei Adzhubey.
On September 15, Lebedev informed Tvardovsky that Khrushchev had read the story, approved it, and ordered that 23 copies of the manuscript be submitted to the Central Committee for all members of the leadership.
Soon, some regular party-literary meeting took place, one of the participants of which said that he did not understand how someone could like a thing like "Ivan Denisovich".
"I know at least one person who has read it and liked it," Tvardovsky replied.
If it were not for Tvardovsky as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, this story would not have been published. And if it were not for Khrushchev at that moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in 1962, is like a phenomenon against physical laws Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The issue of publication was discussed, neither more nor less, at the Presidium of the Central Committee. On October 12, five days before the opening of the XXII Congress, the decision was made.
On November 18, the issue of "New World" with the story was printed and began to spread throughout the country. The circulation was 96,900 copies, but, at the direction of Khrushchev, it was increased by 25,000. A few months later the story was republished by "Roman-newspaper" (700 thousand copies) and a separate book.
In an interview with the BBC on the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recalled:
"It is quite clear: if it were not for Tvardovsky as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I will add. And if Khrushchev had not been at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had been in this moment did not attack Stalin one more time - it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in the year 62, is like a phenomenon against physical laws. "
Solzhenitsyn considered it a great victory that his story was first published in the USSR, and not in the West.
“You can see from the reaction of the Western socialists: if it had been printed in the West, these very socialists would have said: everything is a lie, there was nothing of this. Only because everyone’s tongues were taken away because it was printed with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, this shocked me,” he told the BBC.
The editors and censors made a number of comments, with some of which the author agreed.
“The funniest thing for me, a hater of Stalin, is that at least once it was required to name Stalin as the culprit of disasters. And indeed, he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This was no coincidence, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin is alone. I made this concession: I mentioned "dad with a mustache" once," he recalled.
Unofficially, Solzhenitsyn was told that the story would have been much better if he had made his Shukhov not an innocently injured collective farmer, but an innocently injured regional committee secretary.
"Ivan Denisovich" was also criticized from opposite positions. Varlam Shalamov believed that Solzhenitsyn embellished reality to please the censors, and was especially indignant at the episode, in his opinion, implausible, in which Shukhov feels joy from his forced labor.
Solzhenitsyn immediately became a celebrity.
You can live "better and more fun" when conditional "zeks" work for you. But when the whole country saw this "convict" in the face of Ivan Denisovich, she sobered up and realized: you can't live like that! Pavel Basinsky, literary historian
“Letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote what they experienced, what anyone had. Or they insisted on meeting with me and telling me, and I began to meet. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, still describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and carried the missing material to me. So I collected indescribable material that cannot be collected in the Soviet Union - only thanks to "Ivan Denisovich ". So he became a pedestal for the Gulag Archipelago," he recalled.
Some wrote on envelopes: "Moscow, Novy Mir magazine, to Ivan Denisovich" - and the mail reached them.
On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of the story, it was republished in the form of a two-volume edition: the first book included herself, and the second - letters that had lain under a bushel in the Novy Mir archive for half a century.
"The publication in Sovremennik of Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter objectively brought the abolition of serfdom closer. Because you can still sell conditional" serfs ", but you will agree that it is no longer possible to sell Khor and Kalinich like pigs. You can live "better and more fun" when Conditional "prisoners" work for you. But when the whole country saw this "prisoner" in the face of Ivan Denisovich, she sobered up and realized: you can't live like that!" - wrote Pavel Basinsky.
The editors nominated "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" for the Lenin Prize. The "literary generals" were uncomfortable criticizing the content of the book, which Khrushchev himself had approved, and they found fault with the fact that earlier only novels, and not "works of small forms," were awarded the highest award.
After the removal of Khrushchev, other winds blew.
On February 5, 1966, the party boss of Uzbekistan, Sharaf Rashidov, sent a note to the Politburo in which he specifically mentioned Solzhenitsyn, calling him a "slanderer" and "an enemy of our wonderful reality."
"After all, in fact, comrades, no one has yet taken a party position on Ivan Denisovich's book," Brezhnev was indignant, confusing the hero and the author.
"When Khrushchev was in charge, we suffered enormous harm in ideological work. We corrupted the intelligentsia. And we argued so much about Ivan Denisovich, we talked so much! But he supported all this camp literature!" - said Mikhail Suslov.
Solzhenitsyn was given to understand that he could fit into the system if he forgot about the "theme of repression" and began to write about the life of the village or something else. But he continued to secretly collect materials for the Gulag Archipelago, meeting with about three hundred former campers and exiles over several years.
Even dissidents at that time demanded observance of human rights, but did not aim at the Soviet power as such. The actions were carried out under the slogan: "Respect your constitution!"
Solzhenitsyn was the first, in "One Day" indirectly, and in "Archipelago" directly, said that the matter was not only in Stalin, that the communist regime was criminal from the moment of its inception and remains such that, by and large, it happened over the "Leninist guard" historical justice.
Solzhenitsyn had his own fate, he did not want, and objectively could not sacrifice the "Archipelago" even for the sake of Tvardovsky Pavel Basinsky
According to a number of researchers, Solzhenitsyn single-handedly won a historic victory over the all-powerful Soviet state. There were many supporters of the official revision of the decisions of the 20th Congress and the rehabilitation of Stalin in the party leadership, but the publication of Archipelago in Paris in December 1973 was such a bomb that they preferred to leave the issue in limbo.
In the USSR, the campaign against Solzhenitsyn acquired an unprecedented character. Since the time of Trotsky, the propaganda machine has not fought on such a scale against one person. Day after day, newspapers published letters from "Soviet writers" and "ordinary workers" with the leitmotif: "I have not read this book, but I am deeply indignant at it!"
Using quotes taken out of context, Solzhenitsyn was accused of sympathizing with Nazism and labeled him as a "literary Vlasovite."
For many citizens, this had the opposite effect of what was desired: it means that the Soviet government became not the same if a person, while in Moscow, openly declares that he does not like it, and is still alive!
An anecdote was born: in the Encyclopedia of the Future in the article "Brezhnev" it will be written: "a political figure of the era of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov."
The question of what to do with an unmanaged writer has long been discussed at the highest level. Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin demanded to give him a camp term. Interior Minister Nikolai Shchelokov, in a note to Brezhnev, urged "not to execute enemies, but to strangle them in an embrace." In the end, the point of view of the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, prevailed.
On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and the next day he was deprived of his citizenship and "expelled from the USSR" (put on a plane flying to Germany).
In the entire history of the Soviet Union, this exotic punishment was applied only twice: to Solzhenitsyn and Trotsky.
Contrary to popular belief, Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature not for The Gulag Archipelago, but earlier, in 1970, with the wording: "For the moral strength with which he followed the immutable traditions of Russian literature."
Shortly thereafter, all editions of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were withdrawn from libraries. The copies that were preserved on the hands cost 200 rubles on the black market - one and a half monthly salaries of the average Soviet worker.
On the day of Solzhenitsyn's exile, by a special order of Glavlit, all his works were officially banned. The ban was lifted on December 31, 1988.
Suslov spoke in the spirit that if he was removed from work immediately, "he will now leave a hero."
They began to create unbearable conditions for Tvardovsky and harass him with nit-picking. Army libraries stopped subscribing to Novy Mir - this was a signal that everyone understood.
The head of the department of culture of the Central Committee, Vasily Shauro, told the chairman of the board of the Union of Writers Georgy Markov: "All conversations with him and your actions should push Tvardovsky to leave the magazine."
Tvardovsky many times turned to Brezhnev, Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev and other bosses, asking him to clarify his situation, but received evasive answers.
In February 1970, the exhausted Tvardovsky resigned as editor. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. "The Novy Mir team was dispersed after his departure.
Solzhenitsyn was later reproached for refusing to compromise and "setting up" Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, who had done so much for him.
According to Pavel Basinsky, "Solzhenitsyn had his own fate, he did not want, and objectively could not sacrifice the Archipelago even for the sake of Tvardovsky."
In turn, Solzhenitsyn, in the book A Calf Butted an Oak, published in the West in 1975, paid tribute to Tvardovsky, but criticized the rest of the "Novomirites" for the fact that they, as he believed, "did not show courageous resistance, did not make personal sacrifices ".
According to him, "the death of Novy Mir was devoid of beauty, since it did not contain even the slightest attempt at public struggle."
"The lack of magnanimity of his memory stunned me," wrote Vladimir Lakshin, Tvardovsky's former deputy, in an article forwarded abroad.
While in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn, in an interview with the American CBS television channel, called modern history "the history of America's disinterested generosity and the ingratitude of the whole world."
However, having settled in the state of Vermont, he did not begin to sing the praises of American civilization and democracy, but began to criticize them for materialism, lack of spirituality and weakness in the fight against communism.
"One of your leading newspapers after the end of Vietnam ran a full page headline: 'Blessed Silence.' Give back Taiwan, give back ten more African countries, just give us the opportunity to live in peace.Let us drive in our wide cars on our beautiful roads.Let us play tennis and golf in peace.Let us mix cocktails in peace, as we used to. Let us see on every page of the magazine a smile with open teeth and a glass," he said in one public speech.
As a result, many in the West have not completely cooled off towards Solzhenitsyn, but have begun to treat him as an eccentric with an old-fashioned beard and overly radical views.
After August 1991, most of the political emigrants of the Soviet period welcomed the changes in Russia, began to willingly come to Moscow, but preferred to live in a comfortable, stable West.
Image caption Solzhenitsyn on the Duma rostrum (November 1994)Solzhenitsyn, one of the few, returned to his homeland.
In the words of ironic journalists, he framed his arrival as the appearance of Christ to the people: he flew to Vladivostok and traveled across the country by train, meeting with citizens in every city.
Without ether and order
The hope of becoming a national prophet like Leo Tolstoy did not come true. Russians were preoccupied with current problems, not with global issues of being. A society that had taken a sip of informational freedom and pluralism of opinions was not inclined to accept anyone as an indisputable authority. Solzhenitsyn was respectfully listened to, but no one was in a hurry to follow his instructions.
The author's program on Russian television was soon closed: according to Solzhenitsyn, guided by political considerations; according to TV people, because he began to repeat himself and lost his rating.
The writer began to criticize the Russian order in the same way as he criticized the Soviet and American ones, and refused to accept the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, which Boris Yeltsin awarded him.
During his lifetime, Solzhenitsyn was reproached for messianism, ponderous seriousness, exaggerated claims, arrogant moralizing, an ambiguous attitude towards democracy and individualism, and a passion for archaic ideas of the monarchy and the community. But, in the end, every person, and Solzhenitsyn's scale, and even more so, has the right to his non-trivial opinion.
All this is gone with him. There are books left.
“And it doesn’t matter at all whether the Gulag Archipelago will be included in the compulsory school curriculum or not,” political observer Andrei Kolesnikov wrote on the eve of the anniversary. “Because the absolutely free Alexander Solzhenitsyn has already entered optional eternity anyway.”
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (its original name was "Sch-854") - the first work of A. Solzhenitsyn, which was published and brought world fame to the author. According to literary critics and historians, it influenced the entire course of the history of the USSR in subsequent years. The author defines his work as a story, but by the decision of the editors, when it was published in Novy Mir, it was called a story "for weightiness". We invite you to read a short summary of it. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a work that certainly deserves your attention. Its main character is a soldier in the past, and now a Soviet prisoner.
The action of the work covers only one day. Both the work itself and the brief retelling presented in this article are devoted to its description. "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" begins as follows.
Shukhov Ivan Denisovich wakes up at 5 o'clock in the morning. He is in Siberia, in a camp for political prisoners. Today Ivan Denisovich does not feel well. He wants to stay in bed longer. However, the guard, a Tartar, discovers him there and sends him to wash the floor in the guardhouse. Nevertheless, Shukhov is glad that he managed to escape the punishment cell. He goes to the paramedic Vdovushkin to get a release from work. Vdovushkin measures his temperature and reports that it is low. Shukhov then goes to the dining room. Here, the prisoner Fetyukov kept breakfast for him. Taking it, he again goes to the barracks in order to hide the ration in the mattress before roll call.
Solzhenitsyn ("One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich") is further interested in organizational issues in the camp. Shukhov and other prisoners go to roll call. Our hero buys a pack of tobacco, which is sold by a man nicknamed Caesar. This prisoner is a metropolitan intellectual who lives well in the camp, as he receives food parcels from home. Volkov, a cruel lieutenant, sends guards to find an extra from the prisoners. It is found in Buinovsky, who stayed in the camp for only 3 months. Buynovsky is sent to a punishment cell for 10 days.
The column of prisoners finally goes to work, accompanied by guards with machine guns. Shukhov reflects on his wife's letters on the way. Their content continues our brief retelling. One day of Ivan Denisovich, described by the author, not in vain includes memories of letters. Probably Shukhov thinks about them very often. His wife writes that those who returned from the war do not want to go to the collective farm, all the young people go to work either at the factory or in the city. The peasants do not aspire to stay on the collective farm. Many of them make a living by stenciling carpets, and this brings in good income. Shukhov's wife hopes that her husband will return from the camp and will also become engaged in this "trade", and finally they will live richly.
The detachment of the protagonist that day works at half strength. Ivan Denisovich can take a break. He takes out the bread hidden in his coat.
Shukhov reflects on how he ended up in prison. Ivan Denisovich went to war on June 23, 1941. And already in February 1942, he was surrounded. Shukhov was a prisoner of war. He miraculously escaped from the Germans and with great difficulty reached his own. However, due to a careless story about his misadventures, he ended up in a Soviet concentration camp. Now Shukhov is a saboteur and spy for the security forces.
So our brief retelling came to the description of lunchtime. One day of Ivan Denisovich, described by the author, is typical in many respects. Now it's time for dinner, and the whole squad goes to the dining room. Our hero is lucky - he gets an extra bowl of food (oatmeal). Caesar and another prisoner argue in the camp about Eisenstein's films. Tyurin tells about his fate. Ivan Denisovich smokes a cigarette with tobacco, which he took from two Estonians. After that, the team gets to work.
The author (his photo is presented above) presents the reader with a whole gallery of social types. In particular, he talks about Kavtorang, who was a naval officer and managed to visit the prisons of the tsarist regime. Other prisoners - Gopchik (16-year-old teenager), Alyosha the Baptist, Volkov - a cruel and merciless boss who regulates the life of prisoners.
A description of work and life in the camp is also presented in a work describing the 1st day of Ivan Denisovich. A brief retelling cannot be made without saying a few words about them. All thoughts of people are focused on obtaining food. The food is very scarce and bad. They give, for example, a gruel with small fish and frozen cabbage. The art of living here is to get an extra bowl of porridge or rations.
In the camp, collective work is based on how to shorten the time from one meal to the next as much as possible. In addition, in order not to freeze, you should move. You need to be able to work correctly so as not to overwork. However, even in such difficult conditions of the camp, people do not lose the natural joy from the perfect work. We see this, for example, in the scene where the crew is building the house. In order to survive, one should be more agile, cunning, smarter than the guards.
A brief retelling of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is already coming to an end. The prisoners are returning from work. After the evening roll call, Ivan Denisovich smokes cigarettes, and also treats Caesar. He, in turn, gives the main character some sugar, two cookies and a piece of sausage. Ivan Denisovich eats sausage, and gives one cookie to Alyosha. He reads the Bible and wants to convince Shukhov that consolation should be sought in religion. However, Ivan Denisovich cannot find it in the Bible. He just goes back to his bed and before going to sleep he thinks that this day can be called successful. He had 3,653 more days to live in the camp. This concludes the brief recap. We described one day of Ivan Denisovich, but, of course, our story cannot be compared with the original work. Solzhenitsyn's skill is undeniable.
The work took less than a month and a half.
In 1950, on some long camp winter day, I was dragging a stretcher with a partner and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest hard worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And you don’t even need to escalate any horrors, you don’t need it to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day that years are made up of. I conceived this way, and this idea remained in my mind, for nine years I did not touch it, and only in 1959, nine years later, I sat down and wrote. ... I wrote it for a short time at all, only forty days, less than a month and a half. It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and not only do you not have to guess something, try to understand something, but only fight off excess material, just so that the excess does not climb , but to accommodate the most necessary.
In 1961, a "lite" version was created, without some of the harsher judgments about the regime.
On December 11, Tvardovsky, by telegram, asked Solzhenitsyn to urgently come to the editorial office of Novy Mir.
On December 12, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow, met with Tvardovsky, Berzer, Kondratovich, Zaks, Dementiev in the editorial office of Novy Mir (Kopelev was also present at the meeting). The story, which was originally called "Sch-854. One day of one convict ", it was proposed to name the story called" One day of Ivan Denisovich ". An agreement was concluded between the editorial office and the author.
In December 1961, Tvardovsky gave the manuscript of "Ivan Denisovich" to be read by Chukovsky, Marshak, Fedin, Paustovsky, Ehrenburg. At Tvardovsky's request, they wrote their written reviews of the story. Tvardovsky planned to use them when promoting the manuscript for publication.
Chukovsky titled his review "A Literary Miracle":
Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, "malicious", hardy, jack of all trades, crafty - and kind. Brother of Vasily Terkin. Although he is referred to here in the third person, the whole story is written in HIS language, full of humor, colorful and well-aimed.
At the same time, "Ivan Denisovich" began to circulate in handwritten and typewritten copy lists.
Members of the editorial board of Novy Mir, in particular, Dementiev, as well as high-ranking figures of the CPSU, to whom the text was also presented for review (Chernoutsan, Head of the Fiction Sector of the Culture Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU), expressed a number of comments and claims to the author of the work. Basically, they were dictated not by aesthetic, but by political considerations. Amendments to the text were also proposed. As Lakshin points out, all proposals were carefully recorded by Solzhenitsyn:
Solzhenitsyn carefully wrote down all the comments and suggestions. He said that he divides them into three categories: those with which he can agree, even considers that they are beneficial; those that he will think about are difficult for him; and finally, the impossible - those with which he does not want to see the thing printed.
Solzhenitsyn later wrote ironically of these demands:
And, the funniest thing for me, a hater of Stalin, was at least once required to name Stalin as the culprit of disasters. (And indeed - he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This is not accidental, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin alone.) I made this concession: I mentioned the “Moustached Old Man” once ...
In July 1962, Tvardovsky, feeling the censorship impassability of the story to print for political reasons, compiled a brief preface to the story and a letter addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR N. S. Khrushchev with a brief assessment of the work. On August 6, Tvardovsky handed over the letter and manuscript of "Ivan Denisovich" to Khrushchev's assistant V. Lebedev:
<…>We are talking about the amazingly talented story by A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The name of this author has not yet been known to anyone, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names of our literature.
This is not only my deep conviction. The unanimous high appraisal of this rare literary find by my co-editors of the journal Novy Mir, including K. Fedin, is joined by the voices of other prominent writers and critics who had the opportunity to get acquainted with it in the manuscript.
<…>Nikita Sergeevich, if you find an opportunity to pay attention to this manuscript, I will be happy, as if it were my own work.
On October 12, 1962, under pressure from Khrushchev, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to publish the story, and on October 20, Khrushchev announced to Tvardovsky about this decision of the Presidium.
Between November 1 and 6, the first journal proofreading of the story appeared.
In a 1982 radio interview for the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the BBC, Solzhenitsyn recalled:
It is quite clear: if it were not for Tvardovsky as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I will add. And if it were not for Khrushchev at that moment, it would not have been printed either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at that very moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in 1962, is like a phenomenon against physical laws.<…>now, from the reaction of the Western socialists, it is clear: if it had been published in the West, these very socialists would have said: everything is a lie, there was nothing of this, and there were no camps, and there were no exterminations, nothing happened. Only because everyone's tongues were taken away, that this was printed with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, that shocked.
The news of this publication spread all over the world. Solzhenitsyn immediately became a celebrity.
On December 30, 1962, Solzhenitsyn was accepted as a member of the Writers' Union of the USSR.
After a fairly short time - in January 1963 - the story was republished by Roman-gazeta (No. 1/277, January 1963; circulation 700 thousand copies) and - in the summer of 1963 - a separate book in the publishing house "Soviet Writer" (circulation 100 thousand copies).
Solzhenitsyn was flooded with letters from readers:
... when “Ivan Denisovich” was printed, letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted to meet with me and tell, and I began to meet. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, more, to describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and carried the missing material to me.
... so I collected indescribable material that cannot be collected in the Soviet Union - only thanks to "Ivan Denisovich". So he became like a pedestal for the Gulag Archipelago
On December 28, 1963, the editors of the Novy Mir magazine and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art nominated One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the 1964 Lenin Prize in Literature. The nomination for such a high prize of a literary work of a “small form” was perceived by many “literary generals” as at least blasphemous, this has never happened in the USSR. The discussion of the story at the meetings of the Prize Committee took the form of bitter disputes. On April 14, 1964, the candidacy was voted down in the Committee.
After the resignation of Khrushchev, the clouds over Solzhenitsyn began to thicken, the assessments of "Ivan Denisovich" began to acquire other shades. Noteworthy is the response of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan Rashidov, expressed in the form of a note to the Central Committee of the CPSU on February 5, 1966, where Solzhenitsyn is directly called a slanderer and enemy of "our wonderful reality":
His story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" under the guise of debunking the cult of personality gave food to bourgeois ideologists for anti-Soviet propaganda.
Solzhenitsyn finally edited the text in April 1968.
In 1971-1972, all editions of Ivan Denisovich, including the magazine edition, were secretly removed from public libraries and destroyed. The pages with the text of the story were simply torn out of the magazine, the author's name and the title of the story in the table of contents were covered over. Officially, the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, in agreement with the Central Committee of the CPSU, decided to withdraw Solzhenitsyn's works from public libraries and the bookselling network on January 28, 1974. On February 14, 1974, after the expulsion of the writer from the USSR, Glavlit’s order No. 10, specially dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, was issued, which listed the issues of the Novy Mir magazine with the writer’s works to be withdrawn from public libraries (No. 11, 1962; No. 1, 7, 1963 ; No. 1, 1966) and separate editions of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, including a translation into Estonian and a book for the blind. The order was accompanied by a note: "Foreign publications (including newspapers and magazines) with the works of the specified author are also subject to seizure." The ban was lifted by a note of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU dated December 31, 1988.
Again, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has been published in his homeland since 1990.
For the first time in Soviet literature, readers were truthfully shown the Stalinist repressions with great artistic skill.
It tells about one day in the life of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov:
From the very beginning, I understood Ivan Denisovich that he should not be like me, and not any especially developed, he should be the most ordinary camp inmate. Tvardovsky later told me: if I had made a hero, for example, Caesar Markovich, well, there was some kind of intellectual, somehow arranged in an office, then a quarter of that price would not have been. No. He was supposed to be the most average soldier of this Gulag, the one on whom everything is pouring.
The story begins with the words:
At five o'clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks.
and ends with the words:
The day passed, nothing marred, almost happy.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell.
Due to leap years - three extra days were added ...
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the publication.
The first review, written by Konstantin Simonov, "On the past for the sake of the future", appeared in the newspaper "Izvestia" literally on the day of the publication of "Ivan Denisovich":
<…>Laconic and polished prose of great artistic generalizations<…>The story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was written by a mature, original master. A strong talent has come into our literature.
The rejection of the story by the "literary generals" was indicated in Nikolai Gribachev's allegorical poem "Meteorite", published in the Izvestia newspaper on November 30.
In November, under the fresh impression of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Varlam Shalamov wrote in a letter to the author:
The story is like poetry - everything is perfect in it, everything is expedient. Each line, each scene, each characterization is so concise, intelligent, subtle and deep that I think that Novy Mir has never printed anything so solid, so strong from the very beginning of its existence. And so necessary - because without an honest solution of these very questions, neither literature nor social life can move forward - everything that comes with omissions, bypasses, deception - has brought, brings and will bring only harm.
There is one more huge advantage - this is the deeply and very subtly shown peasant psychology of Shukhov. I have not yet seen such a delicate highly artistic work, to be honest, for a long time.
In general, the details, the details of everyday life, the behavior of all the characters are very precise and very new, scorchingly new.<…>There are hundreds of such details in the story - others, not new, not accurate, not at all.
Your whole story is that long-awaited truth, without which our literature cannot move forward.
On December 8, in the article “In the name of the future” in the newspaper “Moskovskaya Pravda”, I. Chicherov wrote that Solzhenitsyn unsuccessfully chose the peasant Shukhov as the main character of the story, it would be necessary to strengthen the “line” of Buinovsky, “real communists, party leaders.” "The tragedy of such people for some reason was of little interest to the writer."
The émigré press and critics vividly responded to the historical literary event: on December 23, an article by Mikh. Koryakov "Ivan Denisovich", and on December 29 "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published for the first time abroad in Russian (in the newspaper "New Russian Word"; the newspaper printed the story in parts, until January 17, 1963). On January 3, 1963, G. Adamovich wrote an article about Solzhenitsyn under the heading "Literature and Life" in the newspaper "Russian Thought" (Paris).
In January 1963, I. Druta's articles "On the Courage and Dignity of Man" appeared (in the journal "Friendship of Peoples", No. 1):
A small story - and how spacious it has become in our literature!
in March - V. Bushina "Daily Bread of Truth" (in the Neva magazine, No. 3), N. Gubko "Man wins" (in the Zvezda magazine, No. 3):
The best traditional features of Russian prose of the 19th century combined with the search for new forms, which can be called polyphonic, synthetic
In 1964, S. Artamonov's book "The Writer and Life: Historical, Literary, Theoretical and Critical Articles" was published, which promptly included the article "On the story of Solzhenitsyn."
In January 1964, an article by V. Lakshin "Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies" was published in the Novy Mir magazine:
If Solzhenitsyn had been an artist of lesser scale and flair, he would probably have chosen the most miserable day of the most difficult period of Ivan Denisovich's camp life. But he went the other way, possible only for a writer confident in his strength, who is aware that the subject of his story is so important and harsh that it excludes vain sensationalism and the desire to terrify with a description of suffering, physical pain. Thus, by placing himself, as it were, in the most difficult and unfavorable conditions in front of the reader, who did not expect to get acquainted with the “happy” day of the life of a prisoner, the author thereby guaranteed the complete objectivity of his artistic testimony ...
On April 11, Pravda published a review of letters from readers about the story “One Day ...” under the title “High Demanding”; at the same time, a selection of letters from readers “Once again about A. Solzhenitsyn’s story” One day of Ivan Denisovich.
From December 1962 to October 1964, more than 60 reviews and articles were devoted to Solzhenitsyn's stories (including "One Day ...", "Matryonin Dvor", "The Incident at the Kochetovka Station", "For the Good of the Cause") in the periodical press.
The nature of the disputes around the story is indicated by Chukovsky. In his diary, published many years later (in 1994), Korney Ivanovich wrote on November 24, 1962:
... met Kataev. He is outraged by the story "One Day", which is published in the "New World". To my amazement, he said: the story is false: it does not show protest. - What protest? - The protest of the peasant sitting in the camp. - But this is the whole truth of the story: the executioners created such conditions that people have lost the slightest concept of justice and, under the threat of death, do not even dare to think that there is conscience, honor, humanity in the world. The man agrees to consider himself a spy so that the investigators do not beat him. This is the whole essence of a wonderful story - 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, like all (we).
In the fall of 1964, an anonymous (written by V. L. Teush) analysis of the main ideas of the story began to circulate in "samizdat". This analysis was very accurately assessed by the "writers in civilian clothes":
In an anonymous document, the author seeks to prove that the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is important, as it reveals not only the life of a particular forced labor camp, but is essentially a reflection of one day in the life of Soviet society. He draws a direct analogy of the relationship, on the one hand, between the leaders of the camp and the prisoners, and on the other, between the leaders of the country and the population; between the situation of prisoners and the life of Soviet people, the overwork of prisoners and the “slave” labor of Soviet workers, etc. All this is disguised as an image of the period of the personality cult, although in fact there is a clear criticism of the socialist system.
In response to the publication, the writer received a large number of letters from readers: .
When the former prisoners learned from the trumpet calls of all the newspapers at once that some kind of story about the camps had come out and the newspapermen were praising it, they decided unanimously: “again nonsense! conspired and then lie. That our newspapers, with their usual exorbitance, would suddenly pounce on praising the truth - after all, this, after all, could not be imagined! Others did not want to take my story into their hands. When they began to read, it was as if a common continuous groan escaped, a groan of joy - and a groan of pain. Letters flowed.
A significant amount of research and memoirs appeared in 2002, on the 40th anniversary of the first publication.
Due to the large number of publications, the list of which significantly affects the length of the article, only the first or different editions are given here.
Withstood at least four English translations.
The title of the story is a transcription of the English ditloid acronym DITLOID = One D ay I n T he L ife O f I van D enisovich.
