One day Instead of lunch - a daily necessity! – I went to look at the Tagus and returned to wander the streets, not even expecting that I would notice some benefit for the soul in seeing all this... At least this way... Life is not worth living. It's worth just watching. The ability to look

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The idea for the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” came to Alexander Solzhenitsyn while imprisoned in a special regime camp in the winter of 1950-1951. He was able to implement it only in 1959. Since then, the book has been reprinted several times, after which it was withdrawn from sale and libraries. The story became publicly available in the homeland only in 1990. The prototypes for the characters in the work were real people whom the author knew while in the camps or at the front.

Shukhov's life in a special regime camp

The story begins with a wake-up call in a special regime correctional camp. This signal was given by hitting the rail with a hammer. The main character, Ivan Shukhov, never woke up. Between him and the start of work, the prisoners had about an hour and a half of free time, during which they could try to earn extra money. Such a part-time job could be helping in the kitchen, sewing, or cleaning stores. Shukhov always happily worked part-time, but that day he was not feeling well. He lay there and wondered whether he should go to the medical unit. In addition, the man was worried about rumors that they wanted to send their brigade to build “Sotsgorodok” instead of building workshops. And this work promised to be hard labor - in the cold without the possibility of heating, far from the barracks. Shukhov's foreman went to settle this issue with the contractors, and, according to Shukhov's assumptions, brought them a bribe in the form of lard.
Suddenly, the man's padded jacket and peacoat with which he was covered were roughly torn off. These were the hands of a warden nicknamed Tatar. He immediately threatened Shukhov with three days of “withdrawal.” In local jargon, this meant three days in a punishment cell with assignment to work. Shukhov began to pretend to ask for forgiveness from the warden, but he remained adamant and ordered the man to follow him. Shukhov obediently hurried after Tatar. It was bitterly cold outside. The prisoner looked hopefully at the large thermometer hanging in the yard. According to the rules, if the temperature was below forty-one degrees, they were not allowed to go to work.

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Meanwhile, the men came to the guards' room. There the Tatar generously proclaimed that he forgives Shukhov, but he must wash the floor in this room. The man assumed such an outcome, but began to feigned gratitude to the warden for mitigating the punishment and promised never to miss a lift again. Then he rushed to the well for water, wondering how to wash the floor without getting his felt boots wet, because he didn’t have replacement shoes. Once during his eight years of imprisonment he was given excellent leather boots. Shukhov loved them very much and took care of them, but the boots had to be returned when they were given felt boots in their place. During his entire imprisonment, he never regretted anything as much as those boots.
Having quickly washed the floor, the man rushed into the dining room. It was a very gloomy building, filled with steam. Men sat in teams at long tables eating gruel and porridge. The rest were crowded in the aisle, waiting for their turn.

Shukhov in the medical unit

There was a hierarchy in each prisoner brigade. Shukhov was not the last person in his family, so when he came from the dining room, a guy lower than his rank was sitting and guarding his breakfast. The gruel and porridge have already cooled down and become practically inedible. But Shukhov ate it all thoughtfully and slowly, he thought that in the camp the prisoners only have personal time, ten minutes for breakfast and five minutes for lunch.
After breakfast, the man went to the medical unit, and when he had almost reached it, he remembered that he had to go buy a samosad from a Lithuanian who had received a parcel. But after hesitating a little, he still chose the medical unit. Shukhov entered the building, which never tired of striking him with its whiteness and cleanliness. All the offices were still locked. Paramedic Nikolai Vdovushkin sat at the post and carefully wrote words on sheets of paper.

Our hero noted that Kolya was writing something “leftist,” that is, not related to work, but immediately concluded that this did not concern him.

He complained to the paramedic about feeling unwell, he gave him a thermometer, but warned him that the orders had already been distributed, and he needed to complain about his health in the evening. Shukhov understood that he would not be able to stay in the medical unit. Vdovushkin continued to write. Few people knew that Nikolai became a paramedic only after being in the zone. Before that, he was a student at a literary institute, and the local doctor Stepan Grigorovich took him to work, in the hope that he would write here what he could not in the wild. Shukhov never ceased to be amazed at the cleanliness and silence that reigned in the medical unit. He spent a full five minutes inactive. The thermometer showed thirty-seven point two. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov silently pulled his hat down and hurried to the barracks to join his 104th brigade before work.

The harsh everyday life of prisoners

Brigadier Tyurin was sincerely glad that Shukhov did not end up in a punishment cell. He gave him a ration, which consisted of bread and a pile of sugar poured on top of it. The prisoner hastily licked the sugar and sewed half of the bread he had been given into the mattress. He hid the second part of the ration in his padded jacket pocket. At the signal from the foreman, the men set off to work. Shukhov noted with satisfaction that they were going to work in the same place - which means Tyurin managed to come to an agreement. On the way, the prisoners were subjected to a “shmon.” This was a procedure to determine whether they were taking anything prohibited outside the camp. Today the process was led by Lieutenant Volkova, whom even the camp commander himself was afraid of. Despite the cold, he forced the men to strip down to their shirts. Anyone who had extra clothes was confiscated. Shukhov's teammate Buinovsky, a former hero of the Soviet Union, was outraged by this behavior of his superiors. He accused the lieutenant of not being a Soviet man, for which he immediately received ten days of strict regime, but only upon returning from work.
After the search, the prisoners were lined up in lines of five, carefully counted and sent under escort to the cold steppe to work.

The frost was such that everyone wrapped rags around their faces and walked in silence, looking down at the ground. Ivan Denisovich, in order to distract himself from the hungry rumbling in his stomach, began to think about how he would soon write a letter home.

He was entitled to two letters a year, and he didn’t need more. He hadn't seen his family since the summer of '41, and now it was '51. The man reflected that now he has more common themes with his bunk neighbors than with his relatives.

Letters from my wife

In her rare letters, his wife wrote to Shukhov about the difficult collective farm life that only women endure. The men who returned from the war work on the side. Ivan Denisovich could not understand how anyone could not want to work on their land.

The wife said that many in their area are engaged in a fashionable, profitable trade - carpet dyeing. The unfortunate woman hoped that her husband would also take up this business when he returned home, and this would help the family get out of poverty.

In the work area

Meanwhile, the one hundred and fourth brigade reached the working area, they were lined up again, counted and allowed into the territory. Everything there was dug up and dug up, boards and chips were lying everywhere, traces of the foundation were visible, prefabricated houses stood. Brigadier Tyurin went to receive an outfit for the brigade for the day. The men, taking the opportunity, ran into a large wooden building on the territory, a heating room. The place near the furnace was occupied by the thirty-eighth brigade that worked there. Shukhov and his comrades just leaned against the wall. Ivan Denisovich could not control the temptation and ate almost all the bread he had saved for lunch. About twenty minutes later the foreman appeared, and he looked unhappy. The team was sent to complete the construction of the thermal power plant building, which had been abandoned since the fall. Tyurin distributed the work. Shukhov and the Latvian Kildigs were given the task of laying walls, since they were the best craftsmen in the brigade. Ivan Denisovich was an excellent mason, the Latvian was a carpenter. But first it was necessary to insulate the building where the men would work and build a stove. Shukhov and Kildigs went to the other end of the yard to bring a roll of roofing felt. They were going to use this material to seal the holes in the windows. The roofing felt had to be smuggled into the thermal power plant building secretly from the foreman and the informers who were monitoring the theft of building materials. The men stood the roll upright and, pressing it tightly with their bodies, carried it into the building. The work was in full swing, each prisoner worked with the thought - the more the brigade does, each member will receive a larger ration. Tyurin was a strict but fair foreman, under his leadership everyone received a well-deserved piece of bread.

Closer to lunch, the stove was built, the windows were covered with tar paper, and some of the workers even sat down to rest and warm their chilled hands by the fireplace. The men began to tease Shukhov that he had almost one foot in freedom. He was given a sentence of ten years. He has already served eight of them. Many of Ivan Denisovich’s comrades had to serve another twenty-five years.

Memories of the past

Shukhov began to remember how all this happened to him. He was imprisoned for treason against the Motherland. In February 1942, their entire army in the North-West was surrounded. Ammo and food ran out. So the Germans began to catch them all in the forests. And Ivan Denisovich was caught. He remained in captivity for a couple of days - five of him and his comrades escaped. When they reached their own, the submachine gunner killed three of them with his rifle. Shukhov and his friend survived, so they were immediately registered as German spies. Then the counterintelligence service beat me for a long time and forced me to sign all the papers. If I hadn’t signed, they would have killed me completely. Ivan Denisovich has already visited several camps. The previous ones were not strict security, but living there was even harder. At a logging site, for example, they were forced to complete the daily quota at night. So everything here is not so bad, Shukhov reasoned. To which one of his comrades, Fetyukov, objected that people were being slaughtered in this camp. So it’s clearly no better here than in domestic camps. Indeed, recently two informers and one poor worker were killed in the camp, apparently having mixed up their sleeping place. Strange things began to happen.

Prisoners' lunch

Suddenly the prisoners heard the whistle of the energy train, which meant it was time for lunch. Deputy foreman Pavlo called Shukhov and the youngest in the brigade, Gopchik, to take their places in the dining room.

The industrial canteen was a rough-hewn wooden building without a floor, divided into two parts. In one the cook was cooking porridge, in the other the prisoners were having lunch. Fifty grams of cereal were allocated per prisoner per day. But there were a lot of privileged categories who received a double portion: foremen, office workers, sixes, a medical instructor who supervised the preparation of food. As a result, the prisoners received very small portions, barely covering the bottom of the bowls. Shukhov was lucky that day. Counting the number of servings for the brigade, the cook hesitated. Ivan Denisovich, who helped Pavel count the bowls, gave the wrong number. The cook got confused and miscalculated. As a result, the crew ended up with two extra servings. But only the foreman could decide who would get them. Shukhov hoped in his heart that he would. In the absence of Tyurin, who was in the office, Pavlo commanded. He gave one portion to Shukhov, and the second to Buinovsky, who had given up a lot over the last month.

After eating, Ivan Denisovich went to the office and brought porridge to another member of the team who worked there. It was a film director named Caesar, he was a Muscovite, a wealthy intellectual and never wore clothes. Shukhov found him smoking a pipe and talking about art with some old man. Caesar took the porridge and continued the conversation. And Shukhov returned to the thermal power plant.

Memories of Tyurin

The foreman was already there. He gave his boys good rations for the week and was in a cheerful mood. The usually silent Tyurin began to remember his past life. I remembered how he was expelled from the Red Army in 1930 because his father was a kulak. How he made his way home on the stage, but didn’t find his father anymore; how he managed to escape from his home at night with his little brother. He handed that boy over to the gang and after that he never saw him again.

The prisoners listened to him attentively with respect, but it was time to get to work. They started working even before the bell rang, because before lunch they were busy setting up their workplace, and had not yet done anything to meet the norm. Tyurin decided that Shukhov would lay one wall with a cinder block, and assigned the friendly, somewhat deaf Senka Klevshin as his apprentice. They said that Klevshin escaped from captivity three times, and even went through Buchenwald. The foreman himself, together with Kildigs, undertook to lay the second wall. In the cold, the solution hardened quickly, so it was necessary to lay the cinder block quickly. The spirit of competition captured the men so much that the rest of the brigade barely had time to bring them the solution.

The 104th brigade worked so hard that it barely made it in time for the recount at the gate, which takes place at the end of the working day. Everyone was again lined up in fives and began to count with the gates closed. The second time they had to count it when they were open. There were supposed to be four hundred and sixty-three prisoners in total at the facility. But after three recounts it turned out to be only four hundred and sixty-two. The convoy ordered everyone to form into brigades. It turned out that the Moldovan from the thirty-second was missing. It was rumored that, unlike many other prisoners, he was a real spy. The foreman and assistant rushed to the site to look for the missing person, everyone else stood in the bitter cold, overwhelmed with anger at the Moldavian. It became clear that the evening was gone - nothing could be done on the territory before lights out. And there was still a long way to get to the barracks. But then three figures appeared in the distance. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief - they found it.

It turns out that the missing man was hiding from the foreman and fell asleep on the scaffolding. The prisoners began to vilify the Moldovan at all costs, but quickly calmed down, everyone already wanted to leave the industrial zone.

Hacksaw hidden in sleeve

Just before the bustle on duty, Ivan Denisovich agreed with director Caesar that he would go and take his turn at the parcel post. Caesar was from the rich - he received parcels twice a month. Shukhov hoped that for his service the young man would give him something to eat or smoke. Just before the search, Shukhov, out of habit, examined all his pockets, although he had no intention of bringing anything prohibited today. Suddenly, in the pocket on his knee, he discovered a piece of a hacksaw, which he had picked up in the snow at a construction site. In the heat of the moment he completely forgot about the find. And now it was a shame to throw away the hacksaw. She could bring him a salary or ten days in a punishment cell if found. At his own peril and risk, he hid the hacksaw in his mitten. And then Ivan Denisovich was lucky. The guard who was inspecting him was distracted. Before that, he had only managed to squeeze one mitten, but didn’t finish looking at the second one. Happy Shukhov rushed to catch up with his people.

Dinner in the zone

Having passed through all the numerous gates, the prisoners finally felt like “free people” - everyone rushed to go about their business. Shukhov ran to the line for parcels. He himself did not receive the parcels - he strictly forbade his wife to tear him away from the children. But still, his heart ached when one of his neighbors in the barracks received a parcel post. About ten minutes later Caesar appeared and allowed Shukhov to eat his dinner, and he himself took his place in line.

Inspired, Ivan Denisovich rushed into the dining room.
There, after the ritual of searching for free trays and a place at the tables, the one hundred and fourth finally sat down to dinner. The hot gruel pleasantly warmed the chilled bodies from the inside. Shukhov was thinking about what a successful day it had been - two servings at lunch, two in the evening. He didn’t eat the bread - he decided to hide it, and he also took Caesar’s rations with him. And after dinner, he rushed to the seventh barrack, he himself lived in the ninth, to buy a samosad from a Latvian. Having carefully fished out two rubles from under the lining of his padded jacket, Ivan Denisovich paid for the tobacco. After that, he hurriedly ran “home.” Caesar was already in the barracks. The dizzying smells of sausage and smoked fish wafted around his bunk. Shukhov did not stare at the gifts, but politely offered the director his ration of bread. But Caesar did not take the ration. Shukhov never dreamed of anything more. He climbed upstairs to his bunk to have time to hide the hacksaw before the evening formation. Caesar invited Buinovsky to tea; he felt sorry for the goner. They were sitting happily eating sandwiches when they came for the former hero. They did not forgive him for his morning prank - Captain Buinovsky went to the punishment cell for ten days. And then the check came. But Caesar did not have time to hand over his food to the storage room before the start of the inspection. Now he had two left to go out - either they would take him away during the recount, or they would sneak him out of bed if he left him. Shukhov felt sorry for the intellectual, so he whispered to him that Caesar would be the last one to go to the recount, and he would rush in the front row, and they would take turns guarding the gifts.

Reward for work

Everything turned out just fine. The capital's delicacies remained untouched. And Ivan Denisovich received several cigarettes, a couple of cookies and one slice of sausage for his efforts. He shared the cookies with Baptist Alyosha, who was his bunk neighbor, and ate the sausage himself. The meat tasted good in Shukhov's mouth. Smiling, Ivan Denisovich thanked God for another day. Today everything turned out well for him - he didn’t get sick, he didn’t end up in a punishment cell, he got some rations, and managed to buy a self-propelled gun. It was a good day. And in total Ivan Denisovich had three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days...

August 3, 2013 is the fifth anniversary of the death of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian writer, publicist, dissident and Nobel laureate. Russian writer, public figure, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk, into a Cossack family. The father, Isaac Semenovich, died hunting six months before the birth of his son. Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak - from the family of a wealthy landowner. In 1941, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University (enrolled in 1936).
In October 1941 he was drafted into the army. Awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd degree and the Red Star. For criticizing the actions of J.V. Stalin in personal letters to his childhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, Captain Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in forced labor camps. In 1962, in the magazine "New World", with the special permission of N.S. Khrushchev, the first story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was published - "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (the story "Shch-854" was redone at the request of the editors).
In November 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but refused to travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony, fearing that the authorities would not allow him back to the USSR. In 1974, after the publication of the book “The Gulag Archipelago” in Paris (in the USSR, one of the manuscripts was seized by the KGB in September 1973, and in December 1973 it was published in Paris), the dissident writer was arrested. On May 27, 1994, the writer returned to Russia, where he lived until his death in 2008.

Several unexpected facts from the life of the writer.

1. Solzhenitsyn entered literature under the erroneous patronymic “Isaevich”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's real middle name is Isaakievich. The writer's father, Russian peasant Isaac Solzhenitsyn, died hunting six months before the birth of his son. The mistake crept in when the future Nobel laureate was receiving his passport.
2. In elementary school, Sasha Solzhenitsyn was laughed at for wearing a cross and going to church.
3. Solzhenitsyn did not want to make literature his main specialty and therefore entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov State University. At the university he studied with excellent marks and received a Stalinist scholarship.
4. Solzhenitsyn was also attracted to the theatrical environment, so much so that in the summer of 1938 he went to take exams at the Moscow theater studio of Yu. A. Zavadsky, but failed.

5. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sent to a correctional camp because, while at the front, he wrote letters to friends in which he called Stalin a “godfather” who distorted “Leninist norms.”
6. In the camp, Solzhenitsyn fell ill with cancer. He was diagnosed with advanced seminoma, a malignant tumor of the gonads. The writer underwent radiation therapy, but he did not feel better. Doctors predicted three weeks to live, but Solzhenitsyn was healed. In the early 1970s, he had three sons.
7. While still at university, Solzhenitsyn began writing poetry. A collection of poetry called “Prussian Nights” was published in 1974 by the emigrant publishing house YMCA-press. 8. While in prison, Solzhenitsyn developed a method of memorizing texts using rosary beads. On one of the transfers, he saw Lithuanian Catholics making rosaries from soaked bread, colored black, red and white with burnt rubber, tooth powder or streptocide. Touching the knuckles of his rosary, Solzhenitsyn repeated poems and passages of prose. This made memorization go faster.
9. Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, who put a lot of effort into publishing Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” subsequently became disillusioned with Solzhenitsyn and spoke extremely negatively about his work “Cancer Ward.” Tvardovsky said to Solzhenitsyn to his face: “You have nothing sacred. Your bitterness is already harming your skill.” Mikhail Sholokhov also did not sympathize with the Nobel laureate, calling Solzhenitsyn’s work “morbid shamelessness.”
10. In 1974, for leaving the “GULAG Archipelago” abroad, Solzhenitsyn was accused of treason and expelled from the USSR. Sixteen years later he was restored to Soviet citizenship and awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR for the same “GULAG Archipelago”. A recording of Solzhenitsyn’s first interview after his expulsion has been preserved:

11. In 1998, he was awarded the highest order of Russia, but refused it with the wording: “I cannot accept the award from the supreme power that brought Russia to its current disastrous state.”
12. "Polyphonic novel" is Solzhenitsyn's favorite literary form. This is the name of a novel with exact signs of time and place of action, in which there is no main character. The most important character is the one who is caught up in the story in this chapter. Solzhenitsyn's favorite technique is the technique of “montage” of a traditional story with documentary materials.
13. In the Tagansky district of Moscow there is Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street. Until 2008, the street was called Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya, but was renamed. In order to do this, the law had to be changed to prohibit naming streets after a real person until ten years after that person's death.

Audiobook A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

Observer. Topic: A. Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". In the studio: A. Filippenko - actor, People's Artist of Russia; L. Saraskina - critic, literary critic; - B. Lyubimov - rector of the Higher Theater School named after M. S. Shchepkina.

Several quotes from A.I. Solzhenitsyn

Merciful to men, the war took them away. And she left the women to worry about it. ("Cancer Ward")

If you don't know how to use a minute, you will waste an hour, a day, and your whole life.

What is the most expensive thing in the world? It turns out: to realize that you are not participating in injustices. They are stronger than you, they were and will be, but let them not be through you. (“In the first circle”)

You are still there, Creator, in heaven. You endure for a long time, but you hit hard.

No matter how much we laugh at miracles, while we are strong, healthy and prosperous, but if life is so wedged, so flattened that only a miracle can save us, we believe in this only, exceptional miracle! ("Cancer Ward")

He is a wise man who is satisfied with little.

Work is like a stick, there are two ends to it: if you do it for people, give it quality, if you do it for the boss, give it show. ("One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich")

Art is not what, but how.

When the eyes incessantly and incessantly look into each other, a completely new quality appears: you will see something that does not open when sliding quickly. The eyes seem to lose their protective colored shell, and the whole truth is splashed out without words, they cannot hold it.

...one fool will ask so many questions that a hundred smart people will not be able to answer.

But humanity is valuable, after all, not for its looming quantity, but for its maturing quality.

There are two mysteries in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember; how I will die - I don’t know. ("Matrenin's Dvor")
Don’t be afraid of the bullet that whistles, if you hear it, it means it’s no longer hitting you. You won't hear the one bullet that will kill you.

There are many smart things in the world, but few good ones

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 Khrushchev Thaw, it was published and raised on 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 curriculum for literature.

On November 6, on the eve of the anniversary, Vladimir Putin received the writer’s widow, Natalya Solzhenitsyn, who shared her concern about the reduction in the number of hours allocated in the school curriculum for the study of literature.

The TV report included Solzhenitsyn’s phrases that “without knowledge of history and literature, a person walks like a lame” and “unconsciousness is a disease of a weak person, and a weak society, and a weak state.” 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 research, and even carried out at the risk of his life. Most of his literary works today, to put it mildly, are not read.

But the first attempt at writing, “One Day,” turned out to be extremely successful. This story amazes with its colorful characters and rich language and is broken down into quotes.

The author and his hero

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a mathematics teacher by training, an artillery captain in the war, was arrested in East Prussia by SMERSH in February 1945. The censor illustrated his letter to a friend who fought on another front, containing some critical remark about the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

The future writer, in his words, who dreamed of literature since his school years, after interrogations at Lubyanka received eight years in prison, which he served first in the 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.

While 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 someone who is buried alive then lives a long time. Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89, and not from cancer, but from heart failure.

The idea for “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.

“One long winter camp day I was carrying a stretcher with my partner and thought: how to describe our entire camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest worker. And there is no need to even force it some kind of horrors, it doesn’t need to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day from which years are made up. I thought like this, and this idea remained in my mind, I haven’t thought about it for nine years. touched it and only nine years later sat down and wrote,” he later recalled.

“I didn’t write it for long at all,” admitted Solzhenitsyn. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and it’s not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only you fight off excess material, just so that the excess does not fit, but to accommodate the most necessary things.”

In an interview in 1976, Solzhenitsyn returned to this idea: “It is enough to collect everything in one day, as if in fragments; it is enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be.”

Solzhenitsyn made the main character the Russian peasant, soldier and prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

The day from getting up to lights out turned out well for him, and “Shukhov fell asleep, completely satisfied.” The tragedy lay in the last meager phrase: “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...”

Tvardovsky and Khrushchev

The story owed its meeting with readers to two people: the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, and Nikita Khrushchev.

A 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 felt a kindred spirit in the author of Terkin. In his autobiographical book “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” he noted “the peasant delicacy that allowed him to stop before any lie at the last millimeter, never crossed this millimeter, nowhere! - that’s why the miracle happened!”

“But behind the poetic significance of Tvardovsky today it is not that he is forgotten, but to many it seems that his significance as the editor of the best literary and social magazine of the last century is no longer so significant. Of course, the significance of “New World” is broader than Solzhenitsyn’s publication alone. It was a powerful educational magazine, which opened for us military prose, the “villagers,” which published the best examples of Western literature possible. It was a magazine of new criticism, which, unlike the criticism of the 30s, did not separate “sheep” from “goats,” but spoke about life and literature.” , writes modern literary historian Pavel Basinsky.

“Two magazines in the history of Russia bear the author’s name - “Sovremennik” by Nekrasov and “New World” by Tvardovsky. Both had both a brilliant and bitterly sad fate. Both were beloved, the most precious brainchild of two great and very related Russian poets, and both became their personal tragedies, the most severe defeats in life, which undoubtedly brought their death closer,” he points out.

On November 10, 1961, Solzhenitsyn, through Raisa Orlova, the wife of his cellmate in the sharashka, Lev Kopelev, handed over the manuscript of One Day to the editor of the prose department of the New World, Anna Berzer. 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 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 his suit and continued reading while sitting.

“The strongest impression of the last 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 author’s first meeting with the editors of Novy Mir took place. Solzhenitsyn considered his work a story and initially entitled it “Shch-854. One day of one prisoner.” “Novomirtsy” proposed to slightly change the title and “for weight” to consider the story a story.

Tvardovsky showed the manuscript to Chukovsky, Marshak, Fedin, Paustovsky, and Ehrenburg.

Korney Chukovsky called his review “A Literary Miracle”: “Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, “evil-willed,” hardy, a jack of all trades, crafty - and kind. Brother of Vasily Terkin. The story is written in HIS language, full of humor, colorful and apt."

Tvardovsky understood the censorship impediment of “Ivan Denisovich,” but on the eve of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev was preparing to make a decision to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum, he felt that the moment had come.

On August 6, he handed over the manuscript and a covering letter to Khrushchev’s assistant Vladimir Lebedev, which contained the words: “The author’s name has not been known to anyone until now, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names in our literature. If you find the 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 stated that he did not understand how someone could like a thing like “Ivan Denisovich”.

“I know at least one person who read it and liked it,” Tvardovsky replied.

If Tvardovsky had not been the editor-in-chief of the magazine, this story would not have been published. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in 1962, was 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 Novy Mir with the story was printed and began to be distributed throughout the country. The circulation was 96,900 copies, but, at the direction of Khrushchev, it was increased by 25 thousand. A few months later, the story was republished by Roman Newspaper (700 thousand copies) and as 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 absolutely 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 there at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had been in Stalin had not attacked this moment one more time - the publication of my story in the Soviet Union in 1962 would also not have been published.

Solzhenitsyn considered it a great victory that his story was published for the first time in the USSR, and not in the West.

“You can see from the reaction of Western socialists: if it had been published in the West, these same socialists would have said: it’s all a lie, none of this happened. It was only because everyone lost their tongues that it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, this was shocking,” - he told the BBC.

The editors and censors made a number of comments, some of which the author agreed with.

“The funniest thing for me, a Stalin hater, is that at least once it was necessary to name Stalin as the culprit of the disaster. 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 was alone. I made this concession: I mentioned the “mustachioed old man” 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 implausible, in his opinion, episode in which Shukhov experiences joy from his forced labor.

Solzhenitsyn immediately became a celebrity.

You can live “better and more fun” when conditional “prisoners” work for you. But when the whole country saw this “prisoner” in the person of Ivan Denisovich, it sobered up and realized: you can’t live like that! Pavel Basinsky, literary historian

“From all over Russia, letters to me exploded, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted on meeting me and telling me, and I began to meet. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, yet to describe this entire camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and brought me the missing material. So I collected indescribable material that could not be collected in the Soviet Union - only thanks to “Ivan Denisovich.” "So it became a pedestal for the Gulag Archipelago," he recalled.

Some wrote on the envelopes: “Moscow, New World magazine, to Ivan Denisovich,” and the mail arrived.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of the story, it was republished in the form of a two-volume book: the first book included herself, and the second - letters that had lain under wraps for half a century in the archives of the New World.

“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 selling Khor and Kalinich like pigs, you see, is no longer possible. You can live “better and more fun” when conditional “prisoners” work for you. But when the whole country saw this “prisoner” in the person of Ivan Denisovich, it 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 a book that Khrushchev himself approved, and they found fault with the fact that previously only novels, and not “works of small forms,” were awarded the highest award.

Butting with oak

After Khrushchev's removal, other winds began to blow.

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.”

“In fact, comrades, no one has yet taken a party position regarding Ivan Denisovich’s book,” Brezhnev was indignant, confusing the hero and the author.

“When Khrushchev was in charge, enormous harm was done to us in our ideological work. We corrupted the intelligentsia. And how much we argued and how much we talked about Ivan Denisovich! But he supported all this camp literature!” - said Mikhail Suslov.

Solzhenitsyn was made to understand that he could fit into the system if he would forget about the “topic of repression” and start writing about village life or something else. But he continued to secretly collect materials for the Gulag Archipelago, meeting with approximately three hundred former camp inmates and exiles over several years.

Even dissidents at that time demanded respect for human rights, but did not attack the Soviet regime as such. The protests were held under the slogan: “Respect your constitution!”

Solzhenitsyn was the first, indirectly in “One Day” and directly in “Archipelago,” to say that it was not just Stalin that was at issue, that the communist regime was criminal from the moment it arose and remains so, that, by and large, the “Leninist guard” had suffered historical justice.

Solzhenitsyn had his own destiny, he did not want, and objectively could not, sacrifice the “Archipelago” even for the sake of Tvardovsky Pavel Basinsky

According to some researchers, Solzhenitsyn single-handedly won a historic victory over the all-powerful Soviet state. There were many supporters in the party leadership of an official review of the decisions of the 20th Congress and the rehabilitation of Stalin, but the publication of “Archipelago” in Paris in December 1973 became 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. Every day, newspapers published letters from “Soviet writers” and “ordinary workers” with the leitmotif: “I have not read this book, but I am deeply outraged by it!”

Using quotes taken out of context, Solzhenitsyn was accused of sympathizing with Nazism and labeled him a “literary Vlasovite.”

For many citizens, this had the opposite effect to what was desired: it means that the Soviet government has become different if a person, while in Moscow, openly declares that he does not like it, and is still alive!

A joke 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 uncontrollable writer was discussed for a long time at the highest level. Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin demanded that he be given a prison sentence. In a note to Brezhnev, Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Shchelokov called for “not executing enemies, but strangling them in our arms.” In the end, the point of view of KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov prevailed.

On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and the next day he was deprived of 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.”

Soon after this, all editions of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were removed from libraries. The surviving copies cost 200 rubles on the black market - one and a half monthly salaries of the average Soviet worker.

On the day of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, all his works were officially banned by a special order from Glavlit. The ban was lifted on December 31, 1988.

Suslov spoke in the spirit that if he were removed from his job immediately, “he will now leave as a hero.”

They began to create unbearable conditions for Tvardovsky and harass him with nagging. Army libraries stopped checking out “New World” - this was a signal clear to everyone.

The head of the cultural department of the Central Committee, Vasily Shauro, told the chairman of the board of the Writers' Union, Georgy Markov: “All conversations with him and your actions should push Tvardovsky to leave the magazine.”

Tvardovsky turned to Brezhnev, Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev and other superiors many times, asking for clarification of his position, but received evasive answers.

In February 1970, the exhausted Tvardovsky resigned as editor. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “The New World team was dispersed after his departure.

Solzhenitsyn was subsequently reproached for the fact that, by refusing to compromise, he “set up” Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, which had done so much for him.

According to Pavel Basinsky, “Solzhenitsyn had his own destiny; he did not want, and objectively could not, sacrifice the Archipelago even for the sake of Tvardovsky.”

In turn, Solzhenitsyn, in his book “The Calf Butted an Oak,” published in the West in 1975, paid tribute to Tvardovsky, but criticized the rest of the “Novomirtsy” for the fact that, as he believed, they “did not put up courageous resistance and did not make personal sacrifices.” ".

According to him, “the death of the New World was devoid of beauty, since it did not contain even the smallest attempt at public struggle.”

“The ungenerosity of his memory stunned me,” Tvardovsky’s former deputy, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in an article sent abroad.

Eternal dissident

While in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn, in an interview with the American television channel CBS, called modern history “the story of America’s selfless generosity and the ingratitude of the whole world.”

However, having settled in Vermont, he did not 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.” I would not wish such blessed silence on an enemy! We are already hearing voices: “Give up Korea, and we will live quietly.” Give up Portugal, give up Israel , give back Taiwan, give back ten more African countries, just give us the opportunity to live in peace. Give us the opportunity to drive in our wide cars on our beautiful roads. Give us the opportunity to play tennis and golf in peace. Give us the opportunity to mix cocktails in peace, as we are accustomed 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 did not completely lose interest in Solzhenitsyn, but began to treat him as an eccentric with an old-fashioned beard and overly radical views.

After August 1991, the majority of political emigrants of the Soviet period welcomed the changes in Russia and began to willingly come to Moscow, but preferred to live in the comfortable, stable West.

Solzhenitsyn, one of the few, returned to his homeland.

He framed his visit, in the words of ironic journalists, 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 air and order

The hope of becoming a national prophet like Leo Tolstoy did not come true. The Russians were concerned with current problems, and not with global issues of existence. A society that had enjoyed information freedom and pluralism of opinions was not inclined to accept anyone as an indisputable authority. They listened to Solzhenitsyn respectfully, but were in no hurry to follow his instructions.

The author's program on Russian television was soon closed: according to Solzhenitsyn, guided by political considerations; according to television people, because it began to repeat itself and lost ratings.

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 his messianism, ponderous seriousness, inflated claims, arrogant moralizing, ambiguous attitude towards democracy and individualism, and passion for archaic ideas of monarchy and community. But, in the end, every person, and even more so on Solzhenitsyn’s scale, has the right to his own non-trivial opinion.

All this became a thing of the past 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 an optional eternity anyway.”