What is the duration of action in the work Gulag Archipelago. Genre specificity of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s epic
According to Solzhenitsyn, he understands life more than other comrades, including not only Caesar (an involuntary and sometimes voluntary accomplice of Stalin’s “Caesarism”), but also the captain
and the foreman, and Alyoshka - a Baptist - all the characters in the story, Ivan Denisovich himself, with his simple peasant mind, peasant intelligence, clear practical view of the world, Solzhenitsyn, of course, is aware that there is no need to expect or demand understanding from Shukhov historical events intellectual generalizations at the level of his own study of the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich has a different philosophy of life, but this is also a philosophy that has absorbed and generalized his long camp experience, difficult historical experience Soviet history. In the person of the quiet and patient Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recreated the image of the Russian people, almost symbolic in its generality, capable of enduring unprecedented suffering, deprivation, bullying of the communist regime, the yoke Soviet power and the criminal chaos of the Archipelago and, in spite of everything, survive in this “tenth circle” of hell. And at the same time maintain kindness towards people, humanity, condescension towards human weaknesses and intolerance to moral vices.
One day of the hero Solzhenitsyn, running before the gaze of the shocked reader, grows to the limits of an entire human life, to the scale people's fate, to symbol an entire era in the history of Russia. “A day passed, unclouded, almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his period from bell to bell. Because leap years- three extra days were added..."
Solzhenitsyn even then, if he didn’t know, then had a presentiment: the time frame imposed on the country by the Bolshevik Party was coming to an end. And for the sake of approaching this hour, it was worth fighting, regardless of any personal sacrifices.
It all started with the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”... With the presentation of a simple peasant’s view of the Gulag. Maybe if Solzhenitsyn had started by publishing his intellectual view of the camp experience (for example, in the spirit of his early novel“In the first circle”), nothing would have worked out for him. The truth about the Gulag would not have seen the light of day in its homeland for a long time; foreign publications would probably have preceded domestic ones (if they had turned out to be possible at all), and “The Gulag Archipelago,” with a stream of confidential letters and stories that formed the basis of Solzhenitsyn’s research, began precisely after the publication of “One Day” in Novy Mir. .. The whole history of our country would probably have turned out differently if “Ivan Denisovich” had not appeared in the November 1962 issue of Tvardovsky’s magazine. Solzhenitsyn later wrote about this in his “essays literary life““A calf butted with an oak tree”: “I won’t say that this is an exact plan, but I had a correct guess and presentiment: the top man Alexander Tvardovsky and the top man Nikita Khrushchev cannot remain indifferent to this man Ivan Denisovich. And so it came true: not even poetry and not even politics decided the fate of my story, but this is its down-to-earth peasant essence, so much ridiculed, trampled and reviled among us since the Great Turning Point.”
Conclusion
Quite a bit of time has passed since the breakup Soviet Union, which marked the final collapse totalitarian state, created by Lenin and Stalin, and the times of outlawing have receded into the deep and, it seems, irrevocable past. The word “anti-Soviet” has lost its ominous and culturally fatal meaning. However, the word “Soviet” has not lost its meaning to this day. All this is natural and understandable: with all its turns and fractures, history does not change immediately, eras “layer on each other, and such transitional periods of history are usually filled with intense struggle, intense disputes, the collision of the old, trying to hold on, and the new, conquering semantic territories What is it not a pity to part with, and what is dangerous to lose, to lose irretrievably? cultural values turned out to be true, stood the test of time, and which ones were imaginary, false, forcibly imposed on society, the people, the intelligentsia?
At that time, it seemed that the victory of the tyrannical centralized state over literature and the artistic intelligentsia was complete. The repressive and punitive system worked flawlessly in every single case of spiritual opposition and dissent, depriving the offender of freedom, livelihood, and peace of mind. However, internal freedom of spirit and responsibility to the word did not allow keeping silent reliable facts stories carefully hidden from the majority of the population.
The strength of “oppositional” Soviet literature did not lie in the fact that it called for “resistance to evil by force.” Its strength lies in the gradual but inexorable shaking from within the very foundations of the totalitarian system, in the slow but inevitable decomposition of the fundamental dogmas, ideological principles, ideals of totalitarianism, in the consistent destruction of faith in the impeccability of the chosen path, the set goals of social development used to achieve the means; in a subtle but nevertheless effective exposure of the cult of communist leaders. As Solzhenitsyn wrote: “I am not hopeful that you will want to kindly delve into considerations that have not been requested by you in your service, although a rather rare compatriot who is not on the ladder subordinate to you cannot be dismissed by you from his post, nor demoted, nor promoted, nor awarded. I am not hopeful, but I am trying to briefly say the main thing here: what I consider salvation and good for our people, to which you and I all belong by birth. And I am writing this letter in the ASSUMPTION that they are subject to the same primary care and you, that you are not alien to your origin, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and native spaces, that you are not without nationality.”
At that moment, Solzhenitsyn was mistaken about the “leaders of the Soviet Union,” just as all the writers of “other” Soviet literature who preceded him were mistaken about them with letters and articles, essays and poems, stories. In Solzhenitsyn they could only see an enemy, a subversive element, a “literary Vlasovite,” i.e. traitor to the Motherland, in best case scenario- schizophrenic. Even on a common national basis between the “leaders” and a dissident writer, the leader of the invisible spiritual opposition to the ruling regime, there was nothing in common.
As another Protestant of our time and a fighter against Soviet tyranny, Academician A.D. Sakharov, wrote about Solzhenitsyn: “Solzhenitsyn’s special, exceptional role in the spiritual history of the country is associated with an uncompromising, accurate and deep coverage of the suffering of people and the crimes of the regime, unheard of in their mass cruelty and concealment. This role of Solzhenitsyn was very clearly manifested already in his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and now in the great book “The Gulag Archipelago”, before which I bow.” "Solzhenitsyn is a giant in the struggle for human dignity in today's tragic world."
Solzhenitsyn, who single-handedly overthrew communism in the USSR and exposed the “GULAG Archipelago” as the core of a misanthropic system, was free from it. Free to think, feel, worry with everyone who has been in the repressive machine. Having made a structural composition from the fate of a simple prisoner Ivan Denisovich to the scale of the country, represented by single islands connected by “sewage pipes”, human lives and the general way of life, the author thereby predetermines our attitude towards the main character - towards the Archipelago. Having been the first and last initiator of a new literary genre, called the “experience of artistic research,” Solzhenitsyn was able to to some extent bring the problems of public morality closer to such a distance that the line between man and non-man is clearly visible. Using the example of just one character - Ivan Denisovich, it is shown that the main feature inherent in the Russian person, which helped to find and not cross this line - fortitude, self-confidence, the ability to get out of any situation - this is the stronghold that helps to stay in the immense ocean of violence and lawlessness. Thus, one day of a prisoner, who personified the fate of millions like him, became the long history of our state, where “violence has nothing to hide behind except lies, and lies has nothing to resist except violence.” Having once chosen this path as our ideological line, our leadership unwittingly chose lies as the principle by which we lived long years. But it is possible for writers and artists to defeat the universal mask of untruth. “A lie can stand against many things in the world, but not against art.” These words from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture perfectly suit his entire work. As one famous Russian proverb says: “One word of truth will conquer the whole world.” And indeed, monumental artistic research caused a resonance in public consciousness. A prisoner of the Gulag, who became a writer in order to tell the world and his homeland about the inhuman system of violence and lies: in his person, Russian culture discovered the source of its revival, new vital forces. And remembering his feat is our universal duty, for we have no right to forget and not know him.
Only in May 1994, 20 years after his expulsion from Russia, did Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn return to his homeland. So what scared the then Soviet leadership in 1974? It seems to me that, first of all, the meaning of the seven lines at the beginning of “The Gulag Archipelago”: “In this book there are no fictitious persons, no fictitious events. People and places are named by them proper names. If they are named by initials, it is for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has not preserved names - but everything was exactly like that...” Was it necessary to fantasize, to invent something for a person who spent eleven years on the islands of this terrible archipelago? In February 1945, twenty-seven-year-old artillery captain and order bearer Sasha Solzhenitsyn was arrested due to censorship of criticism of Stalin in his letters and sentenced to eight years, of which he served almost a year during the investigation, three in a prison research institute (it was useful to finish in Rostov -on-Don Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University) and spent four of the most difficult ones on general works in the political Special Security. Plus three years in exile in Kazakhstan, after which he was rehabilitated by a decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1957.
I read the first pages of “Archipelago...” from the chapter “Arrest” simply with curiosity: it was interesting to know how they “took” then, fifty extra years ago: “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested, there was a coffin in the room with his just deceased child. The lawyers threw the child out of the coffin: they looked there too.” Or here’s another: “Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, once got two tickets from the Comintern Grand Theatre, in the first rows. Investigator Kliegel courted her, and she invited him. They spent the whole performance very tenderly, and after that he took her... straight to the Lubyanka.”
There is still room for irony here. While preparing “Archipelago...” Solzhenitsyn became acquainted with the memories of someone who escaped during Patriotic War from the Archipelago to the mainland of the literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik, where there is an episode of his meeting in 1938 in Butyrki with the former prosecutor general of the country Krylenko. He sent tens of thousands to the Gulag, and now he himself finds himself under the bunk. And Solzhenitsyn ironizes: “I imagine very vividly (I climbed myself): the bunks there are so low that you can only crawl on your bellies along the dirty asphalt floor, but a beginner will not immediately adapt and crawls on all fours. He sticks his head in, but his protruding butt remains outside. I think it was especially difficult for the Supreme Prosecutor to adapt, and his not yet emaciated butt stuck out for a long time to the glory of Soviet justice. Sinful man, with gloating I imagine this stuck ass, and throughout the long description of these processes, he somehow calms me down.” And this image of Krylenko’s ass is etched into the memory, like the tight thighs of Napoleon from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
But the further narration makes my heart sink. Solzhenitsyn lists the simplest techniques that grind the will and personality of a prisoner without leaving traces on his body: “18. Forcing a defendant to kneel is not some kind of figuratively, but directly: on your knees and so that you don’t sit on your heels, but keep your back straight. In the investigator's office or in the corridor, you can make him stand like that for 12 hours, and 24, and 48... Who is good to stand like that? Already broken, already inclined to give up. It’s good to put women this way. Ivanov-Razumnik reports on a variant of this method: after putting young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the investigator urinated in his face! And what. Not taken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. This means that it works well on the proud too...”
The longest and most depressing part of the book is about the extermination camps. Especially the pages about women, politics, minors, repeaters, the camp world and places of especially strict imprisonment. That is why the thoughts of those who miraculously escaped from these places are so dear. It is amazing that even there, in prison, people were thinking about something, somehow reasoning. Let’s take the inherently surprising definition of the intelligentsia that Solzhenitsyn gives precisely in this part: “Over the years, I had to think about this word - intelligentsia. We all really like to consider ourselves one of them - but not everyone is... Everyone who does not work (and is afraid to work) with their hands began to be classified as the intelligentsia.” Solzhenitsyn continues: “... if we do not want to lose this concept, we should not exchange it. An intellectual is not determined by his professional affiliation or occupation. Good parenting And good family They also don’t necessarily raise an intellectual yet. An intellectual is one whose interests and will to the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not forced by external circumstances and even in spite of them. The intellectual is the one. whose thought is not imitative.”
In Solzhenitsyn's epic, one can also feel a glimmer of hope for some light in the leaden veil of clouds. After the war, when millions of Soviet people walked across Europe and looked at freedom and democracy, this ray of light in the dark kingdom of the Gulag is already breaking through at every stop. The writer met an unnamed Russian old woman at the Torbeevo station, when the prison car accidentally stopped at the station platform. “An old peasant woman stopped in front of our window with the frame down and through the window bars... for a long time, motionless, she looked at us, tightly squeezed on the top shelf. She looked with that eternal look with which our people always looked at the “unlucky ones.” Rare tears flowed down her cheeks. The gnarled one stood there and looked as if her son was lying between us. “You can’t look, mother,” the guard told her rudely. She didn't even move her head. And next to her stood a girl of about ten years old with white ribbons in her pigtails. She looked very sternly, even mournfully beyond her years, opening her eyes wide and wide and not blinking. She looked so hard that I think she photographed us forever. The train moved gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and earnestly, slowly crossed us.”
Finished reading the novel. And I believe, despite its oppressive tension, that as long as there are old women who believe in God and girls who remember everything, the new Gulag will not pass... And Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel will remain only beautiful literary monument to his victims.
Solzhenitsyn forces every reader to imagine himself as a “native” of the Archipelago - suspected, arrested, interrogated, tortured. Prisoners of prisons and camps... Anyone is inevitably imbued with the unnatural, perverted psychology of a person, disfigured by terror, even by the shadow of terror hanging over him, by fear; gets used to the role of a real and potential prisoner. Reading and disseminating Solzhenitsyn's research is a terrible secret; it attracts, attracts, but also burns, infects, forms the author’s like-minded people, recruits more and more opponents of the inhumane regime, its irreconcilable opponents, fighters against it, and therefore more and more of its victims, future prisoners of the Gulag (until he exists, lives, hungers for new “streams”, this terrible Archipelago). And the Gulag Archipelago is not some other world: the boundaries between “that” and “this” world are ephemeral, blurred; it's one space! “We rushed happily along the long crooked street of our life or wandered unhappily past some fences - rotten, wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast iron fences. We didn't think - what's behind them? We didn’t try to look behind them either with our eyes or with our minds - and that’s where the Gulag country begins, very close by, two meters from us. And we also did not notice in these fences the myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. All, all of these were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly swung open, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, grabbed us by the hand, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they dragged us like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate into our past life , slammed forever. All. You are under arrest! And there’s nothing you can answer to this other than lamb bleach: Me-ah?? For what??.. That’s what an arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and blow, from which the present immediately shifts into the past, and the impossible becomes a full-fledged present.” Solzhenitsyn shows what irreversible, pathological changes occur in the consciousness of an arrested person. What kind of moral, political, aesthetic principles or beliefs! They are finished almost at the same moment when you move to the “other” space - on the other side of the nearest fence with barbed wire. Particularly striking and catastrophic is the change in the consciousness of a person brought up in classical traditions - sublime, idealistic ideas about the future and what is proper, moral and beautiful, honest and just. From the world of dreams and noble illusions, you immediately find yourself in a world of cruelty, unprincipledness, dishonesty, ugliness, dirt, violence, criminality: in a world where you can survive only by voluntarily accepting its ferocious, wolfish laws; into a world where being a human is not supposed to be, even mortally dangerous, and not being a human means to break down forever, stop respecting yourself, reduce yourself to the level of the scum of society and treat yourself the same way. To let the reader understand the inevitable changes with him , to experience more deeply the contrast between dreams and reality, A.I. Solzhenitsyn deliberately suggests remembering the ideals and moral principles pre-October " silver age“- this is how to better understand the meaning of the psychological, social, cultural, ideological revolution that took place. “Nowadays, former prisoners, and even just people of the 60s, may not be surprised by the story about Solovki. But let the reader imagine himself as a man of Chekhov’s or after Chekhov’s Russia, a man of the Silver Age of our culture, as the 1910s were called, brought up there, well, let him be shocked civil war, - but still accustomed to people’s food, clothing, and mutual verbal communication...” And so that same “man of the Silver Age” suddenly plunges into a world where people are dressed in gray camp rags or in sacks, have a bowl of gruel and four hundred, or maybe three hundred, or even a hundred grams of bread for food (!); and communication - swearing and thieves' jargon. "Fantasy world!". This is an external breakdown. And the inner one is cooler. Start with the accusation. “In 1920, as Ehrenburg recalls, the Cheka posed the question to him like this: “Prove that you are not an agent of Wrangel.” And in 1950, one of the prominent lieutenant colonels of the MGB, Foma Fomich Zheleznov, announced to the prisoners: “We will not bother to prove his guilt to him (the arrested person). Let him prove to us that he had no hostile intentions.” And in between, countless memories of millions fit into this simple straight line. What an acceleration and simplification of the consequences, unknown to previous humanity! A caught rabbit, shaking and pale, not having the right to write to anyone, call anyone on the phone, bring anything from the outside, deprived of sleep, food, paper, pencil and even buttons, seated on a bare stool in the corner of the office, must find it himself and lay it out in front of the bum - the investigator proves that he had no hostile intentions! And if he didn’t look for them (and where could he get them), then he thereby brought to the investigation approximate evidence of his guilt!” But this is only the beginning of the breakdown of consciousness. Here is the next stage of self-degradation. Giving up oneself, one’s beliefs, one’s consciousness of one’s innocence (hard!). It wouldn't be so hard! - Solzhenitsyn sums up, - yes, it’s unbearable to the human heart: having fallen under your own ax - justify it. And here is the next step of degradation. “All the firmness of the imprisoned faithful was enough only to destroy the traditions of political prisoners. They shunned dissident fellow prisoners, hid from them, whispered about terrible consequences so that non-party people or Socialist Revolutionaries would not hear - “don’t give them material against the party!” And finally - the last one (for the “ideological”!): to help the party in its fight against enemies, at least at the cost of the lives of their comrades, including their own: the party is always right! (Article 58, paragraph 12 “On failure to report in any of the acts described under the same article, but in paragraphs 1-11” had no upper limit!! This paragraph was already such a comprehensive expansion that it did not require further. Knew and did not say - no matter what you did yourself!). “And what way out did they find for themselves? - Solzhenitsyn sneers. - What effective solution did their revolutionary theory suggest to them? Their decision is worth all their explanations! Here it is: the more they plant, the sooner those at the top will realize the mistake! And therefore - try to name as many names as possible! Give as much fantastic evidence against the innocent as possible! The whole party won't be arrested! (But Stalin didn’t need everything, he only needed a head and long-serving employees.).” And the camp prisoners, meeting them, these true-believing communists, these “well-meaning orthodoxies,” these real “Soviet people,” “say to them with hatred: “Over there, in the wild, you are us, here we will be you!” "Loyalty? - asks the author of “Archipelago”. - And in our opinion: at least a stake on your head. These adherents of the theory of development saw loyalty to their development in the renunciation of any personal development.” And this, Solzhenitsyn is convinced, is not only the misfortune of the communists, but also their direct fault. And the main fault is in self-justification, in justifying the native party and the native Soviet government, in removing from everyone, including Lenin and Stalin, responsibility for the Great Terror, for state terrorism as the basis of one’s policy, for the bloodthirsty theory of class struggle, which makes the destruction of “enemies” , violence is a normal, natural phenomenon of social life.
T.V. Telitsyn
Attention to imagery in the structure of “The Gulag Archipelago” is determined primarily by the author’s definition of the genre of this book - “an experience in artistic research.” A.I. Solzhenitsyn explains it this way: “This is something other than rational research. For rational research, almost everything was destroyed: witnesses died, documents were destroyed. What I managed to do in “Archipelago,” which, fortunately, has influence throughout the world, was accomplished using a qualitatively different method than the rational and intellectual method.” “Where science lacks statistics, tables and documents, artistic method allows you to make a generalization based on particular cases. From this point of view, artistic research not only does not replace scientific research, but also surpasses it in its capabilities.”
The author consciously uses a method close to artistic in the knowledge of real events, based on intuition, the creative capabilities of the artist, who in a particular case is able to see the general, typical. “Artistic research is the use of factual (not transformed) life material in such a way that from individual facts, fragments, united, however, by the artist’s capabilities, the general idea would emerge with complete evidence, in no way weaker than in scientific research.”
Artistic research, according to the author, is not internally contradictory. The interaction of two different methods of understanding reality, research and art, suggests, at first glance, the destruction of one of them. In fact, there is a complementarity of one method with another, and therefore, one system of structural elements embodying this method with another. Created special type a story in which artistic origin acts as a continuation of the research, and the research grows out of the artistic. Therefore, it is especially important to analyze the figurative system of the “GULAG Archipelago” - an artistic and journalistic work, since, first of all, the artistic method is realized at the figurative level of its structure.
The main factor shaping the structure of this work, is a journalistic idea, the proof of which organizes the text into a single whole. This journalistic idea is so deep and multifaceted that the author did not express it in finished form anywhere in the work. Throughout the book, it develops, becomes more precise, and acquires new shades. In order for the reader to correctly understand the main idea, the author builds a complex system of proof. This system also includes imagery. It becomes an integral part of the structure of the text of the work. This is especially clearly visible when examining it linearly.
Already in the introduction a figurative impulse is given to the entire further narrative, and in the 1st chapter the main types of figurativeness are outlined.
The fact reported in an article from the journal “Nature” about how, during excavations on the Kolyma River, fish or newt meat was found in a lens of ice and then eaten by those present, is almost neutral in vocabulary. And it would not have attracted much reader attention if the author’s ironic modality had not been expressed in the presentation. She plays special role and is concentrated in the beginning, commentary and conclusion.
“In the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine” - this fairy-tale beginning contrasts with the subsequent presentation of the content, neutral in modality. In the course of the narrative, an ironic author's remark appears - “the learned correspondent testified.” The modality of vocabulary in the next paragraph emphasizes the incorrectness of the reader’s conclusions after reading the note, which was that the magazine surprised readers with the fish meat it found.
In the phrase that concludes the message, the correct logical emphasis is placed thanks to the author’s irony: “But few of them could heed the true heroic meaning of the careless note.”
The modality of the final phrase raises two questions for the reader: 1. What is the true heroic meaning of the note?
2. What is the carelessness of the note? What did she let out?
The author's ironic message about the note and its content already prepares the reader for the opposite, hidden meaning. Readers did not solve it because they were amazed at the freshness of the fish meat, but, in the author’s opinion, those who ate the fish meat should have attracted attention. These are those present at the excavations.
To focus the reader's attention on the “those present,” the author in the third paragraph creates a picture of eating fish meat. It is exaggerated, the burden of action is accelerated, as if in slow motion, the modality of the vocabulary is clearly expressed:
“We immediately understood. We saw the whole scene vividly down to the smallest detail: how those present chopped the ice with fierce haste; how, trampling on the lofty interests of ichthyology and pushing each other away with their elbows, they beat off pieces of thousand-year-old meat, dragged it to the fire, thawed it and ate it.”
The answer is given to the reader in the fourth paragraph. These present were “the only powerful tribe of prisoners on earth, which carried out excavations on the Kolyma River, and only the prisoners could willingly eat the newt.
Superphrasal unity consisting of four paragraphs in semantically completed, linked thematic vocabulary. In three paragraphs the word present is repeated, and in the fourth, logical emphasis is placed on it. In the first and fourth, the expressions are repeated: willingly ate them (1st), willingly eat the newt (4th), as if bordering a superphrasal unity. (Repetitions are a sign of special authorial attention.) The third word - zeki - acts as an answer to the question: what is the “heroic” meaning of a careless note? The fact that she told about the prisoners.
And Kolyma no longer became just a place where frozen newt meat was found, but a place where a “mighty tribe of prisoners” lived.
The fifth paragraph is dedicated to Kolyma, represented by the following verbal images: Kolyma - “the largest and most famous island”, Kolyma - “the pole of cruelty of this amazing Gulag country, torn apart by geography into an archipelago, but by psychology shackled into a continent - an almost invisible, almost intangible country, which and inhabited by a people of prisoners.”
The image of the Archipelago - as a country of prisoners - logically arises from the author's reasoning about the article in the newspaper. It appears not just as a metaphor, but as a logically explained metaphor. The fact that the archipelago becomes a truly figurative version of the idea of the location of the camps in the USSR is confirmed by the further disclosure of its essence as a whole indivisible being, with its own character, its own psychology, its own way of life.
In the following paragraphs - the answer to the question, what is the negligence of the note. It is that it was not customary to talk about the country of the Gulag Archipelago. Historical changes in the country lifted the veil of secrecy over the Archipelago, but “insignificant things” came to light. The author understands that time carries away the signs of the Archipelago: “During this time, other islands trembled, spread out, the polar sea of oblivion splashes over them.”
The image of the Archipelago arose from logical reasoning, documentary material and associative comparison. This feature is characteristic of journalistic works, where imagery is closely related to the logic of reasoning and often arises as thought develops.
The very introduction to the book makes it clear that this is not just a study of the amazing and cruel country of the Archipelago - it is a journalistic study. The last two paragraphs define the task facing the author: “I do not dare to write the history of the Archipelago: I did not get to read the documents...”, but “...maybe I will be able to convey something from bones and meat? - still, by the way, living meat, still, by the way, a living newt.”
Thus, the formulation of the research problem is completed with the image of a still living newt.
The semantic pieces of this text, complete in themselves, are united not only by the logic of thought, but also by the development of a figurative vision of the problem. In the first paragraph, it is simply a fact - an underground lens of ice with frozen representatives of fossil fauna. In the ninth paragraph - the bones of the inhabitants of the Archipelago, frozen into a lens of ice - this is an allegory, and in the last paragraph - bones and meat, still living meat, however, still a living newt - this is already an image. Thus, the introduction demonstrates the cohesion of the author’s journalistic thought with his imaginative vision of the topic of discussion.
The figurative tone set in this part of the book’s text is present in the subsequent narrative. The appeal to artistic imagery seems to pulsate depending on the development of the main journalistic idea, on the turns of the author’s thoughts when reasoning, on the presence or absence of documentary material provided as evidence.
In order to most accurately analyze the varieties of images and their organization into a system, it is necessary to determine the parameter of artistry.
The image of the Archipelago, already established in the introduction, runs through the entire book, enriched in each chapter by new documentary material. Passionate journalistic interpretation and presentation of the material saturate it special meaning. This is the only image that develops throughout the book as the factual material is examined. Becoming capacious, the image of the Archipelago changes the reader’s perception of the document, the fact, in the further narration. Thanks to him, specific episodes, cases, situations receive, as it were, a single figurative point of refraction.
The logic of reasoning explains the sequence of chapters in the book, and within each chapter - the systematic ordering of the material. A component of this system is imagery included in solving research problems.
Part one is called “The Prison Industry.” This title is a metaphor that covers the entire path from arrest to imprisonment. The analogy with industrial production certainly expresses the author’s bitter irony, emphasizing the parallel between the faceless production process and the process of relocating people to the country of prisoners. Chapter One - "Arrest" - is the first stage of the "prison industry". It begins with a question that determined the logic of the subsequent narrative - “How do they get to this mysterious Archipelago?” And almost immediately the author answers: “Those who go to govern the Archipelago get there through the schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go to protect the Archipelago are conscripted through military registration and enlistment offices.
And then the author, discussing the arrest, gives a metaphorical description of the feeling of arrest. In rhetorical questions, arrest is compared to a turning point in your whole life, to a lightning strike in you, to an unbearable spiritual shock, to a split universe. “An arrest is an instantaneous, dramatic transfer, a transfer, a changeover from one state to another.”
The author defines arrest precisely as dynamic state, which in this and subsequent examples is lexically expressed by verbal nouns: management, hacking, ripping, dumping, tearing, throwing out, shaking out, scattering, tearing, cluttering, crunching.
The abundance of semantically related and figurative vocabulary conveys the shades of this state. The characteristics of the state of arrest are drawn up through details that fit organically into big picture: “This is the gallant entrance of the unwiped boots of awake operatives.” Not the incoming operatives, but the brave entrance of the boots. And further: “This is ... a frightened, nailed witness.”
And again, in this context, the witness is not a character, but a detail of the picture of the arrest.
The picture of the state of arrest is conveyed through visual and auditory signs - cluttering, tearing, knocking, hitting, ringing. This version of the image can be called a state-type image.
The image-type as a type of journalistic imagery is studied by M.I. in a number of works. Styuflyaev, but relates this type of imagery primarily to the creation of a generalized image of a person. However, this definition can also be used when analyzing the state picture. The image-type of the state is close to the lyrical image, but it manifests itself to a greater extent as a research principle than an artistic one.
As the text moves, the figurative method of studying the arrest deepens and appears in a new version: “Down the long crooked street of our life, we rushed happily or unhappily wandered past some fences, fences, fences - rotten wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast-iron fences . We didn't think - what's behind them? We didn’t try to look behind them either with our eyes or with our minds - and that’s where the Gulag country begins, very close by, two meters from us. And we also did not notice in these fences the myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. Everything, all these wickets were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly swung open, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, grabbed us by the leg, by the hand, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they dragged us like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate into our past life is slammed shut forever.
All. You are under arrest!
This version of imagery could be called a model image. Abstraction from reality, specifics, appeal to fantasy, conventions allows us to say that we have before us a figurative modeling of an arrest situation. According to M.I. Styuflyaeva, “Model representation is inevitably associated with the impoverishment of the object, its deliberate primitivization; the model becomes approximate due to coarsening of the features of the phenomenon. But precisely these seemingly negative ones from the point of view aesthetic laws properties make it especially valuable for use in journalistic work.”
The model demonstrates the movement mechanism in a logically proven sequence. Lexically, this mechanism of interaction between the internal components of the model is expressed in verbs of movement, since they embody the dynamics of the situation: we rushed, wandered, didn’t think, didn’t try, didn’t notice, we were grabbed, dragged along; they are slamming behind us. All the verbs used are imperfect and create the impression of length, incompleteness, and duration of the process. The mechanism in the model is clearly expressed at the level of the actors: we are a generalized concept, this is both the author and the reader, and those who “trod happily” and those who “traveled unhappily.” We include everyone who has gone through this model of an arrest situation, and also those who could have gone through it just as unreasonably. Other characters - those who “grabbed”, “dragged”, “slammed” - are also presented in general terms: “four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping...” Synecdoche in this case acts as a method of typification, a way generalizations. The simulated situation presupposes a clear vision of the components of the model and the mechanism of their interaction: those who “rushed” and “wandered” are grabbed by some others - “four white male hands” - dragged in, slammed.
But this model is not so bare as to become a scheme. She appeared in a figurative form. The life of those who are arrested is presented as a long crooked street, behind each fence of which “the country of the Gulag begins.” And in these fences there are a countless number of well-camouflaged doors, gates, where everyone can be dragged, and the gate can be slammed forever.
The dual nature of this image-model (on the one hand - an image, on the other hand - a model) is closely related to its functions in the work. There are two of them: the cognitive one is manifested in the model, the aesthetic one - in the image. This connection is also reinforced by the role of the author, his position in the work. On the one hand, he is a publicist who addresses the reader, models the situation, presenting the essence more clearly, and on the other hand, he is a hero - one of those who wanders or rushes along the long crooked street of life and behind whom the gate slams.
As we see, the image-model is actively included in the narrative and becomes the equivalent of logical reasoning.
State - key concept at this stage of the study, only after the figurative disclosure of the state of arrest does documentary data about it appear. Repetitions of semantically similar words closely connect documentary examples with previous figurative definitions. The arrest status is as follows:
“This is hacking, ripping, throwing and tearing from the walls, throwing onto the floor from cabinets and tables, shaking out, scattering” and then we read: “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested... The lawyers threw the child out of the coffin, they searched there too. And they shake the sick out of bed and undo the bandages.”
Next comes an explanation of what an arrest is, in a different way. The reasoning is logically structured, the phrases are precise and concise. This presentation represents a different type of research. First, the thesis is put forward: “And it is true that night arrest of the type described is our favorite because it has important advantages.” Further discussion about the arrest can hardly be attributed to scientific style presentation, this is a journalistic study. Despite the external precision of the phrases and the accuracy of the explanation, it is imbued with the author’s irony, which is especially noticeable in the scientific vocabulary: “Arrest science is an important section of the course of general prison studies, and a solid social theory is subsumed under it.” The journalistic nature of reasoning is also manifested in other forms: rhetorical exclamations, rhetorical appeals, in appeals to the reader’s experience, in hypothetical conclusions, etc.
The problem solved by the author of the book predetermines the need to turn to various options journalistic imagery. An example is the image-type of a hero. He appears already in the first chapter. This is the prisoner. The author writes: “The prisoner has been torn out of the warmth of his bed, he is still in a half-asleep helplessness, his mind is clouded.” This is some kind of average type. According to researchers, the “average person” is specific to journalism; he is a product of journalistic typification itself. If an artistic image, generalizing reality, “...reveals in the individual, transitory, accidental - the essential, unchangeably abiding, eternal...”, then the type-image absorbs what is characteristic of many, and sociological generalization dominates in it. But precisely because of this, it helps to more accurately reflect the social aspect of the problem being analyzed. On the other hand, an image-type becomes an image because it is completed, abstracted, and already exists independently as a complete whole by the author’s imagination. Its completeness is manifested in the desire to generalize all the shades of a hero of this type. So, the same arrested person can be malicious, he can appear in the form of some “unknown mortal”, frozen by the general arrests, or in the form of a “rabbit”. There is even a “freshly arrested” one.
But everything: the malicious arrested person, the freshly arrested person, and the “rabbit” are included in one image-type - the arrested person. In the text you can find an improperly direct speech belonging to a certain arrested person: “General innocence gives rise to general inaction. Maybe they won’t hire you yet? Maybe it will work out?” “Most remain stuck in a flickering hope. Since you are innocent, then why can they take you? This is mistake".
As we study the “tribe of prisoners,” the image-type appears repeatedly in the book by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. So, in the following chapters we meet with image-types: a new prisoner, an intelligent prisoner, a man of Chekhov and post-Chekhov Russia, a goner. Image-types of others appear, inhabitants of the Gulag country: a jailer, an OGPU officer. Type images largely determine the specificity of the book’s figurative system.
The journalistic part of the study of Chapter 1 is distinguished by the presence of an image-type of the hero (the arrested person) and verbal images. Separately, it should be said about the use of sayings in this part of the story and in further chapters of the book.
It is in the part of journalistic research that we first encounter the use of a proverb. She ends the episode where the author writes about the lack of resistance among those arrested, because political arrests “were different precisely in that they captured people who were innocent of anything, and therefore not prepared for any resistance.” This inactivity was convenient for the GPU - NKVD. The paragraph ends with the saying “A quiet sheep is too tough for a wolf.” In this case, the proverb becomes a figurative version of reasoning about the situation of inaction during political arrest. The model of relations between the characters in the proverb (wolf and sheep) seems to be superimposed on the model of relations “arrestee - GPU - NKVD”. A saying and a proverb, falling into the context of research, perform the same function as a model image. But if the model image is created by the author’s imagination, then the proverb or saying is borrowed by the researcher for his journalistic purposes at the level of speech imagery, as well as tropes.”
When analyzing the 1st chapter, it is necessary to highlight one more feature of the book - its memoir beginning. And although the author repeatedly emphasizes that his book is not a memoir, memories are an important component of the structure of the text. These parts of the book showed its artistry in a different way. There are three such episodes in Chapter 1. The function of the first episode could be conditionally called a memoir argument, since the episode from personal experience is given as an argument for the thesis why the arrested did not resist or scream. The author not only reports his silence, but analyzes the reasons for it. It is as if he is separated from himself, arrested. He begins to exist separately, becomes one of the “majority”. The journalistic focus of the analysis is possible because the arrested person is removed from the author by time, life experience, worldview. “I was silent in the Polish city of Brodnitsa - but maybe they don’t understand Russian there? I didn’t shout a word on the streets of Bialystok - but maybe this doesn’t concern the Poles? I didn’t utter a sound at the Volkovysk station - but it was sparsely populated, so why am I silent??!..”
The memoir passage is based on reasoning, devoid of figurative means, he seems to continue the previous journalistic presentation.
The second memoir episode is descriptive. In the context of the entire chapter, it looks like an illustration, like artistic argument- picture of the author's arrest. This is a special case in the study of a large number of real events, but felt, deeply understood, reproduced in detail and figuratively described.
In this memoir passage, the image of a specific person - the brigade commander - attracts attention. All the characters involved in the arrest are named by name: the brigade commander, the officer's retinue, two counterintelligence officers, Smershevites. The given names are, as it were, conditional. The brigade commander in the general mass, he is one of them, but this is not a mask, not a role, but a living person. And his human essence is revealed precisely in the climax of the arrest. "Unthinkable fairy tale words“The brigade commander becomes the threshold of turning just a brigade commander into Zakhar Georgievich Travkin.
The author's description corresponds to this movement. It can be divided into two halves: one characterizes the brigade commander before the arrest, the other during the arrest. The arrest of the author for the brigade commander is like a moment of self-purification, when hidden human qualities suddenly “broke out” to the surface. It’s as if a new person is being born before our eyes: “His face always expressed an order, a command, and anger for me. And now it lit up thoughtfully - is it shame for its forced participation in a dirty business? an impulse to rise above a lifetime of miserable submission?”
All the other participants in the arrest remain faceless - “a retinue of staff in the corner.” The brigade commander’s action sets him apart from other characters.
“And at least Zakhar Georgievich Travkin could have stopped there!
But no! Continuing to cleanse himself and straighten up in front of himself, he rose from the table (he never stood up to meet me in that former life!), extended his hand across the plague line to me (free, he never extended it to me!) and, in a handshake, in the silent horror of his retinue, with the warmth of his always stern face, he said fearlessly, separately:
I wish you happiness - captain!
Before the reader, as if being purified, a new person is born. His mental “straightening” even coincides with the movement of his body - “rose from the table.” The dynamics of the image are visible in the vocabulary we have highlighted: the face has always expressed an order, a command, anger - now it is illuminated; never got up - rose from the table; never extended it to me - extended his hand to me; always a stern face - warmth.
The image is complete, included in the episode, so information about the further fate of the brigade commander is included in the footnote by the author.
There are two main options when creating an image of a specific person. The first is the one that we analyzed using the example of an image as a method close to artistic, where a person is represented in all his depth and versatility, even if he is created with strokes, briefly. (This option in A. Solzhenitsyn’s book is found mainly in memoir episodes.) The second option is a journalistic way of creating the image of a specific person, when the social role of the individual becomes decisive. A person appears primarily in those circumstances in which he is revealed as a representative of a particular party, population group, or environment. For example, the image of Naftaliy Frenkel, one of the “ideologists” of Solovki. For the author, the documentary basis is important in this version of the image. He gives biographical information about Naftaliy and refers the reader to a photograph. The entire story about him is constructed as proof of the inhumane nature of those who helped create the camps. If the brigade commander is a unique human personality against the backdrop of faceless mediocrity, then Nafgaly Frenkel is only one of many. “He was one of those successful figures whom History is already waiting and inviting with hunger.” A journalistic version of the image of a specific person can include the image of silicate engineer Olga Petrovna Matronina. The image is specific, but something else is important for the author’s research: “She is one of those unshakably well-intentioned people whom I have already met a little in the cells...”. The image of Aviation Major General Alexander Ivanovich Belyaev is a different type. He is a representative of the senior officers who in a special way he saw the world of prisoners and himself in it: “Elongated, he looked above the crowd, as if taking in a completely different parade, invisible to us.”
The third memoir episode of the first chapter continues the plot of the second - it is a description of what happened to the author after the arrest. And at the same time, it allows you to disconnect from the author’s personality and introduce into the narrative a story about other people arrested at the front. This episode concludes the chapter, creating a picture of the state of arrest and the first minutes of life of those arrested. It ends with the figurative expression: “These were the first sips of my prison breath.”
The chapter is not only logically, but also figuratively completed.
The complexity of a special research type of narrative determined its compositional complexity. The chapter begins with a figurative depiction of the arrest, then a journalistic discussion follows, and the chapter ends with memoir episodes that artistically recreate the picture of the arrest. Other chapters are structured differently depending on the material, purpose and objectives of the study. Accordingly, a figurative system is formed within each chapter and the book as a whole. The indicated imagery options are only the main ones. In our analysis they may seem disjointed if we do not return to the cross-cutting, main image of the Archipelago.
Outlined in the book's introduction, this image continues to develop. As the narrative progresses, it begins to “come to life,” and by the end of the first part, the “insatiable Archipelago” has already “scattered to enormous proportions.” Often the image of the Archipelago opens a separate chapter, as if giving a figurative impulse for subsequent documentary material (in chapter 2, 4 of the second part, in chapter 1, 3, 7 of the third part) or ends the documentary material of the chapter (in the 5th, 14th chapter of the third part).
This generalizing image becomes a symbol. He is connected with the factual material and already stands above it, living some kind of life of his own. The image of the Archipelago is a symbol of lawlessness, a symbol of injustice and inhumanity. It expresses the ideological essence of the work. A.F. Losev writes: “... the symbol of a thing is its law and, as a result of this law, its certain orderliness, its ideological and figurative design.”
“The Gulag Archipelago” is an artistic and journalistic type of work on a documentary basis. Three principles coexist in it: documentary, journalistic and artistic. In accordance with these principles, a system of figurative means was organized. It consists of the following variants of imagery: image-type of a state, image-type of a person, image of a specific person, image-symbol, image-model, verbal images. The interaction of these figurative options and their organization into a system is determined by the journalistic task of each chapter and the book as a whole.
Keywords: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”, criticism of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, criticism of the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, analysis of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, download criticism, download analysis, download for free, Russian literature of the 20th century.
"(1959). Then he named his future book “The Gulag Archipelago.” A possible outline of the presentation was drawn up, the principle of successive chapters was adopted on the prison system, on the investigation, trials, stages, forced labor camps, hard labor, exile and the mental changes of prisoners during the years of imprisonment. Some chapters were written at the same time, but the author postponed the work, realizing that the experience of his own and his camp friends was not enough to cover such a topic.
The secret history of the Gulag Archipelago. Documentary
Immediately after the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (“ New world", 1962, No. 11) the author was overwhelmed by a stream of hundreds of letters from former prisoners or from their surviving families, where heatedly, sometimes in detail and voluminously, personal stories and observations. During 1963-64, Solzhenitsyn processed letters and met with prisoners, listening to their stories. In the summer of 1964 in Estonia, he drew up a complete and final plan for the “Archipelago” in seven parts, and all the new supplementary materials went into this design.
In the fall of 1964, Solzhenitsyn began writing “The Archipelago” in Solotch near Ryazan; work continued until September 1965, when the KGB seized part of the author’s archive, and all the finished chapters and preparations for “The Archipelago” were immediately taken away by fellow prisoners to the safe “Shelter.” There, on an Estonian farm near Tartu, the writer secretly went to work for two winters in a row (1965-66 and 1966-67), so that by the spring of 1967 the first six Parts were written. In the winter of 1967-68, revisions continued; in May 1968, the final edition of the book was made and printed, which now had to await publication, planned by the author first for 1971, then for 1975. However, in August 1973, under tragic circumstances, State Security discovered an intermediate version of “Archipelago” in one of the storage facilities - and thus prompted its immediate publication.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1958-1967 in conditions when not only all official documents about the system remained strictly classified political repression and forced labor camps in the USSR since 1918, but he had to carefully hide the fact of many years of work on this topic.
“The Gulag Archipelago,” volume one, was published on December 28, 1973 in the oldest emigrant publishing house YMCA-PRESS, in Paris. The book opened with the words of the author (which were not reproduced in any subsequent edition):
“With a constriction in my heart, for years I refrained from printing this already finished book: my duty to the still living outweighed my duty to the dead. But now, when state security took this book anyway, I have no choice but to publish it immediately.
A. Solzhenitsyn
September 1973».
On February 12, 1974, a month and a half after the release of the first volume, A. I. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the USSR. In 1974, the YMCA-PRESS publishing house released the second volume, and in 1975 – the third.
The first edition of The Gulag Archipelago in Russian corresponded to the latest edition of 1968, supplemented by clarifications made by the author in 1969, 1972 and 1973. The text ended with two author's afterwords (from February 1967 and May 1968), explaining the history and circumstances of the creation of the book. Both in the preface and afterwords, the author thanked the witnesses who carried out their experience from the bowels of the Archipelago, as well as friends and assistants, but did not give their names due to the obvious danger for them: “ Full list those without whom this book would not have been written, revised, or preserved—the time has not yet come to entrust it to paper. They themselves know. I bow to them."
“The Gulag Archipelago” has been translated into European and Asian languages and published on all continents, in four dozen countries. A. I. Solzhenitsyn transferred the copyrights and royalties for all world publications to the “Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families,” which he founded in the first year of exile. Since then, the Foundation has helped many thousands of people inhabiting the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, and after the dissolution of the political Gulag continues to help former political prisoners.
Just as “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the early sixties in his homeland caused a flow of letters and personal stories, many of which became part of the fabric of “Archipelago,” so “Archipelago” itself gave rise to many new evidence; together with printed materials previously inaccessible to him, they prompted the author to make some additions and revisions.
The new edition was published in 1980, as part of the Collected Works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn (Collected works: In 20 volumes. Vermont; Paris: YMCA-PRESS. Vol. 5-7). The author added a third afterword (“And in another ten years,” 1979) and a detailed “Contents of the chapters.” The publication was supplied with two small dictionaries (“prison camp terms” and “Soviet abbreviations and expressions”).
When the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago” in the homeland became possible, it began with a reprint of the “Vermont” edition (M.: Sov. pis.; Novy mir, 1989) - and in the 1990s in Russia, all subsequent ten editions were printed according to the same text.
A significantly updated edition of The Gulag Archipelago was published in 2007 by the U-Faktoriya publishing house (Ekaterinburg). First published full list witnesses who provided material for this book. Initials revealed in text: replaced full names and surnames - wherever they were known to the author. Added some later notes. Footnotes have been streamlined and Soviet abbreviations in camp names have been brought into uniformity. Also, for the first time, the publication was accompanied by a name index of all persons mentioned in the “Archipelago” - both historical figures and ordinary prisoners. This voluminous work was carried out by N. G. Levitskaya and A. A. Shumilin with the participation of N. N. Safonov. Additional search for information and editing of the Index was undertaken by a historian, senior researcher at the Russian national library A. Ya. Razumov. Subsequent domestic publications reproduced the above.
