One day of Ivan Denisovich prisoners. Facts from the life of A. Solzhenitsyn and the audiobook “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is a story about a prisoner who describes one day of his life in prison, of which there are three thousand five hundred and sixty-four. A summary is below :)

The main character of the work, which takes place over the course of one day, is the peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. On the second day after the start of the Great Patriotic War, he went to the front from his native village of Temgenevo, where he left behind a wife and two daughters. Shukhov also had a son, but he died.

In February, one thousand nine hundred and forty-two, on the North-Western Front, a group of soldiers, which included Ivan Denisovich, was surrounded by the enemy. It was impossible to help them; Because of hunger, the soldiers even had to eat the hooves of dead horses soaked in water. Soon Shukhov was captured by the Germans, but he and four colleagues managed to escape from there and get to their own. However, Soviet machine gunners killed two former prisoners immediately. One died from his wounds, and Ivan Denisovich was sent to the NKVD. As a result of a quick investigation, Shukhov was sent to a concentration camp - after all, every person who was captured by the Germans was considered an enemy spy.

Ivan Denisovich has been serving his sentence for the ninth year. For eight years he was imprisoned in Ust-Izhma, and now he is in a Siberian camp. Over the years, Shukhov grew a long beard, and his teeth became half as numerous. He is dressed in a padded jacket, over which is a peacoat belted with a string. Ivan Denisovich has cotton trousers and felt boots on his feet, and under them are two pairs of foot wraps. On the trousers, just above the knee, there is a patch on which the camp number is embroidered.

The most important task in the camp is to avoid starvation. The prisoners are fed disgusting gruel - a soup made from frozen cabbage and small pieces of fish. If you try, you can get an extra portion of such gruel or another ration of bread.

Some prisoners even receive packages. One of them was Caesar Markovich (either a Jew or a Greek) - a man of pleasant oriental appearance with a thick, black mustache. The prisoner's mustache was not shaved, since without it he would not have matched the photograph attached to the case. He once wanted to become a director, but he never managed to film anything - he was imprisoned. Caesar Markovich lives with memories and behaves like a cultured person. He talks about a “political idea” as a justification for tyranny, and sometimes publicly scolds Stalin, calling him “the mustachioed old man.” Shukhov sees that in penal servitude there is a freer atmosphere than in Ust-Izhma. You can talk about anything without fear that your sentence will be increased. Caesar Markovich, being a practical person, managed to adapt to hard labor: he knows how to “put it in the mouth of whoever needs it” from the parcels sent to him. Thanks to this, he works as an assistant standardizer, which was quite an easy task. Caesar Markovich is not greedy and shares food and tobacco from parcels with many (especially with those who helped him in some way).

Ivan Denisovich still understands that Tsezar Markovich does not yet understand anything about camp procedures. Before the "shmon" he does not have time to take the parcel to the storage room. The cunning Shukhov managed to save the goods sent to Caesar, and he did not remain in his debt.

Most often, Caesar Markovich shared supplies with his neighbor “on the bedside table” Kavtorang, a sea captain of the second rank Buinovsky. He sailed around Europe and along the Northern Sea Route. Once Buinovsky, as a communications captain, even accompanied an English admiral. He was impressed by his high professionalism and after the war sent him a souvenir. Because of this parcel, the NKVD decided that Buinovsky was an English spy. Kavtorang has been in the camp not long ago and has not yet lost faith in justice. Despite his habit of commanding people, Kavtorang does not shy away from camp work, for which he enjoys the respect of all prisoners.

There is also someone in the camp whom no one respects. This is the former office boss Fetyukov. He doesn't know how to do anything at all and can only carry a stretcher. Fetyukov does not receive any help from home: his wife left him, after which she immediately married someone else. The former boss is used to eating plenty and therefore often begs. This man has long lost his self-esteem. He is constantly offended, and sometimes even beaten. Fetyukov is not able to fight back: “he will wipe himself off, cry and go.” Shukhov believes that it is impossible for people like Fetyukov to survive in a camp where they need to be able to position themselves correctly. Preserving one's own dignity is necessary only because without it a person loses the will to live and is unlikely to be able to survive until the end of his sentence.

Ivan Denisovich himself does not receive parcels from home, because people in his native village are already starving. He diligently stretches out his rations throughout the day so as not to feel hungry. Shukhov also does not shy away from the opportunity to “cut” an extra piece from his superiors.

On the day described in the story, the prisoners are working on the construction of a house. Shukhov does not shy away from work. His foreman, the dispossessed Andrei Prokofievich Tyurin, at the end of the day writes out a “percentage” - an extra bread ration. After getting up, work helps prisoners not to live in painful anticipation of lights out, but to fill the day with some meaning. The joy brought by physical labor especially supports Ivan Denisovich. He is considered the best master in his team. Shukhov intelligently distributes his strength, which helps him not to overexert himself and work effectively throughout the day. Ivan Denisovich works with passion. He is glad that he managed to hide a fragment of a saw, from which he can make a small knife. With the help of such a homemade knife it is easy to earn money for bread and tobacco. However, guards regularly search prisoners. The knife can be taken away during a “shmon”; This fact gives the matter a kind of excitement.

One of the prisoners is a sectarian Alyosha, who was imprisoned for his faith. Alyosha the Baptist copied half of the Gospel into a notebook and made a hiding place for it in a crack in the wall. Aleshino's treasure has never been discovered during a search. In the camp he did not lose faith. Alyosha tells everyone that we need to pray so that the Lord will remove the evil scum from our hearts. In penal servitude, neither religion, nor art, nor politics are forgotten: prisoners worry not only about their daily bread.

Before going to bed, Shukhov sums up the results of the day: he was not put in a punishment cell, he was not sent to work on the construction of Sotsgorodok (in a frosty field), he hid a piece of saw and did not get caught during the "shmona", during lunch he received an extra portion of porridge ("mowed"), bought tobacco... This is what an almost happy day in the camp looks like.

And Ivan Denisovich has three thousand five hundred and sixty-four such days.

One day of Ivan Denisovich

At five o'clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks. An intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen into two fingers, and soon died down: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant to wave his hand for a long time.

The ringing died down, and outside the window everything was the same as in the middle of the night, when Shukhov got up to the bucket, there was darkness and darkness, and three yellow lanterns came through the window: two in the zone, one inside the camp.

And for some reason they didn’t go to unlock the barracks, and you never heard of the orderlies picking up the barrel on sticks to carry it out.

Shukhov never missed getting up, he always got up on it - before the divorce he had an hour and a half of his own time, not official, and whoever knows camp life can always earn extra money: sew someone a mitten cover from an old lining; give the rich brigade worker dry felt boots directly on his bed, so that he doesn’t have to trample barefoot around the pile, and doesn’t have to choose; or run through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, sweep or offer something; or go to the dining room to collect bowls from the tables and take them in piles to the dishwasher - they will also feed you, but there are a lot of hunters there, there is no end, and most importantly, if there is anything left in the bowl, you can’t resist, you will start licking the bowls. And Shukhov firmly remembered the words of his first brigadier Kuzyomin - he was an old camp wolf, he had been in prison for twelve years by the year nine hundred and forty-three, and he once said to his reinforcement, brought from the front, in a bare clearing by the fire:

- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. Here's who's dying in the camp: who's licking bowls, who's relying on the medical unit, and who's godfather goes to knock.

As for the godfather, of course, he turned down that. They save themselves. Only their care is on someone else's blood.

Shukhov always got up when he got up, but today he didn’t get up. Since the evening he had been uneasy, either shivering or aching. And I didn’t get warm at night. In my sleep I felt like I was completely ill, and then I went away a little. I still didn’t want it to be morning.

But the morning came as usual.

And where can you get warm here - there is ice on the window, and on the walls along the junction with the ceiling throughout the entire barracks - a healthy barracks! - white cobweb. Frost.

Shukhov did not get up. He was lying on top linings, covering his head with a blanket and pea coat, and in a padded jacket, in one sleeve turned up, putting both feet together. He didn’t see, but from the sounds he understood everything that was happening in the barracks and in their brigade corner. So, heavily walking along the corridor, the orderlies carried one of the eight-bucket buckets. Considered disabled, easy work, but come on, take it out without spilling it! Here in the 75th brigade they slammed a bunch of felt boots from the dryer onto the floor. And here it is in ours (and today it was our turn to dry felt boots). The foreman and sergeant-at-arms put on their shoes in silence, and their lining creaks. The brigadier will now go to the bread-slicer, and the foreman will go to the headquarters barracks, to the contractors.

And not just to the contractors, as he goes every day, - Shukhov remembered: today fate is being decided - they want to transfer their 104th brigade from the construction of workshops to the new Sotsgorodok facility. And that Social Town is a bare field, in snowy ridges, and before you do anything there, you have to dig holes, put up poles and pull the barbed wire away from yourself - so as not to run away. And then build.

There, sure enough, there won’t be anywhere to warm up for a month – not a kennel. And if you can’t light a fire, what to heat it with? Work hard conscientiously - your only salvation.

The foreman is concerned and is going to settle things. Some other brigade, sluggish, should be pushed there instead. Of course, you can’t come to an agreement empty-handed. The senior foreman had to carry half a kilo of fat. Or even a kilogram.

The test is not a loss, shouldn't we try it in the medical unit? touch, free from work for a day? Well, the whole body is literally torn apart.

And also, which guard is on duty today?

On duty - I remembered - Ivan and a half, a thin and long black-eyed sergeant. The first time you look, it’s downright scary, but they recognized him as one of the most flexible of all the guards on duty: he doesn’t put him in a punishment cell, or drag him to the head of the regime. So you can lie down until you go to barracks nine in the dining room.

The carriage shook and swayed. Two stood up at once: at the top was Shukhov’s neighbor Baptist Alyoshka, and at the bottom was Buinovsky, a former captain of the second rank, cavalry officer.

The old orderlies, having carried out both buckets, began to argue about who should go get boiling water. They scolded affectionately, like women. An electric welder from the 20th brigade barked:

- Hey, wicks!- and threw a felt boot at them. - I’ll make peace!

The felt boot thudded against the post. They fell silent.

In the neighboring brigade the brigadier muttered slightly:

- Vasil Fedorych! The food table was distorted, you bastards: it was nine hundred and four, but it became only three. Who should I miss?

He said this quietly, but of course the whole brigade heard and hid: a piece would be cut off from someone in the evening.

And Shukhov lay and lay on the compressed sawdust of his mattress. At least one side would take it - either the chill would strike, or the aching would go away. And neither this nor that.

While the Baptist was whispering prayers, Buinovsky returned from the breeze and announced to no one, but as if maliciously:

- Well, hold on, Red Navy men! Thirty degrees true!

And Shukhov decided to go to the medical unit.

And then someone’s powerful hand pulled off his padded jacket and blanket. Shukhov took off his pea coat from his face and stood up. Below him, with his head level with the top bunk of the carriage, stood a thin Tatar.

This means that he was not on duty in line and sneaked in quietly.

- Another eight hundred fifty-four! - Tatar read from the white patch on the back of his black pea coat. – Three days kondeya with output!

And as soon as his special, strangled voice was heard, in the entire dim barracks, where not every light bulb was on, where two hundred people were sleeping on fifty bedbug-lined carriages, everyone who had not yet gotten up immediately began to stir and hastily get dressed.

- For what, citizen chief? – Shukhov asked, giving his voice more pity than he felt.

Once you're sent back to work, it's still half a cell, and they'll give you hot food, and there's no time to think about it. A complete punishment cell is when without withdrawal.

– Didn’t get up on the way up? “Let’s go to the commandant’s office,” Tatar explained lazily, because he, Shukhov, and everyone understood what the condo was for.

Nothing was expressed on Tatar’s hairless, wrinkled face. He turned around, looking for someone else, but everyone was already, some in the semi-darkness, some under the light bulb, on the first floor of the carriages and on the second, pushing their legs into black cotton trousers with numbers on the left knee or, already dressed, wrapping them up and hurrying to the exit - wait for Tatar in the yard.

If Shukhov had been given a punishment cell for something else, where he deserved it, it wouldn’t have been so offensive. It was a shame that he was always the first to get up. But it was impossible to ask Tatarin for time off, he knew. And, continuing to ask for time off just for the sake of order, Shukhov, still wearing cotton trousers that had not been taken off for the night (a worn, dirty flap was also sewn above the left knee, and the number Shch-854 was inscribed on it in black, already faded paint), put on a padded jacket (she had two such numbers on her - one on the chest and one on the back), chose his felt boots from the pile on the floor, put on his hat (with the same flap and number on the front) and followed Tatarin out.

The significance of A. Solzhenitsyn’s work is not only that it opened the previously forbidden topic of repression and set a new level of artistic truth, but also that in many respects (from the point of view of genre originality, narrative and spatio-temporal organization, vocabulary, poetic syntax, rhythm, richness of the text with symbolism, etc.) was deeply innovative.

Shukhov and others: models of human behavior in the camp world

At the center of A. Solzhenitsyn’s work is the image of a simple Russian man who managed to survive and morally withstand the harshest conditions of camp captivity. Ivan Denisovich, according to the author himself, is a collective image. One of his prototypes was the soldier Shukhov, who fought in Captain Solzhenitsyn’s battery, but never spent time in Stalin’s prisons and camps. The writer later recalled: “Suddenly, for some reason, Ivan Denisovich’s type began to take shape in an unexpected way. Starting with the surname - Shukhov - it fit into me without any choice, I did not choose it, and it was the surname of one of my soldiers in the battery during the war. Then, along with this surname, his face, and a little bit of his reality, what area he was from, what language he spoke" ( P. II: 427) . In addition, A. Solzhenitsyn relied on the general experience of Gulag prisoners and on his own experience acquired in the Ekibastuz camp. The author's desire to synthesize the life experience of different prototypes, to combine several points of view, determined the choice of the type of narrative. In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” Solzhenitsyn uses a very complex narrative technique based on alternate merging, partial combination, complementarity, interflow, and sometimes divergence of points of view of the hero and the author-narrator close to him in his worldview, as well as some generalized view expressing the mood 104th brigade, column or in general of hard-working prisoners as a single community. The camp world is shown primarily through Shukhov’s perception, but the character’s point of view is complemented by a more comprehensive author’s vision and point of view reflecting the collective psychology of prisoners. The author's thoughts and intonations are sometimes added to the character's direct speech or internal monologue. The “objective” third-person narration that dominates the story includes direct speech that conveys the point of view of the main character, preserving the peculiarities of his thinking and language, and speech that is not the author’s own. In addition, there are inclusions in the form of a narrative in the first person plural, such as: “And the moment is ours!”, “Our column reached the street...”, “This is where we have to squeeze them!”, “The number is one harm to our brother.” …" etc.

The view “from the inside” (“the camp through the eyes of a man”) in the story alternates with the view “from the outside”, and at the narrative level this transition is carried out almost imperceptibly. Thus, in the portrait description of the old convict Yu-81, whom Shukhov looks at in the camp canteen, upon careful reading one can detect a slightly noticeable narrative “glitch”. The phrase “his back was perfectly straight” could hardly have been born in the minds of a former collective farmer, an ordinary soldier, and now a hardened “prisoner” with eight years of experience in general labor; stylistically, he falls somewhat out of Ivan Denisovich’s speech structure and is barely noticeably dissonant with him. Apparently, here is just an example of how inappropriately direct speech, conveying the peculiarities of the thinking and language of the main character, is “interspersed” someone else's word. It remains to be seen whether it is copyright, or belongs to Yu-81. The second assumption is based on the fact that A. Solzhenitsyn usually strictly follows the law of “linguistic background”: that is, he constructs the narrative in such a way that the entire linguistic fabric, including the author’s own, does not go beyond the circle of ideas and word usage of the character in question . And since the episode talks about an old convict, we cannot exclude the possibility of the appearance in this narrative context of speech patterns inherent specifically to the Yu-81.

Little is known about the pre-camp past of forty-year-old Shukhov: before the war, he lived in the small village of Temgenevo, had a family - a wife and two daughters, and worked on a collective farm. Actually, there is not so much “peasant” in it; the collective farm and camp experience overshadowed and supplanted some “classical” peasant qualities known from works of Russian literature. Thus, the former peasant Ivan Denisovich has almost no desire for his mother earth, no memories of his wet-nurse cow. For comparison, we can recall what a significant role cows play in the destinies of heroes of village prose: Zvezdonya in F. Abramov’s tetralogy “Brothers and Sisters” (1958–1972), Rogulya in V. Belov’s story “A Habitual Business” (1966), Zorka in the story V. Rasputin “Deadline” (1972). Remembering his village past, a former thief with extensive prison experience, Yegor Prokudin, tells about a cow named Manka, whose belly was pierced by evil people with a pitchfork, in V. Shukshin’s film story “Red Kalina” (1973). There are no such motives in Solzhenitsyn's work. Horses in the memoirs of Shch-854 also do not occupy any noticeable place and are mentioned in passing only in connection with the theme of criminal Stalinist collectivization: “They threw them into one heap<ботинки>, in the spring yours won’t be there. Just like they drove horses to the collective farm"; “Shukhov had such a gelding before the collective farm. Shukhov was saving it, but in the wrong hands it was quickly cut off. And they took off his skin." It is characteristic that this gelding in the memoirs of Ivan Denisovich appears nameless, faceless. In works of village prose telling about peasants of the Soviet era, horses (horses), as a rule, are individualized: Parmen in “A Habitual Business,” Igrenka in “The Deadline,” Veselka in “Men and Women” by B. Mozhaev, etc. . The nameless mare, bought from a gypsy and “thrown her hooves away” even before her owner managed to get to his kuren, is natural in the spatial and ethical field of the semi-lumpenized grandfather Shchukar from the novel by M. Sholokhov “Virgin Soil Upturned”. It is not accidental in this context that the same nameless “calf” that Shchukar “pitted” so as not to give it to the collective farm, and, “out of great greed”, having eaten too much boiled brisket, was forced to continuously run “until the wind” into the sunflowers for several days .

The hero A. Solzhenitsyn does not have sweet memories of holy peasant labor, but “in the camps, Shukhov more than once recalled how they used to eat in the village: potatoes - in whole frying pans, porridge - in cast iron, and even earlier, without collective farms, meat - in slices healthy. Yes, they blew milk - let the belly burst." That is, the village past is perceived more by the memory of a hungry stomach, and not by the memory of hands and souls yearning for the land, for peasant labor. The hero does not show nostalgia for the village “lady,” for peasant aesthetics. Unlike many heroes of Russian and Soviet literature who did not go through the school of collectivization and the Gulag, Shukhov does not perceive his father’s house, his native land as a “lost paradise”, as some kind of hidden place to which his soul is directed. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that the author wanted to show the catastrophic consequences of the social, spiritual and moral cataclysms that shook Russia in the 20th century and significantly deformed the personality structure, inner world, and the very nature of the Russian person. The second possible reason for the absence of some “textbook” peasant traits in Shukhov is the author’s reliance primarily on real life experience, and not on stereotypes of artistic culture.

“Shukhov left home on the twenty-third of June forty-one,” he fought, was wounded, refused the medical battalion and voluntarily returned to duty, which he regretted more than once in the camp: “Shukhov remembered the medical battalion on the Lovat River, how he came there with a damaged jaw and - that's a damn thing! “I returned to duty with good will.” In February 1942, on the Northwestern Front, the army in which he fought was surrounded, and many soldiers were captured. Ivan Denisovich, having spent only two days in fascist captivity, escaped and returned to his own people. The denouement of this story contains a hidden polemic with the story of M.A. Sholokhov’s “The Fate of a Man” (1956), the central character of which, having escaped from captivity, was accepted by his own people as a hero. Shukhov, unlike Andrei Sokolov, was accused of treason: as if he was carrying out a task from German intelligence: “What a task - neither Shukhov himself nor the investigator could come up with. So they just left it as a task.” This detail clearly characterizes the Stalinist justice system, in which the accused himself must prove his own guilt, having previously invented it. Secondly, the special case cited by the author, which seems to concern only the main character, gives reason to assume that so many “Ivanov Denisovichs” passed through the hands of investigators that they were simply not able to come up with a specific guilt for each soldier who was captured . That is, at the subtext level we are talking about the scale of repression.

In addition, as the first reviewers (V. Lakshin) noted, this episode helps to better understand the hero, who came to terms with monstrously unfair accusations and sentences, and did not protest and rebel, seeking “the truth.” Ivan Denisovich knew that if you didn’t sign, they would shoot you: “In counterintelligence they beat Shukhov a lot. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; if you sign, you’ll at least live a little longer.” Ivan Denisovich signed, that is, he chose life in captivity. The cruel experience of eight years of camps (seven of them in Ust-Izhma, in the north) did not pass without a trace for him. Shukhov was forced to learn some rules, without which it is difficult to survive in the camp: he is not in a hurry, he does not openly contradict the convoy and the camp authorities, he “groans and bends,” and does not “stick his head out” once again.

Shukhov alone with himself, as an individual, differs from Shukhov in the brigade and, even more so, in the column of prisoners. The column is a dark and long monster with a head (“the head of the column was already being torn apart”), shoulders (“the column in front swayed, its shoulders swayed”), a tail (“the tail fell onto the hill”) - absorbs the prisoners, turns them into a homogeneous mass. In this crowd, Ivan Denisovich changes imperceptibly to himself, assimilates the mood and psychology of the crowd. Forgetting that he himself had just been working “without noticing the bell,” Shukhov, along with other prisoners, angrily shouts at the Moldovan who has committed a fine:

“And the whole crowd and Shukhov are getting angry. After all, what kind of bitch, bastard, carrion, scoundrel, Zagrebian is this?<…>What, you haven’t worked enough, you bastard? The official day is not enough, eleven hours, from light to light?<…>

Woohoo! - the crowd cheers from the gate<…>Chu-ma-a! Schoolboy! Shushera! Disgraceful bitch! Nasty! Bitch!!

And Shukhov also shouts: “Chu-ma!” .

Another thing is Shukhov in his brigade. On the one hand, a brigade in a camp is one of the forms of enslavement: “a device so that it is not the authorities who push the prisoners, but the prisoners push each other.” On the other hand, the brigade becomes for the prisoner something like a home, a family, it is here that he is saved from camp leveling, it is here that the wolf laws of the prison world recede somewhat and the universal principles of human relationships, the universal laws of ethics come into force (albeit in a somewhat reduced and distorted form). It is here that the prisoner has the opportunity to feel like a human being.

One of the culminating scenes of the story is a detailed description of the work of the 104th brigade on the construction of the camp thermal power plant. This scene, commented on countless times, makes it possible to better understand the character of the main character. Ivan Denisovich, despite the efforts of the camp system to turn him into a slave who works for the sake of “rations” and out of fear of punishment, managed to remain a free man. Even hopelessly late for his shift, risking being sent to a punishment cell for this, the hero stops and once again proudly inspects the work he has done: “Eh, the eye is a spirit level! Smooth!" . In an ugly camp world based on coercion, violence and lies, in a world where man is a wolf to man, where work is cursed, Ivan Denisovich, in the apt expression of V. Chalmaev, returned to himself and others - albeit for a short time! - a feeling of original purity and even holiness of work.

On this issue, another famous chronicler of the Gulag, V. Shalamov, fundamentally disagreed with the author of “One Day...”, who in his “Kolyma Stories” argued: “In the camp work kills - therefore anyone who praises camp labor is a scoundrel or a fool.” In one of his letters to Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov expressed this idea on his own behalf: “I put those who praise camp labor on the same level as those who hung the words on the camp gates: “Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism"<…>There's nothing more cynical<этой>inscriptions<…>And isn’t praising such work the worst humiliation of a person, the worst kind of spiritual corruption?<…>In the camps there is nothing worse, more humiliating than deadly hard physical forced labor.<…>I, too, “pulled on as long as I could,” but I hated this work with every pore of my body, every fiber of my soul, every minute.”

Obviously, not wanting to agree with such conclusions (the author of “Ivan Denisovich” became acquainted with the “Kolyma Tales” at the end of 1962, having read them in the manuscript, Shalamov’s position was also known to him from personal meetings and correspondence), A. Solzhenitsyn in a book written later “The Gulag Archipelago” will again speak about the joy of creative work even in conditions of unfreedom: “You don’t need this wall for anything and you don’t believe that it will bring the happy future of the people closer, but, pathetic, ragged slave, this creation of your own hands has you yourself smile at yourself."

Another form of preserving the inner core of personality, the survival of the human “I” in conditions of camp leveling of people and suppression of individuality is the use by prisoners in communication with each other of first and last names, and not prisoners’ numbers. Since “the purpose of a name is to express and verbally consolidate the types of spiritual organization”, “the type of personality, its ontological form, which further determines its spiritual and mental structure”, the loss of a prisoner’s name, its replacement with a number or nickname can mean a complete or partial disintegration of the personality , spiritual death. Among the characters in “One Day...” there is not a single one who has completely lost his name, turned into room. This applies even to Fetyukov, who has lowered himself.

Unlike camp numbers, the assignment of which to prisoners not only simplifies the work of guards and guards, but also contributes to the erosion of the personal identity of Gulag prisoners, their ability to self-identify, a name allows a person to preserve the primary form of self-manifestation of the human “I”. In total, there are 24 people in the 104th brigade, but fourteen are singled out from the total mass, including Shukhov: Andrei Prokofievich Tyurin - brigadier, Pavlo - pombrigadier, cavalry rank Buinovsky, former film director Caesar Markovich, “jackal” Fetyukov, Baptist Alyosha, former prisoner of Buchenwald Senka Klevshin, the “informer” Panteleev, the Latvian Jan Kildigs, two Estonians, one of whom is named Eino, sixteen-year-old Gopchik and the “hefty Siberian” Ermolaev.

The surnames of the characters cannot be called “talking”, but, nevertheless, some of them reflect the character traits of the heroes: the surname Volkova belongs to the animal-like cruel, evil head of the regime; the surname Shkuropatenko - to the prisoner, zealously performing the duties of a guard, in a word, “in the skin.” Alyosha is the name of a young Baptist who is completely absorbed in thoughts about God (here one cannot exclude an allusive parallel with Alyosha Karamazov from Dostoevsky’s novel), Gopchik is a clever and roguish young prisoner, Caesar is a metropolitan intellectual who imagines himself an aristocrat, rising above ordinary hard workers. The surname Buinovsky is a match for a proud prisoner, ready to rebel at any moment - in the recent past, a “ringing” naval officer.

Fellow brigades often call Buinovsky rank, captain, less often they address him by his last name and never by his first name and patronymic (only Tyurin, Shukhov and Caesar are awarded such an honor). He is called a kavtorang, perhaps because in the eyes of prisoners with many years of experience, he has not yet established himself as a person, he remained the same, pre-camp person - person-social role. Buinovsky has not yet adapted to the camp; he still feels like a naval officer. That’s why, apparently, he calls his fellow brigadiers “Red Navy men,” Shukhov “sailor,” and Fetyukova “salagoy.”

Perhaps the longest list of anthroponyms (and their variants) for the central character: Shukhov, Ivan Denisovich, Ivan Denisych, Denisych, Vanya. The guards call him in their own way: “eight hundred and fifty-four,” “pig,” “bastard.”

Speaking about the typicality of this character, one must not miss that the portrait and character of Ivan Denisovich are built from unique features: the image of Shukhov collective, typical, but not at all averaged. Meanwhile, critics and literary scholars often focus specifically on the typicality of the hero, relegating his unique individual characteristics to the background or even calling them into question. Thus, M. Schneerson wrote: “Shukhov is a bright individual, but, perhaps, typological traits in him prevail over personal ones.” Zh. Niva did not see any fundamental differences in the image of Shch-854 even from the janitor Spiridon Egorov, the character in the novel “In the First Circle” (1955-1968). According to him, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is “an outgrowth” of a big book (Shukhov repeats Spiridon) or, rather, a compressed, condensed, popular version of a prisoner’s epic,” “a “squeeze” from the life of a prisoner.”

In an interview dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, A. Solzhenitsyn seemed to speak out in favor of the fact that his character is a predominantly typical figure, at least that’s what he thought of: “From the very beginning I thought of Ivan Denisovich as understood that<…>this must be the most ordinary camp inmate<…>the most average soldier of this Gulag" ( P. III: 23). But literally in the next sentence the author admitted that “sometimes a collective image comes out even brighter than an individual one, it’s strange, this happened with Ivan Denisovich.”

To understand why the hero of A. Solzhenitsyn managed to preserve his individuality in the camp, the statements of the author of “One Day...” about “Kolyma Tales” help. In his assessment, there are “not specific special people, but almost only surnames, sometimes repeating from story to story, but without the accumulation of individual traits. Assume that this was Shalamov’s intention: the cruelest camp everyday life wears down and crushes people, people cease to be individuals<…>I do not agree that all personality traits and past life are completely destroyed: this does not happen, and something personal must be shown in everyone.”

In the portrait of Shukhov there are typical details that make him almost indistinguishable when he is in a huge mass of prisoners, in a camp column: two-week stubble, a “shaved” head, “half of his teeth are missing,” “the hawk eyes of a camp prisoner,” “hardened fingers,” etc. He dresses just like the majority of hard-working prisoners. However, in the appearance and habits of Solzhenitsyn’s hero there is also individual, the writer endowed him with a considerable number of distinctive features. Even the camp gruel Shch-854 eats differently from everyone else: “He ate everything in any fish, even the gills, even the tail, and he ate the eyes when they came across them on the spot, and when they fell out and swam separately in the bowl - big fish eyes - did not eat. They laughed at him for that." And Ivan Denisovich’s spoon has a special mark, and the character’s trowel is special, and his camp number begins with a rare letter.

It’s not for nothing that V. Shalamov noted that “art fabric<рассказа>so subtle that you can tell a Latvian from an Estonian.” In A. Solzhenitsyn’s work, not only Shukhov, but also all the other camp inmates singled out from the general mass are endowed with unique portrait features. So, Caesar has a “black, fused, thick mustache”; Baptist Alyosha - “clean, washed”, “eyes, like two candles, glow”; Brigadier Tyurin - “his shoulders are healthy and his image is wide”, “his face is covered in large mountain ash, from smallpox”, “the skin on his face is like oak bark”; Estonians - “both white, both long, both thin, both with long noses, with big eyes”; Latvian Kildigs - “red-faced, well-fed”, “ruddy”, “thick-cheeked”; Shkuropatenko - “a crooked pole, staring like a thorn.” The portrait of a prisoner, the old convict Yu-81, is the most individualized and the only one presented in detail in the story.

On the contrary, the author does not give a detailed, detailed portrait of the main character. It is limited to individual details of the character’s appearance, from which the reader must independently recreate in his imagination the complete image of Shch-854. The writer is attracted by such external details, from which one can get an idea of ​​the inner content of the personality. Responding to one of his correspondents who sent a homemade sculpture “Zek” (recreating the “typical” image of a camp prisoner), Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Is this Ivan Denisovich? I'm afraid it's still not<…>Kindness (no matter how suppressed it may be) and humor must definitely be visible in Shukhov’s face. On the face of your prisoner there is only severity, coarseness, bitterness. All this is true, all this creates a generalized image of a prisoner, but... not Shukhov.”

Judging by the above statement of the writer, an essential feature of the hero’s character is responsiveness and the ability to compassion. In this regard, Shukhov’s proximity to the Christian Alyosha cannot be perceived as a mere coincidence. Despite Ivan Denisovich’s irony during a conversation about God, despite his statement that he does not believe in heaven and hell, the character of Shch-854 also reflected the Orthodox worldview, which is characterized primarily by a feeling of pity and compassion. It would seem difficult to imagine a situation worse than that of this disenfranchised camp inmate, but he himself not only grieves about his own fate, but also empathizes with others. Ivan Denisovich feels sorry for his wife, who for many years raised her daughters alone and pulled the collective farm burden. Despite the strongest temptation, the always hungry prisoner forbids sending him parcels, realizing that it is already difficult for his wife. Shukhov sympathizes with the Baptists, who received 25 years in the camps. He also feels sorry for the “jackal” Fetyukov: “He won’t live out his term. He doesn’t know how to position himself.” Shukhov sympathizes with Caesar, who has settled well in the camp, and who, in order to maintain his privileged position, has to give away part of the food sent to him. Shch-854 sometimes sympathizes with the guards (“<…>they also don’t need butter to trample on towers in such frost”) and the guards accompanying the column in the wind (“<…>They are not supposed to tie themselves with rags. The service is also unimportant").

In the 60s, critics often reproached Ivan Denisovich for not resisting tragic circumstances and for accepting the position of a powerless prisoner. This position, in particular, was substantiated by N. Sergovantsev. Already in the 90s, the opinion was expressed that the writer, by creating the image of Shukhov, allegedly slandered the Russian people. One of the most consistent supporters of this point of view, N. Fed, argued that Solzhenitsyn fulfilled the “social order” of the official Soviet ideology of the 60s, which was interested in reorienting public consciousness from revolutionary optimism to passive contemplation. According to the author of the Young Guard magazine, official criticism needed “a standard of such a limited, spiritually sleepy, and in general, indifferent person, incapable not only of protest, but even of the timid thought of any discontent,” and similar demands Solzhenitsyn’s hero allegedly answered in the best possible way:

“The Russian peasant in the work of Alexander Isaevich looks cowardly and stupid to the point of impossibility<…>Shukhov's whole philosophy of life comes down to one thing - survival, no matter what, at any cost. Ivan Denisovich is a degraded person who only has enough will and independence to “fill his belly”<…>His element is to serve, bring something, run to the general rise through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, etc. So he runs around the camp like a dog<…>His servile nature is dual: Shukhov is full of servility and hidden admiration for high authorities, and he has contempt for lower ranks<…>Ivan Denisovich gets true pleasure from groveling before wealthy prisoners, especially if they are of non-Russian origin<…>Solzhenitsyn's hero lives in complete spiritual prostration<…>Reconciliation with humiliation, injustice and abomination led to the atrophy of everything human in him. Ivan Denisovich is a complete mankurt, without hopes or even any light in his soul. But this is an obvious Solzhenitsyn’s untruth, even some kind of intent: to belittle the Russian people, to once again emphasize his supposedly slavish essence.”

Unlike N. Fedya, who assessed Shukhov in an extremely biased manner, V. Shalamov, who had 18 years of camp experience behind him, in his analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s work wrote about the author’s deep and subtle understanding of the hero’s peasant psychology, which manifests itself “in both curiosity and naturally tenacious intelligence, and the ability to survive, observation, caution, prudence, a slightly skeptical attitude towards the various Caesar Markovichs, and all kinds of power that has to be respected.” According to the author of “Kolyma Stories,” Ivan Denisovich’s “intelligent independence, intelligent submission to fate and the ability to adapt to circumstances, and distrust are all traits of the people.”

Shukhov's high degree of adaptability to circumstances has nothing to do with humiliation or loss of human dignity. Suffering from hunger no less than others, he cannot allow himself to turn into a semblance of Fetyukov’s “jackal,” scouring garbage dumps and licking other people’s plates, humiliatingly begging for handouts and shifting his work onto the shoulders of others. Doing everything possible to remain human in the camp, Solzhenitsyn’s hero, nevertheless, is by no means Platon Karataev. If necessary, he is ready to defend his rights by force: when one of the prisoners tries to move the felt boots he had put out to dry from the stove, Shukhov shouts: “Hey! You! ginger! What about a felt boot in the face? Place your own, don’t touch anyone else’s!” . Contrary to the popular belief that the hero of the story treats “timidly, peasant-like, respectfully” those who represent the “bossies” in his eyes, we should recall the irreconcilable assessments that Shukhov gives to various kinds of camp commanders and their accomplices: foreman Der - “pig face”; to the guards - “damned dogs”; to the nachkar - “dumb”, to the senior in the barracks - “bastard”, “urka”. In these and similar assessments there is not even a shadow of that “patriarchal humility” that is sometimes attributed to Ivan Denisovich with the best intentions.

If we talk about “submission to circumstances,” which Shukhov is sometimes reproached for, then first of all we should remember not him, but Fetyukov, Der and the like. These morally weak heroes who do not have an internal “core” are trying to survive at the expense of others. It is in them that the repressive system forms a slave psychology.

The dramatic life experience of Ivan Denisovich, whose image embodies some typical properties of the national character, allowed the hero to derive a universal formula for the survival of a person from the people in the country of the Gulag: “That’s right, groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break.” This, however, does not mean that Shukhov, Tyurin, Senka Klevshin and other Russian people close to them in spirit are always submissive in everything. In cases where resistance can bring success, they defend their few rights. For example, by stubborn silent resistance they nullified the commander’s order to move around the camp only in brigades or groups. The convoy of prisoners offers the same stubborn resistance to the nachkar, who kept them in the cold for a long time: “I didn’t want to be with us like a human being - at least now I’ll burst into tears from screaming.” If Shukhov “bends”, it is only outwardly. In moral terms, he resists a system based on violence and spiritual corruption. In the most dramatic circumstances, the hero remains a man with soul and heart and believes that justice will prevail: “Now Shukhov is not offended by anything: no matter the long term<…>there will be no Sunday again. Now he thinks: we’ll survive! We will survive everything, God willing, it will end!” . In one of the interviews, the writer said: “But communism choked, in fact, in the passive resistance of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Although outwardly they remained submissive, they naturally did not want to work under communism" ( P. III: 408).

Of course, even in conditions of camp unfreedom, open protest and direct resistance are possible. This type of behavior is embodied by Buinovsky, a former combat naval officer. Faced with the arbitrariness of the guards, the cavalry guard boldly tells them: “You are not Soviet people! You are not communists! and at the same time refers to his “rights”, to Article 9 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits mockery of prisoners. Critic V. Bondarenko, commenting on this episode, calls the kavtorang a “hero”, writes that he “feels like an individual and behaves like an individual”, “in case of personal humiliation he rebels and is ready to die”, etc. But at the same time, he loses sight of the reason for the character’s “heroic” behavior, does not notice why he “revolts” and is even “ready to die.” And the reason here is too prosaic to be a reason for a proud uprising, much less a heroic death: when a column of prisoners leaves the camp for the work area, the guards write down from Buinovsky (to force him to hand over his personal belongings to the storeroom in the evening) “a vest or a navel of some kind. Buynovsky - in the throat<…>". The critic did not feel some inadequacy between the statutory actions of the guards and such a violent reaction of the captain, did not catch the humorous shade with which the main character, who in general sympathized with the captain, looked at what was happening. The mention of the “napuznik”, because of which Buinovsky came into conflict with the head of the regime Volkov, partly removes the “heroic” aura from the action of the kavtorang. The price of his “vest” rebellion turns out to be generally meaningless and disproportionately expensive - the cavalryman ends up in a punishment cell, about which it is known: “Ten days in the local punishment cell<…>This means losing your health for the rest of your life. Tuberculosis, and you can’t get out of the hospital. And those who served fifteen days of strict punishment are in damp ground.”

Humans or nonhumans?
(on the role of zoomorphic comparisons)

The frequent use of zoomorphic comparisons and metaphors is an important feature of Solzhenitsyn’s poetics, which has support in the classical tradition. Their use is the shortest way to creating visual, expressive images, to identifying the main essence of human characters, as well as to an indirect, but very expressive manifestation of the author's modality. The likening of a person to an animal makes it possible in some cases to abandon the detailed characterization of characters, since the elements of the zoomorphic “code” used by the writer have meanings firmly anchored in the cultural tradition and therefore easily guessed by readers. And this perfectly corresponds to Solzhenitsyn’s most important aesthetic law - the law of “artistic economy”.

However, sometimes zoomorphic comparisons can also be perceived as a manifestation of the author’s simplified, schematic ideas about the essence of human characters - first of all, this applies to the so-called “negative” characters. Solzhenitsyn’s inherent penchant for didacticism and moralizing finds various forms of embodiment, including manifesting itself in his actively used allegorical zoomorphic similes, which are more appropriate in “moralizing” genres - primarily in fables. When this tendency powerfully asserts itself, the writer strives not to comprehend the subtleties of a person’s inner life, but to give his “final” assessment, expressed in an allegorical form and having an openly moralizing character. It is then that an allegorical projection of animals begins to be discerned in the images of people, and an equally transparent allegory of people begins to be discerned in the animals. The most typical example of this kind is the description of the zoo in the story “Cancer Ward” (1963–1967). The frank allegorical orientation of these pages leads to the fact that the animals languishing in cages (marked goat, porcupine, badger, bears, tiger, etc.), which are considered in many respects by Oleg Kostoglotov, who is close to the author, become primarily an illustration of human morals, an illustration of human types behavior. There is nothing unusual about this. According to V.N. Toporova, “animals for a long time served as a kind of visual paradigm, the relationships between the elements of which could be used as a certain model of the life of human society<…>» .

Most often zoonyms, used to name people, are found in the novel “In the First Circle”, in the books “The Gulag Archipelago” and “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree”. If you look at Solzhenitsyn’s works from this angle, then Gulag archipelago will appear as something like a grandiose menagerie, which is inhabited by the “Dragon” (the ruler of this kingdom), “rhinoceros”, “wolves”, “dogs”, “horses”, “goats”, “gorilloids”, “rats”, “hedgehogs” , “rabbits”, “lambs” and similar creatures. In the book “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” the famous “engineers of human souls” of the Soviet era also appear as inhabitants of an “animal farm” - this time a writer’s: here there is K. Fedin “with the face of a vicious wolf”, and the “polkanist” L. Sobolev, and “wolfish” V. Kochetov, and “fed up fox” G. Markov...

He himself is inclined to see in characters the manifestation of animal traits and properties, A. Solzhenitsyn often endows this ability with heroes, in particular, Shukhov, the main character of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The camp depicted in this work is inhabited by many animal-like creatures - characters that the heroes of the story and the narrator repeatedly name (or compare to) dogs, wolves, jackals, bears, horses, rams, sheep, pigs, calves, hares, frogs, rats, kites etc.; in which the habits and properties attributed or actually inherent to these animals appear or even prevail.

Sometimes (this happens extremely rarely) zoomorphic comparisons destroy the organic integrity of the image and blur the contours of character. This usually happens when there are too many comparisons. The zoomorphic comparisons in Gopchik’s portrait characteristics are clearly redundant. In the image of this sixteen-year-old prisoner, who evokes fatherly feelings in Shukhov, the properties of several animals are contaminated: “<…>pink, like a pig" ; “He is an affectionate calf, he fawns over all the men”; “Gopchik, like a squirrel, is light - he climbed up the rungs<…>" ; “Gopchik runs behind like a bunny”; “He has a tiny little voice, like a kid’s.” A hero whose portrait description combines features piglet, calf, squirrels, bunnies, baby goat, and besides, wolf cub(presumably, Gopchik shares the general mood of the hungry and chilled prisoners who are being kept in the cold because of a Moldovan who fell asleep at the facility: “<…>If only this Moldovan had held them for half an hour, it seems, and given his convoy to the crowd, they would have torn a calf to pieces like wolves!” ), it is very difficult to imagine, to see, as they say, with your own eyes. F.M. Dostoevsky believed that when creating a portrait of a character, the writer must find the main idea of ​​his “physiography.” The author of “One Day...” in this case violated this principle. Gopchik’s “face” does not have a portrait dominant, and therefore his image loses its clarity and expressiveness and turns out to be blurred.

The easiest way would be to consider that the antithesis bestial (animal) - humane in Solzhenitsyn's story comes down to the opposition of executioners and their victims, that is, the creators and faithful servants of the Gulag, on the one hand, and camp prisoners, on the other. However, such a scheme is destroyed upon contact with the text. To some extent, in relation primarily to the images of jailers, this may be true. Especially in episodes when they are compared to a dog - “traditionally a “low”, despised animal, symbolizing man’s extreme rejection of his own kind.” Although this is most likely not a comparison with an animal, not a zoomorphic likening, but the use of the word “dogs” (and its synonyms - “dogs”, “polkans”) as a curse word. It is for this purpose that Shukhov turns to such vocabulary: “How much for that hat they dragged into the condo, damn dogs”; “At least they knew how to count, dogs!” ; “Here are the dogs, counting again!” ; “They govern without guards, Polkans,” etc. Of course, to express his attitude towards the jailers and their accomplices, Ivan Denisovich uses zoonyms as curse words not only with canine specifics. So, the foreman Dair for him is a “pig’s face”, the privateer in the storage room is a “rat”.

In the story there are also cases of direct likening of guards and wardens to dogs, and, it should be emphasized, to evil dogs. Zoonyms “dog” or “dog” are usually not used in such situations, dog the actions, voices, gestures, and facial expressions of the characters receive color: “Oh, fuck you in the forehead, what are you barking?” ; “But the warden bared his teeth...” ; "Well! Well! - the warden growled,” etc.

The correspondence of the external appearance of a character to the internal content of his character is a technique characteristic of the poetics of realism. In Solzhenitsyn’s story, the brutal, “wolfish” nature of the head of the regime corresponds not only to his appearance, but even to his last name: “Here God marks a rogue, he gave him a last name!” - Volkova doesn’t look any other way than a wolf. Dark, and long, and frowning - and rushes quickly." Hegel also noted that in fiction the image of an animal is usually “used to designate everything bad, evil, insignificant, natural and unspiritual.”<…>". The likening of the GULAG servants to predatory animals in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has a completely understandable motivation, since in the literary tradition “the beast is, first of all, instinct, the triumph of the flesh,” “the world of flesh freed from the soul.” Camp guards, guards, and superiors in Solzhenitsyn’s story often appear in the guise of predatory animals: “And the guards<…>rushed like animals<…>". Prisoners, on the contrary, are likened to sheep, calves, and horses. Buinovsky is especially often compared to a horse (gelding): “The horseman is already falling off his feet, but he’s still pulling. Shukhov had such a gelding too<…>" ; “The cavourang has become very haggard over the past month, but the team is pulling”; “The cavorang secured the stretcher like a good gelding.” But Buinovsky’s other teammates during the “Stakhanovist” work at the thermal power plant are likened to horses: “The carriers are like puffed-up horses”; “Pavlo came running from below, harnessing himself to a stretcher...”, etc.

So, according to the first impression, the author of “One Day...” is building a tough opposition, at one pole of which are the bloodthirsty jailers ( animals, wolves, evil dogs), on the other - defenseless “herbivorous” prisoners ( sheep, calves, horses). The origins of this opposition go back to the mythological ideas of pastoral tribes. So, in poetic views of the Slavs on nature, “the destructive predation of the wolf towards horses, cows and sheep seemed<…>similar to the hostile opposition in which darkness and light, night and day, winter and summer are placed.” However, the dependency-based concept man's descent down the ladder of biological evolution to the lower creatures from who he belongs to - the executioners or the victims, begins to slip as soon as the images of prisoners become the object of consideration.

Secondly, in the system of values ​​firmly internalized by Shukhov in the camp, rapacity is not always perceived as a negative quality. Contrary to a long-established tradition, in some cases even likening prisoners to a wolf does not carry a negative evaluative value. On the contrary, Shukhov behind his back, but respectfully calls the most authoritative people in the camp for him - the brigadiers Kuzyomin (“<…>the old one was a camp wolf") and Tyurin ("And you need to think before going after such a wolf<…>""). In this context, likening a predator does not indicate negative “animal” qualities (as in the case of Volkov), but positive human ones - maturity, experience, strength, courage, firmness.

When applied to hard-working prisoners, traditionally negative, reducing zoomorphic analogies do not always turn out to be negative in their semantics. Thus, in a number of episodes based on the likening of prisoners to dogs, the negative modality becomes almost invisible, or even disappears altogether. Tyurin’s statement addressed to the brigade: “We won’t heat up<машинный зал>- we’ll freeze like dogs...”, or the narrator’s look at Shukhov and Senka Klevshin running to the watch: “They’re on fire like mad dogs...” do not carry a negative assessment. Quite the opposite: such parallels only increase sympathy for the characters. Even when Andrei Prokofyevich promises to “blow the forehead” of his fellow brigade members who are huddling near the stove before setting up a workplace, Shukhov’s reaction: “Just show a beaten dog the whip,” indicating the submissiveness and downtroddenness of the camp inmates, does not discredit them at all. The comparison with a “beaten dog” characterizes not so much the prisoners as those who turned them into frightened creatures who did not dare disobey the foreman and the “superior” in general. Tyurin uses the “crowded conditions” of prisoners already formed by the Gulag, moreover, caring for their own good, thinking about the survival of those for whom he is responsible as a foreman.

On the contrary, when it comes to the capital’s intellectuals who find themselves in the camp, who, if possible, try to avoid general work and generally contacts with “gray” prisoners and prefer to communicate with people in their own circle, the comparison is with dogs (and not even vicious ones, as in the case of guards, but only possessing a keen sense) hardly indicates the hero and narrator’s sympathy for them: “They, Muscovites, smell each other from afar, like dogs. And, having come together, they all sniff, sniff in their own way.” The caste alienation of Moscow “eccentrics” from the everyday worries and needs of ordinary “gray” prisoners receives a veiled assessment through a comparison with sniffing dogs, which creates the effect of an ironic reduction.

Thus, zoomorphic comparisons and likenings in Solzhenitsyn’s story have an ambivalent character and their semantic content most often depends not on traditional, established meanings of the fable-allegorical or folklore type, but on the context, on the specific artistic tasks of the author, on his worldview.

Researchers usually reduce the writer’s active use of zoomorphic comparisons to the theme of the spiritual and moral degradation of a person who found himself a participant in the dramatic events of Russian history of the 20th century, drawn by the criminal regime into the cycle of total state violence. Meanwhile, this problem contains not only socio-political, but also existential meaning. It has the most direct relation to the author’s concept of personality, to the writer’s aesthetically translated ideas about the essence of man, about the purpose and meaning of his earthly existence.

It is generally accepted that Solzhenitsyn the artist proceeds from the Christian concept of personality: “For a writer, a person is a spiritual being, a bearer of the image of God. If the moral principle disappears in a person, then he becomes like a beast, the animal, the carnal, predominates in him.” If we project this scheme onto One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, then, at first glance, it seems to be fair. Of all the portrait-presented characters in the story, only a few do not have zoomorphic likenings, including Alyoshka the Baptist - perhaps the only character who can lay claim to the role of “bearer of the image of God.” This hero was able to spiritually resist the battle with the inhumane system thanks to his Christian faith, thanks to his firmness in upholding unshakable ethical standards.

Unlike V. Shalamov, who considered the camp a “negative school,” A. Solzhenitsyn focuses not only on the negative experience that prisoners acquire, but also on the problem of stability - physical and especially spiritual and moral. The camp corrupts and turns into animals, first and foremost, those who are weak in spirit, who do not have a strong spiritual and moral core.

But that's not all. For the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the camp is not the main and only reason for the distortion in man of his original, natural perfection, the “godlikeness” inherent, “programmed” in him. Here I would like to draw a parallel with one feature of Gogol’s work, which Berdyaev wrote about. The philosopher saw in “Dead Souls” and other works of Gogol “an analytical dissection of the organically integral image of man.” In the article “Spirits of the Russian Revolution” (1918), Berdyaev expressed a very original, although not entirely indisputable, view of the nature of Gogol’s talent, calling the writer an “infernal artist” who had a “completely exceptional sense of evil” (how can one not recall the statement of Zh. Niva about Solzhenitsyn: “he is perhaps the most powerful artist of Evil in all modern literature”?). Here are a few statements by Berdyaev about Gogol, which help to better understand Solzhenitsyn’s works: “Gogol has no human images, but only muzzles and faces<…>He was surrounded on all sides by ugly and inhuman monsters.<…>He believed in man, looked for the beauty of man and did not find it in Russia.<…>His great and incredible art was given the power to reveal the negative sides of the Russian people, their dark spirits, everything that was inhuman in them, distorting the image and likeness of God.” The events of 1917 were perceived by Berdyaev as confirmation of Gogol’s diagnosis: “In the revolution, the same old, eternally Gogol’s Russia, inhuman, half-animal Russia, mug and face, was revealed.<…>Darkness and evil lie deeper, not in the social shells of the people, but in their spiritual core.<…>The revolution is a great manifester and it revealed only what was hidden in the depths of Russia.”

Based on Berdyaev’s statements, we will make the assumption that, from the point of view of the author of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the Gulag exposed and revealed the main diseases and vices of modern society. The era of Stalinist repressions did not give rise to, but only aggravated, brought to the extreme hardness of heart, indifference to the suffering of others, spiritual callousness, unbelief, lack of a solid spiritual and moral foundation, faceless collectivism, zoological instincts - everything that accumulated in Russian society over several centuries. The GULAG was a consequence, the result of the erroneous path of development that humanity chose in modern times. The Gulag is a natural result of the development of modern civilization, which abandoned faith or turned it into an external ritual, which put socio-political chimeras and ideological radicalism at the forefront, or rejected the ideals of spirituality in the name of reckless technical progress and slogans of material consumption.

The author’s orientation to the Christian idea of ​​human nature, the desire for perfection, for the ideal, which Christian thought expresses in the formula of “Godlikeness,” can explain the abundance of zoomorphic likenings in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” including in relation to the images of prisoners. As for the image of the main character of the work, then, of course, he is not a model of perfection. On the other hand, Ivan Denisovich is by no means an inhabitant of a menagerie, not an animal-like creature who has lost the idea of ​​the highest meaning of human existence. Critics of the 60s often wrote about the “down-to-earthness” of Shukhov’s image, emphasizing that the hero’s range of interests did not extend beyond an extra bowl of gruel (N. Sergovantsev). Such assessments, which are heard to this day (N. Fed), come into clear contradiction with the text of the story, in particular, with the fragment in which Ivan Denisovich is compared to a bird: “Now he, like a free bird, fluttered out from under vestibule roof - both in the zone and in the zone!” . This comparison is not only a form of stating the mobility of the protagonist, not only a metaphorical image characterizing the speed of Shukhov’s movements around the camp: “The image of a bird, in accordance with the poetic tradition, indicates freedom of imagination, the flight of the spirit directed to the heavens.” A comparison with a “free” bird, supported by many other similar portrait details and psychological characteristics, allows us to conclude that this hero has not only a “biological” survival instinct, but also spiritual aspirations.

Big in small
(art of artistic detail)

An artistic detail is usually called an expressive detail that plays an important ideological, semantic, emotional, symbolic and metaphorical role in a work. “The meaning and power of detail lies in what is contained in the infinitesimal whole". Artistic detail includes details of historical time, life and way of life, landscape, interior, portrait.

In the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, artistic details carry such a significant ideological and aesthetic load that without taking them into account, it is almost impossible to fully understand the author’s intention. First of all, this refers to his early, “censored” work, when the writer had to hide, take into subtext the most intimate of what he wanted to convey to the readers of the 60s, accustomed to the Aesopian language.

It should only be noted that the author of “Ivan Denisovich” does not share the point of view of his character Caesar, who believes that “art is not What, A How". According to Solzhenitsyn, truthfulness, accuracy, and expressiveness of individual details of an artistically recreated reality mean little if historical truth is violated and the overall picture, the very spirit of the era, is distorted. For this reason, he is rather on the side of Buinovsky, who, in response to Caesar’s admiration for the expressiveness of details in Eisenstein’s film “Battleship Potemkin,” retorts: “Yes... But the sea life there is puppet-like.”

Among the details that deserve special attention is the camp number of the main character - Shch-854. On the one hand, it is evidence of a certain autobiographical nature of Shukhov’s image, since it is known that the camp number of the author, who served time in the Ekibastuz camp, began with the same letter - Shch-262. In addition, both components of the number - one of the last letters of the alphabet and a three-digit number close to the limit - make one think about the scale of repression, prompting the astute reader that the total number of prisoners in one camp alone could exceed twenty thousand people. It is impossible not to pay attention to one more similar detail: the fact that Shukhov works in the 104th (!) Brigade.

One of the first readers of the then handwritten “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Lev Kopelev, complained that A. Solzhenitsyn’s work was “overloaded with unnecessary details.” Critics of the 60s also often wrote about the author’s excessive passion for camp life. Indeed, he pays attention to literally every little detail that his hero encounters: he talks in detail about how the barracks, clapboards, punishment cells are arranged, how and what the prisoners eat, where they hide their bread and money, what they wear and dress in, how they earn extra money, where they get the smoke, etc. Such increased attention to everyday details is justified primarily by the fact that the camp world is given in the perception of the hero, for whom all these little things are of vital importance. The details characterize not only the way of camp life, but also, indirectly, Ivan Denisovich himself. Often they provide an opportunity to understand the inner world of Shch-854 and other prisoners, the moral principles that guide the characters. Here is one of these details: in the camp canteen, prisoners spit fish bones they find in the gruel onto the table, and only when a lot of them accumulate, does someone brush the bones off the table onto the floor, and there they “grind”: “And don’t spit the bones directly on the floor.” - seems to be considered sloppy.” Another similar example: in the unheated dining room, Shukhov takes off his hat - “no matter how cold it was, he could not allow himself to eat in a hat.” Both of these seemingly purely everyday details indicate that the disenfranchised camp inmates retained the need to observe norms of behavior, unique rules of etiquette. The prisoners, whom they are trying to turn into work animals, into nameless slaves, into “numbers”, remained people, want to be people, and the author speaks about this also indirectly - through a description of the details of camp life.

Among the most expressive details is the repeated mention of Ivan Denisovich’s legs tucked into the sleeve of his padded jacket: “He was lying on top linings, covering his head with a blanket and pea coat, and in a padded jacket, in one sleeve turned up, putting both feet together”; “Legs again in the sleeve of a padded jacket, a blanket on top, a peacoat on top, sleep!” . This detail was also noticed by V. Shalamov, who wrote to the author in November 1962: “Shukhov’s legs in one sleeve of a padded jacket - all this is magnificent.”

It is interesting to compare Solzhenitsyn’s image with the famous lines of A. Akhmatova:

My chest was so helplessly cold,

But my steps were light.

I put it on my right hand

Glove from the left hand.

The artistic detail in "Song of the Last Meeting" is sign, carrying “information” about the internal state of the lyrical heroine, so this detail can be called emotional and psychological. The role of detail in Solzhenitsyn’s story is fundamentally different: it characterizes not the character’s experiences, but his “external” life - it is one of the reliable details of camp life. Ivan Denisovich puts his legs into the sleeve of his padded jacket not by mistake, not in a state of psychological affect, but for purely rational, practical reasons. This decision was prompted by his long camp experience and folk wisdom (according to the proverb: “Keep your head cold, your stomach hungry, and your feet warm!”). On the other hand, this detail cannot be called purely domestic, since it also carries a symbolic load. The left glove on the right hand of the lyrical heroine Akhmatova is a sign of a certain emotional and psychological state; Ivan Denisovich’s legs, tucked into the sleeve of a padded jacket, are a capacious symbol inversion, anomalies of the entire camp life as a whole.

A significant part of the subject images of Solzhenitsyn’s work is used by the author to simultaneously recreate camp life and to characterize the Stalinist era as a whole: a parachute barrel, clapboard, rag muzzles, front-line flares - a symbol of the war between the authorities and their own people: “Like this camp, Special, they started - there were too many front-line flares at the guards, as soon as the lights went out - they showered flares over the zone<…>the war is real." The symbolic function in the story is performed by a rail suspended on a wire - a camp resemblance (more precisely - substitution) bells: “At five o’clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks. An intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen into two fingers, and soon died down: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant to wave his hand for a long time.” According to H.E. Kerlot, bell ringing - “a symbol of creative power”; and since the sound source hangs, “all the mystical properties that are endowed with objects suspended between heaven and earth apply to it.” In the “inverted” desacralized world of the Gulag depicted by the writer, an important symbolic substitution occurs: the place of a bell, shaped like the vault of heaven, and therefore symbolically connected with the world to the heavenly, occupies "picked up by a thick wire<…>a worn-out rail”, hanging not on a bell tower, but on an ordinary pole. The loss of the sacred spherical form and the replacement of the material substance (hard steel instead of soft copper) correspond to a change in the properties and functions of the sound itself: the blows of the guard's hammer on the camp rail remind not of the eternal and sublime, but of the curse that hangs over the prisoners - of exhausting forced slave labor, bringing people to an early grave.

Day, term, eternity
(about the specifics of artistic time-space)

One day of Shukhov’s camp life is uniquely unique, since it is not a conventional, not a “prefabricated”, not an abstract day, but a completely definite one, having precise time coordinates, filled, among other things, with extraordinary events, and, secondly, extremely is typical, because it consists of many episodes, details that are typical for any of the days of Ivan Denisovich’s camp term: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.”

Why does one single day of a prisoner turn out to be so meaningful? Firstly, for extra-literary reasons: this is facilitated by the very nature of the day - the most universal unit of time. This idea was exhaustively expressed by V.N. Toporov, analyzing the outstanding monument of ancient Russian literature - “The Life of Theodosius of Pechersk”: “The main quantum of time when describing the historical micro-plan is the day, and the choice of the day as time in the Life Book is not accidental. On the one side,<он>self-sufficient, self-sufficient<…>On the other hand, the day is the most natural and from the beginning of Creation (it itself was measured in days) a unit of time established by God, acquiring a special meaning in connection with other days, in that series of days that determines “macro-time”, its fabric, rhythm<…>The temporal structure of the life cycle is precisely characterized by the always assumed connection between the day and the sequence of days. Thanks to this, the “micro-plane” of time correlates with the “macro-plane”; any specific day, as it were, approaches (at least potentially) to the “big” time of Sacred History<…>» .

Secondly, this was originally A. Solzhenitsyn’s idea: to present the prisoner’s day depicted in the story as the quintessence of his entire camp experience, a model of camp life and existence in general, the focus of the entire Gulag era. Recalling how the idea for the work arose, the writer said: “there was such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner, and I thought how I should describe the entire camp world - in one day” ( P. II: 424); “It is enough to describe just one day of the simplest worker, and our whole life will be reflected here” ( P. III: 21).

So, anyone who considers A. Solzhenitsyn’s story to be a work exclusively on a “camp” theme is mistaken. Artistically recreated in the work, the day of the prisoner grows into a symbol of an entire era. The author of “Ivan Denisovich” would probably agree with the opinion of I. Solonevich, a writer of the “second wave” of Russian emigration, expressed in the book “Russia in a Concentration Camp” (1935): “The camp is no different from “freedom” in any significant way. If it is worse in the camp than in the wild, it is not much worse - of course, for the bulk of the camp inmates, workers and peasants. Everything that happens in the camp happens in the wild. And vice versa. But only in the camp is all this more visible, simpler, clearer<…>In the camp, the foundations of Soviet power are presented with the clarity of an algebraic formula.” In other words, the camp depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s story is a smaller copy of Soviet society, a copy that retains all the most important features and properties of the original.

One of these properties is that natural time and intra-camp time (and more broadly, state time) are not synchronized and move at different speeds: days (they, as already mentioned, are the most natural, God-established unit of time) follow their “own course” , and the camp term (that is, the time period determined by the repressive authorities) hardly moves: “And no one has ever had an end to their term in this camp”; "<…>The days in the camp are rolling by - you won’t look back. But the deadline itself doesn’t advance at all, it doesn’t decrease at all.” In the artistic world of the story, the time of prisoners and the time of the camp authorities are also not synchronized, that is, the time of the people and the time of those who personify power: “<…>prisoners are not given a clock; the authorities know the time for them”; “None of the prisoners ever sees a watch, and what do they need, a watch? The prisoner just needs to know: is it time to get up soon? How long until divorce? before lunch? until lights out? .

And the camp was designed in such a way that it was almost impossible to get out of it: “every gate always opens into the zone, so that if the prisoners and the crowd pressed on them from the inside, they could not drop them out.” Those who turned Russia into a “GULAG archipelago” are interested in ensuring that nothing changes in this world, that time either stops altogether, or at least is controlled by their will. But even they, seemingly omnipotent and omnipotent, are unable to cope with the eternal movement of life. An interesting episode in this sense is in which Shukhov and Buinovsky argue about when the sun is at its zenith.

In the perception of Ivan Denisovich, the sun as a source of light and heat and as a natural natural clock that measures the time of human life, opposes not only the cold and darkness of the camp, but also the very authorities that gave birth to the monstrous Gulag. This power poses a threat to the entire world, as it seeks to disrupt the natural course of things. A similar meaning can be seen in some “sunny” episodes. One of them reproduces a dialogue with subtext conducted by two prisoners: “The sun had already risen, but there were no rays, as if in fog, and on the sides of the sun there stood - weren’t they pillars? - Shukhov nodded to Kildigs. “But the pillars don’t bother us,” Kildigs waved it off and laughed. “As long as they don’t stretch the thorn from pillar to post, look at this.” It is no coincidence that Kildigs laughs - his irony is aimed at the power that is straining, but in vain, trying to subjugate the whole of God's world. A little time passed, “the sun rose higher, dispersed the haze, and the pillars disappeared.”

In the second episode, having heard from captain Buinovsky that the sun, which in “grandfather’s” times occupied the highest position in the sky at exactly noon, now, in accordance with the decree of the Soviet government, “stands highest at the hour,” the hero, by simplicity, understood these words literally - in the sense that it obeys the requirements of the decree, nevertheless, I am not inclined to believe the captain: “The cavalryman came out with a stretcher, but Shukhov would not have argued. Does the sun really obey their decrees? . For Ivan Denisovich, it is quite obvious that the sun does not “submit” to anyone, so there is no reason to argue about this. A little later, being in the calm confidence that nothing can shake the sun - not even the Soviet government, along with its decrees, and wanting to make sure of this once again, Shch-854 looks at the sky again: “And Shukhov checked the sun too, squinting, - about the commander’s decree.” The absence of references to the heavenly body in the next phrase proves that the hero is convinced of what he never doubted - that no earthly power is able to change the eternal laws of the world order and stop the natural flow of time.

The perceptual time of the heroes of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is correlated in different ways with historical time - the time of total state violence. Physically being in the same space-time dimension, they feel themselves almost in different worlds: Fetyukov’s horizons are limited by barbed wire, and the center of the universe for the hero becomes the camp garbage dump - the focus of his main life aspirations; former film director Caesar Markovich, who avoided general work and regularly receives food parcels from the outside, has the opportunity to live with his thoughts in the world of film images, in the artistic reality of Eisenstein’s films recreated by his memory and imagination. Ivan Denisovich’s perceptual space is also immeasurably wider than the territory fenced with barbed wire. This hero correlates himself not only with the realities of camp life, not only with his village and military past, but also with the sun, moon, sky, steppe expanse - that is, with the phenomena of the natural world that carry the idea of ​​​​the infinity of the universe, the idea of ​​eternity.

Thus, the perceptual time-space of Caesar, Shukhov, Fetyukov and other characters in the story does not coincide in everything, although plot-wise they are in the same temporal and spatial coordinates. The locus of Caesar Markovich (Eisenstein's films) marks a certain distance, the distance of the character from the epicenter of the greatest national tragedy, the locus of Fetyukov's "jackal" (garbage dump) becomes a sign of his internal degradation, Shukhov's perceptual space, including the sun, sky, steppe expanse, is evidence of the hero's moral ascent .

As you know, artistic space can be “point”, “linear”, “planar”, “volumetric”, etc. Along with other forms of expressing the author’s position, it has valuable properties. Artistic space “creates the effect of “closedness,” “dead end,” “isolation,” “limitedness,” or, on the contrary, “openness,” “dynamism,” “openness” of the hero’s chronotope, that is, it reveals the nature of his position in the world.” The artistic space created by A. Solzhenitsyn is most often called “hermetic”, “closed”, “compressed”, “densified”, “localized”. Such assessments are found in almost every work devoted to “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” As an example, we can quote one of the most recent articles about Solzhenitsyn’s work: “The image of the camp, given by reality itself as the embodiment of maximum spatial isolation and isolation from the big world, is realized in the story in the same closed time structure of one day.”

These conclusions are partly true. Indeed, the general artistic space of “Ivan Denisovich” is composed, among other things, of the closed-boundary spaces of the barracks, medical unit, canteen, parcel room, thermal power plant building, etc. However, such isolation is overcome by the fact that the central character constantly moves between these local spaces, he is always on the move and does not stay long in any of the camp premises. In addition, while physically being in the camp, Solzhenitsyn’s hero perceptually breaks out beyond its boundaries: Shukhov’s gaze, memory, and thoughts are also directed to what is behind the barbed wire - both in spatial and temporal perspectives.

The concept of spatiotemporal “hermeticism” does not take into account the fact that many small, private, seemingly closed phenomena of camp life are correlated with historical and metahistorical time, with the “big” space of Russia and the space of the whole world as a whole. At Solzhenitsyn's stereoscopic artistic vision, therefore the author’s conceptual space created in his works is not planar(especially horizontally limited), and volumetric. Already in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” this artist’s inclination to create, even within the confines of works of small form, even within a chronotope strictly limited by genre boundaries, a structurally comprehensive and conceptually holistic artistic model of the entire universe, was clearly evident.

The famous Spanish philosopher and cultural scientist José Ortega y Gasset in his article “Thoughts on the Novel” said that the main strategic task of the artist of words is to “remove the reader from the horizon of reality,” for which the novelist needs to create “a closed space - without windows and cracks, so that the horizon of reality is indistinguishable from the inside.” The author of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “Cancer Ward”, “In the First Circle”, “The Gulag Archipelago”, “The Red Wheel” constantly reminds the reader of the reality located outside the internal space of the works. By thousands of threads, this internal (aesthetic) space of a story, novel, “experience of artistic research,” historical epic is connected with an external space, external to the works, located beyond them - in the sphere of extra-artistic reality. The author does not seek to dull the reader’s “sense of reality”; on the contrary, he constantly “pushes” his reader out of the “fictional” and artistic world into the real world. More precisely, it makes interpenetrable that line which, according to Ortega y Gasset, should tightly fence off the internal (actually artistic) space of a work from the “objective reality” external to it, from real historical reality.

The event chronotope of “Ivan Denisovich” is constantly correlated with reality. The work contains many references to events and phenomena that are outside the plot recreated in the story: about the “father with a mustache” and the Supreme Council, about collectivization and the life of the post-war collective farm village, about the White Sea Canal and Buchenwald, about the theatrical life of the capital and Eisenstein’s films, about the events of the international life: "<…>they argue about the war in Korea: because the Chinese intervened, there will be a world war or not” and about the past war; about a curious incident from the history of allied relations: “This is before the Yalta meeting, in Sevastopol. The city is absolutely hungry, but we need to show the American admiral. And so they made a special store full of products<…>" etc.

It is generally accepted that the basis of the Russian national space is the horizontal vector, that the most important national mythologeme is Gogol’s mythologeme “Rus-troika”, which marks the “path to endless space”, that Russia “ rolls: her kingdom is the distance and breadth, the horizontal.” Kolkhoz-Gulag Russia, depicted by A. Solzhenitsyn in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” if rolls, then not horizontally, but vertically - vertically down. The Stalinist regime took away from the Russian people endless space, deprived millions of Gulag prisoners of freedom of movement, concentrating them in closed spaces of prisons and camps. The rest of the country's inhabitants, primarily the unpassported collective farmers and semi-serf workers, also do not have the opportunity to move freely in space.

According to V.N. Toporov, in the traditional Russian model of the world, the possibility of free movement in space is usually associated with such a concept as will. This specific national concept is based on “an extensive idea, devoid of purposefulness and specific design (there! away! outside!) - as variants of one motive “just to leave, to get out of here”.” What happens to a person when he is deprived will, deprived of the opportunity to at least try to find salvation from state tyranny and violence in flight, in movement across the endless Russian expanses? According to the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who recreates just such a plot situation, the choice here is small: either a person becomes dependent on external factors and, as a result, morally degrades (that is, in the language of spatial categories, slides down), or gains internal freedom, becomes independent of circumstances - that is, chooses the path of spiritual elevation. Unlike will, which among Russians is most often associated with the idea of ​​escaping from “civilization,” from despotic power, from the state with all its coercive institutions, Liberty, on the contrary, is “an intensive concept that presupposes a purposeful and well-formed self-deepening movement<…>If freedom is sought outside, then freedom is found within oneself.”

In Solzhenitsyn’s story, such a point of view (almost one to one!) is expressed by the Baptist Alyosha, addressing Shukhov: “What is your will? In freedom, your last faith will be swallowed up by thorns! Be glad you're in prison! Here you have time to think about your soul!” . Ivan Denisovich, who himself sometimes “didn’t know whether he wanted it or not,” also cares about preserving his own soul, but understands this and formulates it in his own way: “<…>he was not a jackal even after eight years of general work - and the further he went, the more firmly he became established.” Unlike the devout Alyosha, who lives almost by the “holy spirit” alone, the half-pagan, half-Christian Shukhov builds his life along two axes that are equivalent to him: “horizontal” - everyday, everyday, physical - and “vertical” - existential, internal , metaphysical." Thus, the line of approach of these characters has a vertical orientation. The idea verticals“associated with upward movement, which, by analogy with spatial symbolism and moral concepts, symbolically corresponds to the tendency towards spiritualization.” In this regard, it seems no coincidence that it is Alyoshka and Ivan Denisovich who occupy the top places on the carriage, and Tsezar and Buinovsky - the bottom: the last two characters have yet to find the path leading to spiritual ascent. The writer, based also on his own camp experience, clearly outlined the main stages of the ascent of a person who found himself in the millstones of the Gulag in an interview with Le Point magazine: the struggle for survival, comprehension of the meaning of life, finding God ( P. II: 322-333).

Thus, the closed framework of the camp depicted in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” determines the movement of the story’s chronotope primarily not along a horizontal, but along a vertical vector - that is, not due to the expansion of the spatial field of the work, but due to the development of spiritual and moral content.

Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays lit. life // New world. 1991. No. 6. P. 20.

A. Solzhenitsyn recalls this word in an article devoted to the history of relations with V. Shalamov: “<…>very early on, a dispute arose between us about the word “zek” that I had introduced: V.T. strongly objected, because this word was not at all common in the camps, even rarely anywhere, while prisoners almost everywhere slavishly repeated the administrative “ze-ka” (for fun, varying it - “Polar Komsomolets” or “Zakhar Kuzmich”), in other camps they said “language”. Shalamov believed that I should not have introduced this word and that it would never catch on. And I was sure that he would get stuck (it is verbose, and inflected, and has a plural form), that language and history were waiting for him, it was impossible without him. And he turned out to be right. (V.T. never used this word anywhere.)” ( Solzhenitsyn A.I. With Varlam Shalamov // New World. 1999. No. 4. P. 164). Indeed, in a letter to the author of “One Day...” V. Shalamov wrote: “By the way, why “zek” and not “zek”. After all, this is how it is written: s/k and bows: zeka, zekoyu” (Znamya. 1990. No. 7. P. 68).

Shalamov V.T. Resurrection of Larch: Stories. M.: Artist. lit., 1989. P. 324. True, in a letter to Solzhenitsyn immediately after the publication of “One Day...” Shalamov, “stepping over his deep conviction about the absolute evil of camp life, admitted: “It is possible that this kind of passion for work [as in Shukhov] and saves people"" ( Solzhenitsyn A.I. A grain landed between two millstones // New World. 1999. No. 4. P. 163).

Banner. 1990. No. 7. P. 81, 84.

Florensky P.A. Names // Sociological research. 1990. No. 8. P. 138, 141.

Schneerson M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Essays on creativity. Frankfurt a/M., 1984. P. 112.

Epstein M.N.“Nature, the world, the hiding place of the universe...”: A system of landscape images in Russian poetry. M.: Higher. school, 1990. P. 133.

By the way, jailers also turn to zoonym words to express their contempt for prisoners, whom they do not recognize as people: “Have you ever seen how your woman washed the floors, pig?” ; “- Stop! - the watchman makes noise. - Like a flock of sheep"; “- Let’s figure it out five by one, sheep’s heads<…>" etc.

Hegel G.V.F. Aesthetics. In 4 vols. M.: Art, 1968–1973. T. 2. P. 165.

Fedorov F.P.. Romantic artistic world: space and time. Riga: Zinatne, 1988. P. 306.

Afanasyev A.N. Tree of Life: Selected Articles. M.: Sovremennik, 1982. P. 164.

Compare: “The wolf, due to its predatory, predatory nature, received in folk legends the meaning of a hostile demon” ( Afanasyev A.N.

Banner. 1990. No. 7. P. 69.

Kerlot H.E. Dictionary of symbols. M.: REFL-book, 1994. P. 253.

An interesting interpretation of the symbolic properties of these two metals is contained in the work of L.V. Karaseva: “Iron is an unkind, infernal metal<…>metal is purely masculine and militaristic”; “Iron becomes a weapon or reminds of a weapon”; " Copper- matter of a different nature<…>Copper is softer than iron. Its color resembles the color of the human body<…>copper - female metal<…>If we talk about the meanings that are closer to the mind of the Russian person, then among them, first of all, will be the churchliness and statehood of copper”; “Copper resists aggressive and merciless iron as a soft, protective, compassionate metal” ( Karasev L.V.. Ontological view of Russian literature / Ross. state humanist univ. M., 1995. pp. 53–57).

National images of the world. Cosmo-Psycho-Logos. M.: Publishing house. group “Progress” - “Culture”, 1995. P. 181.

Toporov V.N. Space and text // Text: semantics and structure. M.: Nauka, 1983. pp. 239–240.

Nepomnyashchiy V.S. Poetry and fate: Above the pages of the spiritual biography of A.S. Pushkin. M., 1987. P. 428.

Kerlot H.E. Dictionary of symbols. M.: REFL-book, 1994. P. 109.

The first work about Stalin's camps published in the USSR. The description of an ordinary day for an ordinary prisoner is not yet a complete account of the horrors of the Gulag, but it also produces a deafening effect and deals a blow to the inhumane system that gave birth to the camps.

comments: Lev Oborin

What is this book about?

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, aka number Shch-854, has been in the camp for nine years. The story (in length - more like a story) describes his usual day from wake-up until lights out: this day is full of both hardships and small joys (as far as one can talk about joys in the camp), clashes with the camp authorities and conversations with comrades in misfortune, selfless work and small tricks that make up the struggle for survival. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was, in fact, the first work about the camps to appear in the Soviet press - for millions of readers it became a revelation, a long-awaited word of truth and a brief encyclopedia of life in the Gulag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 1953

Laski Collection/Getty Images

When was it written?

Solzhenitsyn conceived the story about one day of a prisoner in the camp, in 1950-1951. Direct work on the text began on May 18, 1959 and lasted 45 days. At the same time - the end of the 1950s - the work on the second edition of the novel “In the First Circle”, the collection of materials for the future “Red Wheel”, the plan for the “GULAG Archipelago”, the writing of “Matryonin’s Dvor” and several “Krokhotka” dates back to this time; At the same time, Solzhenitsyn teaches physics and astronomy at a Ryazan school and is being treated for the consequences of cancer. At the beginning of 1961, Solzhenitsyn edited One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, softening some details so that the text became at least theoretically “passable” for the Soviet press.

The house in Ryazan where Solzhenitsyn lived from 1957 to 1965

In the summer of 1963, “One Day...” appears in a secret CIA report on the cultural policy of the USSR: the intelligence services know that Khrushchev personally authorized the publication

How is it written?

Solzhenitsyn sets himself a strict time frame: the story begins with a wake-up call and ends with going to bed. This allows the author to show the essence of the camp routine through many details and to reconstruct typical events. “He did not construct, essentially, any external plot, did not try to start the action abruptly and unravel it more effectively, did not stir up interest in his narrative with the tricks of literary intrigue,” noted critic Vladimir Lakshin 1 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, notes. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M.: LLC “Agency “KRPA Olimp”, 2004. P. 118. ⁠ : The reader's attention is held by the courage and honesty of the descriptions.

“One day...” is adjacent to the tradition of skaz, that is, the depiction of oral, non-bookish speech. In this way, the effect of direct perception “through the eyes of the hero” is achieved. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn mixes different layers of language in the story, reflecting the social reality of the camp: the jargon and abuse of prisoners coexist with the bureaucracy of abbreviations, the vernacular of Ivan Denisovich - with various registers of the intelligent speech of Caesar Markovich and kavtorank Captain of the second rank. ⁠ Buinovsky.

How did I not know about Ivan Shukhov? How could he not feel that on this quiet frosty morning he, along with thousands of others, was being taken under escort with dogs outside the camp gates into a snowy field - to the object?

What influenced her?

Solzhenitsyn’s own camp experience and testimonies of other camp inmates. Two large, different order traditions of Russian literature: essay (influenced the concept and structure of the text) and tale, from Leskov to Remizov (influenced the style, language of the characters and the narrator).

In January 1963, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published in Roman-Gazeta with a circulation of 700,000 copies

The first edition of the story in the New World. 1962

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published thanks to a unique combination of circumstances: there was a text by the author, who survived the camp and miraculously recovered from a serious illness; there was an influential editor willing to fight for this text; there was a request from the authorities to support anti-Stalinist revelations; there were personal ambitions of Khrushchev, for whom it was important to emphasize his role in de-Stalinization.

At the beginning of November 1961, after much doubt whether it was time or not, Solzhenitsyn handed over the manuscript Raisa Orlova Raisa Davydovna Orlova (1918-1989) - writer, philologist, human rights activist. From 1955 to 1961 she worked in the magazine “Foreign Literature”. Together with her husband Lev Kopelev, she spoke in defense of Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1980, Orlova and Kopelev emigrated to Germany. In exile, their joint book of memoirs “We Lived in Moscow” and the novels “Doors Open Slowly” and “Hemingway in Russia” were published. Orlova’s book of memoirs, “Memories of Non-Past Time,” was published posthumously. ⁠ , the wife of his friend and former prisoner Lev Kopelev Lev Zinovievich Kopelev (1912-1997) - writer, literary critic, human rights activist. During the war, he was a propaganda officer and translator from German; in 1945, a month before the end of the war, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison “for promoting bourgeois humanism” - Kopelev criticized looting and violence against the civilian population in East Prussia. At the Marfinskaya Sharashka I met Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Since the mid-1960s, Kopelev has been involved in the human rights movement: speaking out and signing letters in defense of dissidents, distributing books through samizdat. In 1980, he was deprived of citizenship and emigrated to Germany with his wife, writer Raisa Orlova. Among Kopelev’s books are “Keep Forever”, “And He Made Himself an Idol”, and the memoirs “We Lived in Moscow” were written in co-authorship with his wife. ⁠ , later published in the novel “In the First Circle” under the name Rubin. Orlova brought the manuscript to the New World editor and critic Anne Berser Anna Samoilovna Berzer (real name Asya; 1917-1994) - critic, editor. Berzer worked as an editor at Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Writer publishing house, and the Znamya and Moscow magazines. From 1958 to 1971 she was the editor of Novy Mir: she worked with texts by Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Dombrovsky, Trifonov. Berser was known as a brilliant editor and author of witty critical articles. In 1990, Berzer’s book “Farewell,” dedicated to Grossman, was published. ⁠ , and she showed the story to the editor-in-chief of the magazine, poet Alexander Tvardovsky, bypassing his deputies. Shocked, Tvardovsky launched an entire campaign to get the story published. A chance for this was given by the recent Khrushchev revelations on XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU On February 14, 1956, at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev made a closed report condemning Stalin’s personality cult. At the XXII Congress, in 1961, anti-Stalinist rhetoric became even harsher: words were publicly spoken about Stalin’s arrests, torture, and crimes against the people, and it was proposed to remove his body from the Mausoleum. After this congress, settlements named in honor of the leader were renamed, and monuments to Stalin were eliminated. ⁠ , Tvardovsky’s personal acquaintance with Khrushchev, the general atmosphere of the thaw. Tvardovsky received positive reviews from several major writers - including Paustovsky, Chukovsky and Ehrenburg, who was in favor.

This streak used to be so happy: everyone was given ten. And from forty-nine such a streak began - everyone was twenty-five, regardless

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The leadership of the CPSU proposed making several amendments. Solzhenitsyn agreed to some, in particular, to mention Stalin in order to emphasize his personal responsibility for terror and the Gulag. However, throw away the words of Brigadier Tyurin: “You are still there, Creator, in heaven. You endure for a long time and you hit painfully.” Solzhenitsyn refused: “... I would give in if it were at my own expense or at literary expense. But then they offered to give in at the expense of God and at the expense of the peasant, and I promised to never do this. do" 2 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. P. 44. ⁠ .

There was a danger that the story, which was already selling copies, would “leak” abroad and be published there - this would close the possibility of publication in the USSR. “That the flight to the West did not happen for almost a year is a miracle no less than the publication itself in the USSR,” Solzhenitsyn noted. Ultimately, in 1962, Tvardovsky was able to convey the story to Khrushchev - the Secretary General was excited by the story, and he authorized its publication, and for this he had to argue with the top of the Central Committee. The story was published in the November 1962 issue of Novy Mir with a circulation of 96,900 copies; later another 25,000 were printed - but this was not enough for everyone, “One Day...” was distributed in lists and photocopies. In 1963, “One Day...” was re-released "Roman-newspaper" One of the largest circulation Soviet literary publications, published since 1927. The idea was to publish works of art for the people, as Lenin put it, “in the form of a proletarian newspaper.” Roman-Gazeta published works by major Soviet writers - from Gorky and Sholokhov to Belov and Rasputin, as well as texts by foreign authors: Voynich, Remarque, Hasek. ⁠ circulation is already 700,000 copies; this was followed by a separate book edition (100,000 copies). When Solzhenitsyn fell into disgrace, all these publications began to be confiscated from libraries, and until perestroika, “One Day...”, like other works of Solzhenitsyn, was distributed only in samizdat and tamizdat.

Alexander Tvardovsky. 1950 Editor-in-Chief of Novy Mir, where “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was first published

Anna Berzer. 1971 Editor of Novy Mir, who gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript to Alexander Tvardovsky

Vladimir Lakshin. 1990s. Deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, author of the article “Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes” (1964)

How was she received?

The highest favor towards Solzhenitsyn's story became the key to favorable responses. In the first months, 47 reviews appeared in the Soviet press with loud headlines: “You must be a citizen...”, “In the name of man,” “Humanity,” “Harsh truth,” “In the name of truth, in the name of life” (the author of the latter is an odious critic Vladimir Ermilov, who participated in the persecution of many writers, including Platonov). The motive of many reviews is that repressions are a thing of the past: for example, a front-line writer Grigory Baklanov Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov (real name Friedman; 1923-2009) - writer and screenwriter. He went to the front at the age of 18, fought in the artillery, and ended the war with the rank of lieutenant. Since the early 1950s, he has been publishing stories and stories about the war; his story “An Inch of Earth” (1959) was sharply criticized for the “trench truth”; the novel “July 41” (1964), which described Stalin’s destruction of the high command of the Red Army, was not republished for 14 years after its first publication. During the years of perestroika, Baklanov headed the magazine “Znamya”; under his leadership, “Heart of a Dog” by Bulgakov and “We” by Zamyatin were published for the first time in the USSR. ⁠ He calls his review “So that this never happens again.” In the first, “ceremonial” review in Izvestia (“About the past in the name of the future”), Konstantin Simonov asked rhetorical questions: “Whose evil will, whose boundless arbitrariness could tear these Soviet people - farmers, builders, workers, warriors - from their families, from work, and finally from the war against fascism, to put them outside the law, outside society?” Simonov concluded: “It seems that A. Solzhenitsyn showed himself in his story as a true assistant to the party in the sacred and necessary task of fighting the cult of personality and its consequences" 3 The word makes its way: Collection of articles and documents about A. I. Solzhenitsyn. 1962-1974 / intro. L. Chukovskaya, comp. V. Glotser and E. Chukovskaya. M.: Russian way, 1998. pp. 19, 21. ⁠ . Other reviewers fit the story into the larger realistic tradition, comparing Ivan Denisovich with other representatives of the “people” in Russian literature, for example with Platon Karataev from War and Peace.

Perhaps the most important Soviet review was the article by Novomir critic Vladimir Lakshin “Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes” (1964). Analyzing “One Day...”, Lakshin writes: “The story clearly indicates the time of action - January 1951. And I don’t know about others, but while reading the story, my thoughts kept coming back to what I was doing, how I was living at that time.<…>But how come I didn’t know about Ivan Shukhov? How could he not feel that on this quiet frosty morning he, along with thousands of others, was being taken under guard with dogs outside the camp gates into a snowy field - to object? 4 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, notes. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M.: LLC “Agency “KRPA Olimp”, 2004. P. 123. ⁠ Anticipating the end of the Thaw, Lakshin tried to protect the story from possible persecution, making reservations about its “partisanship,” and objected to critics who reproached Solzhenitsyn for the fact that Ivan Denisovich “cannot ... claim the role of the folk type of our era” (that is, he does not fit into normative socialist realist model), that his “whole philosophy is reduced to one thing: to survive!” Lakshin demonstrates - directly from the text - examples of Shukhov’s steadfastness, preserving his personality.

Prisoner of Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1945.
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

Valentin Kataev called “One Day...” false: “the protest is not shown.” Korney Chukovsky objected: “But that’s all Truth story: the executioners created such conditions that people lost the slightest concept of justice...<…>...And Kataev says: how dare he not protest, at least under the covers. Did Kataev himself protest a lot during the Stalinist regime? He composed slave hymns, just like All" 5 Chukovsky K.I. Diary: 1901-1969: In 2 volumes. M.: OLMA-Press Star World, 2003. T. 2. P. 392. ⁠ . Anna Akhmatova’s oral review is known: “This story must be read and learned by heart - every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union" 6 Chukovskaya L.K. Notes about Anna Akhmatova: in 3 volumes. M.: Soglasie, 1997. T. 2. P. 512. ⁠ .

After the release of “One Day...” the editors of Novy Mir and the author himself began to receive mountains of letters with gratitude and personal stories. Former prisoners asked Solzhenitsyn: “You should write a large and equally truthful book on this topic, depicting not just one day, but entire years”; “If you have started this great thing, continue it and further" 7 “Dear Ivan Denisovich!..” Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. P. 142, 177. ⁠ . Materials sent by Solzhenitsyn’s correspondents formed the basis of “The Gulag Archipelago.” “One Day...” was enthusiastically received by Varlam Shalamov, the author of the great “Kolyma Stories” and in the future an ill-wisher of Solzhenitsyn: “The story is like poetry - everything in it is perfect, everything is expedient.”

The prisoner's thought - and that one is not free, keeps coming back, stirs things up again: will they find the solder in the mattress? Will the medical unit be released in the evening? Will the captain be imprisoned or not?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Of course, negative reviews also came: from Stalinists who justified the terror, from people who were afraid that the publication would damage the international prestige of the USSR, from those who were shocked by the rude language of the heroes. Sometimes these motivations were combined. One reader, a former free foreman in places of detention, was indignant: who gave Solzhenitsyn the right to “indiscriminately denounce both the order existing in the camp and the people who are called upon to protect the prisoners...<…>The hero of the story and the author do not like these orders, but they are necessary and necessary for the Soviet state!” Another reader asked: “So tell me, why, like banners, unfurl your dirty trousers in front of the world?<…>I cannot perceive this work, because it humiliates my dignity of the Soviet person" 8 “Dear Ivan Denisovich!..” Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. pp. 50-55, 75. ⁠ . In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn also cites indignant letters from former employees of the punitive authorities, including such self-justifications: “We, the performers, are also people, we also went to heroism: we did not always shoot those who were falling and, thus, risked our service" 9 Solzhenitsyn A.I. The GULAG Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M.: Center “New World”, 1990. T. 3. P. 345. ⁠ .

In emigration, the release of “One Day...” was perceived as an important event: the story was not only strikingly different in tone from the Soviet prose available in the West, but also confirmed the information known to emigrants about Soviet camps.

In the West, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was met with attention - among left-wing intellectuals, according to Solzhenitsyn, it raised the first doubts about the progressiveness of the Soviet experiment: “The only reason everyone lost their tongues was that it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, this shocked." But this also led some reviewers to doubt the literary quality of the text: “This is a political sensation, not a literary one.<…>If we change the scene to South Africa or Malaysia... we get an honest but crudely written essay about completely incomprehensible people" 10 Magner T. F. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1963. Vol. 7. No. 4. Pp. 418-419. ⁠ . For other reviewers, politics did not overshadow the ethical and aesthetic significance of the story. American Slavist Franklin Reeve Franklin Reeve (1928-2013) - writer, poet, translator. In 1961, Reeve became one of the first American professors to come to the USSR on exchange; in 1962 he was an interpreter for the poet Robert Frost during his meeting with Khrushchev. In 1970, Reeve translated Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize speech. From 1967 to 2002 he taught literature at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Reeve is the author of more than 30 books: poems, novels, plays, critical articles, translations from Russian. ⁠ expressed concern that “One Day” would be read solely as “another performance at the international political Olympics,” a sensational exposure of totalitarian communism, while the meaning of the story is much broader. The critic compares Solzhenitsyn with Dostoevsky, and “One Day” with “The Odyssey,” seeing in the story “the deepest affirmation of human value and human dignity”: “In this book, an “ordinary” person in inhumane conditions is studied to the most depths" 11 Reeve F. D. The House of the Living // Kenyon Review. 1963. Vol. 25. No. 2. Pp. 356-357. ⁠ .

Dishes of prisoners in a forced labor camp

Prisoners of Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1945

Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

For a short time, Solzhenitsyn became a recognized master of Soviet literature. He was accepted into the Writers' Union, he published several more works (the most notable is the long story “Matryonin's Dvor”), and the possibility of awarding him the Lenin Prize for “One Day...” was seriously discussed. Solzhenitsyn was invited to several “meetings of party and government leaders with cultural and artistic figures” (and left caustic memories of this). But from the mid-1960s, with the end of the Thaw that began under Khrushchev, censorship stopped allowing Solzhenitsyn’s new works: the newly rewritten “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” never appeared in the Soviet press until perestroika, but were published in the West. “The accidental breakthrough with “Ivan Denisovich” did not at all reconcile the System with me and did not promise easy movement further,” he later explained Solzhenitsyn 12 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. P. 50. ⁠ . At the same time, he worked on his main book, “The Gulag Archipelago,” a unique and meticulous study of the Soviet punitive system, as far as the author’s circumstances allowed. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize - primarily for “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, and in 1974 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship and deported abroad - the writer would live in exile for 20 years, remaining an active publicist and increasingly speaking in irritating role of teacher or prophet.

After perestroika, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was republished dozens of times, including as part of the 30-volume collected works of Solzhenitsyn (M.: Vremya, 2007) - the most authoritative at the moment. In 1963, an English television play was made based on the work, and in 1970, a full-fledged film adaptation (a joint production of Norway and Great Britain; Solzhenitsyn reacted positively to the film). “One Day” was staged in the theater more than once. The first Russian film adaptation should appear in the coming years: in April 2018, Gleb Panfilov began filming a film based on Ivan Denisovich. Since 1997, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has been included in the compulsory school literature curriculum.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 1962

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“One Day” - the first Russian work about the Great Terror and the camps?

No. The first prose work about the Great Terror is considered to be the story “Sofya Petrovna” by Lydia Chukovskaya, written back in 1940 (Chukovskaya’s husband, the outstanding physicist Matvey Bronstein, was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938). In 1952, the novel “Imaginary Values” by second-wave emigrant Nikolai Narokov was published in New York, describing the very height of Stalin’s terror. Stalin's camps are mentioned in the epilogue of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Varlam Shalamov, whose “Kolyma Tales” is often contrasted with Solzhenitsyn’s prose, began writing them in 1954. The main part of Akhmatova’s “Requiem” was written in 1938-1940 (at that time her son Lev Gumilyov was in the camp). In the Gulag itself, works of art were also created - especially poetry, which was easier to remember.

It is usually said that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first published work about the Gulag. A caveat is needed here. On the eve of the publication of One Day, the editors of Izvestia, already aware of Tvardovsky’s struggle for Solzhenitsyn, published the story Georgy Shelest Georgy Ivanovich Shelest (real name - Malykh; 1903-1965) - writer. In the early 1930s, Shelest wrote stories about the Civil War and partisans, and worked for Transbaikal and Far Eastern newspapers. In 1935 he moved to the Murmansk region, where he worked as secretary of the editorial board of “Kandalaksha Communist”. In 1937, the writer was accused of organizing an armed uprising and sent to the Ozerlager; 17 years later he was rehabilitated. After his release, Shelest went to Tajikistan, where he worked on the construction of a hydroelectric power station, and there he began writing prose on a camp theme. ⁠ “Nugget” is about communists who were repressed in 1937 and panning for gold in Kolyma (“At the editorial meeting of Izvestia, Adzhubey was angry that it was not his newspaper that was “discovering” an important topic" 13 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. P. 45. ⁠ ). Tvardovsky, in a letter to Solzhenitsyn, complained: “...For the first time, such words as “oper”, “sexot”, “morning prayer”, etc. were introduced into use on the printed page. how" 14 “Dear Ivan Denisovich!..” Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. P. 20. ⁠ . Solzhenitsyn was initially upset by the appearance of Shelest’s story, “but then I thought: why is he interfering?<…>“Pioneering” the topic - I think they didn’t succeed. What about words? But we didn’t invent them, we can’t get a patent for them costs" 15 “Dear Ivan Denisovich!..” Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. P. 25. ⁠ . The emigrant magazine “Posev” in 1963 spoke contemptuously of “Nugget”, believing that it was an attempt “on the one hand, to establish the myth that in the camps it was the good security officers and party members who suffered and died from the evil Uncle Stalin; on the other hand, by showing the mood of these good security officers and party members, to create a myth that in the camps, enduring injustice and torment, the Soviet people, by their faith in the regime, by their “love” for it, remained Soviet people" 16 The brigade commander of the Cheka-OGPU “remembers” the camps... // Posev. 1962. No. 51-52. P. 14. ⁠ . At the end of Shelest’s story, the prisoners who found a gold nugget decide not to exchange it for food and shag, but to hand it over to their superiors and receive gratitude “for helping the Soviet people in difficult days” - Solzhenitsyn, of course, has nothing similar, although many Gulag prisoners actually remained true-believing communists (Solzhenitsyn himself wrote about this in “The Gulag Archipelago” and the novel “In the First Circle”). Shelest’s story went almost unnoticed: there were already rumors about the imminent publication of “One Day...”, and it was Solzhenitsyn’s text that became a sensation. In a country where everyone knew about the camps, no one expected that the truth about them would be expressed publicly, in thousands of copies - even after the XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU, at which the repressions and Stalin’s cult of personality were condemned.

Corrective labor camp in Karelia. 1940s

Does One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich depict life in the camp truthfully?

The main judges here were the former prisoners themselves, who rated “One Day...” highly and wrote letters of gratitude to Solzhenitsyn. Of course, there were individual complaints and clarifications: in such a painful topic, every little detail was important to Solzhenitsyn’s comrades in misfortune. Some prisoners wrote that “the regime of the camp where Ivan Denisovich was imprisoned was very easy.” Solzhenitsyn confirmed this: the special prison in which Shukhov served the last years of his imprisonment was no match for the camp in Ust-Izhma, where Ivan Denisovich suffered scurvy and lost his teeth.

Some reproached Solzhenitsyn for exaggerating the prisoner’s zeal for work: “No one would, at the risk of leaving himself and the brigade without food, continue to lay wall" 17 Abelyuk E. S., Polivanov K. M. History of Russian literature of the 20th century: A book for enlightened teachers and students: In 2 books. M.: New Literary Review, 2009. P. 245. ⁠ , - however, Varlam Shalamov pointed out: “The passion for the work of Shukhov and other brigadiers when they are laying a wall is subtly and correctly shown.<…>This passion for work is somewhat akin to that feeling of excitement when two hungry columns overtake each other.<…>It’s possible that this kind of passion for work saves people.” “How can Ivan Denisovich survive ten years, day and night just cursing his work? After all, he’s the one who should hang himself on the first bracket!” — wrote later Solzhenitsyn 18 Solzhenitsyn A.I. The GULAG Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M.: Center “New World”, 1990. T. 2. P. 170. ⁠ . He believed that such complaints come from “former idiots In the camp, prisoners who got a privileged, “dust-free” position were called idiots: cook, clerk, storekeeper, duty officer. ⁠ and their never-sitting intelligent friends.”

But none of the Gulag survivors accused Solzhenitsyn of lying and distorting reality. Evgenia Ginzburg, the author of “Steep Route,” when offering her manuscript to Tvardovsky, wrote about “One Day...”: “Finally, people learned from the original source about at least one day of the life that we led (in different versions) for 18 years.” . There were a lot of similar letters from camp inmates, although “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” does not mention even a tenth of the hardships and atrocities that were possible in the camps—Solzhenitsyn performs this work in “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Barracks for prisoners of Ponyslag. Perm region, 1943

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Why did Solzhenitsyn choose such a title for the story?

The fact is that Solzhenitsyn did not choose him. The name under which Solzhenitsyn sent his manuscript to Novy Mir is “Shch-854,” the personal number of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the camp. This name focused all attention on the hero, but was unpronounceable. The story also had an alternative title or subtitle - “One Day of One Prisoner.” Based on this option, the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir Tvardovsky proposed “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Here the focus is on time, duration, and the title turns out to be almost equal to the content. Solzhenitsyn easily accepted this successful option. It is interesting that Tvardovsky proposed a new name for “Matryonin’s Dvor,” which was originally called “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” Here, censorship considerations primarily played a role.

Why one day and not a week, month or year?

Solzhenitsyn specifically resorts to a limitation: during one day, many dramatic, but generally routine events take place in the camp. “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell”: this means that these events, familiar to Shukhov, are repeated day after day, and one day is not much different from another. One day is enough to show the entire camp - at least that relatively “prosperous” camp under the relatively “prosperous” regime in which Ivan Denisovich had to sit. Solzhenitsyn continues to list numerous details of camp life even after the climax of the story - laying cinder blocks at the construction of a thermal power plant: this emphasizes that the day does not end, there are still many painful minutes ahead, that life is not literature. Anna Akhmatova noted: “In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the details irritate me. The leg went numb, one shark died, a hook was inserted, a hook was not inserted, etc. And all to no avail. And here every detail is needed and road" 19 Saraskina L. I. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. M.: Young Guard, 2009. P. 504. ⁠ .

“The action takes place for a limited time in a confined space” is a characteristic essay device (you can recall texts from "physiological" collections Collections of works in the genre of everyday, morally descriptive essays. One of the first “physiological” collections in Russia is “Ours, Copied from Life by Russians,” compiled by Alexander Bashutsky. The most famous is the almanac “Physiology of St. Petersburg” by Nekrasov and Belinsky, which became the manifesto of the natural school. ⁠ , individual works by Pomyalovsky, Nikolai Uspensky, Zlatovratsky). “One Day” is a productive and understandable model, which even after Solzhenitsyn is used by “review” and “encyclopedic” texts that no longer adhere to the realist agenda. Over the course of one day (and - almost all the time - in one closed space) an action is performed; Vladimir Sorokin clearly writes his “Day of the Oprichnik” with an eye on Solzhenitsyn. (By the way, this is not the only similarity: the hypertrophied “folk” language of “The Day of the Oprichnik” with its vernacular, neologisms, and inversions refers to the language of Solzhenitsyn’s story.) In Sorokin’s “Blue Fat,” lovers Stalin and Khrushchev discuss the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” written by a former prisoner of the “Crimean forced love camps” (LOVELAG); the leaders of the people are dissatisfied with the insufficient sadism of the author - here Sorokin parodies the long-standing dispute between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. Despite the clearly travesty nature, the fictional story retains the same “one-day” structure.

Map of forced labor camps in the USSR. 1945

Why does Ivan Denisovich have the number Shch-854?

Assigning numbers, of course, is a sign of dehumanization - prisoners officially do not have names, patronymics or surnames, they are addressed like this: “Yu forty-eight! Hands back!”, “Be five hundred and two! Pull yourself up!” An attentive reader of Russian literature will remember here Zamyatin’s “We,” where the heroes bear names like D-503, O-90, but in Solzhenitsyn we are faced not with dystopia, but with realistic detail. The number Shch-854 has no connection with the real name of Shukhov: the hero of “One Day”, captain of the rank Buinovsky, had the number Shch-311, Solzhenitsyn himself had the number Shch-262. Prisoners wore such numbers on their clothes (in the famous staged photograph of Solzhenitsyn, the number is sewn on a padded jacket, trousers and cap) and were obliged to monitor their condition - this brings the numbers closer to the yellow stars that Jews were ordered to wear in Nazi Germany (other persecuted people had their own marks Nazi groups - gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses...). In German concentration camps, prisoners also wore numbers on their clothes, and in Auschwitz they were tattooed on their arms.

Numerical codes generally play an important role in camp dehumanization 20 Pomorska K. The Overcoded World of Solzhenitsyn // Poetics Today. 1980. Vol. 1. No. 3, Special Issue: Narratology I: Poetics of Fiction. P. 165. ⁠ . Describing the morning divorce, Solzhenitsyn talks about dividing the camp prisoners into brigades. People are counted by head, like cattle:

- First! Second! Third!

And the fives separated and walked in separate chains, so that you could look from behind or from front: five heads, five backs, ten legs.

And the second watchman, the controller, stands silently at the other railings, just checking to see if the bill is correct.

Paradoxically, these seemingly worthless heads are important for reporting: “Man is more valuable than gold. If one head behind the wire is missing, you’ll add your head there.” Thus, among the repressive forces of the camp, one of the most significant is the bureaucracy. Even the smallest, absurd details speak of this: for example, Shukhov’s prisoner Caesar did not have his mustache shaved off in the camp, because in the photograph in the investigative case he has a mustache.

Vorkutlag punishment cell. Komi Republic, 1930–40s

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Padded jacket with a number, worn by prisoners of forced labor camps

Lanmas/Alamy/TASS

In what camp was Ivan Denisovich imprisoned?

The text of “One Day” makes it clear that this camp is a “convict” camp, relatively new (no one has yet served a full term there). We are talking about a special camp - the camps created for political prisoners received this name in 1948, although hard labor was returned to the penitentiary system back in 1943. The action of “One Day” takes place, as we remember, in 1951. From Ivan Denisovich’s previous camp odyssey it follows that for most of his term he spent most of his time in Ust-Izhma (Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) along with criminals. His new campmates believe that this is still not the worst fate The purpose of the special camps was to isolate “enemies of the people” from ordinary prisoners. The regime there was similar to a prison: bars on the windows, barracks locked at night, a ban on leaving the barracks after hours, and numbers on clothes. Such prisoners were used for particularly difficult work, for example in mines. However, despite the more difficult conditions, for many prisoners the political zone was a better fate than a domestic camp, where the “political” were terrorized by the “thieves”. ⁠ : “You, Vanya, spent eight years in prison - in what camps?.. You were in domestic camps, you lived there with the women. You didn’t wear numbers.”

Indications of a specific place in the text of the story itself are only indirect: for example, already on the first pages, the “old camp wolf” Kuzyomin tells the new arrivals: “Here, guys, the law is the taiga.” However, this saying was common in many Soviet camps. The winter temperature in the camp where Ivan Denisovich sits can drop below forty degrees - but such climatic conditions also exist in many places: in Siberia, the Urals, Chukotka, Kolyma, and the Far North. The name “Sotsgorodok” could give a clue (in the morning Ivan Denisovich dreams that his brigade would not be sent there): there were several settlements with this name (all of them were built by prisoners) in the USSR, including in places with a harsh climate, but this is the typical the name also “depersonalizes” the scene of action. Rather, one must assume that the conditions of the special camp in which Solzhenitsyn himself was imprisoned are reflected in the camp of Ivan Denisovich: Ekibastuz convict camp, later - part Steplaga A camp for political prisoners, which was located in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. Steplag prisoners worked in the mines: they mined coal, copper and manganese ores. In 1954, there was an uprising in the camp: five thousand prisoners demanded the arrival of a Moscow commission. The revolt was brutally suppressed by troops. Two years later, Steplag was liquidated. ⁠ In Kazakhstan.

Forced Labor Camp Honor Board

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Why was Ivan Denisovich imprisoned?

Solzhenitsyn writes openly about this: Ivan Denisovich fought (he went to the front in 1941: “The woman, the boss, left me in the forty-first year”) and was captured by the Germans, then broke out from there to his own - but the stay of the Soviet being a soldier in German captivity was often equated with treason. According to NKVD 21 Krivosheev G. F. Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th century: Statistical research / Under the general editorship. G. F. Krivosheeva. M.: OLMA-Press, 2001. P. 453-464. ⁠ , out of 1,836,562 prisoners of war who returned to the USSR, 233,400 people were sent to the Gulag on charges of treason. Such people were convicted under Article 58, paragraph 1a, of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“Treason to the Motherland”).

And this is how it happened: in February 1942, their entire army was surrounded in the North-West, and nothing was thrown from the planes for them to eat, and there were no planes. They went so far as to trim the hooves of dead horses, soak that cornea in water and eat it. And there was nothing to shoot with. And so little by little the Germans caught them in the forests and took them. And in such a group, Shukhov was held captive for a couple of days, there, in the forests, and the five of them ran away. And they sneaked through forests and swamps - miraculously they got to their own people. Only two were killed by his machine gunner on the spot, the third died from his wounds - two of them survived. If they were smarter, they would say that they were wandering through the forests, and it wouldn’t matter to them. And they opened up: they say, from German captivity. From captivity?? Holy shit! Fascist agents! And to jail. If there were five of them, maybe they would compare the testimonies and believe them, but they wouldn’t believe two of them: they said, the bastards agreed to escape.

Counterintelligence agents beat Shukhov to sign statements against himself (“if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; if you sign, you’ll at least live a little longer”). By the time the story takes place, Ivan Denisovich has been in the camp for the ninth year: he is due to be released in mid-1952. The penultimate phrase of the story - “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell” (let’s pay attention to the long, “in words”, writing out the numerals) - does not allow us to say unequivocally that Ivan Denisovich will be released: after all, many camp prisoners those who served their sentence received a new one instead of being released; Shukhov is also afraid of this.

Solzhenitsyn himself was convicted under paragraphs 10 and 11 of Article 58 for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation during wartime: in personal conversations and correspondence, he allowed himself to criticize Stalin. On the eve of his arrest, when the fighting was already taking place on German territory, Solzhenitsyn withdrew his battery from the German encirclement and was presented with the Order of the Red Banner, but on February 9, 1945 he was arrested in East Prussia.

Gate of the Vorkutlag coal mine. Komi Republic, 1945

Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

Prisoners at work. Ozerlag, 1950

What position does Ivan Denisovich occupy in the camp?

The social structure of the Gulag can be described in different ways. Let's say, before the establishment of special welfare camps, the contingent of the camps was clearly divided into criminals and political ones, “Article 58” (in Ust-Izhma, Ivan Denisovich belongs, of course, to the latter). On the other hand, prisoners are divided into those who participate in “general work” and “morons” - those who managed to take a more advantageous place, a relatively easy position: for example, get a job in an office or a bread slicer, work in a specialty needed in camp (tailor, shoemaker, doctor, cook). Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” writes: “...Among the survivors, among those who were freed, idiots make up a very significant proportion; among long-term residents from the Fifty-Eighth - it seems to me - 9/10.” Ivan Denisovich does not belong to the “morons” and treats them with contempt (for example, he generally calls them “moron”). “When choosing the hero of the camp story, I took a hard worker, I couldn’t take anyone else, because only he can see the true relationships of the camp (as soon as an infantry soldier can weigh the whole weight of the war, but for some reason he is not the one writing the memoirs). This choice of the hero and some harsh statements in the story puzzled and offended other former idiots,” Solzhenitsyn explained.

Among the hard workers, as well as among the “morons,” there is a hierarchy. For example, “one of the last brigadiers” Fetyukov, in freedom - “a big boss in some office”, does not enjoy anyone’s respect; Ivan Denisovich privately calls him “Fetyukov the Jackal.” Another brigadier, Senka Klevshin, who visited Buchenwald before, probably has a harder time than Shukhov, but he is approximately on an equal footing with him. Brigadier Tyurin occupies a special position - he is the most idealized character in the story: always fair, capable of protecting his own and saving them from murderous conditions. Shukhov is aware of his subordination to the foreman (it is important here that, according to the camp’s unwritten laws, the foreman is not one of the “morons”), but for a short time he can feel equality with him: “Go, foreman! Go, you are needed there! - (Shukhov calls him Andrei Prokofievich, but now his work is on par with the foreman. It’s not that he thinks so: “Now I’m equal,” but he just feels that it’s so.).”

Ivan Denisych! You don’t need to pray for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel. What is high among people is an abomination before God!

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

An even more subtle matter is the relationship between the “common man” Shukhov and the intellectual prisoners. Both Soviet and uncensored criticism sometimes reproached Solzhenitsyn for insufficient respect for intellectuals (the author of the contemptuous term “education” actually gave reason for this). “What worries me in the story is the attitude of the common people, all these camp workers towards those intellectuals who are still worried and still continue, even in the camp, to argue about Eisenstein, about Meyerhold, about cinema and literature and about the new performance by Yu. Zavadsky. .. Sometimes you can feel the author’s ironic and sometimes contemptuous attitude towards such people,” wrote critic I. Chicherov. Vladimir Lakshin catches him in the fact that not a word is said about Meyerhold in “One Day...”: for a critic this name is “only a sign of particularly refined spiritual interests, a kind of evidence of intelligence" 22 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, notes. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M.: LLC “Agency “KRPA Olimp”, 2004. P. 116-170. ⁠ . In Shukhov’s attitude towards Caesar Markovich, whom Ivan Denisovich is ready to serve and from whom he expects reciprocal services, there is indeed irony - but, according to Lakshin, it is connected not with Caesar’s intelligence, but with his isolation, with the same ability to get settled, with the preserved and in the camp with snobbery: “Caesar turned around, extended his hand for the porridge, at Shukhov and did not look, as if the porridge itself had arrived by air, and for his own: “But listen, art is not what, but how.” It is no accident that Solzhenitsyn puts side by side a “formalistic” judgment about art and a dismissive gesture: in the value system of “One Day...” they are completely interconnected.

Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1930–40s

Ivan Denisovich - an autobiographical hero?

Some readers tried to guess in which of the heroes Solzhenitsyn drew himself: “No, this is not Ivan Denisovich himself! And not Buinovsky... Or maybe Tyurin?<…>Is it really a paramedic-writer who, without leaving good memories, is still not so bad?" 23 “Dear Ivan Denisovich!..” Letters from readers: 1962-1964. M.: Russian way, 2012. P. 47. ⁠ His own experience is the most important source for Solzhenitsyn: he entrusts his feelings and ordeals after his arrest to Innocent Volodin, the hero of the novel “In the First Circle”; the second of the main characters of the novel, prisoner of the sharashka Gleb Nerzhin, is emphatically autobiographical. The Gulag Archipelago contains several chapters describing Solzhenitsyn's personal experiences in the camp, including attempts by the camp administration to persuade him to secretly cooperate. Both the novel “Cancer Ward” and the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” are autobiographical, not to mention Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs. In this respect, the figure of Shukhov is quite far from the author: Shukhov is a “simple”, unlearned person (unlike Solzhenitsyn, an astronomy teacher, he, for example, does not understand where the new month comes from after the new moon in the sky), a peasant, an ordinary person, and not a battalion commander. However, one of the effects of the camp is precisely that it erases social differences: the ability to survive, preserve oneself, and earn the respect of fellow sufferers becomes important (for example, Fetyukov and Der, who were bosses in freedom, are among the most disrespected people in the camp). In accordance with the essay tradition, which Solzhenitsyn willingly or unwillingly followed, he chose not an ordinary, but a typical (“typical”) hero: a representative of the most extensive Russian class, a participant in the most massive and bloody war. “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,” wrote Korney Chukovsky in a review of the story.

A soldier named Shukhov actually fought alongside Solzhenitsyn, but was not in the camp. The camp experience itself, including work in construction BUR High security barracks. ⁠ and thermal power plant, Solzhenitsyn took from his own biography - but admitted that he would not have endured everything that his hero went through: “Probably, I would not have survived eight years of camps if, as a mathematician, I had not been taken for four years at the so-called sharashka."

Exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a camp padded jacket. 1953

Can “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” be called a Christian work?

It is known that many camp inmates retained their religiosity in the most brutal conditions of Solovki and Kolyma. Unlike Shalamov, for whom the camp is an absolutely negative experience, convincing that God No 24 Bykov D. L. Soviet literature. Advanced course. M.: PROZAIK, 2015. pp. 399-400, 403. ⁠ The camp helped Solzhenitsyn strengthen his faith. During his life, including after the publication of “Ivan Denisovich,” he composed several prayers: in the first of them, he thanked God for being able to “send to Humanity a reflection of Your rays.” Protopresbyter Alexander Shmeman Alexander Dmitrievich Shmeman (1921-1983) - clergyman, theologian. From 1945 to 1951, Schmemann taught Church history at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. In 1951 he moved to New York, where he worked at St. Vladimir's Seminary, and in 1962 he became its director. In 1970, Schmemann was elevated to the rank of protopresbyter, the highest priestly rank for married clergy. Father Schmemann was a famous preacher, wrote works on liturgical theology, and hosted a program about religion on Radio Liberty for almost thirty years. ⁠ , citing this prayer, calls Solzhenitsyn a great Christian writer 25 Shmeman A., protopres. Great Christian writer (A. Solzhenitsyn) // Shmeman A., protopres. Fundamentals of Russian culture: Conversations on Radio Liberty. 1970-1971. M.: Publishing house of the Orthodox St. Tikhon's University for the Humanities, 2017. pp. 353-369. ⁠ .

Researcher Svetlana Kobets notes that “Christian topoi are scattered throughout the text of One Day.” There are hints of them in images, language formulas, conditional notation" 26 Kobets S. The Subtext of Christian Asceticism in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1998. Vol. 42. No. 4. P. 661. ⁠ . These hints bring a “Christian dimension” to the text, which, according to Kobets, ultimately determines the ethics of the characters, and the habits of the camp inmate, which allow him to survive, go back to Christian asceticism. Hardworking, humane, who have retained their moral core, the heroes of the story, with this view, are likened to martyrs and righteous people (remember the description of the legendary old prisoner Yu-81), and those who have settled more comfortably, for example Caesar, “do not get a chance for spiritual awakening" 27 Kobets S. The Subtext of Christian Asceticism in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich // The Slavic and East European Journal. 1998. Vol. 42. No. 4. P. 668. ⁠ .

One of Shukhov’s fellow prisoners is Baptist Alyoshka, a reliable and devout believer who believes that the camp is a test that serves the salvation of the human soul and God’s glory. His conversations with Ivan Denisovich go back to The Brothers Karamazov. He tries to instruct Shukhov: he notices that his soul “asks to pray to God,” explains that “you don’t need to pray for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel.<…>We need to pray about spiritual things: so that the Lord will remove the evil scum from our hearts...” The story of this character sheds light on Soviet repressions against religious organizations. Alyoshka was arrested in the Caucasus, where his community was located: both he and his comrades received twenty-five-year sentences. Baptists and Evangelical Christians In 1944, Evangelical Christians and Baptists living in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus united into one denomination. The doctrine of Evangelical Christians - Baptists is based on the Old and New Testaments, there is no division into clergy and laity in the confession, and baptism is carried out only at a conscious age. ⁠ were actively persecuted in the USSR since the early 1930s; during the years of the Great Terror, the most important figures of Russian Baptists died - Nikolai Odintsov, Mikhail Timoshenko, Pavel Ivanov-Klyshnikov and others. Others, whom the authorities considered less dangerous, were given standard camp sentences of that time - 8-10 years. The bitter irony is that these terms still seem feasible and “happy” to the camp inmates of 1951: “This period used to be so happy: everyone was given ten. And from forty-nine, such a streak began - everyone was twenty-five, no matter what.” Alyoshka is sure that the Orthodox Church “has moved away from the Gospel. They don’t imprison them or give them five years because their faith is not firm.” However, Shukhov’s own faith is far from all church institutions: “I willingly believe in God. But I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Why do you consider us fools and promise us heaven and hell?” He notes to himself that “Baptists love to agitate, like political instructors.”

Drawings and comments by Euphrosyne Kersnovskaya from the book “How Much is a Man Worth.” In 1941, Kersnovskaya, a resident of Bessarabia occupied by the USSR, was transferred to Siberia, where she spent 16 years

From whose perspective is the story told in “One Day”?

The impersonal narrator of “Ivan Denisovich” is close to Shukhov himself, but not equal to him. On the one hand, Solzhenitsyn reflects the thoughts of his hero and actively uses improperly direct speech. More than once or twice what happens in the story is accompanied by comments that seem to come from Ivan Denisovich himself. Behind the cries of captain Buinovsky: “You have no right to undress people in the cold! You ninth article According to the ninth article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1926, “social protection measures cannot be aimed at causing physical suffering or humiliation of human dignity and they do not set themselves the task of retribution or punishment.” ⁠ You don’t know the criminal code!..” follows the following comment: “They have. They know. This is something you, brother, don’t know yet.” In her work on the language of “One Day,” linguist Tatyana Vinokur gives other examples: “The foreman of everything is shaking. It’s shaking, it won’t stop,” “our column reached the street, and the mechanical plant disappeared behind the residential area.” Solzhenitsyn resorts to this technique when he needs to convey the feelings of his hero, often physical, physiological: “Nothing, it’s not very cold outside” or about a piece of sausage that Shukhov gets in the evening: “With her teeth! With teeth! Meat spirit! And real meat juice. It went there, to the stomach.” Western Slavists talk about the same thing, using the terms “indirect internal monologue”, “depicted speech”; British philologist Max Hayward traces this technique to the tradition of Russian tale 28 Rus V. J. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Point of View Analysis // Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. Summer-Fall 1971. Vol. 13. No. 2/3. P. 165, 167. ⁠ . For the narrator, the fairy tale form and folk language are also organic. On the other hand, the narrator knows something that Ivan Denisovich cannot know: for example, that paramedic Vdovushkin is not writing a medical report, but a poem.

According to Vinokur, Solzhenitsyn, constantly shifting his point of view, achieves a “fusion of hero and author,” and by switching to first-person pronouns (“our column reached the street”), he rises to that “highest level” of such a merger, “which gives him the opportunity to especially persistently emphasize their empathy, to remind them again and again of their direct involvement in those depicted events" 29 Vinokur T. G. About the language and style of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” // Questions of speech culture. 1965. Issue. 6. pp. 16-17. ⁠ . Thus, although biographically Solzhenitsyn is not at all equal to Shukhov, he can say (just as Flaubert said about Emma Bovary): “Ivan Denisovich is me.”

How is the language structured in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” mixes several linguistic registers. Usually, the first thing that comes to mind is the “folk” speech of Ivan Denisovich himself and the fairy-tale speech of the narrator himself, which is close to it. In “One Day...”, readers for the first time encounter such characteristic features of Solzhenitsyn’s style as inversion (“And that Sotsbytgorodok is a bare field, in the snowy ridges”), the use of proverbs, sayings, phraseological units (“a trial is not a loss,” “a warm, cold when will he understand?”, “in the wrong hands the radish is always thicker”), colloquial compression In linguistics, compression is understood as the reduction and compression of linguistic material without significant damage to the content. ⁠ in the conversations of the characters (“guarantee” - guaranteed ration, “Vecherka” - newspaper “Vechernyaya” Moscow") 30 Dozorova D. V. Compressive word-formation devices in the prose of A. I. Solzhenitsyn (based on the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) // The legacy of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in the modern cultural space of Russia and abroad (on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of the writer’s birth ): Sat. mat. Intl. scientific-practical conf. Ryazan: Concept, 2014. pp. 268-275. ⁠ . The abundance of improperly direct speech justifies the sketchy style of the story: we get the impression that Ivan Denisovich does not explain everything to us on purpose, like a tour guide, but is simply accustomed, in order to maintain clarity of mind, to explain everything to himself. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn more than once resorts to the author’s neologisms, stylized as vernacular - linguist Tatyana Vinokur names such examples as “under-smoking”, “to catch up”, “to take a breath”, “to groan”: “This is an updated composition of the word, many times increasing its emotional significance, expressive energy, the freshness of its recognition.” However, although “folk” and expressive lexemes in the story are remembered most of all, the bulk is still “general literary vocabulary" 31 Vinokur T. G. About the language and style of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” // Questions of speech culture. 1965. Issue. 6. pp. 16-32. ⁠ .

The camp speech of the peasant Shukhov and his comrades is deeply ingrained by thieves' jargon (“kum” is the detective officer, “knock” is to inform, “kondey” is the punishment cell, “six” is the one who serves others, “popka” is the soldier on the tower, “ idiot" - a prisoner who got a lucrative position in the camp), the bureaucratic language of the punitive system (BUR - high security barracks, PPCH - planning and production unit, nachkar - chief of the guard). At the end of the story, Solzhenitsyn included a small glossary explaining the most common terms and jargon. Sometimes these speech registers merge: for example, the slang “zek” is derived from the Soviet abbreviation “z/k” (“prisoner”). Some former camp inmates wrote to Solzhenitsyn that in their camps they always pronounced “zeka”, but after “One Day...” and “The Gulag Archipelago” Solzhenitsyn’s version (possibly occasionalism Occasionalism is a new word coined by a specific author. Unlike neologism, occasionalism is used only in the author’s work and does not go into wide use. ⁠ ) established itself in the language.

Every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union must read this story and learn it by heart.

Anna Akhmatova

A separate layer of speech in “One Day...” is swearing, which shocked some readers, but met with understanding among camp inmates who knew that Solzhenitsyn had not exaggerated his colors here. When publishing, Solzhenitsyn agreed to resort to banknotes and euphemisms A word or expression that replaces a rude, uncomfortable statement. ⁠ : replaced the letter “x” with “f” (this is how the famous “fuyaslitse” and “fuyomnik” appeared, but Solzhenitsyn managed to defend the “laughs”), added an accent somewhere (“Stop, ... eat!”, “I won’t I can wear this shit with this!”). Swearing every time serves to express expression - a threat or “draining of the soul.” The protagonist’s speech is mostly free of swearing: the only euphemism is unclear, whether it was the author’s or Shukhov’s: “Shukhov quickly hid from Tatarin around the corner of the barracks: the second time you get caught, he’ll sneak in again.” It's funny that in the 1980s, "One Day..." was removed from American schools due to swearing. “I received indignant letters from my parents: how can you publish such an abomination!” - recalled Solzhenitsyn 32 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. P. 54. ⁠ . At the same time, writers of uncensored literature, for example Vladimir Sorokin, whose “Day of the Oprichnik” was clearly influenced by Solzhenitsyn’s story, reproached him - and other Russian classics - for excessive modesty: “In Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” we observe the life of prisoners, and - not a single swear word! Only - “butter-fuyaslitse”. The men in Tolstoy's War and Peace do not utter a single swear word. It's a shame!"

Camp drawings by artist Hulo Sooster. Sooster served time in Karlag from 1949 to 1956

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - a story or a story?

Solzhenitsyn emphasized that his work was a story, but the editors of Novy Mir, obviously embarrassed by the volume of the text, suggested that the author publish it as a story. Solzhenitsyn, who did not think that publication was possible at all, agreed, which he later regretted: “I shouldn’t have given in. In our country, the boundaries between genres are being blurred and forms are being devalued. “Ivan Denisovich” is, of course, a story, albeit a big, loaded one.” He proved this by developing his own theory of prose genres: “I would single out a short story - easy to construct, clear in plot and thought. A story is what we most often try to call a novel: where there are several plot lines and even an almost obligatory length of time. And a novel (a vile word! Isn’t it possible otherwise?) differs from a story not so much in volume, and not so much in its length in time (it even became compressed and dynamic), but rather in the capture of many destinies, the horizon of view and the vertical thoughts" 32 Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays on literary life. M.: Consent, 1996. P. 28. ⁠ . By persistently calling “One Day...” a story, Solzhenitsyn clearly means the sketch style of his own writing; in his understanding, the content of the text matters for the genre name: one day, covering the characteristic details of the environment, is not material for a novel or story. Be that as it may, it is hardly possible to overcome the correctly noted tendency of “blurring” the boundaries between genres: despite the fact that the architecture of “Ivan Denisovich” is indeed more characteristic of the story, due to its volume one would like to call it something more.

Potter in Vorkutlag. Komi Republic, 1945

Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

What brings “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” closer to Soviet prose?

Of course, in terms of the time and place of writing and publication, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is Soviet prose. This question, however, is about something else: about the essence of “Soviet”.

Emigrant and foreign criticism, as a rule, read “One Day...” as anti-Soviet and anti-socialist realist work 34 Hayward M. Solzhenitsyn’s Place in Contemporary Soviet Literature // Slavic Review. 1964. Vol. 23. No. 3. Pp. 432-436. ⁠ . One of the most famous emigrant critics Roman Gul Roman Borisovich Gul (1896-1986) - critic, publicist. During the Civil War, he took part in the Ice Campaign of General Kornilov and fought in the army of Hetman Skoropadsky. Since 1920, Gul lived in Berlin: he published a literary supplement to the newspaper “Nakanune”, wrote novels about the Civil War, and collaborated with Soviet newspapers and publishing houses. In 1933, freed from a Nazi prison, he emigrated to France, where he wrote a book about his time in a German concentration camp. In 1950, Gul moved to New York and began working at the New Journal, which he later headed. Since 1978, he published the memoir trilogy “I Took Russia Away. Apology for emigration." ⁠ in 1963 he published an article “Solzhenitsyn and Socialist Realism” in the New Journal: “...The work of the Ryazan teacher Alexander Solzhenitsyn seems to cross out all socialist realism, that is, all Soviet literature. This story has nothing in common with her.” Gul suggested that Solzhenitsyn’s work, “bypassing Soviet literature... came straight out of pre-revolutionary literature. From the Silver Age. And this is her signaling meaning" 35 Gul R. B. A. Solzhenitsyn and socialist realism: “One day. Ivan Denisovich" // Gul R. B. Odvukon: Soviet and emigrant literature. New York: Most, 1973. P. 83. ⁠ . Gul brings together the fairy-tale, “folk” language of the story “not even with Gorky, Bunin, Kuprin, Andreev, Zaitsev,” but with Remizov and the eclectic set of “writers of the Remizov school”: Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Shishkov Vyacheslav Yakovlevich Shishkov (1873-1945) - writer, engineer. Since 1900, Shishkov conducted expeditionary studies of Siberian rivers. In 1915, Shishkov moved to Petrograd and, with the assistance of Gorky, published a collection of stories, “The Siberian Tale.” In 1923, “The Band,” a book about the Civil War, was published, and in 1933, “The Gloomy River,” a novel about life in Siberia at the turn of the century. For the last seven years of his life, Shishkov worked on the historical epic “Emelyan Pugachev”. ⁠ , Prishvin, Klychkov Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (1889-1937) - poet, writer, translator. In 1911, Klychkov’s first poetry collection, “Songs,” was published, and in 1914, the collection “The Hidden Garden.” In the 1920s, Klychkov became close to the “new peasant” poets: Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Yesenin, with the latter he shared a room. Klychkov is the author of the novels “The Sugar German”, “Chertukhinsky Balakir”, “Prince of Peace”, and has been translating Georgian poetry and Kyrgyz epic. In the 1930s, Klychkov was branded as a “kulak poet,” and in 1937 he was shot on false charges. ⁠ . “The verbal fabric of Solzhenitsyn’s story is akin to Remizov’s in its love for words with ancient roots and for the folk pronunciation of many words”; like Remizov, “in Solzhenitsyn’s dictionary there is a very expressive fusion of archaism with ultra-Soviet colloquial speech, a mixture of fairy-tale with Soviet" 36 Gul R. B. A. Solzhenitsyn and socialist realism: “One day. Ivan Denisovich" // Gul R. B. Odvukon: Soviet and emigrant literature. New York: Most, 1973. pp. 87-89. ⁠ .

Solzhenitsyn himself wrote all his life about socialist realism with contempt, calling it “an oath of abstinence from truth" 37 Nicholson M. A. Solzhenitsyn as a “socialist realist” / author. lane from English B. A. Erkhova // Solzhenitsyn: Thinker, historian, artist. Western criticism: 1974-2008: Sat. Art. / comp. and ed. entry Art. E. E. Erickson, Jr.; comment O. B. Vasilevskaya. M.: Russian way, 2010. pp. 476-477. ⁠ . But he resolutely did not accept modernism or avant-gardeism, considering it a harbinger of “the most destructive physical revolution of the 20th century”; philologist Richard Tempest believes that “Solzhenitsyn learned to use modernist means to achieve anti-modernist goals" 38 Tempest R. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - (anti)modernist / trans. from English A. Skidana // New literary review. 2010. pp. 246-263. ⁠ .

Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, “evil-willed”, hardy, a jack of all trades, crafty - and kind

Korney Chukovsky

In turn, Soviet reviewers, when Solzhenitsyn was officially in favor, insisted on the completely Soviet and even “party” nature of the story, seeing in it almost the embodiment of a social order to expose Stalinism. Gul could be ironic about this, the Soviet reader could assume that “correct” reviews and prefaces are written to divert attention, but if “One Day...” was stylistically completely alien to Soviet literature, it would hardly have been published.

For example, due to the culmination of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - the construction of a thermal power plant - many copies were broken. Some former prisoners saw falsehood here, while Varlam Shalamov considered Ivan Denisovich’s work zeal quite plausible (“Shukhov’s passion for work is subtly and correctly shown...<…>It is possible that this kind of passion for work saves people." And the critic Vladimir Lakshin, comparing “One Day...” with “unbearably boring” industrial novels, saw in this scene a purely literary and even didactic device - Solzhenitsyn managed not only to excitingly describe the work of a mason, but also to show the bitter irony of a historical paradox: “ When the picture of cruelly forced labor seems to be filled with the picture of free labor, labor driven by inner motivation, this makes one understand more deeply and sharply what people like our Ivan Denisovich are worth, and what a criminal absurdity it is to keep them away from their home, under the protection of machine guns. , behind the barbed wire" 39 Lakshin V. Ya. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes // Criticism of the 50-60s of the XX century / comp., preamble, notes. E. Yu. Skarlygina. M.: LLC “Agency “KRPA Olimp”, 2004. P. 143. ⁠ .

Lakshin subtly captures the kinship of the famous scene with the schematic climaxes of socialist realist novels, and the way in which Solzhenitsyn deviates from the canon. The fact is that both socialist realist standards and Solzhenitsyn’s realism are based on a certain invariant, originating in the Russian realistic tradition of the 19th century. It turns out that Solzhenitsyn is doing the same thing as official Soviet writers - only much better, more original (not to mention the context of the scene). American researcher Andrew Wachtel even believes that “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” “must be read as a socialist realist work (at least based on the understanding of socialist realism in 1962)”: “I in no way belittle Solzhenitsyn’s achievements by this...<...>he... took advantage of the most erased clichés of socialist realism and used them in a text that almost completely obscured its literary and cultural Denisovich" 41 Solzhenitsyn A.I. Journalism: In 3 volumes. Yaroslavl: Upper Volga, 1997. T. 3. P. 92-93. ⁠ . But in the text of “Archipelago” itself, Ivan Denisovich appears as a person who knows camp life well: the author enters into a dialogue with his hero. So, in the second volume, Solzhenitsyn invites him to tell him how to survive in a hard labor camp, “if they don’t hire him as a paramedic, or as an orderly, they won’t even give him a fake release for one day? If he has a lack of literacy and an excess of conscience, to become a moron in the zone? This is how, for example, Ivan Denisovich talks about “mostyrka” - that is, deliberately bringing oneself to the point of illnesses 42 Solzhenitsyn A.I. The GULAG Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M.: Center “New World”, 1990. T. 2. P. 145. ⁠ :

“It’s another thing - a bridge, to be injured so that you can live and remain disabled. As they say, a minute of patience is a year of edging. Break a leg, and then have it heal incorrectly. Drinking salty water makes you swell. Or smoking tea is against the heart. And drinking tobacco infusion is good for the lungs. You just have to do it in moderation so as not to overdo it and end up in the grave through disability.”

In the same recognizable colloquial, “fairy-tale” language, full of camp idioms, Ivan Denisovich talks about other ways to escape from murderous work - to get into the OP (in Solzhenitsyn - “recreational”, officially - “health center”) or to obtain activation - a petition for release for health. In addition, Ivan Denisovich was entrusted to talk about other details of camp life: “How tea in the camp is used instead of money... How they drink coffee - fifty grams per glass - and there are visions in my head,” and so on. Finally, it is his story in “Archipelago” that precedes the chapter on women in the camp: “And the best thing is not to have a partner, but a partner. A camp wife, a prisoner. As the saying goes - get married» 43 Solzhenitsyn A.I. The Gulag Archipelago: In 3 volumes. M.: Center “New World”, 1990. T. 2. P. 148. ⁠ .

In "Archipelago" Shukhov is not equal to Ivan Denisovich from the story: he does not think about the "mostyrka" and chifir, does not remember women. Shukhov's "Archipelago" is an even more collective image of a seasoned prisoner, preserving the speech manner of the earlier character.

Review letter; their correspondence continued for several years. “A story is like poetry—everything in it is perfect, everything is purposeful. Every line, every scene, every characteristic is so laconic, smart, subtle and deep that I think that “New World” from the very beginning of its existence has not published anything so integral, so powerful,” Shalamov wrote to Solzhenitsyn. —<…>Everything in the story is true.” Unlike many readers who did not know the camp, he praised Solzhenitsyn for his use of abuse (“camp life, camp language, camp thoughts are inconceivable without swearing, without swearing at the very last word”).

Like other former prisoners, Shalamov noted that Ivan Denisovich’s camp is “easy,” not quite real” (unlike Ust-Izhma, a real camp, which “makes its way in the story like white steam through the cracks of a cold barracks”): “ In the convict camp where Shukhov is sitting, he has a spoon, a spoon for a real camp is an extra tool. Both the soup and the porridge are of such a consistency that you could drink it over the side; there is a cat walking near the medical unit - incredible for a real camp - the cat would have been eaten long ago.” “There are no warriors in your camp! - he wrote to Solzhenitsyn. - Your camp without lice! The security service is not responsible for the plan and does not knock it out with gun butts.<…>Leave the bread at home! They eat with spoons! Where is this wonderful camp? At least I could sit there for a year in my own time.” All this does not mean that Shalamov accused Solzhenitsyn of fabricating or embellishing reality: Solzhenitsyn himself admitted in his response letter that his camp experience, compared to Shalamov’s, “was shorter and easier,” in addition, Solzhenitsyn from the very beginning was going to show “the camp is very prosperous and in very prosperous day."

Here's who is dying in the camp: who licks the bowls, who hopes at the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather's door

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Shalamov saw the only falsehood of the story in the figure of captain Buinovsky. He believed that the typical figure of a debater who shouts to the convoy “You have no right” and the like was only in 1938: “Everyone who shouted like that was shot.” It seems implausible to Shalamov that the captain did not know about the reality of the camp: “Since 1937, for fourteen years, executions, repressions, arrests have been going on before his eyes, his comrades are taken, and they disappear forever. And the captain doesn’t even bother to think about it. He drives along the roads and sees camp guard towers everywhere. And he doesn’t bother to think about it. Finally, he passed the investigation, because he ended up in the camp after the investigation, and not before. And yet I didn’t think about anything. He could not see this under two conditions: either the cavorang spent fourteen years on a long voyage, somewhere on a submarine, without rising to the surface for fourteen years. Or I thoughtlessly signed up as a soldier for fourteen years, and when they took me, I felt bad.”

This remark rather reflects the worldview of Shalamov, who went through the most terrible camp conditions: people who retained some kind of well-being or doubts after the experience aroused his suspicion. Dmitry Bykov compares Shalamov with the prisoner of Auschwitz, the Polish writer Tadeusz Borovsky: “The same disbelief in man and the same refusal of any consolation - but Borovsky went further: he put every survivor under suspicion. If he survived, it means he betrayed someone or something gave up" 44 Bykov D. L. Soviet literature. Advanced course. M.: PROZAIK, 2015. P. 405-406. ⁠ .

In his first letter, Shalamov instructs Solzhenitsyn: “Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone.” Not only Shalamov’s correspondence with Solzhenitsyn, but, first of all, “Kolyma Tales” are capable of convincing anyone who thinks that “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” shows inhuman conditions: there can be much, much worse.

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Full list of references

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1959) is the first work of A. Solzhenitsyn to see the light. It was this story, published in more than a hundred thousand copies in the 11th issue of the New World magazine in 1962, that brought the author not only all-Union, but essentially world-wide fame. In the magazine version, “One Day...” had the genre designation “story.” In the book “A Calf Butted an Oak Tree” (1967-1975), Solzhenitsyn said that the editors of Novy Mir suggested calling this work a story (“for the sake of it”). Later, the writer expressed regret that he succumbed to external pressure: “I shouldn’t have given in. In our country, the boundaries between genres are closing and forms are being devalued. “Ivan Denisovich” is, of course, a story, albeit a big, loaded one.”

The significance of A. Solzhenitsyn’s work is not only that it opened the previously forbidden topic of repression and set a new level of artistic truth, but also that in many respects (from the point of view of genre originality, narrative and spatio-temporal organization, vocabulary, poetic syntax, rhythm, richness of the text with symbolism, etc.) was deeply innovative."

“THE STRONGEST IMPRESSION OF THE LAST DAYS - A. RYAZANSKY’S MANUSCRIPT”

The story's publication history was complex. After Khrushchev’s speech at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, a typewritten copy of the story on November 10, 1961 was transferred by Solzhenitsyn through Raisa Orlova, the wife of Lev Kopelev, a friend in his cell on the Sharashka, to the prose department of the New World, Anna Samoilovna Berzer. The author was not indicated on the manuscript; at Kopelev’s suggestion, Berzer wrote “A. Ryazansky" (at the author’s place of residence). On December 8, Berzer invited the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, to review the manuscript. Knowing the tastes of her editor, she said: “Camp through the eyes of a man, a very popular thing.” On the night of December 8–9, Tvardovsky read and reread the story. On December 12, he wrote in his workbook: “The strongest impression of the last days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solzhenitsyn) ...”

On December 9, Kopelev sent a telegram to Solzhenitsyn: “Alexander Trifonovich is delighted...”. On December 11, Tvardovsky asked Solzhenitsyn by telegram to urgently come to the editorial office of Novy Mir. On December 12, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow and met with Tvardovsky and his deputies Kondratovich, Zaks, and Dementyev at the editorial office of Novy Mir. Kopelev was also present at the meeting. They decided to call the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

But Tvardovsky’s desire to publish this thing was not enough. As an experienced Soviet editor, he understood perfectly well that it would not be published without the permission of the supreme power. In December 1961, Tvardovsky gave the manuscript of “Ivan Denisovich” to Chukovsky, Marshak, Fedin, Paustovsky, and Ehrenburg to read. At Tvardovsky's request, they wrote their written reviews of the story. Chukovsky called his review “Literary Miracle.” On August 6, 1962, Tvardovsky handed over the letter and manuscript of “Ivan Denisovich” to Khrushchev’s assistant Vladimir Lebedev. In September, Lebedev began reading the story to Khrushchev during his leisure hours. Khrushchev liked the story, and he ordered that 23 copies of “Ivan Denisovich” be provided to the CPSU Central Committee for leading figures of the CPSU. On September 15, Lebedev told Tvardovsky that Khrushchev had approved the story. On October 12, 1962, under pressure from Khrushchev, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee decided to publish the story, and on October 20, Khrushchev announced this decision of the Presidium to Tvardovsky. Later, in his memoir “A Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” Solzhenitsyn admitted that without the participation of Tvardovsky and Khrushchev, the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” would not have been published in the USSR. And the fact that it was finally published was another “literary miracle.”

"Shch-854. ONE DAY OF ONE PRISONER"

In 1950, on 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 our whole life will be reflected here. And there is no need to intensify any horrors, it is not necessary for this to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day from which years are formed. I thought like this, and this idea remained in my mind, I didn’t touch it for nine years, and only in 1959, nine years later, I sat down and wrote it. I didn’t write it for long, only about forty days, less than a month and a half. It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the way of life of which you know too much, and not only that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but you only fight off unnecessary material, just so that the unnecessary does not creep in , but to accommodate the most necessary things. Yes, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky suggested this title, the current title, his own. I had Shch-854. One day for one prisoner."

From a radio interview with Alexander SolzhenitsynBBCto the 20th anniversary of the release of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

AKHMATOV ABOUT “IVAN DENISOVITCH” AND SOLZHENITSYN

“He’s not afraid of fame. He probably doesn’t know how scary it is and what it entails.”

“DEAR IVAN DENISOVICH...!” (LETTERS FROM READERS)

“Dear comrade Solzhenitsyn!<…>I read your story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and thank you from the bottom of my heart for Mother Truth.<…>I work in a mine. I drive an electric locomotive with trolleys of coking coal. Our coal has a thousand-degree heat. Let this warmth, through my respect, warm you.”

“Dear comrade A. Solzhenitsyn (unfortunately, I don’t know his name and patronymic). From distant Chukotka, accept warm congratulations on your first generally recognized literary success - the publication of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” I read it with extraordinary interest. I admired the originality of the language, the deep, relief, truthful depiction of all the details of camp life. Your story cleanses our souls and consciences for all the lawlessness and tyranny that was committed during the years of the personality cult.<…>Who am I? Was at the front from battery commander to PNSh<помощника начальника штаба.>artillery regiment Due to injury in the fall of 1943, he did not return to the front. After the war - at party and Soviet work...".

“Dear Alexander Isaevich! I just read your Story (I write with a capital T). Please forgive me for the incoherence of the letter, I am not a writer and, probably, not even a very literate person, and your Tale so excited me and awakened so many sad memories that I have no time to choose the style and syllable of the letter. You described one day of one prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, it is clear that this is the day of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the same prisoners, and this day is not so bad. Ivan Denisovich, summing up the results of the day, is, in any case, pleased. And these are the frosty days when, on duty, the orderlies take the dead out of the barracks and put them in a stack (but there were also those who did not bring the dead right away, but received rations for several days), and we, the unfortunate prisoners, 58- I, shrouded in all sorts of conceivable and unimaginable rags, stood in formation of five, waiting to be taken out of the zone, and the accordion player, providing EHF events<культурно-воспитательной части.>, plays “Katyusha”. The workers’ shouts: “I’ll put them in tin cans, and you’ll go to work,” etc., etc., etc. Then 7-8 km into the forest, the harvesting rate is 5 cubic meters...”

"Despite all the horror of this ordinary day<…>it does not contain even one percent of those terrible, inhuman crimes that I saw after staying in the camps for more than 10 years. I witnessed when 3,000 “organized forces” (as the prisoners were called) arrived at the mine in the fall, and by spring, i.e. after 3-4 months, 200 people remained alive. Shukhov slept on a clapboard, on a mattress, albeit stuffed with sawdust, and we slept on swamp hummocks, in the rain. And when they pulled up the leaky tents, they made their own bunks out of rough poles, laid them with pine branches, and so, damp, wearing everything they wore to work, they went to bed. In the morning, the neighbor on the left or right refused the “Stalinist rations” forever...”

“Dear... (I almost wrote: Ivan Denisovich; unfortunately, I don’t know your first and patronymic name) dear writer Solzhenitsyn! I am writing to you because I cannot resist writing. Today I read your story in a magazine and was shocked. Moreover, I'm happy. I am happy that such an amazing thing has been written and printed. She's irresistible. It confirms with great force the great truth about the incompatibility of art and lies. After the appearance of such a story, in my opinion, any writer will be ashamed to pour pink water. And not a single scoundrel can whitewash the indefensible. I am convinced that millions of readers will read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with a feeling of deepest gratitude to the author.”