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Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.
State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.
Give your opinion on why One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Solzhenitsyn as a Nobel Prize winner.
Describe how the setting complements the primary themes of the novel.
Describe the Solzhenitsyn hero.
Compare and Contrast One Day with another novel you've read in this class.
Instructor's Recommendation: I would like to see an essay on setting, and how it is crucial to the story. How does Solzhenitsyn describe the setting? What are the elements of the setting that contribute to the novel? Are there elements of the setting that are odd, or don't really fit the novel, such as the sick room--a place that exists to give care. This is an odd segment of setting in a prisoner camp, yet Solzhenitsyn manages to integrate the sick room into the same type of despairing, hopeless, sterile setting as other parts of the camp. Comment on how he does this.
Historical Significance of the Novel, True Literature, Literary
Techniques
Introduction And Background
"For the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions
of Russian literature." - From the Nobel Prize Citation for Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, October 8, 1970.
In mid-century - 1962 to be exact - a bright new talent appeared with
stunning suddenness on the literary horizon. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, together
with his epoch-making work, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, flared up
like a supernova in the Eastern skies and incandesced the Western skies as
well. Today Solzhenitsyn remains the most impressive figure in world
literature of the latter half of the 20th century.
Before One Day was throttled in the USSR, it had become an overnight
sensation. The 100,000 copies of Novy Mir (New World) carrying the novella
sold out in November 1962 in a matter of hours; so did the almost 1 million
copies of immediate second and third printings. But by 1963, not only
Solzhenitsyn, who had earlier been a protege of the Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev, but Khrushchev himself fell under a cloud as a new wave of
political and cultural Reactionism again loomed in the Soviet Union. By the
end of 1964, the editor of Novy Mir (Tvardovsky), Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn,
and a number of other liberal elements or influences in Soviet culture became
the targets of a widening campaign to restore Stalinist orthodoxy and a rigid
party line to the arts.
Nineteen sixty-two, debut year for One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
and its author, was an important episode in the most unusual, if brief, epoch
in recent Soviet history. This was the time-1961-1962-of crisscrossing,
incongruous developments, both in domestic as well as foreign policy.
Condemnation Of Stalinism
On the Soviet home scene, the De-Stalinization Campaign reached a
crescendo. Stalin's embalmed body, which lay next to Lenin's, was abruptly
removed from the Lenin Mausoleum on the party's orders and reinterred in a
humble plot at the foot of the Kremlin Wall. This action became a potent
symbol of the widening condemnation of Stalin's draconic policies with respect
to other party comrades, the arts, and the population at large. In the arts,
the liberals now sought to make new inroads, to come out of the closet and
with them, their manuscripts out of desk drawers. This process was illustrated
by the liberal poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, and other
writers acquiring new posts in writers' unions and on editorial boards of
journals. "The younger generation of Russians," Yevtushenko announced
confidently during a lecture tour to England in May 1962, "are increasingly
beginning to feel themselves masters in their own country." The liberal
journal Yunost' (Youth) published Vasily Aksenov's trailblazing story A Ticket
to the Stars while a heterodoxical work also published in Yunost's pages (each
issue of which sold like hot pirozhkis) was that a youthful rebellion of sorts
was underway in the USSR, that younger people were becoming outspokenly
critical of the values and policies identified with the older. Stalinist
generation.
Such heretical works and attitudes by no means were left unchallenged by
the conservatives and hardliners attached to the regime. In fact, 1962 and
1963 represented the beginnings of an effort, culminating in the mid-1970s,
to clamp down on the liberal tendencies that were in such evidence during
these years and upon whose crests Solzhenitsyn and One Day rode to prominence.
One of the signs that a crackdown was imminent was barely concealed (by
Aesopian language) in Yevtushenko's sensational poem published during the
Cuban Missile Crisis week in October 1962 entitled, "The Heirs of Stalin." In
this short but trenchant political poem (which, incidentally, was printed in
the party daily Pravda, edited at the time by Khrushchev allies), Yevtushenko
warned against the possible recrudescence of Stalinism in his country. "A
telephone line is installed [in Stalin's coffin]," he wrote. "Stalin has not
given up," his "telephone line" runs all the way to Communist reactionaries
in Tirana (Albania), Peking, and to the Kremlin. The poem concludes: "As long
as Stalin's heirs exist on earth/It will seem to me/That Stalin is still in
the Mausoleum."
Yevtushenko's warning of a political rollback began to take on concrete
meaning at the end of 1962, after publication of One Day, and especially in
the spring of 1963. First came the Cuban Missile Crisis, or what came to be
called for the Soviets the "Cuban fiasco." Soviet merchantmen bound for
Havana with lethal missiles lashed to their decks were turned back in
humiliating U-shaped wakes-a retreat forced on the Russians by a U.S. naval
blockade ordered from the White House by President John F. Kennedy. Kremlin
watchers immediately detected slippage in Khrushchev's standing in the Moscow
leadership; Soviet loss-of-face became obvious to hundreds of millions of
newspaper readers throughout the world.
The second straw-that-broke-Nikita's-back was the embarrassing exposure
found in the notorious Penkovsky Papers. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been a deputy
chief of a department in the hush-hush State Committee for Coordinating
Scientific Research and probably, too, a member of Soviet military
intelligence. In October 1962 he was arrested in Moscow for having acted as a
double agent, for the USSR but also for both the U.S. and U.K. intelligence
services. Needless to say, he was executed, in somewhere like the basement of
Lubyanka prison, but not without leaving behind in the West his papers, which
then became available to Western media. The Penkovsky Papers told a story of
slack discipline among Soviet intelligence agents (not to mention the treason
of Penkovsky himself), revealed the names of secret agents and their means of
conducting espionage in the West, and seemed to illustrate a general laxity
which, to the conservatives, had been brought on by Khrushchev-endorsed
policies of liberalization.
Third, there was the poor showing of the Soviet economy, according to the
fourth-quarter 1962 economic report; the crucial sector of agriculture was
especially shortfallen.
Encouraged by these and other turns of events as the year 1963 opened,
the Kremlin hardliners, joined by the culture hawks, were loaded for bear.
Khrushchev, his liberal-minded son-in-law (Adzhubei), and a whole flock of
liberal-lining authors and critics came under the sights of the
reactionaries. The list of dramatis personae in this unfolding drama to unseat
the First Secretary and to turn back the clock on the Soviet cultural scene is
too long to recount here; in any case, it is the results that speak just as
loud as the step-by-step causal chain which brought them about.
Solzhenitsyn Attacked
The blips of reaction were clearly manifest at the turn of the year 1962.
The Soviet super-patriotic, party-lining author and critic, Nikolai Gribachev,
aimed a stinging attack against Yevtushenko in the pages of Pravda in January
1963. Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the more respected of old generation liberals,
author of the pace-setting novel of 1953, ironically titled The Thaw, was
raked over the coals in the government daily Izvestiya. In these and other
party-initiated criticisms, the message was that the cultural expression of
de-Stalinization must be halted. Moreover, there was the implication that
de-Stalinization as a whole, not only in the arts, should be discontinued.
liberal journals - Yunost' and Novy Mir particularly - came under sharp
attack. One Lydia Fomenko attacked both Solzhenitsyn and the magazine that had
carried One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (for showing a lack of
"philosophical perspective"); socialism, she wrote, was built in the Soviet
Union, and along with it the various Stalinist institutions, quite aside from
and despite the fact of Stalin's "personal short-comings" (!). It was
profoundly mistaken, she maintained, to identify socialism with Stalin, as
Solzhenitsyn had done implicitly in One Day.
Nikita Khrushchev himself felt obliged to join the swelling chorus of
straight-laced neo-Stalinists on the cultural front. Whether he was under
duress or not, the First Secretary took out after Ehrenburg and Yevtushenko,
and Viktor Nekrasov, all of whose modest literary heresies he had apparently
once tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, to further his own political ends.
Now Khrushchev talked the language of the conservatives: "Our Soviet youth,"
the Leader reminded his audience at a special Kremlin conference of 600
writers, artists, and intellectuals in March 1963, "has been brought up by our
party; it follows our party; and it sees in it its educator and leader."
Harangued on the rostrum by the party apparatchik Leonid Ilyichev and other
spokesmen for a hard line on the arts, this conference heard one
orthodox-minded speaker after another defend the older generation against the
younger, while at the same time each denied that any "fathers-and-sons"
confrontation or minor generation gap could possibly exist under Soviet
conditions. Some, including Khrushchev, held up the example of the author
Mikhail Sholokhov, famous for his great novel Quiet Flows the Don (but some,
Solzhenitsyn for one, question the authenticity of his authorship of the work)
but for precious little else. They pitted this author against the other of his
generation, Ehrenburg, in a subtle but nonetheless obvious display of
anti-Semitism to prove that the one (Sholokhov) was a genuine revolutionist
and Communist while the other (Ehrenburg) was a sham, a coward, even a
"silent" collaborator in the foul deeds of Stalin.
The next step - and this, too, was crucial for the careers of One Day
and its author - was the start of a gradual but steady Rehabilitation Of
Stalin. Just as Khrushchev had used the de-Stalinization campaign to
embarrass the old Stalinist rivals in his leadership, even to purge some
of them as he did in 1957, likewise and anti-Khrushchev forces pushed for
Stalin's rehabilitation precisely for the purpose of sandbagging the First
Secretary. Some of the most denunciatory of anti-Stalin spokesmen of the
recent past (Leonid Brezhnev among them) one-by-one joined the anti-Khrushchev
alliance. This was the group of conservatives, a virtual crypto-cabinet, who
not only opposed any continuance or broadening of the anti-Stalin campaign,
but who also wished to overturn a number of Khrushchev domestic and foreign
policies. The grounds were that these policies were ill-advised, too liberal,
or too "hare-brained," as the Central Committee's indictment against
Khrushchev put it in October 1964 - that is when the First Secretary was
finally replaced by a team of neo-Stalinists headed by Brezhnev, Alexei
Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov.
For One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963-1964 was a turning
point. In fact, the pressure to rehabilitate Stalin and contain
de-Stalinization had an obvious connection with the nomination of One
Day - and for its failure to win - the Lenin Prize. During the autumn of
1963 and into 1964, literati in Russia discussed the possibility of
Solzhenitsyn's receiving the prize for 1964. The Communist youth daily,
Komsomolskaya Pravda, went so far as to publish a letter to the editor by a
reader who recommended that One Day get the Lenin Prize for literature.
(Several works are customarily nominated for the prize, the final decision
being made by an "illustrious" body of judges who are under strong pressure
from the party.) The same newspaper, answering as it were the reader's letter,
criticized the behavior of the novella's main character, the prisoner, Ivan
Shukhov, for being "distasteful." Another Solzhenitsyn writing which figured
in the pre-prize discussion was Matryona's Place, a story published in Novy
Mir shortly after One Day. In the discussion, the "pros" seemed outnumbered,
at least by their connections, by the "cons" on the matter of whether
Solzhenitsyn should receive the prize. Finally, in February 1964 a joint
meeting of the secretariats (which are customarily saturated with partiytsi
[party-liners]) of the RSFSR and Moscow writers' organizations determined that
One Day "cannot be placed among the outstanding works which are worthy of the
Lenin Prize." A bitterly ironic remark began to circulate around Moscow after
this, to many people, shocking rejection of One Day: "Tell me what you think
of One Day and I will proceed to tell you just who you are."
Solzhenitsyn's turning to history has extremely important consequences
for his total literary heritage. As he himself has said, "Literature that is
not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of
literature." To be true literature, "the pain and fears of society must be
held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers
which threaten it."
History to Solzhenitsyn, as to Leo Tolstoy, is the theater and the arena
in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are
revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale. This is not to say
that Solzhenitsyn actually "writes history," meaning by that a formal history
text. Rather, his novel August 1914 is a vehicle for the telling the larger
story of the human condition. As in One Day, characters are minutely
inspected in order best to understand the historical environment in which they
participate as well as being affected by it. In other words, history at its
present juncture provides Solzhenitsyn with concrete, "living" referents or
the actual background against which the moral fiber of realistically depicted
characters are not only revealed but above all tested and tempered. As in the
later work, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's historical novel about
Leninist-Stalinist terror and the labor-camp system, so in August 1914 events
do not simply "happen," as though they were products of the action of Fate. It
is precisely over the issue of Why Events Happen that Solzhenitsyn parts
company with the great Russian writer, Tolstoy, who himself used history (War
and Peace) as a means of dissecting the human spirit and human character.
For Solzhenitsyn, the tragedies of individual men and women-say, as found
in forced labor camps-are not decreed by Fate or by heaven. These individual
tragedies are seen as parts, packets, or "knots" (uzly, Solzhenitsyn's term)
of a larger Tragedy, capital T. People are often seen as victims of
institutionalized distortions of humanity-whether such institutions be Lenin's
revolutionary tribunals, Leninist-Stalinist censorship, or the Gulag
Archipelago. But note that the institutions themselves which debase the
victims are not the inexorable result of "historical necessity." Such
institutions are not only avoidable, but the author strongly implies,
eradicable, even though they have become deeply entrenched as, for example, in
Soviet society.
Not that Solzhenitsyn is a "revolutionary," in the usual sense of that
word. Indeed, he could never dedicate himself to revolution, implying as it
does the unleashing of violence and of "vranyo" (Russian for deceitful
ballyhoo and propaganda), of paying servile homage to cults, either of
leaders, ideologies, or of the State and the Party. Such particular "Causes"
or "The Cause" frequently disappoint and disillusion their followers (as
happened on a small scale as described by John Simon Kunen in The
Strawberry Statement, for example), despite their pious-sounding goals and
alleged "self-transcending devotion."
Solzhenitsyn is tuned in on a more distant, yet more proximate drummer:
his Muse. As an artist, his metier is the calling up of vivid images, even
when he is retelling the history of twentieth-century Russia. At all times it
is the stark, unadorned reality of the world, and of the people living in it,
which interest Solzhenitsyn. But as he tells of the results of the foregoing
events, of the decisions and personalities (including Tsar Nicholas I, his
ministers and generals, Lenin, Stalin, et al.) participating in history,
Solzhenitsyn also seeks out the causes (causation) which have brought about
the historical consequences. Most of the major actions occurring in history,
as Solzhenitsyn views it, are due to conscious human initiation motivated
by consciously defined purposes.
In short, Solzhenitsyn's Sense Of Tragedy is distinctly non-classical as
well as non-Tolstoyan. Heroic characters are not "tragically-flawed" or
innocent victims of unconscious or unknowable forces or enigmas.
Solzhenitsyn's is faintly Manichaean viewpoint, in which the world and the
historical terrain are populated with persons-whether at the grassroots or
at the very summit of power-who appear to be intrinsically, almost
genetically, either evil or on the other hand, good. For Solzhenitsyn, there
are demonic natures and humanitarian natures. To him, the evil-doers may
outnumber the benefactors of mankind, at least in contemporary political and
social life, but they do not ultimately defeat them. This view is not only
non-classical, it is also non-nineteenth century. In the preceding century,
more times than not, history was viewed, whether by trained historians or by
the writers of fiction and philosophy, as a "process." It could be studied
"scientifically" as though it were an environment resembling the Galapagos
Islands where Darwin studied natural processes. Indeed, to the
nineteenth-century historian, history was often viewed as a law-bound
evolution. Terms such as "process," "historicism," "determinism," "impersonal
forces," "inevitability," etc., were employed to give scientific-better,
scientistic-credence to the telling of history. In What is History? Edward
Hallett Carr has called this tendency in historiography a misunderstanding of
the nature of science (whether natural science or social science), the failure
to appreciate that historians advance "progressively from one fragmentary
hypothesis to another," not by means of dogmatic insistence upon "historical
law" and "ultimate truth."
So, for Solzhenitsyn, man's Tragedy does not consist in his being ground
under by an historical juggernaut, a dumb force guided by inexorable
historical laws, impersonal forces, economic determinism, and so forth.
Instead, man makes his own history. Ideologies, religions, policies do help
shape the lines along which history will be made, but above all for
Solzhenitsyn, it is men who make history. It is they who can be blamed. So can
the makers of ideologies be blamed for the postulates they develop and the
consequences which result from them. "Who is to blame?" the author of Gulag
Archipelago asks in the chapter entitled, "The Law Becomes a Man." He answers,
with bitter irony: "Well, of course, it obviously could never be the Over-All
Leadership!"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's style of writing is economical and unornamental.
This is particularly true of One Day. This would seemingly cause little
difficulty in translating One Day were it not for the great amount of prison
jargon contained in the dialogues and discussion of life in the camp.
The author's motto might well be, "wie es eigentlich gewesen," or "tell
it like it is." In believing as he does in honest realism and not the
propaganda slogan of "socialist realism," Solzhenitsyn wishes to render the
real-life situations he describes in so many of his writings-but especially in
One Day-in real-life language. The author did not have to use any glossaries
of prison argot, although the translator must; Solzhenitsyn simply drew on his
own 8-years' experience in corrective labor camps.
Artistic Use Of Blunt Language
Many "unprintable" Russian words turn up in One Day, as it was first
published in Novy Mir. Words like khub kren, yebat', govno and der'mo, khui,
pizda, etc., would make Beelzebub himself blush, but since they are part of a
zek's vocabulary, they appear in the novella. In the half-dozen extant
English translations of the work, these words are rendered with the frankness
of a Henry Miller novel. In Solzhenitsyn's case, the reader gets the
impression that far from wishing to be shocking or sensational, the author has
used these obscenities to show how debased humans can become. In any case,
most of the smutty language comes out of the mouths of the camp authorities.
This undoubtedly is the author's way of illustrating the source of the
debasement, debasement not only of language but of human beings.
In a brilliantly written essay, L. Rzhevsky notes how the blunt language
lends an "immediacy and sincerity of tone" to the story (in Tvorets i Podvig:
Ocherki po Tvorchestvu Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna [The Artist and His
Accomplishments: Notes on the Writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn],
Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt/Main). "The simplicity and credibility of the story"
are enhanced by this device, whether the scene be in the barracks, at the
construction site, or during the friskings and body counts. Professor
Christopher Moody speaks in his book (see Bibliography) of the author's own
familiarity with Russian peasant life; he has learned how to convey the "idiom
of the common people." Solzhenitsyn studied philological texts (such as Dal's
famous dictionary) to verify expressions that he heard, and he took copious
notes, as Dostoyevsky had done before him, as found in Dostoyevsky's Diary of
a Writer. Some of Solzhenitsyn's proverbs appear to be lifted from Dal. Moody
cites and proverb found in One Day, "How can you expect a man who is warm to
understand a man who is cold" (from the infirmary scene where Shukhov is
commenting about Kolya upon leaving the hospital). But the Dal original
renders it, "A man who is satisfied cannot understand one who is hungry." So
in these and other cases, Solzhenitsyn did not reproduce Dal but only adapted
Dal to his own purposes. Moody notes also Solzhenitsyn's folk-tale (skaz)
flavor. He cites the "stitch-stitch-stitch" line when Shukhov is sewing into
his mattress the remaining half of a piece of bread; one might also mention
the top-top, skrip-skrip onomatopoeia, which is Russian folk speech.
Moody also notes how Solzhenitsyn's descriptions do not retard the pace
of One Day. The story's tempo is not slowed down, "nor does the rhythm become
monotonous." The wealth of detail is combined with the lively pace of
narration in which broken phrases, a wealth of emotionally-colored
interrogatory and exclamatory figures, expressive parenthetical words and
phrases, ellipses and unusual word order are used to best advantage.
"Skaz" Story-Telling
As to the folk-tale manner of One Day, Professor Moody and others note
how Solzhenitsyn fits into the Russian tradition of Pilniak, Zamyatin, and
Babel, not to mention prerevolutionary writers like Leskov and Gogol. In the
skaz, the story-teller, or narrator, is one the same level as the main
characters in the story. He think their thoughts and uses their language. The
skaz strategy for telling the story permits the author to tailor in a great
deal of "local color," to lend the story an eye-witness flavor through the
making of astute, sometimes humorous and sardonic observations or
commentaries. The narration in One Day permits the reader along with the
author vicariously to dart in and out of the situations or conversations, as
if he were there, both participating as well as describing goings-on. One
Day's narration is enhanced by the fact that the language is at times simple
and slangy and full of zek argot. The "darting-in-and-out" technique is
accomplished by Solzhenitsyn without establishing any clear dividing line
between Shukhov's speaking and the author's speaking. Moody notes that the
voices "interchange so imperceptibly that the reader is often uncertain which
is speaking." At times it will necessitate extreme care on the part of the
reader to disentangle an unspoken monologue of Shukhov from an exterior
observation made by the author through the unseen narrator, who is in the
third person.
Moreover, the Shukhov himself is speaking, in a dialogue for example, it
is sometimes difficult to know whether he is speaking to us, the readers, or
to another character in the dialogue. At this juncture, the author, via the
narrator, may step in to wrap up a scene with a comment or observation.
In brief, the author has employed a number of techniques to achieve
his overall strategy in One Day. Above all, he wants to tell us the
truth in the manner in which we are generally acquainted with raw truth:
as a blunt, lopsided thing which we have no other choice but to accept.
Avoiding as he does ornamentation or lengthy sentences and description (in
the Dickensian or Dostoyevskian manner), Solzhenitsyn accomplishes a stoic
austerity which somehow suits the equally stark scenes, lean figures, and
cleanshaven heads of the zeks etched against the bleak white background
of the Siberian camp.
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