An introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn
CONCLUSION: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
In this final article, let’s take a look at some of the paradoxes in this situation. For instance, work is the center of the Communist vision: “He who does not work does not eat”–unless you happen to be one of the bureaucrats high up. Therefore, in the camps, everyone worked. There were different kinds of work at different camps. Ivan Denisovich remembers an earlier camp he was in where they would wake up very early to go logging; they stayed in the woods until they met their quota. There was no stopping point. He thought the subsequent camps was relatively easy since they were done when the bell rang. Then there was the bureaucratic lineup to make sure nobody had escaped. They were treated like robots or animals—but at least the work day ended up at some point.
What were they working on? They were afraid of being sent to one of the new projects where there was no cover and no barriers. They would be in the wind and cold all day long. A “good day” consisted in not being sent there. They were sent to a place where they had a few moments to warm themselves at the beginning of the day; the whole novel is filled with attempts to get warm. It was a question of survival. They were building a wall for the new power plant.
What was the power plant going to power? It was going to power the camp in which they were prisoners. You would think they would try to do the shoddiest work possible so that the power plant would fall down. No matter how hard they worked, or how skilled they were, they were cheated on their reward. They weren’t going to get what they were promised. But they didn’t build it so it would fall down; they built it well. They were dedicated workers. They were a group of men joined together building a power plant for their prison. Man works; a real man takes pride in his work. There is more dignity in their building the wall of their power plant than in the whole Soviet bureaucracy. They cared. They did good work. And they did good work because they had to rely on each other, they were proud of each other, and they worked with each other. They did a good job.
This leads to an incredibly ironic scene where Denisovich says, “Well, it’s better here because the work stops at the end of the day.” But when the day ends, what is he doing? He keeps building. If he doesn’t, by the next morning the mortar will have hardened and he won’t be able to work with it. He must complete the last few rows of bricks no matter what. He is a man taking pride in his work, in a job well done. All this, building a power plant for the prison in which he is a prisoner.
There is another extraordinary example of this near the end of the book. A captain is hauled off. He goes to the prison for something he had done that morning, criticizing the Soviet government:
You have no right to make people undress in freezing cold! You don’t know Article 9 of the Criminal Code!
The Code forbade it. But they knew; it was he who did not know. There was no real code. The code was whatever they said it was at any given moment since there is no truth. And there’s no truth because there’s no God. Why was there no God? Because these men tried to replace Him. There was only man—and they sought to re-make the world better than God.
It’s you, brother, who don’t know anything yet!
The captain kept blazing away at them: “You aren’t real Soviet people!”
Volkovoy didn’t mind Article 9, but at this he looked as black as a thundercloud.
“Ten days’ strict regimen!” he shouted.
“Starting this evening,” he told the head warder, lowering his voice.
They never like putting a man in the hole first thing in the morning: it means the loss of one man-shift. Let him sweat and strain all day, and sling him in the hole at night.
And that’s what happened. At the end of the day, he comes back to the hut with the others; and then they come for him. They never forget.
“Keep smiling,” “Don’t let them get you down”—but there was nothing much you could say. Gang 104 had built the punishment block themselves and knew all about it: the walls were stone, the floor cement, there were no windows at all, the stove was kept just warm enough for the ice on the wall to melt and form puddles on the floor. You slept on bare boards, got 300 grams of bread a day, skilly only every third day.
Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital.
Fifteen days in there and you’d be six feet under.
Thank heaven for your cozy hut, and keep your nose clean.
They built it; and they built it well. Why did they build it well? Pride in their work. They were men with human dignity. I could continue with theory and reality, with contradictions that make no sense. But there is something higher than work, prison, or the system. And this higher thing is expressed throughout the novel.
They talk about the same things men always talk about. They have political discussions. Throughout the book, they discuss politics. They share stories. At one point, they are talking about things which happened overseas in different countries. Suddenly, late at night:
Somebody in the room was bellowing: “Old Man Whiskers won’t ever let you go! He wouldn’t trust his own brother, let alone a bunch of cretins like you!”
“Old Man Whiskers” was Papa Joe. The big man. Suddenly, it’s not simply a political discussion—it’s open revolution. Remember that what Solzhenitsyn was sent to the camps for in the first place was being critical of Stalin in a letter. Suddenly, in their camps, there is open political attack on the Leader. How can they get away with it? What was the worse that could happen to them? To be sent to a camp? And suddenly we realize that the only place in the country where there is free and open political discussion is the camps:
The good thing about hard-labor camps is that you have all the freedom in the world to sound off. In Ust-Izhma you’d only have to whisper that people couldn’t buy matches outside and they’d clap another ten on you. Here you could shout anything you liked from a top bunk and the stoolies wouldn’t report it, because the security officer couldn’t care less.
You can imagine how people reading this in the first edition roared with laughter. There was free speech in the Soviet Union! In the camps! Get sent there and you can say whatever you want! But, you see, the men were very aware of politics. What else were they talking about? Art, poetry, music—over and over.
Early on, Shukhov, who is not terribly bright, has been sent to wash the floor in one of the officers’ huts. He had the old wives’ habit of letting his eyes wander where they shouldn’t. And he noticed that Kolya was writing lines of exactly the same length, with a margin, beginning every line with a capital letter immediately below the previous line. He knew right away it wasn’t work, even though it wasn’t his business. Kolya was writing poetry. Shukhov hasn’t read poetry and so he doesn’t recognize it.
You can not stamp out art. You can not stamp out the creative urge. You may be in the midst of horror. Yet what does man do? He writes poetry. We don’t get to read it. And we don’t know what it is.
We have flashes of characters, glimpses of actions which are never explained. There is a distance even among these men. We get bits of their stories, small hints of where they came from or how they got there. But we never have the whole story. Even Ivan Denisovich, we only get fragments of his story.
But this was Solzhenitsyn’s experience. You meet someone, you get to know them, and then you’re off to somewhere else. You meet other people, get a bit of their story, and then there’s another separation. And yet, in the midst of this, what happens? Poetry is written. Art surfaces in the most unlikely places. The camps produced a very great novel. Something the Soviet system certainly did not expect.
There is also an ongoing debate about movies. This is in the camps! They’re living in primitive conditions and debating movies:
“You’re wrong, pal,” Caesar was saying. “One must say in all objectivity that Eisenstein is a genius. Now isn’t Ivan the Terrible a work of genius? The oprichniki dancing in masks! The scene in the cathedral!”
“All show off!” K-123 snapped. “Too much art is no art at all. Like candy instead of bread! And the politics of it is utterly vile–a vindication of a one-man tyranny. An insult to the memory of three generations of Russian intellectuals.”
And they go on with the debate. Why? Because art matters. Art is central to human existence. You can’t crush it out. They debated the moves of Eisenstein in the camps. It pops up again hours later and they’re still arguing. They made it through their day by arguing about things that matter. Art elevates the soul. The gruel doesn’t matter; the work doesn’t matter at that moment; the cold doesn’t matter. They discuss movies because art is important. For a small moment they are elevated above where they are, and are in touch with something good, true, and eternal. Even if it means just arguing about that movie. In the same way, for the Soviet citizenry in 1962, they were elevated above the cold, gray, dead horror of life by reading this novel. And everyone was talking about one book, one novel. It was not just the realism; it was the elevation of soul. Great art elevates the soul.
This is not an entertaining novel. Art has two functions: to entertain and to instruct. Some works are much more entertainment, others are much more instructional; this book is hard instruction. We have a few smiles, a couple of chuckles, but there isn’t a lot of humor. It was instructional to let the people know what was going on, but it’s still art because it elevates. As people read this novel, they were elevated. As with all great art, if you tell the complete truth about one moment in time in one location, you break through time into eternal truth. That’s what Solzhenitsyn does in this novel.
Therefore we should not be surprised that one of the central topics in the book is religion. They tried to stamp it out. It was forbidden. You couldn’t worship, you couldn’t believe, you couldn’t even talk about it. If you were a good communist, you knew there was no God. Right from the beginning of the day–right from the start–one of the first things is we meet Shukhov’s neighbor, Alyosha, the well-washed Baptist. Even in the camps, he kept himself clean. Why? Because he’s a good Baptist and we know that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” It’s a wonderful little moment: the well-washed Baptist, reading the notebook into which he had copied half the New Testament. They couldn’t keep the Scriptures out of the camps; they were there. They may be handwritten, they may be passed from hand to hand, but then remember: that’s the way they were passed originally. And if that’s what we’ve returned to, so be it.
The Baptist was reading his Bible, not altogether silently, but sort of sighing out the words. This was meant perhaps for Shukhov. (A bit like political agitators, these Baptists. Loved spreading the word.)
It’s a wonderful touch. And then we hear what it is he’s reading. What we learn in the course of the day is that they have an ongoing religious debate all day long. And probably not just this day, but day after day after day. They’re arguing about religious matters. Trying to outlaw things like this is like trying to block out stars in the sky. You can’t do it. You could cement their mouths shut and they would talk about God with their fingers. You cannot stop men from talking about the ultimate truths.
“But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God.”
Alyoshka was a champion at one thing: wiggling that little book of his into a crack in the wall so neatly that it had never been found by searching warders.
This is at the beginning of the day. Shukhov just sort of ignores it and goes, “He’s at it again! He’s always reading that thing!” But it continues. It continues throughout the whole day. The book is peppered with it and we get glimpses of what this believer is like. At the work site, we read:
Alyoshka’s cheeks were hollow, he lived on his bare ration and never made anything on the side—what had he got to be happy about? He and the other Baptists spent their Sundays whispering to each other. Life in the camp was like water off a duck’s back to them. They’d been lumbered with twenty-five years apiece just for being Baptists. Fancy thinking that would cure them!
The Baptists were in the camps living out something that they believed, unlike the Soviet officials who did not live out their communist beliefs. The communists were lousy communists according to their own faith! They failed consistently to live up to it. The Baptists were great Baptists to the point where others in the camp were astonished at what they were able to do. But they were not the only ones there. Pavlo, the tough guy, is having his dinner in the middle of the day.
Pavlo tantalized him a bit longer while he finished his gruel, licked his spoon clean (but not the bowl), put it away safely, and crossed himself.
He didn’t lick the bowl; there is part of that human dignity. On the book goes. A tough guy, hard worker, doing that. It is different from the Baptists but it’s there, and that’s why the arguments go on–because these questions matter. And man will fight and argue over these things.
At one point, Shukhov is hiding a piece of metal in his mittens. He wants to get it back into the hut because he can do wonders with a tiny little piece of scrap metal. But who knows what it could be?
A squeeze like that on the other mitten and he’d be done for—into the hole, on 300 grams a day, no hot food for two days at a time. He imagined himself getting weaker and weaker from hunger, and thought how hard it would be to get back to his present wiry (not too well fed, but not starving) condition.
And he offered up a silent, agonized prayer: “Save me, Lord! Don’t let them put me in the hole!”
He gets through and runs off forgetting to say another prayer of gratitude; this time, because he was too much in a hurry. Your average man, like most men, prays: “Help me Lord, help me–oh! Got through that one!” An average man. Solzhenitsyn does not sentimentalize his hero. As I said at the beginning, this is a real man.
At the end of the day, Caesar gets a parcel. It’s loaded: sugar, sausage, biscuits. It’s a gold mine. Everyone is sitting around. First he shares it with the captain. The crew shares with each other; it’s genuine. There is no brotherhood in the communist system, designed to bring us all together and make us one. In reality it separates. It drives apart. There’s a passage where Shukhov talks about no longer writing to his own family often. He told them not to send him parcels, because they needed it more than he did. He’d get along. He had more concern for his family than for himself no matter how bad off he is. Communism separates. “You will be brothers as we tear you apart!” But thrown in prison, on their own, the parcel is opened and they begin sharing. This is not economic theory.
Then the moment comes where suddenly they’re called out again for roll. If he leaves the parcel there, it’s going to be gone. The first ones back in the hut will carry it off. Thieves will come in while they’re outside and carry it off. He panics. He doesn’t know what to do. But of course, Shukhov knows. He’s clever and bright. This is the kind of stuff he can do. The same way he has the extra bread because he sewed it into his bed in the morning. The meticulous care of sewing in that piece of bread is work well done because it’s work for a purpose. He who works cleverly will eat a little more bread at night. That’s not communist theory. He helps him preserve his parcel, but we’re told he doesn’t expect anything for it. Not that he wanted to earn a bit more from Caesar; he just pitied the man with all his heart. You can’t destroy that kind of decency!
There is another argument with the Baptist again. It’s worth reading and quite amusing. Afterwards, Shukhov says a little prayer:
“Thanks be to Thee, O God, another day over!”
He was thankful that he wasn’t sleeping in the punishment cell. Here it was just about bearable.
Alyoshka was reading his Testament again.
“There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is asking to be allowed to pray to God. Why not let it have its way, eh?”
They end the day arguing again about something that really matters.
“The Lord’s behest was that we should pray for no earthly or transient thing except our daily bread. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’”
“Our ration, you mean?” Shukhov asked.
Then Shukhov says:
“There’s a priest at our church in Polomnya...”
“Don’t tell me about your priest!”
It is absolutely typical. It’s a conversation that we’ve all been through. But why is it happening there? Because it’s eternal. Why? Because it’s true.
“Remember what the Apostle Paul says, ‘What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.’”
Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not. To begin with, he’d wanted it very much, and counted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he’d got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier—here or there.
The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home.
But they wouldn’t let him go home.
There it is again: “God” and “they”–and they are at variance.
Caesar’s hand reached up to place two biscuits, two lumps of sugar, and one round chunk of sausage on Shukhov’s bed.
It’s a miracle. He had expected nothing, and gets something–a lot. And then we find out he’s been making slippers for everybody but getting none for himself. A simple guy, humble and decent. They go out for another roll call. They come back in:
Now Alyoshka was back. He had no sense at all, Alyoshka, never earned a thing, but did favors for everybody.
“Here you are, Alyoshka!” Shukhov handed him one biscuit.
Give us this day our daily bread. And in one tiny act of selfless charity, the two biscuits that are his, the man who’s complained of hunger all day long, who obsesses about two things: bread and cigarettes, gets two biscuits.
Alyoshka was all smiles. “Thank you! You won’t have any for yourself!”
“Eat it!”
If we’re without, we can always earn something.
That little action overturns the whole Soviet system. It crumbles. It cannot last because you cannot destroy charity in the human heart. You cannot destroy that which is good, that which God has placed even in a humble, simple little man. You can’t do it.
Let me end with one huge contrast to make my point: There’s a very sad scene that comes near the end of the book. Fetyukov is a character running through the whole day. He compromises at every turn. The worst thing he does is he licks other people’s bowls–not just his own. No one will have anything to do with him. At the work site he dumps out some of the mortar so that the wheelbarrow will be lighter. They find it contemptible. At the end of this day:
Fetyukov passed down the hut, sobbing. He was bent double. His lips were smeared with blood. He must have been beaten up again for licking out bowls. He walked past the whole team without looking at anybody, not trying to hide his tears, climbed onto his bunk, and buried his face in his mattress.
You felt sorry for him, really. He wouldn’t see his time out. He didn’t know how to look after himself.
How do you look after yourself? By uniting with those whom you find yourself in the midst of. That’s how you get through. This may be my favorite moment in the book: Shukhov is sitting down late at night to eat:
He did notice the tall old man, Yu-81, sit down opposite him when the place became free. Shukhov knew that he belonged to Gang 64, and standing in line in the parcel room he’d heard that 64 had been sent to Sotsgorodok in place of 104, and spent the whole day stringing up barbed wire—making themselves a compound—with nowhere to get warm.
He’d heard that this old man had been in prison time out of mind—in fact, as long as the Soviet state had existed; that all the amnesties had passed him by, and that as soon as he finished one tenner they’d pinned another on him.
This was Shukhov’s chance to take a close look at him. With hunched-over lags all round, he was as straight-backed as could be. He sat tall, as though he’d put something on the bench under him. That head hadn’t needed a barber for ages: the life of luxury had caused all his hair to fall out. The old man’s eyes didn’t dart around to take in whatever was going on in the mess, but stared blindly at something over Shukhov’s head. He was steadily eating his thin skilly, but instead of almost dipping his head in the bowl like the rest of them, he carried his battered wooden spoon up high. He had no teeth left, upper or lower, but his bony gums chewed his bread just as well without them. His face was worn thin, but it wasn’t the weak face of a burnt-out invalid, it was like dark chiseled stone. You could tell from his big chapped and blackened hands that in all his years inside he’d never had a soft job as a trustee. But he refused to knuckle under: he didn’t put his three hundred grams on the dirty table, splashed all over, like the others; he put it on a rag he washed regularly.
Just as there are prisoners who will not eat with their caps on, this old man sits proudly. No hair, no teeth, no life–nothing left but human dignity. He won’t bow to his bowl but lifts the spoon to his lips and eats–not off a place mat, but a clean rag he washed over and over again. You cannot get rid of charity. You cannot get rid of the eternal questions. You cannot destroy art which elevates. You cannot in any way get rid of humanity, try as you might. This is true in the camps, in an American city, or a jungle in Africa.
There are all kinds living together in God’s world, all on a pilgrimage to one end. That is the end God has decreed, no matter what man or the State tries to do instead. This image is the image of the dignity of that old man; and not the beaten up, bleeding Fetyukov who won’t make it. It is clear there is nothing the State can do to bend that old man’s back. They tried. There is nothing the State can do to stop brotherhood under the name of communism. They tried. And there’s nothing the State can do to withhold God’s truth expressed in art if He wishes it to get out. They tried. And they will fail and fail and fail again.
Because there is something higher. And it is embodied not just in this novel, but in the life of this man. It has come to be embodied for some mysterious purpose of God’s plan in the country of Russia itself. We all need to keep our eyes focused there, because at any moment we could be swept up in its story. It is bound to happen. We need to be ready as Solzhenitsyn was with courage to speak the truth, and a willingness to suffer no matter what God sends. Thank you very much.
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