An introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn
PART 3: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The novel first appeared and became very popular because a new reader class had been created through the rise of a middle class with leisure time and the availability of books thanks to the printing press. What these new readers wanted to read about was themselves. What they wanted to read about was life as they knew it. And since those who bought the novels were basically middle-class—coming into a little money, proud of the world they lived in—they liked to read about their world. And what defines Don Quixote, the first novel, is that it is not a fantasy world (other than in Quixote’s poor, dried-up brain). What we have in the novel are the dusty roads of Spain, the inns he stops at, the shepherds he encounters, the ladies of the evening he bumps into: he meets the population of Spain. He rides the roads of Spain. He eats the food of Spain. And the Spanish loved it. They saw, in the novel, their world. The books were about the world they knew.
As a result, the best definition that we can give of the novel, that sets it apart from all other literary forms, is that the novel is an extended fiction with multiple characters, often with multiple plots, that creates or re-creates a real world. The novel tends to be realistic.
The Iliad is not realistic. It gives us a sense of war, but the characters are monumental, magnificent, and heroic. The same can be said of the Greek drama. And even of Shakespearean drama. The figures in these stories are “larger than life.” Sancho Panza, however, is not larger than life, even if he is larger than the other Spanish characters in the book. He is very real. And whether he is eating his onions, or sneaking off to nap in the bushes or do “that which no other man can do for him,” we have a real character in a real world, behaving in a very real way. And this was new, beginning with the novel.
If you think about the novels that come after Quixote, their great strength—and one reason we return to them—is that given the fact that the novel recreates for us a specific time and place, with real characters, life lived as it was lived; we can re-enter those worlds. Our clearest sense of what those times and places were like can come to us from the novel.
Thus, if I want to know what Puritan New England was like, and what it would have been like to live there, I can turn to the The Scarlet Letter because Hawthorne recreates it. If I want to have some sense of what the whaling industry was like—it has vanished, leaving nothing behind except a little museum and a boat or two, hardly remnants of what was once the greatest industry in the world—there is Moby Dick. And every single aspect of that whaling world, from the ships to the voyages to the behavior of the men, is captured in realistic detail in that novel. And so we know what the whaling industry was like.
If you want to know what Russia was like during the Napoleonic wars, read War and Peace. You will get the feel, the sense, of lived life in elaborate detail. That is what the novel does. And that is its strength. I emphasize this because what Solzhenitsyn was doing in writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is what a great novelist does: he sets down, in realistic detail, what life was like in a very specific, enclosed world and renders it with a vividness of imagination, and, at the same time, a reality that recreates that world.
Why was this so controversial? Simply because no one knew that world existed. Or, if they did, it was being covered up. That world of the Gulag, of the Soviet Union slave labor camps, was either a well-kept secret, or, if you knew it was there, you did not speak a word about it. It may have been a great grinding mill which ground up millions upon millions of Russians—but no one spoke about it, because if you did, you risked becoming a statistic. Therefore it was kept quiet.
The first thing Solzhenitsyn was trying to do, in writing this novel, was to open up this world to the wider world, letting the citizens of his native land know what was happening there in vivid detail. And then, by extension, letting the world know what had happened in those camps. For this reason, he takes neither the worst possible camps that existed in the Gulag nor the best—he talks about that world, the prison world touched with some ease and comfort, in The First Circle, the camp where the mathematicians and scientists were kept. What he seeks to portray in Ivan Denisovich is a camp somewhere in the middle, a typical camp, set among the entire range of camps, a place you would be likely to go to if you were arrested and sent off. You might end up somewhere worse; if you were brilliant, you might end up somewhere better. It was something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears; Solzhenitsyn’s camp in Ivan Denisovich had the porridge that was “just right.”
Having chosen to describe simply an average camp, what does he do next? He chooses an average man. He is writing–and, in this, he is very much in line with 20th century literature—a novel without a hero. Our hero is not heroic. He is simply an average John (which is how the name “Ivan” translates) with an average name, from an average background—just another average Russian who one day found himself astonished to be thrown into this entire system. There is nothing exceptional about him. There is a way in which the central character is even bland. And that is deliberate. The focus is supposed to be on the fact that this man could be any man, every man, all men who, at any moment, could find themselves sent there.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is thus “standing in” for all of humanity and is representing all of humanity; he is a kind of blank slate. He has some personality and a past, we discover some things about him, but he is not particularly remarkable.
And then to complete it, what do we get? Not a history of the camp, neither how it was founded nor how it developed—all this is saved for The Gulag Archipelago, when he discusses all the camps. There he gives a history of the entire system.
What we have here is one day–simply one average day of one average man in one average camp. This is not dramatic. And those of us who read it now, not having lived through it and not having the sense of the panic it caused in the Soviet regime, or the excitement it caused among the Russian people, look at it and first react by thinking: there’s not much happening here. It is true, yet it is simple and deliberate. It is part of the plan of the novel.
In one sense, this was the first novel he attempted to get published. He did not choose stronger material because if you have a desperately sick body, the first medicine you administer must be fairly mild. Something too strong can shock and kill. Or as St. Paul says in Corinthians: “I gave you milk to drink, not meat; for you were not able as yet.” Therefore, what we get here is a fairly mild dose of the truth. Yet it is true.
Even this caused an enormous furor, for this book does what art should do, namely, reflect truth. In this sense, Solzhenitsyn is doing what the great novelists have always done, simply reflecting reality. What happened when he created this little world, a world he had known personally? You must understand the sheer courage, the guts needed, to send this manuscript off in the first place. Given the kinds of things people were being arrested and thrown into the camps for, to actually submit, to a literary magazine, this manuscript, could have meant becoming a non-person the very next day, with the manuscript burned, never to be released again.
Why did he take the chance? He took this chance in the early 60’s because, for one brief moment in the history of the Soviet Union, there was a thaw. The ruler was Nikita Khrushchev. During the early 60’s, Khrushchev decided that there had to be a little bit of truth told about the Stalin years. Khrushchev realized that those years were so destructive, so horrific, that what the country had been through had demoralized it so, that if there was any hope of prolonging the Communist system or getting some life out of the people again, perhaps a little bit of truth might do it.
And it was allowed to be said that maybe Comrade Stalin had made a few mistakes. Maybe Comrade Stalin had gone a bit overboard in some of the things he attempted, liking ordering the White Sea Canal to be dug in six months, including winter, at the cost of 300,000 men, who died as they dug and were simply thrown into the hole. Maybe Comrade Stalin had gone a bit too far in his pressure tactics in trying to see to it that the counter-revolutionaries didn’t get a grip on the world. The extent of this thaw was only a few small admissions.
But there had been a break. There was a bubble of antidote rising above the poison. Solzhenitsyn saw this break and decided it was now or never. He took the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and sent it to Novy Mir, the prominent literary magazine. We have nothing like this. Everybody in the Soviet Union read this magazine. Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor, was highly respected and he was a good man who loved literature. For the most part, he could only publish junk because art was controlled by the State. He could generally only publish the garbage that was Socialist realism. This ate him up because he loved great literature. He shows up later in The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs about trying to get published. This man was tortured by the system he was living under.
What happened? The manuscript showed up. It was every editor’s dream. He opened the envelope, pulled it out, started reading it, and realized he had a work of absolute genius. He was holding in his hands one of the great works of fiction ever written. Then he realized he could not publish it. A life’s dream come true...and there was nothing he could do about it. The man was tormented. If he had been smart, he would have stuck it in a safe, locked it, and let it be discovered in the future, if truth should ever be restored to the country. He could not do it, partially because he felt a need to give the truth to his readers and partially out of pride, because if he published it, he would also make his name forever.
What he did was hand the manuscript up one level in the bureaucracy to the figure above him who was in charge of censoring the magazine. Tvardovsky told his overseer he was interested in publishing it and asked him to read it and give his opinion. (He did not say, “This is dynamite, it will blow up in our hands, but it is a work of genius!”) The censor of the magazine read it, returned it, and said, “It’s a work of absolute genius...but there’s no way we can publish that.” Tvardovsky insisted: “We must, we must!” The censor mildly resisted: “Perhaps we should...but I’m not taking responsibility for it!”
So it went up to the chain to the man who oversaw the censor. His view was much the same: “The man is an absolute genius, but there’s no way we can publish it...but it must be published. A giant has appeared among us. There’s a genius walking among us. What do we do?” They had meetings and conferences about this, tormented about what they should do. Up it went through the chain of command, until finally, at the last meeting of everybody concerned, they decided the only course of action was to send it to Comrade Khrushchev. It went to the very top. Imagine, if you will, a literary manuscript, the publication of which is being debated, going to the White House so that the President could give his review. We cannot conceive of this, yet that is what happened.
Khrushchev was going off to his dacha in the country. (“Everyone in the Soviet Union lives equally!” “In palatial mansions and with limousines?”) He took with him the manuscript. He read it. He returned and said to publish it, calling it a great work. That was his first mistake.
His second mistake occurred at almost the same time. This was October 1962. This is when he confronted President Kennedy over missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev backed down in a major confrontation with the United States. These two things did it. Shortly thereafter, he found himself out of power.
In the meantime, the presses had rolled. Everybody bought up the few remaining copies. They spread everywhere throughout Russia, causing a sensation. Suddenly, everyone knew what that camp system was like. And every family had had someone, or perhaps many, who had gone there. And suddenly everyone knew what they had lived through. It was the first breath of truth in decades in that country.
Let me read a part of an essay written by a Russian man who made a pilgrimage to Vermont to find Solzhenitsyn’s house after he had returned to Russia. He wanted to see where Solzhenitsyn had lived in this country because of the author’s importance in this man’s life. Here is part of his account:
I had always wanted to see this house. Why? The answer can probably be found in the mass hysteria which surrounded Solzhenitsyn’s name in the Soviet Union of my youth. All his books were confiscated from shops and libraries, and one could easily end up in prison for simply possessing (let alone reading) any of his works.
“Mass hysteria” is the correct term for what occurred. The confiscation he refers to happened shortly after Ivan Denisovich was published. It had a few months and years but that was it.
I shall never forget the feeling of danger when, as a 16-year-old, I read a tattered copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Hiding the book under the blanket in my bed, I finished it in one sleepless night. Next morning I had to pass it on to the next person in line by the light of a small torch.
And, remember, this is after the book was published. It was after people had read it. Mass hysteria, indeed.
Let me quote Solzhenitsyn himself again: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” This small work of absolute truth, rendered in realistic detail, began the overturning of that world. It began the process.
After Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn finally thought he could get everything published. He sent The First Circle to Tvardovsky. He also sent Cancer Ward. The editor read these longer novels and simply couldn’t believe it—one work of genius after another. And then he was told not to print anything else by Solzhenitsyn. So they did get locked up in a safe. They were not published in Russia until the 1990’s. They sat in the safe for a long time.
The editor of the magazine was hounded to death by the authorities. He was blamed for what had happened. Solzhenitsyn was briefly the most famous man in the country but was suddenly expelled from the Writers’ Union. He was attacked from every side—his fellow writers, the government, his former friends. He was on the road to becoming a non-person, even though he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The book was this much of a bombshell. Curiously, it’s just an average book: one day, in the life of one man, in one camp. But it was sufficient because it functions the way a great novel functions. It tells the truth and renders that day-to-day truth in realistic detail.
Let us take a look at that day. It’s an average day. If you take a look at the structure of that day, you begin to see what he is doing. For us, a day is structured by what happens in the sky. We get up in the dark and they get up in the dark. But when they get up, what do they see?
The camp lights had chased the stars from the sky, and it was as dark as before.
There is light, but it is not the light of the stars. That is gone—it has been blocked out. God’s creation is blocked out by the lights of the prison camp. From such a simple reference, we are introduced to the battle which rages throughout the book. He puts it that way, quietly and subtly, the totalitarian regime lighting up the prison camp all night long because they do not trust the prisoners. What they are doing is blotting out God’s starlit sky. There is a battle of the lights: the prison lights of the Communist regime and the stars of God’s sky. The prison lights, in the book, were winning: “It was as dark as before.”
Throughout the book, there are references to the sky, the stars, the sun, very simple realities. They are marched off to the work site in the morning as a dim red sun rises over the deserted compound. You can barely see the sun. Why? Because it is red. I don’t think I need to explain that one to you. The color, at that moment, radiates. The people who read this understood these references. They knew what these symbols represented.
“It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.”
“If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.”
“How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folks say the sun is highest at dinner time.”
“Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government!”
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn’t going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees!
This pattern can be followed throughout the whole book. I am giving but a few examples. Anytime anyone in this novel looks upward, you the reader are finding out something more than what the novel says directly. Even as this was published, it was a book written in code, but it’s the simplest code: the stars in the sky, the sun, time. These things are the works of God—not the work of the Soviet government.
This next passage appears after night has come again, near the end, right before we go to bed. It is good peasant wisdom—good humor, connected with nature–as opposed to Soviet orders. The moon is so bright the wolves are out “sunbathing”:
“The wolves are out sunbathing–come and try it! Give us a light, old man!”
He lit up just inside the door and went out on the porch. “Wolf’s sunshine” was what they jokingly called the moonlight where Shukhov came from.
The moon had risen very high. As far again and it would be at its highest. Sky white with a greenish tinge, stars bright but far between. Snow sparkling white, barracks walls also white. Camp lights might as well not be there.
By the end of the day, when night has come again, because it has been a good day–and I’ll define what that means later–God’s moonlight is beaming down on that camp, turning everything white, making it impossible to see the prison lights. They are blotted out by God’s created glory.
These are the parameters of the day. The prison lights that rule and reign at the beginning are finally overcome by the bright, full moonlight at the end of the book. And even with that moonlight, you can see the stars again. God’s creation is there and visible. The readers picked up on these subtle touches.
The whole reason these people are in the prison camps is because they have defied that perfect, Utopian, workers’ paradise, the Soviet Union, where “the great experiment” was first tried, and, according to the government, had triumphed. The book is thus loaded with Communist theory. Let me give one example of how Solzhenitsyn treats Communist theory in the novel. If we had grown up there, as he did, we would have had this stuff beaten into our heads, the way the old nuns used to catechize the children.
What were those lies? “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” So I work, but because I live in a “fair and just” economic system, I get what I need, unless there are others around who unfortunately cannot work, and, thus, need some of it more than I do. What we end up with, in theory, is perfect equality. Which, of course, is a lie, which everyone knew. But you couldn’t say it was a lie—unless you could sneak it in. Here is how Solzhenitsyn did it:
“A good rate for the job” meant good rations for five days. Well, four days more likely: the bosses would appropriate one day’s rations and hand out the standard minimum for every gang in the camp, good or bad. Fair shares all around, they called it–fair to everybody, but they were saving at the expense of the zek’s belly. [The zek was the poor slob of the camp.] True enough, a zek’s stomach can put up with anything: if today’s no good, we’ll stuff ourselves tomorrow. That was the dream the whole camp went to bed with on minimum ration days.
Just think, though—it was five days’ work and four days’ eats.
That is an open attack on Communist theory and the way the Soviet system was run. We read it as if there’s nothing to it. But it is something far more. What it makes clear is that there may be theory in Moscow, but here is reality in the camps, where people were being cheated. At every turn, that cheating was going on, proving that there is no such thing as scientific economic theory.
Whatever happens in terms of material goods in the world—even if you think it is the most important element in human life—the truth is that human beings do not operate according to theory. Men are occasionally selfish and unfair! This is no surprise to anyone who knows of original sin and the fallen state of man. As the book goes along, there are places where the situation begins to explode. Near the end, a parcel arrives—the arrival of parcels being one of the few sources of excitement in the camps:
Some people take the view that a man with a parcel is always a tightwad, you have to gouge what you can out of him. But when you think of it–it’s easy come, easy go. Even those lucky people are sometimes glad to earn an extra bowl of gruel between parcels. Or scrounge a butt. A bit for the warder, a bit for the team foreman, and you can’t leave out the trustee in the parcel room. If you do, he’ll mislay your parcel next time around and it’ll be there a week before it gets on the list. Then there’s the clerk in the storeroom, where all the groceries have to be handed in–Tsezar will be taking a bagful there before work parade next morning to be kept safe from thieves, and hut searches, and because the commandant has so ordered–if you don’t make the clerk a handsome gift, he’ll pinch a bit here and a bit there... He sits there all day behind a locked door with other men’s groceries, the rat, and there’s no way of checking up on him. Then there’s payment for services rendered (by Shukhov to Tsezar, for instance). Then there’ll be a little something for the bathhouse man, so he’ll pick you out a decent set of clean underwear. Then there’s the barber, who shaves you “with paper”–wiping the razor on a scrap of paper, not your bare knee–it may not amount to much, but you have to give him three or four cigarettes. Then there’ll be somebody in the CES–to make sure your letters are put aside separately and not lost. Then supposing you want to wangle a day off and rest up in the compound–you need to fix the doctor. You’re bound to give something to your neighbor who eats from the same night stand, like the captain does with Tsezar. And counts every bite you take. The most shameless zek can’t hold out against that.
So those who always think the other man’s radish is plumper than their own might feel envy, but Shukhov knew what was what and didn’t let his belly rumble for other people’s goodies.
So, you see, the system ran entirely on bribery. As presented in the novel, not to share your parcels with virtually everyone else in the camp was to create a living hell. It was symptomatic of the whole country. The people reading this must have roared with laughter, recognizing their own experiences. Solzhenitsyn is attacking the entire Soviet economic system through one little parcel.
The Russians who read this realized that all of Russia, in a way, was a camp. The whole country was under the prison lights. The whole country ran on bribery, theft, inequality, and corruption. And if that was the case, then the whole country should collapse. And, eventually, it would—but it held on for so long for a simple reason. There are larger issues here than mere Soviet history; there are questions of human nature:
So those who always think the other man’s radish is plumper than their own might feel envy, but Shukhov knew what was what and didn’t let his belly rumble for other people’s goodies.
Our hero—not an extraordinary man—is not filled with envy. In the midst of such corruption, in a world where there is never enough to eat, in a world where you are dependent on the kindness of those around you, he feels no envy and desires nothing from them. He does not covet his neighbor’s parcel. It is a small thing; yet it is an enormous thing. It is a basic decency that cannot be crushed out of some men. In the midst of the horror and darkness, the torment and suffering, we get tiny glimpses of human decency and dignity. Not simply man at his worst—but man at his best, like the stars shining in the dark sky. In this way, we begin to get a sense of who this man is and how he functions. He may never, in the course of the novel, stand up and commit a heroic action, but Solzhenitsyn is making the point that, to live in these conditions, to go through what he goes through, to suffer what he has suffered, and to have a belly as empty as his belly—and not envy—is a heroism of a kind that most of us may not be able to understand. And maybe this small triumph of the good can have enormous consequences.
This basic decency and dignity of man is everywhere in the novel. Simply put, it is what the Soviets could not stamp out, try as they might. They couldn’t finally destroy that which was good and the little flashes of nobility which still existed. As Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag:
Do you love life? Good. Then love it in the camps. Because that is life too. Whatever is going on in the world at large, you will find reflected here in miniature. We may be behind barbed wire and walls, we may be freezing to death and starving, but this is life. In this life you will find the full array of everything you find in humanity.
Whatever the system, the nature of man does not change. The mystery is not the economic or political theory or the totalitarian government; the mystery is the mystery of man. And you can discover the extreme range of that mystery just as much in an average slave labor camp as you can anywhere else in the world. And this is what Solzhenitsyn examined.
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