Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn served almost a third of his prison camp term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - in the Ekibastuz special camp in northern Kazakhstan. There, at the general works, the idea of a story about one day of one prisoner flashed through on a long winter day. “It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought how I should describe the entire camp world - in one day,” the author said in a television interview with Nikita Struve (March 1976). “Of course, you can describe your ten years of the camp, the entire history of the camps, but it’s enough to collect everything in one day, as if from fragments; it’s enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” [see. on our website its full text, summary and literary analysis] written in Ryazan, where Solzhenitsyn settled in June 1957 and from the new school year became a teacher of physics and astronomy at secondary school No. 2. Started on May 18, 1959, completed on 30 June. The work took less than a month and a half. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the way of which you know too much, and it’s not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only fight off unnecessary material, just so that the unnecessary is not climbed, but it could accommodate the most necessary things,” the author said in a radio interview for the BBC (June 8, 1982), conducted by Barry Holland.
While writing in the camp, Solzhenitsyn, in order to keep what he wrote secret and himself along with it, first memorized only poetry, and at the end of his term, dialogues in prose and even continuous prose. In exile, and then rehabilitated, he could work without destroying passage after passage, but he had to remain hidden as before in order to avoid a new arrest. After retyping it on a typewriter, the manuscript was burned. The manuscript of the camp story was also burned. And since the typewriting had to be hidden, the text was printed on both sides of the sheet, without margins and without spaces between the lines.
Only more than two years later, after a sudden violent attack on Stalin launched by his successor N. S. Khrushchev at the XXII Party Congress (October 17 - 31, 1961), A.S. ventured to propose the story for publication. “Cave Typescript” (out of caution - without the name of the author) on November 10, 1961 was transferred by R.D. Orlova, the wife of A.S.’s prison friend, Lev Kopelev, to the prose department of the magazine “New World” to Anna Samoilovna Berzer. The typists rewrote the original, Anna Samoilovna asked Lev Kopelev, who came to the editorial office, what to call the author, and Kopelev suggested a pseudonym at his place of residence - A. Ryazansky.
On December 8, 1961, as soon as the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, appeared at the editorial office after a month’s absence, A. S. Berzer asked him to read two difficult manuscripts. One did not need a special recommendation, at least based on what I had heard about the author: it was the story “Sofya Petrovna” by Lydia Chukovskaya. About the other, Anna Samoilovna said: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.” It was this that Tvardovsky took with him until the morning. On the night of December 8-9, he reads and rereads the story. In the morning, he dials up the chain to the same Kopelev, asks about the author, finds out his address, and a day later calls him to Moscow by telegram. On December 11, on the day of his 43rd birthday, A.S. received this telegram: “I ask the editors of the new world to come urgently, expenses will be paid = Tvardovsky.” And Kopelev already on December 9 telegraphed to Ryazan: “Alexander Trifonovich is delighted with the article” (this is how the former prisoners agreed among themselves to encrypt the unsafe story). For himself, Tvardovsky wrote down workbook 12 December: " Strongest impression last days - the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solongitsyn), whom I will meet today.” Tvardovsky recorded the author's real name from his voice.
On December 12, Tvardovsky received Solzhenitsyn, calling the entire editorial board to meet and talk with him. “Tvardovsky warned me,” notes A.S., “that he did not firmly promise publication (Lord, I was glad that they did not hand it over to the ChekGB!), and he would not indicate a deadline, but he would not spare any effort.” Immediately the editor-in-chief ordered to conclude an agreement with the author, as A.S. notes... “at the highest rate accepted by them (one advance is my two-year salary).” A.S. earned “sixty rubles a month” by teaching.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich. The author reads. Fragment
The original titles of the story were “Shch-854”, “One Day of One Prisoner”. The final title was composed by the editorial office of Novy Mir on the author’s first visit, at the insistence of Tvardovsky, “throwing assumptions across the table with the participation of Kopelev.”
Following all the rules of Soviet apparatus games, Tvardovsky began to gradually prepare a multi-move combination in order to ultimately enlist the support of the country’s chief apparatchik, Khrushchev, the only person who could authorize the publication of the camp story. At Tvardovsky’s request, written reviews of “Ivan Denisovich” were written by K. I. Chukovsky (his note was called “Literary Miracle”), S. Ya. Marshak, K. G. Paustovsky, K. M. Simonov... Tvardovsky himself compiled a brief preface to the story and a letter addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR N. S. Khrushchev. On August 6, 1962, after a nine-month editorial period, the manuscript of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” with a letter from Tvardovsky was sent to Khrushchev’s assistant, V. S. Lebedev, who agreed, after waiting for a favorable moment, to introduce the patron to the unusual work.
Tvardovsky wrote:
“Dear Nikita Sergeevich!
I would not have considered it possible to encroach on your time on a private literary matter, if not for this truly exceptional case.
We are talking about the amazingly talented story by A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The name of this author has not been known to anyone until now, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names in our literature.
This is not only my deep conviction. The unanimous high assessment of this rare literary find by my co-editors for the New World magazine, including K. Fedin, is joined by the voices of other prominent writers and critics who had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with it in manuscript.
But due to the unusual nature of the life material covered in the story, I feel an urgent need for your advice and approval.
In a word, dear Nikita Sergeevich, if you find an opportunity to pay attention to this manuscript, I will be happy, as if it were my own work.”
In parallel with the progress of the story through the supreme labyrinths, routine work with the author on the manuscript was going on in the magazine. On July 23, the story was discussed by the editorial board. A member of the editorial board, and soon Tvardovsky’s closest collaborator, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in his diary:
“I see Solzhenitsyn for the first time. This is a man of about forty, ugly, in a summer suit - canvas trousers and a shirt with an unbuttoned collar. The appearance is rustic, the eyes are set deep. There is a scar on the forehead. Calm, reserved, but not embarrassed. He speaks well, fluently, clearly, with an exceptional sense of dignity. Laughs openly, showing two rows of large teeth.
Tvardovsky invited him - in the most delicate form, unobtrusively - to think about the comments of Lebedev and Chernoutsan [an employee of the CPSU Central Committee, to whom Tvardovsky gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript]. Let’s say, add righteous indignation to the kavtorang, remove the shade of sympathy for the Banderaites, give someone from the camp authorities (at least an overseer) in more conciliatory, restrained tones, not all of them were scoundrels.
Dementyev [deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir] spoke about the same thing more sharply and straightforwardly. Yaro stood up for Eisenstein, his “Battleship Potemkin.” He said that even from an artistic point of view he was not satisfied with the pages of the conversation with the Baptist. However, it is not the art that confuses him, but the same fears that hold him back. Dementiev also said (I objected to this) that it was important for the author to think about how his story would be received by former prisoners who remained staunch communists after the camp.
This hurt Solzhenitsyn. He replied that he had not thought about such a special category of readers and did not want to think about it. “There is a book, and there is me. Maybe I’m thinking about the reader, but this is the reader in general, and not different categories... Then, all these people were not in general work. They, according to their qualifications or former position, usually got jobs in the commandant’s office, at a bread slicer, etc. But you can understand Ivan Denisovich’s position only by working in general work, that is, knowing it from the inside. Even if I were in the same camp, but observed it from the side, I would not have written this. If I hadn’t written it, I wouldn’t have understood what kind of salvation work is...”
A dispute arose about that part of the story where the author directly speaks about the position of the katorang, that he - a sensitive, thinking person - must turn into a stupid animal. And here Solzhenitsyn did not concede: “This is the most important thing. Anyone who does not become dull in the camp, does not coarse his feelings, perishes. That's the only way I saved myself. I’m scared now to look at the photograph as I came out of it: then I was older than now, about fifteen years, and I was stupid, clumsy, my thought worked clumsily. And that’s the only reason he was saved. If, as an intellectual, I was internally tossing around, nervous, worried about everything that happened, I would probably die.”
During the conversation, Tvardovsky inadvertently mentioned a red pencil, which at the last minute could erase something or other from the story. Solzhenitsyn became alarmed and asked to explain what this meant. Can the editor or censor remove something without showing him the text? “To me the integrity of this thing is more valuable than its printing,” he said.
Solzhenitsyn carefully wrote down all comments and suggestions. He said that he divides them into three categories: those with which he can agree, even believes that they are beneficial; those that he will think about are difficult for him; and finally, impossible - those with which he does not want to see the thing printed.
Tvardovsky proposed his amendments timidly, almost embarrassedly, and when Solzhenitsyn took the floor, he looked at him with love and immediately agreed if the author’s objections were well founded.”
A.S. also wrote about the same discussion:
“The main thing that Lebedev demanded was to remove all those places in which the kavtorang was presented as a comic figure (by the standards of Ivan Denisovich), as he was intended, and to emphasize the partisanship of the kavtorang (one must have “ positive hero"!). This seemed to me the least of the sacrifices. I removed the comic, and what remained was something “heroic,” but “insufficiently developed,” as critics later found. Now the captain's protest at the divorce was a little inflated (the idea was that the protest was ridiculous), but this, perhaps, did not disturb the picture of the camp. Then it was necessary to use the word “butts” less often when referring to the guards; I reduced it from seven to three; less often - “bad” and “bad” about the authorities (it was a bit dense for me); and so that at least not the author, but the kavtorang would condemn the Banderaites (I gave such a phrase to the kavtorang, but later threw it out in a separate publication: it was natural for the kavtorang, but they were too heavily reviled anyway). Also, to give the prisoners some hope of freedom (but I couldn’t do that). And, the funniest thing for me, a Stalin hater, was that at least once it was necessary to name Stalin as the culprit of the disaster. (And indeed, he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This is not accidental, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin alone.) I made this concession: I mentioned “the mustachioed old man” once...”
On September 15, Lebedev told Tvardovsky by phone that “Solzhenitsyn (“One Day”) has been approved by N[ikita] S[ergeevi]ch” and that in the coming days the boss would invite him for a conversation. However, Khrushchev himself considered it necessary to enlist the support of the party elite. The decision to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was made on October 12, 1962 at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee under pressure from Khrushchev. And only on October 20 did he receive Tvardovsky to report the favorable result of his efforts. About the story itself, Khrushchev remarked: “Yes, the material is unusual, but, I will say, both the style and the language are unusual - it’s not suddenly vulgar. Well, I think it’s a very strong thing. And, despite such material, it does not evoke a heavy feeling, although there is a lot of bitterness there.”
Having read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” even before publication, in typescript, Anna Akhmatova, who described it in “ Requiem“The grief of the “hundred-million people” on this side of the prison gates, she said with emphasis: “I must read this story and learn it by heart - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union."
The story, called a story by the editors in the subtitle for weight, was published in the magazine “New World” (1962. No. 11. P. 8 – 74; signed for publication on November 3; advance copy was delivered to the editor-in-chief on the evening of November 15; according to Vladimir Lakshin, mailing started on November 17; on the evening of November 19, about 2,000 copies were brought to the Kremlin for the participants of the plenum of the Central Committee) with a note by A. Tvardovsky “Instead of a preface.” Circulation 96,900 copies. (with the permission of the CPSU Central Committee, 25,000 were additionally printed). Republished in “Roman-Gazeta” (M.: GIHL, 1963. No. 1/277. 47 pp. 700,000 copies) and as a book (M.: Soviet Writer, 1963. 144 pp. 100,000 copies). On June 11, 1963, Vladimir Lakshin wrote: “Solzhenitsyn gave me the released “ Soviet writer“quickly “One day...”. The publication is truly shameful: gloomy, colorless cover, gray paper. Alexander Isaevich jokes: “They released it in the GULAG publication.”
Cover of the publication “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in Roman-Gazeta, 1963
“In order for it [the story] to be published in the Soviet Union, it took a confluence of incredible circumstances and exceptional personalities,” noted A. Solzhenitsyn in a radio interview on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” for the BBC (June 8, 1982 G.). – It is absolutely clear: if Tvardovsky had not been the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I'll add. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at that very moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union in 1962 was like a phenomenon against physical laws, as if, for example, objects began to rise upward from the ground on their own, or cold stones began to heat up on their own, heating up to the point of fire. This is impossible, this is absolutely impossible. The system was structured this way, and for 45 years it had not released anything - and suddenly there was such a breakthrough. Yes, Tvardovsky, Khrushchev, and the moment - everyone had to get together. Of course, I could then send it abroad and publish it, but now, from the reaction of Western socialists, it is clear: if it had been published in the West, these same socialists would have said: it’s all a lie, none of this happened, and there were no camps, and there was no destruction, nothing happened. It was only because everyone was speechless because it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow that it shocked me.”
“If this [submission of the manuscript to Novy Mir and publication at home] had not happened, something else would have happened, and worse,” A. Solzhenitsyn wrote fifteen years earlier, “I would have sent the photographic film with camp things - abroad, under the pseudonym Stepan Khlynov , as it had already been prepared. I didn’t know that in the best case scenario, if it were both published and noticed in the West, not even a hundredth of that influence could have happened.”
The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is associated with the author’s return to work on The Gulag Archipelago. “Even before Ivan Denisovich, I conceived the Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn said in a television interview with CBS (June 17, 1974), conducted by Walter Cronkite, “I felt that such a systematic thing was needed, a general plan of everything that was , and in time, how it happened. But my personal experience and the experience of my comrades, no matter how much I asked about the camps, all the fates, all the episodes, all the stories, was not enough for such a thing. And when “Ivan Denisovich” was published, letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted on meeting me and telling me, and I started dating. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, more, to describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and brought me the missing material.” “And so I collected indescribable material, which cannot be collected in the Soviet Union, only thanks to “Ivan Denisovich,” summed up A.S. in a radio interview for the BBC on June 8, 1982. “So it became like a pedestal for “The Gulag Archipelago”.
In December 1963, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was nominated for the Lenin Prize by the editorial board of the New World and the Central state archive literature and art. According to Pravda (February 19, 1964), selected “for further discussion.” Then included in the list for secret voting. Didn't receive the prize. Laureates in the field of literature, journalism and publicism were Oles Gonchar for the novel “Tronka” and Vasily Peskov for the book “Steps on the Dew” (“Pravda”, April 22, 1964). “Even then, in April 1964, there was talk in Moscow that this story with the vote was a “rehearsal for a putsch” against Nikita: would the apparatus succeed or not succeed in withdrawing a book approved by Himself? In 40 years they have never dared to do this. But they became bolder and succeeded. This reassured them that He Himself was not strong.”
From the second half of the 60s, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was withdrawn from circulation in the USSR along with other publications by A.S. The final ban on them was introduced by order of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, agreed upon with the Central Committee of the CPSU, dated January 28, 1974 Glavlit’s order No. 10 of February 14, 1974, specially dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, lists the issues of the magazine “New World” containing the writer’s works that are subject to removal from public libraries (No. 11, 1962; No. 1, 7, 1963; No. 1, 1966) and separate editions of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, including a translation into Estonian and a book “for the blind”. The order is accompanied by a note: “Foreign publications (including newspapers and magazines) containing the works of the specified author are also subject to seizure.” The ban was lifted by a note from the Ideological Department of the CPSU Central Committee dated December 31, 1988.
Since 1990, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has been published again in his homeland.
Foreign Feature Film based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
In 1971, an English-Norwegian film was made based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (directed by Kasper Wrede, Tom Courtenay played Shukhov). For the first time, A. Solzhenitsyn was able to watch it only in 1974. Speaking on French television (March 9, 1976), when asked by the presenter about this film, he answered:
“I must say that the directors and actors of this film approached the task very honestly, and with great penetration, they themselves did not experience this, did not survive, but were able to guess this painful mood and were able to convey this slow pace that fills the life of such a prisoner 10 years, sometimes 25, unless, as often happens, he dies first. Well, very minor criticisms can be made of the design; this is mostly where the Western imagination simply cannot imagine the details of such a life. For example, for our eyes, for mine, or if my friends could see it, former prisoners (will they ever see this film?), - for our eyes the padded jackets are too clean, not torn; then, almost all the actors, in general, are heavy-set men, and yet in the camp there are people on the very verge of death, their cheeks are hollow, they have no more strength. According to the film, it’s so warm in the barracks that there’s a Latvian sitting there with bare legs and arms - this is impossible, you’ll freeze. Well, these are minor remarks, but in general, I must say, I’m surprised how the authors of the film could understand so much and with a sincere soul tried to convey our suffering to the Western audience.”
The day described in the story occurs in January 1951.
Based on materials from the works of Vladimir Radzishevsky.
Sections: Literature
On August 4, 2008, the great Russian thinker, prose writer, playwright of the 20th century, Nobel Prize laureate in literature, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn passed away. For Russian culture, he became a symbol of the 20th century. In this connection, the Department of State Policy and Legal Regulation in the Field of Education recommended studying the writer’s work in school, due to the scale of his personality and the significance that this figure has for the history of the development of social thought in Russia in the second half of the 20th century. and literary history of the same period.
Studying the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the course of 20th century literature. associated primarily with the “camp theme” in Russian literature of the 20th century. Turning to this work allows you to raise the topic tragic fate person in totalitarian state and the responsibility of the people and their leaders for the present and future of the country.
Textual rather than survey study suggested of this work in literature lessons in 11th grade, because The “camp theme” may not be understood by students if they do not refer to the text of the work.
The study of “One Day:” allows us to show what the role of fiction is in the process of discovering the tragic pages of Russian history of the 20th century.
A group form of work is used (exemplary answers are given partially), elements of theater pedagogy.
Goals and objectives of the lesson:
- introduce the life and work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the history of the creation of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", its genre and compositional features, artistic and expressive means, the hero of the work;
- note the features of the writer’s artistic skill;
- consider the reflection of the tragic conflicts of history in the destinies of the heroes;
Equipment: portrait and photographs of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, literary sheets on the writer’s work, an exhibition of his books, a fragment of the feature film “Cold Summer of ’53”, a reference diagram based on the text of the work, a retrospective (1977, 1970, 1969, 1967) of dates in life of the writer, plaques with the names of writers for an impromptu meeting of the Union of Writers of the USSR (K. Fedin, A. Korneichuk, A. Surkov, Y. Yashin, A.I. Solzhenitsyn).
Questions on the board to update perception:
- What does the writer see as his purpose in literature?
Where does his creativity come from?
What allows a person to survive in inhuman conditions?
How can a person remain free in conditions of actual unfreedom?
Vocabulary work:
something that contains a retrospective review (retrospective exhibition, description)
During the classes
1. Determining the purpose and objectives of the lesson.
Retrospective of a selection of newspaper articles critical of A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
Theatrical meeting of the USSR Writers' Union.
Brief curriculum vitae about the writer.
Stills from the film "Cold Summer of '53".
Analysis of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich":
1) history of creation and publication, genre of the work;
2) theme, main idea, plot of the story;
3) pre-camp biography of the hero;
4) character traits and spiritual qualities of Ivan Denisovich;
5) “the camp through the eyes of a man”;
6) the breadth of the work’s subject matter;
8) the meaning of the epithet for the word “day” included in the title of the story;
Why not only grief squeezes the heart when reading this wonderful book, but also light penetrates the soul.
This is because of deep humanity, because people remained human even in an environment of mockery.
Zh.Medvedev.
Teacher's opening remarks:
:On one damp February day in 1974, a single passenger descended down the ramp of a Soviet plane that had arrived unscheduled from Moscow to Frankfurt am Main. This passenger in a demi-season coat, with the buttons cut off on the collar of his shirt, who three hours ago had been slurping prison stew in the famous Lefortovo, and now did not know exactly what awaited him.
German officials who met the unusual Russian guest (or titled exile), and then the famous German writer Heinrich Böll, of course, could not help but notice on his face traces of obvious fatigue, the corollas of wrinkles around his eyes, keen and observant, the grooves on his forehead: These were signs of continuous work of thought.
Who was this lonely Russian exiled passenger, silent, stingy in his movements and extremely taciturn in his first conversations with the press? Everything in him was “pressed” to the limit, the spring of will was not dissolved. Borders, visas, passports! They flash for him, replacing each other, but he inner world not changed. Nothing separated him for a moment - as the near future showed - from the continent of Russian history, from Russia.
This passenger, who flatly refused many questions from journalists, was Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, who went through many rounds of trials in his homeland. And in this lesson it is proposed to consider these circles in retrospect, that is, to turn back to the writer’s past and find out why A.I. Solzhenitsyn ended up abroad, what Alexander Isaevich sees as his purpose in literature as a writer, what were the origins of his creativity using the example of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.
Let's listen to some newspaper collections those years with eloquent headings, selected from the writer’s numerous letters (students write out dates and read out messages).
TASS message: By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, A.I. Solzhenitsyn was deprived of USSR citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union for systematically committing actions incompatible with belonging to USSR citizenship and causing damage to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
With a feeling of relief, I read that the Supreme Soviet of the USSR deprived Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship, that our society got rid of him. Solzhenitsyn's civil death is natural and fair. Valentin Kataev.
From the secretariat of the board of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR: To my own open letter Solzhenitsyn proved that he stands on positions alien to our people, and thereby confirmed the necessity, justice and inevitability of his exclusion from the Union of Soviet Writers...
Teacher's word: On September 22, 1967, a meeting of the secretariat of the USSR Writers' Union took place. And today we have a unique opportunity to reproduce part of it. 30 writers attended the meeting. K. Fedin chaired. A.I. Solzhenitsyn was invited. The meeting to analyze his letters began at 1 p.m. and ended after 6 p.m. (students take part in the role of writers; they come out with signs with the names of the writers written on them and sit down at the table, then take turns going to the impromptu podium to give a speech).
K. Fedin: I was shocked by Solzhenitsyn’s letters. And today we will have to talk about his works, but it seems to me that we need to talk in general about his letters.
A. Korneychuk: With our creativity we defend our government, our party, our people. We go abroad to fight. We return from there exhausted, exhausted, but with the knowledge of our duty. We know that you have suffered a lot, but you are not alone (addressing Solzhenitsyn). There were many other people in the camps besides you. Old communists. They went from the camp to the front. In our past there was not only lawlessness, there was heroism. But you didn't notice it. Everything you write is evil, dirty, offensive!
A. Surkov: Solzhenitsyn is more dangerous for us than Pasternak. Pasternak was a man cut off from life, and Solzhenitsyn had a lively, militant, ideological temperament. This is an ideological man, this is a dangerous man.
A. Yashin (Popov): The author of “The Feast of the Winners” is poisoned by hatred. People are outraged that there is such a writer in the ranks of the Writers' Union. I would like to propose expelling him from the Union. He was not the only one who suffered, but others understand the tragedy of the times.
K. Fedin: Let's give the floor to the writer himself - A. I. Solzhenitsyn.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn: I believe that the tasks of literature both in relation to society and in relation to the individual are not to hide the truth from him, to soften it, but to tell the truth as it is: The tasks of the writer concern the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the collision of life and death, overcoming spiritual grief and those laws of extended humanity that originated in the immemorial depths of millennia and will cease only when the sun goes out. Tell me, what is my letter about?
A.I. Solzhenitsyn: You didn’t understand anything then about censorship. This is a letter about the fate of our great literature, which once conquered and captivated the whole world. I am a patriot, I love my homeland. Under my soles all my life is the land of the fatherland, only its pain I hear, only I write about it.
Teacher's word:
Historical reference. We are talking about the “Open Letter” written by A.I. Solzhenitsyn on May 16, 1967 to the delegates of the IV All-Union Congress and sent by Alexander Isaevich to the presidium of the congress as a speech, since he himself was no longer elected as a delegate.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn: Without access to the congress rostrum, I ask you to discuss the unbearable oppression to which our fiction has been subjected from decade to decade by censorship. Literature cannot develop in the categories of “if they let you in or they don’t let you in.” Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that does not dare to convey its pain and anxiety to society, to warn at the right time about threatening moral and social dangers, does not even deserve the name of literature.
They say about me: “He was released early!” In addition to the 8-year sentence, I spent a month in transit prisons, then received eternal exile without a sentence, with this eternal doom I spent three years in exile, only thanks to the 20th Congress I was released - and this is called early!
I am alone, hundreds slander me. The only consolation is that I will never get a heart attack from any slander, because I was hardened in Stalin’s camps.
No one can block the paths of truth, and I am ready to accept death for its movement. But perhaps many lessons will teach us, finally, not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime. This has never once embellished our history.
Given (briefly) biographical information about the writer prepared by students.
Teacher's word: “My homeland is there, my heart is there, that’s why I’m going,” the writer said before flying to Russia on May 27, 1994. He turned out to be a prophet of his own destiny, since he foresaw his return back in the stagnant year of 1984: “I will return there, not only will my books return, but I will return there alive: For some reason it seems to me that I will die in my homeland.”
In the summer of 2008, Russia suffered a great loss: a citizen writer died, who passionately and devotedly loved his Motherland, rooting for it with all his soul; a person with a clearly expressed position in life, who goes to the end in defending his moral principles; a persistent, courageous person (approximately this verbal portrait should appear in students’ notebooks).
Solzhenitsyn began his search in the name of man within one person, the hero of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
Historical reference: From 5.5 to 6.5 million people became victims of terror from 1947-1953 (data in all sources are based on materials collected by A.I. Solzhenitsyn).
In 1970, a film based on the story was shot in Norway. The feature film “Cold Summer of ’53” has been created in Russian cinema, several frames of which will help transport you to the atmosphere of those years and answer the question: what is the common destinies of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and the heroes of the film (view). In his work, A.I. Solzhenitsyn reflected the tragic conflicts of history in the destinies of the heroes; showed how people became slaves to the “cult of personality.” And all the same: the spirit of the people broke through like a sprout breaking the asphalt (Zh. Medvedev).
Group work on the text of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"(each group was given a preliminary homework according to the text of the work).
1. History of creation and publication, genre of the work.
“One Day” was conceived by the author during general work in the Ekibastuz Special Camp in the winter of 1950-51. Implemented in 1959, first as “Shch - 854 (One day of one prisoner)” (shch-854 is the camp number of the writer himself). After the XXII Congress, the writer for the first time decided to propose something to the public press and chose A. Tvardovsky’s “New World”. Getting published was not easy.
“How was this born? It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought how to describe the entire camp world - in one day. Of course, you can describe your 10 years of camp, there, the whole history of the camps, but enough in in one day, collect only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening, and that’s all.
This idea was born to me in 1952. In the camp. Well, of course, it was crazy to think about it then. And then the years passed. And in 1959 I thought: it seems that I could already apply this idea now. For seven years she just lay there. Let me try to write one day of one prisoner. I sat down and how it started pouring! With terrible tension! Because many of these days are concentrated in you at once. And just so as not to miss anything, I incredibly quickly wrote “One day:”
Image of Ivan Denisovich was formed from the soldier Shukhov, who fought with the author in the Soviet-German war (and was never imprisoned), the general experience of prisoners and the author’s personal experience in a special camp as a mason.
The genre of the story attracted the writer, since a lot can be put into a small form, and it is a great pleasure for an artist to work on a small form, because in it you can “hone the edges with great pleasure for yourself.”
2. Determine the theme, main idea, reveal the plot of the story.
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is not only a portrait of one day in our history, it is a book about the resistance of the human spirit to camp violence.
3. Although the plot of the story is based on the events of one day, the memories of the main character allow us to imagine him pre-camp biography. Briefly describe it.
4. Note the character traits and spiritual qualities of Ivan Denisovich.
What kind of figure is in front of us? What impression does the hero evoke?
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is, first of all, a peasant, he is characterized by prudence, thoroughness in his thoughts, he is not fussy, eating into the little things of life; knows that it is from them that life consists; resourceful, reasonable, never loses human dignity.
His character is revealed in a whole series of small episodes.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the name “Ivan” in the translation of ancient Hebrew. - (God) had mercy, (God) had mercy.
5. What is Solzhenitsyn’s camp in this story? How can a person live and survive in it? What is the logic behind the character composition?
The convict camp was taken from Solzhenitsyn not as an exception, but as a way of life.
A person can gather his strength and fight against circumstances. You can survive only by resisting the camp order of forced forced extinction. And the whole plot, if you look closely, is the plot of non-resistance between living and non-living things, between Man and the Camp. The camp was created for the sake of murder, aimed at destroying the most important thing in a person - the inner world: thoughts, conscience, memory. “Life here tormented him from waking up to bedtime, leaving no idle memories: And he had even less reason to remember the village of Temgenevo and his native hut.”
Camp law: “If you die today, I will die tomorrow.” This general “guidance of life” puts a person on the other side of good and evil. Not allowing yourself to do this if you want to be called a Human is Shukhov’s task.
Question to the students of the whole class: what saves a person in this inhuman life?
1) Saves belonging to a community of people. Here it is a brigade, an analogue of a family in free life.
2) Saves work(the episode of laying a wall at the site is re-read: “He did the work dashingly, but without thinking at all:”). Ivan Denisovich returned both to himself and to others - albeit for a short time! - a feeling of purity and even holiness of work. The whole masonry scene is a scene of human emancipation, since they stopped being afraid, they even forgot about security.
6. Is only life in the camp zone the thematic content of the story? Which fragments of it indicate a greater breadth of topics?
1) Modern life villages;
2) memories of the village;
3) discussion of Eisenstein’s film “Ivan the Terrible”;
4) details Soviet history in connection with the fates of fellow prisoners (the fate of foreman Tyurin reflected the consequences of collectivization in the country).
Description of the scene is subject to the principle of expanding concentric circles: barracks - zone - crossing the steppe - construction site. The enclosed space is limited by a wire fence. Camp is home, that’s what everyone says: “We’re going home.” There is no time to remember another, real house in a day, but it exists in the story thanks to the hero’s inner vision. And then the next row appears concentric circles: house - village - region - Motherland. (reference diagram)
Time Decree.
None of the prisoners ever sees a watch in their eyes, and what is the point of a watch? The prisoner just needs to know whether it’s time to get up soon, how long before the divorce? Before lunch? Before lights out? Prisoners are not given a clock; the authorities know the time for them.
Time is determined by the sun and month:
“Shukhov raised his head to the sky and gasped: the sky was clear, and the sun had risen almost by lunchtime. It’s a marvelous thing: now it’s time for work! How many times did Shukhov notice: the days roll by in the camp - you won’t look back. But the deadline itself doesn’t pass at all, doesn’t gets rid of it completely."
“In the morning, this is the only way the prisoners can save themselves by dragging themselves to work slowly. Those who run fast will not live out their time in the camp - they will evaporate and fall.”
8. Find an epithet for the word “day” in the title of the story.
“Almost a happy day,” thinks Ivan Denisovich Shukhov at the end of his day. Let's name the happy events in the life of the hero of this day:
He hesitated on the rise - they didn’t put him in a punishment cell;
The brigade was not driven out into an open field in the cold to pull the wire from themselves;
At lunchtime I managed to make some porridge;
The foreman closed the interest well, therefore, the next five days the foreman will be “well-fed”;
I found a piece of a hacksaw, forgot about it, but didn’t get caught during the “shmon”;
I worked for Caesar in the evening and bought some tobacco;
And he didn’t get sick, he got over it.
“Not overshadowed by anything,” the happy day of a simple Soviet prisoner I.D. Shukhov. “The day passed, unclouded, almost happy.” “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added:”
Question for the whole class: why did the author show us a “happy” camp day? (I think because the author’s main goal is to show Russian folk character in various circumstances, show through an event, a chain of events - a person. The camp is such an “event”. And the person is Ivan Denisovich Shukhov).
9. Conclusion from the analysis of the story.
What is the hero of the story?
“Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a Russian man, savvy, delicate, hard-working, in whom the cruel era of cultivating envy, anger and denunciations did not kill that decency, that moral foundation that firmly lives among the people, never allowing deep down the soul to confuse good and evil, honor and dishonor, no matter how much they call for it - in the name of what, in the name of what social experiment, what game of mind and fantasy - torn from the family, from the earth and thrown into a huge barracks inhabited by other rooms (A. Latynina).
Composition
1. Camp is a special world.
2. Shukhov - main character and the narrator.
3. Ways to survive in the camp.
4. Features of the language of the story.
A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is based on real events the life of the author himself - his stay in the Ekibastuz special camp in the winter of 1950-1951 for general work. The main character of the story, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, is an ordinary prisoner of a Soviet camp. On his behalf, it is told about one day out of three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of the sentence that Ivan Denisovich received. The description of the events of one day in the life of a prisoner is enough to understand what kind of situation reigned in the camp, what orders and laws existed. One day - and before us is a general terrifying picture of the life of prisoners. The reader is presented with a special world - a camp that exists separately, parallel to normal life. Completely different laws apply here, and people do not live by them, but survive in spite of them. Life in the zone is shown from the inside by a person who knows about it from his own personal experience. Therefore, the story amazes with its realism.
“Thank you, Lord, another day has passed!” - Ivan Denisovich ends the story with these words, “a day passed, unclouded by anything, almost happy.” Indeed, this day was one of the most “successful”: Shukhov’s brigade was not sent to Sotsgorodok to pull wire in the cold, without heating, the hero bypassed the punishment cell, got away with only washing the floors in the guard’s room, received an extra portion of porridge for lunch, the work was familiar - laying a wall at a thermal power plant , he successfully passed the search, carried a hacksaw into the camp, worked in the evening at Caesar's, bought two glasses of samosada from a Latvian, and most importantly, did not get sick.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov was sentenced to ten years on a fabricated case: he was accused of returning from captivity on a secret German mission, but they could not figure out what exactly it was. In fact, Shukhov shared the fate of millions of other people who fought for their Motherland, and at the end of the war, they migrated from prisoners of German camps to the category of “enemies of the people.”
Solzhenitsyn also portrays another type of people - “jackals”, like Fetyukov, a former high-ranking boss accustomed to command, who does not even disdain to take cigarette butts out of the spittoon. Licking other people's plates, looking into a person's mouth in anticipation of leaving something for him is a way for Fetyukov to survive. He is disgusting; prisoners even refuse to work with him. He has absolutely no pride left and cries openly when he is beaten for licking plates. In the camp, everyone chooses their own way of survival. The most undignified of these methods is the path of the informer Panteleev, who lives off denunciations of other prisoners. Such people are hated in the camp, and such people do not live long.
Ivan Denisovich “was not a jackal even after eight years of general work - and the further he went, the more firmly he became established.” This man tries to earn money only through his own labor: he sews slippers, brings felt boots to the foreman, stands in line for parcels, for which he receives his honestly earned money. Shukhov has strong ideas about pride and honor, so he will never slide to Fetyukov’s level. As a peasant, Shukhov is very economical: he cannot just pass by a piece of a hacksaw, knowing that it can be made into a knife, which is an opportunity for additional income.
The former captain of the second rank Buinovsky, who is accustomed to doing everything conscientiously, deserves respect, does not try to shirk general work, “he looks at camp work as at naval service: if you say do it, then do it.” Brigadier Tyurin, who ended up in the camp only because his father was a kulak, also evokes sympathy. He always tries to defend the interests of the brigade: to get more bread, a profitable job. In the morning, Tyurin gives a bribe; his people were not kicked out for the construction of the Social Town. Ivan Denisovich says that “a good foreman will give a second life.” This is about Tyurin too. These people could never choose for themselves the path of survival of Fetyukov or Panteleev.
Alyoshka the Baptist evokes pity. This person is very kind, but weak-hearted, so “he is not commanded only by those who do not want to.” He perceives the conclusion as the will of God, tries to see only the good in his situation, says that “here there is time to think about the soul.” But Alyoshka cannot adapt to the camp conditions, and Ivan Denisovich believes that he will not last long here.
Another hero, sixteen-year-old boy Gopchik, has a grasp that Alyosha the Baptist lacks. Gopchik is cunning, he will not miss the opportunity to snatch a piece. He received his sentence for carrying milk to the forest to Bendera residents. In the camp they predict a great future for him: “Gopchik will be the right camp prisoner... they don’t predict a fate for him less than a grain cutter.”
Cesar Markovich, a former director, is in a special position in the camp. He receives packages from the outside and can afford many things that other prisoners cannot: he wears a new hat and other prohibited things. The former director works in an office and avoids general work. He avoids other prisoners and communicates only with Buinovsky. Tsezar Markovich has business acumen and knows who to give and how much to give. Solzhenitsyn’s story is written in the language of a simple camp prisoner, which is why a lot of slang, “thieves” words and expressions are used. “Shmon”, “knock on your godfather”, “six”, “morons”, “bastard” - the usual vocabulary in the camp. The use of these words, including “unprintable” ones, is justified, since with their help, authenticity in conveying the general atmosphere of the camp and what is happening is achieved.
Other works on this work
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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. So, in portrait description The old convict Yu-81, whom Shukhov is examining 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 will no longer 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 “The Fate of Man” (1956), central character who, having escaped from captivity, was received by his own 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 stay 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“claimed: “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 the degraded Fetyukov.
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, his unique individual characteristics relegating it to the background or even calling it 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 complete image 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 generalized image 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 magazine “Young Guard”, 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! How about a felt boot in the face? Set up 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 main point 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...
Himself 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. Zoomorphic comparisons are clearly redundant in portrait characteristics Gopchik. 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 main idea his "face". 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 guards 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: “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 surname: “Here God marks a rogue, he gave him a surname! - 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 denote 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 cavalryman 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 negative quality. Contrary to a long-rooted 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 leaning towards the stove, before equipping workplace, Shukhov’s reaction: “Just show the beaten dog the whip,” indicating the obedience and downtroddenness of the camp prisoners, 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 there are 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 allowed to be discovered negative sides 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 development modern civilization who abandoned faith or turned it into an external ritual, who placed socio-political chimeras and ideological radicalism at the forefront, or who 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 impossible to understand author's intention in full it is almost impossible. 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 a 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 internal state 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 an outstanding monument 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’s worse in the camp than in the wild, it’s 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 Buynovsky 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 it. 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, he makes interpenetrable that line which, according to Ortega y Gasset, should tightly fence off the internal (actually artistic) space of the work from the external one in relation to it “ objective reality", 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 “mustachioed old man” 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 vertical“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 art 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.
Astashkina Larisa Nikolaevna
teacher of Russian language and literature
MOBU secondary school No. 34, Taganrog
Subject : “A person is saved by dignity” (based on A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”).
To end,
Until the silent cross
Let the soul
Will remain clean
N.Rubtsov.
Solzhenitsyn became oxygenof our breathless time.
V. Astafiev.
Lesson format:
Contrasting board:
Slogan: (one side wing board)
“Thank you to Comrade Stalin for our happy life”
Poster: (other wing of the board)
"The Dark Night of Our History"
Under these inscriptions are pictures about construction sites, pictures about camps. Poster about the number of repressed people.On the central part of the board:- Lesson topic - Portrait of Solzhenitsyn- A table on which children attach answers at the end of the lesson.Goals for the teacher: Arouse interest in the personality and work of the writer;Show unusual life material taken as the basis of the story;Lead students to understand the tragic fate of man in a totalitarianState, to cultivate self-esteem.To develop the ability to create an oral monologue presentation;Learn to compose syncwines;
Goals for students: Know the content of the story; On the deskBe able to find language features this text;Be able to analyze text.
During the classes:
1.Organization of the class – 1 minute.2. Introductory speech by the teacher: the topic of the lesson is announced, attention is drawn to the first epigraph. The 50s came. Everything was done for the people, for the people. The 8-hour working day was restored, annual leave was introduced, the card system was abolished, and monetary reform was carried out. And the grateful people did not tire of glorifying holy name Stalin, composing songs and poems about him, making films and living according to his commandments. But there was another life, tightly closed from outsiders, the truth about which came to a person for a very long time. It was held back by barbed wire, fear in the souls of our fathers and grandfathers, and a lie that had monstrously grown throughout the country’s information space. And completely different words were addressed to the “father of all times and peoples.”Some paint you and exalt you,And they pray and thirst to resurrect!Others mug and vilify,You can't calm them down, you can't beg them.
About these others For the first time in Russian literature, Solzhenitsyn said openly in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Pay attention to the epigraph of our lesson.
Refer to the second epigraph.
- So who is he, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn?
Fate decreed that he was destined to go through all the circles of “prison hell”: 8 years in the camps and 3 years in exile for letters from the front to a friend in which he condemned Lenin and Stalin. In 1974, life prepared another blow - he was forcibly expelled from the country, and this despite the fact that the whole world had already recognized his talent as a writer, awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1970. At the age of 55, Solzhenitsyn became an exile because he dared to tell the truth about the terrible Stalinist era and create a work about camp life. Ahead of him lay 20 years of homesickness. And only in 1994 Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland, but he did it in his own way: for 55 days he moved from the Far East to Moscow, crossing half the country to plunge into our life.Today A.I. Solzhenitsyn is a man with eight decades behind him, years filled with dramatic events and the acquisition of wisdom. Today he is one of the most titled writers of our time. But this is today, and then, in the sixties, he was excommunicated from literature, prohibited from publishing and all his books were removed from libraries. And the beginning of all this is the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
- What is the history of the creation of this work?
“One Day...” was conceived by the author during general work in the Ekibastuz Special Camp in the winter of 1950-1951. Implemented in 1959, first as "Shch-854" (One day of one prisoner). After the 22nd Congress, the writer for the first time decided to propose something to the public press. I chose “New World” by Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky himself managed to convey in the exact words: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.” Having read it, Tvardovsky immediately began fighting for publication. Finally, “the decision to publish the story was made by the Politburo in October 1969 under personal pressure from Khrushchev.”
-And now that Solzhenitsyn has become available to the domestic reader for the second time, we have the opportunity to delve anew into “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
-
Name the two main characters in the story.
(Camp – Man)(If they don’t name the students, the question is: one of them is alive, a real man, and the other is an image-symbol.)-I divided you into 2 groups:
One group is trying to show, on the basis of the work, what the camp does to a person, and the other - how a person remains a Man. The ancient Greek scientist Socrates said that there are many people, but it is difficult to find a person among them.-
Guys, what does it mean to be a real Human?
-
As a result of our thoughts in class, we will fill out the table
(On the desk).
Task for groups.
1. How does the Man in Man camp kill? (Answer: will, human dignity, the ability to reflect and think, fortitude, turns into a slave).2. Compose a syncwine on the topic: “Camp”Group II 1.How does a person resist the camp? (Answer: address each other by first name and patronymic, human relationships, salvation in work, thirst for life, do not sit at the table wearing a hat).2. Compose a syncwine on the topic: “Man”
Problematic question.
Throughout the course of our work, we must answer the question: Who wins: Camp-Human? Man - Camp? (On the desk).3.Direct analysis. - Solzhenitsyn described the camp world alone during the day. Which one? Let's turn to the end of the text.(Read out )-This is Shukhov’s assessment of the past day.-Now let’s read the author’s assessment:“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.” And days like these make it scary.- The author, the heroes of the story, and after them we are in a Special Camp for Political Prisoners. So, January 1951. - How did the day begin?? Why did Shukhov never wake up?- Let's visit the kitchen. (Read pp. 14-15: It's cold sitting in the dining room… ). How does the camp defeat a person here, what does it push him to do?- Let's go out into the cold and watch the inspection episode. (Read pp. 26-27: But he shouted something to Volkova... ) The meaning of this episode. (The law is being broken; they cannot stand direct moral protest).
- We will go to work with the 104th brigade. Let us pay attention to how the camp inmates approach work.
-Why does Solzhenitsyn describe Shukhov’s work so touchingly?? (Read p.65: Work started...) (Quote: “Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, give it quality; if you do it for a fool, give it show.”- Through whose eyes did we see the routine of camp life?(Shukhov and author).- What is unique about the story?
Let's read the passage on page 14“Work is like a stick...”
- Is the vocabulary used abstract or specific?? (Specific. The author describes what he sees, i.e. it’s like newsreel footage before us).
- Determine the type of speech. (Narration)
-Let's find the verbs: managed smartly, wiped, threw, pulled, splashed, pushed, must keep up, not get caught, catch, plant . What is the motive in them? (Hurry. Time does not belong to prisoners, the day is scheduled by the minute)
-What other narrative features does the author use? (Parcelation, comparisons, camp vocabulary, the author finds a place for expressive means of language).
- How are the signs of peasant speaking and camp jargon combined in Ivan Denisovich’s language?
-Find words in the text that could be classified as means of language expansion. What word formation methods does the author use? Match these words with commonly used synonyms. What is the semantic capacity, the richness of shades of Solzhenitsyn’s vocabulary?
(Calling, ples, ples, okunumshi, dokhryastyvayut. More often the author uses traditional methods of word formation, but the unusual combination of morphemes makes the word extremely laconic, expressive, creates new shades of meaning. Moreover, this is a simplified vocabulary. This helps the author to bring his speech closer to the speech of the illiterate Shukhov ).
- So, Shukhov is a simple man, why did he end up in the camp? ( Read out)(An order was given for the number of arrests)This is how A. Akhmatova, whose work you are about to get acquainted with, said about this time:Death stars stood above usAnd innocent Rus' writhedUnder bloody bootsAnd under the black tires Marus.
-What are the others in prison for? Remember Vdovushkin the paramedic, Tyurin the foreman, Alyoshka the Baptist.-Since this is a Special Camp, it means there are traitors to the Motherland in it, are there any among the main characters? Answer: No - And who is sitting? ( And talented students, and artists, and film scriptwriters, and military men, and Baptists, and peasants. The best, i.e. extraordinary individuals who have a rich spiritual world)- Why does Solzhenitsyn introduce such polyphony and diversity into the story?(To embody the truth, it must be heard. And Solzhenitsyn is an epic artist. He needed all voices to express this truth). -Can we name who is to blame for everything?(System)
Conclusion: Solzhenitsyn talks about the cruelty and injustice of the totalitarian system.
Guys, this begs the question:- Is it possible to remain human in the camps created by the system? If yes, then who remained human? (You have the names of the characters - choose those who are not broken.)
-And now, after we have immersed ourselves in the text, let’s listen to each other’s reasoning and conclusions. Let's go back to our task and reproduce it on the board. Give 3 minutes. Questions for the table:
Camp - spiritual dispute, fight Man - dust Personality - What happens between the camp and the person? (Spiritual dispute, struggle)- What does the camp turn a Man into? If I say that it’s in the dust, will you agree? - And when does a person remain a Human? (When he is a Person) Representatives from the groups come to the board and attach to the table the answers that were the result of the work of the entire group; comments are required. The answers are written on pre-prepared pieces of paper. (Tip: to attach the pieces of paper with answers to whatman paper, you can use office Velcro, which are now on sale. Very convenient and aesthetically pleasing).
-Let's pay attention to the title again. At the beginning of the lesson we talked about several options for the name. Which ones? -Look at the table and try to decide why the last option seemed to Solzhenitsyn the most correct?
- Let's summarize everything that has been said. And we will do this by making a syncwine. You have instructions. First we will work together, and then each group separately. Memo “How to write a syncwine.” The word “cinquain” comes from the French “five”. This is a five line poem.
The first line is the theme of the poem, expressed in one word, usually a noun.
The second line is a description of the topic in two words, usually using adjectives.
The third line is a description of the action within this topic in three words, usually verbs.
The fourth line is a four-word phrase expressing the author’s attitude to this topic.
The fifth line - one word - is a synonym for the first, repeating the essence of the topic on an emotional-figurative or philosophical-generalized level.
Compiling a syncwine with a class:
Story Deep, trueOpens, teaches, helpsWe must try to remain human Epic
Possible syncwines of groups: Camp Inhuman, disastrousHumiliates, breaks, destroys Students comment: Shows the inhumanity of the totalitarian system, why they picked upKiller ki har-ki
Human Ordinary, simpleResists, preserves, survivesDon't let yourself be broken Personality
-Let's answer the problematic question. Were there those whom the camp managed to break? Remember the task about characters. Were there those who preserved themselves as individuals?
-Now let’s see if we have come to the right conclusion, have we unraveled the author’s intention? Pay attention to the supporting summary of Solzhenitsyn himself, try to decipher it?( Post it on the board before the question. The frontispiece technique is used here).
(The upper part of the picture is an incorrect, distorted human face, because... the camp sought to change the spiritual and physical essence of the prisoner.The lower part of the picture is a symbol of the camp, behind which there is power, strength, therefore the lines are bolder.)-The camp was created for killing, and the camp defeated many, grinding them into dust, camp dust. He has one goal, to kill everything: thoughts, feelings, conscience, memory. So who wins: Camp-Man or Man-Camp.
-So, we answered our problematic question with the help of a table, syncwine and drawing. ( Personality over the camp). So what do Solzhenitsyn and his main character teach us? (So that under no circumstances does a person lose self-esteem, no matter how hard life is, no matter what trials it prepares, one must always remain human and not make deals with one’s conscience).
Lesson summary.
The teacher’s final word (it can sound against the background of A. Marshal’s song about Kolyma):The lesson lasted 40 minutes, and in those years 140-150 people were shot every 2 minutes. It’s scary to imagine how many people were deprived of their lives during this time. Perhaps the families of your loved ones were repressed, and our lesson will help you better understand the grief and horror they experienced.
Therefore, our lesson today is a tribute to the memory of those millions who were shot, who did not live even half of their lives, who died from hunger and overwork. This is a tribute to the memory of those people who worked for a bowl of gruel and a piece of bread, from whom they tried to take away their names and assign a faceless number in return. But this is a tribute to all those Ivans who won the Great Patriotic War, carried out the construction of cities on their shoulders, and then died unknown in camp barracks and found refuge in the frozen soil of Kolyma. That’s why “just one day of Ivan Denisovich” was so important for Solzhenitsyn, because thanks to such Ivans Russia survived, and that’s why this prisoner was so respectfully named by his first name and patronymic, Ivan Denisovich.
-And I also want to ask: “Is human life highly valued today?” - Who does it depend on? (You're standing on the threshold adult life, and I want you to remember that a lot depends on you).-Thank you for the lesson, all the best.
D/z Compare the images of Shukhov and Matryona Timofeevna.
Compose a syncwine for the image of Matryona Timofeevna.