Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker

With an Introduction by Marvin L Kalb

FORWORD BY ALEXANDER TVARDOVSKY

English translation copyright 1963 by E.P. Dutton, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., New York, and Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

This novel was first published in the Russian language in the U.S.S.R. in the magazine _Novy Mir_, November 1962.

FOREWORD

BY ALEXANDER TVARDOVSKY

The raw materlal of life whilch serves as a basis for A. Solzhenitsyn's story is unusual In Soviet literature. It carries within itself an echo of the painful features In our developmeat related to the cult of personality that has been debunked and repudiated by the Party, features that, although they are not so far away from us in time, nevertheless seem to us to be in the distant past. But the past, no matter what it was like, never becomes a matter of indifference to the present. The assurance of a complete and irrevocable break with everything which beclouds the past lies in a true and courageous comprehension of its full consequences. It was about this that N. S. Khrushchev spoke in his concluding words at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, words so memorable for all of us: "It is our duty to gain a thorough and comprehensive understanding of the nature of the matters related to the abuse of power. Time will pass and we shall die, we are all mortal, but so long as we work we can and must clear up many points and tell the truth to the Party and to the people...... This we must do so that such things never happen again."

_One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ is not a document in the sense of being a memoir, nor is it notes or reminiscences of the author's personal experiences, although only such personal experiences could lend this story its sense of genuine authenticity.

This is a work of art and it is by virtue of the artistic interpretation of this material from life that it is a witness of special value, a document of an art which up to now had seemed to have few possibilities.

The reader will not find in A. Solzhenitsyn's story an allencompassing portrayal of that historic period which is particularly marked by the bitter memory of the year 1937. The content of _One Day_ is naturally limited in time and place of action and the horizons of the main hero of the story. But in the writing of A. Solzhenitsyn, who here enters the literary scene for the first time, one day in the life of the camp prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, develops into a picture which gives extraordinary vitality and fidelity to the truthfulness of its human characters. Herein above all lies the uncommon power of the work to impress. The reader can visualize for himself many of the people depicted here in the tragic role of camp inmates in other situations-- at the front or at postwar construction sites. They are the same people who by the will of circumstance have been put to severe physical and moral tests under special and extreme conditions.

In this story there is no deliberate concentration of terrible facts of the cruelty and arbitrariness that were the result of the violation of Soviet legality. The author chose instead to portray only one of the most ordinary of days in the life at camp from reveille to retreat. Nevertheless this "ordinary" day cannot but arouse in the heart of the reader a bitter feeling of pain for the fate of the people who, from the pages of this story, rise up before us so alive and so near. Yet the unquestionable victory of the artist lies in the fact that the bitterness and the pain have nothing In common with a feeling of hopeless depression. On the contrary, the impression left by this work is so extraordinary in its unvarnished and difficult truth that it somehow frees the soul of the burden of things unsaid that needed to be said and at the same time it strengthens one's manly and lofty feelings.

This is a grim story -- still another example of the fact that there are no areas or facts of reality that can be excluded from the sphere of the Soviet artist in our days or that are beyond truthful portrayal. Everything depends on the capabilities of the artist himself.

This story leads to still another simple and instructive conclusion: the truly significant content, the fidelity to the great truths of life, the profound humanity In the approach to the portrayal of even the most difficult subjects cannot but awaken corresponding virtues in the author's writing. _One Day_ is alive and distinctive in its very everyday ordinariness and outward unassumingness; it is least of all concerned with itself and is therefore full of an inner dignity and force.

I do not want to anticipate the evaluation of this work -- and so great in size --although for me it is indubitable that it signifies the entrance into our literature of a new, original, and completely mature artist.

It is possible that the author's use -- a quite moderate and advisable use, by the way -- of some words and expressions of the environment in which the hero spends his working day will provoke the objections of fastidious taste. But on the whole _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ belongs with those works of literature which, once we have read them, create in us a deep desire to have our feeling of gratitude to the author shared by other readers too.

BY MARVIN L. KALB

On November 20, 1962, _Novy Mir_, a monthly Soviet literary magazine, published a short novel by an unknown Russian writer, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, entitled _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_. It was an immediate literary and political sensation. Within a day all of the ninety-flve thousand copies of the November issue of the magazine were snapped up by eager Russians. Within a week Solzhenitsyn skyrocketed to international fame from an obscure job teaching mathematics in Ryazan, a small provincial town not too far from Moscow; and his title character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, was quickly recognized throughout the country as a touching symbol of the suffering which the Russian people had endured under the Stalinist system.

Was there anything special about Ivan that sparked this lightning response? Not really. Ivan was an ordinary Russian caught up in the swirl and chaos of World War II.

Like millions of other Russians, he served uncomplainingly in the Red Army for four years, surviving the bitter cold and hunger of the Western front. In 1945, he and a friend were captured by the Germans. After a few days they managed to escape and returned to Russian lines. Ironically, instead of being decorated for heroism and loyalty, Ivan was arrested by Stalin's supersensitive secret police, who accused him of high treason and charged that he had returned only to spy for the Germans. Confused and helpless, afraid that he would be shot if he tried to explain, Ivan "confessed." He was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian concentration camp. Solzhenitsyn's book describes one day in that camp, one day no better and no worse than any of the other three thousand six hundred and fifty-two days of Ivan's sentence. Ivan's experience was no isolated miscarriage of justice; it was typical of the Stalinist system, under which the labor camps of Siberia were crowded with Russians whose "crime" may have been nothing greater than a careless remark about Stalin to a tattletale neighbor. There is hardly a Russian family today that managed to escape this tragic fate. Almost every one of them had a father or a husband or a son or a cousin who "sat"--the Russian euphemism for serving a term, generally unwarranted, in the camps. That is why _One Day_, the first book about this black page of the Stalin era ever to appear in the Soviet Union, has such a profound Impact on the Russian people. By its brevity and simple power, it forces a Russian reader to remember the days of Stalin.