Exeter Yaroslavl Twinning Association
Общество Дружбы Ярославль-Эксетер

 

Lord Mayor of Exeter - Councillor Trish Oliver presents Sophie Brace of Exeter College with her Exeter Yaroslavl Creative Writing Competition first prize, at Exeter Guildhall

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 

My first impressions of reading literature are difficult to pin down as they took place at a very early age, although I am confident that they were sparked by and fuelled by my father’s own love for it. In contrast my first impression of Russian literature is very distinct as it occurred only a few years ago with Anna Karenina which I picked up mainly out of idle curiosity; that year had been my first year of studying our selection of classic English novels and plays. What struck me most when reading Anna Karenina was not its differences with the classics I knew but its similarities; the obsession with marriage; the focus on wealth and class; the distant and flowery language, even Tolstoy’s infamous longwinded writing style were intimately familiar to me from my own classics. That is not to say there were not differences as the setting was steeped in a history I knew only fragments of and a cold, harsh natural environment I could not begin to imagine but which was spoken of with a matter of fact tone.

 

Russian literature is not my greatest literary love but the blend of achingly familiar tropes and a foreign environment created a fascinating juxtaposition. Books have forever functioned as an escape and a thought puzzle all in one for me but exploring books from different cultures created a new experience that was not about escape but about my place in the world and how that place differed for people in a culture that I had only ever considered in the abstract and the factual. Keeping all this in mind it is unsurprising that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich captured my attention so thoroughly when I first read it on a recommendation for the soviet history portion of my history course. The book depicted such a specific situation that took place under a regime that was to me represented by only a vague negative impression of dictatorship and death but despite that it still spoke of themes I could understand and a reality of both emotion and situation that I could picture perfectly. In light of this I will not explore this novel on a level of deep political theory or historical impact but on a level of universality.

 

The most striking thing about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is hinted at in its title, it is well and truly mundane. There is no grand hero’s journey or emotional outbursts or out pouring of rebellion, the events of the day are predictable and the narrative voice is bland and unemotional. This mundanity is completely intentional on Solzhenitsyn’s part and was an integral part of the book from the beginning as he once stated “I asked myself how one might portray the totality of our camp existence. In essence it should suffice to give a thorough description of a single day, providing minute details and focusing on the most ordinary kind of worker; that would reflect the entirety of our experience. It wouldn’t even be necessary to give examples of any particular horrors. It shouldn’t be an extraordinary day at all, but rather a completely unremarkable one, the kind of day that will add up to years. That was my conception, and it lay dormant in my mind for nine years.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 2021) This quote embodies how the mundanity of the events in the novel is what gives its themes and its rare glimpses of emotion such universal impact. This quote also highlights how the mundanity creates a distortion of time in the novel as seen in the way Shukov does not notice “the rim of the sun had disappeared behind the earth”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) when he is working at the “Power Station”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995), this lack of an accurate time is enhanced by the fact that the prisoners do not use clocks but have to rely on vague natural indicators to get a sense of time. The distortion of time is a way of making the events of the novel universal and in doing so Solzhenitsyn achieves his goal of creating “the kind of day that will add up to years”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) but he also allows the reader to form a deeper empathy because the timeless and mundane nature of the day allows the reader to imagine years of identical days. The typical trope of prison stories is to shock and frighten the reader with horrific events and explosions of violence but One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich does the opposite. This allows for a much clearer understanding of the weight of a ten year sentence and the emotional suffering incurred by the inmates but the reader is not detached from the events by an outpouring of violence as occurs in many other war and prison stories.

 

The mundanity of the book is not just found in its plot but also its structure as the major conflict is not between any two people or external threat but a quiet, internal struggle between the prisoners and the Soviet system. This is a conflict that has gone on for years before the book even starts as evidenced by the fact that Shukov knows that Ivan is the “easiest of the lot”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) and has enough faith in that assessment to base his actions on it. This major conflict is never resolved and there are no signs that any of the inmates will ever resolve it as the view the events of the novel as “an unclouded day”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995). This decision to not resolve the conflict emphasis that Gang 104 is ordinary and thousands of people suffer due to this conflict but have no hope of ever resolving it. The suffering of the gulags is so ubiquitous that it is boring, to both the reader and the inmates themselves. The theme of mundanity in the narrative structure can also be seen in the climax and the falling action of the novel which are about Shukov avoiding conflict not about him rebelling, this shows how Shukov and all of the inmates lives depend on avoiding conflict with a system that is wholly arbitrary.

 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is known in the West as a political novel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is known as a great dissident writer for his criticisms of Stalin. Considering this it is greatly ironic that his first work lacks any firm political ideology or grand political truths. Stalin is never mentioned in the book and Shukov does not spend much time thinking on the unfairness of his situation. The closest any of the inmates get to criticising the government is when Buynovsky jokes that “it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) and Shukov believes him. The implication of how preposterous and arbitrary the Soviet government is is never spoken aloud and Shukov never views this as anything other then a fact of life. Solzhenitsyn is the only one who criticises the Soviet government and he does so as the narrator, completely separate from anyone in Gang 104. This is the greatest example of one of the novel’s main themes: that the gulags reduce people and their worlds down to survival. There is no spirit of rebellion and there is certainly no desire of martyrdom because the gulag strips the men of everything but their physical needs and their desires for survival. The recurring motif of the piercing cold shows this constant physical agony but the trade off for this physical pain is a lack of spiritual pain. Shukov nearly never thinks of his wife and daughters like one would expect of a heroic protagonist who could never forget what and who he was fighting for. This lack of pain is because the physical agony that all the men share has meant that “Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) The men in the gulags do not find camaraderie in shared political beliefs or resistance, in fact they call anyone who resists the system “scum”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) as they have to suffer jointly for there actions, instead they find it in this shared pain and degradation. This fits perfectly with Shukov’s question of “Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995), this question shows that Shukov is aware of how far removed his life and his own values have become during this time in the gulags.

 

The novel may lack a political ideology but there are political points to be found embedded within. One of these points is present in the ever present fixation on physical sensations such as cold and hunger. Shukov is one of the most fixated on his physical needs among Gang 104 , he weighs his ration and their importance very precisely as he says “”two hundred gramme portions built the Belomor Canal”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) and he only explicitly examines the physical effects of being in the gulag not the mental or emotion ones although he is capable of some examination over how important food is in his life as seen when he comments “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favours, it always wants more tomorrow.”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) Shukov has a small character arc wherein he grows to consider things beyond his own physical needs through his conversations with Alyoshka who acts as a narrative foil to Shukov in that he is concerned solely with the matter of his soul and unlike Shukov with his singular focus on survival Alyoshka who “never earned a thing but did favours for everybody”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995). Alyoshka and Shukov both enjoy the gulag with Shukov enjoying the work he does as a bricklayer as he treats the wall as if “he owned”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) it while Alyoshka’s enjoyment is seen when he says “Rejoice that you are in prison. Here you can think of your soul.”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) The culmination of Shukov’s small character growth is when he gives a biscuit to Alyoshka without expecting anything in return. Through these two characters and their relationship with each other Solzhenitsyn illustrates that human dignity and compassion can be preserved through small acts even in the worst of circumstances.

 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich humanises the prisoners in the gulag through its characters and their varied reactions to their circumstances. Dehumanising the prisoners was an essential part of the Soviet government’s maintenance on control both inside and outside of the gulags but even stories told from their perspectives and especially historiographies also dehumanise the prisoners into a faceless mob of noble martyrs or the embodiment of human suffering. This is another factor that the mundanity and lack of preached political ideology enhances as the protagonist Shukov is just a simple peasant, not an artist or rebel, as the majority of prisoners were and as such was far more concerned with simply surviving the gulags instead of their ethical or political significant. This was a subversion of the traditional protagonist of a prison story who would be a noble intellectual seeking freedom and revolution and who would bemoan the state of the USSR and the evils of communism. Shukov represents a more honest depiction of life in the gulag as just as how the day depicted represents one of thousand so too does Shukov represent thousands of prisoners like him. Shukov is also an ironic character as he shares many characteristics of ‘homo sovieticus’, the ideal soviet man, as he enjoys work as is seen when he states “he would get to know every inch of that wall as if he owned it”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) showing his regard for property he does not own and his belief that he “had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) is the embodiment of the communist belief in the destruction od traditional family in the name of loyalty to the community. Tsezar is also an ironic character, he name invokes Caesar which was a common moniker of Roman emperors which is fitting as Tsezar represents privilege or the upper class. This is deeply ironic because even in a socialist system which is chosen off from the outside world and officials have extraordinary control over the people’s lives a form of class emerges. Tsezar receives “special packages”(Solzhenitsyn, 1995) from home which gives him a current level of power over both the prisoners and the guards which enables him to get privileges such as eating outside the dinning hall in exchange for giving the guards pieces of his ‘luxury’ foods and these commodities make the other inmates eager to serve him which in a strange way forms a private market around Tsezar’s goods. Tyurin is a subversion of the common portrayal of soviet officials in that he is a character at all and not a blank embodiment of soviet injustice. Tyurin starts off as a threatening enemy but is slowly humanised by the end of the book which demonstrates the theme of humanity being found everywhere in the gulags. Tyurin is also a symbol of how the gulags are unfair to everyone as like everyone else in Gang 104 he is in prison unjustly but due to his position of authority he is denied the camaraderie between Gang 104 which is an ironic subversion of the crime he was imprisoned for, being the son of a kulak and even in the gulag being punished for a perceived but false higher status.

 

The impact of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is hard to define, both in the present and in the past. When it was first published in 1962 it was held up as a landmark in Soviet literature and politics and indeed it does hold several records; it was the first public mention of both forced collectivisation and labour camps. Although it was hailed as the ultimate symbol of Khrushchev’s cultural thaws, it is the go to example for all soviet history students who wish to explore censorship, there was and is a conscious political agenda behind the book that cannot be untied from the book itself or the publicity surrounding it. The novel could be held up to show how far Khrushchev had removed censorship and allowed freedom back into the arts and compared to the novels that dominated soviet literature before it which were stripped of any substance in the name of moral and ideological purity. In comparison to books such as Cement by Fyodor Gladkov the frank look into reality that is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich must have seemed illicit and beyond taboo. I cannot begin to guess at how this book affected the soviet citizens who read it, for all that the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a political move it was also a public acknowledgment of the pain and fear most of them must have lived with and to say that the agenda involved in its release renders the emotional effect of that acknowledgement obsolete would be callous. However, when examining the political and cultural impact of this novel it is imperative to acknowledge that it was publish in order to discredit the regime of the past in order to enhance the regime of the present. It did help open the floodgates for more works that could be political and most importantly critical but this was a controlled freedom that was limited to critique of Stalin and Stalin alone. The Union of Soviet Writers and other state apparatus ensured that the political impact of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was always controlled and the banning of Dr Zhivago because it broke through the unspoken limitations for political critique shows that this impact could be cancelled out as soon as it became inconvenient to the regime.

 

In conclusion, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a book that is not about politics but about the survival of human dignity and the mundanity of suffering. It is not interested in unpacking the roots of this pain and the failure of communism like in Solzhenitsyn’s later work Gulag Archipelago. It is instead interested in the slow acting damage of the day to day life in the gulags inflicts on the people within them, whatever their official status. Its mundanity is a fundamental part of its themes of human suffering and the humanity of the people in an unjust system. It is fundamentally a book that shows that the most insidious kind of suffering is not unexpected and severe but boring and endlessly repeatable. This book made such a big impact when it was first released because it made the gulag system an everyday present reality instead of just a hyperphysical extreme. It made such an impact because in its truest form it is universal.

 

Sophie Brace

 

List of References

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center. 2021. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. [online] Available at: https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/one-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich> [Accessed 1 April 2021].

 

Solzhenitsyn, A. (1995) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Knopf 1st reprint edition