Features of the genre of one of the works of Russian literature of the 20th century. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” main characters Spiritual foundations of confrontation

A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is associated with one of the facts
biography of the author himself - Ekibastuz special camp, where
winter 1950–1951 This story was created during general work.
The main character of Solzhenitsyn's story is Ivan Denisovich Shukhov,
prisoner of Stalin's camp. The author narrates from the perspective of his hero
about one day out of three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of the term
Ivan Denisovich. But this day is enough to understand what kind of
the encampment reigned in the camp, what orders and laws existed,
learn about the life of prisoners, be horrified by it. The camp is special
real world, existing separately, parallel to ours, freely
my world. There are other laws here, different from those we are used to,
Here everyone survives in their own way. Life in the zone is not shown
from the outside, but from the inside by a person who knows about it first-hand
ke, but from my personal experience. That is why the story is amazing
with its realism.

Questions for analysis:
What is the role of exposure?
From the exhibition we learn the life philosophy of the main
swarm. What is it?
Which episode of the story is the beginning?
How do events develop next?
What moments in the development of action can be highlighted?
What is their role?
How does the main character's character emerge in these episodes?
What is the artistic function of detailing individual
moments in the life of a camp inmate?
Describing the “shmon” before going to work, the author builds
there is a semantic chain. Determine its role for disclosure
ideas for the entire work.
Which episode of the story can be designated as the climax?
ny? Why does the author make the laying of the wall the highest point?
in the development of the plot?
How does the story end? What is the denouement?
Why does the hero consider the day depicted in the story to be happy?
you m?
Is Shukhova (and is it only Shukhova?) talking about only one day
author?
How does the author achieve expansion of temporal space?
What are the features of the composition of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan De-
Nisovich" can be noted?
What author's idea is expressed in the story?
What can be said about the spatial organization of the story?
Find the spatial coordinates in the work?

What parameters set the character system in the story?
What is the place of the protagonist in this system?
Which heroes does the author single out from the crowd? Why?
What makes Ivan Denisovich stand out among these heroes?
What moral laws does the hero of the story live by? Image
Pay attention to how he relates to everything that he created.
but with the hands of a person, it supports his life. Find these
details that help characterize Ivan Denisovich.
How does Shukhov feel about those with whom he works in the brigade? How
members of the brigade belong to him: foreman Tyurin, mason
Kildis, the deaf Klevshin, the young man Gopchik, etc.? Is it possible to say
Should we say that Shukhov is “terribly lonely”?
What is Shukhov’s attitude to work, to business? Match to answer
episodes of cleaning floors in the supervisor's office and storage room
ki walls in TEC (at the beginning and end of the story).
Why is the hero’s behavior so different? How do you feel about the mind-
Do you want to serve Shukhov?
Find the hero’s thoughts about his military past, about
how he escaped from captivity and was accused of treason. (Epi-
Zod: conversation with Kildis while working on construction
CHP). Can we say that Shukhov is passive and weak in war?
soul? Can you blame him for the fact that during the investigation he got out
does life hurt (“if you sign, at least you’ll live a little longer”)?
Shukhov remembers the words of the first camp foreman Kuzyomin:
“This is who is dying in the camp: some are licking bowls, some are in the medical unit
hopes, but who goes to knock on the godfather [overseer].” Prove-
those that Shukhov follows these rules.
On whose behalf is the story being told? Whose position expresses-
Xia: the author or the hero? What is this method of depicting called?
marriage? Why did the author choose him?

Additional:

Restore Ivan Denisovich's past.

How did he get into the camp?

Why does the day described in the story seem to Shukhov

"almost happy"?

The day spent in the camp did not bring much trouble. This is already happiness in these conditions.

What “happy events” happen to

a hero?

"happy day"?

If such a day is happy, then what are the unlucky days?

What helps the hero to resist, to remain human?

Take notes:

Analysis of the work "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

History of creation.

The 60s are known for the “classification” of Russian history. The first decades of Soviet power were replaced by the plump grayness of faceless textbooks; what was valuable was drowned in the general flow of sayings. Giant hydroelectric power stations and the BAM were declared milestones in history, and “Glory to the CPSU” banners became the main decoration of cities and villages. In schools and universities it was interpreted that history is a sequence of party congresses that are as similar to each other as two peas in a pod. In such a situation, one author suddenly had an epiphany: “For twelve years I calmly wrote and wrote. Only on the thirteenth did I shudder.” It was the summer of 1960." Then he submitted the story "Shch-854" to the editors of Novy Mir.

"One Day..." was conceived during general work in the Ekibastuz Special Camp in the winter of 1950-1951. Released in 1959, first as "Shch-854 (One day of one prisoner)".

After the XXII Congress, the writer for the first time decided to propose something to the public press. The choice fell on A. Tvardovsky’s “New World,” where the manuscript went with the note: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.” Tvardovsky, who lay down to “read” with it in the evening, got up two or three pages later, got dressed, re-read it twice during a sleepless night and immediately began the fight for its publication.

It is no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn chooses Tvardovsky as publisher: “I had a true guess and presentiment: the top man A. Tvardovsky and the top man N. Khrushchev cannot remain indifferent to this man, Ivan Denisovich. And so it came true: not even poetry and It wasn’t even politics that decided the fate of my story, but this down-to-earth peasant essence of it, which has been ridiculed, trampled and reviled so much among us since the Great Turning Point and even before.”

The story appeared in the eleventh issue of the same year. The author explains his idea like this: “How was it born? It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thinking about how to describe the entire camp world - in one day. And everything will be. This idea was born to me in 52 ". For seven years she lay there just like that. I'll try to write one day of one prisoner. I sat down, and how it began to pour! With terrible tension."

The image of Ivan Denisovich was formed from the soldier Shukhov, who fought with the author in the Soviet-German war (and never went to prison), the general experience of prisoners and the personal experience of the author, who was a mason in the Special Camp. The rest of the faces are all from camp life, with their authentic biographies, - something like this is what Solzhenitsyn said about his heroes. At that time, he, being a teacher, modest, but knowing his worth, firm, but not arrogant, flexible, was worried that the text would not be cut in the editor: “I value the integrity of this thing more than its printing.”

On November 16, 1962, a signal version was received. After two or three days, the whole city was talking about the story of an unknown author, a week later - the country, after two - the whole world. The story overshadowed many political and everyday news: it was talked about in the subway and on the streets. In libraries, the eleventh issue of Novy Mir was torn from their hands; enthusiasts copied the text by hand. Tvardovsky wanted to please the author with such success, but Solzhenitsyn replied: “They have written about me before. In the Ryazan newspaper, when I won the championship in athletics...”

It was important for Solzhenitsyn not to become famous, but to say the truth about a page in the history of society. And since we are talking about studying the story at school, then the best epigraph To the topic “Lessons of Solzhenitsyn”, perhaps, you can’t match: “The word of truth will outweigh the whole world.”

The book not only conveyed something new and terrible about Russian reality, and not only gave a portrait of one day in the country. It is about the internal confrontation between man and the Gulag.

The theme of this book was affirmation of the victory of the human spirit over camp violence. The story answered the painful question of a troubled century: what needs to be done so that, in the words of B. Pasternak, “... not a single piece of the face is lost.”

Plotis built on the resistance of the living - the non-living, of Man - to the Camp: “Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. In the camp, that’s who dies: who licks the bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather” (A. I. Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich. - M., 1990, pp. Further quoted from this publication.)

With Chekhov's brevity and precision of the Russian word, the story conveys the essence of camp philosophy, which drives the plot of a person's internal resistance to the Gulag.

Subject to the plot, a grouping of images is also organized: every day the drama of resistance to the Camp is played out: Alyoshka is a Baptist, Senka Klevshin, Pavlo is a brigadier, Tyurin. Others lose and are doomed to death: Caesar Markovich, the jackal Fetyukov, the foreman Der, idiots. Those who protect themselves “on the blood of others” also die. This is how the conflict of the story is indicated.

Problem, i.e. the most important question that resolves

When starting to work on the text, we simultaneously clarify the problems of the work.

1. Camp like, the embodiment of malice, thoughtlessness, dirt taken into service system. - one of the leading problems of Solzhenitsyn’s work.

At A.T. Tvardovsky is a reflection on the “wrong side” of a person, which prevails in moments of darkness of the soul and mind:

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Solzhenitsyn's Camp in the destinies of millions of people is also a sign of darkness of the soul and mind, a dangerous and cruel machine that grinds the weak. The camp is presented not as an exception to life, but as its order. A person can, by tempering his heart with courage, fight against extraordinary circumstances, but how to deal with something that has become a long-term habit? By the time of imprisonment, a person has already developed the skills of cleanliness, food culture, reading, and hobbies. In the camp, “habits are temporary” and you can only survive here by resisting them. The camp pursues the main goal - to destroy the inner world of a person; many here turn into “camp dust”. And is it wise? The text contains quite a lot of descriptions of camp life: “The camp inmate lives for himself only for ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five at lunch, and five at dinner...”, “...we walked through the winter without felt boots...”, “never yawn You can’t, you have to try so that no warden sees you alone, but only in a crowd... Maybe he’s looking for someone to send to work, maybe there’s no one to take the evil to.” Hungry prisoners carried pieces of bread, bitten off for a note, in a suitcase, and fought every time, because “the pieces were still similar, all from the same bread.” Prisoners could only send two letters home per year.

The camp was created to kill individuals: “Life here tormented him from waking up to bedtime, leaving no idle memories...” But Shukhov has the strength to resist the power of the Camp. He immediately separates “his” free time from the hours of bondage, official time, dead and wretched. With these lines, thinking about the main thing begins, a competition begins between will and captivity, “one’s own” and “the government’s.” This competition is difficult, because everything in the camp is mixed up and what’s yours is often not yours either. Through this whole “day that lasts longer than a century” runs the drama of resistance to the Camp.

Ivan Denisovich has been feeling unwell since the morning: “Even if only one side was working, either he would feel chilled, or the aches would go away. Otherwise, it’s neither one nor the other.” But, as A. Tvardovsky wrote: “Just a body is one thing, but here there is both body and soul.” And this state of internal struggle runs through the entire story.

The camp makes no sense of any reasonable human action. Here the warden takes Ivan Denisovich to wash the floors in the warden's room. But the guards themselves don’t need cleanliness: “Here’s what, listen, 854th! Just wipe it lightly so that it’s just a little wet, and get out of here.” Ivan Denisovich savvy: “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. Otherwise, everyone would have died long ago, it’s a well-known fact.”

2. Attitude to work becomes one of the main facets of a person’s assessment in the story. This determines the relationships between people in the camp, in the Shukhov brigade. “Outside, the brigade is all wearing the same black pea coats and identical numbers, but inside it’s very uneven - it’s going up steps.” On the bottom step is Fetyukov, on the middle step is Ivan Denisovich. The hierarchy in the camp is more true than in the wild. “Jackal” Fetyukov, an opportunist and a hack, drove a car there and was a big boss. Ivan Denisovich “there” is a gray man from the boss’s point of view. Here they were equalized and then rebuilt by another life, where there are fewer illusions that prevent them from seeing the essence of what is happening. Tyurin’s team works conscientiously, skillfully, promptly, this is how they resist unfreedom. (A wall is being laid; this is where real human values ​​become clear. “Whoever pushes hard at work, becomes like a foreman above his neighbors.”) It’s one thing for a Cavtorang who stubbornly, breathlessly, carries a stretcher with mortar, and a completely different thing is Fetyukov. , who, in a hack, according to the precepts of the system, “tilts the stretcher and spits out the solution to make it easier to carry... Shukhov stabbed him in the back once: “Ugh, disgusting blood!” And he was the director - I suppose he demanded it from the workers?" The episode of masonry is described as if before us were free workers, virtuosos in their work. In the hands of the mason Shukhov, everything is alive: "The cinder blocks are not all the same. Which one has a broken corner, a dented edge or a tide - Shukhov immediately sees this, and sees which side this cinder block wants to lie on, and sees the place on the wall where the cinder block is waiting."

And when the work was finished, Ivan Denisovich experienced his “moment of truth”, and no one in the world could stop him: “Shukhov, even though the convoy there is now harassing him with dogs, ran back along the site, looked. Nothing. Now he ran up - and through the wall , left, right. Eh, the eye is a spirit level! Exactly! The hand is not getting old yet."

This is the legitimate pride of an internally free person for a job that he has completed as it should be for a master: “This is how Shukhov is built like a fool, and after eight years in the camps they can’t wean him off: he spares every thing and labor so that he doesn’t perish in vain.” And at work, everything else was settled in Shukhov: when the day is already over, Shukhov decides to get wet without doctors: “These doctors will heal you in a wooden pea coat.” So it’s over with the idea that your problems can be solved by others - doctors, bosses... They won’t solve them. Only the person himself is responsible for everything.

To defend freedom in a convict camp means to depend as little as possible on its regime. This is difficult for the open and conscientious Shukhov. Peasant life, its customs, embedded in the genes or in the soul, do not allow the hero to hope for a medical unit. The state's imaginary concern for the health of the camp inmate is expressed in the image of an imaginary paramedic, a student at the Literary Institute.

3. Another problem - waste of people's strength. The young poet Kolya Vdovushkin, in the camp hospital, completes poems unfinished in freedom; the peasant Shukhov must “rewind” eight years in logging; artists “paint free paintings for their bosses, and in turn go to paint numbers for scams.” (Is this the purpose of the artist? “To the command of God, O muse, be obedient...”); the brigadier of the 104th “has been in prison for nineteen years”; the first Shukhov brigadier had already served twelve years in prison by 1943; for the guards, too, “it’s not like butter to stomp on the towers in such cold weather,” the hard workers are at least busy with work, but they? All together - they are the people! Some were forcibly torn from life during the years of “total collectivization”, others from the war stream. The endless, endless absurdity that our long-suffering people have gone through is presented in detail on the pages of the story.

4. This is how the problem arises moral, spiritual judgment over everything that happens. The awareness of real human life is opposed to the monstrous abuse of people in its familiarity: the convoy conducts a careful head count, “a person is more valuable than gold. If one head is missing behind the wire, you will add your head there.” What could be a greater mockery of the very concept of human value?

5. Sad news from Ivan Denisovich’s house reveals the problem transformations of "WILL" in a way "ZONE".

It turns out that there is no proper order in the wild either, but there is build, essentially not much different from the camp one. The villagers are not busy with real work; There is no one to work on the collective farm. Hack workers - "dyes" - are thriving. It's ridiculous, like being in a camp. Shukhov feels mentally more protected in the camp than in this freedom incomprehensible to him, where the “free” have to bend their hearts and dodge day after day, while the camp prisoner Shukhov “never gave to anyone or took from anyone in the camp I haven't learned." Personal spiritual resistance, a person’s defense of the frailty of his inner world, can counter the absurdity of the spirit of “will” or “zone”. The hero finds the source of spiritual strength in useful work.

6. Work as opposition to the Camp. The “gene” of hard work has been preserved in Shukhov; he cannot work, like all generations of his ancestors, carelessly. The work began - and “how all thoughts were swept out of my head. Shukhov did not remember or care about anything now, but only thought about how he could assemble and remove the pipe bends so that it would not smoke.” Shukhov may assent when he hears Senka Klevshin’s words: “If you get screwed, you’ll be lost.” But he reinterprets them in his own way: “This is true. Groan and bend. But if you resist, you will break.” To bend so as not to break requires more strength and stamina than to resist.

7. Decay and disintegration at the very base of the Camp:“They steal here, and they steal in the zone, and even earlier they steal in the warehouse. And all those who steal do not use a pickaxe themselves.” This infection, cultivated in the bowels of the Gulag, is spreading everywhere, metastasizing far beyond the barbed wire, establishing itself in the wild: in production, culture and other areas of human life. The camp system, like a mirror, reflects state policy aimed at depriving a person of independent thinking and behavior. “In camps and prisons, Ivan Denisovich has lost the habit of figuring out what’s for tomorrow, what’s next year, and how to feed his family. The authorities think about everything for him - it’s supposed to be easier.”...

Year after year there was a great destruction of common sense and the very ability to think.

8. Art as a source of human spiritual strength.

People in the Camp remain people, help each other master the science of survival, and support the weak as best they can. Shukhov, who “has mowed down” two bowls of porridge, notes with satisfaction that one of them went to Kavtorang. “But according to Shukhov, it’s right that they gave it to the captain. The time will come, and the captain will learn to live, but for now he doesn’t know how.” In the next episode we talk about the same urgency of spiritual bread.

In the slave room, there is an argument between Caesar Markovich, a film director, and X-123, “a convict by sentence, a twenty-year-old, wiry old man,” about Eisenstein’s film “John the Terrible.” “An antics,” says X-123 with contempt and anger. “There is so much art that it is no longer art... Geniuses do not adjust the interpretation to the taste of tyrants...” To Caesar’s objection that art is not “what”, but “ how,” he exclaims passionately: “No, to hell with your “how” if it doesn’t awaken good feelings in me!” Art cannot isolate itself from the world of people into its delights.

Another episode: Caesar and Pyotr Mikhailovich discuss the review in the latest Moscow “Evening” of Zavadsky’s premiere. Why did she interest the prisoners?

It is January 1951. In literature, on stage, in cinema, the varnished ball of socialist everyday life rolls. Zavadsky also did not avoid embellishing reality.

It was about this time that A. Tvardovsky wrote in the poem “Beyond the Distance, the Distance”: “And everything around is dead and empty, / And scary in this emptiness.” The intellectual heroes in the story did not see false pathos in the review. They continue to "drive past life."

9. Liberation from illusions for many it comes too late.

Tyurin talks about his life “without pity, if not about himself.” He comprehended the essence of the system that expelled him, a Red Army soldier, “from the ranks” in 1930, pursued him at every step, overtook him and hid him forever in the camp. He remembers the Leningrad student trainees who treated him kindly: “they are driving past life, the lights are green”... The bitter and sympathetic smile of an experienced prisoner, already free from universal lies. One of the main instruments of liberation is Truth. People who bring the truth to others are visible everywhere and always.

Here is the old man Yu-81: “of all the backs in the camp, his back was excellently straight, and at the table it seemed as if he had put something under him on top of the bench. There was nothing to cut on his bare head for a long time - all the hair had come out from a good life. The eyes of the old man They didn’t rush after everything that was happening in the dining room, but on top of Shukhov they blindly rested in their own. He measuredly ate the empty gruel with a wooden spoon, over a chipped one, but did not plunge headlong into the bowl, like everyone else, but carried the spoon high to his mouth... Face he was all exhausted, but not to the point of weakness of a wick - an invalid, but to the point of a hewn, dark stone. And from his hands, large, in cracks and blackness, it was clear that he had had a little time in all the years of being a moron. But it still stuck in him , will not reconcile: he does not place his three-hundred-gram paper, like everyone else, on an unclean table in spills, but on a washed rag.”

The old man is distinguished from everyone else by his unbending firmness, integrity, and loyalty to some idea. I haven't forgotten anything. He didn't give up anything.

10. Spiritual dispute between characters The story is accompanied by the power of the arguments of each of the extraordinary people. The camp gathered many of them, with their own voices and faces.

Alyoshka the Baptist finds solace in his God, thereby distancing himself from the majority of atheist prisoners. He is right that “we should not pray for a package to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel. What is high among people is an abomination before God! We need to pray for spiritual things, so that God will remove the scum from our hearts...” Prayers make life easier this a person, but they won’t make life easier for everyone, they won’t “remove” the evil scum of the Camp from it: “In general,” Ivan Denisovich decided, “no matter how much you pray, you won’t get rid of the deadline. So you’ll wait from bell to bell.”

This idea, in its own way, also looks “above” a person, and also “blindly rests on its own.” Many different things came together in the Gulag.

It is the many faces and many voices of the Camp that deprive any of the characters in the story of the right to be the authorized and sole spokesman for the truth about the Camp and about human resistance to it. Solzhenitsyn is an epic artist. To express the truth, he needed all voices combined to be heard.

Gleb Nerzhin, the hero of the novel “In the First Circle,” thought that over time the people who passed through the camp “will trample with relief their prison past... and will even say that it was reasonable, and not merciless, - and, perhaps, "None of them are going to remind today's executioners what they did with human hearts! But for all of them, Nerzhin felt his duty and his calling all the more strongly. He knew in himself the meticulous ability to never go astray, never cool down, never forget."

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was written by such a person.

[in the camp]? [Cm. summary of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”] After all, it’s not just the need to survive, not the animal thirst for life? This need alone produces people who work at the table, like cooks. Ivan Denisovich is at the other pole of Good and Evil. Shukhov’s strength lies in the fact that despite all the inevitable moral losses for a prisoner, he managed to keep his soul alive. Such moral categories as conscience, human dignity, decency determine his life behavior. Eight years of hard labor did not break the body. They didn’t break their soul either. Thus, the story about the Soviet camps grows to the scale of a story about the eternal power of the human spirit.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich. The author is reading. Fragment

Solzhenitsyn's hero himself is hardly aware of his spiritual greatness. But the details of his behavior, seemingly insignificant, are fraught with deep meaning.

No matter how hungry Ivan Denisovich was, he did not eat greedily, attentively, and tried not to look into other people's bowls. And even though his shaved head was freezing, he always took off his hat while eating: “no matter how cold it is, he couldn't allow himself is in the hat." Or another detail. Ivan Denisovich smells the fragrant smoke of a cigarette. “... He tensed up in anticipation, and now this tail of a cigarette was more desirable to him than, it seems, the will itself - but he wouldn't have dropped himself and I wouldn’t look into your mouth like Fetyukov.”

There is deep meaning in the words highlighted here. Behind them lies a huge amount of internal work, a struggle with circumstances, with oneself. Shukhov “forged his soul himself, year after year,” managing to remain human. “And through that - a grain of his people.” Speaks about him with respect and love

This explains Ivan Denisovich’s attitude towards other prisoners: respect for those who survived; contempt for those who have lost their human form. So, he despises the goner and jackal Fetyukov because he licks bowls, that he “dropped himself.” This contempt is aggravated, perhaps, because “Fetyukov, of course, was a big boss in some office. I drove a car." And any boss, as already mentioned, is an enemy for Shukhov. And so he doesn’t want the extra bowl of gruel to go to this goon, he rejoices when he gets beaten. Cruelty? Yes. But we also need to understand Ivan Denisovich. It took him considerable mental effort to preserve his human dignity, and he earned the right to despise those who had lost their dignity.

However, Shukhov not only despises, but also feels sorry for Fetyukov: “To figure it out, I feel so sorry for him. He won't live out his time. He doesn’t know how to position himself.” Zek Shch-854 knows how to stage himself. But his moral victory is expressed not only in this. Having spent many years in hard labor, where the cruel “taiga law” operates, he managed to preserve his most valuable asset - mercy, humanity, the ability to understand and feel sorry for another.

All sympathies, all sympathy of Shukhov are on the side of those who survived, who have a strong spirit and mental fortitude.

Brigadier Tyurin is pictured in the imagination of Ivan Denisovich like a fairy-tale hero: “... the foreman has a steel chest /... / I’m afraid to interrupt his high thought /... / Stands against the wind - he won’t wince, the skin on his face is like oak bark.” (34) . The same is true for prisoner Yu-81. “...He spends countless hours in camps and prisons, how much Soviet power costs...” The portrait of this man matches the portrait of Tyurin. Both of them evoke images of heroes, like Mikula Selyaninovich: “Of all the hunched backs of the camp, his back was excellently straight /... / His face was all exhausted, but not to the weakness of a disabled wick, but to a hewn, dark stone” (102).

This is how “Human Fate” is revealed in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - the fate of people placed in inhuman conditions. The writer believes in the unlimited spiritual powers of man, in his ability to withstand the threat of brutality.

Re-reading Solzhenitsyn’s story now, you involuntarily compare it with “ Kolyma stories» V. Shalamova. The author of this terrible book draws the ninth circle of hell, where suffering reached such a degree that, with rare exceptions, people could no longer maintain their human appearance.

“Shalamov’s camp experience was bitterer and longer than mine,” writes A. Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago,” and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not me, who got to touch the bottom of brutality and despair to which the entire camp life pulled us " But while giving this mournful book its due, Solzhenitsyn disagrees with its author in his views on man.

Addressing Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn says: “Maybe anger is not the most durable feeling after all? With your personality and your poems, don’t you refute your own concept?” According to the author of “The Archipelago,” “...and in the camp (and everywhere in life) corruption does not occur without ascension. They are close".

Noting the fortitude and fortitude of Ivan Denisovich, many critics, however, spoke of the poverty and mundaneness of his spiritual world. Thus, L. Rzhevsky believes that Shukhov’s horizons are limited to “bread alone.” Another critic argues that Solzhenitsyn’s hero “suffers as a man and a family man, but to a lesser extent from the humiliation of his personal and civic dignity.”

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” brought popularity to the writer. The work became the author's first published work. It was published by the New World magazine in 1962. The story described one ordinary day of a camp prisoner under the Stalinist regime.

History of creation

Initially the work was called “Shch-854. One day for one prisoner,” but censorship and a lot of obstacles from publishers and authorities influenced the name change. The main character in the story described was Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

The image of the main character was created based on prototypes. The first was Solzhenitsyn’s friend, who fought with him at the front in the Great Patriotic War, but did not end up in the camp. The second is the writer himself, who knew the fate of camp prisoners. Solzhenitsyn was convicted under Article 58 and spent several years in a camp, working as a mason. The story takes place in the winter month of 1951 in hard labor in Siberia.

The image of Ivan Denisovich stands apart in Russian literature of the 20th century. When there was a change of power, and it became permissible to talk about the Stalinist regime out loud, this character became the personification of a prisoner in a Soviet forced labor camp. The images described in the story were familiar to those who suffered a similar sad experience. The story served as an omen for a major work, which turned out to be the novel “The Gulag Archipelago.”

"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich"

The story describes the biography of Ivan Denisovich, his appearance and how the daily routine in the camp is drawn up. The man is 40 years old. He is a native of the village of Temgenevo. When he went to war in the summer of 1941, he left his wife and two daughters at home. As fate would have it, the hero ended up in a camp in Siberia and managed to serve eight years. The ninth year is coming to an end, after which he will again be able to lead a free life.

According to the official version, the man received a sentence for treason. It was believed that, having been in German captivity, Ivan Denisovich returned to his homeland on instructions from the Germans. I had to plead guilty to stay alive. Although in reality the situation was different. In the battle, the detachment found itself in a disastrous situation without food and shells. Having made their way to their own, the fighters were greeted as enemies. The soldiers did not believe the story of the fugitives and brought them to trial, which determined hard labor as punishment.

First, Ivan Denisovich ended up in a strict regime camp in Ust-Izhmen, and then he was transferred to Siberia, where restrictions were not so strictly observed. The hero lost half his teeth, grew a beard and shaved his head bald. He was assigned the number Shch-854, and his camp clothes make him a typical little man whose fate is decided by higher authorities and people in power.

During his eight years of imprisonment, the man learned the laws of survival in the camp. His friends and enemies from among the prisoners had equally sad fates. Relationship problems were a key disadvantage of being incarcerated. It was because of them that the authorities had great power over the prisoners.

Ivan Denisovich preferred to show calm, behave with dignity and maintain subordination. A savvy man, he quickly figured out how to ensure his survival and a worthy reputation. He managed to work and rest, planned his day and food correctly, and skillfully found a common language with those with whom he needed it. The characteristics of his skills speak of wisdom inherent in the genetic level. Serfs demonstrated similar qualities. His skills and experience helped him become the best foreman in the team, earning respect and status.

Ivan Denisovich was a full-fledged manager of his destiny. He knew what to do in order to live comfortably, did not disdain work, but did not overwork himself, could outwit the warden and easily avoided sharp corners in dealing with prisoners and with his superiors. Ivan Shukhov's happy day was the day when he was not put in a punishment cell and his brigade was not assigned to Sotsgorodok, when the work was done on time and the rations were stretched out for the day, when he hid a hacksaw and it was not found, and Tsezar Markovich gave him some extra money for tobacco.

Critics compared the image of Shukhov with a hero - a hero from the common people, broken by an insane state system, found himself between the millstones of the camp machine, breaking people, humiliating their spirit and human self-awareness.

Shukhov set himself a bar below which it was unacceptable to fall. Therefore, he takes off his hat when he sits down at the table and neglects the fish eyes in the gruel. This is how he preserves his spirit and does not betray his honor. This elevates a man above the prisoners licking bowls, vegetating in the infirmary and knocking on the boss. Therefore, Shukhov remains a free spirit.

The attitude towards work in the work is described in a special way. The laying of the wall causes an unprecedented stir, and the men, forgetting that they are camp prisoners, put all their efforts into its rapid construction. Industrial novels filled with a similar message supported the spirit of socialist realism, but in Solzhenitsyn’s story it is rather an allegory for The Divine Comedy.

A person will not lose himself if he has a goal, so the construction of a thermal power plant becomes symbolic. Camp existence is interrupted by satisfaction from the work done. The purification brought by the pleasure of fruitful work even allows you to forget about the disease.

The specificity of the image of Ivan Denisovich speaks of the return of literature to the idea of ​​populism. The story raises the topic of suffering in the name of the Lord in a conversation with Alyosha. The convict Matryona also supports this theme. God and imprisonment do not fit into the usual system of measuring faith, but the dispute sounds like a paraphrase of the Karamazovs’ discussion.

Productions and film adaptations

The first public visualization of Solzhenitsyn's story took place in 1963. The British channel NBC released a teleplay starring Jason Rabards Jr. Finnish director Caspar Reed shot the film “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1970, inviting artist Tom Courtenay to collaborate.

The story is in little demand for film adaptation, but in the 2000s it found a second life on the theater stage. A deep analysis of the work carried out by the directors proved that the story has great dramatic potential, describes the country's past, which should not be forgotten, and emphasizes the importance of eternal values.

In 2003, Andriy Zholdak staged a play based on the story at the Kharkov Drama Theater. Solzhenitsyn did not like the production.

Actor Alexander Filippenko created a one-man show in collaboration with theater artist David Borovsky in 2006. In 2009, at the Perm Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, Georgy Isaakyan staged an opera based on the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to music by Tchaikovsky. In 2013, the Arkhangelsk Drama Theater presented a production by Alexander Gorban.

“Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. This is who is dying in the camp: who licks the bowls, who relies on the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather” - these are the three fundamental laws of the zone, told to Shukhov by the “old camp wolf” foreman Kuzmin and since then strictly observed by Ivan Denisovich. “Licking bowls” meant licking already empty plates in the dining room behind prisoners, that is, losing human dignity, losing one’s face, turning into a “gossip,” and most importantly, falling out of the fairly strict camp hierarchy.

Shukhov knew his place in this unshakable order: he did not strive to get into the “thieves”, to take a higher and warmer position, however, he did not allow himself to be humiliated. He did not consider it shameful for himself “to sew someone a mitten cover from an old lining; Serve the rich brigadier dry felt boots straight to his bed...", etc. However, Ivan Denisovich never asked to pay him for the service rendered: he knew that the work performed would be paid according to its merits, and the unwritten law of the camp rests on this. If you start begging and groveling, it won’t be long before you turn into a “six”, a camp slave like Fetyukov, whom everyone pushes around. Shukhov earned his place in the camp hierarchy through deeds.

He also does not rely on the medical unit, although the temptation is great. After all, hoping for a medical unit means showing weakness, feeling sorry for yourself, and self-pity corrupts and deprives a person of his last strength to fight for survival. So on this day, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov “overcame”, and while working, the remnants of the illness evaporated. And “knocking on the godfather” - reporting one’s own comrades to the head of the camp, Shukhov knew, was generally the last thing. After all, this means trying to save yourself at the expense of others, alone - and this is impossible in the camp. Here, either together, shoulder to shoulder, do a common forced task, standing up for each other when absolutely necessary (as the Shukhov brigade stood up for their foreman at work in front of the construction foreman Der), or live trembling for your life, expecting that at night you will be killed by your own people. as comrades in misfortune.

However, there were also rules, not formulated by anyone, but nevertheless strictly observed by Shukhov. He firmly knew that it was useless to fight the system directly, as, for example, captain Buinovsky was trying to do. The falsity of Buinovsky’s position, refusing, if not to reconcile, then at least to outwardly submit to circumstances, was clearly manifested when at the end of the working day he was taken to an ice cell for ten days, which in those conditions meant certain death. However, Shukhov was not going to completely submit to the system, as if feeling that the entire camp order served one task - to turn adults, independent people into children, weak-willed executors of other people's whims, in a word - into a herd.

To prevent this, it is necessary to create your own little world, into which the all-seeing eye of the guards and their minions does not have access. Almost every camp inmate had such a field: Tsezar Markovich discusses issues of art with people close to him, Alyoshka the Baptist finds himself in his faith, Shukhov tries, as far as possible, to earn himself an extra piece of bread with his own hands, even if it requires him to sometimes even break the laws of the camp. So, he carries a hacksaw blade through the “shmon”, search, knowing what the discovery of it threatens him with. However, you can make a knife out of linen, with the help of which, in exchange for bread and tobacco, you can repair shoes for others, cut out spoons, etc. Thus, even in the zone, he remains a real Russian man - hardworking, economical, skillful. It is also surprising that even here, in the zone, Ivan Denisovich continues to take care of his family, even refuses parcels, realizing how difficult it will be for his wife to collect this parcel. But the camp system, among other things, strives to kill in a person this sense of responsibility for another, to break all family ties, to make the prisoner completely dependent on the rules of the zone.

Work occupies a special place in Shukhov’s life. He doesn’t know how to sit idle, he doesn’t know how to work carelessly. This was especially evident in the episode of building a boiler house: Shukhov puts his whole soul into forced labor, enjoys the very process of laying a wall and is proud of the results of his work. Work also has a therapeutic effect: it drives away illness, warms you up, and most importantly, brings members of the brigade closer together, returning to them the feeling of human brotherhood, which the camp system tried unsuccessfully to kill.

Solzhenitsyn also refutes one of the stable Marxist dogmas, simultaneously answering a very difficult question: how did the Stalinist system manage to raise the country from ruins twice in such a short period of time - after the revolution and after the war? It is known that much in the country was done by the hands of prisoners, but official science taught that slave labor was unproductive. But the cynicism of Stalin’s policy lay in the fact that the best people ended up in the camps for the most part - such as Shukhov, the Estonian Kildigs, cavalryman Buinovsky and many others. These people simply did not know how to work poorly; they put their souls into any work, no matter how hard and humiliating it was. It was with the hands of the Shukhovs that the Belomorkanal, Magnitka, and Dneproges were built, and the war-ravaged country was restored. Separated from their families, from home, from their usual worries, these people devoted all their strength to work, finding their salvation in it and at the same time unconsciously asserting the power of the despotic government.

Shukhov, apparently, is not a religious person, but his life is consistent with most Christian commandments and laws. “Give us this day our daily bread,” says the main prayer of all Christians, “Our Father.” The meaning of these deep words is simple - you need to take care only of the essentials, knowing how to give up what you need for the sake of what is necessary and be content with what you have. Such an attitude towards life gives a person an amazing ability to enjoy little things.

The camp is powerless to do anything with the soul of Ivan Denisovich, and he will one day be released as a man unbroken, not crippled by the system, who has survived the fight against it. And Solzhenitsyn sees the reasons for this perseverance in the primordially correct life position of the simple Russian peasant, a peasant who is accustomed to coping with difficulties, finding joy in work and in those small joys that life sometimes gives him. Like the great humanists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy once upon a time, the writer calls on us to learn from such people their attitude to life, to stand in the most desperate circumstances, and to save their face in any situation.