A lesson in studying new material based on the story of A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in Ivan Denisovich". Lesson-reflection on the story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn "One day of Ivan Denisovich" - Lesson

“I haven't read anything like it for a long time. Good clean, great talent, no falsehood ... ”This is the very first impression of AT Tvardovsky, who read the manuscript of this story.

Varlam Shalamov wrote: “Dear Alexey Isaakovich! I didn’t sleep for two nights, read the story, reread it, remembered ... "

“I was stunned, shocked,” Vyacheslav Kondratyev shared his impressions. - once in my life I realized so realistically that the truth can ... "

SP Zalygin noted: "More than any other writer, Solzhenitsyn answers the questions of our time, through the question: what is happening to us?" ("New World", article "The Year of Solzhenitsyn", 1990, No. 1).

A.T. Tvardovsky made incredible efforts to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's story saw the light of day. After the 22nd Congress, when NS Khrushchev launched a "Furious attack on Stalin," Solzhenitsyn decided to give the manuscript "Shch-854". This was the first work in Soviet fiction about the Stalinist camps.

"The camp through the eyes of a peasant," said Lev Kopelev, handing over to AT Tvardovsky Solzhenitsyn's manuscript.

The camp is a special world with its own realities: a zone, towers, barracks, barbed wire, a drill, a regime chief, a punishment cell, convicts, a black jacket with a number, rations, warders ... Solzhenitsyn recreates the details of such a life: “The frost was dark, breathless ... Two large searchlights shot across the area from the far corner towers. The lanterns of the zone and the inner lanterns were shining. So many of them were bumped into that they completely brightened the stars.

Squeaking with felt boots in the snow, the convicts quickly ran about their business - some to the restroom, some to the locker, some to the parcel warehouse, and then the cereals were taken to the individual kitchen. All of them have their heads sunk into their shoulders, their pea coats are wrapped around them, and all of them are not so cold from the frost as from the thought that they will spend a whole day in this frost. They walked past a high boardwalk around BUR, a stone in-camp prison; past a thorn that guarded the camp bakery from prisoners; past the corner of the headquarters barrack, where, caught by a thick wire, hung on a pole an old-fashioned rail; by another pillar, where in a calm, so as not to show too low, all covered with frost, hung a thermometer. " (A.I.Solzhenitsyn "One day of Ivan Denisovich")

The author writes in such a way that we get to know the life of a prisoner not from the outside, but from the inside. Talking about the camp, Solzhenitsyn writes not about how they suffered there, but about how they managed to survive, preserving themselves as people. Shukhov is portrayed very truthfully: neither in actions, nor in gestures, nor in speech can you notice falsehood. The heroes are not a representative of the intelligentsia, but a person from the people. Yesterday he, Shukhov, cut off from peasant work, became a soldier, and today he shared the hardships of camp life.

Anyone could be in the camp. Neither social status, nor high professional status, nor education affected.

Shukhov will forever remember the words of his first brigadier, the old camp wolf Kuzyomin: “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.” In "One Day." there are people about whom the author talks with great sympathy: they are Brigadier Tyurin, Shukhov, Cavtorang Buinovsky, Latvian Kildigs, Senka Klevshin. The writer singles out another character who is not named. Only half a page is occupied by a story about a “tall, silent old man”: “He sat in prisons and camps for an uncountable number of years, not a single amnesty touched him. But I didn’t lose myself.

His face was exhausted, but not to the extent of the weakness of the disabled wick, but to the hewn, dark stone. And on the hands, large, in cracks and blackness, it was evident that not much had fallen to him for all the years to sit out like an idiot. " (A.I.Solzhenitsyn "One day of Ivan Denisovich")

The "jerk" - working in an administrative position (but the foreman is not a jerk) or in the service sector - always in an easier, privileged job.

As you can see, in the author's characteristics, short, stingy, the moral aspect is very strongly expressed. The best pages of the story include those episodes that show the 104th brigade at work: “Shukhov and other bricklayers stopped feeling the frost. From quick, exciting work, first the first heat passed through them - that heat, from which it gets wet under a pea jacket, under a quilted jacket, under the top and bottom shirts. But they did not stop for a moment and drove the masonry further and further. And an hour later, a second heat struck them - the one from which the sweat dries up. The frost did not take them to their feet, this is the main thing, and the rest is nothing, not a light sipping breeze - could not distract their thoughts from the masonry. " (A.I.Solzhenitsyn "One day of Ivan Denisovich")

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"We would have died if we hadn't." Themistocles. "Guys! Isn't Moscow behind us? Let us die near Moscow. " M. Yu. Lermontov. What is “patriotism” and what kind of person can be called a patriot? The answer to this question is rather complicated. For simplicity of judgment, we can agree to be considered the first who more or less clearly defined the concept of "patr ...

Lesson-reflection based on the story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn "One day of Ivan Denisovich"

Lesson objectives:

Introduce students to life and creativity

AI Solzhenitsyn, to arouse interest in the personality of the writer and his works.

To form an idea about the value of human life and freedom, about the need to preserve human dignity despite the circumstances.

To improve the skills of elementary research activities of students, to develop the ability to reason over problematic issues.

Equipment: a portrait and photographs of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, an exhibition of his books,

multimedia installation for demonstration of presentation.

During the classes.

1. Introductory remarks by the teacher.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn - who is he? Prophet, mentor, or intercessor? They saw in him either the savior of the Fatherland, or the enemy of the people, or the teacher of life.

Solzhenitsyn is an outstanding Russian writer, publicist and public figure. His name in literature became known during the "Khrushchev thaw", then disappeared for many years.

Solzhenitsyn dared to tell the truth about the terrible Stalinist time, to create works that aroused the anger of "domestic officials from literature." Stories about camp life, documentary research "The Gulag Archipelago", the story "Cancer Ward", the novel "In the First Circle" - works based on the terrible memories of those who survived the Stalinist repressions. It is no coincidence that A. I. Solzhenitsyn was called the classic of "camp" prose.

2. The life and work of the writer.(Message from a trained student).

Alexander Isaevich was born in the city of Kislovodsk. Father - Isaak Efimovich Solzhenitsyn, an officer, a participant in a campaign in East Prussia in 1914, the son of a wealthy peasant who had a farm in the Stavropol steppe. He died in 1918, six months before the birth of his son.

Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak, daughter of a large landowner in the Kuban, lived until the age of 49, until 1944, mainly in Rostov-on-Don (since 1924). Here she was found by the Great Patriotic War, the tragedy of evacuation with bombing, tuberculosis and hunger. Among the worries about her son, she did not recognize the main one - six months after her death, he was arrested, and he began a completely different life.

The mother managed to give her son a good education (she herself worked as a stenographer and at the same time attended English stenography courses in order to receive a higher salary). As a result, Solzhenitsyn successfully graduated from high school and in 1936 entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Rostov University. Of his childhood and youth friends, Kirill Simonyan remained with him - later a major doctor, Nikolai Vitkevich, Lydia Ezherets and the future wife of the writer - Natalya Reshetovskaya. They got married on April 27, 1940. But everything was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. In 1941, Solzhenitsyn left his studies in mathematics and physics and studies at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (MIFLI) and went to the front. At first he was a groom and a sled in a transport battalion. This work looked like a mockery of a successful mathematician: it was necessary to clean the stables of dung. But in reality, war always puts everything in its place. In 1942, in February, the "horse" company was abandoned, and Solzhenitsyn found himself on an artillery course in Kostroma. Further, in the rank of lieutenant, he got into the reconnaissance group in Saransk. In January 1945 he accomplishes a feat - he takes his battery out of the encirclement. And on February 9, he was arrested for several critical lines about Stalin, expressed in a letter to a friend, and in July of the same year, the future writer received a sentence: 8 years in forced labor camps. He was released only on March 5, 1953, the day of Stalin's death, and was sent to Kazakhstan. His wife also returned, who, over the long years of separation, managed to get along with another - an intelligent, decent person.

Since 1957, Solzhenitsyn has been working in Ryazan as a teacher of mathematics, physics and astronomy. He teaches lessons intelligently and lively, and the children pay him with love, give him an affectionate nickname - Isaich. There was not enough money at that time, but Solzhenitsyn refused a more monetary position of the head teacher in order to continue the main thing - his beloved literary work. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Solzhenitsyn carefully prepared himself for serving literature. In 1989, in an interview with the American Times magazine, Solzhenitsyn said that at the age of nine he thought that I would become a writer, although he did not know what I would write about. Solzhenitsyn was always demanding of himself, and therefore, it seemed that he was somewhat rude with the others.

Events in the following years:

1962 - publication of the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich"; admitted to the Writers' Union

1970 - awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for moral strength gleaned from the tradition of great Russian literature" (Solzhenitsyn becomes the third Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize: the first - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, the second - Boris Leonidovich Pasternak). At the same time, changes are taking place in his personal life - a divorce from Natalya Reshetovskaya and a marriage with Natalya Svetlova, who later became Solzhenitsyna. The writer lived with her until the end of his days.

Preparation of works for publication:

1958 - 1968 - the book "The Gulag Archipelago"

1955 - 1968 - the novel "The First Circle"

1966 - the story "Zakhar Kalita"

1969 - The Red Wheel

1963 - the story "An incident at the Kochetovka station" and many others.

1974 - deprivation of citizenship and expulsion abroad, for 20 years he lived in America in the state of Vermont with his wife and four sons, dreamed of returning to his homeland, but connected the moment of return only with the publication of his works.

It happened on May 27, 1994. Before leaving for Russia to the question "Why are you returning to Russia?" Solzhenitsyn said: "My homeland is there, my heart is there, that's why I'm going." With triumph, the writer traveled all over the country, from Vladivostok to Moscow, everywhere enthusiastic admirers, admirers of his talent and ordinary citizens of Russia were waiting for him, because everyone wanted to meet “a man-legend, a man-legend,” as Lydia Chukovskaya called Solzhenitsyna.

Unfortunately, in our country, what happened to the most popular writer often happens. They tried to use the name of Solzhenitsyn by multidirectional political forces, which aroused discontent among the common people and not only against such forces, but also against the writer himself. In addition, Solzhenitsyn was given airtime, free and "first", and instead of praising the authorities, he began to come out with thoughts unfashionable for today - about sacrifice, self-restraint and repentance. Each time the performance time decreased and, finally, Solzhenitsyn was deprived of the air at all. He retired to his home and began to work as before. Not everyone liked the publicistic speeches of the Nobel laureate, because he spoke the truth, because all his life he fought for the truth. "Live not by lies!" - this is the motto of the writer.

He is one of the most titled writers of our time (laureate of the Nobel (1970) and Templeton Prizes (1983), literary awards of the American National Arts Club, Golden Cliché awards, Freedom Foundation, Brakanti.

He is an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, holder of the Order of St. Andrew the Primordial (which he did not accept due to disagreement with the policies of President Yeltsin), and in 1994 he himself became the founder of his own literary prize of $ 25,000.

3. Updating students' knowledge

In our today's lesson, we will reflect on the pages of the story “One Day in Ivan Denisovich”, which became his literary debut, brought the author world fame and aroused the wrath of “domestic officials from literature”.

The purpose of our conversation will be to show the “unusual life material” taken as the basis of the story and to lead you to comprehend the tragic fate of a person in a totalitarian state.

A report on the history of the creation of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, prepared by the students.

The story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a relatively small work. But it occupies a very important place in the author's creative biography. "I wrote this story in 40 days. It is an" offshoot "of a large book about the camp epic, or, rather, a condensed presentation of it," the writer will say later. Having written the story in 1959, A.I. Solzhenitsyn decided to publish it. This decision was bold, even during the period of the "thaw" the story about the imprisoned "traitor to the motherland", about his comrades in misfortune could hardly be met easily and simply. The writer did not expect this. He began publishing attempts not for the purpose of personal gain or fame, but because he could not come to terms with oblivion of the thousands and thousands of crippled destinies that passed before his eyes. The publication of this story seemed to make the rehabilitation real. After all, if a person can openly say what he saw and felt in the closed space of the zone, he becomes an equal member of society. Moreover, he has nothing to repent of. He did not commit crimes.

With these thoughts A.I. Solzhenitsyn handed over the manuscript of the story to the editorial office of the Novy Mir magazine. The chief editor of Novy Mir was then A.T. Tvardovsky. After reading the story, he did not cast it aside in fear, but wrote to A.I. Solzhenitsyn a letter with an invitation to come to Moscow. Tvardovsky's invitation was assessed by Alexander Isaevich ambiguously. A person who has spent many years under escort remains wary for a long time. What if the editor of a Moscow magazine invites him to turn him over to the authorities?

Therefore, all the manuscripts (and there was also the novel "In the First Circle") were hidden by the faithful person. What if they are arrested in Moscow and in Ryazan (and the writer lived in that city then) there will be a search? But then Solzhenitsyn, who was still unknown to anyone, did not know that Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky accepted the pain of the Ryazan teacher as his own, that the wave of the Gulag swept through his peasant family: his father and two brothers died on Solovki. Therefore, A.T. Tvardovsky long negotiations with the authorities and, finally, received permission from N.S. Khrushchev to publish the story. And although the rehabilitation of innocent convicts had already passed (AI Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated in 1956), and in 1961 the cult of personality and its consequences was popularly condemned, the publication of "Ivan Denisovich" in 1962 became a sensation. For the first time, someone directly and honestly did not just say, but "showed" camp life from the inside. He showed that life, about which not only talk, but did not like to remember. The story is reprinted by more than 500 magazines and publishing houses around the world. Solzhenitsyn becomes a famous writer.

In the face of the past

You have no right to bend your soul

After all, these were paid

We pay the biggest price

(A. T. Tvardovsky "By the Right of Memory")

The responses to "Ivan Denisovich" were so numerous and so "lively" that in 1963 Solzhenitsyn published a documentary book "Reading Ivan Denisovich" based on their material. The story brought the writer worldwide fame, but it also became the reason for the special control over him by the KGB, endless searches and devastating critical articles.

Group work on the text of the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" (each group was given preliminary homework for the text of the work).

The teacher distributes assignments for work in groups (3 people each):

In the end, the teacher leads the students to the conclusion that A. I. Solzhenitsyn believed in the spiritual strength of man and his ability to overcome everything.

4. Analytical discussion.

Teacher:

So what kind of life was it, so truthfully portrayed by Solzhenitsyn?

What is Ivan Denisovich himself imprisoned for?

(About the cruelty, injustice of the totalitarian system. Almost all the characters in the story help the author express their ideas about the causes and consequences of repression.)

Why do you think Solzhenitsyn chose a simple, poorly educated peasant peasant as the hero of his story?

(Because there were many such innocent people in the camps, Shukhov is the people themselves, Shukhov is a peasant offended by the Soviet regime)

Teacher: And now let's plunge into the life of such a simple convict and together with him we will live not just a day, but a “happy day”, as Ivan Denisovich believed, and at the end of the lesson we will answer the question,

why did Shukhov consider the day he lived happy?

How does this day begin?

(The camp wakes up at 5 o'clock in the morning, a cold barrack, in which not every light is on, 200 people sleep on fifty “bug-clapboards”. There is nowhere to warm up: there is frost on the walls and on the windows. They sleep dressed, covered with a blanket and a pea jacket over their heads.)

How does Ivan Denisovich feel on this day?

(Ivan Denisovich is ill. His whole body is pulling apart. He slept badly all night, and did not get warm in his sleep. He shivers, and he decides to go to the medical unit in order to get free from work at least for a day. The medical unit is good and warm. Everything is painted white. There are no doctors yet, only the paramedic Kolya Vdovushkin, who sits at the table in a white coat).

How does Ivan Denisovich behave in the medical unit? Does he insist on being released? Is he trying to pity Vdovushkin?

(No. He behaves conscientiously, as if charging for something else).

Was Ivan Denisovich one of those who stick to the medical unit?

(No. And Vdovushkin knew this, but he could not do anything, since he could only free two, and they had already been released).

What conclusion does Shukhov come to when leaving the medical unit?

(What a warm, chilly does not understand, it was 37 in Shukhov, in the frost it was 27 degrees, now who is who.)

So, from the medical unit Shukhov hurries to the kitchen. Where is the problem of getting food in the camp?

(On the first)

How are the prisoners fed? (Very bad)

Therefore, the problem of getting food is a kind of art, which consists in getting an extra bowl of gruel and a ration of bread, and if you are lucky, then tobacco.

How does Shukhov solve this problem?

(He moonlights as best he can)

Can such behavior of Shukhov be called “opportunism?

(No).

The second vital issue is the attitude towards bonded labor. In what conditions do prisoners work?

(It's cold outside, which takes your breath away, and there is nowhere to hide in a bare field, so the prisoners work willingly in winter, as if competing with each other so as not to freeze).

How does Ivan Denisovich feel about work?

(He has a special attitude to work: “Work is like a double-edged sword, you do it for people - give quality, for bosses - show it off.” Shakhov is a jack of all trades, he works conscientiously, without feeling cold, like on his own collective farm).

Is there a sense of his peasant thrift in him?

(Yes, he hides only to close up the windows, tries to hide the trowel between the walls, tries to facilitate the work of others, risking being punished for this, stays late at work, as he is sorry for the remaining mortar).

What conclusion can we draw from this?

(Work for Shukhov is life. The Soviet government did not corrupt him, did not teach him how to cheat. The way of peasant life, its age-old laws turned out to be stronger. And a healthy sense and a sober outlook on life help him to survive).

The working day is over, the prisoners are returning to the barracks.

Why Shukhov considers this day happy and goes to bed satisfied. Why?

(They didn’t drive him to Sotsgorodok, he didn’t get sick, he didn’t put himself in a punishment cell, he got an extra bowl of gruel for lunch. That’s why this day is considered to be a happy one. And these days are getting scary!)

So what does Solzhenitsyn and his protagonist teach us?

(To ensure that under no circumstances a person loses his self-esteem, no matter how hard life is, no matter what trials it prepares, you should always remain a person, not make deals with your conscience.)

Camp philosophy

The laws of salvation from death:

In the camp, this is who is dying: who licks the bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to the godfather to knock.

Those who run fast will not live up to that time in the camp - they will evaporate, fall down.

Work laws:

Work is like a stick, there are two ends in it: for people you do - give quality, for the boss you do - give a show.

Until the bosses figure it out - stick your head around, where it’s warmer, sit down, sit, you’ll still break your back.

Drag the day until the evening, and the night is ours.

3. Brigade Laws:

Even though the foreman does not receive parcels himself, he does not sit without fat. Whoever gets from the brigade is now bringing him a gift. Otherwise you will not live.

Either all the extra, or all die.

Smirny - there is a treasure in the brigade.

Self-preservation laws:

You should never yawn.

Groan and rot. And if you resist, you will break.

If you don't bite out, you won't beg.

Whoever can eat who.

A fast louse is always the first to hit the comb .

Shukhov's statements

Every thing and every work he regrets, so that they do not go to waste.

The one who pulls the work tightly, he also becomes like a foreman over the neighbors.

Whoever knows two things with his hands will also pick up ten.

Easy money - it doesn't weigh anything ... What you don’t pay extra for, you don’t inform.

What has fallen, what has sunk - there is no response to that.

Stocky is better than rich.

If a person asks, why not help?

We will survive everything, God willing it will end!

Why do you think this title variant appeared?

(From reflecting personal experiences, the writer moved on to showing an epic picture in life and began to speak not only on behalf of himself, but on behalf of many victims of injustice).

To do this, he needs to hit "a typical hero in typical circumstances." Therefore, the author showed one, in no way outstanding, a typical day of a typical prisoner Ivan Denisovich. The stage of understanding began with comprehending the name of the protagonist.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is a typical and common name. It is difficult to find names more common in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary villages than Ivan and Denis. ("people like Ivan Denisovich are understandable to everyone, because they meet at every step", "Shukhov is a simple man, and Solzhenitsyn took just such a hero").

Yes, Ivan Denisovich is a very ordinary person, his ancestors were simple Russian peasants, and he himself was an “ordinary” all his life, both a collective farmer and a soldier. Getting acquainted with the fate of one typical person, we get acquainted with the fate of an entire people in a certain historical era. But it's not only that. Shukhov embodies the psychology of an entire nation. In the Stalinist camps (and Solzhenitsyn shows this) there were not only Russian peasants, but also representatives of the intelligentsia, and of all kinds, there were Estonians, Latvians, Jews, and Ukrainians. But Solzhenitsyn, against the background of the camp diversity, shows the life of a typical Russian "peasant". A similar topic was raised by many Russian writers. Here we can recall the peasant types of I.S. Turgenev, as if merged with nature and being its integral part, and the peasant truth, which L.N. Tolstoy, and the downtrodden and humiliated men N.A. Nekrasov. This series is continued by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. But he does it in his own way.

5. Closing remarks from the teacher.

The character of the protagonist of the story was immediately understood. "How good he is, how charming, - said S. Artamonov about Shukhov, - this dear, so pure, so chaste Ivan Denisovich." "In Ivan Denisovich," wrote V. Lakshin, "with his popular attitude to people and work, such a life-affirming force is laid that leaves no room for emptiness and unbelief." Shukhov is a "national character" - he makes an unambiguous conclusion.

And as a result of observations and critical reflections on the story - an assessment of the peculiarities of Solzhenitsyn's worldview. Ermilov speaks about the “high, noble artistic and human position of the writer”. "Behind the external restraint, one can feel the author's enormous moral strength," writes F. Kuznetsov.
The author's art in portraying character made the story not just a symbol of an entire era. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a book of generations, a book of life and artistic truth. In the genre of a short story, the author was able to present the large and difficult camp life of prisoners, to show the diversity of human characters in an unusual setting, to draw the reader's attention to the suffering of people, to convince him of how it is necessary today to know the history of the past of his people, so as not to repeat the horrors that he had to experience.
day Ivana Denisovich ...

1. Biographical information.
2. "One day of Ivan Denisovich": the camp through the eyes of a man.
3. "GULAG Archipelago": the harsh truth of the Soviet concentration world.
4. Chronicle novel "The Red Wheel": the truth about the Russian revolution unclaimed by society.

LITERATURE:

1. Geller M. Concentration World and Soviet Literature. London, 1974. - S. 299–317.
2. Leiderman N.L., Lipovetsky M.N. Modern Russian literature: 1950-1990s: Textbook. manual for stud. higher. study. institutions: In 2 volumes - Vol. 1. M., 2003, pp. 260-315.
3. Niva Georges. Solzhenitsyn. M., 1993.
4. Russian literature of the twentieth century: Textbook. manual for stud. higher. ped. study. institutions: In 2 volumes - Vol. 1. / L.P. Krementsov, L.F. Flekseeva and others; Ed. L.P. Krementsova. M., 2003. S. 111-121.
5. Chalmaev V. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Work. M., 1994.

In the early 1980s, US President Reagan invited some of the most prominent Soviet dissidents living in the West for breakfast. Of all those who were invited, only Solzhenitsyn refused, saying that he was not a dissident, but a Russian writer who could not afford to talk to the head of state, whose generals are seriously developing the idea of ​​selective destruction of the Russian people through nuclear strikes.

A short biography of Solzhenitsyn is as follows: he was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk.
The future writer did not see his father, an officer of the tsarist army Isaak Solzhenitsyn: his father died under mysterious circumstances six months before the birth of his son. Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak, daughter of a large landowner in the Kuban. It was she, an educated person who knew several foreign languages, who became the main educator of the future writer. First of all, the mother did not allow the memory of the father, of the past of the Solzhenitsyn Cossack family to fade in the child.
Solzhenitsyn always studied very willingly, diligently, he was an excellent student. He had a unique memory.
His schoolmates recalled that he was a lively, very active boy, well-read, accustomed to independent work from an early age. He knew how to be friends, keep his word, never refused to help.
After successfully graduating from school, Solzhenitsyn entered the physics and mathematics department of Rostov University, within the walls of which he spent the years from 1936 to 1941.
In October 1941, being mobilized into the army, he got into a transport battalion. In February 1942 he was sent to the 3rd Leningrad Artillery School in Kostroma. From the end of 1942, Solzhenitsyn, with his "sound battery" (detecting enemy artillery), began his combat path, which went up to East Prussia.
In 1943, after the capture of Orel, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, in 1944, after the capture of Bobruisk, the Order of the Red Banner of the Battle.
The war became a period of Solzhenitsyn's swift deliverance from socialist mirages and phantoms. It was during the war years that he decided to write a book with a new assessment of the revolutionary transformations that took place in 1917 in Russia. This was evidenced by his letters to his friend Nikolai Vitkevich. Solzhenitsyn was too outspoken in these letters, and in 1945 he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The route of captain Solzhenitsyn's prison and camp wanderings is as follows: in 1945 - a camp at Kaluzhskaya outpost, from summer 1946 to summer 1947 - a special prison in the city of Rybinsk, then - Marfinskaya "sharashka" (that is, a special institute in the northern suburbs of Moscow), from 1949 - camp work in Ekibastuz. Considering that in the Marfinskaya sharashka (depicted in the novel In the First Circle) the writer could read a lot, talk with very original people, then Solzhenitsyn's camp route was apparently less “steep” than, say, the routes of “diving into darkness "V. Shalamov, which ran through the icy deserts of the Kolyma, than" steep routes "and a two-year stay in solitary confinement E. Ginzburg.
In February 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released from the camp and became an "eternal exile."
In 1955, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to enter Tashkent for treatment in an oncological hospital. Actually, the operation - for seminoma - was done to him in the camp, and in Tashkent, Solzhenitsyn was irradiated with X-rays of the abdominal cavity (the episode of his stay in the oncological dispensary is covered in the story "Cancer Ward", 1968).
There was a period when doctors announced that their patient had no more than three weeks to live. “It was a terrible moment in my life: death on the threshold of deliverance ... However, I did not die (with my hopelessly neglected acute malignant tumor, it was a miracle of God, I did not understand otherwise. All the life returned to me since then is not mine in the full sense has a nested target ").
After rehabilitation in 1957, the writer worked for some time at the Mezinovskaya school in the Vladimir region (here he lived in the village of Miltsevo in the hut of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova, who became the prototype of the heroine of the story “Matrenin's Dvor.” In the same 1957, the writer moved to Ryazan, where he lived until 1969.
In 1962, Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" was published, which brought the author worldwide fame. But relations with the authorities were not easy, and after 1965 Solzhenitsyn was no longer published in the USSR. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1974, after the appearance of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was accused of treason and exiled abroad. Until 1976 he lived in Zurich, then moved to the American state of Vermont, which by nature resembled the middle zone of Russia.
Solzhenitsyn's first marriage was unsuccessful, the second extremely happy. The writer has three sons - Ermolai, Ignat and Stepan.
In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. His career - and especially in the genre of journalism - continues. On December 11, 1988, Solzhenitsyn turned 80. This event was noted, but not widely enough. It seems to me that today's Russia is not in a position to properly assess Solzhenitsyn's contribution to Russian culture. ("The big is seen at a distance").
The relationship between the artist and the authorities, as always, is not easy. The broadcasts that Solzhenitsyn conducted on Russian television were banned, and Solzhenitsyn pointedly refused the order that Yeltsin decided to award him in honor of his 80th birthday.
The work that brought fame to Solzhenitsyn was the story (novella) "One Day in Ivan Denisovich." It is with a conversation about this work that we will begin the analysis of the writer's work.
This story was conceived by the author in 1950. Implemented in 1959, first as "Ш-854 (one day of one convict)". In the fall of 1961, he was transferred to the Novy Mir magazine. The decision to publish the story was made by the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in October 1962 under personal pressure from Khrushchev.
The image of Ivan Denisovich was formed from the soldier Shukhov, who fought with the author in the Soviet-German war (and never sat), the general experience of prisoners and the author's personal experience in the Special Camp as a bricklayer. The rest of the faces are all from the camp life, with their true biographies.
It should be said that One Day ... was not Solzhenitsyn's first work about the camps. Prior to this story, the play "The Deer and the Shalashovka" and the novel "In the First Circle" were written. Due to circumstances beyond the author's control, it was the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" that was destined to introduce a previously forbidden topic into Russian literature.
About the intention of the story, Solzhenitsyn said the following: “In 1950, on some long winter camp day, I was dragging a stretcher with my partner and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, and the day of the simplest hard worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And you don’t even need to whip up some horrors, you don’t need it to be a special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day that life is made of ”. Indeed, in this work, the writer does not depict horrors, anger, does not depict the fate of people at risk of chance, on the playing card of blatars. There is even a situation in the story - the return of the column from the object - when the convicts and the guards are, as it were, at the same time.
The day described in the work turns out to be extremely "successful" for Ivan Denisovich: although he hesitated on the rise, he was not put in a punishment cell; the brigade was not driven out into the open field in the frost from themselves to pull the wire; at lunchtime we managed to “eat” the porridge; the brigadier closed the interest well, therefore, for the next five days, all the brigadiers will be "full"; I found a piece of a hacksaw, forgot about it, but did not get caught on the "shmone"; worked in the evening for Caesar, then bought tobacco; and did not get sick, got over it. "Successful" day of a simple Soviet prisoner Shukhov Ivan Denisovich.
Why did the author show us a "happy" camp day? I think this is because the everyday, static story about camp life, according to the author's plan, should have turned out to be no less amazing than the possible whipping up of fears, anguish, and cries of terror. The reader should have been horrified by the usual, that which was not considered a catastrophe of humanism. Solzhenitsyn, not looking for an amazing plot, spoke of the camp as something long and firmly existing, not at all extraordinary, with its own rules, everyday set of rules for survival, its own folklore, its camp "morality" and established discipline. The author's calculation was justified: the everyday life of the tragedy depicted in One Day ... struck the reader most of all.
The surprise of Solzhenitsyn's first published work was connected, however, not only with the theme, but also with the choice of the hero. Solzhenitsyn introduced into Russian literature a character that was completely alien to it. A characteristic feature of contemporary literature for Solzhenitsyn was its antidemocratic character. In books about the war, an officer became a hero, in books on construction - an engineer, in books on collective farms - the secretary of the district committee or, at worst, the chairman of a collective farm. And even in Solzhenitsyn's first works on the camp theme, the main character was also an intellectual.
And in "One Day ...." for the first time, the main character is a simple peasant, an ordinary collective farmer, a soldier convicted of being captured by the Germans for two days through the fault of his commanders.
The writer himself explained his choice in the following way: "Choosing the hero of the camp story, I took a hard worker, I could not take anyone else, because only he can see the true relations of the camp." Solzhenitsyn by no means idealizes his hero. Even Nerzhin, the protagonist of the novel "In the Circle ...", will say about people like Ivan Denisovich: “They (the men) were not more resistant than him (Nerzhin) endured hunger and thirst. They were not stronger in spirit before a stone wall of ten years ... But they were blind and trusting to the informers. They were fond of gross deceptions by their superiors ... And they were also a lot greedy for small goods: an additional sour hundred-gram millet grandma, ugly trousers, if only a little newer and more chic. Most of them lacked the point of view that becomes more precious than life itself. " But Solzhenitsyn takes Shukhov as his heroes - firstly, because he represents that “tongueless Russia,” about which the writer considers it his duty, and, secondly, because, according to Solzhenitsyn, it was the Shukhovs who carried the main burden of all camp work.
The camp is thus in "One Day ...." shown through the eyes of a man. It is quite obvious that if he had been shown through the eyes of Buinovsky, Caesar or Tyurin, he would have looked different.

In this work of his, Solzhenitsyn defends the point of view according to which, even in the most inhuman conditions, a person can keep his soul alive. What saves a person in this inhuman life?
First, being a part of the human community. In the story, this is a brigade, an analogue of a family in a free life. The father is the foreman, whose authority rests on justice, humanity and food. “The brigadier in the camp is everything: a good brigadier will give you a second life, a bad brigadier will drive you into a wooden pea jacket ... the brigadier has a steel chest. But he raises an eyebrow or points a finger - run, do it. "
The second thing that, according to Solzhenitsyn, saves a person from falling is labor. There is an episode in the story when the convicts are laying a wall with real enthusiasm. This episode is a kind of "symphony of labor". Ivan Denisovich is so fond of work that he works even longer than the allotted time. Ivan Denisovich knows that his work brings bonuses to his bosses, to those people who mock prisoners, but he still cannot work badly. This is such a person.
Solzhenitsyn shows that there is only one way to survive in the camp: we must “forget” that the camp itself is a disaster, it is a failure. Solzhenitsyn's hero believes in the ultimate triumph of justice, hopes for its embodiment. He is driven by an inexplicable love of life itself. “Now no matter what Shukhov is not offended: neither the time is long, nor that there will be no Sunday again. Now he thinks: we will survive! We will survive everything, God willing - it will end! "
Speaking about the story “One Day in Ivan Denisovich,” it should also be noted that the contemporary Solzhenitsyn reader was struck not only by the novelty in the coverage of the camp theme, but also by the language of the work. Russian prose of the 60s did not know such a complex interweaving of speech layers, which appeared in the work of Solzhenitsyn: from the camp-thug vocabulary ("opera", "bastard", "knock", "idiots", "shmon") to common words " bend "(that is, say the implausible)," work hard "," swear "and words from the dictionary of V. Dahl (" changed "," hardened ", etc.). Solzhenitsyn's story in terms of the revival of the skaz (skaz is an extremely expressive form of narration that helps to convey the reliability, the authenticity of what is depicted. , stencil speech, allows you to combine the folk word with the real figure of a colorful folk hero), in the art of storytelling anticipated the future successes of "village" prose. In particular - the art of the tale of VP Astafiev in "The Last Bow" and "Tsar-Fish".

After the publication of One Day ... in Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn received a stream of letters from former prisoners of Soviet concentration camps. These letters allowed Solzhenitsyn to begin the implementation of a generalizing work about the camp world, conceived back in 1958, for the writing of which one personal experience of the author and his friends was clearly lacking. Solzhenitsyn selected the experience of 227 witnesses, with many of whom the writer met and spoke personally. The work on the "GULAG Archipelago" was completed in the winter of 67/68.
At first, it was supposed to postpone the printing of "Archipelago" until 1975. However, in August 1973, the existence of this work became known to the KGB. The woman who betrayed the secret of the existence of the "Gulag Archipelago" was found a little later hanged in her room under unexplained circumstances. Solzhenitsyn suspected Soviet special services of involvement in this death. And he gave the order for the publication of the work, which was preceded by the words: “With an embarrassment in my heart, for years I refrained from publishing this already finished book: the duty to the living outweighed the duty to the dead. But now ... I have no choice but to publish it immediately. "

A. Solzhenitsyn defined the genre of his work as “the experience of artistic research”. This definition very accurately sets out the huge task set by the writer: artistic study of the camp as a phenomenon that determines the nature of the state, the study of camp civilization and a person preparing to come to the camp and living in the camp. In The Gulag Archipelago, the author also tries to answer the question of how the corruption of the people took place, why the state needed it, and at the same time shows the possible ways of spiritual rebirth.
The GULAG Archipelago consists of three volumes. Figuratively, their content can be represented as a fall (I volume) - life at the bottom (II volume) - resurrection from the dead (III volume).
The first volume has two parts: "Prison Industry" and "Perpetual Motion". This is the long and painful slide of the country down the sloping curve of terror.
The second volume also has two parts: the third "Fighter-Labor" and the fourth "Soul and Barbed Wire". Of these, the part about extermination camps is the longest in the book (22 chapters) and the most depressingly hopeless.
The super task of the camps is defined by Solzhenitsyn as follows: to exterminate through backbreaking labor. He compares the labor of Soviet prisoners with the labor of the builders of the Egyptian pyramids and finds that it was easier for the slaves in Egypt: “after all, the pyramids were built with the involvement of modern technology! And we had equipment - forty centuries ago! " Compares with the labor of Russian serfs. And he finds that, although there are similarities, there are more differences, and "all differences are for the benefit of serfdom." Finally, the writer compares the tsarist hard labor and the Soviet extermination-labor. And all the differences are also to the disadvantage of the Archipelago. He writes: "In the Akatui fierce hard labor, the work lessons were easy for everyone ... Their summer working day was 8 hours walking together, from October - 7, and in winter - only 6 ..."
The forced labor camp system, as Solzhenitsyn shows, rested on the use of hunger as the main incentive. The second lever of pressure on a person is the team. The production rate was given not for one person, but for the entire brigade. Depending on the fulfillment of the norm, the camp fed not an individual prisoner, but all members of the brigade. Thus, the brigade became the engine that forced everyone to give their last strength to the slave owners.
“Oh, you can still survive the camp without a brigade! Without a brigade, you are a person, you yourself choose the line of conduct. Without a brigade, you can at least die proudly - in a brigade and die you will be given only meanly, only on the belly. "
A glimmer of hope first appears at the beginning of the third volume, in the history of "special political camps" (part five of "Hard labor"). Those who come to the Archipelago after the war suddenly clearly begin to feel the air of freedom - not external, to which the path is extremely far, but an inalienable and motivating internal will. Its herald is a silent Russian old woman, met by the writer at the quiet station of Torbeevo, when their carriage froze for a while at the platform: top shelf. She looked with that eternal gaze, which our people always looked at the "unfortunate ones". Rare tears ran down her cheeks. “You can't look, mother,” the guard told her roughly. She didn't even move her head. And next to her stood a girl of about ten with white ribbons in pigtails. She looked very sternly, even mournfully beyond her years, opening wide and wide and not blinking her little eyes. So she looked that, I think, she took pictures of us forever. The train set off gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and fervently, unhurriedly, baptized us. "
Internal liberation entails external liberation. First, power is taken from the thieves in the camp; frontline officers lead desperate attempts to escape; hard times are coming for traitor informers. Finally, the whole camp revolts, starting from the strike in Ekibastuz in 1951-1952, and ending with the uprising in 1954, after Stalin's death, in Kengir (chapters "When the earth is on fire in the zone", "We tear the chains by touch", "Forty days of Kengir").

In the "Gulag Archipelago" three storylines can be distinguished. The first is an image of the country's gradual but steady slide towards mass lawlessness. The writer begins with the words of Lenin, who proclaimed in January 1918 about the need to cleanse "Russian land from all harmful insects." The most effective means of cleaning up was massive, all-encompassing terror. "The cleansing of Russia took place gradually: one species of" insects "after another, one stream after another was driven" through the sewers of the prison sewer. " But while some were being destroyed, others, convinced that they would not be affected, remained silent. It took only twenty years, writes Solzhenitsyn, for lawlessness to finally triumph in the country and the corruption of the country was completed - and then the islands of the GULAG merged into the Archipelago.
The second storyline of the work is to show the forms and means used by the state in the formation of a “new” Soviet man, a potential prisoner of the GULAG and a future prisoner. To force people to tacitly endure tyranny, they had to instill a sense of fear. Over the years, fear becomes the main stimulus for human behavior. But scaring people, forcing them to agree with the arrest of everyone around was not enough. The next step on the way to creating a "new" person was, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, "nationwide participation in the sewage system." At this stage, passive consent to terror was no longer sufficient, its active approval was required: “those who have not yet crashed into the sewers with their bodies, who have not yet carried pipes to the Archipelago - they should walk on top with banners, praise the courts and rejoice in court punishments ". Solzhenitsyn notes the most important phenomenon of Soviet society: the relationship between the executioner and the victim. Today's executioner became a victim tomorrow, and yesterday's victim was ready to turn into an executioner at the first word. The emergence of this relationship, encouraged by the authorities as the most important means of corrupting the soul, was facilitated by universal innocence and universal fear.
Complicity - passive or active - broke souls in crimes. After the arrest, one of the means used to obtain false testimony, to agree to cooperate with the executioners, was torture. The chapter on torture seems to be rewritten from the Inquisitor's Handbook, published in the 16th century. The third reason for the recognition of innocent people in uncommitted crimes is, according to the writer, is their lack of "moral support" necessary to resist evil. The result, summed up by the writer, is the following: “We lacked love for freedom. And even before that - awareness of the true situation. We wasted in one unrestrained outburst of the seventeenth year, and then we hurried to submit, we submitted with pleasure. "
The third storyline of the GULAG Archipelago is the fate of its author. In this work, he performs under his own name, talks about himself with the utmost frankness. He, too, is the son of his country. And he grew up in an atmosphere of "nationwide approval of the judicial reprisals against" enemies ", and he breathed in the air of revolutionary slogans and myths. While reproaching millions for silence and obedience, he does not spare himself. And he was silent, although he had the opportunity to shout many times. And he was already in prison, continuing to ardently defend Marxism, convinced that Stalin had "distorted" Lenin.
In the history of the Archipelago, the writer is most shocked by the fate of several million Russian prisoners of war, the same age as Solzhenitsyn, declared "traitors to the motherland" and thrown into Soviet camps. The fate of the Russian prisoners revealed to Solzhenitsyn the inhumanity, cruelty and ingratitude of the Soviet state.
The writer turns to the history of his country: “How many wars did Russia fight ... and how many traitors did they know in all those wars? .. But under the fairest system in the world, a just war broke out - and suddenly millions of traitors from the people themselves. How to understand this? How to explain? .. And maybe it's all the same in the state system? " For Solzhenitsyn, the answer is obvious: millions of former prisoners were thrown into camps in order to preserve the isolation of the country from the rest of the world, disturbed by the war: “All these prisoners ... were imprisoned so that they would not remember Europe among their fellow villagers. What you do not see, so do not delusion ... "
Spiritual liberation comes to Solzhenitsyn in prison: in torment, in suffering, the human spirit undergoes a test and, having endured it, is strengthened, purified, and freed. The conclusion of the writer can be formulated as follows: in a fundamentally immoral society that has arisen as a result of a violation of the normal course of history, only suffering allows one to rise spiritually, to understand the impossibility of living without morality.
Thus, "The Gulag Archipelago" is a book about spiritual enlightenment, about the possibility of remaining human at the bottom of hell, but, above all, it is a monument to millions of prisoners who died in Soviet camps, who passed through them, who were broken or survived.

The final, but so far unclaimed by society, Solzhenitsyn's work is the ten-volume epic The Red Wheel, which has grown during its creation since 1969 into a profound tragic chronicle novel with a completely unique image of the author-narrator, with the continuous movement of fictional and genuine heroes.
"The Red Wheel" is a thorough chronicle of February, the irrevocable disintegration of Russia, the threshold of Bolshevism, and a bloody civil war. Solzhenitsyn shows where it all began: with treason, betrayal, street triumph, seduction by the crackling phraseology of demagogues ... From this Petrograd street the symbolic "red wheel" of terror, the lumpenization of a great country began to roll, when "everything was reviled, betrayed, sold" ( A.A. Akhmatova).
When depicting revolutionaries in The Red Wheel, the principle of thickening ironic thought and sarcasm prevails.

The significance of A. Solzhenitsyn's work is not only that it opened the previously forbidden topic of repression, set a new level of artistic truth, but also that in many respects (in terms of genre originality, narrative and space-time organization, vocabulary, poetic syntax, rhythm, richness of text with symbolism, etc.) was deeply innovative.

Shukhov and others: models of human behavior in the camp world

In the center of A. Solzhenitsyn's work is the image of a simple Russian man who managed to survive and withstand morally in the harshest conditions of captivity in the camp. Ivan Denisovich, according to the author himself, is a collective image. One of his prototypes was the soldier Shukhov, who fought in the battery of Captain Solzhenitsyn, but never spent time in Stalin's prisons and camps. Later the writer recalled: “Suddenly, for some reason, the type of Ivan Denisovich began to take shape in an unexpected way. Starting with the surname - Shukhov, - she crawled into me without any choice, I did not choose it, and this was the name of one of my soldiers in the battery during the war. Then, along with this surname, his face, and a little of his reality, what locality he was from, what language he spoke ”( NS... II: 427). In addition, A. Solzhenitsyn relied on the general experience of the GULAG prisoners and on his own experience gained 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 narration. In One Day of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn uses a very complex narrative technique based on alternating fusion, partial alignment, complementarity, overlapping, and sometimes divergence of points of view of the hero and the author-narrator, who is close to him in his outlook on the world, as well as some kind of expressive generalized outlook, 104th brigade, column, or as a whole, hard-working convicts as a single community. The camp world is shown mainly through the perception of Shukhov, but the character's point of view is complemented by a more voluminous author's vision and point of view, reflecting the collective psychology of prisoners. Author's reflections and intonations are sometimes connected to direct speech or an internal monologue of a character. The dominant in the story "objective" third-person narration includes improperly direct speech that conveys the point of view of the protagonist, preserving the peculiarities of his thinking and language, and improperly author's speech. In addition, there are inclusions in the form of a first-person plural of the type: "And the moment is ours!" …" etc.

The look "from the inside" ("the camp through the eyes of a man") in the story alternates with the look "from the outside", and at the narrative level this transition is almost imperceptible. So, in the portrait description of the old convict Ju-81, whom Shukhov is examining in the camp canteen, upon careful reading one can find a slightly noticeable narrative "failure". The phrase “his back was excellent was straightforward” 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 general work experience; stylistically, he somewhat falls out of the speech structure of Ivan Denisovich, barely noticeably discord with him. Apparently, here is just an example of how in improperly direct speech, which conveys the peculiarities of the thinking and language of the protagonist, is "interspersed" someone else's word. It remains to be understood whether it is copyright, or belongs to Ju-81. The second assumption is based on the fact that A. Solzhenitsyn usually strictly follows the law of the "linguistic background": that is, he builds the narrative in such a way that the entire linguistic fabric, including the author's own one, does not go beyond the circle of ideas and word usage of the character in question ... And since the episode deals with an old convict, one cannot exclude the possibility of the appearance in this narrative context of speech turns inherent in Ju-81.

Little is reported about the 40-year-old Shukhov's pre-camp past: 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 "peasant", however, there is not so much in it, the collective farm and camp experience overshadowed, supplanted some of the "classic" peasant qualities known from the works of Russian literature. So, the former peasant Ivan Denisovich almost does not show a craving for mother earth, there are no memories of a cow-nurse. For comparison, we can recall what a significant role cows play in the fates of the heroes of village prose: Zvezdonya in F. Abramov's tetralogy "Brothers and Sisters" (1958–1972), Rogul in V. Belov's story "A Usual Business" (1966), Zorka in the story V. Rasputin "The Last Term" (1972). Remembering his village past, about a cow named Manka, which evil people pierced the belly with pitchforks, tells the former thief with a long prison experience Yegor Prokudin in V. Shukshin's film "Kalina Krasnaya" (1973). There are no such motives in Solzhenitsyn's work. Horses (horses) in Shch-854's memoirs also do not occupy any noticeable place and are mentioned in passing only in conjunction with the theme of criminal Stalinist collectivization:<ботинки>, yours will not be in the spring. Just like they drove the horses to the collective farm ”; “Shukhov had such a gelding before the collective farm. Shukhov kept it safe, but in the hands of others he cut himself off quickly. And they took the skin off him. " It is characteristic that this gelding in the memoirs of Ivan Denisovich appears to be nameless, faceless. In the works of village prose telling about the peasants of the Soviet era, horses (horses), as a rule, are individualized: Parmen in "Habitual Business", Igrenka in "The Last Term", Veselka in "Men and Women" by B. Mozhaev, etc. ... The unnamed mare, bought from a gypsy and “thrown off the hooves” even before its owner managed to get to his kuren, is natural in the spatial and ethical field of the semi-lumpenized grandfather Shchukar from M. Sholokhov's novel “Virgin Soil Upturned”. It is no coincidence in this context that the same nameless "heifer" that Shchukar "piled up" so as not to give to the collective farm, and, "out of great greed", gorged on boiled brisket, was forced for several days to endlessly run "to the wind" in sunflowers ...

The hero A. Solzhenitsyn has no sweet memories of the holy peasant labor, but “in the camps Shukhov more than once recalled how they ate in the village before: potatoes - with whole frying pans, porridge - with cast iron, and even earlier, without collective farms, meat - in slices healthy. Yes, they blew the milk - let the belly burst. " That is, the village past is perceived rather by the memory of a hungry stomach, and not by the memory of the hands and souls longing for the land, for the peasant labor. The hero does not show nostalgia for the village "harmony", for the 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 a kind of secret place to which his soul is directed. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the author wanted to show the catastrophic consequences of social and spiritual and moral cataclysms that shook Russia in the 20th century and significantly deformed the structure of the personality, the inner world, the very nature of the Russian person. The second possible reason for the absence of some "textbook" peasant traits in Shukhov is the reliance of the author of the story primarily on real life experience, and not on the stereotypes of artistic culture.

“Shukhov left the house on June twenty-third of the forty-first year”, 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 - the lack of a shit! - I returned in good faith ”. In February 1942, on the North-Western Front, the army in which he fought was surrounded, many soldiers were captured. Ivan Denisovich, after being in Nazi captivity for only two days, fled, returned to his own. The denouement of this story contains a latent polemic with the story of M.A. Sholokhov's "The Fate of a Man" (1956), the central character of which, after escaping from captivity, was accepted as a hero by his own people. Shukhov, in contrast to Andrei Sokolov, was accused of treason: as if he was carrying out a task from German intelligence: “What a task - neither Shukhov himself could have come up with, nor the investigator. So they left it simply - the 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, suggests that "Ivanov Denisovichs" passed through the hands of investigators so many that they were simply unable to come up with a specific blame for every soldier who was in captivity ... That is, at the level of subtext, we are talking here about the scale of repression.

In addition, as the first reviewers (V. Lakshin) have already noted, this episode helps to better understand the hero, who has resigned himself to the monstrous accusations and judgment of injustice, who did not begin to protest and rebel, seeking the "truth." Ivan Denisovich knew that if you didn’t sign, they would shoot: “Shukhov was beaten a lot in counterintelligence. And Shukhov's calculation was simple: if you don't sign it - a wooden pea coat, if you sign it - at least you'll live a little longer. Ivan Denisovich signed, that is, he chose life in captivity. The cruel experience of eight years in the 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, does not openly reread the convoy and the camp authorities, “groans and bends”, does not “stick 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 column's head was already shingled”), shoulders (“the column in front swayed, swayed with its shoulders”), a tail (“the tail dumped on the hill”) - absorbs the prisoners, turns them into a homogeneous mass. In this mass, 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 call,” Shukhov, along with other prisoners, angrily shouts at the fined Moldovan:

“And the whole crowd and Shukhov takes evil. After all, what is this bitch, bastard, carrion, bastard, zagreban?<…>What, didn’t work out, you bastard? A government day is not enough, eleven hours, from light to light?<…>

Ooh! - the crowd cheers from the gate<…>Chu-ma-a! School student! Shushera! Shameful bitch! Abomination! The bitch !!

And Shukhov also shouts: "Chu-ma!" ...

Another thing is Shukhov in his brigade. On the one hand, the brigade in the camp is one of the forms of enslavement: "such a device so that not the bosses of the prisoners urge on, but the prisoners of each other." On the other hand, the brigade becomes for the prisoner something like a home, a family, it is here that he escapes from the camp leveling, it is here that the wolf laws of the prison world somewhat recede and the universal principles of human relationships, universal laws of ethics come into force (albeit in a somewhat curtailed and distorted form). It is here that the prisoner has the opportunity to feel like a man.

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 CHP. This scene, commented countless times, makes it possible to better understand the character of the protagonist. 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 remain a free man. Even hopelessly late for the watch, risking getting into a punishment cell for this, the hero stops and once again proudly examines the work he has done: “Oh, 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 labor is cursed, Ivan Denisovich, as V. Chalmaev aptly put it, returned to himself and to others - even if not for long! - a feeling of primordial purity and even sacredness of labor.

On this issue, another well-known chronicler of the Gulag, V. Shalamov, fundamentally disagreed with the author of One Day ..., who in his Kolyma Tales stated: "Work kills in the camp - 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: “Those who praise camp labor are put on the same level by me as those who hung the words on the camp gates:“ Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism "<…>There is nothing more cynical<этой>lettering<…>And isn't the praise of such labor the worst humiliation of man, the worst kind of spiritual corruption?<…>There is nothing worse in the camps, more offensive than deadly hard physical forced labor<…>I, too, “pulled as long as I could,” but I hated this work with all the pores of my body, with all the fibers of my soul, every minute. "

Obviously, not wanting to agree with such conclusions (the author of "Ivan Denisovich" got acquainted with "Kolyma stories" at the end of 1962, having read them in a 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 once again say about the joy of creative work even in conditions of lack of freedom: “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, miserable, tattered slave, this creation of your own hands is you you will smile at yourself. "

Another form of preserving the inner core of the personality, the survival of the human "I" in the conditions of the camp leveling of people and the suppression of individuality is the use of names and surnames by prisoners in communication with each other, 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 of his name, its replacement with a number or nickname can mean a complete or partial disintegration of the personality , spiritual death. Among the characters of "One Day ..." there is not a single one who has completely lost his name, turned into room... This even applies to the lowered Fetyukov.

Unlike camp numbers, the assignment of which to prisoners not only simplifies the work of guards and guards, but also helps to erode the personal identity of the Gulag prisoners, their ability to self-identify, the 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 people are singled out from the general mass, including Shukhov: Andrei Prokofievich Tyurin - foreman, Pavlo - assistant foreman, Cavtorang Buinovsky, former film director Caesar Markovich, "jackal" Fetyukov, Baptist Alyosha, former prisoner of Buchenwald Klevshin, "informer" Panteleev, Latvian Jan Kildigs, two Estonians, one of whom is called Eino, sixteen-year-old Gopchik and "hefty Siberian" Ermolaev.

The names of the characters cannot be called "speaking", but, nevertheless, some of them reflect the character traits of the heroes: the surname Volkova belongs to an animal-like cruel, spiteful chief of the regime; the surname Shkuropatenko is a prisoner who zealously fulfills his duties as a guard, in a word, “skin”. Alyosha is called a young Baptist completely absorbed in thinking about God (here one cannot exclude an allusional parallel with Alyosha Karamazov from Dostoevsky's novel), Gopchik is a dexterous and roguish young prisoner, Caesar is an aristocrat imagining himself, who has risen above ordinary hard workers, a metropolitan intellectual. The surname Buinovsky matches the proud prisoner who is ready to rebel at any moment - in the recent past, a "ringing" naval officer.

One-brigade mates are more often called Buinovsky co-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 honored with such an honor). He is called kavtorang perhaps because in the eyes of convicts with many years of experience he has not yet established himself as a person, he has remained the same, a long-term man - human-social role... In the camp, Buinovsky has not yet adapted, he still feels like a naval officer. Therefore, apparently, he calls his collectors "Red Navy men", Shukhov - "sailor", Fetyukov - "salaga".

The central character has perhaps the longest list of anthroponyms (and their variants): Shukhov, Ivan Denisovich, Ivan Denisych, Denisych, Vanya. The guards call him in their own way: "sche-eight hundred and fifty-four", "chushka", "bastard."

Speaking about the typicality of this character, it should not be overlooked 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 critics often focus on the typical character of the hero, relegating his unique individual features to the background or even questioning him. So, M. Schneerson wrote: "Shukhov is a bright individuality, but, perhaps, typological features in him prevail over personal ones." J. Niva did not see any fundamental differences in the image of Shch-854 even from the janitor Spiridon Egorov, the character of the novel "The First Circle" (1955-1968). According to him, “One Day in Ivan Denisovich” is “an offshoot” of a large book (Shukhov repeats Spiridon) or, rather, a condensed, condensed, popular version of a prisoner's epic, “a squeeze out of the life of a prisoner”.

In an interview dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in Ivan Denisovich, A. Solzhenitsyn seemed to speak in favor of the fact that his character is a mostly typical figure, at least that is how he thought: “Ivan Denisovich, I’m from the very beginning understood that<…>it must be the most ordinary prisoner<…>the most average soldier of this GULAG "( NS... III: 23). But literally in the next phrase, the author admitted that "sometimes the collective image comes out even brighter than the individual, that's strange, it happened with Ivan Denisovich."

To understand why the hero of A. Solzhenitsyn was able to preserve his individuality in the camp too, the statements of the author of One Day ... about the Kolyma Tales help. According to him, “not specific special people act there, but almost the same surnames, sometimes repeating themselves from story to story, but without the accumulation of individual traits. Assume that this was Shalamov's plan: the most brutal camp routine abrade and crush people, people cease to be individuals<…>I do not agree that all the traits of personality and past life are destroyed to the end so much: 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, “shaved” head, “teeth are missing half”, “prisoner's hawk eyes”, “hardened fingers”, etc. just like the bulk of the hard-working convicts. However, in the appearance and habits of the Solzhenitsyn hero there is also individual, the writer endowed it with a considerable number of distinctive features. Even the camp gruel Shch-854 eats not like everyone else: “He ate everything in any fish, even gills, even a tail, and ate eyes, when they came across on the spot, and when they fell out and swam in a bowl separately - 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 was not for nothing that V. Shalamov noted that “the artistic fabric<рассказа>so subtle that you can tell a Latvian from an Estonian ”. In the work of A. Solzhenitsyn, unique portrait features are endowed not only with Shukhov, but also with all the other prisoners singled out from the general mass. So, Caesar - "mustache is black, merged, thick"; baptist Alyosha - "clean, washed out", "eyes, like two candles, glow"; Brigadier Tyurin - "he is healthy in his shoulders and he has a wide image", "face in large mountain ash, from smallpox", "the skin on the 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", "fat-cheeked"; Shkuropatenko - "the pole is crooked, stared like a thorn." The portrait of a prisoner, the old convict Ju-81, is the most individualized and presented in the story.

On the contrary, the author does not give a detailed, detailed portrait of the protagonist. It is limited to individual details of the character's appearance, according to which the reader must independently recreate in his imagination a holistic image of Sch-854. The writer is attracted by such external details, by which one can form an idea of ​​the inner content of the personality. Answering one of his correspondents, who sent a home-made sculpture "Zek" (recreating a "typical" image of a prisoner), Solzhenitsyn wrote: "Is this Ivan Denisovich? I'm afraid not<…>In the face of Shukhov, kindness (no matter how crushed it may be) and humor must necessarily be seen. On the face of your prisoner - only severity, coarseness, ferocity. All this is true, all this creates a generalized image of a prisoner, but ... not Shukhov. "

Judging by the above statement of the writer, an essential feature of the character of the hero is responsiveness, the ability to compassion. In this regard, Shukhov's neighborhood with the Christian Alyosha cannot be perceived as a mere coincidence. Despite the irony of Ivan Denisovich during a conversation about God, despite his assertion that he does not believe in heaven and hell, the character of Shch-854 reflected, among other things, the Orthodox worldview, for which, above all, a feeling of pity and compassion is characteristic. It would seem that it is difficult to imagine a situation worse than that of this disenfranchised prisoner, but he himself not only grieves about his fate, but also empathizes with others. Ivan Denisovich takes pity on his wife, who for many years single-handedly raised her daughters and pulled the collective farm strap. Despite the strongest temptation, the eternally hungry prisoner forbids sending him parcels, realizing that his wife is already not easy. Shukhov sympathizes with the Baptists who received 25 years in the camps. It is a pity for him and “jackal” Fetyukov: “He will not live up to the deadline. He does not know how to put himself. " Shukhov sympathizes with Caesar, who is well settled in the camp, who, in order to preserve his privileged position, has to give part of the food sent to him. Shch-854 sometimes sympathizes with the guards ("<…>they also don't have butter to trample on the towers in such frost ") and the guards accompanying the column in the wind ("<…>they are not supposed to be tied with rags. The service is also unimportant ").

In the 60s, critics often reproached Ivan Denisovich for not resisting tragic circumstances, resigned to 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, having created 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 1960s, which was interested in reorienting public consciousness from revolutionary optimism to passive contemplation. According to the author of the magazine "Molodaya Gvardiya", the semi-official criticism needed "a standard of such a limited, spiritually sleepy, and in general, indifferent person, not capable of protest, but even of a timid thought of any discontent", and similar requirements Solzhenitsyn's hero seemed to answer in the best possible way:

“The Russian peasant in the work of Alexander Isaevich looks cowardly and stupid to the point of impossibility<…>The whole philosophy of Shukhov's life boils down to one thing - to survival, in spite of everything, at any cost. Ivan Denisovich is a degraded person, who has the will and independence only to "fill his belly"<…>His element is to serve, to bring something, to run up to the general rise in the lockers, where who needs to be served, etc. So he runs like a dog around the camp<…>His servile nature is twofold: for the high authorities Shukhov is full of servility and hidden admiration, and for the lower ranks he has contempt.<…>Ivan Denisovich gets real pleasure from groveling in front of 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 opening in his soul. But this is a clear Solzhenitsyn lie, even some kind of intent: to belittle the Russian man, once again emphasize his supposedly slavish essence. "

Unlike N. Fedya, who highly tendentiously evaluates Shukhov, V. Shalamov, behind whom he had 18 years of camps, in his analysis of Solzhenitsyn's work wrote about the author's deep and subtle understanding of the peasant psychology of the hero, which manifests itself “in curiosity and naturally tenacious intelligence, and the ability to survive, observation, caution, discretion, a little skeptical attitude towards the various Caesars Markovich, and all kinds of power that have to be respected. " According to the author of the Kolyma Tales, Ivan Denisovich's inherent "clever independence, clever obedience to fate and the ability to adapt to circumstances, and distrust are all features of the people."

Shukhov's high degree of adaptability to circumstances has nothing to do with humiliation, with the loss of human dignity. Suffering from hunger no less than others, he cannot afford to turn into a kind of "jackal" Fetyukov, prowling through the garbage dumps and licking other people's plates, humbly 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. He is ready, if necessary, to defend his rights by force: when one of the prisoners tries to move the felt boots that he put to dry off the stove, Shukhov shouts: “Hey! you! ginger! And if a felt boot? Put yours, don't touch strangers! " ... Contrary to the widespread belief that the hero of the story treats "timidly, peasantly respectfully" to those who represent in his eyes the "bosses", one should recall those irreconcilable assessments that Shukhov gives to various camp chiefs and their accomplices: the foreman Der - "pig face"; overseers - "damned dogs"; nachkar - "idiot", the head of the barracks - "bastard", "urka". In these and similar assessments there is not even a shadow of that "patriarchal humility" which is sometimes attributed to Ivan Denisovich out of the best intentions.

If we talk about "obedience to circumstances", for which Shukhov is sometimes reproached, then first of all one should remember not him, but Fetyukov, Der and the like. These morally weak heroes who do not have an inner "core" try to survive at the expense of others. It is with them that the repressive system forms a slave mentality.

The dramatic life experience of Ivan Denisovich, whose image embodies some typical properties of the national character, allowed the hero to deduce 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 obedient in everything. In cases where resistance can bring success, they defend their few rights. So, for example, by stubborn tacit resistance, they nullified the order of the chief to move around the camp only in brigades or groups. The same stubborn resistance is shown by the column of prisoners to the nachkar, who kept them in the cold for a long time: "I didn’t want to be with us humanly - at least break now from a cry." If Shukhov does "bend", it is only outwardly. Morally, however, he puts up resistance to a system based on violence and spiritual corruption. In the most dramatic circumstances, the hero remains a person with soul and heart and believes that justice will prevail: “Now, no matter what, Shukhov is not offended: nothing is long<…>nor that there will be no Sunday again. Now he thinks: we will survive! We will survive everything, God willing, it will end! " ... In one of his interviews, the writer said: “But communism was drowned, 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 ”( NS... III: 408).

Of course, even in the conditions of a prison camp, open protest and direct resistance are possible. This type of behavior is embodied by Buinovsky, a former military naval officer. Faced with the arbitrariness of the guards, the cavalry ranks boldly toss them: “You are not Soviet people! You are not communists! " and at the same time refers to his “rights”, to the 9th article of the Criminal Code, which prohibits bullying of prisoners. The critic V. Bondarenko, commenting on this episode, calls the cavtorang a “hero”, writes that he “feels himself as a person and behaves like a person,” “in case of personal humiliation, he rises and is ready to die”, etc. But at the same time he loses sight of the reason for the “heroic” behavior of the character, does not notice why he “rises” and even “is ready to die”. And the reason here is too prosaic to be a reason for a proud uprising and even more heroic death: when a column of prisoners leaves the camp in the working area, the guards write down at Buinovsky's (in order to force them to hand over their personal belongings to the closet in the evening) “some kind of waistcoat or napkin. Buinovsky - in the throat<…>". The critic did not feel some inadequacy between the statutory actions of the guards and such a violent reaction of the cavtorang, did not catch the humorous tone with which the main character looks at what is happening, in general sympathizing with the captain. The mention of the "napuznik", because of which Buinovsky entered into a clash with the head of the regime, Volkov, partly removes the "heroic" halo from the act of the cavalier. The price of his "vest" riot turns out to be, in general, senseless and disproportionately expensive - the kavtorang ends up in a punishment cell, about which it is known: “Ten days of the local punishment cell<…>it means losing your health for life. Tuberculosis, and you can't get out of hospitals. And those who have served fifteen strict days - those in the earth are damp ”.

Human or non-human?
(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 application is the shortest way to create visual expressive images, to identify the main essence of human characters, as well as to an indirect, but very expressive manifestation of the author's modality. Assimilation of a person to an animal makes it possible in some cases to abandon the detailed characterization of the characters, since the elements of the zoomorphic "code" used by the writer have values ​​firmly fixed in the cultural tradition and therefore easily guessed by the readers. And this is the best way to meet the most important aesthetic law of Solzhenitsyn - the law of "artistic economy."

However, sometimes zoomorphic comparisons can be perceived as a manifestation of simplified, schematic representations of the author about the essence of human characters - first of all, this concerns the so-called “negative” characters. Solzhenitsyn's inherent tendency to didactism and moralizing finds various forms of embodiment, including manifesting itself in the allegorical zoomorphic assimilations that he actively uses, which are more appropriate in "moralizing" genres, primarily in fables. When this tendency powerfully declares itself, the writer seeks not to comprehend the intricacies of a person's inner life, but to give his “final” assessment, expressed in an allegorical form and having a frankly moral character. It was then that in the images of people the allegorical projection of animals begins to be guessed, and in the animals - no less transparent allegory of people. The most typical example of this kind is the description of a zoo in the story "Cancer Ward" (1963-1967). The frank allegorical orientation of these pages leads to the fact that animals languishing in cages (horned goat, porcupine, badger, bears, tiger, etc.), which are considered in many respects by Oleg Kostoglotov, close to the author, become predominantly an illustration of human mores, an illustration of human types. behavior. This is not unusual. According to V.N. Toporov, “animals for a long time served as a kind of visual paradigm, the relationship 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 "The First Circle", in the books "The Gulag Archipelago" and "Butting a Calf with an Oak". If you look at the works of Solzhenitsyn from this angle, then GULAG archipelago will appear as something like a grand menagerie, which is inhabited by the "Dragon" (the ruler of this kingdom), "rhinos", "wolves", "dogs", "horses", "goats", "gorilloids", "rats", "hedgehogs" , "Rabbits", "lambs" and the like. In the book "Butting a Calf with an Oak", famous "engineers of human souls" of the Soviet era also appear as inhabitants of a "fur farm" - this time a writer's one: here and K. Fedin "with the face of a vicious wolf", and "polkanist" L. Sobolev, and The "wolfish" V. Kochetov, and the "fat fox" G. Markov ...

Himself inclined to see in the characters the manifestation of animal traits and properties, A. Solzhenitsyn often endows such an ability and heroes, in particular, Shukhov - the main character of "One Day in Ivan Denisovich." The camp depicted in this work is inhabited by many zoo-like creatures - characters that the heroes of the story and the narrator repeatedly name (or compare with) dogs, wolves, jackals, bears, horses, rams, sheep, pigs, calves, hares, frogs, rats, kites etc.; in which habits and properties that are attributed or actually inherent in these animals appear or even prevail.

Sometimes (this is extremely rare) zoomorphic comparisons destroy the organic integrity of the image, blur the contours of character. This usually happens when there are too many comparisons. Zoomorphic comparisons in the portrait characterization of Gopchik are clearly redundant. In the image of this sixteen-year-old prisoner, who evokes paternal feelings in Shukhov, the properties of several animals are contaminated: “<…>rosy as a pig ”; “He is an affectionate calf, fondles all the peasants”; "Gopchik, like a squirrel, light - climbed the crossbeams<…>"; "Gopchik is running behind like a bunny"; "He has a tiny little voice like a goat's." A hero whose portrait description combines features piglet, calf, proteins, bunnies, goat and besides, wolf cub(Presumably, Gopchik shares the general mood of hungry and chilled prisoners who are kept in the cold because of a Moldovan who has fallen asleep at the facility: “<…>still, it seems, this Moldovan would hold them for half an hour, but he would give him to the convoy to the crowd - they would tear 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 the main idea of ​​his "physiognomy". The author of One Day ... in this case violated this principle. Gopchik's "physiognomy" does not have a portrait dominant, and therefore his image loses its distinctness and expressiveness, it turns out to be blurred.

The easiest way would be to assume that the antithesis bestial (animal) - humane Solzhenitsyn's story boils down to the opposition of the executioners and their victims, that is, the creators and loyal servants of the GULAG, on the one hand, and prisoners in the camp, on the other. However, this scheme is destroyed when it comes into contact with the text. To some extent, in relation to the images of the jailers, this may be true. Especially in episodes when they are compared with a dog - "according to the tradition of a" low ", despised animal, symbolizing the extreme rejection of man from his own kind." Although here, rather, not a comparison with an animal, not a zoomorphic assimilation, but the use of the word "dogs" (and its synonyms - "dogs", "polkans") as a curse. It is for this purpose that Shukhov turns to similar vocabulary: "How many for that hat they dragged into the air conditioner, you damned dogs"; "If only they knew how to count, the dogs!" ; "Here are the dogs, count again!" ; "They are ruled without guards, polkans", etc. Of course, to express his attitude towards the guards and their accomplices, Ivan Denisovich uses zoonyms as curse words not only with canine specificity. So, the foreman Der for him is "a pig's face", the captain in the storage room is "a rat".

In the story, there are also cases of direct assimilation of guards and wardens to dogs, and, it should be emphasized, to evil dogs. The zoonyms "dog" or "dog" are usually not used in such situations, doggy actions, voices, gestures, facial expressions of characters receive coloring: "Yes, tore you in the forehead, what are you barking?" ; "But the overseer grinned ..."; "Well! Well! - growled the overseer, "etc.

The correspondence of the character's external appearance to the inner content of his character is a technique characteristic of the poetics of realism. In the story of Solzhenitsyn, according to the bestial cruel, "wolf" nature of the chief of the regime, not only the appearance, but even the surname corresponds: “Here God marks the rogue, he gave the name! - otherwise, like a wolf, Volkova does not look. Dark, but long, but frowning - and rushes quickly. " Even Hegel noted that in fiction the image of an animal is usually used to denote everything bad, evil, insignificant, natural and nonspiritual<…>". The assimilation of the GULAG servants to predatory animals and beasts in One Day in Ivan Denisovich has an understandable motivation, since in the literary tradition, “the beast is primarily an instinct, the triumph of the flesh,” “the world of flesh, freed from the soul”. In Solzhenitsyn's story, camp guards, guards, and bosses often appear in the guise of predatory animals: “And the guards<…>rushed like animals<…>". Prisoners, on the other hand, are like sheep, calves, horses. Especially often Buinovsky is compared with a horse (gelding): “A cavtorang is already falling off his feet, but he pulls. Such a gelding and Shukhov had<…>"; “The cavalry ranks have leaned on tightly over the last month, but the team is pulling”; "Cavtorang secured the stretcher like a good gelding." But other one-brigade members of Buinovsky, during "Stakhanov's" work at the thermal power station, are likened to horses: "Carriers are like puffy horses"; "Pavlo came running from below, harnessed to the stretcher ..." and so on.

So, at first impression, the author of One Day ... is building a tough opposition, at one pole of which are bloodthirsty jailers ( beasts, wolves, angry dogs), on the other - defenseless "herbivorous" prisoners ( sheeps, calves, horses). The origins of this opposition go back to the mythological concepts of pastoralist tribes. So, in poetic views of the Slavs on nature, “The destructive predation of the wolf in relation to horses, cows and sheep seemed<…>analogous to that hostile opposition in which darkness and light, night and day, winter and summer are placed. " However, a concept based on the establishment of a dependency the descent of man on the ladder of biological evolution to the lower creatures from who he belongs to - 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 assimilated by Shukhov in the camp, rapacity is not always perceived as a negative quality. Contrary to the long-rooted tradition, in a number of cases, even assimilation of prisoners to a wolf does not carry negative evaluations. On the contrary, Shukhov behind the eyes, but respectfully names the most authoritative people for him in the camp - Kuzyomin's brigade leaders (“<…>was an old camp wolf ") and Tyurin (" And you need to think before you go to such a wolf<…>"). In this context, assimilation to a predator indicates not negative "animal" qualities (as in the case of Volkov), but positive human ones - maturity, experience, strength, courage, and toughness.

As applied to prisoners-hard workers, traditionally negative, reducing zoomorphic assimilations are by no means always negative in their semantics. Thus, in a number of episodes based on the likeness of prisoners to dogs, the negative modality becomes almost imperceptible, or even disappears altogether. Tyurin's statement to the brigade: “We will not heat<машинный зал>- we will freeze like dogs ... ", or the narrator's glance at Shukhov and Senka Klevshin running to watch:" Fired up like mad dogs ... ", do not carry negative evaluations. Rather, the opposite is true: such parallels only increase sympathy for the heroes. Even when Andrei Prokofievich promises to "hit the head on the head" of his one-brigade men, who leaned towards the stove before equipping the workplace, Shukhov's reaction: "Show the whip to the beaten dog," indicating the submissiveness and downturn of the inmates, does not discredit them at all. Comparison with the "bat dog" characterizes not so much the prisoners as those who turned them into intimidated creatures who dare not disobey the foreman and the "bosses" in general. Tyurin uses the "slaughter" of prisoners already formed by the GULAG, and, moreover, taking care of their own welfare, 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 ended up in the camp, who, whenever possible, try to avoid general work and generally contacts with "gray" prisoners and prefer to communicate with people of their circle, comparison with dogs (and not even evil, as in the case of the guards, but only those possessing a keen instinct) hardly testifies to the sympathy of the hero and the narrator for them: “They, Muscovites, can sense each other from afar, like dogs. And, having come together, everyone sniffs, sniffs 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 comparison with sniffing dogs, which creates the effect of ironic decline.

Thus, zoomorphic comparisons and assimilations in Solzhenitsyn's story are ambivalent in nature and their semantic content most often depends not on the 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 author's active use of zoomorphic comparisons to the topic of spiritual and moral degradation of a person who has become a participant in the dramatic events of Russian history of the 20th century, drawn into a cycle of total state violence by the criminal regime. Meanwhile, this problem contains not only a socio-political, but also an existential meaning. It is directly related to the author's concept of personality, to the aesthetically embodied ideas of the writer 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 the beast, the animal, the carnal prevails in him. " If we project this scheme onto One Day in Ivan Denisovich, then, at first glance, it seems to be fair. Of all the portraits of the heroes of the story, only a few do not have zoomorphic assimilations, including Alyoshka the Baptist - perhaps the only character who can claim the role of "the bearer of the image of God." This hero managed to spiritually withstand the battle with the inhuman system thanks to the Christian faith, thanks to his firmness in upholding unshakable ethical norms.

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, turns into animals, first and foremost, those who are weak in spirit, who do not have a solid spiritual and moral core.

But that's not all. The camp is not for the author of "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" the main and only reason for the distortion in a person of his original, natural perfection, inherent, "programmed" in him "likeness". Here I would like to draw a parallel with one feature of Gogol's work, about which Berdyaev wrote. The philosopher saw in "Dead Souls" and other works of Gogol "an analytical dismemberment of the organically integral image of man." In his 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 possessed "an absolutely exceptional sense of evil" (how can you not recall the statement Zh Niva about Solzhenitsyn: "is he perhaps the most powerful artist of Evil in all modern literature"?). Here are some of Berdyaev's statements about Gogol, which help to better understand the works of Solzhenitsyn: “Gogol has no human images, but only muzzles and faces<…>Ugly and inhuman monsters surrounded him on all sides.<…>He believed in man, looked for the beauty of man and did not find him in Russia.<…>His great and incredible art was given to reveal the negative sides of the Russian people, its dark spirits, everything that was inhuman in him, 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 Gogolian Russia, inhuman, half-beastly Russia of mugs and muzzles was revealed.<…>Darkness and evil are embedded deeper, not in the social shell of the people, but in its spiritual core.<…>The revolution is a great developer and it showed only what was hidden in the depths of Russia. "

Based on the statements of Berdyaev, let us make the assumption that, from the point of view of the author of One Day in Ivan Denisovich, the GULAG exposed and manifested the main diseases and vices of modern society. The era of Stalinist repressions did not give rise, but only exacerbated, brought to the limit cruelty, indifference to other people's suffering, mental callousness, lack of faith, lack of a solid spiritual and moral foundation, faceless collectivism, zoological instincts - everything that accumulated in Russian society over several centuries. The GULAG became a consequence, the result of the erroneous path of development that humanity has chosen in modern times. The GULAG is a natural result of the development of modern civilization, which has abandoned faith or turned it into an external ritual, which has placed socio-political chimeras and ideological radicalism at the forefront, or rejected the ideals of spirituality in the name of reckless technological progress and slogans of material consumption.

The author's orientation towards the Christian concept of human nature, striving for perfection, for the ideal that Christian thought expresses in the formula of "likeness", can explain the abundance of zoomorphic comparisons in the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich", including in relation to the images of prisoners. As for the image of the protagonist of the work, then, of course, he is not an example of perfection. On the other hand, Ivan Denisovich is by no means an inhabitant of a menagerie, not a zoo-like creature that has lost the idea of ​​the highest meaning of human existence. Critics of the 60s often wrote about the "earthiness" of the image of Shukhov, emphasized that the circle of interests of the hero does not extend beyond an extra bowl of gruel (N. Sergovantsev). Similar assessments, which sound 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 of the vestibule roof - both in the zone and in the zone! " ... This assimilation is not only a form of stating the mobility of the protagonist, not only a metaphorical image characterizing the swiftness 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 a spirit striving to heaven." Comparison with the "free" bird, supported by many other similar in meaning 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)

It is customary to call an artistic detail an expressive detail that plays an important ideological and semantic, emotional, symbolic and metaphorical role in a work. “The meaning and power of a detail lies in the fact that whole". The artistic details include the details of the historical time, way of 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 it is almost impossible to understand the author's intention in full without taking them into account. 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 readers accustomed to the Aesopian language of the 60s.

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, the truthfulness, accuracy, expressiveness of individual details of the artistically recreated reality mean little if this violates the historical truth, distorts the general picture, the very spirit of the era. For this reason, he is more likely 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."

Among the details that deserve special attention is the protagonist's camp number - Shch-854. On the one hand, it is evidence of some autobiographical character of Shukhov, since it is known that the camp number of the author, who served time in the Ekibastuz camp, began with the same letter - Ш-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 you think about the scale of the repression, suggest to the discerning reader that the total number of prisoners in only one camp could exceed twenty thousand people. It is impossible not to pay attention to another similar detail: the fact that Shukhov works in the 104th (!) Brigade.

One of the first readers of the then still handwritten "One Day in 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 enthusiasm for camp life. Indeed, he pays attention to literally every little thing that his hero encounters: he talks in detail about how the barrack, the lining, the punishment cell are arranged, how and what the prisoners eat, where they hide bread and money, what they put on and dress in, how they earn extra money, where smoke is obtained, etc. Such an 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 life in the camp, but also - indirectly - of Ivan Denisovich himself. They often make it possible to understand the inner world of Shch-854 and other prisoners, the moral principles that govern the characters. Here is one of such details: in the camp canteen, prisoners spit out fish bones caught in gruel onto the table, and only when there are a lot of them, someone brushes the bones from the table to the floor, and there they “grow fat”: - it seems to be considered inaccurate. " Another similar example: in an unheated dining room Shukhov takes off his hat - “no matter how cold it is, he could not allow himself to eat in a hat”. Both of these seemingly purely everyday details indicate that the disenfranchised prisoners still need to observe the norms of behavior, peculiar rules of etiquette. The convicts, whom they are trying to turn into working animals, into nameless slaves, into "numbers", remain people, they want to be people, and the author speaks about this, including indirectly, through the 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 quilted jacket: “He was lying on top lining having covered his head with a blanket and a pea jacket, and in a quilted jacket, in one rolled up sleeve, thrusting both feet together ”; "Legs are back in the sleeve of a quilted jacket, a blanket on top, a pea jacket on top, sleep!" ... V. Shalamov also drew attention to this detail, writing to the author in November 1962: "Shukhov's legs are in one sleeve of a quilted jacket - all this is great."

It is interesting to compare Solzhenitsyn's image with the famous lines of A. Akhmatova:

So helplessly my chest grew cold

But my steps were easy.

I put it on my right hand

Left hand glove.

The artistic detail in Song of the Last Meeting is sign, carrying "information" about the inner state of the lyric 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 the camp life. Ivan Denisovich sticks his legs into the sleeve of his quilted jacket not by mistake, not in a state of psychological affect, but for purely rational, practical reasons. Such a decision is prompted by a long camp experience and folk wisdom (according to the proverb: "Keep your head cold, your stomach hungry, and your legs warm!"). On the other hand, this detail cannot be called purely domestic, since it also carries a symbolic meaning. The left glove on the right hand of the lyric heroine Akhmatova is a sign of a certain emotional and psychological state; Ivan Denisovich's legs tucked into the sleeve of a quilted jacket are a capacious symbol inverted, the anomalies of the whole camp life as a whole.

A significant part of the subject images of Solzhenitsyn's work is used by the author at the same time to recreate the camp life, and to characterize the Stalin era as a whole: a parash barrel, lining, muzzle rags, front-line lighting rockets - a symbol of the power's war with its own people: “Like this camp, Special, conceived - even front-line lighting missiles hurt a lot at the guards, a little the light goes out - they pour rockets over the zone<…>the war is real. " The symbolic function in the story is performed by a rail suspended on a wire - a camp likeness (more precisely - substitution) bells: “At five o'clock in the morning, as always, the ascent struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barrack. The intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen into two fingers, and soon subsided: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant to wave his hand for a long time. " According to Kh.E. Kerlot, bell ringing - "a symbol of the creative power"; and since the source of the sound hangs, "all the mystical properties that are endowed with objects suspended between heaven and earth extend to it." In the "inverted" desacralized world of the GULAG portrayed by the writer, an important symbolic substitution takes place: the place of the bell, shaped like the vault of heaven, and therefore symbolically connected with the world mountaineers, occupies "a thick wire caught<…>an ordinary rail ", hanging not on the bell tower, but on an ordinary pole. The loss of the sacred spherical shape and the replacement of material substance (hard steel instead of soft copper) correspond to a change in the properties and functions of sound itself: the blows of the overseer's hammer on the camp rail remind not of the eternal and lofty, but of the curse that prevails over the prisoners - exhausting forced slave labor, bringing people to the grave ahead of time.

Day, time, eternity
(about the specifics of artistic time-space)

One day of Shukhov's camp life is uniquely peculiar, since it is not a conditional, not a "composite", not an abstract day, but a quite definite one, having exact time coordinates, filled, among other things, with extraordinary events, and, secondly, to the highest degree typical, because it consists of many episodes, details that are characteristic of any of the days of the camp term of Ivan Denisovich: "There were three thousand six hundred fifty-three such days in his period from bell to bell."

Why is one day of a prisoner so meaningful? Firstly, already due to non-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 the outstanding monument of Old Russian literature - "The Life of Theodosius of the Caves": "The main quantum of time in describing the historical micro-plan is the day, and the choice of the day as the time in LF is not accidental. One side,<он>self-sufficient, self-sufficient<…>On the other hand, the day is the most natural and from the beginning of Creation (it was itself measured in days) a unit of time established by God, which acquires a special meaning in conjunction with other days, in the sequence of days that determines "macro-time", its fabric, rhythm<…>The temporal structure of the LF is precisely characterized by the always assumed connection between the day and the sequence of days. Thanks to this, the "micro-plan" of time is correlated with the "macro-plan", any particular day seems to be adjusted (at least in potency) to the "big" time of the Sacred history<…>» .

Secondly, this was the original intention of A. Solzhenitsyn: to present the day of the prisoner depicted in the story as the quintessence of all his camp experience, a model of camp life and life in general, the focus of the entire Gulag era. Recalling how the idea of ​​the work arose, the writer said: “it was such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with my partner, and I thought how to describe the whole camp world - in one day” ( NS... II: 424); "It is enough to describe just one day of the simplest hard worker, and our whole life will be reflected here" ( NS... III: 21).

So those who consider A. Solzhenitsyn's story to be a work exclusively on the "camp" theme are mistaken. The day of the prisoner, artistically recreated in the work, grows into a symbol of an entire era. The author of "Ivan Denisovich" would probably agree with the opinion of I. Solonevich - the writer of the "second wave" of the Russian emigration, expressed in the book "Russia in a concentration camp" (1935): "The camp does not differ from the" will "in any significant way. In the camp, if it is worse than in the wild, then very much not by much - of course, for the bulk of the camp inmates, workers and peasants. Everything that happens in the camp also happens outside. And vice versa. But only in the camp all this is clearer, simpler, clearer<…>In the camp, the foundations of Soviet power are presented with a clear algebraic formula. " In other words, the camp depicted in Solzhenitsyn's story is a reduced 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, they 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: “But no one has yet had the end of the term in this camp”; "<…>the days in the camp are rolling - you can't look back. And the term itself - does not go at all, it does not decrease at all ”. The time of the prisoners and the time of the camp authorities are also not synchronized in the artistic world of the story, that is, the time of the people and the time of those who personify the power: “<…>the prisoners are not supposed to have a clock, the authorities know the time for them ”; “None of the prisoners ever sees a watch in the eye, and what are they, watches for? The prisoner only needs to know - is the rise soon? before divorce how much? before lunch? until lights out? " ...

And the camp was designed in such a way that it was almost impossible to get out of it: “all gates always open inside the zone, so that if the prisoners and the crowd pushed on them from the inside, they could not land”. Those who turned Russia into the "Gulag archipelago" are interested that nothing in this world changes, that time either stops altogether, or, at least, be controlled by their will. But even they, seemingly omnipotent and omnipotent, cannot cope with the eternal movement of life. Interesting in this sense is the episode 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, measuring the time of human life, opposes not only the cold and darkness of the camp, but also the power itself, which gave rise to the monstrous GULAG. This power contains a threat to the whole 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, like in a fog, and on the sides of the sun stood up - weren't they pillars? Shukhov nodded to Kildigs. - And the pillars do not interfere with us, Kildigs dismissed and laughed. - If only the thorn would not be pulled from pillar to pillar, this is what you are looking at. It is no coincidence that Kildigs laughs - his irony is directed at the power, which is straining, but in vain, trying to subjugate the entire world of God. A little time passed, "the sun rose higher, the haze dispersed, and the pillars were gone."

In the second episode, having heard from Cavtorang Buinovsky that the sun, which in "grandfather's" times occupied the highest position in the firmament exactly at noon, now, in accordance with the decree of the Soviet government, "stands above everything at an hour," the hero, having understood these words by simplicity literally - in the sense that it obeys the requirements of the decree, nevertheless, is not inclined to believe the captain: “A cavtorang came out with a stretcher, but Shukhov would not argue. Really, and the sun obeys their decrees? " ... For Ivan Denisovich it is quite obvious that the sun does not "obey anyone", therefore there is no reason to argue about this. A little later, being calmly confident that nothing can shake the sun - even the Soviet government, together 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 rank-and-file decree ”. The absence of any mention of the heavenly body in the next phrase proves that the hero was convinced of what he never doubted - that no earthly power can 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 Ivan Denisovich is correlated in different ways with the historical time - the time of total state violence. Physically being in one space-time dimension, they feel themselves almost in different worlds: Fetyukov's outlook is limited by barbed wire, and the camp garbage dump becomes the center of the universe for the hero - the focus of his main life aspirations; Former filmmaker Caesar Markovich, who escaped common work and regularly receives food parcels from the outside, has the opportunity to live with his thoughts in the world of cinema images, in the artistic reality of Eisenstein's films recreated by his memory and imagination. The perceptual space of Ivan Denisovich 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 rural 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 they are plotted in the same temporal and spatial coordinates. The locus of Caesar Markovich (Eisenstein's films) marks some remoteness, the character's distance from the epicenter of the greatest folk tragedy, the locus of Fetyukov's “jackal” (garbage dump) becomes a sign of his internal degradation, Shukhov's perceptual space, including the sun, sky, and steppe expanse, is evidence of the hero's moral ascent ...

As you know, artistic space can be “point”, “linear”, “flat”, “volumetric”, etc. Along with other forms of expressing the author's position, it has value properties. Artistic space "creates the effect of" closedness "," deadlock "," isolation "," limited "or, on the contrary," openness "," dynamism "," openness "of the hero's chronotope, that is, reveals the nature of his position in the world." The artistic space created by A. Solzhenitsyn is most often called "hermetic", "closed", "compressed", "condensed", "localized". Such assessments are found in almost every work dedicated to "One Day of Ivan Denisovich". As an example, we can cite one of the most recent articles about Solzhenitsyn's work: "The image of the camp, defined 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."

In part, these conclusions are true. Indeed, the common artistic space of "Ivan Denisovich" is made up, among other things, of the spaces of the barracks, medical unit, canteen, parcel office, CHP building, and so on, which have closed boundaries. However, such isolation is overcome by the fact that the central character constantly moves between these local spaces, he is always in motion and does not stay for a long time in any of the camp premises. In addition, being physically in the camp, perceptually Solzhenitsyn's hero breaks out of it: his gaze, memory, and Shukhov's thoughts are turned to what is behind the barbed wire - both in spatial and temporal perspectives.

The concept of space-time "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 "large" space of Russia and the space of the whole world as a whole. Solzhenitsyn stereoscopic artistic vision, therefore, the author's conceptual space created in his works is not planar(all the more horizontally bounded), and voluminous... Already in "One Day of Ivan Denisovich", this artist's tendency to create, even within the boundaries of works of a small form, even in the chronotope of a structurally exhaustive and conceptually integral artistic model of the entire universe, is clearly defined by the genre framework.

The famous Spanish philosopher and culturologist Jose Ortega y Gasset in his article "Thoughts on the novel" said that the main strategic task of the artist of the word 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 of Ivan Denisovich”, “Cancer Ward”, “In the First Circle”, “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Red Wheel” constantly reminds the reader of the reality outside the inner space of the works. By thousands of threads, this internal (aesthetic) space of a story, a story, an “experience of artistic research”, a historical epic is connected with an external space, external to works outside of 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”, artistic world into the real world. More precisely, it makes the borderline which, according to Ortega y Gasset, should tightly fence off the inner (artistic) space of the work from the “objective reality” external to it, from the actual historical reality, is mutually permeable.

The event chronotope of "Ivan Denisovich" is constantly correlated with reality. The work contains a lot of references to events and phenomena that are outside the plot recreated in the story: about the "father with a mustache" 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, will this 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, and the American admiral must be shown. And so they made a special store full of groceries.<…>" etc.

It is generally accepted that the basis of the Russian national space is a horizontal vector, that the most important national mythologeme is the Gogol mythologeme “Rus-Troika”, which signifies the “path to endless space” that Russia “ rolling: her kingdom is distance and breadth, horizontal ”. Kolkhoz-Gulag Russia, depicted by A. Solzhenitsyn in the story "One Day of Ivan Denisovich", if rolling, then not horizontally, but vertically - sheer downward. The Stalinist regime took away from the Russian people endless space, deprived millions of Gulag prisoners of freedom of movement, concentrated them in the confined spaces of prisons and camps. The rest of the country's inhabitants - first of all, passportless 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 concrete 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, make it impossible, even in flight, in movement across the endless Russian expanses, to try to find salvation from state arbitrariness and violence? According to the author of One Day in Ivan Denisovich, who recreates just such a plot situation, there is little choice here: either a person becomes dependent on external factors and, as a result, morally degrades (that is, in the language of spatial categories, it rolls down), or acquires inner freedom, becomes independent of the circumstances - that is, chooses the path of spiritual elevation. Unlike will, which for Russians is most often associated with the idea of ​​flight from "civilization", from despotic power, from the state with all its institutions of coercion, freedom on the contrary, there is “the concept of intense and presupposing a purposeful and well-formed self-deepening movement<…>If the will is sought outside, then freedom is found within themselves. "

In Solzhenitsyn's story, this point of view (practically one to one!) Is expressed by Baptist Alyosha, addressing Shukhov: “What is your will? In the wild, your last faith will die out like thorns! Rejoice that you are in prison! Here you have time to think about your soul! " ... Ivan Denisovich, who himself sometimes “did not know whether he wanted will or not,” also cares about preserving his own soul, but he understands this and formulates it in his own way: “<…>he was not a jackal even after eight years of common work - and the further, the more firmly established. " In contrast to the devout Alyoshka, who lives almost by one “holy spirit,” the half-pagan, half-Christian Shukhov builds his life along two axes equivalent to him: “horizontal” - everyday, everyday, physical - and “vertical” - existential, internal , metaphysical ". Thus, the line of convergence of these characters is vertical. The idea is 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 upper places on the lining, and Caesar and Buinovsky - the lower ones: the last two characters have yet to find a path leading to spiritual ascent. The main stages of the ascent of a man who found himself in the millstones of the GULAG, the writer, based on his own camp experience, clearly outlined in an interview with Le Poin magazine: the struggle for survival, comprehension of the meaning of life, finding God ( NS... II: 322-333).

Thus, the closed frames of the camp depicted in One Day in Ivan Denisovich determine the movement of the story's chronotope, first of all, not along the horizontal, but along the vertical vector - that is, not due to the expansion of the spatial field of the work, but due to the expansion of the spiritual and moral content.

Solzhenitsyn A.I. Butting a calf with an oak: 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: “<…>at a very early time, a dispute arose between us about the word "zek" I had introduced: V.T. (for a joke, varying it - "Zapolyarny Komsomolets" or "Zakhar Kuzmich"), in other camps they said "zyk". Shalamov believed that I should not have introduced this word and that it would not be grafted in any way. And I - I was sure that it would get stuck (it is resourceful, and inclined, and has a plural), that language and history are waiting for it, without it it is impossible. And he was right. (VT - 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 is it a“ prisoner ”and not a“ prisoner ”. After all, this is how it is written: z / k and bows: zek, zekoyu "(Banner. 1990, No. 7. P. 68).

Shalamov V.T. Resurrection of the Larch: Stories. M .: Art. Lit., 1989. S. 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: Shukhov] and saves people "" ( Solzhenitsyn A.I. A grain pleased between two millstones // Novy Mir. 1999. No. 4. P. 163).

Banner. 1990. No. 7. S. 81, 84.

Florensky P.A. Names // Sociological Research. 1990. No. 8. S. 138, 141.

Schneerson M... Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Essays on creativity. Frankfurt a / M., 1984.S. 112.

Epshtein M.N."Nature, the world, the secret of the universe ...": The system of landscape images in Russian poetry. M .: Higher. school, 1990.S. 133.

By the way, the jailers also turn to zoonyms to express their contemptuous attitude towards the prisoners, whom they do not recognize as people: "- Have you ever seen how your woman was washing floors, chushka?" ; “- Stop! - the watchman makes a noise. - Like a herd of sheep "; "- Deal with five, mutton heads<…>" etc.

Hegel G.V. F... Aesthetics. In 4 volumes. Moscow: Art, 1968-1973. T. 2.P. 165.

Fedorov F.P... Romantic art world: space and time. Riga: Zinatne, 1988.S. 306.

Afanasyev A.N. The tree of life: Selected articles. Moscow: Sovremennik, 1982.S. 164.

Wed: "The wolf, due to its predatory, predatory disposition, 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.S. 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 metal, infernal<…>metal is purely masculine and militaristic ”; "Iron becomes a weapon or reminds of a weapon"; " Copper- matter of a different property<…>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, there will be churchliness and statehood of copper ”; "Aggressive and merciless iron is opposed by copper as a soft, protective, compassionate metal" ( Karasev L.V... Ontological view of Russian literature / Ros. state humanizes. un-t. M., 1995. S. 53–57).

National images of the world. Cosmo-Psycho-Logos. Moscow: Ed. group "Progress" - "Culture", 1995. P. 181.

Toporov V.N. Space and text // Text: semantics and structure. Moscow: Nauka, 1983, pp. 239–240.

Nepomnyashchy V.S. Poetry and fate: Over the pages of the spiritual biography of A.S. Pushkin. M., 1987.S. 428.

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Almost a third of the prison camp term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn served in the Ekibastuz special camp in the north of Kazakhstan. There, in general work, and on a long winter day, the idea of ​​a story about one day of one prisoner flashed across. “It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with my partner and thought how to describe the whole camp world - in one day,” the author said in a TV interview with Nikita Struve (March 1976). - Of course, you can describe your ten years of the camp, there is the whole history of the camps - but it is enough to collect everything in one day, as if in fragments, it is 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 Ivan Denisovich" [see. on our website its full text, summary and literary analysis] was written in Ryazan, where Solzhenitsyn settled in June 1957 and from the new academic year became a teacher of physics and astronomy at secondary school No. 2. Started May 18, 1959, completed 30 June. The work took less than a month and a half. “It always turns out this way if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only fight off unnecessary material, just so that unnecessary fit, but to accommodate the most necessary, "- said the author in a radio interview for the BBC (June 8, 1982), which was conducted by Barry Holland.

While composing in the camp, Solzhenitsyn, in order to keep what he wrote in secret and with himself, first memorized some verses, and at the end of the term, dialogues in prose and even solid prose. In exile, and then rehabilitated, he could work without destroying passage after passage, but he still had to hide in order to avoid a new arrest. After being typed on a typewriter, the manuscript was burned. The manuscript of the camp story was also burned. And since the typescript had to be hidden, the text was printed on both sides of the sheet, without margins and without spaces between lines.

Only more than two years later, after a sudden and violent attack on Stalin, undertaken by his successor N. S. Khrushchev at the XXII Party Congress (October 17 - 31, 1961), A. S. ventured to offer the story to the press. "Cave typing" (out of caution - without the name of the author) 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 Novy Mir magazine, Anna Samoilovna Berzer. The typists rewrote the original, Anna Samoilovna, who came to the editorial office of Lev Kopelev, asked what to name the author, and Kopelev suggested a pseudonym for his place of residence - A. Ryazansky.

On December 8, 1961, as soon as the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, appeared in the editorial office after a month's absence, A. S. Berzer asked him to read two difficult-to-pass manuscripts. One did not need a special recommendation, even if she had heard about the author: it was the story of Lydia Chukovskaya "Sofya Petrovna". About the other, Anna Samoilovna said: "The camp through the eyes of a peasant is a very popular thing." It was her that Tvardovsky took with him until morning. On the night of December 8-9, he reads and rereads the story. In the morning, through a chain, he calls up 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, the day of his 43rd birthday, A. S. received this telegram: "I ask you to urgently come to the editorial office of the new world zpt, the costs 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 to encrypt the unsafe story among themselves). For himself, Tvardovsky wrote in his workbook on December 12: "The strongest impression of the last days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solonzhitsyn), whom I will meet today." Tvardovsky recorded the real surname of the author from voice.

On December 12, Tvardovsky received Solzhenitsyn, summoning the entire head of the editorial board to meet and talk with him. “Tvardovsky warned me,” notes A.S., “that he does not firmly promise the publication (Lord, I was glad that they didn’t give it to the ChKGB!), And he will not give a time limit, but he will not spare the effort.” The editor-in-chief immediately ordered to conclude a contract with the author, as noted by A. S ... "at the highest rate they have accepted (one advance is my two-year salary)." Teaching AS earned then "sixty rubles a month."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich. Read by the author. Fragment

The original titles of the story are "Ш-854", "One day of one prisoner". The final title was composed by the editorial staff of Novy Mir on the first visit of the author at the insistence of Tvardovsky, "transferring assumptions over the table with the participation of Kopelev."

In accordance with 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 about "Ivan Denisovich" were written by K. I. Chukovsky (his note was called "Literary Miracle"), S. Ya. Marshak, K. G. Paustovsky, K. M. Simonov ... a short preface to the story and a letter addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers NS Khrushchev. On August 6, 1962, after nine months of editorial labor, the manuscript of "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" with a letter from Tvardovsky was sent to Khrushchev's assistant, V.S.

Tvardovsky wrote:

“Dear Nikita Sergeevich!

I would not consider it possible to encroach on your time in a private literary business, if not for this truly exceptional case.

We are talking about the amazingly talented story of A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in Ivan Denisovich". The name of this author has never been known to anyone, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names of our literature.

This is not only my deep conviction. The voices of other prominent writers and critics, who had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with it in the manuscript, join the unanimous appreciation of this rare literary find by my co-editors for the Novy Mir magazine, including K. Fedin.

But due to the unusual 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 the 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, the journal went on a routine work with the author on the manuscript. On July 23, a discussion of the story took place at the editorial board. A member of the editorial board, soon the closest employee of Tvardovsky, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in his diary:

“This is the first time I see Solzhenitsyn. This is a man of about forty, ugly, in a summer suit - canvas trousers and a shirt with an open collar. The appearance is rustic, the eyes are set deep. There is a scar on the forehead. Calm, restrained, but not embarrassed. 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 remarks of Lebedev and Chernoutsan [an employee of the CPSU Central Committee, to whom Tvardovsky gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript]. For example, add righteous indignation to the kavtorang, remove the shade of sympathy for the Banderaites, give someone from the camp authorities (at least a warden) in more conciliatory, restrained tones, not all the villains were there.

Dementyev [deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir] spoke about the same in a sharper, more straightforward manner. 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 keep him. Dementyev also said (I objected to this) that it is important for the author to think about how the former prisoners who remained staunch communists after the camp would accept his story.

This hurt Solzhenitsyn. He replied that he had not thought about such a special category of readers and did not want to think about. “There is a book, and there is me. Maybe I think about the reader, but this is a reader in general, and not different categories ... Then, all these people were not in common jobs. They, according to their qualifications or former position, usually got a job in the commandant's office, at the bread slicer, etc. And you can understand the position of Ivan Denisovich only by working in general jobs, that is, knowing this from the inside. Even if I were in the same camp, but watched it from the outside, I would not write this. I would not write, I would not understand what kind of salvation is work ... "

There was a dispute about the place of the story, where the author directly speaks about the position of the kavtorang, that he - a finely feeling, thinking person - should 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 - dies. I myself was saved only by that. I am scared now to look at the photograph as I came out of there: then I was older than now, about fifteen years old, and I was stupid, clumsy, thought worked awkwardly. And only because of that I was saved. If, as an intellectual, I was inwardly rushing about, getting nervous, experiencing everything that happened, I would surely die. "

In the course of the conversation, Tvardovsky inadvertently mentioned a red pencil, which at the last minute could delete this or that from the story. Solzhenitsyn was alarmed and asked to explain what this meant. Can the editors or censors remove something without showing him the text? “The wholeness of this thing is dearer to me than printing it,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn carefully wrote down all comments and suggestions. He said that he divides them into three categories: those with whom he can agree, even thinks that they are beneficial; those that he will think about are difficult for him; and finally, the impossible - those with whom 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 substantiated. "

A.S. also wrote about the same discussion:

“The main thing that Lebedev demanded was to remove all those places in which the Cavto rank appeared to be a comic figure (by Ivan Denisovich's standards), as it was conceived, and to emphasize the Cavto rank's partisanship (you must have a“ positive hero ”!). This seemed to me the least of the casualties. I removed the comic, leaving as if “heroic”, but “insufficiently disclosed,” as critics later found. The protest of the kavtorang at the divorce was now a little swollen (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 "ass" less often to the escorts, I reduced it from seven to three; less often - "bastard" and "bastards" about the authorities (I had a lot); and so that at least not the author, but the Cavto rank would condemn the Banderaites (I gave this phrase to the Cavto rank, but later I threw it out in a separate edition: it was natural for the Cavto rank, but they were too heavily reviled without that). Also, to give the prisoners some kind of hope for freedom (but I could not do that). And, the funniest thing for me, a hater of Stalin, - at least once it was required to name Stalin as the culprit of disasters. (And indeed - he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! It was no coincidence, of course, I succeeded: I saw the Soviet regime, not Stalin alone.) I made this concession: I mentioned the "mustache dad" once ... ".

On September 15, Lebedev told Tvardovsky by phone that “Solzhenitsyn (“ One Day ”) was approved by N [ikita] S [ergeevi] than,” and that in the next few days the chief 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 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 in order to report the favorable result of his troubles. About the story itself, Khrushchev remarked: “Yes, the material is unusual, but, I will say, both the style and the language are unusual - it did not suddenly go off. Well, I think the thing is strong, very. And it does not cause, despite such material, feelings of heavy, although there is a lot of bitterness. "

After reading “One Day in Ivan Denisovich” even before publication, in typescript, Anna Akhmatova, who described in “ Requiem"The grief of the" hundred million people "on this side of the prison locks, with pressure she uttered:" This story is about to be read and learned by heart - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union. "

The story, for the sake of weight, named by the editors in the subtitle of the story, was published in the magazine "Novy Mir" (1962. No. 11. P. 8 - 74; signed for printing on November 3; a signal copy was delivered to the editor-in-chief on the evening of November 15; according to the testimony of Vladimir Lakshin, mailing started on November 17; in the evening of November 19, about 2,000 copies were brought to the Kremlin for the participants in the plenum of the Central Committee) with A. Tvardovsky's note "Instead of a preface." Circulation 96,900 copies. (by permission of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 25,000 were printed additionally). Republished in "Roman-Gazeta" (Moscow: GIHL, 1963. No. 1/277. 47 p. 700,000 copies) and a book (Moscow: Soviet writer, 1963. 144 p. 100,000 copies). On June 11, 1963, Vladimir Lakshin wrote: “Solzhenitsyn presented me with the hastily released“ Soviet Writer ”,“ One Day… ”. The publication is really shameful: a gloomy, colorless cover, gray paper. Aleksandr Isaevich jokes: "They released it in the edition of the GULAG."

Cover of the publication "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" in Roman-Gazeta, 1963

“In order for her [story] to be published in the Soviet Union, it was necessary to have a combination of incredible circumstances and exceptional personalities,” A. Solzhenitsyn noted in a radio interview dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the publication of “One Day in Ivan Denisovich” for the BBC (June 8, 1982 G.). - It is absolutely clear: if it were not for Tvardovsky as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I will add. And if it had not been for Khrushchev at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at this very moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in the 62nd year, is like a phenomenon against physical laws, as if, for example, objects began to rise from the ground upward by themselves, or cold stones themselves began to heat up, heat up to fire. It’s impossible, it’s completely impossible. The system was designed this way, and for 45 years it has not released anything - and suddenly there is such a breakthrough. Yes, and Tvardovsky, and Khrushchev, and the moment - all had to come together. Of course, I could later send it abroad and publish it, but now, according to the reaction of the Western socialists, it is clear: if it were published in the West, these very socialists would say: everything is a lie, nothing of this happened, and there were no camps, and there was no destruction, nothing. It was only because everyone was deprived of their languages ​​because it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, and this shocked ”.

“If this had not happened [submission of the manuscript to Novy Mir and publication at home], something else would have happened, and worse,” wrote A. Solzhenitsyn fifteen years earlier. , as it was already prepared. I didn’t know that in the most successful version, if it was published and noticed in the West, even a hundredth part of that influence could not have happened ”.

The author's return to work on The Gulag Archipelago is connected with the publication of One Day in Ivan Denisovich. “Even before Ivan Denisovich, I had conceived the Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn said in a CBS television interview (June 17, 1974) conducted by Walter Cronkite. , 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, were 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 experienced, what they had. Or they insisted to meet with me and tell 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 have collected indescribable material, which in the Soviet Union and cannot be collected, - only thanks to“ Ivan Denisovich ”, - summed up A. S. in a radio interview for the BBC on June 8, 1982 - So he 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 Novy Mir and the Central State Archives of Literature and Art. According to Pravda (February 19, 1964), selected "for further discussion." Then included in the list for the secret ballot. I did not receive the award. Oles Gonchar for the novel "Tronka" and Vasily Peskov for the book "Steps on the dew" ("Pravda", April 22, 1964) became laureates in the field of literature, journalism and publicism. “Even then, in April 1964, it was rumored in Moscow that this story with the voting was a“ rehearsal for a putsch ”against Nikita: will the apparatus succeed or fail to withdraw the book approved by itself? For 40 years, they have never dared to do this. But now they got bold - and they succeeded. This encouraged them that He Himself is not strong either. "

From the second half of the 60s, "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" was withdrawn from circulation in the USSR along with other publications of A.S. The Glavlit Order No. 10 of February 14, 1974, specially dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, lists the issues of the Novy Mir magazine with the writer's works to be withdrawn from public libraries (No. 11, 1962; No. 1, 7, 1963; No. 1, 1966) and separate editions of One Day in Ivan Denisovich, including a translation into Estonian and a book “For the Blind”. The order is provided with a note: "Foreign publications (including newspapers and magazines) with the works of the specified author are also subject to seizure." The ban was lifted by a note from the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU dated December 31, 1988.

Since 1990 "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" has been published again at home.

Foreign feature film based on "One Day in Ivan Denisovich"

In 1971, an Anglo-Norwegian film was shot based on One Day in Ivan Denisovich (directed by Casper Wrede, with Tom Courtney in the role of 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 host about this film, he replied:

“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 it, did not survive, but they were able to guess this nagging mood and were able to convey this slow pace that fills the life of such a prisoner 10 years, sometimes 25, if, as often happens, he does not die sooner. Well, very small reproaches can be made to the design, this is mostly where the Western imagination simply can no longer imagine the details of such a life. For example, for our eye, for mine, or if my friends could see it, ex-convicts (will they ever see this film?) - for our eye the quilted jackets are too clean, not torn; then, almost all the actors, in general, are dense men, and after all, there in the camp people are on the very brink of death, they have sunken cheeks, they no longer have the strength. According to the film, it is so warm in the barracks that a Latvian with bare legs and hands is sitting there - this is impossible, you will freeze. Well, these are minor remarks, but in general, I must say, I am amazed how the filmmakers could understand this way and sincerely tried to convey our suffering to the Western audience. "

The day described in the story falls on January 1951.

Based on materials from the works of Vladimir Radzishevsky.