Lesson-reflection on the story by A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - Lesson. “Camp life in A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

D/z Compare the images of Shukhov and Matryona Timofeevna.

Compose a syncwine for the image of Matryona Timofeevna.

Sections: Literature

On August 4, 2008, the great Russian thinker, prose writer, playwright of the 20th century, Nobel Prize laureate in literature, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn passed away. For Russian culture, he became a symbol of the 20th century. In this connection, the Department of State Policy and Legal Regulation in the Field of Education recommended studying the writer’s work in school, due to the scale of his personality and the significance that this figure has for the history of the development of social thought in Russia in the second half of the 20th century. and literary history of the same period.

Studying the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the course of 20th century literature. associated primarily with the “camp theme” in Russian literature of the 20th century. Turning to this work allows us to raise the topic of the tragic fate of man in a totalitarian state and the responsibility of the people and their leaders for the present and future of the country.

A textual rather than a survey study of this work is proposed in literature lessons in the 11th grade, because The “camp theme” may not be understood by students if they do not refer to the text of the work.

The study of “One Day:” allows us to show what the role of fiction is in the process of discovering the tragic pages of Russian history of the 20th century.

A group form of work is used (exemplary answers are given partially), elements of theater pedagogy.

Goals and objectives of the lesson:

• introduce the life and work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the history of the creation of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, its genre and compositional features, artistic and expressive means, the hero of the work;
• note the features of the writer’s artistic skill;
• consider the reflection of the tragic conflicts of history in the destinies of the heroes;

Equipment: portrait and photographs of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, literary sheets on the writer’s work, an exhibition of his books, a fragment of the feature film “Cold Summer of ’53”, a reference diagram based on the text of the work, a retrospective (1977, 1970, 1969, 1967) of dates in life of the writer, plaques with the names of writers for an impromptu meeting of the Union of Writers of the USSR (K. Fedin, A. Korneichuk, A. Surkov, Y. Yashin, A.I. Solzhenitsyn).

Questions on the board to update perception:

- What does the writer see as his purpose in literature?

Where does his creativity come from?

What allows a person to survive in inhuman conditions?

How can a person remain free in conditions of actual unfreedom?

Vocabulary work:

• retrospective -

During the classes

1. Determining the purpose and objectives of the lesson.

Retrospective of a selection of newspaper articles critical of A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

Theatrical meeting of the USSR Writers' Union.

Brief biographical information about the writer.

Stills from the film "Cold Summer of '53".

Analysis of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich":

1) history of creation and publication, genre of the work;

2) theme, main idea, plot of the story;

3) pre-camp biography of the hero;

4) character traits and spiritual qualities of Ivan Denisovich;

5) “the camp through the eyes of a man”;

6) the breadth of the work’s subject matter;

8) the meaning of the epithet for the word “day” included in the title of the story;

Why not only grief squeezes the heart when reading this wonderful book, but also light penetrates the soul.
This is because of deep humanity, because people remained human even in an environment of mockery.
Zh.Medvedev.

Teacher's opening remarks:

:On one damp February day in 1974, a single passenger descended down the ramp of a Soviet plane that had arrived unscheduled from Moscow to Frankfurt am Main. This passenger in a demi-season coat, with the buttons cut off on the collar of his shirt, who three hours ago had been slurping prison stew in the famous Lefortovo, and now did not know exactly what awaited him.

German officials who met the unusual Russian guest (or titled exile), and then the famous German writer Heinrich Böll, of course, could not help but notice on his face traces of obvious fatigue, the corollas of wrinkles around his eyes, keen and observant, the grooves on his forehead: These were signs of continuous work of thought.

Who was this lonely Russian exiled passenger, silent, stingy in his movements and extremely taciturn in his first conversations with the press? Everything in him was “pressed” to the limit, the spring of will was not dissolved. Borders, visas, passports! They flash for him, replacing each other, but his inner world has not changed. Nothing separated him for a moment - as the near future showed - from the continent of Russian history, from Russia.

This passenger, who flatly refused many questions from journalists, was Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, who went through many rounds of trials in his homeland. And in this lesson it is proposed to consider these circles in retrospect, that is, to turn back to the writer’s past and find out why A.I. Solzhenitsyn ended up abroad, what Alexander Isaevich sees as his purpose in literature as a writer, what were the origins of his creativity using the example of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.

Let's listen to some newspaper collections those years with eloquent headings, selected from the writer’s numerous letters (students write out dates and read out messages).

TASS message: By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, A.I. Solzhenitsyn was deprived of USSR citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union for systematically committing actions incompatible with belonging to USSR citizenship and causing damage to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

With a feeling of relief, I read that the Supreme Soviet of the USSR deprived Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship, that our society got rid of him. Solzhenitsyn's civil death is natural and fair. Valentin Kataev.

From the secretariat of the board of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR: With his open letter, Solzhenitsyn proved that he stands on positions alien to our people, and thereby confirmed the necessity, justice and inevitability of his exclusion from the Union of Soviet Writers...

Teacher's word: On September 22, 1967, a meeting of the secretariat of the USSR Writers' Union took place. And today we have a unique opportunity to reproduce part of it. 30 writers attended the meeting. K. Fedin chaired. A.I. Solzhenitsyn was invited. The meeting to analyze his letters began at 1 p.m. and ended after 6 p.m. (students take part in the role of writers; they come out with signs with the names of the writers written on them and sit down at the table, then take turns going to the impromptu podium to give a speech).

K. Fedin: I was shocked by Solzhenitsyn’s letters. And today we will have to talk about his works, but it seems to me that we need to talk in general about his letters.

A. Korneychuk: With our creativity we defend our government, our party, our people. We go abroad to fight. We return from there exhausted, exhausted, but with the knowledge of our duty. We know that you have suffered a lot, but you are not alone (addressing Solzhenitsyn). There were many other people in the camps besides you. Old communists. They went from the camp to the front. In our past there was not only lawlessness, there was heroism. But you didn't notice it. Everything you write is evil, dirty, offensive!

A. Surkov: Solzhenitsyn is more dangerous for us than Pasternak. Pasternak was a man cut off from life, and Solzhenitsyn had a lively, militant, ideological temperament. This is an ideological man, this is a dangerous man.

A. Yashin (Popov): The author of “The Feast of the Winners” is poisoned by hatred. People are outraged that there is such a writer in the ranks of the Writers' Union. I would like to propose expelling him from the Union. He was not the only one who suffered, but others understand the tragedy of the times.

K. Fedin: Let's give the floor to the writer himself - A. I. Solzhenitsyn.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn: I believe that the tasks of literature both in relation to society and in relation to the individual are not to hide the truth from him, to soften it, but to tell the truth as it is: The tasks of the writer concern the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the collision of life and death, overcoming spiritual grief and those laws of extended humanity that originated in the immemorial depths of millennia and will cease only when the sun goes out. Tell me, what is my letter about?

A.I. Solzhenitsyn: You didn’t understand anything then about censorship. This is a letter about the fate of our great literature, which once conquered and captivated the whole world. I am a patriot, I love my homeland. Under my soles all my life is the land of the fatherland, only its pain I hear, only I write about it.

Teacher's word:

Historical reference. We are talking about the “Open Letter” written by A.I. Solzhenitsyn on May 16, 1967 to the delegates of the IV All-Union Congress and sent by Alexander Isaevich to the presidium of the congress as a speech, since he himself was no longer elected as a delegate.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn: Without access to the congress rostrum, I ask you to discuss the unbearable oppression to which our fiction has been subjected from decade to decade by censorship. Literature cannot develop in the categories of “if they let you in or they don’t let you in.” Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that does not dare to convey its pain and anxiety to society, to warn at the right time about threatening moral and social dangers, does not even deserve the name of literature.

They say about me: “He was released early!” In addition to the 8-year sentence, I spent a month in transit prisons, then received eternal exile without a sentence, with this eternal doom I spent three years in exile, only thanks to the 20th Congress I was released - and this is called early!

I am alone, hundreds slander me. The only consolation is that I will never get a heart attack from any slander, because I was hardened in Stalin’s camps.

No one can block the paths of truth, and I am ready to accept death for its movement. But perhaps many lessons will teach us, finally, not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime. This has never once embellished our history.

Given (briefly) biographical information about the writer prepared by students.

Teacher's word: “My homeland is there, my heart is there, that’s why I’m going,” the writer said before flying to Russia on May 27, 1994. He turned out to be a prophet of his own destiny, since he foresaw his return back in the stagnant year of 1984: “I will return there, not only will my books return, but I will return there alive: For some reason it seems to me that I will die in my homeland.”

In the summer of 2008, Russia suffered a great loss: a citizen writer died, who passionately and devotedly loved his Motherland, rooting for it with all his soul; a person with a clearly expressed position in life, who goes to the end in defending his moral principles; a persistent, courageous person (approximately this verbal portrait should appear in students’ notebooks).

Solzhenitsyn began his search in the name of man within one person, the hero of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

Historical reference: From 5.5 to 6.5 million people became victims of terror from 1947-1953 (data in all sources are based on materials collected by A.I. Solzhenitsyn).

In 1970, a film based on the story was shot in Norway. The feature film “Cold Summer of ’53” has been created in Russian cinema, several frames of which will help transport you to the atmosphere of those years and answer the question: what is the common destinies of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and the heroes of the film (view). In his work, A.I. Solzhenitsyn reflected the tragic conflicts of history in the destinies of the heroes; showed how people became slaves to the “cult of personality.” And all the same: the spirit of the people broke through like a sprout breaking the asphalt (Zh. Medvedev).

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

1. History of creation and publication, genre of the work.

“One Day” was conceived by the author during general work in the Ekibastuz Special Camp in the winter of 1950-51. Implemented in 1959, first as “Shch - 854 (One day of one prisoner)” (shch-854 is the camp number of the writer himself). After the XXII Congress, the writer for the first time decided to propose something to the public press and chose A. Tvardovsky’s “New World”. Getting published was not easy.

“How was this born? It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought how to describe the entire camp world - in one day. Of course, you can describe your 10 years of camp, there, the whole history of the camps, but enough in in one day, collect only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening, and that’s all.

This idea was born to me in 1952. In the camp. Well, of course, it was crazy to think about it then. And then the years passed. And in 1959 I thought: it seems that I could already apply this idea now. For seven years she just lay there. Let me try to write one day of one prisoner. I sat down and how it started pouring! With terrible tension! Because many of these days are concentrated in you at once. And just so as not to miss anything, I incredibly quickly wrote “One day:”

Image of Ivan Denisovich was formed from the soldier Shukhov, who fought with the author in the Soviet-German war (and never went to prison), the general experience of prisoners and the author’s personal experience in a special camp as a mason.

The genre of the story attracted the writer, since a lot can be put into a small form, and it is a great pleasure for an artist to work on a small form, because in it you can “hone the edges with great pleasure for yourself.”

2. Determine the theme, main idea, reveal the plot of the story.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is not only a portrait of one day in our history, it is a book about the resistance of the human spirit to camp violence.

3. Although the plot of the story is based on the events of one day, the memories of the main character allow us to imagine him pre-camp biography. Briefly describe it.

4. Note the character traits and spiritual qualities of Ivan Denisovich.

What kind of figure is in front of us? What impression does the hero evoke?

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is, first of all, a peasant, he is characterized by prudence, thoroughness in thoughts, he is not fussy, eating into the little things of life; knows that it is from them that life consists; resourceful, reasonable, never loses human dignity.

His character is revealed in a whole series of small episodes.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the name “Ivan” in the translation of ancient Hebrew. - (God) had mercy, (God) had mercy.

5. What is Solzhenitsyn’s camp in this story? How can a person live and survive in it? What is the logic behind the character composition?

The convict camp was taken from Solzhenitsyn not as an exception, but as a way of life.

A person can gather his strength and fight against circumstances. You can survive only by resisting the camp order of forced forced extinction. And the whole plot, if you look closely, is the plot of non-resistance between living and non-living things, between Man and the Camp. The camp was created for the sake of murder, aimed at destroying the most important thing in a person - the inner world: thoughts, conscience, memory. “Life here tormented him from waking up to bedtime, leaving no idle memories: And he had even less reason to remember the village of Temgenevo and his native hut.”

Camp law: “If you die today, I will die tomorrow.” This general “guidance of life” puts a person on the other side of good and evil. Not allowing yourself to do this if you want to be called a Human is Shukhov’s task.

Question to the students of the whole class: what saves a person in this inhuman life?

1) Saves belonging to a community of people. Here it is a brigade, an analogue of a family in free life.

2) Saves work(the episode of laying a wall at the site is re-read: “He did the work dashingly, but without thinking at all:”). Ivan Denisovich returned both to himself and to others - albeit for a short time! - a feeling of purity and even holiness of work. The whole masonry scene is a scene of human emancipation, since they stopped being afraid, they even forgot about security.

6. Is only life in the camp zone the thematic content of the story? Which fragments of it indicate a greater breadth of topics?

1) Modern village life;

2) memories of the village;

3) discussion of Eisenstein’s film “Ivan the Terrible”;

4) details of Soviet history in connection with the fates of fellow prisoners (the fate of foreman Tyurin reflected the consequences of collectivization in the country).

Description of the scene is subject to the principle of expanding concentric circles: barracks - zone - crossing the steppe - construction site. The enclosed space is limited by a wire fence. Camp is home, that’s what everyone says: “We’re going home.” There is no time to remember another, real house in a day, but it exists in the story thanks to the hero’s inner vision. And then the next row appears concentric circles: house - village - region - Motherland. (reference diagram)

Time Decree.

None of the prisoners ever sees a watch in their eyes, and what is the point of a watch? The prisoner just needs to know whether it’s time to get up soon, how long before the divorce? Before lunch? Before lights out? Prisoners are not given a clock; the authorities know the time for them.

Time is determined by the sun and month:

“Shukhov raised his head to the sky and gasped: the sky was clear, and the sun had risen almost by lunchtime. It’s a wondrous wonder: now it’s time to go to work! How many times did Shukhov notice: the days in the camp roll by - you won’t look back. But the deadline itself doesn’t pass at all, not gets rid of it completely."

“In the morning, this is the only way the prisoners can save themselves by dragging themselves to work slowly. Those who run fast will not live out their time in the camp - they will evaporate and fall.”

8. Find an epithet for the word “day” in the title of the story.

“Almost a happy day,” thinks Ivan Denisovich Shukhov at the end of his day. Let's name the happy events in the life of the hero of this day:

He hesitated on the rise - they didn’t put him in a punishment cell;

The brigade was not driven out into an open field in the cold to pull the wire from themselves;

At lunchtime I managed to make some porridge;

The foreman closed the interest well, therefore, the next five days the foreman will be “well-fed”;

I found a piece of a hacksaw, forgot about it, but didn’t get caught during the “shmon”;

I worked for Caesar in the evening and bought some tobacco;

And he didn’t get sick, he got over it.

“Not overshadowed by anything,” the happy day of a simple Soviet prisoner I.D. Shukhov. “The day passed, unclouded, almost happy.” “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added:”

Question for the whole class: why did the author show us a “happy” camp day? (I think because the author’s main goal is to show the Russian national character in various circumstances, to show through an event, a chain of events, a personality. The camp is such an “event.” And the personality is Ivan Denisovich Shukhov).

9. Conclusion from the analysis of the story.

What is the hero of the story?

“Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a Russian man, savvy, delicate, hard-working, in whom the cruel era of cultivating envy, anger and denunciations did not kill that decency, that moral foundation that firmly lives among the people, never allowing deep down the soul to confuse good and evil, honor and dishonor, no matter how much they call it, - in the name of what, in the name of what social experiment, what game of mind and fantasy - torn from the family, from the earth and thrown into a huge barracks inhabited by other rooms (A. Latynina).

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn served almost a third of his prison camp term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - in the Ekibastuz special camp in northern Kazakhstan. There, at the general works, the idea of ​​a story about one day of one prisoner flashed through on a long winter day. “It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought how I should describe the entire camp world - in one day,” the author said in a television interview with Nikita Struve (March 1976). “Of course, you can describe your ten years of the camp, the entire history of the camps, but it’s enough to collect everything in one day, as if from fragments; it’s enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” [see. on our website its full text, summary and literary analysis] written in Ryazan, where Solzhenitsyn settled in June 1957 and from the new school year became a teacher of physics and astronomy at secondary school No. 2. Started on May 18, 1959, completed on 30 June. The work took less than a month and a half. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the way of which you know too much, and it’s not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only fight off unnecessary material, just so that the unnecessary is not climbed, but it could accommodate the most necessary things,” the author said in a radio interview for the BBC (June 8, 1982), conducted by Barry Holland.

While writing in the camp, Solzhenitsyn, in order to keep what he wrote secret and himself along with it, first memorized only poetry, and at the end of his term, dialogues in prose and even continuous prose. In exile, and then rehabilitated, he could work without destroying passage after passage, but he had to remain hidden as before in order to avoid a new arrest. After retyping it on a typewriter, the manuscript was burned. The manuscript of the camp story was also burned. And since the typewriting had to be hidden, the text was printed on both sides of the sheet, without margins and without spaces between the lines.

Only more than two years later, after a sudden violent attack on Stalin launched by his successor N. S. Khrushchev at the XXII Party Congress (October 17 - 31, 1961), A.S. ventured to propose the story for publication. “Cave Typescript” (out of caution - without the name of the author) on November 10, 1961 was transferred by R.D. Orlova, the wife of A.S.’s prison friend, Lev Kopelev, to the prose department of the magazine “New World” to Anna Samoilovna Berzer. The typists rewrote the original, Anna Samoilovna asked Lev Kopelev, who came to the editorial office, what to call the author, and Kopelev suggested a pseudonym at his place of residence - A. Ryazansky.

On December 8, 1961, as soon as the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, appeared at the editorial office after a month’s absence, A. S. Berzer asked him to read two difficult manuscripts. One did not need a special recommendation, at least based on what I had heard about the author: it was the story “Sofya Petrovna” by Lydia Chukovskaya. About the other, Anna Samoilovna said: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.” It was this that Tvardovsky took with him until the morning. On the night of December 8-9, he reads and rereads the story. In the morning, he dials up the chain to the same Kopelev, asks about the author, finds out his address, and a day later calls him to Moscow by telegram. On December 11, on the day of his 43rd birthday, A.S. received this telegram: “I ask the editors of the new world to come urgently, expenses will be paid = Tvardovsky.” And Kopelev already on December 9 telegraphed to Ryazan: “Alexander Trifonovich is delighted with the article” (this is how the former prisoners agreed among themselves to encrypt the unsafe story). For himself, Tvardovsky wrote down in his workbook on December 12: “The strongest impression of the last days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solongitsyn), whom I will meet today.” Tvardovsky recorded the author's real name from his voice.

On December 12, Tvardovsky received Solzhenitsyn, calling the entire editorial board to meet and talk with him. “Tvardovsky warned me,” notes A.S., “that he did not firmly promise publication (Lord, I was glad that they did not hand it over to the ChekGB!), and he would not indicate a deadline, but he would not spare any effort.” Immediately the editor-in-chief ordered to conclude an agreement with the author, as A.S. notes... “at the highest rate accepted by them (one advance is my two-year salary).” A.S. earned “sixty rubles a month” by teaching.

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

The original titles of the story were “Shch-854”, “One Day of One Prisoner”. The final title was composed by the editorial office of Novy Mir on the author’s first visit, at the insistence of Tvardovsky, “throwing assumptions across the table with the participation of Kopelev.”

Following all the rules of Soviet apparatus games, Tvardovsky began to gradually prepare a multi-move combination in order to ultimately enlist the support of the country’s chief apparatchik, Khrushchev, the only person who could authorize the publication of the camp story. At Tvardovsky’s request, written reviews of “Ivan Denisovich” were written by K. I. Chukovsky (his note was called “Literary Miracle”), S. Ya. Marshak, K. G. Paustovsky, K. M. Simonov... Tvardovsky himself compiled a brief preface to the story and a letter addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR N. S. Khrushchev. On August 6, 1962, after a nine-month editorial period, the manuscript of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” with a letter from Tvardovsky was sent to Khrushchev’s assistant, V. S. Lebedev, who agreed, after waiting for a favorable moment, to introduce the patron to the unusual work.

Tvardovsky wrote:

“Dear Nikita Sergeevich!

I would not have considered it possible to encroach on your time on a private literary matter, if not for this truly exceptional case.

We are talking about the amazingly talented story by A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The name of this author has not been known to anyone until now, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names in our literature.

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

But due to the unusual nature of the life material covered in the story, I feel an urgent need for your advice and approval.

In a word, dear Nikita Sergeevich, if you find 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, routine work with the author on the manuscript was going on in the magazine. On July 23, the story was discussed by the editorial board. A member of the editorial board, and soon Tvardovsky’s closest collaborator, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in his diary:

“I see Solzhenitsyn for the first time. This is a man of about forty, ugly, in a summer suit - canvas trousers and a shirt with an unbuttoned collar. The appearance is rustic, the eyes are set deep. There is a scar on the forehead. Calm, reserved, but not embarrassed. He speaks well, fluently, clearly, with an exceptional sense of dignity. Laughs openly, showing two rows of large teeth.

Tvardovsky invited him - in the most delicate form, unobtrusively - to think about the comments of Lebedev and Chernoutsan [an employee of the CPSU Central Committee, to whom Tvardovsky gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript]. Let’s say, add righteous indignation to the kavtorang, remove the shade of sympathy for the Banderaites, give someone from the camp authorities (at least an overseer) in more conciliatory, restrained tones, not all of them were scoundrels.

Dementyev [deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir] spoke about the same thing more sharply and straightforwardly. Yaro stood up for Eisenstein, his “Battleship Potemkin.” He said that even from an artistic point of view he was not satisfied with the pages of the conversation with the Baptist. However, it is not the art that confuses him, but the same fears that hold him back. Dementiev also said (I objected to this) that it was important for the author to think about how his story would be received by former prisoners who remained staunch communists after the camp.

This hurt Solzhenitsyn. He replied that he had not thought about such a special category of readers and did not want to think about it. “There is a book, and there is me. Maybe I’m thinking about the reader, but this is the reader in general, and not different categories... Then, all these people were not in general work. They, according to their qualifications or former position, usually got jobs in the commandant’s office, at a bread slicer, etc. But you can understand Ivan Denisovich’s position only by working in general work, that is, knowing it from the inside. Even if I were in the same camp, but observed it from the side, I would not have written this. If I hadn’t written it, I wouldn’t have understood what kind of salvation work is...”

A dispute arose about that part of the story where the author directly speaks about the position of the katorang, that he - a sensitive, thinking person - must turn into a stupid animal. And here Solzhenitsyn did not concede: “This is the most important thing. Anyone who does not become dull in the camp, does not coarse his feelings, perishes. That's the only way I saved myself. I’m scared now to look at the photograph as I came out of it: then I was older than now, about fifteen years, and I was stupid, clumsy, my thought worked clumsily. And that’s the only reason I was saved. If, as an intellectual, I was internally tossing around, nervous, worried about everything that happened, I would probably die.”

During the conversation, Tvardovsky inadvertently mentioned a red pencil, which at the last minute could erase something or other from the story. Solzhenitsyn became alarmed and asked to explain what this meant. Can the editor or censor remove something without showing him the text? “To me the integrity of this thing is more valuable than its printing,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn carefully wrote down all comments and suggestions. He said that he divides them into three categories: those with which he can agree, even believes that they are beneficial; those that he will think about are difficult for him; and finally, impossible - those with which he does not want to see the thing printed.

Tvardovsky proposed his amendments timidly, almost embarrassedly, and when Solzhenitsyn took the floor, he looked at him with love and immediately agreed if the author’s objections were well founded.”

A.S. also wrote about the same discussion:

“The main thing that Lebedev demanded was to remove all those places in which the kavtorang was presented as a comic figure (by the standards of Ivan Denisovich), as he was intended, and to emphasize the partisanship of the kavtorang (you must have a “positive hero”!). This seemed to me the least of the sacrifices. I removed the comic, and what remained was something “heroic,” but “insufficiently developed,” as critics later found. Now the captain's protest at the divorce was a little inflated (the idea was that the protest was ridiculous), but this, perhaps, did not disturb the picture of the camp. Then it was necessary to use the word “butts” less often when referring to the guards; I reduced it from seven to three; less often - “bad” and “bad” about the authorities (it was a bit dense for me); and so that at least not the author, but the kavtorang would condemn the Banderaites (I gave such a phrase to the kavtorang, but later threw it out in a separate publication: it was natural for the kavtorang, but they were too heavily reviled anyway). Also, to give the prisoners some hope of freedom (but I couldn’t do that). And, the funniest thing for me, a Stalin hater, was that at least once it was necessary to name Stalin as the culprit of the disaster. (And indeed, he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This is not accidental, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin alone.) I made this concession: I mentioned “the mustachioed old man” once...”

On September 15, Lebedev told Tvardovsky by phone that “Solzhenitsyn (“One Day”) has been approved by N[ikita] S[ergeevi]ch” and that in the coming days the boss would invite him for a conversation. However, Khrushchev himself considered it necessary to enlist the support of the party elite. The decision to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was made on October 12, 1962 at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee under pressure from Khrushchev. And only on October 20 did he receive Tvardovsky to report the favorable result of his efforts. About the story itself, Khrushchev remarked: “Yes, the material is unusual, but, I will say, both the style and the language are unusual - it’s not suddenly vulgar. Well, I think it's a very strong thing. And, despite such material, it does not evoke a heavy feeling, although there is a lot of bitterness there.”

Having read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” even before publication, in typescript, Anna Akhmatova, who described it in “ Requiem“The grief of the “hundred-million people” on this side of the prison gates, she said with emphasis: “I must read this story and learn it by heart - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union."

The story, called a story by the editors in the subtitle for weight, was published in the magazine “New World” (1962. No. 11. P. 8 – 74; signed for publication on November 3; advance copy was delivered to the editor-in-chief on the evening of November 15; according to Vladimir Lakshin, mailing started on November 17; on the evening of November 19, about 2,000 copies were brought to the Kremlin for participants in the plenum of the Central Committee) with a note by A. Tvardovsky “Instead of a Preface.” Circulation 96,900 copies. (with the permission of the CPSU Central Committee, 25,000 were additionally printed). Republished in “Roman-Gazeta” (M.: GIHL, 1963. No. 1/277. 47 pp. 700,000 copies) and as a book (M.: Soviet Writer, 1963. 144 pp. 100,000 copies). On June 11, 1963, Vladimir Lakshin wrote: “Solzhenitsyn gave me the hastily released “One Day...” by “Soviet Writer.” The publication is truly shameful: gloomy, colorless cover, gray paper. Alexander Isaevich jokes: “They released it in the GULAG publication.”

Cover of the publication “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in Roman-Gazeta, 1963

“In order for it [the story] to be published in the Soviet Union, it took a confluence of incredible circumstances and exceptional personalities,” noted A. Solzhenitsyn in a radio interview on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” for the BBC (June 8, 1982 G.). – It is absolutely clear: if Tvardovsky had not been the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I'll add. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at that very moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union in 1962 was like a phenomenon against physical laws, as if, for example, objects began to rise upward from the ground on their own, or cold stones began to heat up on their own, heating up to the point of fire. This is impossible, this is absolutely impossible. The system was structured this way, and for 45 years it had not released anything - and suddenly there was such a breakthrough. Yes, Tvardovsky, Khrushchev, and the moment - everyone had to get together. Of course, I could then send it abroad and publish it, but now, from the reaction of Western socialists, it is clear: if it had been published in the West, these same socialists would have said: it’s all lies, none of this happened, and there were no camps, and there was no destruction, nothing happened. It was only because everyone was speechless because it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow that it shocked me.”

“If this [submission of the manuscript to Novy Mir and publication at home] had not happened, something else would have happened, and worse,” A. Solzhenitsyn wrote fifteen years earlier, “I would have sent the photographic film with camp things - abroad, under the pseudonym Stepan Khlynov , as it had already been prepared. I didn’t know that in the best case scenario, if it were both published and noticed in the West, not even a hundredth of that influence could have happened.”

The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is associated with the author’s return to work on The Gulag Archipelago. “Even before Ivan Denisovich, I conceived the Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn said in a television interview with CBS (June 17, 1974), conducted by Walter Cronkite, “I felt that such a systematic thing was needed, a general plan of everything that was , and in time, how it happened. But my personal experience and the experience of my comrades, no matter how much I asked about the camps, all the fates, all the episodes, all the stories, was not enough for such a thing. And when “Ivan Denisovich” was published, letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted on meeting me and telling me, and I started dating. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, more, to describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and brought me the missing material.” “And so I collected indescribable material, which cannot be collected in the Soviet Union, only thanks to “Ivan Denisovich,” summed up A.S. in a radio interview for the BBC on June 8, 1982. “So it became like a pedestal for “The Gulag Archipelago”.

In December 1963, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was nominated for the Lenin Prize by the editorial board of the New World and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art. According to Pravda (February 19, 1964), selected “for further discussion.” Then included in the list for secret voting. Didn't receive the prize. Laureates in the field of literature, journalism and publicism were Oles Gonchar for the novel “Tronka” and Vasily Peskov for the book “Steps on the Dew” (“Pravda”, April 22, 1964). “Even then, in April 1964, there was talk in Moscow that this story with the vote was a “rehearsal for a putsch” against Nikita: would the apparatus succeed or not succeed in withdrawing a book approved by Himself? In 40 years they have never dared to do this. But they became bolder and succeeded. This reassured them that He Himself was not strong.”

From the second half of the 60s, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was withdrawn from circulation in the USSR along with other publications by A.S. The final ban on them was introduced by order of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, agreed upon with the Central Committee of the CPSU, dated January 28, 1974 Glavlit’s order No. 10 of February 14, 1974, specially dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, lists the issues of the magazine “New World” containing the writer’s works that are subject to removal from public libraries (No. 11, 1962; No. 1, 7, 1963; No. 1, 1966) and separate editions of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, including a translation into Estonian and a book “for the blind”. The order is accompanied by a note: “Foreign publications (including newspapers and magazines) containing the works of the specified author are also subject to seizure.” The ban was lifted by a note from the Ideological Department of the CPSU Central Committee dated December 31, 1988.

Since 1990, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has been published again in his homeland.

Foreign feature film based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

In 1971, an English-Norwegian film was made based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (directed by Kasper Wrede, Tom Courtenay played Shukhov). For the first time, A. Solzhenitsyn was able to watch it only in 1974. Speaking on French television (March 9, 1976), when asked by the presenter about this film, he answered:

“I must say that the directors and actors of this film approached the task very honestly, and with great penetration, they themselves did not experience this, did not survive, but were able to guess this painful mood and were able to convey this slow pace that fills the life of such a prisoner 10 years, sometimes 25, unless, as often happens, he dies first. Well, very minor criticisms can be made of the design; this is mostly where the Western imagination simply cannot imagine the details of such a life. For example, for our eyes, for mine, or if my friends could see it, former prisoners (will they ever see this film?), - for our eyes the padded jackets are too clean, not torn; then, almost all the actors, in general, are heavy-set men, and yet in the camp there are people on the very verge of death, their cheeks are hollow, they have no more strength. According to the film, it’s so warm in the barracks that there’s a Latvian sitting there with bare legs and arms - this is impossible, you’ll freeze. Well, these are minor remarks, but in general, I must say, I’m surprised how the authors of the film could understand so much and with a sincere soul tried to convey our suffering to the Western audience.”

The day described in the story occurs in January 1951.

Based on materials from the works of Vladimir Radzishevsky.

1. Biographical information.
2. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”: the camp through the eyes of a man.
3. “The Gulag Archipelago”: the harsh truth of the Soviet concentration world.
4. Novel chronicle “The Red Wheel”: the truth about the Russian revolution, unclaimed by society.

LITERATURE:

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

In the early 1980s, American President Reagan invited the most prominent Soviet dissidents living in the West to breakfast. Of all those who were invited, only Solzhenitsyn refused, saying that he was not a dissident, but a Russian writer who could not talk with the head of state, whose generals were 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, 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 child’s memory of his father and the past of the Solzhenitsyn Cossack family to fade away.
Solzhenitsyn always studied very willingly, diligently, and 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 a very early age. He knew how to be friends, keep his word, and never refused help.
After successfully graduating from school, Solzhenitsyn entered the physics and mathematics department of Rostov University, where he spent the years from 1936 to 1941.
In October 1941, being mobilized into the army, he ended up in a horse-drawn 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 a combat path that went all the way to East Prussia.
In 1943, after the capture of Orel, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, and in 1944, after the capture of Bobruisk, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Battle.
The war became a period of Solzhenitsyn’s rapid 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 Russia in 1917. This was evidenced by his letters to his friend Nikolai Vitkevich. Solzhenitsyn was too frank 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 the Kaluga outpost, from the summer of 1946 to the summer of 1947 - a special prison in the city of Rybinsk, then - the Marfinskaya "sharashka" (that is, a special institute in the northern suburbs of Moscow), from 1949 - camp work in Ekibastuz. If we take into account that in the Marfinsk sharashka (depicted in the novel “In the First Circle”) the writer could read a lot and talk with very original people, then Solzhenitsyn’s camp route was apparently less “steep” than, say, the routes of “immersions in darkness” by V. Shalamov, which ran through the icy deserts of Kolyma, than “steep routes” and a two-year stay in solitary confinement by 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 at an oncology hospital. The actual operation - for seminoma - was performed on him while still in the camp, and in Tashkent Solzhenitsyn was irradiated with X-rays to the abdominal cavity (an episode of his stay in an oncology clinic is covered in the story “Cancer Ward”, 1968).
There was a period when doctors said that their patient had no more than three weeks to live. “It was a terrible moment in my life: death on the verge of deliverance... However, I did not die (with my hopelessly advanced acutely malignant tumor, it was God’s miracle, I could not understand it any other way. All the life returned to me since then is not mine in the full sense, it has a nested goal").
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 Yard.” Also in 1957, the writer moved to Ryazan, where he lived until 1969.
In 1962, Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of 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 first volume of The Gulag Archipelago appeared, Solzhenitsyn was accused of treason and deported abroad. Until 1976 he lived in Zurich, then moved to the American state of Vermont, whose nature resembled central Russia.
Solzhenitsyn's first marriage was unsuccessful, the second was extremely happy. The writer has three sons - Ermolai, Ignat and Stepan.
In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. His creative path - and especially in the genre of journalism - continues. On December 11, 1988, Solzhenitsyn turned 80 years old. This event was celebrated, but not widely enough. It seems to me that today's Russia is not able to properly appreciate Solzhenitsyn's contribution to national culture. (“Big things are seen from a distance”).
The relationship between the artist and the authorities, as always, is not easy. The programs that Solzhenitsyn hosted 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 Solzhenitsyn fame was the story (story) “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It is with a conversation about this work that we will begin our analysis of the writer’s work.
This story was conceived by the author in 1950. Implemented in 1959, first as “Shch-854 (one day for one prisoner).” In the fall of 1961, it was submitted to the New World 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 went to prison), the general experience of the prisoners and the author’s personal experience in the Special Camp as a mason. The remaining persons are all from camp life, with their authentic biographies.
It should be said that “One Day...” was not Solzhenitsyn’s first work about the camps. Before this story, the play “The Deer and the Shalashovka” and the novel “In the First Circle” were written. Due to circumstances beyond the control of the author, it was the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” that was destined to introduce a previously forbidden topic into Russian literature.
Solzhenitsyn said the following about the idea of ​​the story: “In 1950, on some long winter camp day, I was carrying a stretcher with my partner and thinking: how to describe our entire camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, and the day of the simplest worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And there is no need to intensify any horrors, it is not necessary for this to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day from which life is made up.” And indeed, in this work the writer does not depict horror, bitterness, does not depict the fate of people at stake on the card of chance, on the playing card of thieves. There is even a situation in the story - the return of a convoy from a facility - when the prisoners and the guards seem to be at the same time.
The day described in the work turns out to be unusually “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 an open field in the cold to pull the wire from themselves; I managed to make some porridge at lunchtime; the foreman closed the interest well, therefore, for the next five days all the foreman will be “well-fed”; I found a piece of a hacksaw, forgot about it, but didn’t get caught during the search; I worked for Caesar in the evening, then bought some tobacco; and didn’t get sick, he got over it. A “lucky” day for a simple Soviet prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
Why did the author show us a “happy” camp day? It seems because the everyday, static story about camp life, according to the author’s plan, should have turned out to be no less shocking than the possible whipping up of fears, torments, and cries of terror. The reader should have been horrified by the ordinary, by what was not considered a catastrophe of humanism. Solzhenitsyn, without looking for an amazing plot, spoke about the camp as something that has long and firmly existed, is not at all extraordinary, has its own regulations, an everyday set of rules of survival, its own folklore, its own camp “morality” and established discipline. The author’s calculation was justified: the everyday nature 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 hero completely unusual for it. A characteristic feature of Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary literature was its anti-democratic nature. In books about the war, the hero became an officer, in books about construction - an engineer, in books about collective farms - the secretary of the district committee or, at worst, the chairman of the 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 becomes a simple man, 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 this way: “When 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 does not at all idealize his hero. Nerzhin, the main character of the novel “In the Circle...”, will also say about people like Ivan Denisovich: “They (the men) endured hunger and thirst no more steadfastly than he (Nerzhin). They were no stronger in spirit in front of the stone wall of a ten-year sentence... But they were blinder and more trusting of informers. They were more susceptible to the gross deceptions of their superiors... And they were also much more greedy for small goods: an additional sour hundred-gram millet, ugly trousers, if only they were a little newer and more colorful. Most of them lacked that point of view that becomes dearer than life itself.” But Solzhenitsyn takes Shukhov as his hero - firstly, because he represents that “languageless Russia”, which the writer considers it his duty to tell about, and, secondly, because, according to Solzhenitsyn, it was the Shukhovs who carried bear the brunt of all camp work on their shoulders.
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, 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?
Firstly, involvement in a community of people. In the story, this is a brigade, an analogue of a family in free life. The role of the father is played by the foreman, whose authority rests on justice, humanity and food. “The foreman in the camp is everything: a good foreman will give you a second life, a bad foreman will force you into a wooden pea coat... the foreman has a steel chest. But he will move an eyebrow or point a finger - run, do it.”
The second thing, according to Solzhenitsyn, that saves a person from falling is work. There is an episode in the story when the prisoners are putting up a wall with real passion. This episode is a kind of “symphony of labor.” Ivan Denisovich is so passionate about his work that he works even longer than the allotted time. Ivan Denisovich knows that his work brings bonuses to his superiors, to those people who abuse prisoners, but he still cannot work poorly. This is the kind of person he is.
Solzhenitsyn shows that there is only one way to survive in the camp: you must “forget” that the camp itself is a disaster, a failure. Solzhenitsyn's hero believes in the ultimate triumph of justice and hopes for its implementation. He is driven by an inexplicable love for life itself. “Now Shukhov is not offended by anything: neither that the term 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 the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” it should also be noted that contemporary Solzhenitsyn’s reader was struck not only by the novelty in covering 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 as appeared in Solzhenitsyn’s work: from camp-thieve vocabulary (“opers”, “bastard”, “knock”, “morons”, “shmon”) to colloquial usages “ bend” (that is, to say something implausible), “to work hard”, “to swear” and sayings from V. Dahl’s dictionary (“changed”, “hardened”, etc.). Solzhenitsyn's story in terms of the revival of the skaz (skaz is an extremely expressive form of narration that helps convey the reliability and authenticity of what is depicted. In the skaz, those elements of language and phraseology come to the fore, which, against the background of canonized smooth literary speech, look “wrong.” But this destroys the faceless , stencil speech, allows you to connect 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 storytelling by V.P. Astafiev in “The Last Bow” and “The Tsar Fish”.

After the publication of “One Day...” in Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn received a flood of letters from former prisoners of Soviet concentration camps. These letters allowed Solzhenitsyn to begin implementing a general work about the camp world, conceived back in 1958, for the writing of which the personal experience of the author and his friends was clearly lacking. Solzhenitsyn selected the experience of 227 witnesses, many of whom the writer met and talked with personally. Work on “The Gulag Archipelago” was completed in the winter of 67/68.
At first it was planned to postpone the printing of “Archipelago” until 1975. However, in August 1973, the KGB became aware of the existence of this work. The woman who revealed the secret of the existence of the Gulag Archipelago was found hanged in her room a short time later under unclear circumstances. Solzhenitsyn suspected Soviet intelligence services of involvement in this death. And he gave the command for the publication of the work, which was preceded by the words: “With an oppression in my heart, for years I refrained from printing 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 “an experience of artistic research.” This definition very accurately sets out the enormous task the writer set for himself: an artistic study of the camp as a phenomenon that determines the character of the state, a 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 occurred, why the state needed it, and at the same time shows possible ways of spiritual revival.
The Gulag Archipelago consists of three volumes. Figuratively, their content can be represented as the fall (Volume I) - life at the bottom (Volume II) - resurrection from the dead (Volume III).
The first volume contains two parts: “The Prison Industry” and “Perpetual Motion.” It depicts the country's long and painful slide down the downward curve of terror.
The second volume also has two parts: the third, “Destructive Labor,” and the fourth, “The Soul and Barbed Wire.” Of these, the part about the extermination camps is the longest in the book (22 chapters) and the most depressingly hopeless.
Solzhenitsyn defines the primary task of the camps 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 slaves in Egypt: “after all, the pyramids were built using modern technology! And we had technology – forty centuries ago!” Compares with the labor of Russian serfs. And he finds that, although there are similarities, there are more differences, and “all the differences are to the benefit of serfdom.” Finally, the writer compares tsarist penal servitude and Soviet extermination labor. And also all the differences are to the disadvantage of the Archipelago. He writes: “At the Akatuy harsh penal servitude, work lessons were easily doable for everyone... Their summer working day was 8 hours with walking together, from October - 7, and in winter - only 6...”
The camp system of forced labor, 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 team. Depending on the fulfillment of the quota, 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 team, you are an individual, you choose your own line of behavior. Without a brigade you can at least die proudly - in a brigade they will only let you die meanly, only on your belly.”
A glimmer of hope first appears at the beginning of the third volume, in the history of the “special political camps” (part five “Katorga”). Those who find themselves on the Archipelago after the war suddenly begin to clearly feel the air of freedom - not external, to which the path is extremely far, but an integral and motivating internal will. Its herald is a silent Russian old woman, met by the writer at the quiet Torbeevo station, when their carriage stopped briefly at the platform: “The old peasant woman stopped opposite our window with the frame lowered and through the window bars and through the internal bars for a long time, motionless, looked at us, tightly squeezed on top shelf. She looked with that eternal look with which our people always looked at the “unlucky ones.” Rare tears flowed down her cheeks. “You can’t look, mother,” the guard told her rudely. She didn't even move her head. And next to her stood a girl of about ten years old with white ribbons in her pigtails. She looked very sternly, even mournfully beyond her years, with her eyes wide open and without blinking. She looked so hard that I think she photographed us forever. The train moved gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and earnestly, slowly crossed us.”
Internal liberation entails external liberation. First, in the camp, power is taken away from the thieves; front-line officers lead desperate attempts to escape; Hard times are coming for traitorous informers. Finally, the entire camp rebels, 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 burns in the zone”, “We break chains to the touch”, "Forty Days of Kengir")

In "The Gulag Archipelago" three storylines can be distinguished. The first is a depiction of the country's gradual but steady slide into mass lawlessness. The writer begins with the words of Lenin, who in January 1918 proclaimed the need to cleanse “the Russian land of all harmful insects.” The most effective means of cleansing was mass, all-encompassing terror. “The cleansing of Russia took place gradually: one type of “insect” after another, one stream after another was driven “through the sewer pipes of the prison sewer.” But while some were being destroyed, others, convinced that this would not affect them, remained silent. It took only twenty years, Solzhenitsyn writes, for lawlessness to finally triumph in the country and the corruption of the country to be completed - and then the islands of the Gulag merged into the Archipelago.
The second storyline of the work is a demonstration of the forms and means used by the state in the formation of the “new” Soviet man, a potential prisoner of the Gulag and a future prisoner. To make people silently endure arbitrariness, they had to be instilled with a sense of fear. Over the years, fear becomes the main driver of human behavior. But scaring people and forcing them to agree with the arrest of everyone around them was not enough. The next stage on the path to the creation of a “new” person was, as Solzhenitsyn put it, “national participation in the sewerage.” At this stage, passive consent to terror was no longer sufficient, its active approval was required: “those who have not yet fallen into sewer manholes with their bodies, who have not yet been carried by pipes to the Archipelago - they must walk on top with banners, glorify the courts and rejoice in judicial reprisals " Solzhenitsyn notes the most important phenomenon of Soviet society: the relationship between the executioner and the victim. Today's executioner became tomorrow's victim, 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 general innocence and general fear.
Complicity - passive or active - in crimes broke souls. After the arrest, one of the means used to obtain false testimony in order to agree to cooperate with the executioners was torture. The chapter on torture appears to have been rewritten from the Inquisitor's Manual, published in the 16th century. The third reason for admitting innocent people to uncommitted crimes is, according to the writer, their lack of “moral support” necessary to resist evil. The conclusion summed up by the writer is as follows: “We lacked the love of freedom. And even before that - awareness of the true situation. We were spent in one uncontrollable outbreak of the seventeenth year, and then we hastened to submit, we submitted with pleasure.”
The third storyline of “The Gulag Archipelago” is the fate of its author. In this work he appears under his own name and talks about himself with utmost frankness. He, too, is the son of his country. And he grew up in an atmosphere of “popular approval of judicial reprisals against “enemies,” and he inhaled the air of revolutionary slogans and myths. 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 passionately 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, Solzhenitsyn’s peers, 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 wage... and how many traitors were there in all those wars?.. But with the fairest system in the world, the fairest war came - and suddenly millions of traitors from among the people themselves. How to understand this? How can I explain it?.. Or maybe it’s still a matter of the political system?” For Solzhenitsyn, the answer is obvious: millions of former prisoners were thrown into camps in order to maintain the country’s isolation from the rest of the world, broken by the war: “All these prisoners... were imprisoned so that they would not remember Europe among their fellow villagers. What you don’t see, you don’t delusion..."
Spiritual liberation comes to Solzhenitsyn in prison: in torment, in suffering, the human spirit passes the test and, having withstood it, is strengthened, purified, and liberated. The writer’s conclusion can be formulated as follows: in a fundamentally immoral society that arose as a result of a violation of the normal course of history, only suffering allows one to rise spiritually and understand the impossibility of living without morality.
Thus, “The Gulag Archipelago” is a book about spiritual insight, about the possibility of remaining human at the bottom of hell, but, above all, it is a monument to the millions of prisoners who died in Soviet camps, who passed through them, who were broken or who survived.

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