Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

[Stewart]

(thread created from posts on the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thread)

I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich a few years back and found it interesting, although I never truly connected. But, having stood inside a replica gulag in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia earlier this year, and having the chance to browse amongst many other aspects of such an era, I'm interested to take a second look at the novel.

[Bjorn]

I read his One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich a few years back and found it interesting, although I never truly connected. But, having stood inside a replica gulag in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia earlier this year, and having the chance to browse amongst many other aspects of such an era, I'm interested to take a second look at the novel.

I read this a couple of weeks ago and found it brilliant; painfully realistic, as stripped-down and worked to the essentials as its protagonist; 24 hours in the life of a political prisoner trying to keep alive in Siberia that somehow manages to not lose itself in messages or despair. He's even got sympathy for the people running the camp. Simultaneously stoic and refusing to bow itself. Very highly recommended.

[Beth]

I loved One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich when I read it several years ago. I don't recall his sympathy for his captors, but I'll never forget the dried bread.

[Heteronym]

What I remember most from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is how physically exhausting it was reading it. No chapter breaks, no convenient point to stop for a while, just one long read, as interminable as Denisovich's day. I loved the oppressiveness of the situation, the resourcefulness of the inmates, the naturalistic prose. When I read it I was rather young and knew little of USSR and I wondered how could the people who had helped defeat Hitler be so despicable, and my cynicism over Mankind slowly began growing.

[Eric]

I too read Denisovich too early, before I really appreciated how monstrous the whole Gulag system of slave labour was. Nowadays, after my years of translating Estonian literature and reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag, I understand much more.

So, what Stewart discovered in Latvia, I discovered in Estonia. Denisovich is perhaps Solzhenitsyn's best book, not least because it is short and, as Bjorn says, strips the whole problem down. The thing that has to be remembered is that this is not a fairy-tale, a Kafka?sque story, but what Solzhenitsyn experienced personally. This is as real as the descriptions of Auschwitz by people who survived.

Yet for some incomprehensible reason, while Holocaust literature has become a whole cottage industry, with even people who never experienced the horrors cashing in on the game, relatively few Western intellectuals have been prepared to acknowledge that murdering people by overwork in Siberia (nice and slowly...) is as criminal as gassing them.

*

The Denisovich book originally appeared quite legally in Russian in the Soviet Union in 1962, during one of the many thaws they had in the Soviet Union, and was translated into Estonian, appearing in that language in 1963. The translator was the ethnologist and filmmaker Lennart Meri, who would later become President of a liberated Estonia, in 1991.

An amusing trick was then played. The Soviet censors had allowed Denisovich to be published freely in that tiny Baltic language, where it could do no harm. But it sold out immediately: original print-run 40,000 copies in a country of only one million native-speakers of Estonian. The Soviet censors began to see that maybe the book was a bit dodgy. So: no reprint.

What did exile Estonians in Sweden do? They found some second-rate paper, similar to what was used in the Soviet Union, and printed facsimile copies, one of which is in front of me as I write. The clever part of this ruse was then to take lots of these facsimile copies to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (i.e. Estonia). The customs people, all trained KGB officers of course, couldn't stop this import because to them it just looked as if some weird Westerners were importing Soviet books to the Soviet Union. How many of these facsimile copies were printed, I do not know.

*

As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget: Stalin and Hitler made a cosy friendship pact in 1939, termed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocal they divided Europe into their respective spheres of influence. (The three Baltic countries were all in the Russian half.) Paranoid Stalin also murdered loads of Soviet generals shortly before WWII, when they would have been rather useful, once the Pact broke down and the Soviet Union was at war with Hitler's Germany.

[Sybarite]

... As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget: Stalin and Hitler made a cosy friendship pact in 1939, termed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocal they divided Europe into their respective spheres of influence. (The three Baltic countries were all in the Russian half.) Paranoid Stalin also murdered loads of Soviet generals shortly before WWII, when they would have been rather useful, once the Pact broke down and the Soviet Union was at war with Hitler's Germany.

So the major turning point in the war in Europe was not Hitler's decision to open up the eastern front, and the subsequent response by the Soviet people to that?

[fausto]

So the major turning point in the war in Europe was not Hitler's decision to open up the eastern front, and the subsequent response by the Soviet people to that?

Funny, because that's not what I read in Eric's comment, which is factually correct.

And don't forget the "subsequent response" took a good year to materialize precisely because of the purge in the military.

[saliotthomas]

There is a very funny part in the First Circle about Stalin as a charactere, where in the middle of all this paranoia, he decide to trust Hitler completly.The following betrayal pushing his madness a few notch further.
In the Requiem for the East by Makine the third part describe very well the first fight against the nazi,the antique weapons(due to this trust of Hitler by Stalin)The germain smiling while shooting,they understand latter it's not sadisme but the recoile of submachine guns.

[Eric]

What I was trying to say was, as Fausto picked up, that two murderous criminal dictators, one an imported Austrian, the other an imported Georgian (i.e. neither had any loyalty from birth to the peoples they were oppressing), drew a line on a piece of paper, i.e. the Secret Protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with Stalin, I think, holding the pencil, and divided Europe in two. Half for me, half for you. Like you could do with a cake at a picnic.

All the pathos-soaked rhetoric that we hear about the Soviet Union rescuing Europe from the nasty Nazis is only partly true. Western European armchair Communists and Marxists still don't want to believe what is staring them in the face: that the Russians were so cowed and stupid that they let Stalin create a system which was based on fear, lies and murder. And, of course, a system where you kept your nose clean. And joined the KGB if that would save your skin. Etc. Not like in Britain.

Stalin was as much of an anti-Semite as Hitler. So one way for a Leningrad Jew to escape anti-Semitism in Russia was to move to the Baltic countries. There were honourable people, like the semioticist Yuri Lotman and his wife Zara Mintz, who moved to Tartu, Estonia. A lot of Russian Jews, however, found life so much better in the Baltic republics, so they joined the KGB and got posted there. Who could blame them? But the result: Balts don't like Jews, because they are associated with being KGB agents. So much for multiculturalism.

The Balts did not feel that they were rescued from the Soviets by the Germans (1941) or from the Germans by the Soviets (1944). Two occupations do not make freedom.

During WWII, the Russians were our allies. Churchill had to do some calculations to see how best to smite the Nazi foe. Unfortunately for the Balts, once WWII was over, and everybody was thoroughly sick of war, destruction and death, there was no appetite in the West for rescuing the Balts from Soviet oppression. Plans were no doubt made, the U.S. Army had an Estonian language manual ready (I've got a copy), should they need to infiltrate freedom fighters into the Baltic states. But no one wanted a nuclear war with Russia. So the Balts drew the short straw.

If you know your history, Solzhenitsyn makes so much more sense. Remember that Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag at the end of WWII. The Soviets / Russians were still up to their tricks, even though the nastiest dictator, Stalin, died in 1953. The Soviets finally got fed up of this troublesome man and booted him out in 1974. He then went to live in Canada. Strangely enough, now that he is back in Russia, he appears to have become an almost chauvinistic Russian patriot.

[nnyhav]

I came to One Day in the Life after The Gulag Archipelago myself. Not to take anything away from the former, but it isn't alone; a brief I posted last year:

Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (trans John Glad): A part of the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn left unexplored due to this effort, a hybrid of testament and (as Glad says, Chekhovian) short story. Shalamov (or Glad?) saves the best for the last sections, "The Virtuoso Shovelman" and "The Resurrection of the Larch", when the territory covered expands beyond the work camps.

[nnyhav]

Stalin was as much of an anti-Semite as Hitler.

Unlike the rest of what you say, this is utter folderol. Yes, Uncle Joe was antisemitic, but on and off, unlike Adolf's raison d'etre pas, and reflected a longstanding bias common across eastern Europe (including Balts). Even the late insanity of the doctor's plot pales by comparison.

[Heteronym]

If you want to read a book that shows how similar Hitler and Stalin's political careers were, you should read Richard Overy's The Dictators.

[Sybarite]

Funny, because that's not what I read in Eric's comment, which is factually correct...

I read it as implying that what happened after Hitler's decision to open the eastern front has, in some way, to be 'balanced' against "As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget ..."

What Stalin did and did not do after the war (and even before) is irrelevant in terms of what the Soviet people did when Hitler invaded. It doesn't alter that at all. It doesn't make the sacrifice or the bravery any less. Or the impact on the Nazi war effort and the ultimate outcome of the war in Europe.

As for "... the Russians were so cowed and stupid ..." I've heard the Tsarist regime blamed for some things in my time, but that's a good one. Nice sweeping generalisation too. ~~LOL~~

[fausto]

What Stalin did and did not do after the war (and even before) is irrelevant in terms of what the Soviet people did when Hitler invaded. It doesn't alter that at all. It doesn't make the sacrifice or the bravery any less. Or the impact on the Nazi war effort and the ultimate outcome of the war in Europe.

I seem to understand you have some issue with Eric. Fine. I'm not interested in those issues creeping out in every other thread.

Who exactly denied the sacrifice or the bravery? Until your online nemesis brought up the supposed stupidity of the Russian people, it was just pointed out that some tend to forget the impact the pact, the military purge and Stalin's own blindness had on the whole campaign -- and those are things that happened before and during the first month of Barbarossa. I fail to see how this -- all facts -- is irelevant or a sacrilegious thing to say in the light of the hardship suffered by the people.

[fausto]

I read it as implying that what happened after Hitler's decision to open the eastern front has, in some way, to be 'balanced' against "As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget ..."

One last thing... Well obviously it has to be balanced. The way you seem to put it, it should read "the great Soviet people won the war for us". It's partially true but it's as silly as claiming the Soviets didn't do anything to get the war ended. Whatever you might want to think, the initial (and I mean only the initial) point made by Eric has to be taking into account when making a general assessment of what happened.

[Mirabell]

*whistles*

glad this discussion passed me by...

[saliotthomas]

*whistles*

glad this discussion passed me by...

A discussion??? I thought it was a lecture.I was taking notes and all.How lucky we are !

[Mirabell]

A discussion??? I thought it was a lecture.I was taking notes and all.How lucky we are !

[metin]

Unfortunately, I attempted to read One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich in the wrong time when I was in the army. And failed to finish it. Instead I preferred reading The House of Matryona which is great in my opinion.

[Eric]

I've never heard the expression "folderol". I take it to mean "an idea of genius". Stalin took Jews into his nasty campaigns, then got envious or paranoid, and had them murdered. The final solution, I would suggest, if you really want to make the big time as a dictator.

It is a little mean-spirited to briefly praise all my carefully crafted points, and them focus on the one thing you think was bullshit.

Stalin murdered Jews:

Night of the Murdered Poets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And those he didn't murder he banished to Birobidzhan, from 1934 onwards, under the pretext of building a homeland for them:

Birobidzhan Stalin's Forgotten Zion

Stalin's antisemitism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot

Saliothomas: this is a lecture. When you know things and can find proof about them on the internet, then you have to show people that you're right