Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T08:28:18.371Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

One Day–Fifty Years Later

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Andrew Wachtel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 102 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Quoted in Klimoff, Alexis, “The Sober Eye: Ivan Denisovich and the Peasant Perspective,“ in Klimoff, Alexis, ed., One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion (Evanston, 1997), 4.Google Scholar

2. For a discussion of Solzhenitsyn's dialogue with Tolstoi in the Red Wheel cycle, see my book An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, 1994). Simultaneously, One Day is also in dialogue with Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead, 1862), Fedor Dostoevskii's fictionalized distillation of his Siberian prison experiences between 1850 and 1854. For a thoughtful consideration of One Day and Dostoevskii's Notes, see McLean, Hugh, “Walls and Wire: Notes on the Prison Theme in Russian Literature,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, nos. 25-26 (1982): 253-65.Google Scholar

3. “V strashnye gody ezhovshchiny ia provela semnadtsat’ mesiatsev v tiuremnykh ocherediakh v Leningrade. Kak-to raz kto-to ‘opoznal’ menia. Togda stoiashchaia za mnoi zhenshchina s golubymi gubami, kotoraia, konechno, nikogda ne slykhala moego imeni, ochnulas’ ot svoistvennogo nam vsem otsepeneniia i sprosila menia na ukho (tam vse govorili shepotom): —A eto vy mozhete opisat'? I ia skazala: —Mogu. [In the terrible years of the Ezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone 'recognized’ me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I answered: ‘Yes, I can.’].” Akhmatova, Anna, “Rekviem,” in Reeder, Roberta, ed., The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Hemshemeyer, Judith, 2 vols. (Somerville, Mass., 1990), 2:94–95.Google Scholar

4. For a general consideration of Soviet prison camp literature, see Tolczyk, Dariusz, See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven, 1999).Google Scholar

5. The difficulty of reading One Day as a purely literary work was clear even to its earliest readers. Thus for example, Victor Erlich wrote, “no sane person, to paraphrase Irving Howe, can be expected to register a ‘purely’ literary response.” He was referring to Irving Howe's comments in “Predicaments of Soviet Writing,” New Republic, 11 May 1963, 19. From Dunlop, Erlich, “The Writer as Witness…: The Achievement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,“ Slavic Forum (Mouton, 1973)Google Scholar, reprinted in John, Haugh, Richard, and Klimoff, Alexis, eds., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials (Belmont, Mass., 1973), 197. Thanks to one of Slavic Review's anonymous reviewers for pointing out this set of commentsGoogle Scholar.

6. Russian text from Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 2006), 1:15;Google Scholar English text from Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Hayward, Max and Hingley, Ronald (New York, 1963), 1.Google Scholar

7. Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:114; Solzhenitsyn, One Day, 203.

8. For a multifaceted treatment of issues relating to thick journals in Russia, see Martinsen, Deborah A., ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1997).Google Scholar See also Maguire, Robert, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Ithaca, 1967), esp. 36–100.Google Scholar For a study of Novyi mir in the period before the publication of One Day, see Frankel, Edith Rogovin, Novyi mir: A Case Study in the Politics of Literature, 1952-1958 (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

9. The November 1962 issue of Novyi mir was released on 18 November 1962 in an edition of almost 100,000 copies. Simonov's article, entitled “0 proshlom vo imia budushchego [From the Past in the Name of the Future],” appeared on 17 November. As a result of unprecedented reader demand, an additional 25,000 copies of the journal were apparently printed very soon thereafter, presumably in response to demand caused by One Day.

10. According to Tvardovskii's notebooks, he learned that Khrushchev had approved One Day for publication on 15 October 1962. See Aleksandr Tvardovskii, “Rabochie tetradi 60-kh godov,” Znamia, no. 7 (2000), at magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2000/7/tvard.html (last accessed 5 December 2012). He met with Khrushchev in person on 22 October. Solzhenitsyn's chronology in Bodalsia telenok s dubom (The Calf Butted the Oak, 1975,1996) indicates that he received the proofs of the story “just before the November holidays” (i.e., just before 7 November). This means that Tvardovskii would have had at least two weeks to decide what else would appear with Solzhenitsyn's story.

11. Tvardovskii's tone here seems borrowed from Tolstoi's autocommentary on War and Peace: “Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha — eto dokument v memuarnom smysle, ne zapiski ili vospominaniia o perezhitom avtorom lichno […] Eto proizvedenie khudozhestvennoe. [One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not a book of memoirs in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not consist merely of notes on the author's experiences […] It is a work of art.]”. Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11:8; Solzhenitsyn, One Day, xix. Compare this with Tolstoi's words: “Eto ne roman, eshche men'she poema, eshche menee istoricheskaia khronika. [This is not a novel, still less a narrative poem, still less a historical chronicle.]“ Lev Tolstoi, “Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi ‘Voina i mir,'” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh (Moscow, 1928-1958), 16:7; translation mine.

12. According to Tvardovskii's notebooks, he had, in the original handwritten preface that was read by Khrushchev, used the highly Soviet adjective zhizneutverzhdaiushchaia (life-affirming) to describe Solzhenitsyn's work, but on the advice of some colleagues removed it from the final published version of the preface. See the entry for 21 October 1962, in Tvardovskii, “Rabochie tetradi 60-kh godov.“

13. Tvardovskii was correct in his fear that some readers would be bothered by the language of the story, as we know from letters written by ordinary Soviet readers immediately after the story was published. On this topic, see Miriam Dobson, “Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization: Readers’ Responses to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,“ Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 580-600, esp. 590-92. See also Kozlov, D., “Otzyvy sovetskikh chitatelei 1960-kh gg. na povest’ A. I. Solzhenitsyna Odin den Ivana Denisovicha : Svidetel'stva iz arkhiva ‘Novogo mira’ (Chasf I),” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 2011, no. 1:178-200, esp. 181.Google Scholar

14. Miezelaitis, Eduardas, “Gimn utra,” Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11:3.Google Scholar The Russian translation is credited to the well-known Soviet poet David Samoilov.

15. There is evidence that Tvardovskii specifically chose these poems as the lead-in to Solzhenitsyn's work. According to the critic Vladimir Lakshin (one of Tvardovskii's close confidantes) the censor who reviewed the original text of the journal affirmed that when he first saw it (on 17 October 1962) neither Solzhenitsyn's text nor the poems of Miezelaitis were included. On 23 October, however (the day after Tvardovskii's conversation with Khrushchev in which he received the go-ahead to publish One Day), the story and the poems were added to the journal manuscript. See Lakshin, V., “Novyi mir” vo vremena Khrushcheva: Dnevnik ipoputnoe (1953-1964) (Moscow, 1991), 78.Google Scholar

16. Mieželaitis, , “Rzhavchina,” Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11:5.Google Scholar This translation is credited to Stanislav Kuniaev.

17. The two works are only separated by a two-page translation by Samuil Marshak of the poetry of William Blake.

18. Brushtein, , “Prostaia operatsiia,” Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11:78.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 80.

20. Ibid., 86.

21. That at least some readers made a strong distinction between those communists imprisoned in 1937 (who were seen by 1962 as having been unfairly suppressed) and those who found themselves in the camps for other reasons, such as wartime activities, can be seen from the letters they sent to Novyi mir after reading the story. See Dobson, “Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization,” 584-88. For further discussion of the distinction that some readers made between those whom they felt had truly suffered unjustly versus those whom they identified as true “enemies,” see Kozlov, “Otzyvy sovetskikh chitatelei,“ 189-93.

22. Brushtein, , “Prostaia operatsiia,” Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11:92.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 107.

24. 1 have not had the opportunity to read these letters, but as I noted earlier, there are two fairly comprehensive studies of their contents: Dobson, “Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization,” and Kozlov, “Otzyvy sovetskikh chitatelei.” According to Kozlov, the archive of Novyi mir contains some 532 comments from readers of One Day written between 1962 and 1969 (178). The great majority of comments were positive (422), but 100 were negative, indicating that the reception of the work was by no means one-sided. Of the negative comments, a certain number came from former prison guards who were undoubtedly trying to justify to themselves their role in the gulag system. Others, however, came from a variety of people, some of whom objected to Solzhenitsyn's even-handed treatment of zeks from various epochs.

25. The exception appears to be one reader's comparison of One Day with the 1948 novel Daleko ot Moskvy (Far from Moscow) by the writer Vasilii Azhaev.

26. As described in V. Lakshin, “Ivan Denisovich, ego druz'ia i nedrugi,” Novyi mir, 1964, no. 1:228-29.

27. Ibid., 230.

28. Ibid., 245.

29. Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:69; Solzhenitsyn, One Day, 111. Lakshin specifically points to these passages in his defense of Ivan Denisovich and his creator against insinuations that the work is not sufficiently Soviet.

30. Even if one does not believe that Tvardovskii consciously chose to surround One Day with works that would help it to be read “properly” (as is the case with one of the anonymous readers who evaluated this article for Slavic Review), the fact that Solzhenitsyn's story is echoed and amplified by them is an indication of just how “typical” an example of contemporary Soviet writing it was. Indeed, it proves the point even more definitively. After all, if two literary texts pulled at random from contributions Tvardovskii had recently accepted sounded many of the same general themes and even employed some of the same imagery as Solzhenitsyn's novella, how unusual (except in execution) was One Day really?

31. The phrases in this sentence are taken from the famous speech by Andrei Zhdanov denning socialist realism at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.

32. Max Hayward cemented the author's role in the west as, if not a full-blown dissident, at least a foe of the Soviet Union. Hayward, , “Solzhenitsyn's Place in Contemporary Soviet Literature” Slavic Review 23, no. 3 (September 1964): 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Solzhenitsyn, A., Bodalsia telenok s dubom: Ocherki literaturnoi zhizni (Paris, 1975), 36.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. Any reader wishing to investigate Solzhenitsyn's bona fides as an appropriate Soviet writer (at least as denned in the mid-1960s) is encouraged to read “Dlia pol'zy dela” (For the Good of the Cause), Solzhenitsyn's most socialist realist production, which was published in Novyi mir in 1963. For more on the way this topic was seen at the time, see György Lukàcs's contemporary article “Sotsialisticheskii realizm segodnia” (1964) republished at scepsis.ru/library/id_693.html (last accessed 5 December 2012).