(Sasha Johnson, May 2001)
Song of the GULAG
It has been Russian writers in particular, who for two centuries have struggled against censorship and oppression to accomplish two great tasks: to create innovative and meaningful art, and to use that art to make a statement about a specifically Russian predicament. So often the theme was political, and so many generations of Russians criticised Mother Russia for her backward ways. Vissarion Belinsky's caustic admonitions in his "Letter to Gogol" were long a rallying cry for writers: "This is why, especially among us, universal attention is paid...to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's gifts...The public...sees in Russian writers its only leaders, defenders and saviours from dark autocracy, Orthodoxy, and the national way of life." This conditional existence was the inheritance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who followed the great Russian tradition of the intelligentsia. To awaken Russia's people and illuminate for them the deep recesses of a world which is yet unknown to them, this was, I believe, the greater part of why he chose to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and for it to be published first in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn's intent on writing One Day could never have been solely literary. If that were so, he would have chosen a safe topic, instead of one of the uttermost dangerous, forbidden subjects of the day. He chose an open attack on Stalin's penal system. Continuing to write in this vein eventually caused his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers. His expulsion made it impossible for him to earn a living as a writer where within his country. Note that One Day is only the precursor and preparation for his monumental Gulag Archipelago.
"...Solzhenitsyn's literary mission, the process of giving voice to the tens of millions of victims of Soviet terror, went on secretly, even collectively. Much of GULAG was based on hundreds of letters and memoirs that former prisoners mailed to Solzhenitsyn after One Day was published." (Remnick, 119)
When reading One Day it is overwhelming to comprehend and imagine this single dawn-to-dusk description, with the hindsight to understand that millions of multitudes of men and women suffered through such an evil scheme of servitude of cruelty.
One Day was the first book of its kind to be printed in Russia. Miraculously, it was not only printed, but subsequently soldto the citizenry, who were actually allowed to read it. This unheard-of event occurred during a very delicate period of time known as the "Khrushchev thaw", when open condemnation of the "cult of personality" began to become commonplace, even expected. These brief years of relief enjoyed a momentary artistic flowering, and poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Anderi Voznezensky, among others, began to emerge. "During Khrushchev's cultural thaw, plays or novels such as Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denizovich were the primary signs of new freedom." (Smith, 110) The response to this little book was immense, and an interesting documentation of varied responses to it is included in Leopold Lebedze's work, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record. Mark Ivanovich Konenko, a former prisoner, remembers:
"In Kharkov I have seen all kinds of queues- for the film 'Tarzan', butter, women's drawers, chicken giblets and horse-meat sausage. But I cannot remember a queue as long as the one for your book in the libraries...I waited six months on the list and to no avail. By chance I got hold of it for forty-eight hours."
A working citizen, G.F. Polew, commented, "Can the time be coming when people are beginning to find out?" P.N. Ptitsyn, another common laborer, remarked:
"Our people, guilty of nothing, reduced to the situation of the lowest of cattle, threw themselves heart and soul into this work [as Shukhov did], Real criminals are not capable of genuine toil. truly it is the Ivan Denisoviches who acheived something genuine...What a drama: an enemy of the people is friend to the people. They seek to destroy a man, and he does a good deed."
F. Shults, another working citizen, said, "I am astonished that they have not put both you and Tvardovsky away."
This is a prophetic point, for the thaw did not last long, and the spontaneous and optimistic Nikita Khrushchev was soon replaced by the more reactionary Leonid Brezhnev. Joseph Stalin's legacy and legend began to be "rehaibilitated", and indeed, Solzhenitsyn's writings became too dangerous to posses or even speak about in public.
"The most desperate and daring had huddled in small circles like conspirators to read Solzhenitsyn's contraband book about Stalin's camps, The Gulag Archipelago, typed secretly and laboriously, page by page, onionskin paper." (Smith, 11-12)
Although One Day's publication enjoyed a more favorable political climate, the book was still a breathtaking statement against the vast labyrinth of destruction which the Soviets were responsible for, which existed within its own borders, and was populated by its own citizens. "While the world talked of a stable and monolithic superpower, Solzhenitsyn, solitary and possessed of an almost inhuman courage, wrote of the regime's wretched history and its inherent instability." (Remnick, 116)
Regardless of the infamous "Article 58", the vaguely defined offense of which was "subversive action against the state", most of the people inside labor camps, penal camps, and Siberian prisons were completely innocent of any "crime".
"When I said that a writer is like a second government, I mean this i n the context of a fully totalitarian regime," Solzhenitsyn told me. "And indeed, one can see today, in the newly published documents of the Politburo, that they were concerned with my personal fate as seriously as if I were a whole state. In this sense, there was no exaggeration. But in a free society, this formula no longer appiles. Moreover, literature, like so much else in Russia, is now in a state of terrible degradation. At the moment, literature means very little." (Remnick, 147) Chillingly, this is true. Among other nations, America's cultural influence on post-soviet Russia has transformed its culture, bringing MTV and soap operas to television sets which are more readily available than ever beofre. Levi jeans and Western fashion are more profitable to import, the new orgy of materialism is much more palatable to enjoy than one more bristling reminder of truths which are difficult to swallow. Solzhenitsyn understood this, and fought to challenge the few who could yet hear him. "And yet I still hope that my books might help serve moral goals. I still hope to be useful in some way. I cannot write simply to be able to say, 'Look how cleverly I crafted this.' I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write." (Remnick, 147)
Peasant saying: "Remember- the tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut down by the scythe."
Solzhenitsyn's first book was only one of many events that helped transform the Soviet landscape, but One Day was incredibly influencial. The man behind the literature was ever looking to the culture to which the book was addressed. Shukhov was only a fictional representation for millions and millions of Soviet citizens during the twentieth century. Every blast of cold, every scrape of hunger or wince of pain the reader experiences through the the book is but a wisp, in respect to the endurance, sickness, and deaths of Stalin's million-headed vicitm; Russia, the ancient nation, was being slaughtered. Solzhenitsyn witnessed the massacre, knew the blade's sharpness by his own trials, and rose up to meet its edge.
Works Cited
Labedze, Leopold. Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record. Harper and Row Publishers, New York. 1971.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Smith, Hedrick. The New Russians. Random House, New York. 1990.
Vissarion Belinsky, "Open Letter to Gogol", 15 July 1847.
Remnick, David. Resurrection: The Struggle For a New Russia. Random House, New York. 1997.