Study Guide to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Studienhilfen
• Subtopic: Studienführer

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first openly distributed account of Stalinist repression in Soviet literary history.

As a historical fiction novel of the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gives readers an intimate look into a day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s. Moreover, protagonist Ivan Denisovich and his fellow inmates bring about empathy, companionship, and love in readers. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

“For the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” - From the Nobel Prize Citation for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, October 8, 1970.

In mid-century - 1962 to be exact - a bright new talent appeared with stunning suddenness on the literary horizon. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, together with his epoch-making work, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, flared up like a supernova in the Eastern skies and incandesced the Western skies as well. Today Solzhenitsyn remains the most impressive figure in world literature of the latter half of the 20th century.

Before One Day was throttled in the USSR, it had become an overnight sensation. The 100,000 copies of Novy Mir (New World) carrying the novella sold out in November 1962 in a matter of hours; so did the almost 1 million copies of immediate second and third printings. But by 1963, not only Solzhenitsyn, who had earlier been a protege of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, but Khrushchev himself fell under a cloud as a new wave of political and cultural Reactionism again loomed in the Soviet Union. By the end of 1964, the editor of Novy Mir (Tvardovsky), Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn, and a number of other liberal elements or influences in Soviet culture became the targets of a widening campaign to restore Stalinist orthodoxy and a rigid party line to the arts.

Nineteen sixty-two, debut year for One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and its author, was an important episode in the most unusual, if brief, epoch in recent Soviet history. This was the time-1961-1962-of crisscrossing, incongruous developments, both in domestic as well as foreign policy.

CONDEMNATION OF STALINISM

On the Soviet home scene, the De-Stalinization Campaign reached a crescendo. Stalin’s embalmed body, which lay next to Lenin’s, was abruptly removed from the Lenin Mausoleum on the party’s orders and reinterred in a humble plot at the foot of the Kremlin Wall. This action became a potent symbol of the widening condemnation of Stalin’s draconic policies with respect to other party comrades, the arts, and the population at large. In the arts, the liberals now sought to make new inroads, to come out of the closet and with them, their manuscripts out of desk drawers. This process was illustrated by the liberal poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, and other writers acquiring new posts in writers’ unions and on editorial boards of journals. “The younger generation of Russians,” Yevtushenko announced confidently during a lecture tour to England in May 1962, “are increasingly beginning to feel themselves masters in their own country.” The liberal journal Yunost’ (Youth) published Vasily Aksenov’s trailblazing story “A Ticket to the Stars” while a heterodoxical work also published in Yunost’s pages (each issue of which sold like hot pirozhkis) was that a youthful rebellion of sorts was underway in the USSR, that younger people were becoming outspokenly critical of the values and policies identified with the older. Stalinist generation.

Such heretical works and attitudes by no means were left unchallenged by the conservatives and hardliners attached to the regime. In fact, 1962 and 1963 represented the beginnings of an effort, culminating in the mid-1970s, to clamp down on the liberal tendencies that were in such evidence during these years and upon whose crests Solzhenitsyn and One Day rode to prominence. One of the signs that a crackdown was imminent was barely concealed (by Aesopian language) in Yevtushenko’s sensational poem published during the Cuban Missile Crisis week in October 1962 entitled, “The Heirs of Stalin.” In this short but trenchant political poem (which, incidentally, was printed in the party daily Pravda, edited at the time by Khrushchev allies), Yevtushenko warned against the possible recrudescence of Stalinism in his country. “A telephone line is installed [in Stalin’s coffin],” he wrote. “Stalin has not given up,” his “telephone line” runs all the way to Communist reactionaries in Tirana (Albania), Peking, and to the Kremlin. The poem concludes: “As long as Stalin’s heirs exist on earth/It will seem to me/That Stalin is still in the Mausoleum.”

Yevtushenko’s warning of a political rollback began to take on concrete meaning at the end of 1962, after publication of One Day, and especially in the spring of 1963. First came the Cuban Missile Crisis, or what came to be called for the Soviets the “Cuban fiasco.” Soviet merchantmen bound for Havana with lethal missiles lashed to their decks were turned back in humiliating U-shaped wakes-a retreat forced on the Russians by a U.S. naval blockade ordered from the White House by President John F. Kennedy. Kremlin watchers immediately detected slippage in Khrushchev’s standing in the Moscow leadership; Soviet loss-of-face became obvious to hundreds of millions of newspaper readers throughout the world.

The second straw-that-broke-Nikita’s-back was the embarrassing exposure found in the notorious Penkovsky Papers. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been a deputy chief of a department in the hush-hush State Committee for Coordinating Scientific Research and probably, too, a member of Soviet military intelligence. In October 1962 he was arrested in Moscow for having acted as a double agent, for the USSR but also for both the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services. Needless to say, he was executed, in somewhere like the basement of Lubyanka prison, but not without leaving behind in the West his papers, which then became available to Western media. The Penkovsky Papers told a story of slack discipline among Soviet intelligence agents (not to mention the treason of Penkovsky himself), revealed the names of secret agents and their means of conducting espionage in the West, and seemed to illustrate a general laxity which, to the conservatives, had been brought on by Khrushchev-endorsed policies of liberalization.

Third, there was the poor showing of the Soviet economy, according to the fourth-quarter 1962 economic report; the crucial sector of agriculture was especially shortfallen.

Encouraged by these and other turns of events as the year 1963 opened, the Kremlin hardliners, joined by the culture hawks, were loaded for bear. Khrushchev, his liberal-minded son-in-law (Adzhubei), and a whole flock of liberal-lining authors and critics came under the sights of the reactionaries. The list of dramatis personae in this unfolding drama to unseat the First Secretary and to turn back the clock on the Soviet cultural scene is too long to recount here; in any case, it is the results that speak just as loud as the step-by-step causal chain which brought them about.

SOLZHENITSYN ATTACKED

The blips of reaction were clearly manifest at the turn of the year 1962. The Soviet super-patriotic, party-lining author and critic, Nikolai Gribachev, aimed a stinging attack against Yevtushenko in the pages of Pravda in January 1963. Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the more respected of old generation liberals, author of the pace-setting novel of 1953, ironically titled The Thaw, was raked over the coals in the government daily Izvestiya. In these and other party-initiated criticisms, the message was that the cultural expression of de-Stalinization must be halted. Moreover, there was the implication that de-Stalinization as a whole, not only in the arts, should be discontinued. liberal journals - Yunost’ and Novy Mir particularly - came under sharp attack. One Lydia Fomenko attacked both Solzhenitsyn and the magazine that had carried One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (for showing a lack of “philosophical perspective”); socialism, she wrote, was built in the Soviet Union, and along with it the various Stalinist institutions, quite aside from and despite the fact of Stalin’s “personal short-comings” (!). It was profoundly mistaken, she maintained, to identify socialism with Stalin, as Solzhenitsyn had done implicitly in One Day.

Nikita Khrushchev himself felt obliged to join the swelling chorus of straight-laced neo-Stalinists on the cultural front. Whether he was under duress or not, the First Secretary took out after Ehrenburg and Yevtushenko, and Viktor Nekrasov, all of whose modest literary heresies he had apparently once tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, to further his own political ends. Now Khrushchev talked the language of the conservatives: “Our Soviet youth,” the Leader reminded his audience at a special Kremlin conference of 600 writers, artists, and intellectuals in March 1963, “has been brought up by our party; it follows our party; and it sees in it its educator and leader.” Harangued on the rostrum by the party apparatchik Leonid Ilyichev and other spokesmen for a hard line on the arts, this conference heard one orthodox-minded speaker after another defend the older generation against the younger, while at the same time each denied that any “fathers-and-sons” confrontation or minor generation gap could possibly exist under Soviet conditions. Some, including Khrushchev, held up the example of the author Mikhail Sholokhov, famous for his great novel Quiet Flows the Don (but some, Solzhenitsyn for one, question the authenticity of his authorship of the work) but for precious little else. They pitted this author against the other of his generation, Ehrenburg, in a subtle but nonetheless obvious display of anti-Semitism to prove that the one (Sholokhov) was a genuine revolutionist and Communist while the other (Ehrenburg) was a sham, a coward, even a “silent” collaborator in the foul deeds of Stalin.

The next step - and this, too, was crucial for the careers of One Day and its author - was the start of a gradual but steady Rehabilitation Of Stalin. Just as Khrushchev had used the de-Stalinization campaign to embarrass the old Stalinist rivals in his leadership, even to purge some of them as he did in 1957, likewise and anti-Khrushchev forces pushed for Stalin’s rehabilitation precisely for the purpose of sandbagging the First Secretary. Some of the most denunciatory of anti-Stalin spokesmen of the recent past (Leonid Brezhnev among them) one-by-one joined the anti-Khrushchev alliance. This was the group of conservatives, a virtual crypto-cabinet, who not only opposed any continuance or broadening of the anti-Stalin campaign, but who also wished to overturn a number of Khrushchev domestic and foreign policies. The grounds were that these policies were ill-advised, too liberal, or too “hare-brained,” as the Central Committee’s indictment against Khrushchev put it in October 1964 - that is when the First Secretary was finally replaced by a team of neo-Stalinists headed by Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov.

For One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963-1964 was a turning point. In fact, the pressure to rehabilitate Stalin and contain de-Stalinization had an obvious connection with the nomination of One Day - and for its failure to win - the Lenin Prize. During the autumn of 1963 and into 1964, literati in Russia discussed the possibility of Solzhenitsyn’s receiving the prize for 1964. The Communist youth daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, went so far as to publish a letter to the editor by a reader who recommended that One Day get the Lenin Prize for literature. (Several works are customarily nominated for the prize, the final decision being made by an “illustrious” body of judges who are under strong pressure from the party.) The same newspaper, answering as it were the reader’s letter, criticized the behavior of the novella’s main character, the prisoner, Ivan Shukhov, for being “distasteful.” Another Solzhenitsyn writing which figured in the pre-prize discussion was Matryona’s Place, a story published in Novy Mir shortly after One Day. In the discussion, the “pros” seemed outnumbered, at least by their connections, by the “cons” on the matter of whether Solzhenitsyn should receive the prize. Finally, in February 1964 a joint meeting of the secretariats (which are customarily saturated with partiytsi [party-liners]) of the RSFSR and Moscow writers’ organizations determined that One Day “cannot be placed among the outstanding works which are worthy of the Lenin Prize.” A bitterly ironic remark began to circulate around Moscow after this, to many people, shocking rejection of One Day: “Tell me what you think of One Day and I will proceed to tell you just who you are.”

Once the Brezhnev-Kosygin-Suslov triumvirate (Podgorny, the “Soviet President,” might be counted to make it a quadrumvirate, except that many observers take this official’s family name quite seriously - it means “foothills”) was in power, a series of occurrences, obviously launched directly from the Kremlin, foreshadowed neo-Stalinism on the cultural front.

First came the Brodsky Case of February 1965. Brodsky, a writer, was accused of being a “parasite” and a few other things. Above all, it was his “anti-Soviet” verses which provoked the State Prosecutor’s various “witnesses” into such remarks as describing Brodsky’s (or any writer’s) mind as a “dangerous weapon.” Another said, “Brodsky has torn our youth away from its work, from the world and from life” and, “Brodsky has played a great anti-social role.” The court sentenced the writer to five years in an Archangel (near the Arctic Circle in north-western European Russia) forced labor camp. His job: carting manure. This was the price paid by a Russian poet who had been “guilty” of writing an elegy to John Donne and some other somewhat mystical, religious, or lyrical verses, most of them considered outstanding by Western critics for their cadences and symbolism. The Brodsky Trial became a minor sensation among Western (and also certain Yugoslav) literati, and among those Soviet intellectuals who were knowledgeable about both Brodsky and the star-chamber-like proceedings against him. Even some fellow-traveler critics in the West found it hard to justify the sentencing of the poet. Other observers thought the regime was over-reacting both to the short spell of liberalization under Khrushchev, and to such phenomena as the public disorders in the Soviet cities of Ryazan, Novocherkassk, Omsk, Odessa, Krivoi Rog, and elsewhere in the early 1960s. Moreover, the worldwide “youth rebellion,” typified by Beatlemania, could prove, and already seemed to be proving, subversive to Soviet official conceptions of party and state authoritarianism.

SOLZHENITSYN NOVELS REJECTED

As the news of other trials and repressions against writers began to reach the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn began to figure in the tightening reins being placed over the arts by the post-Khrushchev rulers. The heyday of the Khrushchev years was over, that former time of thaw when the First Secretary personally had introduced the author to several top leaders in the Kremlin and when Khrushchev single-handedly gave the green light to the publication of One Day. Solzhenitsyn and his hundreds of thousands of appreciative readers had to endure the humiliation of seeing the 1964 Lenin Prize go to a third-rate novelist named Oleg Gonchar. Moreover, the two new Solzhenitsyn works, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, could not be published in the USSR, despite pressure from the influential Novy Mir editor, Alexander Tvardovsky. In the case of the latter novel, Tvardovsky’s magazine had actually prepared the first eight chapters for the composing room only to have the permission from on high to publish delayed time after time, much to Novy Mir readers’ dismay and perplexity. Eventually, of course, Cancer Ward did surface, in the West; that destroyed whatever slim chance the work ever had of being published in the Soviet Union.

Out of these reassertions of party and government censorship and “commanding” of the arts, Solzhenitsyn not only emerged bruised but extremely bitter. Solzhenitsyn’s already dec...