ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962

During Khrushchev's partial de-Stalinization campaign of the early 1960s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived in the town of Ryazan', worked as a schoolteacher, and secretly wrote about his experience in Stalin's concentration camps. Recollecting Tolstoi's suggestion that a whole novel could be devoted to one day in the life of a simple peasant, he once attempted to describe a schoolteacher's day, but then, under the pressure of his major concerns, he switched over to a detailed account of a day in the life of a concentration camp inmate. The times seemed propitious for getting the story into print; therefore, Solzhenitsyn "lightened" his story, that is, removed the most shocking and politically subversive material. After great difficulties and the intervention of Khrushchev himself, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) (Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha) came out in Novyi Mir, the country's most influential literary journal. Khrushchev had been partly won over by the peasant origins of the story's protagonist, yet Solzhenitsyn's choice of the peasant hero was mainly a hint at the fate of the millions of peasant victims, eclipsed by the much smaller number of intellectuals and party leaders "liquidated" under Stalin and rehabilitated with fanfare during the so-called thaw.

The publication of the story was a major event in Soviet literature: it seemed to signal that writers henceforth would be allowed to present sincere and truthful views of their country's past and present. For many readers the story was the first reliable aid to imagining what it was really like in the camps. It is now common knowledge that in the majority of Soviet labor camps the conditions were much harder than those of Ivan Denisovich, and the story itself mentions that the protagonist almost died in his previous camp. Yet the relatively livable setting of the story, which got it past the censorship, is a matter not of misrepresentation but of the choice of the place and time: the camp, modeled on the author's own Ekibastuz, is located among the relatively warm Kazakhstan steppes; its inmates are employed on construction sites; the time is around 1950, when political offenders were separated from criminal convicts yet the regime was not as murderous in its camps as it had been a couple of years before. The day described is a particularly lucky one; all of the protagonist's little projects and self-protective infringements of the rules have succeeded (it is suggested that this may have turned out otherwise). Nevertheless, the story powerfully evokes a sense of life reduced to the marrow amid chronic hunger, deprivation, terror, absurdities, and humiliations; it also builds up a complex picture of the veteran prisoners' adjustment and their struggle for physical and moral self-preservation.

The story presents a great deal of information without turning the protagonist's experience into a mere pretext for describing the camp. Clever and alert, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the third-person center-of-consciousness protagonist, always considers the spectrum of the possible outcomes of every situation as well as the alternative options. Moreover, the information about camp food, medical service, frisking, parcels from home, and so on is distributed so that it never interrupts the account of the action but rather fills in stretches of the story time as the protagonist waits in a queue or marches back from work.

Through the letters that Shukhov receives from home and the conversations that he hears, Solzhenitsyn expands the ideological repertoire of the story, thus embracing broader social and aesthetic issues. It is cautiously suggested that the camp is but a condensed expression of the tendencies at work in the country as a whole, tendencies that cripple individual lives, deform personal relationships, and vitiate both official and folk art. Oblique touches of self-reflexivity also hint that similar tendencies threaten the integrity of the narrative itself.

By not idealizing his protagonist, not endowing him with eccentricities beyond endearing folk beliefs, and by avoiding accounts of excess atrocities, Solzhenitsyn creates the impression that Ivan Denisovich depicts a characteristic slice of camp life. The account of what seems to be a more or less typical day is comprehensive, from reveille to lights out, with a logical interconnection of the elements of the setting, yet without a strict thematic control of such narrative details as inset stories of other prisoners. These features of the narrative further contribute to its reality, and though the testimony that the story bears has been lightened, at the time of its publication it proved to be sufficiently consciousness-raising. By shaping Shukhov's camp experience not as a marginal but as a representative phenomenon, Solzhenitsyn practically institutionalized the Gulag subject as ample and vitally important material for literary exploration. The regime's rather prompt suppression of the camp memoirs that started flowing into editorial offices after the publication of Ivan Denisovich came to be perceived as violence that left the Soviet literature of the next two decades largely handicapped and drained.

Occasionally criticized as a piece of covert journalism, Ivan Denisovich actually proved to be a major literary event. It legitimized a new literary genre—Gulag documentary prose, fictionalized or directly autobiographical—in the eyes of the reading public throughout the world.

—Leona Toker