One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (2 page)

Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, a year after the Bolsheviks stormed to power throughout Russia. Although his novel draws on his own experiences, it is not strictly autobiographical; for Solzhenitsyn, unlike his simple peasant hero, came from a "petit-bourgeois" family. When he was a boy, his father died; and he was brought up by his mother in the southern city of Rostov. He completed his ten-year school and enrolled at the University of Rostov, where he majored in physics and mathematics. The biographical note states that he "made no special study of literature until he was twenty-one and took a correspondence course at the Philological Department of Moscow University."

In 1941, his life, and Russia's, changed drastically. The Germans invaded Russia, and Solzhenitsyn, a spare man with dark, intense eyes and a brooding, lined face, was drafted into the Red Army. In 1942, he took an artillery course and became commander of an artillery battery, where he served with distinction for three years. He was twice decorated for bravery.

In February 1945, he was arrested in East Prussia on what Tass calls a "baseless political charge" and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. According to one story, Solzhenitsyn was supposed to have made a derogatory remark about Stalin. For the next eight years, he was in a Russian concentration camp--probably Karaganda, according to unofficial reports--where he survived the experiences he later described in
One Day
. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, he was released from the camp but was still forced to live in exile in Central Asia, where he remained until after Khrushchev's historic "secret speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.

Solzhenitsyn was "rehabilitated" in 1957 "in the absence of corpus delicti." He moved to Ryazan, married a chemistry student, and began to teach mathematics at the local ten-year school. In his spare time, he started to write, drawing on his own experiences and observations of people in a small Russian town.
One Day
is his first published work.

It is a popular sensation because its subject is meaningful for every Soviet citizen; it awakens deeply buried memories and touches deep chords of guilt and despair.

It is a literary sensation because of its simple power, its ability to envelop the reader in the futile atmosphere of camp life and to make him see it through the lives of a Russian peasant who accepts everything, both good and evil, with enduring patience as he has done for centuries under every conceivable kind of misrule.

It is an official sensation because it humanizes the cold clichés of Khrushchev's attacks on Stalinist "violations of socialist legality," and makes his drive to eliminate these abuses more comprehensible to the average Russian.

But beyond all this,
One Day
raises a major question: how far has Khrushchev stretched the limits of what can and cannot be said in print? Although this is a bold and original book, could it have been bolder if the system had not held it back? There are old Bolsheviks here who, while praising
One Day
, point out that there was more to the labor-camp story than fatalistic acceptance. The innocent Ivans, unprotesting and mild, were the majority; but there were others, more politically sophisticated, who refused to accept the injustices of the system which had sent them, guiltless, into the labor camps, and who refused to cooperate in any way with the authorities.

Unlike Ivan, they took no simple pride in getting through another day and building a fine wail. They planned and occasionally tried to carry out revolts. They called themselves the Blacks; they called the Ivans the Reds.

Solzhenitsyn writes nothing about these people, the old Bolsheviks complain.

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn did not know them. Perhaps his experience was limited to Ivans.

Perhaps he knew of the others but considered them irrelevant to his story of the typical suffering Russian peasant. Or, per. haps, he would have written more, but could not because of the limits of present-day Soviet literary policy.

It is difficult to imagine Khrushchev endorsing a different kind of literary sensation--for example, one in which the main character openly denounces the Communist Party itself, rather than Stalin, for the evils of the labor camps. It is certainly a step toward internal liberalization when a cutting attack such as Solzhenitsyn's can be published in Moscow; but Russia still has a long way to go before
Doctor Zhivagos
can be published and freely discussed.

Moscow

December

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. The intermittent sounds barely penetrated the windowpanes on which the frost lay two fingers thick, and they ended almost as soon as they'd begun. It was cold outside, and the camp guard was reluctant to go on beating out the reveille for long.

The clanging ceased, but everything outside still looked like the middle of the night when Ivan Denisovich Shukhov got up to go to the bucket. It was pitch dark except for the yellow light cast on the window by three lamps--two in the outer zone, one inside the camp itself.

And no one came to unbolt the barracks door; there was no sound of the barrack orderlies pushing a pole into place to lift the barrel of excrement and carry it out.

Shukhov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once, for the next ninety minutes, until they assembled for work, belonged to him, not to the authorities, and any old-timer could always earn a bit--by sewing a pair of mittens for someone out of old sleeve lining; or bringing some rich loafer in the squad his dry valenki *[* Knee-length felt boots for winter wear.] -- right up to his bunk, so that he wouldn't have to stumble barefoot round the heap of boots looking for his own pair; or going the rounds of the warehouses, offering to be of service, sweeping up this or fetching that; or going to the mess hall to collect bowls from the tables and bring them stacked to the dishwashers--you're sure to be given something to eat there, though there were plenty of others at that game, more than plenty--and, what's worse, if you found a bowl with something left in it you could hardly resist licking it out. But Shukhov had never forgotten the words of his first squad leader, Kuziomin--a hard-bitten prisoner who had already been in for twelve years by 1943--who told the newcomers, just in from the front, as they sat beside a fire in a desolate cutting in the forest:

"Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live.

The ones that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies."

As for squealers, he was wrong there. Those people were sure to get through camp all right Only, they were saving their own skin at the expense of other people's blood.

Sbukhov always arose at reveille. But this day he didn't. He had felt strange the evening before, feverish, with pains all over his body. He hadn't been able to get warm all through the night. Even in his sleep he had felt at one moment that he was getting seriously ill, at another that he was getting better. He had wished morning would never come.

But the morning came as usual.

Anyway, where would you get warm in a place like this, with the windows iced over and the white cobwebs of frost all along the huge barracks where the walls joined the ceiling!

He didn't get up. He lay there in his bunk on the top tier, his head buried in a blanket and a coat, both feet stuffed into one tucked-under sleeve of his wadded jacket.

He couldn't see, but his ears told him everything going on in the barrack room and especially in the corner his squad occupied. He heard the heavy tread of the orderlies carrying one of the big barrels of excrement along the passage outside. A light job, that was considered, a job for the infirm, but just you try and carry out the muck without spilling any. He heard some of the 75th slamming bunches of boots onto the floor from the drying shed. Now their own men were doing it (it was their own squad's turn, too, to dry valenki). Tiurin, the squad leader, and his deputy Pavlo put on their valenki without a word but he heard their bunks creaking. Now Pavlo would be going off to the bread storage and Tiurin to the staff quarters to see the P.P.D * [* Production Planning Department.]

Ah, but not simply to report as usual to the authorities for the daily assignment.

Shukbov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance: they wanted to shift the 104th from the building shops to a new site, the "Socialist Way of Life" settlement. It lay in open country covered with snowdrifts, and before anything else could be done there they would have to dig holes and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them. Wire themselves in, so that they wouldn't run away. Only then would they start building.

There wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month. Not even a doghouse. And fires were out of the question. There was nothing to build them with. Let your work warm you up, that was your only salvation.

No wonder the squad leader looked so worried, that was his job--to elbow some other squad, some bunch of suckers, into the assignment instead of the 104th. Of course with empty bands you got nowhere. He'd have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if not a couple of pounds.

There's never any harm in trying, so why not have a go at the dispensary and get a few days off if you can? After all, he did feel as though every limb was out of joint.

Then Shukhov wondered which of the camp guards was on duty that morning. It was "One-and-a-half" Ivan's turn, he recalled. Ivan was a thin, weedy, dark eyed sergeant.

At first sight he looked like a real bastard, but when you got to know him he turned out to be the most good-natured of the guards on duty: he didn't put you in the guardhouse, he didn't haul you off before the authorities. So Shukhov decided he could lie in his bunk a little longer, at least while Barracks 9 was at the mess hall.

The whole four-bunk frame began to shake and sway. Two of its occupants were getting up at the same time: Shukhov's top-tier neighbor, Alyosha the Baptist, and Buinovsky, the ex-naval captain down below.

The orderlies, after removing both barrels of excrement, began to quarrel about which of them should go for hot water. They quarreled naggingly, like old women.

"Hey you, cackling like a couple of hens!" bellowed the electric welder in the 20th squad. "Get going." He flung a boot at them.

The boot thudded against a post. The squabbling stopped.

In the next squad the deputy squad leader growled quietly: "Vasily Fyodorovich, they've cheated us again at the supply depot, the dirty rats. They should have given us four twenty-five-ounce loaves and I've only got three. Who's going to go short?"

He kept his voice down, but of course everyone in the squad heard him and waited fearfully to learn who would be losing a slice of bread that evening.

Shukhov went on lying on his sawdust mattress, as hard as a board from long wear. If only it could be one thing or the other--let him fall into a real fever or let his aching joints ease up.

Meanwhile Alyosha was murmuring his prayers and Buinovsky had returned from the latrines, announcing to no one in particular but with a sort of malicious glee: "Well, sailors, grit your teeth. It's twenty below, for sure."

Shukhov decided to report sick.

At that very moment his blanket and jacket were imperiously jerked off him. He flung his coat away from his face and sat up. Looking up at him, his head level with the top bunk, was the lean figure of The Tartar.

So the fellow was on duty out of turn and had stolen up.

"S 854," The Tartar read from the white strip that had been stitched to the back of his black jacket. "Three days' penalty with work."

The moment they heard that peculiar choking voice of his, everyone who wasn't up yet in the whole dimly lit barracks, where two hundred men slept in bug ridden bunks, stirred to life and began dressing in a hurry.

"What for, citizen *[* Prisoners were not allowed to use the word comrade.]

chief?" asked Shukhov with more chagrin than he felt in his voice.

With work--that wasn't half so bad. They gave you hot food and you had no time to start thinking. Real jail was when you were kept back from work.

"Failing to get up at reveille. Follow me to the camp commandant’s office," said The Tartar lazily.

His crumpled, hairless face was imperturbable. He turned, looking around for another victim, but now everybody, in dim corners and. under the lights, in upper bunks and in lower, had thrust their legs into their black wadded trousers or, already dressed, had wrapped their coats around themselves and hurried to the door to get out of the way until The Tartar had left.

Had Shukhov been punished for something he deserved he wouldn't have felt so resentful. What hurt him was that he was always one of the first to be up. But he knew he couldn't plead with The Tartar. And, protesting merely for the sake of form, he hitched up his trousers (a bedraggled scrap of cloth had been sewn on them, just above the left knee, with a faded black number), slipped on his jacket (here the same digits appeared twice--on the chest and on the back), fished his valenki from the heap on the floor, put his hat on (with his number on a patch of cloth at the front), and followed The Tartar out of the barrack room.

The whole 104th saw him go, but no one said a word--what was the use, and anyway what could they say? The squad leader might have tried to do something, but he wasn't there. And Shukhov said nothing to anyone. He didn't want to irritate The Tartar.

Anyway he could rely on the others in his squad to keep his breakfast for him.

The two men left the barracks. The cold made Sbukhov gasp.

Two powerful searchlights swept the camp from the farthest watchtowers. The border lights, as well as those inside the camp, were on. There were so many of them that they outshone the stars.

With the snow creaking under their boots, the prisoners hurried away, each on his own business, some to the parcels office, some to hand in cereals to be cooked in the