One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Like "The Window," the celebrated first section of To the Lighthouse, Solzhenitsyn's novella walks us through a single day of inconsequential yet highly detailed activity. Laying bricks, waiting in line, being counted at roll call, hiding tools and spoons from the guards... busy work. None of it could possibly add up to anything. And yet Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is riveted to these mundane, dysfunctional concerns from before dawn until just before sleep. The free moment is hoarded like so many crusts of bread: "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." By contrast, the empty activity in Woolf's novel is performed inattentively, always serving as an instance for reflection, for diving into oneself. Knitting a stocking is only a cover for contemplating the fragility of our knowledge of other persons, the glimpses of our hidden selves that dart and vanish like wisps.

The "story" is crowded with paths not taken on this particular day, but which will be taken the next day, the next year. The squad will get sent out to work at the (colder) new settlement; this day, they dodge that fate. Another day, Shukhov's bread will get stolen; this day, it is still in his bunk when he returns. What suspense there is resides in these moments, potential turning-points where discovery, betrayal, or a brutal tenure in the guardhouse, threaten. But this is a story of "many strokes of luck," "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day." No decisions are made, no plans laid, none of Aristotle's reversals and recognitions.

In an essay on Solzhenitsyn, Georg Lukács compares One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Hemingway's The Old Man in the Sea and Conrad's Typhoon, as novellas which can only present a restricted scope of life and time. In Hemingway, everything is touched with the aura of the universal, every struggle, every wrinkle, every loyalty stands for something more than just that thing: Struggle, Age, Loyalty. Conrad's novella, while also a "trial at sea," does not give us an allegory of the human condition. It is a character study and an adventure yarn.

Solzhenitsyn's book is much closer to the latter. "No trace of symbolism is to be found in Solzhenitsyn's presentation," says Lukács. "[Solzhenitsyn has given us] a microcosm of everyday life as a whole under Stalin. He has achieved this by grappling imaginatively with the question of what demands that age made on human beings; who succeeded in remaining human and preserving his dignity and integrity as a man; who was able to stand firm and how was this achieved; in what characters the substance of humanity was left intact or was twisted, shattered, destroyed..."

Indeed, the book is not titled A Day in the Life of a Prison Camp, but is concerned with an individual, suffering person. What do we think of this Ivan Denisovich? It is not enough to say that he is an "everyman," a representative of the person who kept his head down during the Stalinist era and who survived--because that is not a "person" but an ideology. It is equally no use to write, as does Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Introduction to my edition, "To what extent is Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn himself? To a great extent, but he, unlike Ivan Denisovich, created a record from his experiences."

Unlike the characters of Stalinist "socialist realism," which Lukács tells us were "puppets contrived for the purpose" of providing "glosses on official directives," who "could not be allowed to have any past, [but] only official dossiers," Solzhenitsyn is presumed to have given us here a set of living, breathing figures, emerging from a historical word, surviving in the midst of complicated demands on their being and consciousness.

I confess that my taste is for characters who are self-conscious articulators of their experience, who soliloquize, debate, and grapple: Antigone, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Heathcliff, Raskolnikov, Isabel Archer, Socrates, Tristram Shandy. Shukhov is much more like a Robinson Crusoe. The most riveting passages in the novella are when someone else is talking: the squad leader Tiurin about his past life, the filmmaker Tsezar about Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and finally Alyosha the Baptist about prayer.

It is hard to show a character without delving into his thoughts, without putting him into conversation with others, without showing a decisive moment in his life, without showing him over time. Solzhenitsyn needlessly handicaps himself (take as a contrast the prison camp film The Human Condition, which over and over climaxes in heightened moments of moral choice). In the most successful pages of the book dealing strictly with work, the reader follows breathlessly the necessities and spatial reasoning of Shukhov as he sizes up a problem (Robinson Crusoe can also be fascinating).

What are Shukhov's values? Not confrontation, criticism, ambition, nostalgia, the purchasing of comfort, camaraderie, or the hope of a projected future. It is easy to define him negatively like that. But this is Solzhenitsyn's method:

"Now he didn't know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch--how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown bored with counting. And then it became clear that men like him wouldn't ever be allowed to return home, that they'd be exiled. And whether his life would be any better there than here--who could tell? Freedom meant one thing to him---home. But they wouldn't let him go home."

This is by a wide margin the longest passage where Ivan thinks about the future, and the conflict is abruptly dropped and met with a shrug. After all, this isn't an immediate problem for tomorrow. So even this facet of Ivan's character is a response to the exigencies of his world. Too true, but I still want to say, "He just isn't a compelling or strongly-drawn character."

There is something to be said for aesthetic failures (e.g. the "man without qualities") being elevated to principles of composition. For instance, one doesn't criticize Andy Warhol for the flatness of his colors. I'm sure this blog will meet this issue coming and going. But I also suspect that, even at a mere 139 pages, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a candidate for Dr. Johnson's remark about Paradise Lost, that "None ever wished it longer."