Solzhenitsyn's One Day As a Practical Defense of Fiction

Volume 38 Number 3 Article 1 March 2010 Faith in Fiction? Solzhenitsyn's One Day as a Practical Defense of Fiction Bob De Smith Dordt College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation De Smith, Bob (2010) "Faith in Fiction? Solzhenitsyn's One Day as a Practical Defense of Fiction," Pro Rege: Vol. 38: No. 3, 1 - 11. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol38/iss3/1 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Faith in Fiction? Solzhenitsyn’s One Day as a Practical Defense of Fiction been teaching Solzhenitsyn’s stunning little novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for nearly 20 years. I am convinced that Solzhenitsyn’s death will not diminish his relevance or significance, so he is on the syllabus again next term. In this essay (and I invoke the early meaning of the word as “at- tempt” or “exploration”), I hope to illustrate how and why I teach Solzhenitsyn’s novel at a Christian college, focusing especially on how fiction tells the truth (strange claim, since fiction is “made up”). If readers of this piece have never read One Day, I hope my description and analysis of the novel encourage them to do so. First, though, Solzhenitsyn’s death almost ex- by Bob De Smith actly a year ago as I write asks for a summary of his life. Read his obituaries and appraisals, and you will find repeated phrases like “bore witness,” “told the truth,” “ethical/moral authority,” “[Old Testament] prophet,” “national conscience,” but One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world also “crank,” “nationalist,” and “irrelevant.” Who —Russian Proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn was this man? By his own account,1 Solzhenitsyn (Ericson and Mahoney 526) was raised in the context of the Christian faith by his mother and an aunt (his father having died a couple of months before he was born). From the On August 9, 2008, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn earliest, Solzhenitsyn saw himself as a writer, but died of heart failure. Born one year after the Rus- the means to advancement under the new Soviet sian Revolution, he died in his homeland (after regime meant studying the sciences, so he studied spending some 20 years in exile in the West) just mathematics. At university, he left his Christianity a few months short of his 90th birthday. Did you behind, becoming an ardent Communist. When notice? I hope that my students did, for I have World War II broke out, Solzhenitsyn volunteered, putting his mathematical training to use in the ar- Dr. Bob De Smith is Professor of English and Chair of the tillery, where he was cited for valor and earned the English Department at Dordt College. rank of captain. But neither these distinctions nor Pro Rege—March 2010 1 his faith in the Soviet system could protect him After hours, Solzhenitsyn began to write: drawing from an increasingly paranoid regime. In a letter on his zek (the Russian word for prisoner) experi- to an old friend who was elsewhere on the front, ences, recalling words he had meticulously memo- Solzhenitsyn offered some veiled criticism of “the rized in the camps, and engaging his imagination, man with the mustache.” This correspondence he created the story of a little everyman, an un- was intercepted, and Solzhenitsyn was arrested, educated but cagey prisoner named Ivan, describ- tortured, and sentenced to eight years in the Gu- ing his experiences in a forced labor camp during lag.2 (Readers of One Day can compare Solzhenit- one day in January of 1951, “from reveille to lights syn’s experience with that of Tyurin, the Captain, out,” as he summarized it (144). Solzhenitsyn had and the main character, Shukhov). His arrest and no thoughts of publishing his work—perhaps he descent into “our sewage disposal system,” as Sol- could trust it to close friends (though remember zhenitsyn called it in his The Gulag Archipelago he was allowed no contact with earlier acquain- (19), was, understandably, the turning point in his tances) or those who could implicitly trust each life. He spent his first years at hard labor, then other because they shared the zek experience.5 So some time at a special prison for scientists (this the writer took care to bury his manuscript in a became the setting of his novel First Circle), and jar in the garden. But when Khrushchev began then, because he did not cooperate fully in the to denounce Stalin’s era as “the period of the per- scientific endeavors, his later years at forced labor sonality cult,”6 a thaw began to spread, so that by again (where he was, among other things, a brick- 1961 Solzhenitsyn, through indirect means and at layer like the title character of his novel). During the urging of friends, submitted his manuscript his time in the camps, Solzhenitsyn was called to to Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir reconsider his faiths—in human beings, in the So- (the official Soviet literary magazine). The story viet system, in God. He said, is told that Tvardovsky had the habit of reading new manuscripts in bed. When he came across in prison, I encountered a very broad variety of this novel, he was so taken that he got up, dressed, people. I saw that my convictions did not have and read the manuscript through at his desk. He a solid basis, could not stand up in dispute, and persuaded Khrushchev that publishing the novel I had to renounce them. Then the question arose was a good political move in the context of the lat- of going back to what I had learned as a child. It ter’s campaign of new openness, and so the novel took more than a year or so. Other believers in- appeared in the journal, showing up in libraries fluenced me, but basically it was a return to what and at the homes of subscribers. Solzhenitsyn had I had thought before. The fact that I was dying called his manuscript S-854 (the prison number of also shook me profoundly. At age 34 I was told his main character), while his editor suggested the I could not be saved, and then I returned to life. title, which replaces that number with Ivan Den- These kinds of upheavals always have an impact on isovich. The two titles suggest in microcosm the a person’s convictions. (59-60) themes of the novel: the impersonal prison num- As the latter part of this statement implies, Sol- ber suggests the dehumanizing effects of the cruel zhenitsyn suffered from two occurrences of ab- camps, while the full name points to the human dominal cancer—one while in the camps and one dignity that needs to be afforded to even the most after his release—and he considered his recovery insignificant prisoner.7 miraculous.3 Released from the Gulag in 1953 The novel was an immediate sensation. To take (the year Stalin died), Solzhenitsyn remained un- the long view, it has been cogently argued that this der the sanction of internal exile, which meant he publication was the first crack in the Iron Curtain. could not have contact with anyone from his past.4 But in 1962, it was simply read to pieces by Rus- Solzhenitsyn taught high school science in ru- sians who found the novel telling the truth that ev- ral Kazakhstan, and here is where the amazing sto- eryone knew (millions by experience and more by ry of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich begins. whisper) to be true but no one talked about. As 2 Pro Rege—March 2010 Edward Ericson, my former teacher and the per- Gulag system and the latter a retelling of Russian son from whom I learned nearly all I know about history leading up to, and including, the Revolu- Solzhenitsyn, puts it, tion. Solzhenitsyn’s thorny relationship with the West, as well as his return to Russia in 1994, are That little novel . [made] Solzhenitsyn world- better told by others and are not directly relevant famous overnight, but it did much more. It broke to an exploration of One Day. the official conspiracy of silence about the greatest One wonders why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn horror story, in quantitative terms at least, in hu- bothered with fiction. After all, he had so much man history. As more than a million copies passed to do. Famously dedicated to telling the truth from hand to hand to yet more hands, all those about his country, he has said, “Our history has families that had lost members to the Gulag pris- been so hidden. I had to dig so deep, I had to on camps now knew what before they could only uncover what was buried and sealed. This took guess. And the Soviet Union was never the same up all my years” (Remnick 70). Indeed, his Gulag again. If we couldn’t see it then, that was the first Archipelago stands as a monument to truth tell- crack in the Berlin Wall. (“Another” 28) ing: its encyclopedic recording, its overwhelming The thaw that allowed the novel to flourish did attention to detail, its often restrained tone seem not last long, and Solzhenitsyn faced increasing to say, “See! This is true! This is the way it was!” And we understand Solzhenitsyn’s single-minded attention to the truth (a quality which has not Indeed, his Gulag always played well in the West).

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