One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Cana Academy® Guide

LEADING A SEMINAR ON ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN’S ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman & Benjamin Mysliwiec

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CANA ACADEMY® www.canaacademy.org

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Front cover image: Gulag Perm-36 (Kuchino near Chusovoi, Russia), postbox on the camp wall, photographed by English Wikimedia Commons user Wulfstan in July 2008, edited and uploaded to English Wikimedia Commons by user Jacek Halicki on April 27, 2018, used under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

i ©2020 Cana Academy® ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, translated by Ralph Parker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Grade Level: 10th-12th 164 pages ISBN-13: 978-045-1228147 Recommended hours: 10-12 hours

INTRODUCTION

When Solzhenitsyn first exposed the internal operations of the Soviet Gulag in his novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he brought the brutality and barbarism of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps to the attention of his fellow citizens and to the larger world. First published in 1962 in the Moscow literary journal, Novy Mir, it would sadly be the only major work by Solzhenitsyn published in the Soviet Union until its collapse. Why and how he was permitted to publish this account in the first place is too complicated to address here.

GULAG is the acronym for the Russian, Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration, an extraordinarily banal title for an institution tasked with terrorizing the population. The Soviet forced labor camps were first decreed and established by Lenin and his administration in 1918 in order to deal with those deemed insufficiently cooperative with and supportive of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: those identified as “counter-revolutionaries” and “enemies of the people.” These first concentration camps housed former landowners, aristocrats, industrialists, clerics, intellectuals, and merchants, among others. In 1929 Stalin

1 ©2020 Cana Academy® greatly expanded the prison system to accommodate the need for cheap labor to support his ambitious Five-Year Plan as he ordered the collectivization of agriculture and the rapid industrialization of the USSR. Stalin’s later purges resulted in fresh waves of mass internment, torture, and execution in the Gulag.

There is disagreement about how many people were incarcerated in the Gulag at any given time. According to Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, approximately 28.7 million individuals passed through the Gulag in the years 1929-1953 (the year Stalin died).1 Solzhenitsyn and others reported much higher numbers. In any case, millions of individuals passed through the elaborate system of slave labor camps, “special” camps, correctional facilities, transit centers, labor colonies and settlements, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons numbering in the thousands and scattered across the Soviet Union in what Solzhenitsyn called the Gulag Archipelago. Given these numbers, prisoners were a visible part of society, especially since they worked inside cities as well as in remote labor camps like the one described by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. These labor camps did not close when Stalin died, although their numbers diminished.

In Fear No Evil, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky reported that his fellow zeks divided the Soviet citizenry into two zones of incarceration.2 There was the Soviet Union itself, a vast prison that denied its citizenry freedom of movement, thought, conscience, expression, and material necessities, and there was the Gulag, which intensified that imprisonment within an elaborate network of cruel, perilous, and often absurd and degrading rules intended to dominate and eventually break the spirit of the prisoner. The degradation of the prisoner recapitulated and deepened the experience of the larger, outer prison the general citizenry endured daily. In this regard, the Gulag was a prison within a prison.

Throughout One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the reader encounters this interpenetration of life inside the Gulag with life outside: the casual embrace of deceit, bribery, cheating, and theft; the stupidity and caprice of petty bureaucrats who have the power to make life unliveable for those they govern; the willful degradation and humiliation of individuals through extreme material poverty; the perverse and arbitrary manipulation of law; the blind neglect of individual civil rights; the appalling rates of death; and the culture of informants, surveillance, and ruinous betrayals that generates the toxic paranoia that divides parent from child, neighbor from neighbor, and zek from zek. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich reaches beyond the mundane details of this specific labor camp to reflect something much larger at work in Soviet society.

As the title suggests, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single day in the life of a prisoner named Ivan Denisovich (Shukhov), prisoner S-854, as he labors to survive another day in utterly dehumanizing circumstances. Throughout, the reader witnesses Ivan’s simple, sardonic, and often canny assessment of his situation, his equally perceptive prognosis for his fellow prisoners, and his resourceful provision for his most immediate needs. By closely following the mounting accumulation of details, the reader gains special access to Ivan’s

1 Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History, “Appendix.” New York City, Doubleday, 2003. 2 Sharansky, Natan. Fear no Evil. New York, Random House, Inc., 1988.

world and thoughts and to a larger world beyond the prison’s gates. Told in the spare, simple language that represents the consciousness of Solzhenitsyn’s protagonist, the story’s profound meaning is laid bare for the reader.

Writing in his monumental The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn drew the following conclusion regarding his experience in prison:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good…Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.3

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gives the reader a close look at what it means to be a human being in conditions so degrading and dehumanizing it is difficult to comprehend what small residue of an individual’s humanity can be rescued and preserved. Yet, Ivan Denisovich does assert his humanity in small but important gestures and resists drifting over the line into grave evil.

Of the several available English editions, for its affordability and its ready availability, we have chosen to work with the First New American Library Printing of 2009, based on Ralph Parker’s translation. The teacher may choose to bring in alternative translations (e.g., Willetts) for the students to compare and contrast various passages.

Solzhenitsyn often wrote out of his personal experience in the Gulag, but One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not a memoir, nor is it a history. It is a literary piece and must be treated as such. Solzhenitsyn was a master craftsman and a beautiful stylist. The students should be directed to notice and appreciate that craft. Furthermore, the students may mistakenly identify the voices of the narrative with Solzhenitsyn’s. They will need to be instructed on this matter. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Denisovich is not an educated man, nor are his reflections those of an educated man. This poses intriguing problems of craft for Solzhenitsyn, and the students will enjoy teasing out the various perspectives and voices at work within the narrative. Although the content is serious and sometimes dark, if treated with care, the students will find insight and inspiration in this story.

Finally, even though the text must be treated as a novel, it does pair especially well with a study of twentieth century history.

3 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Part 4, Chapter 1, “The Ascent.” New York City, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1973.

• A biography of Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

• A list of important historical events the teacher should introduce to the students as background information

• Important advice for the teacher

• An extensive glossary with multiple illustrations

• Discussion questions for each section of the text

• A list of broader questions suitable for closing discussions and essay assignments

• A bibliography for further study

For further study: Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture (delivered in writing in 1972); The First Circle (1968); Cancer Ward (1968); The Red Wheel (1971-1991); and The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation in three volumes (1973).

IMAGES USED IN THIS GUIDE

Political prisoners in the Gulag, 1955, Kaunas 9th Fort Museum, uploaded to English Wikimedia Commons on January 16, 2018, by user Renata3, used under https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/deed.en.

Bert Verhoeff, photograph of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974, public domain.

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