One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
이반 데니소비치의 하루
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first published work, printed in Novy Mir in November 1962. It follows one day in January 1951 of the prisoner Ivan Shukhov in a camp for political prisoners, from reveille to lights out. With Khrushchev's approval it became the first open Soviet fiction about the camps, and in the 1970s it was removed from libraries.
In depth
What is the story?
Nothing happens, and that is the horror of it. At five in the morning Shukhov, forty years old, camp number Shch-854, rises late, feeling ill. Caught during the war, he escaped within days and got ten years for treason, of which he has served eight. He narrowly avoids three days in the punishment cell by washing a guardroom floor. Breakfast is thin soup and gruel, and the infirmary turns him away because its quota is filled.
In nearly thirty degrees of frost, his work gang marches under armed escort to an unfinished power station. Then something strange happens: Shukhov enjoys laying blocks. They start a contest, forget the cold and the end of the shift, and nearly miss the gate because they will not let the mortar freeze unused. He wangles an extra bowl at lunch and picks up a bit of hacksaw blade, which he forgets is in his mitten at the search, and luckily it is not found. Queuing for Tsezar, who has received a parcel, earns him a supper and bread, and he buys tobacco.
Going to sleep he is content: "a day without a shadow, almost happy". Just one of 3,653 days.
Why was it such an event?
The idea came to Solzhenitsyn in the winter of 1950-1951 at the Ekibastuz camp as he carried a stretcher: to describe the camp world, one ordinary day of an ordinary labourer would be enough. He wrote it in 1959 in about forty days. The manuscript by this unknown author reached the Novy Mir editor Alexander Tvardovsky, who on 6 August 1962 gave it, with a letter to Khrushchev, to his aide Lebedev. In September Lebedev read it to Khrushchev in his leisure hours; Khrushchev was moved and ordered 23 copies for the leadership. It fitted the politics of de-Stalinisation begun at the Twentieth Congress. On 12 October the party Presidium decided to publish.
Novy Mir no. 11 appeared in November 1962, and 2,000 copies went to participants of the Central Committee plenum. Roman-gazeta soon printed 700,000 copies. The official praise is itself history: Simonov wrote in Izvestia and Vladimir Yermilov in Pravda. Letters poured in from all over the country, from readers describing what they had been through and asking to meet him, which led on to the testimony of The Gulag Archipelago. Varlam Shalamov wrote to him that the story was like poetry.
What were the objections?
Two kinds. One reviewer asked why the hero was a peasant rather than a real Communist, and Solzhenitsyn was told unofficially that an innocent regional secretary would have been better than an innocent collective farmer. Valentin Katayev called it false for showing no protest. In 1964 an anonymous analysis arguing that it reflected more than one camp circulated in samizdat.
Why did it disappear again?
The climate changed after Khrushchev fell. In 1971-1972 all editions were quietly removed from libraries, the pages torn out of journals and the name blacked out in contents. After Solzhenitsyn's expulsion in February 1974, Glavlit order no. 10 listed everything to be withdrawn, including the edition for the blind. The ban was lifted at the end of 1988, and it was reprinted from 1990.