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Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Kern
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Extract

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 1974 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1974

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References

1. Alexander, Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Frankfurt am Main : Possev, 1969-70), 1 : 116 Google Scholar. Cf. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ronald Hingley and Max Hayward (New York : Bantam, 1969), pp. 176-77.

2. Georg, Lukacs, Solshenitsyn, trans. Graf, William David (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 13 Google Scholar.

3. The very high incidence of interrelationships between the characters suggests, as in Doctor Zhivago, that the novel concerns the life of a whole people. For example, Nerzhin's wife Nadya is courted by Shchagov, who seeks marriage with Liza, whom he meets at the home of two sisters—Clara, who works at Mavrino and is courted by Nerzhin's companion Doronin, and Dotnara, who is the wife of Volodin.

4. Alexander, Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (New York : Bantam, 1969, pp. 82–83 Google Scholar. Subsequent citations in English are taken from, or based on, this translation.

5. This term is favored by Schaarschmidt, G, “Interior Monologue and Soviet Literary Criticism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 7 (1966) : 143–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term “quasidirect discourse” is preferred by R. Luplow, “Narrative Style and Structure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Russian Literature TriQuarterly, no. 1 (1971), p. 400. The term “represented discourse” is defended by Vladimir J. Rus, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich : A Point of View Analysis,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 13 (1971) : 167. Each term has its merits.

6. Later, in chapter 19, the author connects the absence of space with a psychological motivation : “He [Stalin] himself had described space as the basic condition for material existence. But having made himself the master of one-sixth of terrestrial matter, he had begun to be afraid of space. That was what was good about his night office : there was no space” (p. 113).

7. Alexander, Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervotn (New York : Harper & Row, 1969), p. 80 Google Scholar. All Russian citations are taken from this text There are two additional chapters said to exist in samisdat—“In the Open” (chap. 44) and “Dialectical Materialism : An Advanced World View” (chap. 88)—but these were not available for the present study.

8. Solzhenitsyn did not avail himself of all the ways in which Stalin was represented. On the occasion of Stalin's seventieth birthday, his image was projected onto a low cloud over Red Square. A photograph of the event is reproduced in Problems of Communism, 16, no. 6 (1967) : 80.

9. Philip, Roth, Our Gang (New York : Bantam, 1972, pp. 24–25 Google Scholar.

10. Solzhenitsyn's quotations are very close to passages on pp. 83, 73, 77, 242, and 239, in Stalin, I. V., Kratkaia btografita, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 19S0)Google Scholar. Unfortunately, the first edition was not available for this study.

11. Rigby, T. H., ed., The Stalin Dictatorship : Khrushchev's “Secret Speech” and Other Documents (Sydney, 1968), p. 71 Google Scholar. Milovan Djilas also describes Stalin in much the same way Solzhenitsyn does. Compare the following passage : “Poets were inspired by him, orchestras blared cantatas in his honor, philosophers in institutes wrote tomes about his sayings, and martyrs died on scaffolds crying out his name. Now he was the victor in the greatest war of his nation and in history. His power, absolute over a sixth of the globe, was spreading farther without surcease. This convinced him that his society contained no contradictions and that it exhibited superiority to other societies in every way.” Milovan, Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), pp. 106–7 Google Scholar.

12. Medvedev, Roy A.s Let History Judge (New York, 1971)Google Scholar might be listed as the nonfictional counterpart of Solzhenitsyn's attack. Lacking fiction's means of winning assent, however, Medvedev must argue every point. Solzhenitsyn's Arkhipelag Gulag appeared after the present study was completed.

13. This method is a key compositional device of One Day, where nearly every item in Ivan Denisovich's three-part day (morning, work, night) takes on a triple existence : his sickness, his hunk of bread, his spoon, the piece of metal he finds, and so forth.

14. Edward J., Brown, “Solzhenitsyn's Cast of Characters,” Slavic and East European Journal, 15, no. 2 (1971) : 162–63Google Scholar.

15. Rigby, The Stalin Dictatorship, p. SO.

16. Dante's Inferno, trans, and commentary by John D. Sinclair (New York, 1968), p. 65. Sinclair points out that the “fair stream” may signify eloquence (p. 69).

17. The comparison is treated at length by Vladimir, Grebenschikov, “Les cercles infernaux chez Solj6nitsyne et Dante,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 13 (1971) : 154–58Google Scholar.

18. Lukács, , Solzhenitsyn, p. 58 Google Scholar.

19. Cf. Goethé;s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York : Anchor, 1963), pp. 468-69.

20. Brown, “Solzhenitsyn's Cast of Characters,” p. 164.

21. Rigby, The Stalin Dictatorship, p. 29.

22. Robin Blackburn, “The Politics of The First Circle,” New Left Review (London), September-October 1970, p. 61.

23. Lukécs, , Solzhenitsyn, p. 52 Google Scholar

24. There is said to be an early version of the novel in which Sologdin does not turn his discovery over to the authorities and is sent from Mavrino to a strict labor camp. According to Russian émigrés, such was the fate of Sologdin's real-life prototype.

25. It would seem that Solzhenitsyn carefully excluded historical references which might conceivably be used to justify Stalin's actions : the Chinese revolution, the atom bomb, the approaching Korean war. For a careful analysis of Stalin's departure from, and continuation of, Leninism see Lucio Colletti, “The Question of Stalin,” New Left Review, May-June 1970, pp. 61-81.