Gulag

Many legends surround the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, so many that Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, has written that the tale “has acquired such embellishments along the way that it is sometimes hard to disentangle fact from fiction.” The book’s route to literary fame was a slow one. Before it became famous, the manuscript of Ivan Denisovich passed through the hands of Lev Kopelev—a Moscow literary figure, and one of Solzhenitsyn’s camp comrades—and a copy editor at Novyi Mir. Excited by her find, the copy editor passed it to Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor-in-chief of Novyi Mir.

Tvardovsky, so the story goes, began reading Ivan Denisovich while lying in bed. After a few pages, however, he was so impressed by the manuscript that he felt he had to get up, get dressed, and read the story sitting upright. He spent an entire night reading it, and then rushed into his office as soon as dawn broke, howling for the typists to make up extra copies so that he could distribute the book to his friends, all the while hailing the birth of a new literary genius. Whether or not all of this really happened, Tvardovsky certainly told people it had. Later, Solzhenitsyn wrote to him of how happy he had felt when he learned that Tvardovsky found Ivan Denisovich “worth a sleepless night.”⁶²

The novel itself was straightforward enough: it recorded a single day in the life of an ordinary prisoner. Reading it now, it can, in fact, be hard for contemporary readers, even contemporary readers in Russia, to understand why it created such a furor in the Soviet literary world. But to those who read it in 1962, the novel came as a revelation. Instead of speaking vaguely about “returnees” and “repressions,” as some other books did at the time, Ivan Denisovich directly described life in the camps, a subject which had not, until then, been discussed in public.

At the same time, Solzhenitsyn’s style—particularly his use of camp slang—and his descriptions of the dullness and unpleasantness of prison life, made a stunning contrast to the usual empty, phoney fiction then being published. The official Soviet literary creed of that time, “socialist realism,” was not realism at all, but rather the literary version of Stalinist political doctrine. Prison literature, such as it was, had not changed since Gorky’s day. If there was a thief in a Soviet novel, he saw the light and converted to the true Soviet faith. The hero might suffer, but in the end the Party showed him the light. The heroine might shed tears, but once she had learned the value of Work, she would find her proper role in society.

Ivan Denisovich, by contrast, was genuinely realistic: it was not optimistic, and it was not a morality tale. The sufferings of its heroes were pointless. The work they did was exhausting and draining, and they tried to avoid it. The Party did not triumph in the end, and communism did not emerge the victor. This honesty, so unusual for a Soviet writer, was precisely what Tvardovsky admired: he told Solzhenitsyn’s friend Kopelev that the story had “not a drop of falsehood in it.” Which was precisely what would upset many readers, particularly those in the Soviet establishment. Even one of Novyi Mir’s editors found the story’s frankness disturbing. In his comments on the novel he wrote that “it shows life too one-sidedly, involuntarily twisting and upsetting the proportions.” For people used to simplistic conclusions, the novel seemed horrifyingly open-ended and amoral.

Tvardovsky wanted to publish it, but knew that if he simply had the story typeset and sent off to the censors, they would ban it immediately. Instead, he offered Ivan Denisovich to Khrushchev, to be used as a weapon against his enemies. According to Michael Scammell, Tvardovsky wrote a Preface that presented the story’s usefulness in precisely this light, and then began giving it to people whom he hoped would hand it to Khrushchev himself.⁶³

After much back and forth, much debate, and a few changes to the manuscript—Solzhenitsyn was persuaded to add at least one “positive hero,” and to include a token condemnation of Ukrainian nationalism—the novel did finally reach Khrushchev. He approved. He even praised the book for having been written “in the spirit of the Twenty-second Party Congress,” which presumably meant that he thought it would annoy his enemies. Finally, in the November 1962 issue of Novyi Mir, it appeared in print. “The bird is free! The bird is free!” Tvardovsky is alleged to have shouted as he held the first proof copy in his hands.