The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Solzhenitsyn is a master of several prison-camp genres, each informed by his privileged position as an intellectual reduced to the ranks of the unfree. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 and a milepost for the new Thaw, was one type of testimony: modest, private, Chekhovian, a single bricklayer’s survival from dawn to dusk. Prisoner Shukhov’s one day is drawn from Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in 1951 in the northern camp of Ekibastuz, a vast complex established exclusively for “politicals.” But the events of the day are filtered through a far simpler mind. Self-pity and bitterness in this pungent oral diary are minimal. Although the canonical prototypeof Siberian hardlabor is Dostoevsky’s life and prison memoirs, a deeper subtext for Ivan Denisovich’s relatively successful day might be Platon Karatayev, prisoner of war, Tolstoy’s ideal of a reconciliation with one’s fate through resourcefulness and simple manual labor.

From the first Thaw to the end 225

Stalinist practice had grotesquely distorted this Tolstoyan motif, with the willing (or recruited) support of the literary establishment. In 1934, Gorky and thirty-five other prominent writers published a festive volume celebrating the completion of the 140-mile Belomor [White Sea] Canal in the far north. The Belomor project had been directed by engineers arrested for this purpose and built by slave labor, as a model for “re-forging” the social renegade into the New Soviet Citizen through corrective physical labor. Its brutal construction plan, which assigned prison crews the task of chipping with primitive tools through solid granite, cost 100,000 lives and resulted in a waterway too shallow to be of commercial value. Ivan Denisovich was not being “reforged.” Nor does his author focus on the perverse details of that far less harrowing one day. Solzhen-itsyn later remarked that his intent was not to document his own despair, which was very real, but “something more frightening – the gray routine year after year when you forget that the only life you have on earth is destroyed.”2 The “gray routine” of this day nevertheless knew its share of modest success and triumph. That restrained tone surely contributed to the story’s publishability in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s older friend and fellow witness Varlam Shalamov (1907– 82) saw the Gulag inferno in less quotidian fashion. His collection of Kolyma Tales, smuggled out to the West in the early 1970s and drawing on seventeen years in various labor camps between 1929 and 1954, is a sardonic, horrific corrective to Solzhenitsyn’s more heroic-ascetic focus on individual moral growth. Shalamov’s camps contain lepers who pass unnoticed as maimed war invalids and prisoners whose “workday” includes logging a mountainside that, eroded by the wind, suddenly reveals a “mass prisoners’ grave, a stone pit stuffed full of undecayed corpses from 1938” – for in far-north frozen Kolyma, “bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone.”3

Solzhenitsyn’s two quasi-autobiographical novels, The First Circle (1964) and The Cancer Ward (1968), explore other sides of the Tolstoyan legacy: the morality of science collaborating with evil; and the imperative to die well, with circumscribed desires. These great novels in the style of conventional nineteenth-century psychological realism stand apart from Solzhenitsyn’s most ambitious genre hybrid, the massive Gulag Archipelago (1973–75), subtitled “an experiment in literary investigation.” That subtitle deserves attention. Its “investigatory” dimension was meant to expose Gorky’s “disgraceful book on the White Sea Canal, which was the first in Russian literature to glorify slave labor.”4 The “literary” aspect refers, first of all, to the mass of personal narratives woven into the three volumes – but also, one suspects, to the status of Solzhenitsyn’s sources. For the safety of their tellers, these orally transmitted horror stories hadto remain anonymous.Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn challenges us to consider all this unverifiable testimony as non-fiction.

226 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The cumulative effect of this strategy is a nightmarish myth spread out along the archipelago of camps – leaping from island to island. Its impact is more powerful than any footnoted facts could ever be, because we know we have access to only a small part of a larger, untellable or lost story. Awe grows as signatures and agents are withheld. This device serves both political and literary ends. It was first perfected by Gogol for his Dead Souls in a comic vein, albeit laced with dread; the same dynamic lends weight, authority, and terror to the ominous rumors circulating through Bely’s Petersburg.