A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Review
One Solar day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated past H.T. Willetts.
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2005.
ISBN 0 374 52952 three.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'southward One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is my book. This bound, a new translation by H.T. Willetts has given me the perfect excuse to read my book yet once again. And while I could pour over comparable texts and deconstruct discussion choices, I would rather tell you why I staked a personal claim to it more than three decades agone. How did a young American, who was neither a student of global politics nor Soviet history (I was barely a pupil of classic Russian literature so), connect and so deeply with the work of a Soviet dissident?
I first encountered Solzhenitsyn'due south piece of work in 1970, and quickly devoured The Kickoff Circle and Cancer Ward. My volume, notwithstanding, was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a tattered, domestic dog-eared copy of which has been within attain on my desk for 35 years. Although there take been several translations, the one I own is Gillon Aitken'southward. Originally published as a pic tie-in edition, it likewise contains a shooting script for the marvelous picture that virtually ten people in the world saw. Starring Tom Courtenay as Ivan, and featuring stark but stunning cinematography by Sven Nykvist, the movie version of Ivan Denisovich remains the best evocation of a novel on the screen that I have always encountered.
I've read the story of a "happy" mean solar day in Ivan'south miserable life as a gulag prisoner more times than whatsoever other book I possess. It dared to look a monolithic Soviet beast in the eye and did non blink. Solzhenitsyn wrote Ivan Denisovich at the height of the Cold State of war, and even though it was published in 1962 in the literary journal Novy Mir (thanks to a brief, official "thaw" during which Khrushchev evidently saw the novel as a personally useful anti-Stalinist tract), it was still an extraordinary and mettlesome public statement at the time.
The thaw turned out to exist temporary, and Solzhenitsyn paid a heavy cost for his dissidence. He was forced to live in exile for several decades, and settled not far from where I live in Vermont, finding refuge, if non happiness (he is a steadfast Russian, subsequently all, and no fan of Western materialist culture), in a small rural boondocks where his children attended local schools and the residents guarded his privacy from tourists and pilgrims akin.
Even though this little novel fought a big fight, it is besides just a story, and that is how I first encountered it in 1970, when I opened my copy and read: "At 5 A.M., as usual, reveille was sounded—a hammer banged against a rail just by the staff hut."
Recently, I opened the new translation and read: "The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock every bit always."
As usual. As always.
Information technology is this day-to-mean solar day ordinariness that commencement struck me when I read the novel. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan is a workingman, though non in a "Workers of the World Unite!" sense. Stalin bastardized Marxism, and Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of Ivan is both straightforward and ironic in response to this. Ivan is a worker. He has been incarcerated by a system founded upon the illusory rise of the working course. He sustains his identity by working hard in spite of the system rather than for the system.
I recognized Ivan Denisovich Shukhov the moment I met him. I'one thousand a workingman, too. As the son and grandson of marble quarrymen and mill hands, I understood him considering, fifty-fifty in the gulag, he lived a life not unfamiliar to me, a life of adapting to circumstance, of getting the chore done, of keeping the boss at bay—a workingman'due south life. I realize this may seem like a simplistic reading of what then many accept considered a fictionalized political tract, simply Ivan knows that the world outside his captivity isn't then elementary, either:
"He no longer knew whether he wanted to be gratis or not. To begin with, he'd wanted it very much, and counted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he'd got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not immune to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier—here or in that location."
Ivan is no fiery revolutionary; he is a victim of terrible circumstances. During the war, he was a soldier, "fighting" without ammunition or supplies, when he was rounded up by the Germans and held for a couple of days. He escaped, but upon returning to his own lines, he was defendant of being a spy and imprisoned for treason. Neither hero nor coward, Ivan is only another casualty of Stalinist paranoia.
What I beloved about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that information technology is never just the story of a victim. It portrays an ordinary workingman coping with boggling hardship. Ivan's triumphs on this "happy" twenty-four hours in the army camp are so pocket-size that they might escape notice in the "free" world. He swipes an extra basin of gruel at dinner, finds a piece of metal that might exist sharpened into a modest knife, works hard and well, replenishes his precious tobacco supplies, and receives the rare gift of a tasty bit of sausage simply earlier lights out. "He felt pleased with life as he went to sleep."
The adaptability and resilience of the homo spirit in the face of a dehumanizing environs is part of what has made Ivan Denisovich my volume. The other key is Ivan'due south fierce devotion to work as a contributing cistron to both his hard-won pride and survival skills.
Waking "as usual" on this ordinary day, Ivan feels ill, but when he is assigned to launder the flooring in the warders' room, he has a minor revelation: "Now that Shukhov had a job to exercise, his torso seemed to accept stopped aching."
Ivan is non a flooring washer. He's a bricklayer, "a job to take pride in." He'south as close to a perfectionist equally he can exist, given the materials and the conditions at mitt. He works with purpose and professionalism. He works hard because that is how he sees his world and himself most clearly: "There are two ends to a stick, and there's more one fashion of working. If information technology's for human beings—make certain and do it properly. If it's for the big man—just get in look skilful."
Ivan may seem to be working for "the big man" in this novel, but information technology is his foreman and his work gang to whom he gives all of his loyalty and for whom he labors so hard. His captors take cleverly designed a organization in which the work gang is rewarded or punished as a unit, which compels the members to pressure ane another to contribute as. Fifty-fifty every bit Ivan acknowledges the genius of this programme, he transcends information technology with his own performance. When he starts laying cinder blocks at the Power Station that his work gang has been assigned to construct, Ivan brings a focus to the job at manus that the countless, daily degradations of camp life cannot impede:
"He worked fast and skillfully, merely without thinking about it. His heed and his eyes were studying the wall, the fa�ade of the Power Station, two cinder blocks thick, as it showed from under the ice. Whoever had been laying in that location before was either a bungler or a slacker. Shukhov would get to know every inch of that wall as if he owned it. That dent at that place—it would take 3 courses to brand the wall affluent, with a thicker layer of mortar every fourth dimension. That bulge couldn't be straightened out in less than two courses. He ran an invisible ruler over the wall..."
At sundown, Ivan continues working until the last possible infinitesimal, loath to waste mortar. Is he an idiot or a flunky for the system? Hardly. In fact, he risks punishment staying at the piece of work site later on his gang has left, and is fortunate to brand information technology back to them before his tardiness is detected.
Why should we intendance about this human? Why have I cared so much and for so many years? On the surface, Ivan's day is nix special. He wakes, eats three lousy meals, works his ass off in sub-cypher weather condition until sundown, steals a few precious moments for himself at the end of the day, and goes to sleep "happy."
Aitken: "The twenty-four hours had gone by without a single cloud—well-nigh a happy day."
Willetts: "The end of an unclouded day. Nigh a happy i."
Happy? Both translations utilise that give-and-take.
"Can a man who's warm understand ane who's freezing?" Solzhenitsyn asks. Yes, I take to answer. The author wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to expose the horrors of Soviet gulags, just he also wrote it to offer us a story of an ordinary workingman. I will only know the gulags through books, but I've known people like Ivan Denisovich Shukhov nigh of my life. This is my book, and that is why I celebrate the publication of this new translation.
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