The first title is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - history of creation and publication

At five o'clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks. An intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen into two fingers, and soon died down: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant to wave his hand for a long time.

The ringing died down, and outside the window everything was the same as in the middle of the night, when Shukhov got up to the bucket, there was darkness and darkness, and three yellow lanterns came through the window: two in the zone, one inside the camp.

And for some reason they didn’t go to unlock the barracks, and you never heard of the orderlies picking up the barrel on sticks to carry it out.

Shukhov never missed getting up, he always got up on it - before the divorce he had an hour and a half of his own time, not official, and whoever knows camp life can always earn extra money: sew someone a mitten cover from an old lining; give the rich brigade worker dry felt boots directly on his bed, so that he doesn’t have to trample barefoot around the pile, and doesn’t have to choose; or run through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, sweep or offer something; or go to the dining room to collect bowls from the tables and take them in piles to the dishwasher - they will also feed you, but there are a lot of hunters there, there is no end, and most importantly, if there is anything left in the bowl, you can’t resist, you will start licking the bowls. And Shukhov firmly remembered the words of his first brigadier Kuzyomin - he was an old camp wolf, he had been in prison for twelve years by the year nine hundred and forty-three, and he once said to his reinforcement, brought from the front, in a bare clearing by the fire:

- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. Here's who's dying in the camp: who's licking bowls, who's relying on the medical unit, and who's godfather goes to knock.

As for the godfather, of course, he turned down that. They save themselves. Only their care is on someone else’s blood.

Shukhov always got up when he got up, but today he didn’t get up. Since the evening he had been uneasy, either shivering or aching. And I didn’t get warm at night. In my sleep I felt like I was completely ill, and then I went away a little. I still didn’t want it to be morning.

But the morning came as usual.

And where can you get warm here - there is ice on the window, and on the walls along the junction with the ceiling throughout the entire barracks - a healthy barracks! - white cobweb. Frost.

Shukhov did not get up. He was lying on top linings, covering his head with a blanket and pea coat, and in a padded jacket, in one sleeve turned up, putting both feet together. He didn’t see, but from the sounds he understood everything that was happening in the barracks and in their brigade corner. So, heavily walking along the corridor, the orderlies carried one of the eight-bucket buckets. Considered disabled, easy work, but come on, take it out without spilling it! Here in the 75th brigade they slammed a bunch of felt boots from the dryer onto the floor. And here it is in ours (and today it was our turn to dry felt boots). The foreman and sergeant-at-arms put on their shoes in silence, and their lining creaks. The brigadier will now go to the bread-slicer, and the foreman will go to the headquarters barracks, to the contractors.

And not just to the contractors, as he goes every day, - Shukhov remembered: today fate is being decided - they want to transfer their 104th brigade from the construction of workshops to the new Sotsgorodok facility. And that Social Town is a bare field, in snowy ridges, and before you do anything there, you have to dig holes, put up poles and pull the barbed wire away from yourself - so as not to run away. And then build.

There, sure enough, there won’t be anywhere to warm up for a month – not a kennel. And if you can’t light a fire, what to heat it with? Work hard conscientiously - your only salvation.

The foreman is concerned and is going to settle things. Some other brigade, sluggish, should be pushed there instead. Of course, you can’t come to an agreement empty-handed. The senior foreman had to carry half a kilo of fat. Or even a kilogram.

The test is not a loss, shouldn't we try it in the medical unit? touch, free from work for a day? Well, the whole body is literally torn apart.

And also, which guard is on duty today?

On duty - I remembered - Ivan and a half, a thin and long black-eyed sergeant. The first time you look, it’s downright scary, but they recognized him as one of the most flexible of all the guards on duty: he doesn’t put him in a punishment cell, or drag him to the head of the regime. So you can lie down until you go to barracks nine in the dining room.

The carriage shook and swayed. Two stood up at once: at the top was Shukhov’s neighbor Baptist Alyoshka, and at the bottom was Buinovsky, a former captain of the second rank, cavalry officer.

The old orderlies, having carried out both buckets, began to argue about who should go get boiling water. They scolded affectionately, like women. An electric welder from the 20th brigade barked:

- Hey, wicks!- and threw a felt boot at them. - I’ll make peace!

The felt boot thudded against the post. They fell silent.

In the neighboring brigade the brigadier muttered slightly:

- Vasil Fedorych! The food table was distorted, you bastards: it was nine hundred and four, but it became only three. Who should I miss?

He said this quietly, but of course the whole brigade heard and hid: a piece would be cut off from someone in the evening.

And Shukhov lay and lay on the compressed sawdust of his mattress. At least one side would take it - either the chill would strike, or the aching would go away. And neither this nor that.

While the Baptist was whispering prayers, Buinovsky returned from the breeze and announced to no one, but as if maliciously:

- Well, hold on, Red Navy men! Thirty degrees true!

And Shukhov decided to go to the medical unit.

And then someone’s powerful hand pulled off his padded jacket and blanket. Shukhov took off his pea coat from his face and stood up. Below him, with his head level with the top bunk of the carriage, stood a thin Tatar.

This means that he was not on duty in line and sneaked in quietly.

- Another eight hundred fifty-four! - Tatar read from the white patch on the back of his black pea coat. – Three days kondeya with output!

And as soon as his special, strangled voice was heard, in the entire dim barracks, where not every light bulb was on, where two hundred people were sleeping on fifty bedbug-lined carriages, everyone who had not yet gotten up immediately began to stir and hastily get dressed.

- For what, citizen chief? – Shukhov asked, giving his voice more pity than he felt.

Once you're sent back to work, it's still half a cell, and they'll give you hot food, and there's no time to think about it. A complete punishment cell is when without withdrawal.

– Didn’t get up on the way up? “Let’s go to the commandant’s office,” Tatar explained lazily, because he, Shukhov, and everyone understood what the condo was for.

Nothing was expressed on Tatar’s hairless, wrinkled face. He turned around, looking for someone else, but everyone was already, some in the semi-darkness, some under the light bulb, on the first floor of the carriages and on the second, pushing their legs into black cotton trousers with numbers on the left knee or, already dressed, wrapping them up and hurrying to the exit - wait for Tatar in the yard.

If Shukhov had been given a punishment cell for something else, where he deserved it, it wouldn’t have been so offensive. It was a shame that he was always the first to get up. But it was impossible to ask Tatarin for time off, he knew. And, continuing to ask for time off just for the sake of order, Shukhov, still wearing cotton trousers that had not been taken off for the night (a worn, dirty flap was also sewn above the left knee, and the number Shch-854 was inscribed on it in black, already faded paint), put on a padded jacket (she had two such numbers on her - one on the chest and one on the back), chose his felt boots from the pile on the floor, put on his hat (with the same flap and number on the front) and followed Tatarin out.

The entire 104th brigade saw Shukhov being taken away, but no one said a word: there was no point, and what can you say? The brigadier could have intervened a little, but he wasn’t there. And Shukhov also didn’t say a word to anyone, and didn’t tease Tatarin. They'll save breakfast and they'll guess.

So the two of them left.

There was frost with a haze that took your breath away. Two large spotlights hit the zone crosswise from the far corner towers. The area and interior lights were on. There were so many of them that they completely illuminated the stars.

Felt boots creaking in the snow, the prisoners quickly ran about their business - some to the restroom, some to the storeroom, others to the parcel warehouse, others to hand over the cereal to the individual kitchen. All of them had their heads sunk into their shoulders, their peacoats were wrapped around them, and they were all cold, not so much from the frost as from the thought that they would have to spend a whole day in this frost.

And Tatar, in his old overcoat with stained blue buttonholes, walked smoothly, and the frost seemed to not bother him at all.

November 18 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - the most famous, and, in the opinion of many, the best literary work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The fate of the story reflected Russian history. During the Khrushchev Thaw, it was published and raised on the shield in the USSR, under Brezhnev it was banned and removed from libraries, and in the 1990s it was included in the compulsory school curriculum for literature.

On November 6, on the eve of the anniversary, Vladimir Putin received the writer’s widow, Natalya Solzhenitsyn, who shared her concern about the reduction in the number of hours allocated in the school curriculum for the study of literature.

The TV report included Solzhenitsyn’s phrases that “without knowledge of history and literature, a person walks like a lame” and “unconsciousness is a disease of a weak person, and a weak society, and a weak state.” The President promised to "talk to the Ministry of Education."

Solzhenitsyn is considered a literary classic, but was, rather, a great historian.

The main work that brought him worldwide fame, “The Gulag Archipelago,” is not a novel, but a fundamental scientific research, and even carried out at the risk of his life. Most of his literary works today, to put it mildly, are not read.

But the first attempt at writing, “One Day,” turned out to be extremely successful. This story amazes with its colorful characters and rich language and is divided into quotes.

The author and his hero

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a mathematics teacher by training, an artillery captain in the war, was arrested in East Prussia by SMERSH in February 1945. The censor illustrated his letter to a friend who fought on another front, containing some critical remark about the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

The future writer, in his words, who dreamed of literature since his school years, after interrogations at Lubyanka received eight years in prison, which he served first in the Moscow scientific and design "sharashka", then in one of the camps in the Ekibastuz region of Kazakhstan. His term ended in one month with the death of Stalin.

While living in a settlement in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn experienced severe psychological trauma: he was diagnosed with cancer. It is not known for sure whether there was a medical error or a rare case of healing from a fatal illness.

There is a belief that someone who is buried alive then lives a long time. Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89, and not from oncology, but from heart failure.

Image caption On the eve of the anniversary, Vladimir Putin met with the writer’s widow

The idea for “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was born in the camp in the winter of 1950-1951 and was embodied in Ryazan, where the author settled in June 1957 after returning from exile and worked as a school teacher. Solzhenitsyn began writing on May 18 and finished on June 30, 1959.

“One long winter camp day I was carrying a stretcher with my partner and thought: how to describe our entire camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest worker. And there is no need to even force it some kind of horrors, it doesn’t need to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day from which years are formed. I conceived this way, and this plan remained in my mind, for nine years I have not been to it touched it and only nine years later sat down and wrote,” he later recalled.

“I didn’t write it for long at all,” admitted Solzhenitsyn. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the life of which you know too much, and it’s not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only you fight off excess material, just so that the excess does not fit, but to accommodate the most necessary things.”

In an interview in 1976, Solzhenitsyn returned to this idea: “It is enough to collect everything in one day, as if in fragments; it is enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be.”

Solzhenitsyn made the main character the Russian peasant, soldier and prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

The day from getting up to lights out turned out well for him, and “Shukhov fell asleep, completely satisfied.” The tragedy lay in the last meager phrase: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added...”

Tvardovsky and Khrushchev

Image caption Alexander Tvardovsky was a poet and citizen

The story owed its meeting with readers to two people: the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, and Nikita Khrushchev.

A Soviet classic, order bearer and laureate, Tvardovsky was the son of a dispossessed Smolensk peasant and did not forget anything, which he proved with the posthumously published poem “By the Right of Memory.”

Even at the front, Solzhenitsyn felt a kindred spirit in the author of Terkin. In his autobiographical book “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” he noted “the peasant delicacy that allowed him to stop before any lie at the last millimeter, never crossed this millimeter, nowhere! - that’s why the miracle happened!”

“But behind the poetic significance of Tvardovsky today it is not that he is forgotten, but to many it seems that his significance as the editor of the best literary and social magazine of the last century is no longer so significant. Of course, the significance of “New World” is broader than Solzhenitsyn’s publication alone. It was a powerful educational magazine, "discovered for us military prose, "hillbillies", printing the best possible examples of Western literature. It was a magazine of new criticism, which, unlike the criticism of the 30s, did not separate the "sheep" from the "goats", but spoke about life and literature" , writes modern literary historian Pavel Basinsky.

“Two magazines in the history of Russia bear the author’s name - “Sovremennik” by Nekrasov and “New World” by Tvardovsky. Both had both a brilliant and bitterly sad fate. Both were beloved, the most precious brainchild of two great and very related Russian poets, and both became their personal tragedies, the most severe defeats in life, which undoubtedly brought their death closer,” he points out.

On November 10, 1961, Solzhenitsyn, through Raisa Orlova, the wife of his cellmate in the sharashka, Lev Kopelev, handed over the manuscript of One Day to the editor of the prose department of the New World, Anna Berzer. He did not indicate his name; on the advice of Kopelev, Berzer wrote on the first page: “A. Ryazansky.”

On December 8, Berzer showed the manuscript to Tvardovsky, who had returned from vacation, with the words: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.”

Tvardovsky read the story on the night of December 8–9. According to him, he was lying in bed, but was so shocked that he got up, put on his suit and continued reading while sitting.

“The strongest impression of the last days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solzhenitsyn),” he wrote in his diary.

Every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union must read this story Anna Akhmatova

On December 11, Tvardovsky telegraphed Solzhenitsyn, asking him to come to Moscow as soon as possible.

The very next day the author’s first meeting with the editors of Novy Mir took place. Solzhenitsyn considered his work a story and initially entitled it “Shch-854. One day of one prisoner.” “Novomirtsy” proposed to slightly change the title and “for weight” to consider the story a story.

Tvardovsky showed the manuscript to Chukovsky, Marshak, Fedin, Paustovsky, and Ehrenburg.

Korney Chukovsky called his review “A Literary Miracle”: “Shukhov is a generalized character of the Russian common man: resilient, “evil-willed,” hardy, a jack of all trades, crafty - and kind. Brother of Vasily Terkin. The story is written in HIS language, full of humor, colorful and apt."

Tvardovsky understood the censorship impediment of “Ivan Denisovich,” but on the eve of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev was preparing to make a decision to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum, he felt that the moment had come.

On August 6, he handed over the manuscript and a covering letter to Khrushchev’s assistant Vladimir Lebedev, which contained the words: “The author’s name has not been known to anyone until now, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names in our literature. If you find the opportunity to pay attention to this manuscript, I I will be happy as if it were my own work."

According to some reports, Tvardovsky also handed a copy to Khrushchev’s son-in-law Alexei Adzhubey.

On September 15, Lebedev informed Tvardovsky that Khrushchev had read the story, approved it, and ordered that 23 copies of the manuscript be submitted to the Central Committee for all members of the leadership.

Soon, some regular party literary meeting took place, one of the participants of which stated that he did not understand how someone could like a thing like “Ivan Denisovich”.

“I know at least one person who read it and liked it,” Tvardovsky replied.

If Tvardovsky had not been the editor-in-chief of the magazine, this story would not have been published. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in 1962, was like a phenomenon against physical laws. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The issue of publication was discussed, neither more nor less, at the Presidium of the Central Committee. On October 12, five days before the opening of the XXII Congress, the decision was made.

On November 18, the issue of Novy Mir with the story was printed and began to be distributed throughout the country. The circulation was 96,900 copies, but, at the direction of Khrushchev, it was increased by 25 thousand. A few months later, the story was republished by Roman Newspaper (700 thousand copies) and as a separate book.

In an interview with the BBC on the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recalled:

“It is absolutely clear: if it were not for Tvardovsky as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I will add. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had been in "This moment had not attacked Stalin one more time - it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union, in 1962, was like a phenomenon against physical laws."

Solzhenitsyn considered it a great victory that his story was published for the first time in the USSR, and not in the West.

“You can see from the reaction of Western socialists: if it had been published in the West, these same socialists would have said: it’s all a lie, none of this happened. It was only because everyone lost their tongues that it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow, this was shocking,” - he told the BBC.

The editors and censors made a number of comments, some of which the author agreed with.

“The funniest thing for me, a Stalin hater, is that at least once it was necessary to name Stalin as the culprit of the disaster. And indeed, he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This is not accidental, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin is alone. I made this concession: I mentioned the “mustachioed old man” once,” he recalled.

Unofficially, Solzhenitsyn was told that the story would have been much better if he had made his Shukhov not an innocently injured collective farmer, but an innocently injured regional committee secretary.

“Ivan Denisovich” was also criticized from opposite positions. Varlam Shalamov believed that Solzhenitsyn embellished reality to please the censors, and was especially indignant at the implausible, in his opinion, episode in which Shukhov experiences joy from his forced labor.

Solzhenitsyn immediately became a celebrity.

You can live “better and more fun” when conditional “prisoners” work for you. But when the whole country saw this “prisoner” in the person of Ivan Denisovich, it sobered up and realized: you can’t live like that! Pavel Basinsky, literary historian

“From all over Russia, letters to me exploded, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted on meeting me and telling me, and I began to meet. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, still describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and brought me the missing material. So I collected indescribable material that cannot be collected in the Soviet Union - only thanks to “Ivan Denisovich "So it became a pedestal for the Gulag Archipelago," he recalled.

Some wrote on the envelopes: “Moscow, New World magazine, to Ivan Denisovich,” and the mail arrived.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of the story, it was republished in the form of a two-volume book: the first book included herself, and the second - letters that had lain under wraps for half a century in the archives of the New World.

“The publication in Sovremennik of Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter objectively brought the abolition of serfdom closer. Because you can still sell conditional “serfs,” but selling Khor and Kalinich like pigs, you see, is no longer possible. You can live “better and more fun” when conditional "prisoners" work for you. But when the whole country saw this "prisoner" in the person of Ivan Denisovich, it sobered up and realized: you can’t live like that!” - wrote Pavel Basinsky.

The editors nominated One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the Lenin Prize. The “literary generals” were uncomfortable criticizing the content of a book that Khrushchev himself approved, and they found fault with the fact that previously only novels, and not “works of small forms,” were awarded the highest award.

Butting with oak

After Khrushchev's removal, other winds began to blow.

On February 5, 1966, the party boss of Uzbekistan, Sharaf Rashidov, sent a note to the Politburo in which he specifically mentioned Solzhenitsyn, calling him a “slanderer” and “an enemy of our wonderful reality.”

“In fact, comrades, no one has yet taken a party position regarding Ivan Denisovich’s book,” Brezhnev was indignant, confusing the hero and the author.

“When Khrushchev was in charge, enormous harm was done to us in our ideological work. We corrupted the intelligentsia. And how much we argued and how much we talked about Ivan Denisovich! But he supported all this camp literature!” - said Mikhail Suslov.

Solzhenitsyn was made to understand that he could fit into the system if he would forget about the “topic of repression” and start writing about village life or something else. But he continued to secretly collect materials for the Gulag Archipelago, meeting with approximately three hundred former camp inmates and exiles over several years.

Even dissidents at that time demanded respect for human rights, but did not attack the Soviet regime as such. The protests were held under the slogan: “Respect your constitution!”

Solzhenitsyn was the first, indirectly in “One Day” and directly in “Archipelago,” to say that it was not just Stalin that was at issue, that the communist regime was criminal from the moment it arose and remains so, that, by and large, the “Leninist guard” had suffered historical justice.

Solzhenitsyn had his own destiny, he did not want, and objectively could not, sacrifice the “Archipelago” even for the sake of Tvardovsky Pavel Basinsky

According to some researchers, Solzhenitsyn single-handedly won a historic victory over the all-powerful Soviet state. There were many supporters in the party leadership of an official review of the decisions of the 20th Congress and the rehabilitation of Stalin, but the publication of “Archipelago” in Paris in December 1973 became such a bomb that they preferred to leave the issue in limbo.

In the USSR, the campaign against Solzhenitsyn acquired an unprecedented character. Since the time of Trotsky, the propaganda machine has not fought on such a scale against one person. Every day, newspapers published letters from “Soviet writers” and “ordinary workers” with the leitmotif: “I have not read this book, but I am deeply outraged by it!”

Using quotes taken out of context, Solzhenitsyn was accused of sympathizing with Nazism and labeled him a “literary Vlasovite.”

For many citizens, this had the opposite effect to what was desired: it means that the Soviet government has become different if a person, while in Moscow, openly declares that he does not like it, and is still alive!

A joke was born: in the encyclopedia of the future, in the article “Brezhnev” it will be written: “a political figure of the era of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.”

The question of what to do with an uncontrollable writer was discussed for a long time at the highest level. Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin demanded that he be given a prison sentence. In a note to Brezhnev, Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Shchelokov called for “not executing enemies, but strangling them in our arms.” In the end, the point of view of KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov prevailed.

On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and the next day he was deprived of citizenship and “expelled from the USSR” (put on a plane flying to Germany).

In the entire history of the Soviet Union, this exotic punishment was applied only twice: to Solzhenitsyn and Trotsky.

Contrary to popular belief, Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature not for The Gulag Archipelago, but earlier, in 1970, with the wording: “For the moral strength with which he followed the immutable traditions of Russian literature.”

Soon after this, all editions of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were removed from libraries. The surviving copies cost 200 rubles on the black market - one and a half monthly salaries of the average Soviet worker.

On the day of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, all his works were officially banned by a special order from Glavlit. The ban was lifted on December 31, 1988.

Suslov spoke in the spirit that if he were removed from his job immediately, “he will now leave as a hero.”

They began to create unbearable conditions for Tvardovsky and harass him with nagging. Army libraries stopped checking out “New World” - this was a signal clear to everyone.

The head of the cultural department of the Central Committee, Vasily Shauro, told the chairman of the board of the Writers' Union, Georgy Markov: “All conversations with him and your actions should push Tvardovsky to leave the magazine.”

Tvardovsky turned to Brezhnev, Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev and other superiors many times, asking for clarification of his position, but received evasive answers.

In February 1970, the exhausted Tvardovsky resigned as editor. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “The New World team was dispersed after his departure.

Solzhenitsyn was subsequently reproached for the fact that, by refusing to compromise, he “set up” Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, which had done so much for him.

According to Pavel Basinsky, “Solzhenitsyn had his own destiny; he did not want, and objectively could not, sacrifice the Archipelago even for the sake of Tvardovsky.”

In turn, Solzhenitsyn, in his book “The Calf Butted an Oak,” published in the West in 1975, paid tribute to Tvardovsky, but criticized the rest of the “Novomirtsy” for the fact that, as he believed, they “did not put up courageous resistance and did not make personal sacrifices.” ".

According to him, “the death of the New World was devoid of beauty, since it did not contain even the smallest attempt at public struggle.”

“The ungenerosity of his memory stunned me,” Tvardovsky’s former deputy, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in an article sent abroad.

Eternal dissident

While in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn, in an interview with the American television channel CBS, called modern history “the story of America’s selfless generosity and the ingratitude of the whole world.”

However, having settled in Vermont, he did not sing the praises of American civilization and democracy, but began to criticize them for materialism, lack of spirituality and weakness in the fight against communism.

“One of your leading newspapers, after the end of Vietnam, ran a full page headline: “Blessed Silence.” I would not wish such blessed silence on an enemy! We are already hearing voices: “Give up Korea, and we will live quietly.” Give up Portugal, give up Israel , give Taiwan, give ten more African countries, just give us the opportunity to live in peace. Give us the opportunity to drive in our wide cars on our beautiful roads. Give us the opportunity to play tennis and golf in peace. Let us calmly mix cocktails, as we are used to. Let us see on every page of the magazine a smile with open teeth and a glass,” he said in one public speech.

As a result, many in the West did not completely lose interest in Solzhenitsyn, but began to treat him as an eccentric with an old-fashioned beard and overly radical views.

After August 1991, the majority of political emigrants of the Soviet period welcomed the changes in Russia and began to willingly come to Moscow, but preferred to live in the comfortable, stable West.

Image caption Solzhenitsyn at the Duma rostrum (November 1994)

Solzhenitsyn, one of the few, returned to his homeland.

He framed his visit, in the words of ironic journalists, as the appearance of Christ to the people: he flew to Vladivostok and traveled across the country by train, meeting with citizens in every city.

Without air and order

The hope of becoming a national prophet like Leo Tolstoy did not come true. The Russians were concerned with current problems, and not with global issues of existence. A society that had enjoyed information freedom and pluralism of opinions was not inclined to accept anyone as an indisputable authority. They listened to Solzhenitsyn respectfully, but were in no hurry to follow his instructions.

The author's program on Russian television was soon closed: according to Solzhenitsyn, guided by political considerations; according to television people, because it began to repeat itself and lost ratings.

The writer began to criticize the Russian order in the same way as he criticized the Soviet and American ones, and refused to accept the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, which Boris Yeltsin awarded him.

During his lifetime, Solzhenitsyn was reproached for his messianism, ponderous seriousness, inflated claims, arrogant moralizing, ambiguous attitude towards democracy and individualism, and passion for archaic ideas of monarchy and community. But, in the end, every person, and even more so on Solzhenitsyn’s scale, has the right to his own non-trivial opinion.

All this became a thing of the past with him. There are books left.

“And it doesn’t matter at all whether The Gulag Archipelago will be included in the compulsory school curriculum or not,” political observer Andrei Kolesnikov wrote on the eve of the anniversary. “Because the absolutely free Alexander Solzhenitsyn has already entered an optional eternity anyway.”

At five o'clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail
headquarters barracks. An intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen in
two fingers, and soon calmed down: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant for a long time
wave your hand.
The ringing died down, and outside the window everything was the same as in the middle of the night when Shukhov got up
to the bucket, there was darkness and darkness, but three yellow lanterns fell into the window: two - on
zone, one - inside the camp.
And for some reason they didn’t go to unlock the barracks, and it wasn’t heard that the orderlies
they took the barrel on sticks and carried it out.
Shukhov never missed a climb, he always got up on it - before the divorce
it was an hour and a half of his own time, not official time, and who knows camp life,
can always earn extra money: sew someone a cover from an old lining
mittens; give the rich brigadier dry felt boots directly to his bed so that he
don’t trample around the heap barefoot, don’t choose; or run through the private stores,
where someone needs to serve, sweep or offer something; or go to
the dining room collecting bowls from the tables and taking them in piles into the dishwasher - also
they will feed you, but there are a lot of hunters there, there’s no end to it, and most importantly, if there’s anything in the bowl
left, you won’t be able to resist, you’ll start licking the bowls. And Shukhov was firmly remembered
the words of his first foreman Kuzmin - he was an old camp wolf, sitting next to
the year nine hundred and forty-three is already twelve years old and its replenishment,
brought from the front, he once said in a bare clearing by the fire:
- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. In the camp here
who is dying: who licks bowls, who hopes at the medical unit, and who goes to godfather1
knock.
As for the godfather - of course, he turned down that. They save themselves. Only
their care is on someone else's blood.
Shukhov always got up when he got up, but today he didn’t get up. Since the evening he
I felt uneasy, either shivering or aching. And I didn’t get warm at night. Through a dream
It seemed like he was completely ill, and then he walked away a little. I didn’t want everything
so that morning.
But the morning came as usual.
And where can you get warm here - there is ice on the window, and on the walls along
junction with the ceiling throughout the barracks - a healthy barracks! - white cobweb. Frost.
Shukhov did not get up. He was lying on top of the carriage, his head covered
blanket and pea coat, and in a padded jacket, in one rolled up sleeve, putting both
feet together. He didn’t see, but from the sounds he understood everything that was happening in the barracks
and in their brigade corner. So, walking heavily along the corridor, the orderlies carried
one of the eight-bucket buckets. Considered disabled, easy work, come on,
go and take it out without spilling it! Here in the 75th brigade they slammed a bunch of felt boots on the floor

Dryers. And here it is in ours (and today it was our turn to dry felt boots).
The foreman and sergeant-at-arms put on their shoes in silence, and their lining creaks. Pombrigadier
Now he’ll go to the bread slicer, and the foreman will go to the headquarters barracks, to the contractors.
And not just to the workmen, as he goes every day,” Shukhov remembered:
today fate is being decided - they want to destroy their 104th brigade from construction
workshops for the new facility "Sotsbytgorodok".

One day of Ivan Denisovich

And for some reason they didn’t go to unlock the barracks, and you never heard of the orderlies picking up the barrel on sticks to carry it out.

- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. Here's who's dying in the camp: who's licking bowls, who's relying on the medical unit, and who's godfather goes to knock.

As for the godfather, of course, he turned down that. They save themselves. Only their care is on someone else’s blood.

But the morning came as usual.

And where can you get warm here - there is ice on the window, and on the walls along the junction with the ceiling throughout the entire barracks - a healthy barracks! - white cobweb. Frost.

There, sure enough, there won’t be anywhere to warm up for a month – not a kennel. And if you can’t light a fire, what to heat it with? Work hard conscientiously - your only salvation.

The test is not a loss, shouldn't we try it in the medical unit? touch, free from work for a day? Well, the whole body is literally torn apart.

And also, which guard is on duty today?

The carriage shook and swayed. Two stood up at once: at the top was Shukhov’s neighbor Baptist Alyoshka, and at the bottom was Buinovsky, a former captain of the second rank, cavalry officer.

The old orderlies, having carried out both buckets, began to argue about who should go get boiling water. They scolded affectionately, like women. An electric welder from the 20th brigade barked:

- Hey, wicks!- and threw a felt boot at them. - I’ll make peace!

The felt boot thudded against the post. They fell silent.

In the neighboring brigade the brigadier muttered slightly:

- Vasil Fedorych! The food table was distorted, you bastards: it was nine hundred and four, but it became only three. Who should I miss?

He said this quietly, but of course the whole brigade heard and hid: a piece would be cut off from someone in the evening.

And Shukhov lay and lay on the compressed sawdust of his mattress. At least one side would take it - either the chill would strike, or the aching would go away. And neither this nor that.

While the Baptist was whispering prayers, Buinovsky returned from the breeze and announced to no one, but as if maliciously:

- Well, hold on, Red Navy men! Thirty degrees true!

And Shukhov decided to go to the medical unit.

This means that he was not on duty in line and sneaked in quietly.

- Another eight hundred fifty-four! - Tatar read from the white patch on the back of his black pea coat. – Three days kondeya with output!

- For what, citizen chief? – Shukhov asked, giving his voice more pity than he felt.

Once you're sent back to work, it's still half a cell, and they'll give you hot food, and there's no time to think about it. A complete punishment cell is when without withdrawal.

– Didn’t get up on the way up? “Let’s go to the commandant’s office,” Tatar explained lazily, because he, Shukhov, and everyone understood what the condo was for.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn served almost a third of his prison camp term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - in the Ekibastuz special camp in northern Kazakhstan. There, at the general works, the idea of a story about one day of one prisoner flashed through on a long winter day. “It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought how I should describe the entire camp world - in one day,” the author said in a television interview with Nikita Struve (March 1976). “Of course, you can describe your ten years of the camp, the entire history of the camps, but it’s enough to collect everything in one day, as if from fragments; it’s enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person from morning to evening. And everything will be.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” [see. on our website its full text, summary and literary analysis] written in Ryazan, where Solzhenitsyn settled in June 1957 and from the new school year became a teacher of physics and astronomy at secondary school No. 2. Started on May 18, 1959, completed on 30 June. The work took less than a month and a half. “It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the way of which you know too much, and it’s not that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but only fight off unnecessary material, just so that the unnecessary is not climbed, but it could accommodate the most necessary things,” the author said in a radio interview for the BBC (June 8, 1982), conducted by Barry Holland.

While writing in the camp, Solzhenitsyn, in order to keep what he wrote secret and himself along with it, first memorized only poetry, and at the end of his term, dialogues in prose and even continuous prose. In exile, and then rehabilitated, he could work without destroying passage after passage, but he had to remain hidden as before in order to avoid a new arrest. After retyping it on a typewriter, the manuscript was burned. The manuscript of the camp story was also burned. And since the typewriting had to be hidden, the text was printed on both sides of the sheet, without margins and without spaces between the lines.

Only more than two years later, after a sudden violent attack on Stalin launched by his successor N. S. Khrushchev at the XXII Party Congress (October 17 - 31, 1961), A.S. ventured to propose the story for publication. “Cave Typescript” (out of caution - without the name of the author) on November 10, 1961 was transferred by R.D. Orlova, the wife of A.S.’s prison friend, Lev Kopelev, to the prose department of the magazine “New World” to Anna Samoilovna Berzer. The typists rewrote the original, Anna Samoilovna asked Lev Kopelev, who came to the editorial office, what to call the author, and Kopelev suggested a pseudonym at his place of residence - A. Ryazansky.

On December 8, 1961, as soon as the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, appeared at the editorial office after a month’s absence, A. S. Berzer asked him to read two difficult manuscripts. One did not need a special recommendation, at least based on what I had heard about the author: it was the story “Sofya Petrovna” by Lydia Chukovskaya. About the other, Anna Samoilovna said: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant, a very popular thing.” It was this that Tvardovsky took with him until the morning. On the night of December 8-9, he reads and rereads the story. In the morning, he dials up the chain to the same Kopelev, asks about the author, finds out his address, and a day later calls him to Moscow by telegram. On December 11, on the day of his 43rd birthday, A.S. received this telegram: “I ask the editors of the new world to come urgently, expenses will be paid = Tvardovsky.” And Kopelev already on December 9 telegraphed to Ryazan: “Alexander Trifonovich is delighted with the article” (this is how the former prisoners agreed among themselves to encrypt the unsafe story). For himself, Tvardovsky wrote down in his workbook on December 12: “The strongest impression of the last days is the manuscript of A. Ryazansky (Solongitsyn), whom I will meet today.” Tvardovsky recorded the author's real name from his voice.

On December 12, Tvardovsky received Solzhenitsyn, calling the entire editorial board to meet and talk with him. “Tvardovsky warned me,” notes A.S., “that he did not firmly promise publication (Lord, I was glad that they did not hand it over to the ChekGB!), and he would not indicate a deadline, but he would not spare any effort.” Immediately the editor-in-chief ordered to conclude an agreement with the author, as A.S. notes... “at the highest rate accepted by them (one advance is my two-year salary).” A.S. earned “sixty rubles a month” by teaching.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich. The author is reading. Fragment

The original titles of the story were “Shch-854”, “One Day of One Prisoner”. The final title was composed by the editorial office of Novy Mir on the author’s first visit, at the insistence of Tvardovsky, “throwing assumptions across the table with the participation of Kopelev.”

Following all the rules of Soviet apparatus games, Tvardovsky began to gradually prepare a multi-move combination in order to ultimately enlist the support of the country’s chief apparatchik, Khrushchev, the only person who could authorize the publication of the camp story. At Tvardovsky’s request, written reviews of “Ivan Denisovich” were written by K. I. Chukovsky (his note was called “Literary Miracle”), S. Ya. Marshak, K. G. Paustovsky, K. M. Simonov... Tvardovsky himself compiled a brief preface to the story and a letter addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR N. S. Khrushchev. On August 6, 1962, after a nine-month editorial period, the manuscript of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” with a letter from Tvardovsky was sent to Khrushchev’s assistant, V. S. Lebedev, who agreed, after waiting for a favorable moment, to introduce the patron to the unusual work.

Tvardovsky wrote:

“Dear Nikita Sergeevich!

I would not have considered it possible to encroach on your time on a private literary matter, if not for this truly exceptional case.

We are talking about the amazingly talented story by A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The name of this author has not been known to anyone until now, but tomorrow it may become one of the remarkable names in our literature.

This is not only my deep conviction. The unanimous high assessment of this rare literary find by my co-editors for the New World magazine, including K. Fedin, is joined by the voices of other prominent writers and critics who had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with it in manuscript.

But due to the unusual nature of the life material covered in the story, I feel an urgent need for your advice and approval.

In a word, dear Nikita Sergeevich, if you find an opportunity to pay attention to this manuscript, I will be happy, as if it were my own work.”

In parallel with the progress of the story through the supreme labyrinths, routine work with the author on the manuscript was going on in the magazine. On July 23, the story was discussed by the editorial board. A member of the editorial board, and soon Tvardovsky’s closest collaborator, Vladimir Lakshin, wrote in his diary:

“I see Solzhenitsyn for the first time. This is a man of about forty, ugly, in a summer suit - canvas trousers and a shirt with an unbuttoned collar. The appearance is rustic, the eyes are set deep. There is a scar on the forehead. Calm, reserved, but not embarrassed. He speaks well, fluently, clearly, with an exceptional sense of dignity. Laughs openly, showing two rows of large teeth.

Tvardovsky invited him - in the most delicate form, unobtrusively - to think about the comments of Lebedev and Chernoutsan [an employee of the CPSU Central Committee, to whom Tvardovsky gave Solzhenitsyn's manuscript]. Let’s say, add righteous indignation to the kavtorang, remove the shade of sympathy for the Banderaites, give someone from the camp authorities (at least an overseer) in more conciliatory, restrained tones, not all of them were scoundrels.

Dementyev [deputy editor-in-chief of Novy Mir] spoke about the same thing more sharply and straightforwardly. Yaro stood up for Eisenstein, his “Battleship Potemkin.” He said that even from an artistic point of view he was not satisfied with the pages of the conversation with the Baptist. However, it is not the art that confuses him, but the same fears that hold him back. Dementiev also said (I objected to this) that it was important for the author to think about how his story would be received by former prisoners who remained staunch communists after the camp.

This hurt Solzhenitsyn. He replied that he had not thought about such a special category of readers and did not want to think about it. “There is a book, and there is me. Maybe I’m thinking about the reader, but this is the reader in general, and not different categories... Then, all these people were not in general work. They, according to their qualifications or former position, usually got jobs in the commandant’s office, at a bread slicer, etc. But you can understand Ivan Denisovich’s position only by working in general work, that is, knowing it from the inside. Even if I were in the same camp, but observed it from the side, I would not have written this. If I hadn’t written it, I wouldn’t have understood what kind of salvation work is...”

A dispute arose about that part of the story where the author directly speaks about the position of the katorang, that he - a sensitive, thinking person - must turn into a stupid animal. And here Solzhenitsyn did not concede: “This is the most important thing. Anyone who does not become dull in the camp, does not coarse his feelings, perishes. That's the only way I saved myself. I’m scared now to look at the photograph as I came out of it: then I was older than now, about fifteen years, and I was stupid, clumsy, my thought worked clumsily. And that’s the only reason I was saved. If, as an intellectual, I was internally tossing around, nervous, worried about everything that happened, I would probably die.”

During the conversation, Tvardovsky inadvertently mentioned a red pencil, which at the last minute could erase something or other from the story. Solzhenitsyn became alarmed and asked to explain what this meant. Can the editor or censor remove something without showing him the text? “To me the integrity of this thing is more valuable than its printing,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn carefully wrote down all comments and suggestions. He said that he divides them into three categories: those with which he can agree, even believes that they are beneficial; those that he will think about are difficult for him; and finally, impossible - those with which he does not want to see the thing printed.

Tvardovsky proposed his amendments timidly, almost embarrassedly, and when Solzhenitsyn took the floor, he looked at him with love and immediately agreed if the author’s objections were well founded.”

A.S. also wrote about the same discussion:

“The main thing that Lebedev demanded was to remove all those places in which the kavtorang was presented as a comic figure (by the standards of Ivan Denisovich), as he was intended, and to emphasize the partisanship of the kavtorang (you must have a “positive hero”!). This seemed to me the least of the sacrifices. I removed the comic, and what remained was something “heroic,” but “insufficiently developed,” as critics later found. Now the captain's protest at the divorce was a little inflated (the idea was that the protest was ridiculous), but this, perhaps, did not disturb the picture of the camp. Then it was necessary to use the word “butts” less often when referring to the guards; I reduced it from seven to three; less often - “bad” and “bad” about the authorities (it was a bit dense for me); and so that at least not the author, but the kavtorang would condemn the Banderaites (I gave such a phrase to the kavtorang, but later threw it out in a separate publication: it was natural for the kavtorang, but they were too heavily reviled anyway). Also, to give the prisoners some hope of freedom (but I couldn’t do that). And, the funniest thing for me, a Stalin hater, was that at least once it was necessary to name Stalin as the culprit of the disaster. (And indeed, he was never mentioned by anyone in the story! This is not accidental, of course, it happened to me: I saw the Soviet regime, and not Stalin alone.) I made this concession: I mentioned “the mustachioed old man” once...”

On September 15, Lebedev told Tvardovsky by phone that “Solzhenitsyn (“One Day”) has been approved by N[ikita] S[ergeevi]ch” and that in the coming days the boss would invite him for a conversation. However, Khrushchev himself considered it necessary to enlist the support of the party elite. The decision to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was made on October 12, 1962 at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee under pressure from Khrushchev. And only on October 20 did he receive Tvardovsky to report the favorable result of his efforts. About the story itself, Khrushchev remarked: “Yes, the material is unusual, but, I will say, both the style and the language are unusual - it’s not suddenly vulgar. Well, I think it's a very strong thing. And, despite such material, it does not evoke a heavy feeling, although there is a lot of bitterness there.”

Having read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” even before publication, in typescript, Anna Akhmatova, who described it in “ Requiem“The grief of the “hundred-million people” on this side of the prison gates, she said with emphasis: “I must read this story and learn it by heart - every citizen out of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union."

The story, called a story by the editors in the subtitle for weight, was published in the magazine “New World” (1962. No. 11. P. 8 – 74; signed for publication on November 3; advance copy was delivered to the editor-in-chief on the evening of November 15; according to Vladimir Lakshin, mailing started on November 17; on the evening of November 19, about 2,000 copies were brought to the Kremlin for participants in the plenum of the Central Committee) with a note by A. Tvardovsky “Instead of a Preface.” Circulation 96,900 copies. (with the permission of the CPSU Central Committee, 25,000 were additionally printed). Republished in “Roman-Gazeta” (M.: GIHL, 1963. No. 1/277. 47 pp. 700,000 copies) and as a book (M.: Soviet Writer, 1963. 144 pp. 100,000 copies). On June 11, 1963, Vladimir Lakshin wrote: “Solzhenitsyn gave me the hastily released “One Day...” by “Soviet Writer.” The publication is truly shameful: gloomy, colorless cover, gray paper. Alexander Isaevich jokes: “They released it in the GULAG publication.”

Cover of the publication “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in Roman-Gazeta, 1963

“In order for it [the story] to be published in the Soviet Union, it took a confluence of incredible circumstances and exceptional personalities,” noted A. Solzhenitsyn in a radio interview on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” for the BBC (June 8, 1982 G.). – It is absolutely clear: if Tvardovsky had not been the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I'll add. And if Khrushchev had not been there at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at that very moment, it would not have been published either. The publication of my story in the Soviet Union in 1962 was like a phenomenon against physical laws, as if, for example, objects began to rise upward from the ground on their own, or cold stones began to heat up on their own, heating up to the point of fire. This is impossible, this is absolutely impossible. The system was structured this way, and for 45 years it had not released anything - and suddenly there was such a breakthrough. Yes, Tvardovsky, Khrushchev, and the moment - everyone had to get together. Of course, I could then send it abroad and publish it, but now, from the reaction of Western socialists, it is clear: if it had been published in the West, these same socialists would have said: it’s all lies, none of this happened, and there were no camps, and there was no destruction, nothing happened. It was only because everyone was speechless because it was published with the permission of the Central Committee in Moscow that it shocked me.”

“If this [submission of the manuscript to Novy Mir and publication at home] had not happened, something else would have happened, and worse,” A. Solzhenitsyn wrote fifteen years earlier, “I would have sent the photographic film with camp things - abroad, under the pseudonym Stepan Khlynov , as it had already been prepared. I didn’t know that in the best case scenario, if it were both published and noticed in the West, not even a hundredth of that influence could have happened.”

The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is associated with the author’s return to work on The Gulag Archipelago. “Even before Ivan Denisovich, I conceived the Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn said in a television interview with CBS (June 17, 1974), conducted by Walter Cronkite, “I felt that such a systematic thing was needed, a general plan of everything that was , and in time, how it happened. But my personal experience and the experience of my comrades, no matter how much I asked about the camps, all the fates, all the episodes, all the stories, was not enough for such a thing. And when “Ivan Denisovich” was published, letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote what they had experienced, what they had. Or they insisted on meeting me and telling me, and I started dating. Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more, more, to describe this whole camp world. They did not know my plan and did not know how much I had already written, but they carried and brought me the missing material.” “And so I collected indescribable material, which cannot be collected in the Soviet Union, only thanks to “Ivan Denisovich,” summed up A.S. in a radio interview for the BBC on June 8, 1982. “So it became like a pedestal for “The Gulag Archipelago”.

In December 1963, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was nominated for the Lenin Prize by the editorial board of the New World and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art. According to Pravda (February 19, 1964), selected “for further discussion.” Then included in the list for secret voting. Didn't receive the award. Laureates in the field of literature, journalism and publicism were Oles Gonchar for the novel “Tronka” and Vasily Peskov for the book “Steps on the Dew” (“Pravda”, April 22, 1964). “Even then, in April 1964, there was talk in Moscow that this story with the vote was a “rehearsal for a putsch” against Nikita: would the apparatus succeed or not succeed in withdrawing a book approved by Himself? In 40 years they have never dared to do this. But they became bolder and succeeded. This reassured them that He Himself was not strong.”

From the second half of the 60s, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was withdrawn from circulation in the USSR along with other publications by A.S. The final ban on them was introduced by order of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, agreed upon with the Central Committee of the CPSU, dated January 28, 1974 Glavlit’s order No. 10 of February 14, 1974, specially dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, lists the issues of the magazine “New World” containing the writer’s works that are subject to removal from public libraries (No. 11, 1962; No. 1, 7, 1963; No. 1, 1966) and separate editions of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, including a translation into Estonian and a book “for the blind”. The order is accompanied by a note: “Foreign publications (including newspapers and magazines) containing the works of the specified author are also subject to seizure.” The ban was lifted by a note from the Ideological Department of the CPSU Central Committee dated December 31, 1988.

Since 1990, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has been published again in his homeland.

Foreign feature film based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

In 1971, an English-Norwegian film was made based on “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (directed by Kasper Wrede, Tom Courtenay played Shukhov). For the first time, A. Solzhenitsyn was able to watch it only in 1974. Speaking on French television (March 9, 1976), when asked by the presenter about this film, he answered:

“I must say that the directors and actors of this film approached the task very honestly, and with great penetration, they themselves did not experience this, did not survive, but were able to guess this painful mood and were able to convey this slow pace that fills the life of such a prisoner 10 years, sometimes 25, unless, as often happens, he dies first. Well, very minor criticisms can be made of the design; this is mostly where the Western imagination simply cannot imagine the details of such a life. For example, for our eyes, for mine, or if my friends could see it, former prisoners (will they ever see this film?), - for our eyes the padded jackets are too clean, not torn; then, almost all the actors, in general, are heavy-set men, and yet in the camp there are people on the very verge of death, their cheeks are hollow, they have no more strength. According to the film, it’s so warm in the barracks that there’s a Latvian sitting there with bare legs and arms - this is impossible, you’ll freeze. Well, these are minor remarks, but in general, I must say, I’m surprised how the authors of the film could understand so much and with a sincere soul tried to convey our suffering to the Western audience.”

The day described in the story occurs in January 1951.

Based on materials from the works of Vladimir Radzishevsky.