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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Introduction

  Foreword

  Begin Reading

  By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  BY KATHERINE SHONK

  WHEN I LIVED in Russia during the mid-1990s, I worked in the Moscow office of an American company, housed in a yellow stucco building that, before the revolution, had been a military academy. My desk was in the second-floor ballroom, next to a grand piano that no one ever played. That winter, balloon curtains covering the two-story windows at each end of the ballroom billowed steadily from a frigid draft. Men in blue jumpsuits appeared every few days to beat the radiators with pipes, but never produced more than a few puffs of steam; the Russian secretaries wore their furs all day long, and I typed with my gloves on. At home and on the train, I read Russian novels in translation, impatient to feel a bit less like the alien that I was. Squinting in the red-carpeted ballroom during work hours, I pretended that the lovely young women striding to the laser printer were guests at one of Anna Pavlovna’s soirées, while the swaggering accountants transformed into Nikolai Rostov and his gambling buddies. Rolling off the overnight train in St. Petersburg early on a Sunday morning, I found myself in a city, at that time of day and decade, still sleepy and unadorned. But its bustle and celebrated seediness rose up as I retraced, more or less, the 730 steps from Raskolnikov’s house to the pawnbroker’s, then followed Gogol’s nose down Nevsky Prospekt. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the rest romanticized Russia for me, as they do for all their readers, and populated my new landscape with characters that, if the number of walking tours and house museums was any indication, still lived and breathed in the Russian imagination.

  Yet, universal insights into human nature aside, the great writers of the nineteenth century offered few clues about the lives of those I passed on the streets and those I was getting to know ever so slightly. More striking and perplexing than my young, ambitious coworkers—who, I couldn’t help but notice, were adapting to corporate America faster than I was—were their grandparents. War veterans sat ramrod straight on the subway, red-and-gold medals shining on their worn suitcoats. Babushki sold crabsticks and cigarettes in long receiving lines outside the Metro even in the midst of blizzards. Old men, knuckles and forearms blurred with prison tattoos, hunched over stand-up tables outside liquor kiosks on Friday afternoons. Women past retirement age sat guard over the nation’s jewels, its museums and theaters. (I once saw a group of them boot an American college student out of the Bolshoi for showing up in shorts.) In Moscow, overgrown with casinos, billboards, fast-food joints, and mini-marts, the survivors of communism had been pushed to the margins, yet remained stubbornly onstage. The tension between young and old was palpable. Once a young Russian woman mentioned to me that she did not want to grow old, that she hoped to be dead by age fifty-five. Others, like immigrants looking over their shoulders from the safe distance of the New World, would sigh and say that little could be done for those too old to adapt to capitalism. And the new regime, which had promised to lift up the tired and the sick at the end of their lives, was proving to be almost as apathetic and ineffectual as the old one.

  Only when I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich did I begin to understand what the oldest generation of Russians had lived through and how those ordeals now help them stay afloat. The first work of literature to speak openly and honestly about the Gulag, the novel was published in 1962 in the literary journal Novy Mir, launching not only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brave and distinguished career, but also a brief Thaw. More than forty years after Khrushchev handpicked the novel to expose Stalin’s cult of personality, Solzhenitsyn’s story of one peasant’s day in a labor camp enlightens us about lives cornered again and again by history.

  “Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?” the narrator of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich asks. The steady accumulation of sensory detail gives this work of fiction the air of incontrovertible truth. We do feel as if we experience Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s cold, hunger, fear, and exhaustion, as well as the flashes of comfort he snatches in the present—“The smoke seemed to reach every part of his hungry body, he felt it in his feet as well as in his head”—or remembers with disbelief: “great hefty lumps of meat. Milk they used to lap up till their bellies were bursting.” The language of the novel—a blend of peasant slang, prison jargon, and reportage, captured vividly here in H. T. Willetts’s blunt, clean translation—always serves the senses, and emotion is a luxury only the reader can afford. Just as Tyurin, the benevolent foreman of Gang 104, tells the story of his war years and arrest “without self-pity,” as if “talking about somebody else,” Solzhenitsyn describes this better-than-average day in the camps without a trace of sentiment. Some bizarre details are related so matter-of-factly we feel they must be true, such as the story of how, for a time, the guards locked up the zeks’ dinner rations after doling them out in the morning. Ivan Denisovich, or the narrator (their voices braid seamlessly throughout the book), explains: “You took a bite and looked hard at your bread before you put it in the chest.” And though episodic and fragmented, this day in the life is nonetheless fraught with tension and suspense. With the novel’s central antagonist offstage, crafting his cult of personality, a host of stand-ins—guards, zeks, hunger, fatigue, and time—throw obstacles in Ivan Denisovich’s path. Meanwhile, our hero keeps one eye trained skyward, taking note of the sun’s “dull blurry light” or a “red and sulky-looking” moon. These flares of lyricism are purely practical; only when Shukhov is in bed will he be able to say for certain that this was an “unclouded day.”

  “The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier,” the narrator tells us, but we see for ourselves how resourceful Ivan Denisovich is. As he navigates the camp, planning each step in advance, Shukhov also thinks ahead to his scheduled release in two years, though he knows better than to take it for granted. The two letters he receives annually from home offer frustratingly brief glimpses of the life that was taken from him, and of his possible future. When his wife writes to him about the “lively new trade” of dyeing carpets, Ivan Denisovich gamely quizzes her about it in his next letter: was it possible that someone bad at drawing could become a “master dyer,” raking in rubles by stenciling old sheets? The fad seems unlikely to outlast Ivan Denisovich’s prison term, which makes his determination to make a go of it all the more poignant.

  Plotting, scavenging, dissenting, and praying, Ivan Denisovich and the other members of Gang 104 (Fetyukov, Buynovsky, Alyoshka) test out different survival strategies. Uniforms and barbed wire may distort the zeks’ personalities, but they cannot blot them out completely: “Outwardly, the gang all looked the same, all wearing identical black jackets with identical number patches, but underneath there were big differences. You’d never get Buynovsky to sit watching a bowl, and there were jobs that Ivan Denisovich left to those beneath him.” At supper, Ivan Denisovich takes a moment to indulge in a character study of an old man who has been imprisoned “as long as the Soviet state had existed” (at that point, about thirty-four years). Ivan Denisovich notes the man’s excellent posture, the way he lifts his spoon to his lips rather than “dipping his head in the bowl like the rest,” the fact that h
e sets his bread ration on a clean rag rather than on the dirty table. Shukhov carefully monitors the state of his own dignity as well. Early in the day, he refuses to “lower himself like Fetyukov” by begging openly for a cigarette butt. (But dignity can have its advantages: Tsezar gives the butt to Ivan Denisovich precisely because he does not beg.)

  The camp hierarchy is malleable, as seen when Gang 104 terrifies Der, the brutish zek-turned-overseer, into submission. And as in the outside world, personalities and allegiances shift as well. In one comic moment (there are a surprising number of them in the novel), Ivan Denisovich’s column, marching back to camp at the end of the day, tries to outrun a column of engineers: “Things were all mixed up. No more sweet or sour. No more guard or zek. Guards and zeks were friends. The other column was the enemy. Their spirits rose. Their anger vanished.” Then a reversal, two pages later: “Who is the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict.” And in the end, Fetyukov, Gang 104’s scavenger and an all-around “shitbag,” wins Ivan Denisovich’s sympathy: “You felt sorry for him, really. He wouldn’t see his time out. He didn’t know how to look after himself.”

  In his 1962 foreword to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir’s editor and the novel’s first champion, wrote, “The reader can visualize for himself many of the people depicted here in the tragic role of camp inmates in other situations—at the front or at postwar construction sites. They are the same people who by the will of circumstance have been put to severe physical and moral tests under special and extreme conditions.” Many, of course, did not survive the war, the camps, the reconstruction. Others live on, riding subways, sweeping snow, guarding paintings, crossing themselves, walking their grandchildren to school, extending a cupped hand to passersby. The traumas as well as the joys of the not-so-distant past are etched in the faces of the oldest Russian generation, revealed in their defenses and defenselessness. Victims and survivors of one regime, they meet new tests and extreme conditions in a country that has changed too quickly in some ways and not enough in others. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells us why some young Russians, scarred by association rather than personal experience, dread old age. More important, the novel shows us what tyranny and fleetingly captured moments of freedom breed, for better and for worse: stoicism, resilience, pride, and a toughness that should no longer be required.

  In one eerie flight of fancy near the end of the novel, Solzhenitsyn portrays the camp as a regular town: “If someday those roads became streets lined with buildings, the future civic center would surely be where the guardhouse and the frisking area now were. And where work parties now pressed in from all sides, parades would converge on public holidays.” Neon lights have replaced searchlights in Russia. American companies have moved into military academies, and churches are places of worship again. “God breaks up the old moon to make stars,” Ivan Denisovich explains to Captain Buynovsky. “Stars fall every now and then, the holes have to be filled up.” The old moon makes way for the new, but there is still something to be gained from watching the stars as they fall.

  OCTOBER 7, 2004

  KATHERINE SHONK is the author of The Red Passport, a collection of short stories set primarily in contemporary Russia. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.

  FOREWORD

  THE DRAMATIC STORY of the first Soviet publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has often been told. The most authoritative account, and by far the most stimulating one, is by Solzhenitsyn himself, who relates in The Oak and the Calf how a unique confluence of political and psychological circumstances made possible the appearance of One Day on the pages of Novy Mir in 1962.*

  But non-specialist readers are less likely to be aware of the fact that the text published in that Soviet literary journal does not represent the canonical version of One Day. Some of the differences are due to ideologically determined omissions and modifications introduced at the urging of Novy Mir’s editorial board. Other changes were made by the author himself even before he submitted his manuscript to the journal. Such a process is referred to as “self-censorship”: in the case of Solzhenitsyn, it entailed smoothing over and trimming back passages which in his opinion would never get by the censors.

  It is important to recall the political atmosphere prevailing in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Even though Nikita Khrushchev had some years earlier launched a campaign to discredit Stalin, the legacy of the past was still obvious in virtually every sphere of life. In particular, literature operated within a clearly defined framework of restrictions that curtailed any truthful discussion of the central events that had shaped Soviet history. Topics considered highly sensitive included the brutal implementation of the collective farm system, the imprisonment or deportation of vast numbers of people by virtue of their social class, nationality, religion, or other factors suggesting potential disloyalty, the policies affecting the conduct of the war with Nazi Germany, and the very existence of the vast network of prison camps that underpinned the entire Soviet economic system.

  The 1962 publication of One Day made history by breaking each of these taboos. Nevertheless, the text printed at that time—and it must be noted that it served as the basis for all earlier English translations—offered deliberately muted versions of some themes that are made explicit for the first time in the present translation.

  A few examples will suffice.* When we hear the story of Shukhov’s gang leader, Tyurin, who had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor simply for being the son of a “kulak,” we now get a better understanding of the scope of the campaign unleashed against the peasants during collectivization: neither women nor children were spared, and villages were terrorized by communist fanatics.

  Whereas we knew before that Shukhov was in prison camp because he had signed a document which asserted that he was a German spy (he had been captured by the Germans but had escaped), we now learn the brutally simple reason for his “confession”: he had been beaten senseless by Soviet counterintelligence officers, and signing was the only way to save his life.

  Other details restored in the canonical text include the information that Baptists were sentenced to twenty-five years for their faith alone, and that the same type of punishment could be expected for even the briefest association with foreigners (Senka Klevshin’s crime, for example, consisted of being liberated from Buchenwald by Americans).

  The full text of One Day offered here is not structurally different from the versions published earlier: it is more a question of dotting political i’s and crossing historical t’s. But in the present instance we have the additional factor of a masterful new translation by Harry T. Willetts of Oxford University.

  Rendering Solzhenitsyn’s prose into English is always a formidable task, but dealing with the intricate stylistic nuances of One Day presents difficulties of a particularly high order. Although the work is not technically a first-person narrative, the greater part of the text is nevertheless expressed in the idiom of the main protagonist, a man of peasant origin with no formal education. To achieve this effect, Solzhenitsyn has used a narrative style that blends folksy colloquialisms with pungent slang and prison-camp jargon, a combination that is guaranteed to test the mettle of any translator. In Mr. Willetts, who has produced the superlative English rendition of Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf, the author has been fortunate to find a translator who possesses a vital quality most often lacking in others who may be able to render the original accurately enough: genuine literary flair. It is this talent which makes the present translation truly worthy of Solzhenitsyn’s classic original.

  ALEXIS KLIMOFF

  THE HAMMER BANGED reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o’clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering.

  The jangling stopped. Outside, it was still
as dark as when Shukhov had gotten up in the night to use the latrine bucket—pitch-black, except for three yellow lights visible from the window, two in the perimeter, one inside the camp.

  For some reason they were slow unlocking the hut, and he couldn’t hear the usual sound of the orderlies mounting the latrine bucket on poles to carry it out.

  Shukhov never overslept. He was always up at the call. That way he had an hour and a half all to himself before work parade—time for a man who knew his way around to earn a bit on the side. He could stitch covers for somebody’s mittens from a piece of old lining. Take some rich foreman his felt boots while he was still in his bunk (save him hopping around barefoot, fishing them out of the heap after drying). Rush round the storerooms looking for odd jobs—sweeping up or running errands. Go to the mess to stack bowls and carry them to the washers-up. You’d get something to eat, but there were too many volunteers, swarms of them. And the worst of it was that if there was anything left in a bowl, you couldn’t help licking it. Shukhov never for a moment forgot what his first foreman, Kuzyomin, had told him. An old camp wolf, twelve years inside by 1943. One day around the campfire in a forest clearing he told the reinforcements fresh from the front, “It’s the law of the taiga here, men. But a man can live here, just like anywhere else. Know who croaks first? The guy who licks out bowls, puts his faith in the sick bay, or squeals to godfather.”*

  He was stretching it a bit there, of course. A stoolie will always get by, whoever else bleeds for him.

  Shukhov always got up at once. Not today, though. Hadn’t felt right since the night before—had the shivers, and some sort of ache. And hadn’t gotten really warm all night. In his sleep he kept fancying he was seriously ill, then feeling a bit better. Kept hoping morning would never come.

  But it arrived on time.