Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [311]
Solzhenitsyn’s prison career had begun in a manner typical for zeks of his generation. After entering officers’ training school in 1941, he fought across the western front throughout the autumn and winter of 1943, penned some poorly disguised criticism of Stalin in a letter to a friend in 1945—and was arrested soon after. Hitherto a more or less true communist believer, the young officer was stunned by the brutality and crudity with which he was treated. Later, he would be even more shocked by the harsh treatment meted out to Red Army soldiers who had fallen into Nazi captivity. These, he felt, were men who should have returned home as heroes.
His subsequent camp career was perhaps slightly less than typical, only because—thanks to some undergraduate math and physics—he served some of his time in a sharashka, an experience he later recorded in his novel The First Circle. Other than that, it is fair to say that he served in a series of unremarkable lagpunkts, including one in Moscow, and one in a special camp complex in Karaganda. He was also an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer. Bricklaying was the career he later gave to Ivan Denisovich, the zek “Everyman” who was the hero of his first novel. After his release, he went to teach at a school in Ryazan, and began to write about his experiences. That too was not unusual: the many hundreds of Gulag memoirs that have been published since the 1980s are ample testimony to the eloquence and talent of Soviet ex-prisoners, many of whom wrote in secret for years. What made Solzhenitsyn truly unique, in the end, was the simple fact that his work appeared in print, in the Soviet Union, while Khrushchev was still in power.
Many legends surround the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, so many that Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, has written that the tale “has acquired such embellishments along the way that it is sometimes hard to disentangle fact from fiction.” The book’s route to literary fame was a slow one. Before it became famous, the manuscript of Ivan Denisovich passed through the hands of Lev Kopelev—a Moscow literary figure, and one of Solzhenitsyn’s camp comrades—and a copy editor at Novyi Mir. Excited by her find, the copy editor passed it to Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor-in-chief of Novyi Mir.
Tvardovsky, so the story goes, began reading Ivan Denisovich while lying in bed. After a few pages, however, he was so impressed by the manuscript that he felt he had to get up, get dressed, and read the story sitting upright. He spent an entire night reading it, and then rushed into his office as soon as dawn broke, howling for the typists to make up extra copies so that he could distribute the book to his friends, all the while hailing the birth of a new literary genius. Whether or not all of this really happened, Tvardovsky certainly told people it had. Later, Solzhenitsyn wrote to him of how happy he had felt when he learned that Tvardovsky found Ivan Denisovich “worth a sleepless night.”62
The novel itself was straightforward enough: it recorded a single day in the life of an ordinary prisoner. Reading it now, it can, in fact, be hard for contemporary readers, even contemporary readers in Russia, to understand why it created such a furor in the Soviet literary world. But to those who read it in 1962, the novel came as a revelation. Instead of speaking vaguely about “returnees” and “repressions,” as some other books did at the time, Ivan Denisovich directly described life in the camps, a subject which had not, until then, been discussed in public.
At the same time, Solzhenitsyn’s style—particularly his use of camp slang—and his descriptions of the dullness