Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [312]
Ivan Denisovich, by contrast, was genuinely realistic: it was not optimistic, and it was not a morality tale. The sufferings of its heroes were pointless. The work they did was exhausting and draining, and they tried to avoid it. The Party did not triumph in the end, and communism did not emerge the victor. This honesty, so unusual for a Soviet writer, was precisely what Tvardovsky admired: he told Solzhenitsyn’s friend Kopelev that the story had “not a drop of falsehood in it.” Which was precisely what would upset many readers, particularly those in the Soviet establishment. Even one of Novyi Mir’s editors found the story’s frankness disturbing. In his comments on the novel he wrote that “it shows life too one-sidedly, involuntarily twisting and upsetting the proportions.” For people used to simplistic conclusions, the novel seemed horrifyingly open-ended and amoral.
Tvardovsky wanted to publish it, but knew that if he simply had the story typeset and sent off to the censors, they would ban it immediately. Instead, he offered Ivan Denisovich to Khrushchev, to be used as a weapon against his enemies. According to Michael Scammell, Tvardovsky wrote a Preface that presented the story’s usefulness in precisely this light, and then began giving it to people whom he hoped would hand it to Khrushchev himself.63
After much back and forth, much debate, and a few changes to the manuscript—Solzhenitsyn was persuaded to add at least one “positive hero,” and to include a token condemnation of Ukrainian nationalism—the novel did finally reach Khrushchev. He approved. He even praised the book for having been written “in the spirit of the Twenty-second Party Congress,” which presumably meant that he thought it would annoy his enemies. Finally, in the November 1962 issue of Novyi Mir, it appeared in print. “The bird is free! The bird is free!” Tvardovsky is alleged to have shouted as he held the first proof copy in his hands.
At first, the critical praise was fulsome, not least because the story matched the official line of the moment. Pravda’s literary critic hoped that the “fight against the personality cult” would from now on “continue to facilitate the appearance of works of art outstanding for their ever-increasing artistic value.” Izvestiya’s literary critic said Solzhenitsyn had “shown himself a true helper of the Party in a sacred and vital cause—the struggle against the personality cult and its consequences.”64
Those were not quite the reactions of the ordinary readers, however, who flooded Solzhenitsyn with mail in the months that followed the Novyi Mir publication. The story’s close parallels to the new Party line did not impress the former camp inmates who wrote to him from all over the country. Instead, they were overjoyed to read something which actually reflected their own feelings and experience. People afraid to breathe a word of their experiences to their closest friends suddenly felt a sense of release. One woman wrote to describe her reaction: “My face was smothered in tears. I didn’t wipe them away because all this, packed into a small number of pages of the magazine, was mine, intimately mine, for every day of the fifteen years I spent in the camps.”
Another letter addressed Solzhenitsyn, “Dear friend, comrade and brother,” before continuing: “Reading your story I remembered Sivaya Maska and Vorkuta . . . the frosts and blizzards, the insults and humiliations . . . I wept as I read—they were