Dariusz
Tolczyk, "Who is Ivan Denisovich? Ethical Challenge and Narrative
Ambiguity in Solzhenitzyn's Text", in One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion, edited by Alexis
Klimoff, Northwestern University Press, 1997, pp. 70-84.
Abstract: In the following essay, Tolczyk examines the
uncertain ethical dimension of Denisovich's imprisonment and dehumanizing
experiences in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. According to Tolczyk,
the absence of direct authorial conclusions in the novel--a break from
conventional Soviet literature--leaves the significance of the protagonist's
victimization and values open to interpretation.
The revolutionary significance of
Solzhenitsyn"s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the context of
official Soviet culture did not arise from the novelty of the
concentration-camp topic presented in Solzhenitsyn"s work. This theme had
in fact been present in Soviet literature when these penal institutions were
being established in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, it reached high prominence
in official Soviet literary discourse with the publication of Gorky"s
reportage from the Solovki concentration camp in 1929,1 followed by the
triumphant collective volume on the White Sea Canal project in 1934, authored
by Gorky and thirty-five other Soviet writers, including such prominent
literary figures as Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Alexei Tolstoy.2
The camps were presented in these works as benevolent institutions in which the
Soviet government reeducated and resocialized individuals who had not adjusted
sufficiently to life in Stalin"s brave new world of five-year plans and
the forced collectivization of property as well as minds. This peculiar form of
resocialization through hard labor, hunger, and deprivation was known in the
Soviet Union of the early 1930s by the euphemistic name of perekovka
("reforging"). Needless to say, there are no victims in these Soviet
literary descriptions of Stalinist prison camps. The convention that presented
incarceration in the camps as a successful form of Soviet "social
medicine" naturally had no room for any mention of the physical or moral
destruction of the "patients." In the literary reportages from
Solovki and White Sea Canal, prisoners not only do not complain about their
fate but even express appreciation for the regime"s initiative in putting
them to work in the camps. Since the "reforged" camp prisoners were
expected, in these literary accounts from the late 1920s and early 1930s, to
evolve toward virtual self-identification with the Soviet regime, the success
of the perekovka was predicated on the belief in a foreseeable future when
there would be no more individuals in need of "reforging" and the
system of reeducation would become obsolete. But the massive escalation of
Soviet terror against ever-increasing numbers of alleged "enemies of the
people" in the late 1930s contradicted these assumptions, and the whole
perekovka concept was abandoned by the Soviet regime, making the very subject
of the concentration camps taboo for more than two decades.
This lasted until
November 1962 when, for the first time in Soviet literary history, the Soviet
prison-camp experience was addressed in a literary work from the victim"s
point of view. Once again, however, it was not One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich that broke the silence and introduced this new perspective. Just a
few days before publication of One Day, the newspaper Izvestiia printed a short
story entitled "Samorodok" (A nugget)3 from a semi-autobiographical cycle
Kolymskie zapisi (Kolyma notes) by a now-forgotten writer and survivor of the
Kolyma camps, Georgii Shelest.4 Within a short time other soon-to-be-obscure
authors, such as Iurii Piliar, Boris D"iakov, and Andrei Aldan-Semenov,
followed suit with accounts on the same theme.5 Thus Solzhenitsyn was by no
means alone in giving expression to the prison-camp theme in officially
published Soviet literature during the "thaw" of the early 1960s.
Yet what set
Solzhenitsyn apart from the other Soviet writers who addressed the prison-camp
topic at this time was that he alone succeeded in liberating this theme from
specifically Soviet literary conventions and, more generally, in breaking free
from a type of public discourse that had deprived the experiences depicted of
materiality and reduced them to mere illustrations of abstract ideological
constructs. True, all the officially published Soviet literary portrayals of
the prison-camp experiences that appeared in the early 1960s dispensed with
Gorky"s ideological rationalizations as well as with the euphemistic
manner of presentation he had used, showing the horrors of practical communism
in ways that were sometimes even more shocking than the scenes portrayed in One
Day. But at the same time, none of them managed to refrain from offering
specific and clear-cut resolutions of all moral issues raised by the topic at
hand. The constant readiness on the part of Shelest, Piliar, D"iakov, and
Aldan-Semenov to dismiss the moral challenges presented by the camps per se by
means of facile ideological statements produced a situation where the camp
experience did not seem to have enough significance to unsettle the
protagonists seriously, to say nothing of transforming them. These writers thus
failed to uncover the sources of human behavior that could be revealed in this
traumatic test of the limits of humanity. What is especially characteristic of
these officially approved works is that the victim"s point of view,
introduced here, was in fact limited to only one type of victim, an ardent Communist
for whom the main moral question raised by his imprisonment was not "Why
do human beings do this to other people?" but "Why is this being done
to me, a good and loyal Communist?" The conclusion of D"iakov"s
semiautobiographical Povest" o perezhitom (The tale of what I lived
through) is symptomatic of these works. D"iakov"s protagonist is
speaking:
Do you
remember how restlessly we tried to understand what was the root of this evil,
and who was to be judged by whom? Now we understand. Stalin, intoxicated by his
power, treated his own people as enemies, and punished them. But finally the
Twentieth Party Congress came, and it transformed our lives. I feel as if all
these innocent victims were finally brought home by Lenin.6
This and other works of the officially
sanctioned Soviet prison-camp prose of the early 1960s demonstrated that the
ideological jargon of Soviet public discourse had created cognitive,
axiological, and communicative filters unpenetrable for some writers even in
the face of an experience of such devastating magnitude as the concentration
camp.
In contrast,
Solzhenitsyn"s One Day brought to Soviet literary and public discourse a
work that was to test the nature and limitations of this discourse in ways
unprecedented and unrepeated until the advent of glasnost. Specifically, the
human experience of the prison camp is presented here as an open ethical issue
to be confronted by readers directly and individually. After four decades of
Soviet totalitarianism, its chief experience--the horror of concentration
camps--was here shown as a moral question in and of itself, not as part of an
official answer to some other abstract and allegedly more important question
concerning the speed of achieving socialism, the comparisons between
Stalin"s and Lenin"s political agendas, and so on. In
Solzhenitsyn"s work, for the first time in Soviet history, Soviet readers
were invited to face the most dismal aspect of their own reality without the
ideological guidance that, in all other Soviet works concerned with the camp
topic, had always been there to reconcile them with this reality. In One Day,
Soviet readers were required to act as ethical judges, to reflect morally on a
phenomenon crucial not only in terms of the Soviet social experiment but, in
the more general sense, in terms of the twentieth-century experience of
"humanity in extremis": on the ultimate test of human values
confronted by dehumanizing forces of overwhelming magnitude.
Such an ethical
challenge is inherent in the very subject matter of prison-camp literature,
whether it is spelled out in explicit moral terms or not. The presence of an
innocent victim, once it is acknowledged, automatically introduces an element
of ethical anxiety to any situation where this plays a role. In this sense, the
concentration camp is but a particularly vivid example of such an ethically
charged situation. When official Soviet literature dealt with issues of
victimization in general and the prison-camp experience in particular, it
always provided an authoritative resolution, and thus either obliterated or
neutralized the ethical challenge posed by the subject matter. In this
paradigm, the presence of the victim is typically explained as part of some
larger and more abstract context within which the very definition of victimhood
is questioned and reevaluated. The accounts of the prison camps produced by
Shelest, D"iakov, Piliar, and Aldan-Semenov managed to reserve the right
to victimhood and innocence exclusively for those inmates who shared the value
system of their Soviet oppressors and thus were always ready to accept their
own victimization as an unfortunate but ultimately justifiable part of the
larger, essentially positive context of the Soviet road to communism.
In this context,
Solzhenitsyn"s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the only work
that neither provides nor suggests clear authorial resolutions for the ethical
problem inherent in the prison-camp experience. This absence is a result of a
literary strategy assumed by the author and fulfilled with uncompromising
discipline. Solzhenitsyn"s short novel is unique in that it does not
contain in its structure a communicative entity, a point of view or a voice,
capable of presenting an ultimate authorial assessment of the ethical issues
raised in the text. Though One Day is technically a third-person narrative, the
perspective is in fact closely attached to the point of view of the
novel"s main protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a simple
peasant-soldier serving his sentence for uncommitted crimes. His presence
within the text is constant, and virtually the entire testimony of the camp
experience is filtered through his consciousness. Thus the only commentary that
One Day provides on the prison-camp experience is generated by Ivan Shukhov, a
character hardly capable of and generally not interested in developing abstract
arguments in order to define his fate. Moreover, this limited point of view is
rendered by means of the narrative technique of erlebte Rede7: the verbal
account of the camp is not only sifted through the cognitive filter of the
central character, but its very formulation is colored and influenced by his
linguistic competence. The language of the Russian peasant, that is, the
language spoken by the "human material" of Soviet history and not by
its designers, provides the descriptive medium by means of which Solzhenitsyn
portrays the reality of the Soviet totalitarian experience. Thus a reader who
would approach this work with the customary Soviet expectation of being guided
by some ideological argument to a resolution of the potential anxieties
generated by the text is bound for severe frustration. Ivan Denisovich does not
speak the language of ideological generalization, and the author himself
remains silent and distant behind his protagonist.
Solzhenitsyn"s
literary strategy demands the reader"s active role in providing some sort
of philosophical response to the ethical problems raised in the text. Yet no
final resolution is possible, only a specific dialogue between a particular
reader and the text, while the text itself remains open to other dialogues.
Solzhenitsyn was absolutely unique in Soviet literature in establishing such a
dialogical, open-ended communicative link between the reader and a text on a
topic so explosively subversive for the Soviet authorities.
One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich thus clashed frontally with a Soviet public discourse
that was incapable of tolerating open-ended issues, seeing them only as
potential sources of dissent and controversy. Since each social and human
phenomenon had to be fully explicable in the ideological terms of a regime
claiming omniscience and moral superiority, Solzhenitsyn"s work had to be
supplied with interpretations and explanations formulated in the language of
accepted Soviet public discourse. For this reason, One Day became a catalyst
for numerous statements made in the Soviet press in which all the philosophical
and rhetorical means available were mobilized in an attempt to neutralize the
ethical challenge posed by Solzhenitsyn"s work. These attempts failed,
thus proving, for the first and only time in the history of Soviet public
discourse, that the ideological resources necessary for the ethical and
cognitive rationalization of the Bolshevik evil had been already exhausted by
the Soviet regime and that, at the same time, this regime remained incapable of
a searching look at its own ethical legitimacy.
In an interview granted in March 1967 to a
Slovak journalist, Pavel Licko, Solzhenitsyn defined his own views on the
principal tasks of a writer:
By intuition and by singular vision of the
world, a writer is able to discover far earlier than other people various
aspects of social life and can often see them from an unexpected angle. This is
the essence of talent. Talent, however, imposes certain duties. It is incumbent
upon a writer to inform society of all that he is able to perceive and
especially all that is unhealthy and a cause for anxiety. I was brought up with
Russian literature and only circumstances prevented me from pursuing more extensive
studies. & Russian literature has always been sensitive to human
suffering.8
And in another segment of the same interview, Solzhenitsyn added:
I know
that the easiest thing for a writer is to write about himself. But I have
always felt that to write about the fate of Russia was the most fascinating and
important task to be performed. Of all the drama that Russia lived through, the
fate of Ivan Denisovich was the greatest tragedy.9
These two statements shed light on the
author"s intention as well as his awareness of his own craft. By stressing
the social duty of literature (defined here in terms of the anxiety caused by
human suffering) and by viewing Ivan Denisovich (a sufferer) as a
representative type embodying the drama of the Russian historical fate,
Solzhenitsyn identifies himself and his work with the tradition of morally
committed Russian nineteenth-century realism. The significant nature of the
issues he raises within this literary tradition is reflected not only in the
concrete historical circumstances he has chosen to describe but also in his
general vision of human nature, and in this sense the actual circumstances of
the concentration camp serve as the justification for larger philosophical
questions. Just as the protagonist described in One Day is a particular example
of the general moral drama engulfing all of Russia, so too can the drama of
Russia be seen as a particular instance of an even more general trial--that of
humanity degraded by the onslaught of totalitarianism. In this sense, One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich also belongs to the great twentieth-century
literary tradition of prison-camp literature, a tradition that continually
asks: How do human values stand up to the test of the totalitarian experience?
What are the limits of human dignity and what are its sources?
As noted earlier,
the focus of narration, the selection of the phenomena described in One Day,
and the very language in which the image of the prison-camp experience is
presented are essentially the products of the cognitive dynamics and linguistic
competence of Shukhov himself. Ivan Denisovich is an insider in the
dehumanizing world of the camps, and in this respect he is living testimony to
the long-term results of man"s confrontation with this special world. After
years of being subjected to degradation and to a systematic assault on his
self-image, his perception of the prison-camp experience contains an indirect
answer to the question of the sources of human victory and/or defeat in the
face of such extreme conditions. Hence the central ethical question of One Day
is encapsulated in the problem of Ivan Denisovich"s motivations: What is
it that induces his actions and shapes his perceptions?
Seen in this
context, the absence of drama in the tone and plot of One Day becomes a source
of a meaningful ambiguity. The fact is that hunger, cold, pain, violence,
injustice, and oppression--each more than sufficient as a source of shock and
drama--permeate the reality of the prison camp Solzhenitsyn describes. It is
only their status in the eyes of the central protagonist, who tends to perceive
them as routine elements of everyday life, that deprives them of their dramatic
potential. Shukhov, the "well-adjusted" insider, constantly
understates the horror of his experience.
What, then, is the
motivation behind this peculiar perception on the part of Ivan Denisovich? Is
this matter-of-fact, tough-skinned view of the prison camp a necessary element
in the struggle of a human being determined to survive and to save his dignity,
a man who cannot afford to indulge in any dramatization of his fate since this
could become psychologically disarming in the given conditions?10 Or (to state
the opposite possibility) is this perpetual understatement and focus on the
mundane practicalities of day-to-day existence in the camp, this systematic
exclusion of the element of moral outrage, a reflection of an atrophied ethical
sense in the protagonist? Could it be an indirect indication of Ivan"s
inner submission to slavery to the point of accepting his own victimization
without a thought of protest? Is it an indication of Shukhov"s confusion
about what is wrong and what is normal? In other words, does One Day stand as a
testament to the victory of human dignity over totalitarian dehumanization or to
its ultimate defeat?
The question of
Ivan Denisovich"s ability to respond to the ethical challenge of
concentration camp existence finds its most direct expression in the dialogue
between Shukhov and Alyoshka, a Baptist victim of Stalinist religious persecution.
The topic of the conversation is, precisely, the problem of identifying the
sources of human values and relating the prison-camp experience to the value
systems of the victims. Both prisoners express their understanding of how their
experience of incarceration can be understood in light of the values they hold.
The importance of
this dialogue as a key to the ethical dimension of One Day is indicated in at
least two ways. It is the only major instance when Shukhov"s habitual
focus on the mundane and practical aspects of his existence gives way to more
"philosophical" reflection. Moreover, the issue of Shukhov"s own
motivations in his life in the camp appears here explicitly as a theme. The
significance of this episode is also suggested by the fact that it appears in
the novel"s conclusion. This privileged position gives the dialogue
between Shukhov and Alyoshka the character of an interpretive key to the themes
and events described in the whole work. The philosophical issues addressed here
form a paradigmatic framework that allows the ethical dimensions of the
phenomena described in One Day to be seen in proper perspective.
If Shukhov is a
human puzzle owing to his limited verbal competence and his inability to
generalize from his own experience, his partner Alyoshka is just the opposite.
Alyoshka views the individual as an ethical entity, that is, as someone who
looks upon his own fate in the camp as the ultimate test of his value system.
He expresses his value system in religious terms and defines his life as
service to these ideals. Alyoshka"s actions and words show his
uncompromising observance of a fully internalized religious framework of values
that encompass his entire identity. Even though he is physically confined to
the prison camp with its dehumanizing pressures, Alyoshka is spiritually free
because he psychologically inhabits a world beyond the power of the camp. This
internal freedom, the source of Alyoshka"s human dignity in the prison
camp, is based on his rejection of that which is the main cause of all moral
compromises in the camps--the illusive hope for survival and a change of
fortune. That hope--which, according to such writers and prison camp veterans
as Varlam Shalamov and Tadeusz Borowski, turns a prisoner into a slave11--in Alyoshka"s
case loses its tempting appeal.
Within the world
of the prison camp, hope for survival often forces a prisoner to adhere blindly
to the specific pragmatics of survival and either to internalize his
oppressors" point of view, hoping for mercy or the "clarification of
the mistake" (as in Shelest, Piliar, D"iakov, and Aldan-Semenov) or
to acquire "camp smarts" and learn to live at the expense of his
fellow prisoners (the typical attitude of criminals portrayed in nonofficial prison-camp
literature).12 The notion of hope is so foreign to Alyoshka that he not only
seems to care little for the practical aspects of survival in camp but does not
even allow himself to pray for a change of circumstances. When Shukhov tells
him that praying in the camp is unlikely to shorten the time spent there,
Alyoshka replies: "That"s just the sort of thing you shouldn"t
pray for!" (177;117).13 And it is this issue of hope that becomes the key
subject of the climactic dialogue that sheds light on the human puzzle of the
main protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
In contrast to
Alyoshka, Shukhov has no clear-cut system of verbally defined values capable of
serving him as a point of reference and a source of inner freedom in the camp.
However, he indirectly acknowledges the need for something external to the
realm of the camp experience. This point of reference appears as a traditional
rhetorical entity, called "God," when Shukhov, lying on his bunk in
the evening, sighs: "Thanks be to Thee, O God, another day over!"
(174; 115). Shukhov"s purely rhetorical phrase here opens the conversation
that will provide the main ethical paradigm of One Day: "Alyoshka heard
Shukhov thank God out loud, and looked around. "There you are, Ivan
Denisovich, your soul is asking to be allowed to pray to God. Why not let it
have its way, eh?"" (175; 115-16). Shukhov answers: "Because,
Alyoshka, prayers are like petitions--either they don"t get through at
all, or else it"s "complaint rejected"" (175; 116).
The only desire
Shukhov is intellectually capable of reflecting on is the hope for an
improvement in his circumstances, with his release from the camp the peak of
this desire. But he realizes the futility of this hope:
""Anyway," he concluded, "pray as much as you like, but
they won"t knock anything off your sentence. You"ll serve your time
from bell to bell whatever happens"" (177; 117).
Alyoshka"s answer opens a new dimension to
Shukhov--that of a value-system that transcends hope.
That"s just the sort of thing you
shouldn"t pray for! What good is freedom to you? If you"re free, your
faith will soon be choked by thorns! Be glad you"re in prison. Here you
have time to think about your soul. Remember what the Apostle Paul says,
"What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not
only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord
Jesus." (177-78; 117)
In this central passage, Shukhov realizes that
what he thought was the source of his everyday efforts and the direction of his
life in the camp was not necessarily the hope for survival and freedom. In
fact, just like Alyoshka, Ivan Denisovich himself has already abandoned this
desire and has resigned himself to his fate in the camp:
Shukhov
stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to
be free 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 allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there
was no knowing where the living was easier--here or there. (178; 117)
Unlike Alyoshka, however, Shukhov does not know
what the source of his own behavior is in the camp, nor why he should abandon
his hope and accept his fate. ""Look, Alyoshka," Shukhov
explained, "it"s worked out pretty well for you. Christ told you to
go to jail, and you did it, for Christ. But what am I here for?""
(178; 118).
Both Shukhov and the reader (by virtue of
Shukhov"s limited scope of awareness) lack any explicit verbal definition
of the particular values Shukhov himself may stand for in the camp. This
absence of a clear philosophical assessment of the nature of Shukhov"s
true response to the camp experience establishes the principal ethical puzzle
of One Day; namely, is Shukhov"s acceptance of his fate a sign of his
having transcended the enslaving dynamics of prison-camp life and, as in
Alyoshka"s case (but unconsciously), an indication of Shukhov"s inner
victory over totalitarian dehumanization? What, in that case, is the source of
value that supersedes the hope for freedom and survival itself? Or is
Shukhov"s abandonment of any hope for freedom a reflection of the victory
of the totalitarian machine? Is Ivan Denisovich recognizing the camp as his
true home, the only framework of his identity, including his dreams? In such a
case, Ivan Denisovich would exemplify a stance diametrically opposed to that of
Alyoshka: he would represent a Soviet version of what Tadeusz Borowski has called
the "Lagermensch,"14 a type of camp prisoner whose body as well as
spirit have become so accustomed to his circumstances that they refuse to
travel beyond the barbed wire. And the appearance of the
"Lagermensch" may well be totalitarianism"s greatest victory
over the human spirit.
Which of these two contradictory interpretations
provides a more accurate answer to the question of what motivates
Solzhenitsyn"s protagonist? In other words, who is Ivan Denisovich? This
is the question that each reader of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is
invited to ponder long after the last page of the book has been turned.
