One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (A. Solzhenitsyn)

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. Cover from the Einaudi edition.

Title:
Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha [One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]

Author: Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Years of writing: 1959-1962

Year of first publication: November 1962

Magazine: “Novyi Mir”, 11, 1962

Description:
Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) was the debut work of Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn’s. The first draft dates to the period 18^th May to 30^th June 1959 when Solzhenitsyn was working in Riazan’ where he had moved in June 1957, after being released from the gulag.  Having completed his rehabilitation, he was teaching physics and astronomy. Between 1955 and 1958, he had written V kruge pervom (In the First Circle), a novel set in Marfino’s sharashka, the special camp near Moscow, where he had been imprisoned until 1950.  Solzhenitsyn felt a pressing need to recount his experiences of the concentration camps which would culminate in The Gulag Archipelago. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich can be seen as the initial nucleus of a far-reaching work in progress. The narrative is centered on Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in a Siberian Gulag, on an icy day in January 1951. Shukhov is a peasant from a small village in central Russia who, having enlisted during the war, has been condemned by a military court for defeatism and espionage because he handed himself over as a prisoner to the Nazis. The similarities between the author and Shukhov are obvious: Solzhenitsyn, accused of writing letters criticizing Stalin which had been intercepted by censors, was imprisoned from 1945 to 1956 and spent August 1950 to February 1953 in the Ekibastuz Gulag in Kazakhstan. For the inmates, the extreme harshness of the lager erased resentment towards Soviet power as the struggle for survival against the cold, hunger and fatigue left no room for desires of revenge or even liberation. For Solzhenitsyn, the only possible form of resistance was surviving. His attempt to objectify the reality of the concentration camp and portray his protagonist’s thoughts and actions as rational, despite the irrational inhumanity of his environment, impressed the text’s first readers, including Aleksandr Tvardovskii, director of the magazine “Novyi Mir”.
After Nikita Khrushchev’s harsh attack on Stalin during the 22nd Party Congress held between 17^th and 31^st October 1961, Solzhenitsyn had a manuscript of his work sent to Moscow. On 10^th November 1961, Raisa Orlova, the wife of Lev Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn’s cellmate during his imprisonment in Marfino, delivered the anonymous manuscript to Anna Berzer from the editorial office of “Novyi Mir”. Kopelev proposed A. Riazanskii as a pseudonym for the writer. In December, Tvardovskii read Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Sof’ia Petrovna and the story of the man from Riazan’ and was impressed by Solzhenitsyn’s writing. Through Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn was invited to Moscow on 12^th December to sign the publication agreement. The work was revised and shortened before publication and the title Sch-854. Odin den’ odnogo zeka (Sch-854. A Prisoner’s Day) was changed at Tvardovskii’s behest to the less conspicuous One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The editing process lasted until the beginning of 1962. The language of the story is non-standard, deviating from the socialist realist canon to make use of the jargon of the gulag with its ungrammatical and lexical rawness. Solzhenitsyn also uses regional dialect typical of the peasants who lived in the provinces of the Soviet Union before they were deported and annihilated as a class.  Their language, which had effectively disappeared, is brought back to life through literature.
Because of its style and scope, the text was published as a povest’ or short novel. Tvardovskii asked K. Chukovskii, K. Simonov, S. Marshak and K. Paustovskii for reviews, who were all enthusiastic. The editor of “Novy Mir” also wrote a short introduction to the work and enclosed it in a letter to Khrushchev. On 6^th August 1962, the dossier was delivered to Vladimir Lebedev, advisor to the General Secretary. Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoian expressed their approval and on 12^th October 1962, the Party’s Central Committee approved the work’s publication. Lebedev, who had a significant influence on Khrushchev, played a decisive role in the decision and returned the text with some annotations, which were accepted by the author (cf. Solzhenitsyn 2006: 395-398).
On 17^th November, the work was published in issue 11 of “Novyi Mir” (8-74) and was an immediate success. During 1963, it was reprinted in a volume by Sovetskii Pisatel’. Solzhenitsyn was also praised in the West and translations rapidly proliferated. L. Cohen proposed making a film in the USA based on the book, a proposal opposed by the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva.
News of the novel’s publication was widely reported in Italy; on 21^st November 1962; “Il Corriere della sera” headlined: First Soviet novel on the nightmare of dictatorship. Enzo Bettiza, a correspondent from Moscow for “La Stampa”, advised Mondadori to consider the text and on 27^th November published an article on the “first Soviet indictment of Siberian concentration camps”. He wrote that although Ivan Denisovich is a fictional character, the book (personally authorized by Khrushchev) can be viewed as an historical document as the author experienced Stalin’s ‘lagers’ directly: “the horror does not stem from violent cruelty, but from the desperate weariness of men condemned without a reason” (Bettiza 1962: 3). On the same day, Raffaello Uboldi published excerpts from the story in “Il Giorno”, for which he was Moscow correspondent.
In the meantime, Tvardovskii’s article on the “Solzhenitsin case” appeared in the December issue of “L’Europa Letteraria” (cf. Vigorelli, Tvardovsky 1962). “L’Espresso” was also interested in the novel and at the behest of Eugenio Scalfari, from 2^nd December to 27^th January 1963 published a translation in serial form, with an introduction by Enzo Bettiza (alias Sarmatius). Einaudi and Garzanti soon published Italian translations. In mid-January 1963, R. Uboldi, assisted by an anonymous Moscow translator, delivered the work to Einaudi, while Giorgio Kraiski translated it for Garzanti: in this edition there was also a preface by Tvardovskii. Several articles were dedicated to the new work: on 23^rd January 1963, Vittorio Strada, who grasped its historical importance, predicted the coming of a “more mature” Soviet culture in the columns of “L’Unità”. Solzhenitsyn’s book represented a revolutionary event in the formation of a civil and moral consciousness in Soviet readers, a milestone in the literature of the ‘Thaw’; from now on the history of literature would be divided into “before and after Ivan Denisovich” (Strada 1963a: 6). In a later article, in “Rinascita”, Strada described One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as an heroic literary act. Despite the hero’s limited view, the work was a necessary socialist denunciation of Stalin (cf. Strada 1963b: 24-25). During 1963, the debate between critics of different orientations such as P. Alatri, E. Forcella and G. Herling, who had also experienced the gulag, became animated (cf. Herling 1963: 55-58). In the columns of “Il Corriere della sera”, the story was defined as “the example of a truly singular non-conformism in the communist world” (Gramigna 1963: 7).
In August 1963, during a conference on the novel, organised in Leningrad by the Community of European Writers and widely reported in “L’Europa letteraria” (no. 22-23-24), Solzhenitsyn’s absence made the news. The reporter Enzo Biagi, considered his absence to be ominous: “He is a professor in a distant province and seems to be seriously ill […] One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich recounts his experiences as a prisoner. Very few know him because he lives in seclusion” (Biagi 1963: 3).  In reality, the author’s position had become uncomfortable in the USSR, as was evident in the reception of an article published in Italian in his defense in Leningrad by Tvardovskii, editor of “Novyi Mir”, which caused considerable controversy (cf. Tvardovskii 1963: 153-156).
During 1963, Giovanni Giudici in No. 5 of “Questo e altro” and Franco Fortini in No. 12 of “Quaderni Piacentini” (Del disprezzo di Solzenicyn) aired open criticism of Solzhenitsyn (cf. Sabbatini 2018: 70-71). In Italy, as in the USSR,  the writer had defenders and detractors (cf. Strada 1964). At the beginning of 1964, discussions on concentration camp literature were in vogue and Solzhenitsyn polarized opinions (cf. Bettiza 1964: 11). In “L’Unità”, Moscow correspondent, Augusto Pancaldi, claimed that “Ivan Denisovich has become the touchstone against which everyone measures their aspirations for what Soviet society is and will become”. In issue 26 of “L’Europa Letteraria”, Giancarlo Vigorelli and Vittorio Strada called for the Lenin Prize to be awarded to Solzhenitsyn.
This however was not to be.  Despite Iurii Lotman’s positive review which was sent to the Lenin Prize Committee, Solzhenitsyn was not awarded the prize; nor did he win the 1964 International Prize for Literature which was awarded to Nathalie Sarraute (cf. Sabbatini 2018: 71-72). This disavowal of the witness of the Gulag was an unmistakable political signal and was again widely echoed in the Western press (cf. Roberti 1964: 3). This type of media attention, characterised by bitter debate, also surrounded the decision to award Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize in 1970. (cf. Silone 1970). Despite its initial success, in the USSR ‘Ivan Denisovich’ would henceforth follow the destiny of its increasingly marginalized author: “Solzhenitsyn had the misfortune of being the first rhapsodist of the agony of millions of innocents condemned in the camps of Siberia. He is now blamed for this by bureaucrats and other apes, who cover for the brutal torturers he depicts in the harsh ‘stations’ of One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” (Ripellino 1967: 11).
Even though uncensored versions of the work circulated in the USSR thanks to the samizdat, Italian translations of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were always based on the censored 1962 text. Only in 2017, did Einaudi publish a full version of the novel in a new translation, based on the 2006 text, which had been corrected and restored by the author to its original version (cf. Solženicyn 2017).

Marco Sabbatini
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Cecilia Martino

Bibliography

• Bettiza E., I giorni tutti uguali di agonia e umiliazione nella ‘casa dei morti’ per i dannati di Stalin, “La Stampa”, 27/11/1962: 3.
• Bettiza E., Ex prigioniero narra sulle “Izvestija” le atrocità dei ‘Lager’ staliniani, “La Stampa”, 15/01/1964: 3.
• Biagi E., Scrittori deportati da Stalin e ungheresi ribelli al convegno di Leningrado sulla libertà dell’arte“La Stampa”, 06/08/1963: 3.
• Gramigna G., Altre voci del ‘disgelo’, “Corriere della sera”, 09/02/1963: 7.
• Herling G., Jegor and Ivan Denisovic, “Tempo presente”, January 1963: 55-58.
• Pancaldi A., Solzhenitsyn sotto il fuoco della giuria, “L’Unità”, 05/04/1964: 8.
• Roberti V., Premio Lenin per le lettere a un burocrate della narrativa, “Corriere della sera”, 22/04/1964: 3.
• Ripellino A.M., I topi del regime, “L’Espresso”, 18/06/1967: 11.
• Sabbatini M., Lagernaia proza Solzhenitsyna v zerkale ital’ianskoi kritiki 1960-kh – nachala 1970-kh godov, “Tekst i traditsiia”, 6 (2018): 62-75.
• Silone I., Perché Solgenitsin. Un premio Nobel fra politica e letteratura, “Corriere della sera”, 11/10/1970: 13
• Solzhenitsyn A., Rasskazy i krokhotki, Id., Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tt., Tom 1, Vremia, Moskva 2006.
• Solženicyn A., Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič, edited by O. Discacciati, Einaudi, Torino 2017.
• Strada V., Con ‘Ivan Denisovic’ si va oltre il disgelo, “L’Unità”, 23/01/1963a: 6.
• Strada V., I vinti sono i vincitori nel libro di Solzenitsyn, “Rinascita”, 06/07/1963b: 24-25.
• Strada V., In difesa di Solzenitsyn, “L’Europa letteraria”, 26 (1964): 5-13.
• Tvardovskii A., Il convincimento dell’artista e l’esempio di Solzenitsyn, “L’Europa letteraria”, 22-23-24 (1963): 153-156.
• Vigorelli G., Tvardovskii A., Il caso Solzhenizin, “L’Europa letteraria”, 18 (1962): 113-115.