“With an oppression in my heart, I refrained for years from printing this already finished book: my duty to the still living outweighed my duty to the dead. But now that state security has taken this book anyway, I have no choice but to publish it immediately.
A. Solzhenitsyn September 1973» .
This is how “The Gulag Archipelago” begins. The book that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote “on the table” at almost 10 years old. The book, because of which he was expelled from his native country, and then he was given a State Prize for it. The book that was hunted by the KGB, and which was able to see the light of day abroad for the first time.
Background
The beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Young Alexander Solzhenitsyn finds himself at the front and corresponds with his comrades. In one of these letters, the author spoke negatively about “Godfather,” which meant Stalin. Military censorship reports about the “rebel” and at the end of winter 1945 he is arrested. The war is over, compatriots are celebrating, and Solzhenitsyn is being interrogated. And they are sentenced to 8 years of forced labor camps, and upon completion - to eternal exile.
Later, he would describe all the horrors of the camps in his works. For many years they will be distributed by samizdat - without permission from the authorities.
Write letters in small handwriting
Solzhenitsyn's first publications in the magazine "New World" (in particular, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich") caused a storm of responses. Readers wrote to the author about their lives and shared their experiences, including those in the camps. These letters from former prisoners did not pass by Alexander Isaevich: the “GULAG Archipelago” began with them.
The widow of writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn Natalya Dmitrievna at the presentation of the abridged edition of the book “The Gulag Archipelago”. Photo: RIA Novosti / Sergey Pyatakov
Solzhenitsyn dedicated his monumental work to them, victims of repression like himself:
I dedicate
to everyone who didn't have enough life
talk about it.
And may they forgive me
that I didn't see everything
I didn't remember everything
I didn’t guess everything.
What is "GULAG"?
The book takes place in the camps. Their network spreads throughout the Union, which is why Solzhenitsyn calls it the Archipelago. Often the inhabitants of such camps were political prisoners. Alexander Isaevich himself and each of his two hundred “co-authors” survived the arrest.
The work of fans of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Photo: flickr.com/thierry ehrmann
The word GULAG itself means the Main Directorate of Camps. In each such “island”, convicts were considered a labor force. But even if a person survived in harsh conditions, in hunger, cold and hard labor, he still did not always emerge free.
The authorities are against it!
The ruling elite perceived Solzhenitsyn as an enemy - not only did his works undermine the authority of the Soviet government and criticize political foundations, but they also became known in the West.
The following years were very difficult for Solzhenitsyn. They stopped publishing it in his native country, the KGB confiscated the writer’s archive, conducted searches of his friends and took away Solzhenitsyn’s found manuscripts. It is amazing how, under such conditions, the author was able to finish and save the novel. The work was completed in 1967, but it could not yet see the light of day in its homeland.
And in 1973, the KGB detained the writer’s assistant and typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. During interrogation, she told where one of the manuscripts of the Gulag Archipelago was located. Returning home, the 70-year-old woman hanged herself.
Solzhenitsyn learned about what happened a couple of weeks later. And he did two decisive things: he sent the leadership of the USSR a letter in which he called for abandoning the communist regime, and gave instructions to publish the novel in the West.
The KGB tried to stop the writer. Through his ex-wife, the committee offered him a “barter”: he would not publish his “GULAG” abroad, but in return his “Cancer Corps” would be published in the Union. Solzhenitsyn did not negotiate and in December of the same year the first volume of The Archipelago was published in Paris.
After the "GULAG Archipelago"
The Politburo condemned the release of the novel harshly. In February, Alexander Isaevich was accused of treason, deprived of citizenship and expelled from the country. And in all Soviet libraries they ordered to confiscate and destroy any books by Solzhenitsyn.
But the writer “annoyed” the authorities even more. With the royalties received from the publication, he founded Russian public fund assistance to the persecuted and their families” - from there money was secretly transferred to political prisoners in the USSR.
The authorities began to change “anger to mercy” only with the beginning of perestroika. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's citizenship was returned. And they gave him the State Prize of the RSFSR - for the same novel for which he was expelled from the country almost 20 years ago. In the same year, the entire “GULAG Archipelago” was published in the homeland for the first time.
Actress Anna Vartanyan at the reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books in honor of the writer's 95th birthday. year 2013. Photo: www.russianlook.com
Critics' claims: inaccurate figure and mention of Americans
Basically, “The Gulag Archipelago” was criticized for two things. Firstly, Solzhenitsyn’s calculations on the number of repressed people may not have been entirely correct. Secondly, many were “disturbed” by this moment in the novel:
“... on a hot night in Omsk, when we, steamed, sweating meat, were kneaded and pushed into a funnel, we shouted to the guards from the depths: “Wait, you bastards! Truman will be on you! They will throw an atomic bomb on your head!” And the guards remained cowardly silent"
In this episode, some saw a call for the Americans to bomb the USSR. But Solzhenitsyn himself did not leave the Union until the last moment and returned back at the first opportunity.
It so happened that “The Gulag Archipelago” radically changed the entire life of its author. Because of him, Solzhenitsyn was kicked out as a traitor. And then they called me back as if nothing had happened. But the writer fulfilled his civic duty - both his duty to the living and to the dead.
"The Gulag Archipelago" in five quotes
About power:
This wolf tribe - where did it come from among our people? Is it not our root? not our blood? Ours. So, in order not to rinse the white robes of the righteous too much, let us each ask ourselves: if my life had turned out differently, would I not have become such an executioner? This is a scary question if you answer it honestly.
About “readiness” for arrest:
We are educated and prepared from youth for our specialty; to the duties of a citizen; to military service; to care for your body; to decent behavior; even to an understanding of the elegant (well, it’s not very). But neither education, nor upbringing, nor experience in any way leads us to the greatest test of life: to arrest for nothing and to investigation for nothing.
About the thirst for profit:
And the passion to make money is their universal passion. How can one not use such power and such lack of control for enrichment? Yes, you have to be a saint!.. If only it were given to us to know the hidden driving force individual arrests - we would be surprised to see that with the general pattern of imprisonment, the private choice of whom to imprison, personal lot, in three quarters of cases depended on human self-interest and vindictiveness, and half of those cases - on the selfish calculations of the local NKVD (and the prosecutor, of course, Let's not separate them).
About Chekhov:
If Chekhov's intellectuals, who were all wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty, forty years, would have been told that in forty years there would be a torture investigation in Rus', they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath of acids, torture him naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, driving a ramrod hot on a primus into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crushing the genitals with a boot, and in the easiest way - torturing for a week with insomnia, thirst and beating into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would have reached In the end, all the heroes would go to a madhouse.
On the destruction of literature:
Oh, how many plans and works perished in this building! - an entire lost culture. Oh, soot, soot from the Lubyanka pipes!! The most offensive thing is that our descendants will consider our generation stupider, more mediocre, more dumb than it was!..
T.V. Telitsyn
Attention to imagery in the structure of “The Gulag Archipelago” is determined primarily by the author’s definition of the genre of this book - “an experience in artistic research.” A.I. Solzhenitsyn explains it this way: “This is something other than rational research. For rational research, almost everything was destroyed: witnesses died, documents were destroyed. What I managed to do in “Archipelago,” which, fortunately, has influence throughout the world, was accomplished using a qualitatively different method than the rational and intellectual method.” “Where science lacks statistical data, tables and documents, the artistic method makes it possible to make generalizations based on individual cases. From this point of view, artistic research not only does not replace scientific research, but also surpasses it in its capabilities.”
The author consciously uses a method close to artistic in the knowledge of real events, relies on intuition, creative possibilities an artist who, in a particular case, is able to see the general, the typical. “Artistic research is the use of factual (not transformed) life material in such a way that from individual facts, fragments, united, however, by the artist’s capabilities, the general idea would emerge with complete evidence, in no way weaker than in scientific research.”
Artistic research, according to the author, is not internally contradictory. The interaction of two different methods of understanding reality, research and art, suggests, at first glance, the destruction of one of them. In fact, there is a complementarity of one method with another, and therefore, one system of structural elements embodying this method with another. A special type of narrative is created in which the artistic principle acts as a continuation of the research one, and the research one grows out of the artistic one. Therefore, it is especially important to analyze the figurative system of the “GULAG Archipelago” - an artistic and journalistic work, since, first of all, the artistic method is realized at the figurative level of its structure.
The main factor shaping the structure of this work is the journalistic idea, the proof of which organizes the text into a single whole. This journalistic idea is so deep and multifaceted that the author did not express it in finished form anywhere in the work. Throughout the book, it develops, becomes more precise, and acquires new shades. In order for the reader to correctly understand the main idea, the author builds a complex system of proof. This system also includes imagery. It becomes an integral part of the structure of the text of the work. This is especially clearly visible when examining it linearly.
Already in the introduction a figurative impulse is given to the entire further narrative, and in the 1st chapter the main types of figurativeness are outlined.
The fact reported in an article from the journal “Nature” about how on the Kolyma River, during excavations, fish or newt meat was found in a lens of ice and then eaten by those present, is almost neutral in vocabulary. And it would not have attracted much reader attention if the author’s ironic modality had not been expressed in the presentation. She plays special role and is concentrated in the beginning, commentary and conclusion.
“In the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine” - this fairy-tale beginning contrasts with the subsequent presentation of the content, neutral in modality. In the course of the narrative, an ironic author's remark appears - “the learned correspondent testified.” The modality of vocabulary in the next paragraph emphasizes the incorrectness of the reader’s conclusions after reading the note, which was that the magazine surprised readers with the fish meat it found.
In the phrase that concludes the message, the correct logical emphasis is placed thanks to the author’s irony: “But few of them could heed the true heroic meaning of the careless note.”
The modality of the final phrase raises two questions for the reader: 1. What is the true heroic meaning of the note?
2. What is the carelessness of the note? What did she let out?
The author's ironic message about the note and its content already prepares the reader for the opposite, hidden meaning. Readers did not solve it because they were amazed at the freshness of the fish meat, but, according to the author, attention should have been attracted by those who ate the fish meat. These are those present at the excavations.
To focus the reader's attention on the “those present,” the author in the third paragraph creates a picture of eating fish meat. It is exaggerated, the burden of action is accelerated, as if in slow motion, the modality of the vocabulary is clearly expressed:
“We immediately understood. We saw the whole scene vividly down to the smallest detail: how those present crushed the ice with fierce haste; how, trampling on the lofty interests of ichthyology and pushing each other away with their elbows, they beat off pieces of thousand-year-old meat, dragged it to the fire, thawed it and ate it.”
The answer is given to the reader in the fourth paragraph. These present were “the only powerful tribe of prisoners on earth, which carried out excavations on the Kolyma River, and only the prisoners could willingly eat the newt.
The superphrasal unity, consisting of four paragraphs, is semantically complete and linked by thematic vocabulary. In three paragraphs the word present is repeated, and in the fourth, logical emphasis is placed on it. In the first and fourth, the expressions are repeated: willingly ate them (1st), willingly eat the newt (4th), as if bordering a superphrasal unity. (Repetitions are a sign of special authorial attention.) The third word - zeki - acts as an answer to the question: what is the “heroic” meaning of a careless note? In what she told about the prisoners.
And Kolyma no longer became just a place where frozen newt meat was found, but a place where a “mighty tribe of prisoners” lived.
The fifth paragraph is dedicated to Kolyma, represented by the following verbal images: Kolyma - “the largest and most famous island”, Kolyma - “the pole of cruelty of this amazing Gulag country, torn apart by geography into an archipelago, but by psychology shackled into a continent - an almost invisible, almost intangible country, which and inhabited by a people of prisoners.”
The image of the Archipelago - as a country of prisoners - logically arises from the author's reasoning about the article in the newspaper. It appears not just as a metaphor, but as a logically explained metaphor. The fact that the archipelago becomes a truly figurative version of the idea of the location of the camps in the USSR is confirmed by the further disclosure of its essence as a whole indivisible being, with its own character, its own psychology, its own way of life.
In the following paragraphs - the answer to the question, what is the negligence of the note. It is that it was not customary to talk about the country of the Gulag Archipelago. Historical changes in the country they lifted the veil of secrecy over the Archipelago, but “insignificant things” came to light. The author understands that time carries away the signs of the Archipelago: “During this time, other islands trembled, spread out, the polar sea of oblivion splashes over them.”
The image of the Archipelago arose from logical reasoning, documentary material and associative comparison. This feature is characteristic of journalistic works, where imagery is closely related to the logic of reasoning and often arises as thought develops.
Already the introduction to the book makes it clear that this is not just a study of the amazing and cruel country of the Archipelago - it is a journalistic study. The last two paragraphs define the task facing the author: “I do not dare to write the history of the Archipelago: I did not get to read the documents...”, but “...maybe I can convey something from the bones and meat? - still, by the way, living meat, still, by the way, a living newt.”
Thus, the formulation of the research problem is completed with the image of a still living newt.
The semantic pieces of this text, complete in themselves, are united not only by the logic of thought, but also by the development of a figurative vision of the problem. In the first paragraph it is simply a fact - an underground lens of ice with frozen representatives of fossil fauna. In the ninth paragraph - the bones of the inhabitants of the Archipelago, frozen into a lens of ice - this is an allegory, and in the last paragraph - bones and meat, still living meat, however, still a living newt - this is already an image. Thus, the introduction demonstrates the cohesion of the author’s journalistic thought with his imaginative vision of the topic of discussion.
The figurative tone set in this part of the book’s text is present in the subsequent narrative. The appeal to artistic imagery seems to pulsate depending on the development of the main journalistic idea, on the turns of the author’s thoughts when reasoning, on the presence or absence of documentary material provided as evidence.
In order to most accurately analyze the varieties of images and their organization into a system, it is necessary to determine the parameter of artistry.
The image of the Archipelago, already established in the introduction, runs through the entire book, enriching itself in each chapter with new documentary material. Passionate journalistic interpretation and presentation of the material imbues it with special meaning. This is the only image that develops throughout the book as the factual material is examined. Becoming capacious, the image of the Archipelago changes the reader’s perception of the document, the fact, in the further narration. Thanks to him, specific episodes, cases, situations receive, as it were, a single figurative point of refraction.
The logic of reasoning explains the sequence of chapters in the book, and within each chapter - the systematic ordering of the material. A component of this system is imagery included in solving research problems.
Part one is called “The Prison Industry.” This title is a metaphor that covers the entire path from arrest to imprisonment. The analogy with industrial production certainly expresses the author’s bitter irony, emphasizing the parallel between the faceless production process and the process of relocating people to the country of prisoners. Chapter One - "Arrest" - is the first stage of the "prison industry". It begins with a question that determined the logic of the subsequent narrative - “How do they get to this mysterious Archipelago?” And almost immediately the author answers: “Those who go to govern the Archipelago get there through the schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go to protect the Archipelago are conscripted through military registration and enlistment offices.
And then the author, discussing the arrest, gives a metaphorical description of the feeling of arrest. In rhetorical questions, arrest is compared to a turning point in your whole life, to a lightning strike in you, to an unbearable spiritual shock, to a split universe. “An arrest is an instantaneous, dramatic transfer, a transfer, a changeover from one state to another.”
The author defines arrest precisely as a dynamic state, which in this and subsequent examples is lexically expressed by verbal nouns: management, breaking, ripping, dumping, tearing, throwing out, shaking out, scattering, tearing, cluttering, crunching.
The abundance of semantically related and figurative vocabulary conveys the shades of this state. The characterization of the state of arrest is formalized through details that fit organically into the overall picture: “This is the brave entry of the unwiped boots of awake operatives.” Not the incoming operatives, but the brave entrance of the boots. And further: “This is ... a frightened, nailed witness.”
And again, in this context, the witness is not a character, but a detail of the picture of the arrest.
The picture of the state of arrest is conveyed through visual and auditory signs - cluttering, tearing, knocking, hitting, ringing. This version of the image can be called a state-type image.
The image-type as a type of journalistic imagery is studied by M.I. in a number of works. Styuflyaev, but relates this type of imagery primarily to the creation of a generalized image of a person. However, this definition can also be used when analyzing the picture of the state. The image-type of state is close to lyrical image, but it shows more of a research beginning than an artistic one.
As the text moves, the figurative way of exploring the arrest deepens and appears in a new version: “Down the long crooked street of our life, we rushed happily or unhappily wandered past some fences, fences, fences - rotten wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast-iron fences . We didn't think - what's behind them? We didn’t try to look behind them either with our eyes or with our minds - and that’s where the Gulag country begins, very close by, two meters from us. And we also didn’t notice in these fences the myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. Everything, all these wickets were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly opened, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, they grab us by the leg, by the arm, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed forever.
All. You are under arrest!
This version of imagery could be called a model image. Abstraction from reality, specifics, appeal to fantasy, conventions allows us to say that we are dealing with a figurative simulation of an arrest situation. According to M.I. Styuflyaeva, “Model representation is inevitably associated with the impoverishment of the object, its deliberate primitivization; the model becomes approximate due to coarsening of the features of the phenomenon. But it is precisely these seemingly negative properties from the point of view of aesthetic laws that make it especially valuable for use in journalistic creativity.”
The model demonstrates the movement mechanism in a logically proven sequence. Lexically, this mechanism of interaction between the internal components of the model is expressed in verbs of movement, since they embody the dynamics of the situation: we rushed, wandered, didn’t think, didn’t try, didn’t notice, we were grabbed, dragged along; they are slamming behind us. All the verbs used are imperfect and create the impression of length, incompleteness, and duration of the process. The mechanism in the model is clearly expressed at the level of the actors: we are a generalized concept, this is both the author and the reader, and those who “trod happily” and those who “traveled unhappily.” We include everyone who has gone through this model of an arrest situation, and also those who could have gone through it just as unreasonably. Other characters - those who “grabbed”, “dragged”, “slammed” - are also presented in general terms: “four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping...” Synecdoche in this case acts as a method of typification, a way generalizations. The simulated situation presupposes a clear vision of the components of the model and the mechanism of their interaction: those who “rushed” and “wandered” are grabbed by some others - “four white male hands” - dragged in, slammed.
But this model is not so bare as to become a diagram. She appeared in a figurative form. The life of those who are arrested is presented as a long crooked street, behind each fence of which “the country of the Gulag begins.” And in these fences there are a countless number of well-camouflaged doors, gates, where everyone can be dragged, and the gate can be slammed forever.
The dual nature of this image-model (on the one hand - an image, on the other hand - a model) is closely related to its functions in the work. There are two of them: the cognitive one is manifested in the model, the aesthetic one - in the image. This connection is also reinforced by the role of the author, his position in the work. On the one hand, he is a publicist who addresses the reader, models the situation, presenting the essence more clearly, and on the other hand, he is a hero - one of those who wanders or rushes along the long crooked street of life and behind whom the gate slams.
As we see, the image-model is actively included in the narrative and becomes the equivalent of logical reasoning.
State is a key concept at this stage of the study; only after the figurative disclosure of the state of arrest does documentary data about it appear. Repetitions of semantically similar words closely connect documentary examples with previous figurative definitions. The arrest status is as follows:
“This is hacking, ripping, throwing and tearing from the walls, throwing onto the floor from cabinets and tables, shaking out, scattering” and then we read: “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested... The lawyers threw the child out of the coffin, they searched there too. And they shake the sick out of bed and undo the bandages.”
Next comes an explanation of what an arrest is, in a different way. The reasoning is logically structured, the phrases are precise and concise. This presentation represents a different type of research. First, the thesis is put forward: “And it is true that night arrest of the type described is our favorite because it has important advantages.” Further discussion about the arrest can hardly be attributed to scientific style presentation, this is a journalistic study. Despite the external precision of the phrases and the accuracy of the explanation, it is imbued with the author’s irony, which is especially noticeable in the scientific vocabulary: “Arrest science is an important section of the course of general prison studies, and a solid social theory is subsumed under it.” The journalistic nature of reasoning is also manifested in other forms: rhetorical exclamations, rhetorical appeals, appeals to the reader’s experience, hypothetical conclusions, etc.
The problem solved by the author of the book predetermines the need to turn to various options journalistic imagery. An example is the image-type of a hero. He appears already in the first chapter. This is the prisoner. The author writes: “The prisoner has been torn out of the warmth of his bed, he is still in a half-asleep helplessness, his mind is clouded.” This is some kind of average type. According to researchers, the “average person” is specific to journalism; he is a product of journalistic typification itself. If artistic image, generalizing reality, “...reveals in the individual, transitory, accidental - the essential, unchangeably abiding, eternal...”, then the image-type absorbs what is characteristic of many, sociological generalization dominates in it. But precisely because of this, it helps to more accurately reflect the social aspect of the problem being analyzed. On the other hand, an image-type becomes an image because it is completed, abstracted, and already exists independently as a complete whole by the author’s imagination. Its completeness is manifested in the desire to generalize all the shades of a hero of this type. So, the same arrested person can be malicious, he can appear in the form of some “unknown mortal”, frozen by the general arrests, or in the form of a “rabbit”. There is even a “freshly arrested” one.
But everything: the malicious arrested person, the freshly arrested person, and the “rabbit” are included in one image-type - the arrested person. In the text you can find an improperly direct speech belonging to a certain arrested person: “General innocence gives rise to general inaction. Maybe they won’t hire you yet? Maybe it will work out?” “Most remain stuck in a flickering hope. Since you are innocent, then why can they take you? This is mistake".
As we study the “tribe of prisoners,” the image-type appears repeatedly in the book by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. So, in the following chapters we meet with image-types: a new prisoner, an intelligent prisoner, a man of Chekhov and post-Chekhov Russia, a goner. Image-types of others appear, inhabitants of the Gulag country: a jailer, an OGPU officer. Type images largely determine the specificity of the book’s figurative system.
The journalistic part of the study of Chapter 1 is distinguished by the presence of an image-type of the hero (the arrested person) and verbal images. Separately, it should be said about the use of sayings in this part of the story and in further chapters of the book.
It is in the part of journalistic research that we first encounter the use of a proverb. She ends the episode where the author writes about the lack of resistance among those arrested, because political arrests “were different precisely in that they captured people who were innocent of anything, and therefore not prepared for any resistance.” This inactivity was convenient for the GPU - NKVD. The paragraph ends with the saying “A quiet sheep is too tough for a wolf.” In this case, the proverb becomes a figurative version of reasoning about the situation of inaction during political arrest. The model of relations between the characters in the proverb (wolf and sheep) seems to be superimposed on the model of relations “arrestee - GPU - NKVD”. A saying and a proverb, falling into the context of research, perform the same function as a model image. But if the model image is created by the author’s imagination, then the proverb or saying is borrowed by the researcher for his journalistic purposes at the level of speech imagery, as well as tropes.”
When analyzing the 1st chapter, it is necessary to highlight one more feature of the book - its memoir beginning. And although the author repeatedly emphasizes that his book is not a memoir, memories are an important component of the structure of the text. These parts of the book showed its artistry in a different way. There are three such episodes in Chapter 1. The function of the first episode could be conditionally called a memoir argument, since an episode from personal experience is cited as an argument for the thesis why the arrested did not resist or scream. The author not only reports his silence, but analyzes the reasons for it. It is as if he is separated from himself, arrested. He begins to exist separately, becomes one of the “majority”. The journalistic focus of the analysis is possible because the arrested person is removed from the author by time, life experience, worldview. “I was silent in the Polish city of Brodnitsa - but maybe they don’t understand Russian there? I didn’t shout a word on the streets of Bialystok - but maybe this doesn’t concern the Poles? I didn’t utter a sound at the Volkovysk station - but it was sparsely populated, so why am I silent??!..”
The memoir passage is based on reasoning, devoid of figurative means, it seems to continue the previous journalistic presentation.
The second memoir episode is descriptive. In the context of the entire chapter, it looks like an illustration, like an artistic argument - a picture of the author's arrest. This is a special case in the study of a large number of real events, but felt, deeply understood, reproduced in detail and figuratively described.
In this memoir passage, the image of a specific person - the brigade commander - attracts attention. All the characters involved in the arrest are named by name: the brigade commander, the officer's retinue, two counterintelligence officers, Smershevites. The given names are, as it were, conditional. The brigade commander in the general mass, he is one of them, but this is not a mask, not a role, but a living person. And his human essence is revealed precisely in climax arrest. The brigade commander’s “inconceivable fairy-tale words” become the threshold of turning just a brigade commander into Zakhar Georgievich Travkin.
Matches this movement author's description. It can be divided into two halves: one characterizes the brigade commander before the arrest, the other during the arrest. The arrest of the author for the brigade commander as a moment of self-purification, when hidden human qualities suddenly burst out. It’s as if a new person is being born before our eyes: “His face always expressed an order, a command, and anger for me. And now it was thoughtfully illuminated - is it shame for its forced participation in a dirty business? an impulse to rise above a lifetime of miserable submission?”
All the other participants in the arrest remain faceless - “a retinue of staff in the corner.” The brigade commander’s action sets him apart from other characters.
“And at least Zakhar Georgievich Travkin could have stopped there!
But no! Continuing to cleanse himself and straighten up in front of himself, he rose from the table (he never stood up to meet me in that previous life!), extended his hand across the plague line to me (free, he never extended it to me!) and, in a handshake, in the silent horror of his retinue, with the warmth of his always stern face, he said fearlessly, separately:
I wish you happiness - captain!
A new person is born before the reader, as if being purified. His mental “straightening” even coincides with the movement of his body - “rose from the table.” The dynamics of the image are visible in the vocabulary we have highlighted: the face has always expressed an order, a command, anger - now it is illuminated; never got up - rose from the table; never extended it to me - extended his hand to me; always a stern face - warmth.
The image is complete, included in the episode, so information about future fate The brigade commander is included in the footnote by the author.
There are two main options when creating an image of a specific person. The first is the one that we analyzed using the example of an image as a method close to artistic, where a person is represented in all his depth and versatility, even if he is created with strokes, briefly. (This option in A. Solzhenitsyn’s book is found mainly in memoir episodes.) The second option is a journalistic way of creating the image of a specific person, when the social role of the individual becomes decisive. A person appears primarily in those circumstances in which he is revealed as a representative of a particular party, population group, or environment. For example, the image of Naftaliy Frenkel, one of the “ideologists” of Solovki. For the author, the documentary basis is important in this version of the image. He gives biographical information about Naftaliy and refers the reader to a photograph. The entire story about him is constructed as proof of the inhumane nature of those who helped create the camps. If the brigade commander is a unique human personality against the backdrop of faceless mediocrity, then Nafgaly Frenkel is only one of many. “He was one of those successful figures whom History is already waiting and inviting with hunger.” A journalistic version of the image of a specific person can include the image of silicate engineer Olga Petrovna Matronina. The image is specific, but something else is important for the author’s research: “She is one of those unshakably well-intentioned people whom I have already met a little in the cells...”. The image of Aviation Major General Alexander Ivanovich Belyaev is a different type. He is a representative of the senior officers, who saw the world of prisoners and himself in it in a special way: “Elongated, he looked above the crowd, as if taking in a completely different parade, invisible to us.”
The third memoir episode of the first chapter continues the plot of the second - it is a description of what happened to the author after the arrest. And at the same time, it allows you to disconnect from the author’s personality and introduce into the narrative a story about other people arrested at the front. This episode concludes the chapter, creating a picture of the state of arrest and the first minutes of life of those arrested. It ends with the figurative expression: “These were the first sips of my prison breath.”
The chapter is not only logically, but also figuratively completed.
The complexity of a special research type of narrative determined its compositional complexity. The chapter begins with a figurative depiction of the arrest, then a journalistic discussion follows, and the chapter ends with memoir episodes that artistically recreate the picture of the arrest. Other chapters are structured differently depending on the material, purpose and objectives of the study. Accordingly, a figurative system is formed within each chapter and the book as a whole. The indicated imagery options are only the main ones. In our analysis they may seem disjointed if we do not return to the cross-cutting, main image of the Archipelago.
Outlined in the book's introduction, this image continues to develop. As the narrative progresses, it begins to “come to life,” and by the end of the first part, the “insatiable Archipelago” has already “scattered to enormous proportions.” Often the image of the Archipelago opens a separate chapter, as if giving a figurative impulse for subsequent documentary material (in chapter 2, 4 of the second part, in chapter 1, 3, 7 of the third part) or ends the documentary material of the chapter (in the 5th, 14th chapter of the third part).
This generalizing image becomes a symbol. He is connected with the factual material and already stands above it, living some kind of life of his own. The image of the Archipelago is a symbol of lawlessness, a symbol of injustice and inhumanity. It expresses the ideological essence of the work. A.F. Losev writes: “... the symbol of a thing is its law and, as a result of this law, its certain orderliness, its ideological and figurative design.”
“The Gulag Archipelago” is an artistic and journalistic type of work on a documentary basis. Three principles coexist in it: documentary, journalistic and artistic. In accordance with these principles, a system of figurative means was organized. It consists of the following variants of imagery: image-type of a state, image-type of a person, image of a specific person, image-symbol, image-model, verbal images. The interaction of these figurative options and their organization into a system is determined by the journalistic task of each chapter and the book as a whole.
Keywords: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”, criticism of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, criticism of the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, analysis of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, download criticism, download analysis, download for free, Russian literature of the 20th century.
“ Gulag Archipelago ”
(a monumental journalistic study of the repressive system)
1. Introduction
2. Artistic research experience
3. “One day” of a prisoner and the history of the country.
4. Conclusion
Introduction
Any work of literature, reflecting life through words, is addressed to the reader’s consciousness and, to one degree or another, influences it. Direct influence, as is known, takes place in works of journalism devoted to topical issues of the current life of society. The facts of real life, human characters and destinies are considered by the writer-publicist as a reason, as a specific basis for the views of the author, who sets himself the goal of convincing the reader by the fact itself, the logic of judgment and the expressiveness of the image, making him understand his own point of view. Here, one of the most important tools for understanding reality and recreating events in such a combination that allows one to penetrate into the very essence of what is happening is fiction, thanks to which the hidden content of a phenomenon appears much more convincing than a simple statement of fact. Thus, artistic truth is higher than the truth of fact, and most importantly, it has a greater impact on the reader. In my essay, I will try to touch on the main aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s research in the field of objective analysis of the repressive system of Stalin’s camps. It is no coincidence that this particular topic was fundamental in my work, since its relevance is visible to this day. Much of what our compatriots experienced half a century ago is, of course, scary. But it’s even worse to forget the past, to ignore the events of those years. History repeats itself, and who knows, everything could happen again in an even more severe form. A.I. Solzhenitsyn was the first to show artistic form psychology of time. He was the first to lift the veil of secrecy over something that many knew about but were afraid to tell. It was he who took a step towards truthful coverage of the problems of society and the individual. It will be then that V. Shalamov appears, who will declare that “you can spend your whole life in a camp like Ivan Denisovich. This is an orderly post-war camp, and not the hell of Kolyma at all.” But that's not what this is about. The main thing is that everyone who has gone through all the vicissitudes described by Solzhenitsyn (and not only him) deserves special attention and respect, regardless of where he spent them. “The Gulag Archipelago” is not only a monument to everyone “who didn’t have enough life to tell about it,” it is a kind of warning to the future generation. This work aims to trace the relationship between the categories “truth of fact” and “artistic truth” based on the work of documentary prose “The Gulag Archipelago” and the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A. Solzhenitsyn. These works, created over ten years, became an encyclopedia of camp life and the Soviet concentration world. But what is “The Gulag Archipelago” - a memoir, an autobiographical novel, a kind of historical chronicle? Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined the genre of this documentary narrative as an “experience of artistic research.” On the one hand, this definition very accurately formulates the task set by the writer: an artistic study of the camp as a phenomenon that determines the character of the state, a study of camp civilization and the person living in it. On the other hand, this subtitle can be considered as a conventional term, “convenient” in the absence of a clear genre content, but nevertheless accurately reflecting the historical, journalistic and philosophical orientation of the book. And, as you know, no dialogue, if it is not immediately recorded on paper, can be reproduced years later in its specific reality. No event in the external world can be conveyed in the entirety of the thoughts, experiences and motivations of its individual participants and witnesses. A true master always rearranges the material, his imagination melts the documentary mass into the unique world of what he directly saw, thereby confirming the main pattern of the eternal interaction of art and reality - their inseparability at the same time. However, Solzhenitsyn did not resort to this in the bulk of his works, because what is depicted in his books cannot be subject to distortion, bearing a peculiar imprint of time, power and history, which cannot be disavowed, which must be accepted as a fait accompli, remembered and discovered . The author, well understanding this, nevertheless showed life in all its “glory”, and therefore “not every reader will fly his gaze to at least the middle of the Archipelago,” but I will try to reveal the main aspects of this author’s work.
GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (1918-1956)
Artistic Research Experience
Illegitimate legacy of the Gulag,
a half-blooded child is a dorm.
It opened its mouth on the Ust-Ulima highway.
Whatever one may say, don’t drive by.
Thunder and timpani of endless construction,
virgin epic lands.
Beds are squeezed together with a plywood wall.
One of them, out of ten, is mine.
And on the next one, with Panka Volosataya,
teenager lives
from a breed of statues.
Strongly powerful and completely bald.
Dining room and toilet plank
in a frozen puddle, merged in the ice.
A haven for insolent rats.
Oh, is patience granted to everyone?
go to the light through the abomination of desolation!
And where it is, that blessed light,
when all around are people like me?..
In simple words about holiness, about miracle
Would I have believed it at nineteen years old?..
(Alexander Zorin)
“The Gulag Archipelago” is one of the most important works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A constant and sharp critic of our reality, our society and its political system, Solzhenitsyn, one might think, will remain such until the end of his life. At the same time, there is reason that he is looking at the changes taking place in our country, like all of us, with the hope for the peaceful recovery of the country.
But here’s the main thing: the more tragic, the more terrible the time experienced, the more “friends” beat their foreheads to the ground, praising the great leaders and fathers of nations. Villainy, blood and lies are always accompanied by odes that do not cease for a long time even after the lies have been exposed, the blood has been mourned and loud repentance has been made. So, maybe our society needs smart and honest opponents more than cheaply acquired and even sincere, but narrow-minded friends? And if so, Alexander Solzhenitsyn with his unshakable tenacity is simply necessary for us today - we must know and hear him, and we have neither the moral nor the intellectual right not to know and not to hear.
Even if we do not share everything that is expressed by the author in his “Archipelago,” but when we now reckon with our past, we are convinced that he resisted him almost all of his conscious and, in any case, creative life. This fact obliges us to think about many things. Moreover, today we are also different, no longer those to whom our writer once appealed. Being different, having learned, understood and experienced a lot, we will read him differently, quite possibly not even in the way he would like. But this is that long-awaited freedom - freedom of the printed word and freedom of reading, without which there is not and cannot be an active literary life, with undoubted benefit for society, which both literature and society have been creating on equal terms for centuries.
A person does not choose the time in which to live. It is given to him, and in relation to it he defines and reveals himself as a person. It demands ordinary abilities and ordinary diligence from those living in agreement with it, for which it rewards with a quiet life. Not everyone can challenge him.
Standing against the current, it is difficult to resist its pressure. But those who resisted, who threw down an insane challenge and were called rebels by their contemporaries, are revealed to us as true heroes of their time. Their heroism lies in fortitude and moral selflessness. The fact is that they did not live their lives in lies.
This is how the life and creative path of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an outstanding modern Russian writer, is seen today. To understand it means to understand a lot in the history of the outgoing 20th century. But, first of all, we need to name the three “pillars” that make up the pathos of creativity. This is patriotism, love of freedom, resilience.
In order to calmly and objectively evaluate “The Gulag Archipelago,” we need to get out of the state of shock into which the book plunges us. We - everyone - are shocked by the material that the writer unfolds, by his assessments, which diverge from those that were generally accepted. But we also experience shock from the need to make an honest confession to ourselves: so what, it happened?
For each of us this is a complex psychological barrier. For some reason, I don’t really believe the one who easily took this barrier, and he has no questions, everything is clear to him and he found all the answers.
In everyday life, you can get away from what is bothering you: leave your grumpy wife, move away from your annoying neighbor, change jobs, leave the city, and finally, even change your passport under certain circumstances. In a word - start a new life. But is it possible to get away from the past? Moreover, it is not only yours, but also that of your people, your country, the past that has become history.
What happened was what happened. Knowing what happened cannot be immoral. A people who forgets the past has no future. But one does not enter the future with a feeling of shame. It is easier to believe that what Solzhenitsyn described is true. And today we speak out for all those who were forced to remain silent - whether out of fear, shame, or guilt in front of their children. We express our ignorance of the whole truth of this unheard-of crime against the people.
The year 1956 opened the floodgates of the ban and outlined the very problem of the national disaster that had happened. It was brought with them by those who had just returned from prisons, camps and exile. They talked about it at the official level, in N. S. Khrushchev’s memorable report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. It was then, in 1958, that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, having had enough of this misfortune, conceived his “GULAG Archipelago.” The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 strengthened the writer’s confidence in his abilities. Letters came to him in which people told their destinies, provided facts and details, and encouraged him to work.
As this truth was revealed, or rather, as long as this truth was only slightly revealed, the question of the origins, causes, inspirers and performers arose more acutely. It was obvious that all repressions were part of the system, and every system has a certain organizing principle, a core that holds it even when the components change. Repressions could not arise immediately, only in connection with the promotion of J.V. Stalin and those close to him to the leading roles. Officially, repressions are still associated today with the cult of Stalin’s personality; they are officially still recognized as a product of Stalinism; they talk about the victims of Stalin’s repressions.
This continues to be the subject of a rather heated debate; the formula about Stalinist repressions of the 30s - early 50s is incomplete. It does not include the millions of peasants who have been repressed since the beginning of collectivization. It does not include Solovki from the 1920s. It does not include the deportation of hundreds of Russian cultural figures abroad.
Solzhenitsyn quotes Marshal Tukhachevsky on the tactics of suppressing the peasant uprising in the Tambov province in 1921: “It was decided to organize a widespread deportation of bandit families. Large concentration camps were organized, where these families were previously imprisoned.” In 1926, this was already calmly perceived as something normal in the practice of the young Soviet state.
What about “decossackization”?
At the very beginning of the first volume of “Archipelago” Solzhenitsyn names his 227 co-authors (without names, of course): “I do not express personal gratitude to them here: this is our common friendly monument to all those tortured and killed.” “DEDICATED to everyone who didn’t live long enough to tell about it. And they will forgive me that I didn’t see everything, didn’t remember everything, didn’t guess everything.” This is a word of sorrow for all those who were swallowed up by the “hell’s mouth” of the Gulag, whose names were erased from memory, disappeared from documents, and were mostly destroyed.
In the laconic preamble to his grandiose narrative, Solzhenitsyn notes: “There are no fictitious persons or fictitious events in this book. People and places are called by their proper names. If they are named by initials, it is for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has not preserved names - but everything was exactly like that.” The author calls his work “an experience in artistic research.” Amazing genre! With strict documentation, this is a completely artistic work, in which, along with famous and unknown, but equally real prisoners of the regime, there is another phantasmagoric character - the Archipelago itself. All these “islands”, interconnected by “sewage pipes” through which people “flow”, overcooked the monstrous machine of totalitarianism in liquid- blood, sweat, urine; an archipelago living its own life, experiencing either hunger, malicious joy and fun, love, or hatred; an archipelago spreading like a cancerous tumor of a country, metastasizing in all directions; petrifying, turning into a continent within a continent.
The “tenth circle” of Dante’s Inferno, recreated by Solzhenitsyn, is a phantasmagoria of life itself. But unlike the author of the novel “The Master and Margarita,” Solzhenitsyn, a realist among realists, has no need to resort to any artistic “mysticism” - to recreate, through the means of fantasy and grotesque, “black magic” that turns people against their will this way and that. so, to depict Woland with his retinue, to trace all the “royal things” together with the readers, to present the novel version of the “Gospel of Pilate”. The life of the Gulag itself, in all its realistic nakedness, in the smallest naturalistic details, is much more fantastic and scarier than any a book “devilish game”, any, the most sophisticated decadent fantasy. Solzhenitsyn seems to be making fun of the traditional dreams of intellectuals, their pink and white liberalism, who are unable to imagine to what extent human dignity can be trampled, an individual can be destroyed, reduced to a crowd of “prisoners,” the will can be broken, thoughts and feelings can be dissolved in elementary physiological needs. an organism on the verge of earthly existence.
“If Chekhov’s intellectuals, who were all wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty, forty years, would have been told that in Rus' there would be a torture investigation, they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath of acids, torture him naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, drive a ramrod hot on a primus into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genitals with a boot, and in the easiest way, torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would reach the end , all the heroes would go to a madhouse.” And, turning directly to those who pretended that nothing was happening, and if it does happen, then somewhere aside, in the distance, and if nearby, then according to the principle “maybe it will bypass me,” the author of “Archipelago” throws out on behalf of millions of the Gulag population: “While you were engaged in your own pleasure in the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, studying the influence of Heidegger on Sartre and collecting reproductions of Picasso, traveling in compartment cars to a resort or completing the construction of dachas near Moscow, - and the funnels were constantly snooping around the streets and the KGB officers were knocking and ringing the doorbell ...” “The organs never ate bread in vain”; “We have never had empty prisons, but either full or overcrowded”; “in the extortion of millions and in the settlement of the Gulag there was a cold-blooded consistency and unflagging tenacity.”
Summarizing in his study thousands of real destinies, hundreds of personal testimonies and memories, an innumerable number of facts, Solzhenitsyn comes to powerful generalizations - both social, psychological, and moral-philosophical. For example, the author of “Archipelago” recreates the psychology of the arithmetic average resident of a totalitarian state who entered - not of his own free will - into a zone of mortal risk. Beyond the threshold is the Great Terror, and uncontrollable flows into the Gulag have already begun: “arrest epidemics” have begun.
Solzhenitsyn forces every reader to imagine himself as a “native” of the Archipelago - suspected, arrested, interrogated, tortured. Prisoners of prisons and camps... Anyone is involuntarily imbued with the unnatural, perverted psychology of a person, disfigured by terror, even by the shadow of terror hanging over him, by fear; gets used to the role of a real and potential prisoner. Reading and disseminating Solzhenitsyn's research is a terrible secret; it attracts, attracts, but also burns, infects, forms the author’s like-minded people, recruits more and more opponents of the inhumane regime, its irreconcilable opponents, fighters against it, and therefore more and more of its victims, future prisoners of the Gulag (until he exists, lives, hungers for new “streams”, this terrible Archipelago).
And the Gulag Archipelago is not some other world: the boundaries between “that” and “this” world are ephemeral, blurred; it's one space! “We rushed happily along the long crooked street of our life or wandered unhappily past some fences - rotten, wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast-iron fences. We didn't think - what's behind them? We didn’t try to look behind them either with our eyes or with our minds - and that’s where the Gulag country begins, very close by, two meters from us. And we also didn’t notice in these fences the myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. All, all of these were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly swung open, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, grabbed us by the hand, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they dragged us like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate into our past life , slammed forever.
All. You are under arrest!
And there is nothing you can answer to this except lamb bleach:
Me-huh?? For what??..
This is what an arrest is: it is a blinding flash and blow, from which the present immediately shifts into the past, and the impossible becomes a full-fledged present.”
Solzhenitsyn shows what irreversible, pathological changes occur in the consciousness of an arrested person. What moral, political, aesthetic principles or beliefs are there! They are finished almost at the same moment when you move to “another” space - on the other side of the nearest fence with barbed wire. Particularly striking and catastrophic is the change in the consciousness of a person brought up in classical traditions - sublime, idealistic ideas about the future and what is proper, moral and beautiful, honest and just. From the world of dreams and noble illusions, you immediately find yourself in a world of cruelty, unprincipledness, dishonesty, ugliness, dirt, violence, criminality: in a world where you can survive only by voluntarily accepting its ferocious, wolfish laws; into a world where being a human is not supposed to be, even mortally dangerous, and not being a human means breaking down forever, no longer respecting yourself, reducing yourself to the level of the scum of society and treating yourself the same way.
To let the reader feel the inevitable changes with him, to experience more deeply the contrast between dreams and reality, A.I. Solzhenitsyn deliberately suggests recalling the ideals and moral principles of the pre-October “Silver Age” - this way it is better to understand the meaning of the psychological, social, cultural, ideological revolution that took place. “Nowadays, former prisoners, and even just people of the 60s, may not be surprised by the story about Solovki. But let the reader imagine himself as a man of Chekhov’s or after Chekhov’s Russia, a man of the Silver Age of our culture, as the 1910s were called, brought up there, well, perhaps shocked by the civil war, but still accustomed to the food, clothing, and mutual verbal treatment...” And now that same “man of the Silver Age” suddenly plunges into a world where people are dressed in gray camp rags or in sacks, have a bowl of gruel and four hundred, or maybe three hundred, or even a hundred grams of bread for food (!); and communication - swearing and thieves' jargon. -"Fantasy world!".
This is an external breakdown. And the inner one is cooler. Start with the accusation. “In 1920, as Ehrenburg recalls, the Cheka posed the question to him like this: “Prove that you are not an agent of Wrangel.” And in 1950, one of the prominent lieutenant colonels of the MGB, Foma Fomich Zheleznov, announced to the prisoners: “We will not bother to prove his guilt to him (the arrested person). Let He He will prove to us that he had no hostile intentions.”
And in between, countless memories of millions fit into this cannibalistic, simple straight line. What an acceleration and simplification of the consequences, unknown to previous humanity! A caught rabbit, shaking and pale, not having the right to write to anyone, call anyone on the phone, bring anything from the outside, deprived of sleep, food, paper, pencil and even buttons, seated on a bare stool in the corner of the office, must find it himself and lay it out in front of the bum - the investigator provides evidence that he had no hostile intentions! And if he did not look for them (and where could he have gotten them), then he thereby brought to the investigation approximate proof of your guilt!
But this is only the beginning of the breakdown of consciousness. Here is the next stage of self-degradation. Giving up oneself, one’s beliefs, one’s consciousness of one’s innocence (hard!). It wouldn't be so hard! - Solzhenitsyn summarizes, - but it is unbearable for the human heart: having fallen under your own ax, you have to justify it.
And here is the next step of degradation. “All the firmness of the imprisoned faithful was enough only to destroy the traditions of political prisoners. They shunned dissident cellmates, hid from them, whispered about terrible consequences so that non-party people or Socialist Revolutionaries would not hear - “don’t give them material against the party!”
And finally - the last one (for the “ideological”!): to help the party in its fight against enemies, at least at the cost of the lives of their comrades, including their own: the party is always right! (Article 58, paragraph 12 “On failure to report in any of the acts described under the same article, but in paragraphs 1-11” had no upper limit!! This paragraph was already such a comprehensive expansion that it did not require further. He knew and didn’t say - it’s as if he did it himself!). “And what way out did they find for themselves? - Solzhenitsyn sneers. - What effective solution did their revolutionary theory suggest to them? Their decision is worth all their explanations! Here it is: the more they imprison, the sooner those at the top will understand the mistake! And therefore - try to name as many names as possible! Give as much fantastic evidence against the innocent as possible! The whole party won't be arrested!
(But Stalin didn’t need everything, he only needed a head and long-serving employees.).”
The author cites a symbolic episode concerning the “communists recruited in 1937”: “In the Sverdlovsk transit bath, these women were driven through the guards. Nothing, we were comforted. Already on the next stages they sang in their carriage:
“I don’t know another country like this,
Where can a person breathe so freely!”
It is with such a complex worldview, with such a level of consciousness, that well-minded people enter their long camp path. Having understood nothing from the very beginning, neither in the arrest, nor in the investigation, nor in the general events, out of stubbornness, out of devotion (or out of hopelessness?) they will now consider themselves luminous all the way, they will declare only themselves knowledgeable of things". And the camp prisoners, meeting them, these true-believing communists, these “well-meaning orthodoxies,” these real “Soviet people,” “said to them with hatred: “Over there, in the wild, you are us, here we will be you!”
"Loyalty? - asks the author of “Archipelago”. - And in our opinion: at least a stake on your head. These adherents of development theory saw loyalty to their development in the renunciation of any personal development.” And this, Solzhenitsyn is convinced, is not only the misfortune of the communists, but also their direct fault. And the main fault is in self-justification, in justifying the native party and the native Soviet government, in removing from everyone, including Lenin and Stalin, responsibility for the Great Terror, for state terrorism as the basis of one’s policy, for the bloodthirsty theory of class struggle, making the destruction of “enemies” , violence is a normal, natural phenomenon of social life.
And Solzhenitsyn pronounces “his moral verdict on the well-intentioned: “How one could sympathize with them all! But no matter how well they see everything, what they suffered, they do not see what they are to blame for.
These people were not taken until 1937. And after 1938, very few of them were taken. That’s why they are called the “recruitment of ’37,” and it could be so, but so that this does not obscure the overall picture, that even during the peak months it was not them alone who were imprisoned, but all the same peasants, workers, and youth, engineers and technicians, agronomists and economists, and simply believers.
The Gulag system reached its apogee precisely in the post-war years, since those who had been imprisoned there since the mid-30s. Millions of new “enemies of the people” were added. One of the first blows fell on prisoners of war, most of whom (about 2 million) after liberation were sent to Siberian and Ukhta camps. “Alien elements” from the Baltic republics, Western Ukraine and Belarus would also be exiled there. According to various sources, during these years the “population” of the Gulag ranged from 4.5 to 12 million. Human.
“Nabor 37”, very talkative, with access to the press and radio, created a “legend of ’37”, a legend of two points:
1. if they were imprisoned during the Soviet era, then only this year and only about it should we speak and be indignant;
2. they imprisoned - only them.
“And what is the lofty truth of the well-intentioned? - Solzhenitsyn continues to think. - And the fact is that they do not want to give up a single previous assessment and do not want to gain a single new one. Let life rush through them, and roll over, and even roll over them like wheels - but they don’t let it into their heads! But they don’t recognize her, as if she’s not coming! This reluctance to comprehend the experience of life is their pride! Their worldview should not be affected by prison! The camp must not be reflected! What we stood on is what we will stand on! We are Marxists! We are materialists! How can we change because we accidentally ended up in prison? This is their inevitable moral: I was imprisoned in vain and, therefore, I am good, and everyone around me is an enemy and is sitting for a cause.”
However, the guilt of the “well-intentioned,” as Solzhenitsyn understands it, is not just self-justification or apology for party truth. If that were the only question, it wouldn’t be so bad! So to speak, it is a personal matter of the communists. In this regard, Solzhenitsyn says: “Let’s understand them, let’s not mock them. It was painful for them to fall. “They cut down the forest - the chips fly,” was their cheerful justification. And suddenly they themselves fell into these chips.” And further: “To say that it was painful for them is to say almost nothing. It was unbearable for them to experience such a blow, such a collapse - both from their own, from their own party, and apparently - for nothing. After all, they were not before the party guilty of nothing."
And in front of the whole society? Before the country? Before the millions of dead and tortured non-communists, before those whom the communists, including those who suffered from their own party, “well-meaning” Gulag prisoners, honestly and openly considered “enemies” who must be destroyed without any pity? Is it before these millions of “counter-revolutionaries”, former nobles, priests, “bourgeois intellectuals”, “saboteurs and saboteurs”, “kulaks” and “sub-kulaks”, believers, representatives of deported peoples, nationalists and “rootless cosmopolitans” - is it really before all of them? , having disappeared into the bottomless belly of the Gulag, they, striving to create a “new” society and destroy the “old”, are innocent?
And now, after the death of the “leader of the peoples,” “by an unexpected turn in our history, something, insignificantly small, about this Archipelago came to light. But the same hands that screwed our handcuffs now put out their palms in a conciliatory manner: “Don’t! .. There is no need to stir up the past!.. Whoever remembers the old will be out of sight!" However, the proverb ends: "And whoever forgets will get two!" Some of the “well-intentioned” people say about themselves: “if I ever get out of here, I will live as if nothing happened” (M. Danielyan); someone - about the party: "We trusted the party - and we were not mistaken." (N.A. Vilenchik); someone, working in a camp, argues: “in capitalist countries, workers fight against slave labor, but we, even though we are slaves, work for the socialist state, not for private individuals. These are officials who are only temporarily in power, one movement of the people - and they will fly away, but the state of the people will remain"; someone appeals to “prescription”, applying “to their home-grown executioners (“Why stir up the old?..”), who destroyed many more compatriots than all Civil War". And some of those “who don’t want to remember,” Solzhenitsyn notes, “have already had (and will still have) time to destroy all the documents completely.” And in total it turns out that there was no GULAG, and there were millions there were no repressed people, or even a well-known argument: “we don’t put people in prison in vain.” Like this maxim: “As long as the arrests concerned people unknown to me or little known, my friends and I had no doubt about the validity of these arrests. But when people close to me and I myself were arrested, and I met in prison with dozens of the most devoted communists, then...” Solzhenitsyn comments on this maxim murderously: “In a word, they remained calm while they imprisoned the society.” Their minds boiled indignantly.” , when their community began to be imprisoned."
The very idea of camps, this instrument of “reforging” a person, whether it was born in the heads of the theorists of “war communism” - Lenin and Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, not to mention the practical organizers of the Archipelago - Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Frenkel, etc., proves Solzhenitsyn was immoral, vicious, inhuman. Just look at the shameless theoreticisms cited by Solzhenitsyn, for example. Stalin's executioner Vyshinsky: “...the successes of socialism have their magical (that’s how it’s sculpted: magical!) influence on... the fight against crime.” Legal scholar Ida Averbakh (sister of Rappov’s general secretary and critic Leopold Averbakh) did not lag behind her teacher and ideological inspirer. In her programmatic book “From Crime to Labor,” published under the editorship of Vyshinsky, she wrote about the Soviet reform of labor politics - “the transformation of the worst human material (“raw materials” - remember? “Insects - remember? - A.S.) into full-fledged active conscious builders of socialism" " (6, 73). The main idea that wandered from one “scientific” work to another, from one political agitation to another: criminals are the most “socially close” to the working masses social elements: from the proletariat it’s a stone’s throw to the lumpen-proletariat, and there the “thieves” are very close...
The author of “The Gulag Archipelago” does not hold back his sarcasm: “Join my feeble pen in chanting this tribe! They were sung as pirates, as filibusters, as vagabonds, as escaped convicts. noble robbers- from Robin Hood to operettas, they assured that they have a sensitive heart, they rob the rich and share with the poor. O exalted companions of Karl Moore! Oh, rebellious romantic Chelkash! Oh, Benya Krik, Odessa tramps and their Odessa troubadours!
Wasn’t all world literature glorifying the thieves? We won’t reproach François Villon, but neither Hugo nor Balzac avoided this path, and Pushkin praised the thieves in the gypsies (What about Byron?) But they never sang them so widely, so unanimously, so consistently, as in Soviet literature. (But these were high Theoretical Foundations, not just Gorky and Makarenko.).”
And Solzhenitsyn confirms that “there is always a sanctifying high theory for everything. It was not the lightweight writers themselves who determined that the thieves are our allies in building communism." Here it is timely to recall Lenin’s famous slogan “Rob the loot!”, and the understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a legal and political “lawlessness” not bound by any laws and norms , and the “communist” attitude towards property (“everything is our common”), and the very “criminal origins” of the Bolshevik Party. The theorists of Soviet communism did not delve into the theoretical jungle of books in search of optimal models of a new society: the criminal world, crowded into a single “labor army” in a concentration camp, plus systematic violence and intimidation, plus a “ration scale plus agitation” stimulating the re-educational process - that’s all what is needed to build a classless society.
“When this harmonious theory descended onto the camp ground, this is what came out: the most inveterate, seasoned thieves were given unaccountable power on the islands of the Archipelago, on the camp sites and camp points - power over the population of their country, over the peasants, bourgeois and intelligentsia, the power that they never had in history, never in any state, which they could not even imagine in freedom - and now they gave them all other people as slaves. What kind of bandit would refuse such power?..
They made their shameful contribution to the justification - no, not exactly! - into a glorification, a real apology for improved slavery, the camp “reforging” of normal people into “thieves”, into nameless “the worst human material” - Soviet writers led by the author of “Untimely Thoughts” Gorky. “The falcon and the petrel are breaking into the nest of lawlessness, arbitrariness and silence! The first Russian writer! Now he will write for them! Now he will show them! Here, father, he will protect! They expected Gorky almost as a general amnesty.” The camp authorities "hid the ugliness and polished the show."
In Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago,” who opposes the security officers and secret police, the well-intentioned and the “weak,” the theorists and singers of “re-educating” people into prisoners? In Solzhenitsyn, all of them are opposed by the intelligentsia. “Over the years, I had to think about this word - the intelligentsia. We all really like to consider ourselves to be one of them - but not everyone is. In the Soviet Union, this word acquired a completely perverted meaning. Everyone who does not work (and is afraid) began to be classified as the intelligentsia work) with their hands. All the party, state, military and trade union bureaucrats ended up here..." - the list being enumerated is long and dreary. “Meanwhile, by none of these signs can a person be included in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we should not exchange it. An intellectual is not determined by his professional affiliation and occupation. A good upbringing and a good family also do not necessarily raise an intellectual. An intellectual “An intellectual is one whose thoughts are not imitative.”
Reflecting on the tragic fate of the Russian intelligentsia, mutilated, mute, perished in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn unexpectedly comes to a paradoxical discovery: "... The archipelago provided the only, exceptional opportunity for our literature, and perhaps for the world. Unprecedented serfdom in the heyday of the 20th century, in this one, unredeeming sense, it opened up a fruitful, albeit disastrous, path for writers." This path, traversed by the author himself, and with him by several other intellectuals - scientists, writers, thinkers (literally a few survivors!) - the path of asceticism and chosenness. Truly the way of the cross!
“Millions of Russian intellectuals were thrown here not for an excursion: to be maimed, to die, and without hope of return. For the first time in history, so many developed, mature, rich in culture people found themselves without an idea and forever in the skin of a slave, slave, lumberjack and miner. So for the first time in world history (on such a scale) the experiences of the upper and lower layers of society have merged! it blinded them. They were tormented by remorse that they themselves did not share this share, and therefore they considered themselves obliged to shout three times about injustice, while missing a fundamental consideration of the human nature of the lower, the upper, everyone.
Only among the intelligent prisoners of the Archipelago did these remorse finally disappear: they completely shared the evil lot of the people! Only having become a serf himself, could an educated Russian man now (and if he rose above his own Grief) paint the serf man from within.
But now he had no pencil, no paper, no time, no soft fingers. But now the guards shook his things, looked into the digestive entrance and exit, and the security officers looked into his eyes...
The experiences of the upper and lower layers merged, but the bearers of the merged experience died...
Thus, unprecedented philosophy and literature were buried at birth under the cast-iron crust of the Archipelago."
And only a few were given - whether by history, fate, or God's will - to convey to readers this terrible merged experience of the intelligentsia and the people. Solzhenitsyn saw his mission in this. And he did it. He did it, despite the protests of those in power. This expressed the main idea of his work: to convey to the reader the monstrous life of millions of innocent people, most of them the peasantry and part of the intelligentsia, and the other side of reality - the criminal world that rules in this system. A.I. Solzhenitsyn reflected at least the main milestones of the time of mass repressions, “artistically explored” the problem of the camp as a phenomenon that determines the character of the state, and raised certain questions to which there is no clear answer, there are only subjective sensations. Yes, “The Gulag Archipelago” is a cruel work in its realism, there are many frankly inhumane episodes in it, but this is necessary. A kind of shock therapy, according to Solzhenitsyn, will not harm, but rather will help society. We must know and accept history, no matter how inhumane it may seem, first of all, in order not to repeat everything all over again, to avoid pitfalls. Honor and praise to the author, who was the first to portray something that was scary to think about back then. “Archipelago” is a monument not only to all those who died in the camp hell, it is also a symbol of the recklessness of the authorities, the unconsciousness of ourselves. And if this monumental creation is the general picture, then the work, which will be discussed later, touches in more detail on the inner world of a person who finds himself on the other side of the wall on an absurd charge.
"One day" of a prisoner and the history of the country.
Today, the reader looks at many events and stages of our history with different eyes, and strives to more accurately and definitely evaluate them. The increased interest in problems of the recent past is not accidental: it is caused by deep requests for updating. Today it is time to say that the most terrible crimes XX century were committed by German fascism and Stalinism. And if the first brought down the sword on other nations, then the second - on his own. Stalin managed to turn the country's history into a series of monstrous crimes against it. The strictly guarded documents contain a lot of shame and grief, a lot of information about sold honor, cruelty, and the triumph of meanness over honesty and devotion.
This was the era of real genocide, when people were ordered: betray, bear false witness, applaud executions and sentences, sell your people... The most severe pressure affected all areas of life and activity, especially in art and science. After all, it was then that the most talented Russian scientists, thinkers, writers (mainly those who did not obey the “elite”) were destroyed and imprisoned in camps. This was largely because the authorities feared and hated them for their true, limited intention to live for others, for their sacrifice.
That is why many valuable documents were hidden behind the thick walls of archives and special storage facilities, unwanted publications were confiscated from libraries, churches, icons and other cultural values were destroyed. The past has died for the people and ceased to exist. Instead, a distorted history was created, which shaped the public consciousness accordingly. Romain Roland wrote in his diary about the ideological and spiritual atmosphere in Russia in those years: “This is a system of absolute uncontrolled arbitrariness, without the slightest guarantee left to elementary freedoms, the sacred rights of justice and humanity.”
Indeed, the totalitarian regime in Russia destroyed all those who resisted and disagreed along the way. The country turned into one huge Gulag. Ours was the first to speak about its terrible role in the destinies of the Russian people. domestic literature. Here it is necessary to name the names of Lydia Chukovskaya, Yuri Bondarev and Trifonov. But among the first to speak about our tragic past was A.I. Solzhenitsyn. His story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” became a book of life and artistic truth that heralded the future end of the Stalin era.
The path of “undesirable” topics to the reader is thorny at any time. And even today there continue to be examples of one lie being replaced by another. The point is also that totalitarian consciousness is incapable of any enlightenment. Breaking out of the tenacious clutches of dogmatic thinking is very difficult. That is why for many years dullness and unanimity were considered the norm.
And so, from the standpoint of this merged experience - the intelligentsia and the people, who have gone through the way of the cross of the inhuman experience of the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn brings his “camp” to the Soviet press.
story - “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” After lengthy negotiations with the authorities, A.T. Tvardovsky receives permission from N.S. in October. Khrushchev for the publication of "One Day...". The story was published in the 11th issue of Novy Mir in 1962; its author overnight became a world-famous writer. Not a single publication from the time of the “thaw”, or even Gorbachev’s “perestroika” that continued it for many years, had any resonance or force of influence on the course of national history.
The slightly opened crack into the “top secret” world of Stalin’s gas chamber did not just reveal one of the most terrible secrets of the 20th century. The truth about the Gulag (still very small, almost intimate, compared to the future monolith of the “Archipelago”) showed “all progressive humanity” the organic kinship of all disgusting varieties of totalitarianism, be it Hitler’s “death camps” (Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka), or Stalin’s The GULAG archipelago is the same death camps aimed at exterminating their own people and overshadowed by communist slogans, false propaganda of creating a “new man” in the course of a fierce class struggle and the merciless “reforging” of the “old” man.
As was the custom of all party leaders of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev tried to use Solzhenitsyn along with the story as a “wheel and cog” of party affairs. In his famous speech at a meeting with figures of literature and art on March 8, 1963, he presented the discovery of Solzhenitsyn as a writer as a merit of the party, the result of the wise party leadership of literature and art during the years of his own rule.
The Party supports truly truthful works of art, no matter what negative aspects they do not touch life if they help the people in their struggle for a new society, unite and strengthen their forces.”
The condition under which the party supported works relating to the “negative aspects of life” was not formulated by Khrushchev by chance: art and literature - “from party positions” - are needed in order to help in the “struggle for a new society”, and not against it , in order to unite and strengthen the forces of the communists, and not fragment them and disarm them in the face of an ideological enemy. Not all party leaders and writers who applauded Khrushchev in 1962-1963 were clear that Solzhenitsyn and Khrushchev pursued different goals and asserted mutually exclusive ideas. If Khrushchev wanted to save the communist regime by carrying out half-hearted reforms and moderate ideological liberalization, then Solzhenitsyn sought to crush it, to blow it up with the truth from the inside.
At that time, only Solzhenitsyn understood this. He believed in his truth, in his destiny, in his victory. And in this he had no like-minded people: neither Khrushchev, nor Tvardovsky, nor the Novomirsky critic V. Lakshin, who fought for Ivan Denisovich, nor Kopelev...
The first enthusiastic reviews of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” were filled with statements that “the appearance in literature of such a hero as Ivan Denisovich is evidence of the further democratization of literature after the 20th Party Congress”; that some of Shukhov’s features “were formed and strengthened during the years of Soviet power”; that “to anyone who reads the story, it is clear that in the camp, with rare exceptions, people remained human precisely because they were Soviet at heart, that they never identified the evil inflicted on them with the party, with our system.”
Perhaps the authors of critical articles did this in order to support Solzhenitsyn and protect his brainchild from attacks from hostile criticism of the Stalinists. With all their might, those who appreciated “One Day...” tried to prove that the story exposes only individual violations of socialist legality and restores the “Leninist norms” of party and state life (only in this case could the story be published in 1963). , and even be nominated by the magazine for the Lenin Prize).
However, Solzhenitsyn’s path from “One Day...” to “The Gulag Archipelago” irrefutably proves how far the author was by that time from socialist ideals, from the very idea of “Sovietism.” “One day...” is just a small cell of a huge organism called the GULAG. In turn, the GULAG is a mirror reflection of the system of government, the system of relations in society. So the life of the whole is shown through one of its cells, and not the worst one. The difference between “One Day...” and “Archipelago” is primarily in scale, in documentary accuracy. Both “One Day...” and “Archipelago” are not about “individual violations of socialist legality”, but about the illegality, or rather, the unnaturalness of the system itself, created not only by Stalin, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, but also by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other party leaders.
Is he a person?.. This question is asked by the reader who opens the first pages of the story and seems to be plunging into a nightmare, hopeless and endless dream. All the interests of prisoner Shch-854 seem to revolve around the simplest animal needs of the body: how to “cut down” an extra portion of gruel, how at minus twenty-seven, how not to let the cold get under your shirt during a security check, how to save the last crumbs of energy when weakened by chronic hunger and exhausting work body - in a word, how to survive in the camp hell.
And the dexterous and savvy Russian peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov succeeds well in this. Summing up the day I experienced, main character rejoices at the successes achieved: for the extra seconds of the morning nap he was not put in a punishment cell, the foreman closed the interest well - the brigade will receive extra grams of rations, Shukhov himself bought tobacco with two hidden rubles, and the illness that began in the morning was managed to be overcome on the masonry of the wall of the thermal power plant.
All the events of the story seem to convince the reader that everything human remains behind barbed wire. The stage going to work is a solid mass of gray padded jackets. Names have been lost. The only thing that confirms individuality is the camp number. Human life is devalued. An ordinary prisoner is subordinate to everyone - from the warden and guard who are in the service to the cook and barracks foreman, quiet prisoners like him. He could be deprived of lunch, put in a punishment cell, provided with tuberculosis for life, or even shot.
And yet, behind all the inhuman realities of camp life, human traits appear. They are manifested in the character of Ivan Denisovich, in the monumental figure of brigadier Andrei Prokofievich, in the desperate disobedience of captain Buinovsky, in the inseparability of the “brothers” - the Estonians, in the episodic image of an old intellectual serving his third term and, nevertheless, not wanting to give up decent human manners.
There is an opinion that it is time to stop remembering the long-gone horrors of Stalin’s repressions, that the memoirs of eyewitnesses have overflowed the book market of the political space. Solzhenitsyn’s story cannot be classified as an opportunistic “one-day story”. Laureate Nobel Prize true to the best traditions of Russian literature, laid down by Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. In Ivan Denisovich and some other characters, the author managed to embody the resilient, unbroken, life-loving Russian spirit. These are the peasants in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Everyone complains about their fate: both the priest and the landowner, but the peasant (even the last beggar) retains the ability to rejoice just because he is alive.
So is Ivan Denisovich. And ingenuity is inherent in him: he is the first to succeed everywhere, gets everything for the team, without forgetting, however, himself. And despondency is alien to him. Small everyday successes bring joy to Shukhov, when his skill and intelligence help to deceive cruel oppressors and defeat harsh circumstances.
The “Russian character” will never disappear. Maybe he is smart only with a practical mind. But his soul, which, it would seem, should have hardened and become callous, does not lend itself to “corrosion.” Prisoner Shch-854 is not depersonalized or despirited. He is capable of compassion and pity. He worries about the foreman, who is shielding the brigade from the camp authorities. He sympathizes with the reliable Baptist Alyoshka, who does not know how to earn a little money for himself from his reliability. Helps the weak, but not those who have not humiliated themselves, who have not learned to “jackal.” He sometimes takes pity on even the insignificant camp “moron” Fetyukov, overcoming the healthy contempt of a man who managed to maintain dignity in bestial conditions.
Sometimes Shukhov’s pity reaches unrealistic limits: he often notices that both the guards and the watchmen on the towers cannot be envied, because they are forced to stand in the cold without moving, while the prisoner can warm up on the masonry wall.
Shukhov’s love of work also makes him similar to the characters in Nekrasov’s poem. He is as talented and happy at work as the Olonchan stonemason, capable of “crushing a mountain.” Ivan Denisovich is not unique. This is a real, moreover, a typical character. The ability to notice the suffering of those serving time next to you makes the prisoners closer and turns them into a kind of family. An inextricable mutual responsibility binds them. The betrayal of one can cost the lives of many.
A paradoxical situation arises. Deprived of freedom, driven behind barbed wire, prisoners counted like a flock of sheep form a state within a state. Their world has its own unshakable laws. They are harsh but fair. The “man behind bars” is not alone. Honesty and courage are always rewarded. The “messenger” Caesar treats Buinovsky, who is assigned to the punishment cell, Shukhov and Kilgas are put in charge of themselves and the inexperienced Senka, and they come to the defense of the foreman Pavlo. Yes, undoubtedly, the prisoners were able to preserve the human laws of existence. Their relationship is undeniably devoid of sentiment. They are honest and humane in their own way.
Their honest community is opposed by the soulless world of the camp authorities. It ensured a comfortable existence for itself by turning prisoners into its personal slaves. The guards treat them with contempt, being in full confidence that they themselves live like human beings. But it is this world that has an animal appearance. Such is the warden Volkovsky, who is capable of beating a person with a whip for the slightest offense. These are the guards who are ready to shoot a “spy” who is late for roll call - a Moldovan who has fallen asleep from fatigue at his work place. Such are the overfed cook and his henchmen, using a crutch to drive prisoners away from the dining room. It is they, the executioners, who have violated human laws and thereby excluded themselves from humanity society.
Despite the terrible details of camp life that make up the background, Solzhenitsyn's story is optimistic in spirit. She proves that even in the last degree of humiliation it is possible to preserve a person within oneself.
Ivan Denisovich does not seem to feel like a Soviet person, does not identify himself with the Soviet regime. Let us remember the scene where captain Buynovsky explains to Ivan Denisovich why the sun is highest at one o'clock in the afternoon, and not at 12 o'clock (by decree, the time was moved forward an hour). And Shukhov’s genuine amazement: “ Is it really the sun? to them obey decrees?“It’s wonderful to hear this “them” in the mouth of Ivan Denisovich: I am me, and I live by my own laws, and they are them, they have their own rules, and there is a clear distance between us.
Shukhov, prisoner Shch-854, is not just a hero of another literature, he is a hero of another life. No, he lived like everyone else, or rather, like the majority lived - difficult;. When the war began, he went to fight and fought honestly until he was captured. But it is characterized by that solid moral foundation that the Bolsheviks so diligently sought to uproot, proclaiming the priority of state, class, party values - universal human values. Ivan Denisovich did not succumb to the process of dehumanization even in the camp; he remained a man.
What helped him to resist?
It seems that everything in Shukhov is focused on one thing - just to survive: “In counterintelligence they beat Shukhov a lot. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; each step the morning began like this: “Shukhov never missed getting up, he always got up on it - before the divorce he had an hour and a half of his own time, not official, and whoever knows camp life can always earn extra money: sew someone a cover from an old lining. mittens; give the rich brigade worker dry felt boots directly on his bed, so that he doesn’t have to trample barefoot around the pile, and doesn’t have to choose; or run through the storerooms, where someone needs to be served, sweep or offer something; or go to the dining room to collect bowls from the tables<...>". During the day, Shukhov tries to be where everyone is: "... it is necessary that no guard sees you alone, but only in a crowd." Under his padded jacket he has a special pocket sewn into it, where he puts the saved ration of bread to eat not in a hurry, “hasty food is not food.” While working at the thermal power plant, Shukhov finds a hacksaw, for which “they could have given ten days in a punishment cell if they recognized it as a knife. But the shoemaker’s knife provided income, there was bread! It was a shame to quit. And Shukhov put it in a cotton mitten." After work, bypassing the canteen (!), Ivan Denisovich runs to the parcel store to take a turn for Caesar, so that "Caesar... owes Shukhov." And so - every day. It seems that Shukhov lives one day at a time , no, he lives for the future, thinks about the next day, figures out how to live it, although I’m not sure they’ll release it on time, that they won’t “solder” another ten. Shukhov is not sure that he will be released and see his own people, but he lives as if he is sure.
Ivan Denisovich does not think about the so-called damn questions: Why are so many people, good and different, sitting in the camp? What is the reason for the camps? And he doesn’t know why he’s imprisoned, he doesn’t seem to be trying to comprehend what happened to him: “It is considered in the case that Shukhov was imprisoned for treason against his homeland. And he gave testimony that yes, he surrendered, wanting to change homeland, but returned from captivity because he was carrying out a task from German intelligence. What a task - neither Shukhov himself could come up with it, nor the investigator. So they left it just - a task.” The only time throughout the story Shukhov addresses this issue. His answer sounds too generalized to be the result of a deep analysis: “Why did I go to prison? Because we didn’t prepare for war in 1941, for this? And what do I have to do with it?”
Why is that? Obviously, because Ivan Denisovich belongs to those who are called a natural, natural person. A natural person, who has always lived in deprivation and lack, values first of all immediate life, existence as a process, the satisfaction of the first simple needs - food, drink, warmth, sleep. “He began to eat. At first he drank the liquid directly. It was so hot that it spread throughout his body - his insides were all fluttering towards the gruel. Good, good! Here it is, a short moment for which the prisoner lives.” “You can finish a two-hundred-gram cigarette, you can smoke a second cigarette, you can sleep. It’s just because of a good day that Shukhov is cheered up, he doesn’t even seem to want to sleep.” “While the authorities figure it out, hide somewhere warm, sit, sit, you’ll still break your back. It’s good if you’re near the stove, wrap the footcloths and warm them up a little. Then your feet will be warm all day long. And even without a stove, it’s still good.” “Now things seem to have settled down with the shoes: in October Shukhov received sturdy, hard-toed boots, with room for two warm foot wraps. For a week as a birthday boy, he kept tapping his new heels. And in December the felt boots arrived - life, no need to die.” “Shukhov fell asleep completely satisfied. Today he had a lot of successes: he wasn’t put in a punishment cell, the brigade wasn’t sent to Sotsgorodok, he cut porridge at lunchtime, didn’t get caught with a hacksaw on a search, worked in the evening at Caesar’s and bought tobacco. And he didn’t get sick. , got over it. The day passed, unclouded, almost happy.”
And Ivan Denisovich settled down in Ust-Izhma, although the work was harder and the conditions were worse; he was a goner there and survived.
The natural person is far from such activities as reflection and analysis; An ever tense and restless thought does not pulsate within him, and the terrible question does not arise: why? Why? Ivan Denisovich’s thoughts “keep coming back, stirring everything up again: will they find the solder in the mattress? Will they be released from the medical unit in the evening? Will they put the captain in jail or not? And how did Caesar get warm underwear for himself?”
The natural man lives in harmony with himself, the spirit of doubt is alien to him; he does not reflect, does not look at himself from the outside. This simple integrity of consciousness largely explains Shukhov’s vitality and his high adaptability to inhuman conditions.
Shukhov's naturalness, his emphasized alienation from artificial, intellectual life are associated, according to Solzhenitsyn, with the high morality of the hero.
They trust Shukhov because they know that he is honest, decent, and lives according to his conscience. Caesar, with a calm soul, hides a food parcel from Shukhov. Estonians lend tobacco, and they are sure they will pay it back.
Shukhov's high degree of adaptability has nothing to do with opportunism, humiliation, or loss of human dignity. Shukhov “strongly remembered the words of his first foreman Kuzemin: “In the camp, this is who is dying: who licks the bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather.”
These saving paths are sought for by people who are morally weak, trying to survive at the expense of others, “on the blood of others.” Physical survival is thus accompanied by moral death. Not so Shukhov. He is always happy to stock up on extra rations, get some tobacco, but not like Fetyukov - a jackal who “looks into his mouth and his eyes are burning,” and “slobbers”: “Let’s pull it once!” Shukhov would get a smoke so as not to drop himself: Shukhov saw that “his teammate Caesar was smoking, and he was smoking not a pipe, but a cigarette - which means he could get shot.” But Shukhov did not ask directly, but stopped very close to Caesar and half-turned to look past him." While standing in line for a package for Caesar, he doesn’t ask: “Well, have you received it?” - because it would be a hint that he took the turn and now has the right to a share. He already knows what he has. But he was not a jackal even after eight years of general work - and the further he went, the more firmly he became established. One of the first benevolent critics of the story, V. Lakshin, very accurately noted that “the word “affirmed” does not require additions here - “affirmed” not in one thing, but in its general attitude towards life.”
This attitude was formed in that other life; in the camp it was only tested, passed the test.
Here Shukhov is reading a letter from home. The wife writes about the dyers: “But there is one new, fun craft - this is dyeing carpets. Someone brought stencils from the war, and from then on it went, and more and more such master dyers are being recruited: they are not members of anywhere, they don’t work anywhere, They help the collective farm for one month, just for haymaking and harvesting, but for eleven months the collective farm gives him a certificate that such and such a collective farmer has been released on his business and there is no arrears for him. And his wife is very hopeful that Ivan will return too. never set foot on a collective farm, and they will also become painters. And then they will rise out of the poverty in which she lives."
"... Shukhov sees that people's direct road is blocked, but people do not get lost: they go around and thus are alive. Shukhov would have made his way around. Earning money, apparently, is easy, fire. And it seems a shame to lag behind your villagers... But , to my liking, Ivan Denisovich would not like to take on those carpets. They need swagger, impudence, Shukhov has been trampling the ground on the police for forty years, half of his teeth are missing and there is a bald spot on his head, he never gave or took anything to anyone. from whom, and I didn’t learn it in the camp.
Easy money - it doesn’t weigh anything, and there’s no feeling that you’ve earned it.”
No, Shukhov’s attitude to life is not easy, or rather, not frivolous. His principle: if you earn it, get it, but “don’t stretch your belly on other people’s goods.” And Shukhov works at the “facility” in the same way
in good faith, as in freedom. And the point is not only that he works in a brigade, but “in a camp, a brigade is such a device so that it is not the authorities who push the prisoners, but the prisoners push each other. It’s like this: either everyone gets extra money, or everyone dies.”
For Shukhov, there is something more in this work - the joy of a master who is fluent in his craft, who feels inspired and has a surge of energy.
With what touching care Shukhov hides his trowel. “A trowel is a big deal for a mason, if it fits the hand and is light. However, at each site this is the order: they received all the tools in the morning, handed them over in the evening. And which tool you grab tomorrow is a matter of luck. But one day Shukhov shortchanged the toolmaker and the best trowel was worn out. And now he hides it in the evening, and every morning, if there is a clutch, he takes it.” And there is a sense of practical peasant frugality in this.
Shukhov forgets about everything while working - he’s so engrossed in his work: “And how all thoughts were swept out of his head. Shukhov didn’t remember or care about anything now, but only thought about how he could assemble and remove the pipe bends so that it wouldn’t smoke.”
“And Shukhov no longer saw the distant view, where the sun flashed across the snow, or how hard workers were scattering around the zone from their heating pads. Shukhov saw only his wall - from the junction on the left, where the masonry rose and to the right to the corner. And his thought and his eyes learned from under the ice the wall itself. The wall in this place was previously laid by a mason unknown to him, either without understanding or in a sloppy manner, but now Shukhov has gotten used to the wall as if it were his own.” Shukhov even feels sorry that it’s time to finish work: “What, it’s disgusting, the day at work is so short? As soon as you get to work, it’s already seven!” Although this is a joke, there is some truth in it for Ivan Denisovich.
Everyone will run to the watch. “It seems that the foreman ordered - to spare the solution, behind the wall - and they ran. But Shukhov is built like a fool, and they can’t wean him off: he spares every thing, so that it doesn’t perish in vain.” This is all Ivan Denisovich.
That is why the conscientious Shukhov is perplexed, reading his wife’s letter, how it is possible not to work in his village: “What about haymaking?” Shukhov’s peasant soul is worried, even though he is far from home, from his own people and “you won’t understand their life.”
Work is life for Shukhov. The Soviet regime did not corrupt him, could not force him to slack off and shirk. That way of life, those norms and unwritten laws by which the peasant had lived for centuries turned out to be stronger. They are eternal, rooted in nature itself, which takes revenge for a thoughtless, careless attitude towards it. And everything else is superficial, temporary, transitory. That’s why Shukhov is from another life, a past, patriarchal one.
Common sense. It is he who guides Shukhov in any life situation. Common sense turns out to be stronger than fear even before the afterlife. “I’m not against God, you understand,” Shukhov explains to Alyosha, a Baptist, “I willingly believe in God. But I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Why do you consider us fools, promising us heaven and hell?” And then, answering Alyoshka’s question why he doesn’t pray to God, Shukhov says: “Because, Alyoshka, those prayers are like statements, either they don’t get through, or the complaint is refused.”
A sober view of life stubbornly notices all the inconsistencies in the relationship between parishioners and the church, or more precisely, the clergy, who have a mediating mission.
So Ivan Denisovich lives by the old peasant rule: trust in God, but don’t make a mistake yourself! On a par with Shukhov are the likes of Senka Klevshin, Latvian Kildigs, cavalier Buinovsky, assistant foreman Pavlo and, of course, foreman Tyurin himself. These are those who, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “take the blow.” They are highly characterized by the ability to live without losing oneself and “never wasting words in vain,” which distinguishes Ivan Denisovich. It is no coincidence, apparently, that most of these people are rural, “practical” people.
Cavtorang Buinovsky is also one of those “who takes the blow,” but, as it seems to Shukhov, often at a senseless risk. For example, in the morning at a security guard, the guards “order the quilted jackets to be taken off (where everyone hid the barracks’ warmth), the shirts to be unbuttoned - and they start to feel around to see if anything has been put on in violation of the regulations.” “Buinovsky - in the throat, he’s used to his destroyers, but he hasn’t been in the camp for three months:
You have no right to undress people in the cold! You don’t know the ninth article of the criminal code - They do. They know. It’s you, brother, you don’t know yet.” And what was the result? Buinovsky received “ten days of strict imprisonment.” The reaction to the incident of the beaten and beaten Senka Klevshin is unequivocal: “There was no need to get screwed! Everything would have worked out." And Shukhov supported him: "That's right, groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break.”
The protest of the kavtorang is meaningless and pointless. He only hopes for one thing: “The time will come, and the captain will learn to live, but he still doesn’t know how.” After all, what is “ten strict days”: “Ten days in the local punishment cell, if you serve them strictly and to the end, it means losing your health for the rest of your life. Tuberculosis, and you won’t get out of the hospital.”
In the evening, the warden came to the barracks, looking for Buinovsky, asking the foreman, but he was in the dark, “the foreman is trying to save Buinovsky at least for the night, hold out until the inspection.” So the warden shouted: “Buinovsky - is there?” “Huh? Me!” responded the captain. So the fast louse is always the first to hit the comb,” concludes Shukhov disapprovingly. No, the cavorang does not know how to live. Against his background, the practicality and non-vainness of Ivan Denisovich is even more clearly felt. Both Shukhov, with his common sense, and Buinovsky, with his impracticality, are opposed by those who do not “take the blow”, “who evade it.” First of all, this is the film director Tsezar Markovich. all the hats are worn, old, and he has a new fur hat, sent from the outside ("Caesar greased someone, and they allowed him to wear a clean new city hat. And from others they even tore off the frayed front-line ones and gave them all the camp ones, pig fur"); they work in the cold, and Caesar sits warm in the office. Shukhov does not condemn Caesar: everyone wants to survive. But the fact that Caesar takes Ivan Denisovich’s services for granted does not decorate him. Shukhov brought him lunch to the office “he cleared his throat, embarrassed. interrupting the educated conversation. Well, there was no need for him to stand here either. Caesar turned around, extended his hand for the porridge, and did not look at Shukhov, as if the porridge itself had arrived by air..." "Educated conversation" is one of the hallmarks of Caesar's life. He is an educated person, an intellectual. The cinema that Caesar is engaged in is a game, that is, a fictional, unreal life (especially from the point of view of a prisoner). Caesar himself is busy playing with his mind, trying to distance himself from camp life. Even in the way he smokes “to arouse a strong thought in himself, there is an elegant aestheticism, far from crude reality.
Noteworthy is Caesar's conversation with convict X-123, a wiry old man, about Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible": "objectivity requires admitting that Eisenstein is a genius. "Ivan the Terrible" - isn't it brilliant? Dance of the guardsmen with a mask! Scene in the cathedral!" - says Caesar. "Antics! ... There is so much art that it is no longer art. Pepper and poppy seeds instead of daily bread!” answers the old man.
But Caesar is primarily interested in “not what, but how,” he is most interested in how it is done, he is fascinated by a new technique, unexpected editing, original joints of shots. The purpose of art is a secondary matter; "<...>the most vile political idea - the justification of individual tyranny" (this is how the film X-123 characterizes) turns out to be not at all so important for Caesar. He also ignores his opponent’s remark about this “idea”: “Mockery of the memory of three generations of the Russian intelligentsia.” Trying To justify Eisenstein, and most likely himself, Caesar says that only such an interpretation would have been missed. “Oh, would they have been missed? - the old man explodes. - Don’t say you’re a genius! Say that we’re a sycophant, the dog has fulfilled the order. Geniuses do not adjust their interpretation to the taste of tyrants!”
So it turns out that a “game of the mind”, a work in which there is too much art, is immoral. On the one hand, this art serves the “taste of tyrants,” thus justifying the fact that the wiry old man, and Shukhov, and Caesar himself are sitting in the camp; on the other hand, the notorious “how” (sent by the old man “to hell”) will not awaken the author’s thoughts, “good feelings”, and therefore is not only unnecessary, but also harmful.
For Shukhov, a silent witness to the dialogue, all this is an “educated conversation.” But Shukhov understands well about “good feelings,” whether we are talking about the fact that the foreman is “a good soul,” or about how he himself “earned money” for Caesar. “Good feelings” are real properties of living people, and Caesar’s professionalism is, as Solzhenitsyn himself would later write, “educationism.”
Cinema (Stalinist, Soviet cinema) and life! Caesar cannot but command respect for his love for his work and passion for his profession; but one cannot help but think that the desire to talk about Eisenstein is largely due to the fact that Caesar sat warm all day, smoked a pipe, and did not even go to the dining room (“he did not humiliate himself either here or in the camp,” the author notes. He lives far from real camp life.
Caesar slowly approached his team, which had gathered and was waiting for them to go to the zone after work:
How are you, captain?
Gret cannot understand the frozen. An empty question - how are you?
But how? - the captain shrugs his shoulders. “He’s worked hard, he’s straightened his back.” Caesar in the brigade “sticks to one cavalry rank, he has no one else to share his soul with.” Yes, Buinovsky looks at the scenes from “Battleship...” with completely different eyes: “... worms for meat just like the rain ones are crawling. Were there really such things? I think if they brought this meat to our camp now instead of our shitty fish, but if it wasn’t mine, without scraping it, they would have sank into the cauldron, so we would..."
The reality remains hidden from Caesar. He spends his intellectual potential very selectively. He, like Shukhov, does not seem to be interested in “inconvenient” questions. But if Shukhov, with his whole being, is not intended not only to solve, but also to pose such problems, then Caesar, apparently, consciously moves away from them. What is justified for Shukhov turns out to be, if not direct guilt, then disaster for the film director. Shukhova sometimes even feels sorry for Caesar: “He probably thinks a lot about himself, Caesar, but he doesn’t understand life at all.”
According to Solzhenitsyn, he understands life more than other comrades, including not only Caesar (an involuntary and sometimes voluntary accomplice of Stalin’s “Caesarism”), but also the captain
and the foreman, and Alyoshka - a Baptist - all the characters in the story, Ivan Denisovich himself, with his simple peasant mind, peasant intelligence, clear practical view of the world, Solzhenitsyn, of course, is aware that there is no need to expect or demand understanding from Shukhov historical events of intellectual generalizations at the level of his own study of the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich has a different philosophy of life, but this is also a philosophy that has absorbed and generalized his long camp experience, the difficult historical experience of Soviet history. In the person of the quiet and patient Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recreated an almost symbolic in its generality image of the Russian people, capable of enduring unprecedented suffering, deprivation, bullying of the communist regime, the yoke of Soviet power and the criminal lawlessness of the Archipelago and, in spite of everything, surviving in this “tenth circle” " hell. And at the same time maintain kindness towards people, humanity, condescension towards human weaknesses and intransigence towards moral vices.
One day of the hero Solzhenitsyn, running before the gaze of the shocked reader, grows to the limits of an entire human life, to the scale of the people's fate, to the symbol of an entire era in the history of Russia. “A day passed, unclouded by anything, almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his period from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added...”
Solzhenitsyn even then, if he didn’t know, then had a presentiment: the time frame imposed on the country by the Bolshevik Party was coming to an end. And for the sake of approaching this hour, it was worth fighting, regardless of any personal sacrifices.
It all started with the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”... With the presentation of a simple peasant’s view of the Gulag. Perhaps if Solzhenitsyn had started by publishing his intellectual view of the camp experience (for example, in the spirit of his early novel “In the First Circle”), nothing would have worked out for him. The truth about the Gulag would not have seen the light of day in its homeland for a long time; foreign publications would probably have preceded domestic ones (if they had turned out to be possible at all), and “The Gulag Archipelago,” with a stream of confidential letters and stories that formed the basis of Solzhenitsyn’s research, began precisely after the publication of “One Day” in Novy Mir. .. The whole history of our country would probably have turned out differently if “Ivan Denisovich” had not appeared in the November 1962 issue of Tvardovsky’s magazine. On this occasion, Solzhenitsyn later wrote in his “essays on literary life” “A calf butted an oak tree”: “I won’t say that this is an exact plan, but I had a correct guess-premonition: they cannot remain indifferent to this peasant Ivan Denisovich the top man Alexander Tvardovsky and the top man Nikita Khrushchev And so it came true: not even poetry and not even politics decided the fate of my story, but this is its down-to-earth peasant essence, which has been ridiculed, trampled and reviled so much among us since the Great Turning Point.”
Conclusion
Very little time has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which marked the final collapse of the totalitarian state created by Lenin and Stalin, and the times outside the law have receded into the deep and, it seems, irrevocable past. The word “anti-Soviet” has lost its ominous and culturally fatal meaning. However, the word “Soviet” has not lost its meaning to this day. All this is natural and understandable: with all its turns and fractures, history does not change immediately, eras “layer on each other, and such transitional periods of history are usually filled with intense struggle, intense disputes, the collision of the old, trying to hold on, and the new, conquering semantic territories What cultural values are true and have stood the test of time, and which are imaginary, false, forcibly imposed on society, the people, and the intelligentsia?
At that time it seemed that the victory of the tyrannical centralized state over literature and the artistic intelligentsia was complete. The repressive and punitive system worked flawlessly in every single case of spiritual opposition and dissent, depriving the offender of freedom, livelihood, and peace of mind. However, internal freedom of spirit and responsibility to the word did not allow keeping silent about reliable facts of history, carefully hidden from the majority of the population.
The strength of “oppositional” Soviet literature did not lie in the fact that it called for “resistance to evil by force.” Its strength lies in the gradual but inexorable shaking from within the very foundations of the totalitarian system, in the slow but inevitable decomposition of the fundamental dogmas, ideological principles, ideals of totalitarianism, in the consistent destruction of faith in the impeccability of the chosen path, the set goals of social development used to achieve the means; in a subtle but nevertheless effective exposure of the cult of communist leaders. As Solzhenitsyn wrote: “I am not hopeful that you will want to kindly delve into considerations that have not been requested by you in your service, although a rather rare compatriot who is not on the ladder subordinate to you cannot be dismissed by you from his post, nor demoted, nor promoted, nor awarded. I am not hopeful, but I am trying to briefly say the main thing here: what I consider salvation and good for our people, to which you and I all belong by birth. And I am writing this letter in the ASSUMPTION that we are subject to the same primary care. and you, that you are not alien to your origin, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and native spaces, that you are not without nationality.”
At that moment, Solzhenitsyn was mistaken about the “leaders of the Soviet Union,” just as all the writers of “other” Soviet literature who preceded him were mistaken about them with letters and articles, essays and poems, stories. In Solzhenitsyn they could only see an enemy, a subversive element, a “literary Vlasovite,” i.e. a traitor to the Motherland, at best a schizophrenic. Even on a common national basis, the “leaders” had nothing in common with the dissident writer, the leader of the invisible spiritual opposition to the ruling regime.
As another Protestant of our time and a fighter against Soviet tyranny, Academician A.D. Sakharov, wrote about Solzhenitsyn: “Solzhenitsyn’s special, exceptional role in the spiritual history of the country is associated with an uncompromising, accurate and deep coverage of the suffering of people and the crimes of the regime, unheard of in their mass cruelty and concealment. This role of Solzhenitsyn was very clearly manifested in his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and now in the great book “The Gulag Archipelago,” which I bow to.” "Solzhenitsyn is a giant in the struggle for human dignity in today's tragic world."
Solzhenitsyn, who single-handedly overthrew communism in the USSR and exposed the “GULAG Archipelago” as the core of a misanthropic system, was free from it. Free to think, feel, worry with everyone who has been in the repressive machine. Having made a structural composition from the fate of a simple prisoner Ivan Denisovich to the scale of the country, represented by single islands connected to each other by “sewage pipes”, human lives and the general way of life, the author thereby predetermines our attitude to the main character - to the Archipelago. Having been the first and last founder of a new literary genre called the “experience of artistic research,” Solzhenitsyn was able to some extent bring the problems of public morality closer to such a distance that the line between man and non-man is clearly visible. Using the example of just one character - Ivan Denisovich, exactly that main feature, inherent in the Russian person, which helped to find and not cross this line - fortitude, self-confidence, the ability to get out of any situation - this is a stronghold that helps to stay in the immense ocean of violence and lawlessness. Thus, one day of a prisoner, who personified the fate of millions like him, became the long-term history of our state, where “violence has nothing to hide behind except lies, and lies has nothing to resist except violence.” Having once chosen this path as their ideological line, our leadership unwittingly chose lies as their principle by which we lived for many years. But it is possible for writers and artists to defeat the universal mask of untruth. “A lie can stand against many things in the world, but not against art.” These words from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture perfectly suit his entire work. As one famous Russian proverb says: “One word of truth will conquer the whole world.” And indeed, monumental artistic research caused a resonance in the public consciousness. A prisoner of the Gulag, who became a writer in order to tell the world and his homeland about the inhuman system of violence and lies: in his person, Russian culture discovered the source of its revival, new vital forces. And remembering his feat is our universal duty, for we have no right to forget and not know him.
“Your cherished desire,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, addressing the “leaders,” in 1973, “is that our political system and ideological system do not change and remain like this for centuries. But this does not happen in history. Each system either finds a way of development or falls." Life confirmed, less than two decades later, the rightness of our great compatriot, who predicted in his “Nobel Lecture” the victory of the “word of truth” over the “world of violence.”
List of used literature:
1. L.Ya. Shneiberg The beginning of the end of the Gulag Archipelago // From Gorky to Solzhenitsyn. M: Higher School, 1997.
2. A. Solzhenitsyn Stories // small collection of op. T.3
3. V. Lakshin Open door: Memories and portraits. M., 1989. P.208
4. A. Solzhenitsyn Butted a calf with an oak tree // New World. 1991.№6.с18
5. T.V. Gegina “The Gulag Archipelago” by A. Solzhenitsyn: The Nature of Artistic Truth
6. S. Zalygin Introductory article // New World. 1989. No. 8. p. 7
7. A. Zorin “The illegitimate legacy of the Gulag” // New World. 1989. No. 8. p. 4
“The Gulag Archipelago” is a documentary-fiction novel by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, which tells about prison-type camps, on the territory of which the author had to spend 11 years of his life.
Rehabilitated, accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers, approved by Khrushchev himself, Solzhenitsyn did not renounce his plan - to create a truthful chronicle about the Gulag, based on letters, memoirs, stories of camp inhabitants and his own sad experience of prisoner number Shch-854.
“GULAG” was written secretly over 10 years (from 1958 to 1968). When one of the copies of the novel fell into the hands of the KGB, the work had to be quickly published. In 1973, the first volume of the trilogy was published in Paris. In the same year, the Soviet government decided the author's fate. Send a Nobel laureate to the camp, recognized by the world they were afraid of the writer. Andropov signed a decree depriving Solzhenitsyn of Soviet citizenship and his immediate expulsion from the country.
What terrible story did the Soviet writer tell the world? He only told the truth.
The Gulag, or the Main Directorate of Camps and Prisons, was notorious in the Soviet Union in the 30-50s of the twentieth century. His bloody glory still echoes like iron shackles in the ears of his descendants and is a dark stain in the history of our fatherland.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn knew about the Gulag firsthand. He spent 11 long years in the camps of this “marvelous” country, as the writer called it with bitter irony. “My eleven years spent there, having internalized it not as a shame, not as a damned dream, but almost loving it ugly world, and now, by a happy turn, having become a confidant of many of his stories and letters..."
There are no fictitious persons in this book, made up of letters, memories, and stories. All people and places are named by their proper names, some are indicated only by initials.
Solzhenitsyn calls the famous island of Kolyma the “pole of cruelty” of the Gulag. Most know nothing about the miracle Archipelago, some have only a vague idea of it, those who have been there know everything, but they are silent, as if being in the camps has forever deprived them of the power of speech. Only decades later did these cripples speak. They came out of their hiding places, sailed from overseas, climbed out of prison cells, rose from their graves to tell scary story called "GULAG".
How do you get to the Archipelago? You can’t buy a ticket there either at Sovturist or Intourist. If you want to manage the Archipelago, you can get a ticket to it after graduating from the NKVD school. If you want to protect the Archipelago, the domestic military registration and enlistment office offers last-minute tours. If you want to die on the Archipelago, do nothing. Wait. They will come for you.
All Gulag prisoners went through a mandatory procedure - arrest. The traditional type of arrest is at night. A rough knock on the door, half-asleep household members and a confused accused who had not yet reached his trousers. Everything happens quickly: “Neither the neighboring houses nor the city streets see how many were taken away overnight. Having frightened the closest neighbors, they are not an event for distant ones. It’s as if they didn’t exist.” And in the morning, along the same asphalt along which the doomed were led at night, with slogans and will pass with songs unsuspecting young Soviet tribe.”
Close acquaintance with the Motherland
Solzhenitsyn did not recognize the paralyzing attraction of a night arrest; he was detained while serving at the front. In the morning he was a company captain, and in the evening he lay in a stuffy, spit-stained cell, in which three people could hardly fit. Solzhenitsyn was fourth.
The punishment cell became the first refuge of the convicted Solzhenitsyn. Over the course of 11 years, he spent time in many cells. Here, for example, is a lice-infested prison in a bullpen with no bunks, no ventilation, no heating. And here is a solitary cell in the Arkhangelsk prison, where the windows are smeared with red lead so that only bloody light enters the cell. Here's a nice little retreat in Choibalsan - fourteen adults in six square spaces, sitting on a dirty floor for months at a time, switching legs on command, with a 20-watt light bulb hanging from the ceiling that never goes out.
Each cell was followed by a new one, and there was no end to them, and there was no hope of liberation. People were sent to the Gulag under the famous Article 58, which consisted of only four points, each of which sentenced a person to 10, 15, 20 or 25 years. At the end of the term, exile or release occurred. The latter was practiced extremely rarely - as a rule, the convicted person became a “repeater”. And again the cameras and sentences began, lasting decades.
Appeal? Court? Please! All cases fell under the so-called “extrajudicial execution” - a very convenient term coined by the Cheka. The courts were not abolished. They still punished and executed, but extrajudicial executions took place separately. According to statistics compiled much later, in only twenty provinces of Russia the Cheka shot 8,389 people, uncovered 412 counter-revolutionary organizations (ed.: “a fantastic figure, knowing our constant inability to organize”), arrested 87 thousand people (ed.: this figure , from the modesty of the compiler of statistics, is considerably underestimated). And this does not include the number of those officially executed, declassified and convicted!
Among the inhabitants of the Gulag there was a legend about the “paradise islands”, where rivers of milk flow, they are fed to the full, the bed is soft, and the work there is only mental. Prisoners of “special” professions are sent there. Alexander Isaevich was lucky enough to intuitively lie that he was a nuclear physicist. This unconfirmed legend saved his life and opened the way to Sharashki.
When did the camps appear? In the dark 30s? In the wartime 40s? The BBC informed humanity of the terrible truth - the camps existed already in 1921! “Is it really that early?” – the public was amazed. Why, of course not! In 1921, the camps were already in full swing. Comrades Marx and Lenin argued that the old system, including the existing coercive machine, must be broken down and a new one erected in its place. An integral part of this machine is the prison. So the camps existed since the first months after the glorious October Revolution.
Why did the camps arise? In this matter, everything is also simple to the point of banality. There is a huge young state that needs to strengthen in a short time without outside help. He needs: a) cheap labor (even better free); b) unpretentious labor force (forced, easily transported, controlled and permanent). Where to get the source of such power? - Among his people.
What did they do in the camps? They worked, worked, worked... From dawn to dusk and every day. There was work for everyone. Even the armless were forced to trample down the snow. Mines, brickwork, clearing peat bogs, but all prisoners know that the worst thing is logging. It’s not for nothing that it was nicknamed “dry shooting.” First, the prison lumberjack needs to cut down the trunk, then chop off the branches, then drag out the branches and burn them, then saw the trunk and lay the beams in stacks. And all this in chest-deep snow, in thin camp clothes (“at least they sewed on the collars!”). A summer working day is 13 hours, a winter one is a little less, excluding the road: 5 kilometers there and five kilometers back. At the lumberjack's short life- three weeks and you’re gone.
Who was in the camps? The Gulag prison cells were welcomingly open to people of all ages, genders and nationalities. Children (“youngsters”), women, and old people were accepted here without prejudice; fascists, Jews, and spies were rounded up in the hundreds, and dispossessed peasants were brought in entire villages. Some were even born in the camps. The mother was taken out of prison during childbirth and breastfeeding. When the baby grew a little (as a rule, it was limited to a month or two), the woman was sent back to the camp, and the child to Orphanage.
We bring to your attention, which, due to its richness and sharp turns of fate, is very reminiscent of an exciting novel or story.
In his novel he depicted the life of patients of the Tashkent hospital, namely cancer building No. 13, the very name of which filled many people with despair and trepidation.
Each prisoner has his own story, worthy of an entire book. Solzhenitsyn cites some of them on the last pages of the second volume of Gulag. Here are the stories of 25-year-old teacher Anna Petrovna Skripnikova, simple hard worker Stepan Vasilyevich Loschilin, priest Father Pavel Florensky. There were hundreds of them, thousands, I can’t remember them all...
During the heyday of the camps, people did not kill in them; the death penalty, executions and other methods of instant death were abolished as obviously unprofitable. The country needed slaves! The Gulag was a gallows, only extended in the best camp traditions, so that before death the victim had time to suffer and work for the good of the fatherland.
Is it possible to escape from the camp? - Theoretically it is possible. Grates, barbed wire and blank walls are not a barrier for humans. Is it possible to escape from the camp forever? - No. The fugitives were always returned. Sometimes they were stopped by a convoy, sometimes by the taiga, sometimes by kind people who received generous rewards for the capture of especially dangerous criminals. But there were, Solzhenitsyn recalls, so-called “convinced fugitives” who decided on a risky escape again and again. This is how Georgy Pavlovich Tenno was remembered, for example. After his next return, they asked him, “Why are you running?” “Because of freedom,” Tenno answered inspiredly, “A night in the taiga without shackles and guards is already freedom.” The novel “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn: summary
From the thirties to the sixties in the Soviet Union, the administration of forced mass detention camps was entrusted to the Main Directorate of Camps (GULag). A. Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” (a brief summary of the work is given below) in 1956; it was published in a magazine version in 1967. As for the genre, the author himself called it artistic research.
"Gulag Archipelago". Summary part 1 about the prison industry, part 2 about perpetual motion
The narrator lists the ways of getting into the Gulag for everyone who was there: from managers and guards to prisoners. The types of arrests are analyzed. It is stated that they had no reason, but were caused by the need to achieve the target quantity. The fugitives were not caught or prosecuted; only those who were convinced of the justice of the authorities and of their innocence received prison terms.
The narrator explores the history of mass arrests in the country immediately after the powerful and ominous Article 58, added to the Criminal Code of 1926, is explained. It was designed in such a way that it could become a punishment for any action.
It describes the course of a typical investigation based on Soviet citizens' ignorance of their rights, and the ways in which investigators carried out the plan to turn those under investigation into prisoners. Then investigators and even ministers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs became prisoners, and along with them all their subordinates, friends, relatives and simply acquaintances.
The narrator describes the geography of the archipelago. From the transit prisons (he calls them “ports”), zaki cars (ordinary cars, but with bars for transporting up to 25 prisoners in each compartment), called “ships,” depart and moor to them. They also transported prisoners in real ships and barges with deep and dark holds, where neither a doctor nor a convoy ever went down.
"Gulag Archipelago". Summary of part 3 about part 4 about the soul and barbed wire
The narrator sets out the history of the creation of camps in Soviet Russia in which people were forced to work. The idea of their creation was put forward by Lenin in the winter of 1918, after the rebellion of the Socialist Revolutionaries was suppressed. The leader’s idea was reinforced by instructions, which clearly stated that all able-bodied prisoners must be put to work. In the Decree, such labor camps were called “concentration camps.”
Since, in the opinion of the Soviet leaders, they lacked rigor, the leadership became concerned with the creation of Northern Camps, which had a special purpose and inhumane rules. After all the monks were expelled, he received the prisoners. They were dressed in sacks, and for violations they were thrown into punishment cells, where they were kept in harsh conditions.
The free labor of prisoners was used to build the unpaved Kem-Ukhta highway through impassable swamps and forests; people drowned in the summer and froze in the winter. Roads were also built in the Arctic Circle, and often the prisoners were not provided with even the most primitive tools and were built by hand.
Prisoners escaped, and one group was even able to make their way into Britain. This is how Europe learned about the existence of the Gulag. Books about the camps began to appear, but Soviet people did not believe it. Even Gorky, who was told the truth by a minor prisoner, left Solovki without believing it, and the boy was shot.
In the history of the Archipelago there were also great construction projects, for example the White Sea Canal, which took countless lives. Builders and prisoners arrived in trains at the construction site, where there was still no plan, no accurate calculations, no equipment, no tools, no normal supplies, no barracks.
Since 1937, the regime in the Gulag became stricter. They were guarded with dogs under bright electric lights. Worse than the guards were the criminals, who were allowed to rob and oppress the “politicals” with impunity.
Protection for women in the camps was extreme old age or noticeable deformity, while beauty was a misfortune. Women worked in the same jobs as men, even in logging. If any of them became pregnant, she was transported to another camp while the child was breastfeeding. After finishing feeding, the child was sent to an orphanage, and the mother was sent to a stage.
There were also children in the Gulag. Since 1926, it was allowed to try children who committed murder or theft from the age of twelve. Since 1935, it was allowed to apply execution and all other punishments to them. There were cases when eleven-year-old children of “enemies of the people” were sent to the Gulag for 25 years.
As for the economic benefits of prisoner labor, it turned out to be very doubtful, because the quality of forced labor left much to be desired, and the camps were not self-sustaining.
There were few suicides in the Gulag, but more escapees. But the fugitives were sold back to the camp by a hostile local population. Those who could not escape swore to themselves to survive, no matter what.
The advantage of the Archipelago was that it did not infringe on human thoughts: there was no need to join a party, a trade union, there were no production or party meetings, no agitation. My head was free, which contributed to a rethinking of my previous life and spiritual growth. But, of course, this did not apply to everyone. Most of their heads were occupied with thoughts about the need for labor, which was perceived as hostile, and fellow inmates were considered rivals. People who were not enriched by spiritual life were embittered and corrupted even more by the Archipelago.
The existence of the Gulag also had a detrimental effect on the rest of the non-camp part of the country, forcing people to fear for themselves and their loved ones. Fear made betrayal the safest way to survive. Cruelty was fostered and the line between good and evil was blurred.
"Gulag Archipelago". Summary of part 5 about hard labor, part 6 about exile
In 1943, Stalin again introduced the gallows and hard labor. Not everyone deified him in the thirties; there was a peasant minority who were more sober than the townspeople and did not share the enthusiastic attitude of the party and Komsomol towards the leader and the world revolution.
Unlike other exiles, wealthy peasants were sent with their families to uninhabited, remote places without food and agricultural tools. Most died of hunger. In the forties, entire peoples began to be deported.
"Gulag Archipelago". Summary of part 7 about what happened after the death of the leader
After 1953, the Archipelago did not disappear; the time had come for unprecedented indulgences. The narrator believes that the Soviet regime will not survive without him. The life of prisoners will never get better because they receive punishment, but in fact the system takes out on them its miscalculations, the fact that people are not what the Advanced Lenin-Stalin teaching intended them to be. The state is still bound by the metal rim of the law. There is a rim - there is no law.