Abstract The camp theme in the works of A.I. Solzhenitsyn

“Camp” theme in the works of A. Solzhenitsyn and V. Shalamov

Our dispute is not a church one about the age of books,
Our dispute is not a spiritual one about the benefits of faith,
Our dispute is about freedom, about the right to breathe,
About the will of the Lord to knit and decide.
V. Shalamov

The “camp” theme again rises sharply in the twentieth century. Many writers, such as Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Aleshkovsky, Ginzbur, Dombrovsky, Vladimov, testified to the horrors of camps, prisons, and isolation wards. They all looked at what was happening through the eyes of people deprived of freedom, choice, who knew how the state itself destroys a person through repression, destruction, and violence. And only those who have gone through all this can fully understand and appreciate any work about political terror and concentration camps. For us, the book only lifts the curtain, which, fortunately, is not allowed to look behind. We can only feel the truth with our hearts, somehow experience it in our own way.
The camp is most reliably described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his legendary works “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “The Gulag Archipelago” and Varlam Shalamov in “Kolyma Tales”. "GULAG Archipelago" and " Kolyma stories» were written over many years and are a kind of encyclopedia camp life.
In their works, both writers, when describing concentration camps and prisons, achieve the effect of life-like persuasiveness and psychological authenticity; the text is filled with signs of uninvented reality. In Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” most of the characters are genuine heroes taken from life, for example, brigadier Tyurin, captain Buinovsky. Only main character Shukhov's story contains collective image an artillery soldier of the battery that the author himself commanded at the front, and the prisoner Shch-262 Solzhenitsyn. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” are closely connected with the writer’s own exile in Kolyma. This also proves high degree detail. The author pays attention to terrible details that cannot be understood without heartache- cold and hunger, sometimes depriving a person of reason, purulent ulcers on the legs, cruel lawlessness of criminals. In the story “The Carpenters,” Shalamov points to a tightly closed space: “ thick fog“that no person was visible two steps away”, “few directions”: hospital, shift, canteen - which is symbolic for Solzhenitsyn too. In the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” open areas of the zone are hostile and dangerous for prisoners: each prisoner tries to run across the areas between rooms as quickly as possible, which is the complete opposite of the heroes of Russian literature, who traditionally love the expanse and distance. The described space is limited to a zone, a construction site, a barracks. The prisoners are fenced off even from the sky: spotlights are constantly blinding them from above, hanging so low that they seem to be depriving people of air.
But still, in the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, the camp also differs, is subdivided in different ways, since each person has his own views and his own philosophy on the same things.
In Shalamov’s camp, the heroes have already crossed the line between life and death. People seem to show some signs of life, but they are essentially already dead, because they are deprived of any moral principles, memory, will. In this vicious circle, time forever stopped, where hunger, cold, and bullying reign, a person loses his own past, forgets his wife’s name, and loses contact with others. His soul no longer distinguishes between truth and lies. Even all human need for simple communication. “I wouldn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies,” Shalamov points out in the story “Sentence.”
The relationships between people and the meaning of life are clearly reflected in the story “The Carpenters.” The task of the builders is to survive “today” in the fifty-degree frost, and there was no point in making plans “further” than two days.” People were indifferent to each other. "Frost" has reached human soul, she was frozen, shrank and, perhaps, would remain cold forever.
In Solzhenitsyn’s camp, on the contrary, there are living people, like Ivan Denisovich, Tyurin, Klevshin, Buchenwald, who maintain their inner dignity and “don’t lose themselves,” don’t humiliate themselves because of a cigarette, because of rations, and certainly don’t lick the plates , do not inform on their comrades for the sake of improving their own fate. The camps have their own laws: “In the camps, this is who dies: who licks the bowls, who hopes in the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather,” “Groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break”, “Whoever can do it will gnaw at him.” The camp, according to Solzhenitsyn, is a huge evil, violence, but suffering and compassion contributed to moral purification, and the state of hunger of the heroes introduces them to a higher moral existence. Ivan Denisovich proves that the soul cannot be captured, it cannot be deprived of its freedom. Formal release can no longer change inner world hero, his value system.
Shalamov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, emphasizes the difference between a prison and a camp. The picture of the world is upside down: a person dreams of leaving the camp not to freedom, but to prison. In the story “Funeral Word” there is a clarification: “Prison is freedom. This is the only place where people, without fear, said everything they thought. Where they rest their souls."
The creativity and philosophy of two truly amazing writers lead to different conclusions about life and death.
According to Solzhenitsyn, life remains in the camps: Shukhov himself could no longer imagine his “existence” in freedom, and Alyoshka the Baptist is happy to stay in the camp, since there a person’s thoughts come closer to God. Outside the zone, life is full of persecution, which is already “incomprehensible” to Ivan Denisovich. Having condemned the inhumane system, the writer creates a genuine folk hero who managed to go through all the trials and save best qualities Russian people.
In Shalamov’s stories, it’s not just Kolyma camps fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which people live free people, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where everyone living in it is doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.
Having gone through all the suffering and pain, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov found themselves folk heroes, who were able to convey the whole true picture of society of that time. And they are united by the presence of a huge soul, the ability to create and contemplate.

In his work he reflected the theme of camps in Russian literature. Amazingly accurately and reliably, the writer reveals the entire nightmare of camp life in the book “ Kolyma stories" Shalamov's stories are piercing and invariably leave a painful impression on readers. Varlam Tikhonovich's realism is not inferior to the skill of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote earlier. It would seem that he has sufficiently revealed the topic, however, Shalamov’s manner of presentation is perceived as a new word in camp prose.
The future writer Shalamov was born in 1907 into the family of a Vologda priest. As a teenager he began to write. Shalamov graduated from Moscow University. The writer spent many years in prisons, camps and exile. He was first arrested in 1929, accused of distributing V. Lenin's false political will. This charge was enough to get him into the court system for twenty years. At first, the writer spent three years in camps in the Urals, and then from 1937 he was sent to Kolyma. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Shalamov was rehabilitated, but this did not compensate for the lost years of life.
The idea of ​​describing camp life and creating its epic, amazing in its impact on the reader, helped Shalamov survive. unique in their merciless truth about the lives of people in the camps. Ordinary people, close to us in ideals and sentiments, innocent and deceived victims.
Main topic“Kolyma Tales” – human existence in inhuman conditions. The writer reproduces situations he has seen repeatedly and an atmosphere of hopelessness and moral impasse. The state of Shalamov’s heroes is approaching “beyond human”. Every day prisoners lose their physical health and risk losing their mental health. Prison takes away from them everything “superfluous” and unnecessary for this terrible place: their education, experience, connections with normal life, principles and moral values. Shalamov writes: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards, not unwitting witnesses - engineers, geologists, doctors - neither superiors nor subordinates. Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, and if he has seen it, it is better for him to die.”
Shalamov is thoroughly familiar with camp life. He has no illusions and does not instill them in the reader. The writer feels the depth of the tragedy of everyone with whom fate has confronted him over the long twenty years. He uses all his impressions and experiences to create the characters in “Kolyma Tales.” He argues that there is no measure to measure the suffering of millions of people. For an unprepared reader, the events of the author’s works seem phantasmagorical, unreal, and impossible. Nevertheless, we know that Shalamov adheres to the truth, considering distortions and excesses, incorrect placement of emphasis, unacceptable in this situation. He talks about the life of prisoners, their sometimes unbearable suffering, labor, struggle for food, illness, death, death. He describes events that are terrible in their static nature. His cruel truth is devoid of anger and powerless exposure, there is no longer any strength to be indignant, feelings have died.
The material for Shalamov’s books and the problems arising from it would be envied realist writers XIX century. The reader shudders from the realization of how “far” humanity has gone in the “science” of inventing torture and torment for their own kind.
Here are the words of the author, spoken on his own behalf: “The prisoner learns to hate work there - he cannot learn anything else there. There he learns flattery, lies, small and large meanness, and becomes an egoist. Returning to freedom, he sees that not only did he not grow during the camp, but that his interests narrowed, became poor and rude. Moral barriers have moved somewhere to the side. It turns out that you can do mean things and still live... It turns out that a person who has committed mean things does not die... He values ​​​​his suffering too highly, forgetting that every person has his own grief. He has forgotten how to be sympathetic to the grief of others - he just doesn’t understand it, doesn’t want to understand it... He has learned to hate people.”
In the story “Sentence” the author, like a doctor, analyzes the human condition, the only feeling of which anger remains. The worst thing in the camp, worse than hunger, cold and disease, was humiliation, which reduced a person to the level of an animal. It brings the hero to a state where all feelings and thoughts are replaced by “half-consciousness.” When death recedes and consciousness returns to the hero, he joyfully feels that his brain is working, and the forgotten word “maximum” emerges from the subconscious.
The fear that turns a person into a slave is described in the story “Typhoid Quarantine.” The heroes of the work agree to serve the bandit leaders, to be their lackeys and slaves, in order to satisfy such a familiar need for us - hunger. The hero of the story sees in the crowd of such slaves Captain Schneider, a German communist, an educated man, an excellent connoisseur of creativity, who now plays the role of a “heel scratcher” for the thief Senechka. Such metamorphoses, when a person loses his appearance, also affect those around him. The main character of the story does not want to live after what he sees.
“Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief” is a story about hunger and the state to which it can bring a person. The main character Vaska sacrifices his life for food.
Shalamov claims and tries to convey to the reader that the camp is a well-organized state crime. Here there is a deliberate substitution of all the categories familiar to us. There is no place here for naive reasoning about good and evil and philosophical debates. The main thing is to survive.
Despite all the horror of camp life, the author of “Kolyma Tales” also writes about innocent people who were able to preserve themselves in truly inhuman conditions. He affirms the special heroism of these people, sometimes bordering on martyrdom, for which no name has yet been invented. Shalamov writes about people “who were not, were not able to and did not become heroes,” because the word “heroism” has a connotation of pomp, splendor, and short-lived action.
Shalamov’s stories became, on the one hand, a piercing documentary evidence of the nightmares of camp life, and on the other, a philosophical understanding of an entire era. The totalitarian system appears to the writer to be in the same camp.

Lecture, abstract. The originality of the disclosure of the “camp” theme in “Kolyma Stories” by V. T. Shalamov - concept and types. Classification, essence and features.

"Camp theme"in the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.

One of the most terrible and tragic topics in Russian literature is the theme of the camps.
The publication of works on such topics became possible only after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, at which Stalin’s cult of personality was debunked.
Camp prose includes the works of A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov, “Faithful Ruslan” by G. Vladimov, “The Zone” by S. Dovlatov and others.
In his famous story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” A. Solzhenitsyn described only one day of a prisoner - from waking up to lights out, but the narrative is structured in such a way that the reader can imagine the camp life of the forty-year-old peasant Shukhov and his entourage in its entirety. By the time the story was written, its author was already very far from socialist ideals. This story is about the illegality, the unnaturalness of the very system created by the Soviet leaders.
The prototypes of the central character were Ivan Shukhov, former soldier Solzhenitsyn’s artillery battery, and the writer-prisoner himself, and thousands of innocent victims of monstrous lawlessness. Solzhenitsyn is sure that the Soviet camps were the same death camps as the fascist ones, only they killed their own people there.
Ivan Denisovich got rid of illusions long ago; he does not feel like a Soviet person. The camp authorities and guards are enemies, nonhumans with whom Shukhov has nothing in common. Shukhov, carrier universal human values, which he failed to destroy the party-class ideology. In the camp, this helps him to survive, to remain human.
Prisoner Shch-854 - Shukhov - is presented by the author as a hero of another life. He lived, went to war, fought honestly, but was captured. He managed to escape from captivity and miraculously made his way to “his own people.” “In counterintelligence they beat Shukhov a lot. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; if you sign, at least you’ll live a little. He signed.”
In the camp, Shukhov is trying to survive, controlling every step, trying to make money where he can. He is not sure that he will be released on time, that he will not be given another ten years, but he does not allow himself to think about it. Shukhov doesn’t think about why he and many other people are in prison; he’s not tormented by eternal questions without answers. According to the documents, he is imprisoned for treason. For carrying out the task of the Nazis. And neither Shukhov nor the investigator could come up with what task.
By nature, Ivan Denisovich belongs to natural, natural people who value the very process of life. And the prisoner has his own little joys: drink hot gruel, smoke a cigarette, eat a ration of bread, hide somewhere warmer, and take a minute’s nap.
In the camp Shukhov’s work saves him. He works with passion, is not used to slacking, and does not understand how one can not work. In life, he is guided by common sense, which is based on peasant psychology. He “strengthens” himself in the camp without dropping himself.
Solzhenitsyn describes other prisoners who did not break down in the camp. Old man Yu-81 is in prisons and camps, how much does Soviet power cost? Another old man, X-123, is a fierce champion of truth, deaf Senka Klevshin, a prisoner of Buchenwald. Survived torture by the Germans, now in a Soviet camp. Latvian Jan Kildigs, who has not yet lost the ability to joke. Alyoshka is a Baptist who firmly believes that God will remove the “evil scum” from people. Captain of the second rank Buinovsky is always ready to stand up for people, he has not forgotten the laws of honor. To Shukhov, with his peasant psychology, Buinovsky’s behavior seems a senseless risk.
Solzhenitsyn consistently depicts how patience and resilience help Ivan Denisovich survive in the inhumane conditions of the camp. The story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published during the " Khrushchev's thaw" in 1962, caused a great resonance among readers, opened the world the terrible truth about the totalitarian regime in Russia.
The book “Kolyma Tales” created by V. Shalamov reveals all the horror of the camp and camp life. The writer's prose is amazing. Shalamov’s stories were published after the books of Solzhenitsyn, who, it would seem, wrote everything about camp life. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose literally turns the soul upside down and is perceived as a new word in the camp theme. In the style and author's view of the writer, one is struck by the height of spirit with which the stories are written, and the author's epic comprehension of life.
Shalamov was born in 1907 into the family of a Vologda priest. He began writing poetry and prose back in early years. Studied at Moscow University. Shalamov was first arrested in 1929 on charges of distributing an allegedly false political will of V. Lenin. The writer spent three years in camps in the Urals. In 1937, he was arrested again and sent to Kolyma. He was rehabilitated after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Twenty years in prisons, camps and exile!
Shalamov did not die in the camp in order to create an impressive force psychological impact a kind of Kolyma epic, to tell the merciless truth about life - “not life” - “anti-life” of people in the camps. The main theme of the stories: man in inhuman conditions. The author recreates the atmosphere of hopelessness, moral and physical impasse, in which for many years There are people whose condition is approaching the “superhuman” state. “Hell on earth” can engulf a person at any moment. The camp takes away everything from people: their education, experience, connections to normal life, principles and moral values. They are no longer needed here. Shalamov writes: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards, not unwitting witnesses - engineers, geologists, doctors - neither superiors nor subordinates.” “Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot of things that a person should not know, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die.”
The narrator's tone is calm, the author knows everything about the camps, remembers everything, and is devoid of the slightest illusions. Shalamov argues that there is no such measure to measure the suffering of millions of people. What the author is talking about seems completely impossible, but we hear the objective voice of a witness. It tells about the life of the camp prisoners, about their slave labor, the struggle for bread rations, illnesses, deaths, and executions. His cruel truth is devoid of anger and powerless exposure, there is no longer any strength to be indignant, feelings have died. The reader shudders from the realization of how “far” humanity has gone in the “science” of inventing torture and torment for their own kind. To the Writers of the XIX century and never dreamed of the horrors of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Kolyma.
Here are the words of the author, spoken on his own behalf: “The prisoner learns there to hate work - he cannot learn anything else there. He learns flattery, lies, small and large meanness there, becomes an egoist. Moral barriers have moved somewhere to the side. It turns out , you can do mean things and still live... It turns out that a person who has committed mean things does not die... He values ​​​​his suffering too highly, forgetting that every person has his own grief, he has forgotten how to be sympathetic to the grief of others - he. He just doesn’t understand him, doesn’t want to understand... He’s learned to hate people.”
In a piercing and scary story“Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief” tells the state to which hunger can bring a person. Vaska sacrifices his life for food.
Fear, which corrodes personality, is described in the story “Typhoid Quarantine.” The author shows people who are ready to serve the bandit leaders, to be their lackeys and slaves for the sake of a bowl of soup and a crust of bread. The hero of the story, Andreev, sees in the crowd of such slaves Captain Schneider, a German communist, an educated man, an excellent connoisseur of Goethe’s work, who now plays the role of a “heel scratcher” for the thief Senechka. After this, the hero does not want to live.
The camp, according to Shalamov, is a well-organized state crime. All social and moral categories are deliberately replaced by their opposites. Good and evil for camp are naive concepts. But still there were those who retained their soul and humanity, innocent people reduced to a bestial state. Shalamov writes about people “who were not, who were not able to and who did not become heroes.” The word “heroism” has a connotation of pomp, splendor, and short-lived action, but no one has yet come up with a word to define the long-term torture of people in the camps.
Shalamov’s creativity has become not only documentary evidence enormous power, but also a fact philosophical understanding an entire era, a common camp: a totalitarian system.

Essay on the topic “The originality of the disclosure of the camp theme in Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

A special place in Russian literature is occupied by the works of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, who reflected the theme of the camps in his work. The writer accurately and reliably shows all the horror of camp life in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Immediately after its publication, it evoked a strong emotional response from many readers.
The most famous work The author tells only about one day in the life of a prisoner - from getting up to lights out. But the story is structured in such a way that the reader can fully judge the camp life of all prisoners, and not just the main character, the peasant Shukhov. The writer is trying to reveal main idea the story is about the illegality and unnaturalness of the system that the Soviet leaders created.
In the image of the main character - prisoner Ivan Shukhov, who was assigned the number "Shch-854" - Solzhenitsyn revealed the character traits of many real people. The writer met some of them when he himself was in custody. Thanks to this and other precise details in the description of the life of prisoners, the work amazes the reader with its realism.
In the story, the life of the camp is shown “from the inside”: we see how one person survives, and we understand that the rest live in exactly the same way - contrary to the laws. The phrase spoken by the main character at the end of the story confirms this. He thanks God that another day has passed - “not darkened by anything, almost happy.” And what’s most striking is that this is really true: Ivan Denisovich’s brigade was not sent out into the bitter cold to string the wire in a remote area; Shukhov had not yet been sent to the punishment cell, but had only washed the floors in the guard’s room. The hero especially rejoices at his joyful moments in camp life: he received an extra portion of porridge, a hacksaw was not found on him during the check, and he, having worked part-time, was able to buy himself two glasses of samosada from another prisoner. But most importantly, Shukhov was especially glad that he did not get sick.