Solschenizyn, Alexander "His Great Stories"

Solschenizyn, Alexander (Александр Исаевич Солженицын/Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) "His Great Stories: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - 1962; For the Good of the Cause - 1963; Matryona's House - 1963; An Incident at Krechetovka Station" - 1963
(Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha; Для пользы дела/ lja pol'zy dela; Матрёнин двор/Matrjonin dvor; Случай на станции Кречетовка/Sluchaj na stancii Krechetovka) - 1962/63


I am not a huge fan of short stories but I always wanted to read something by Solzhenitsyn. So, when I found this book that started with one of his greatest tales, "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", I thought I'd give it a go.

Since there isn't an English collection of the same stories available, I will just talk about every single part of the book individually, don't worry, there are only four stories.


"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha) - 1962
We always hear about the Gulag, the prisoners who sent to Siberia and have to work there etc. But we never really know what is going on there, what the work is like, how the prisoners are kept.

Unless we read about the one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, starting the instant he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them again in the evening.

And once we read it, we understand why this writer was awared the Nobel Prize for Literature. If he hadn't written anything else, he still would have been one of the greatest authors on earth. While reading this, you are standing next to Ivan, you suffer with him, you follow him. And he seems to be a born survivor, one who can deal with a lot of things, can get that extra ration of terrible soup they all yearn for.

This is a very moving novel by someone who experienced the Gulag. He spent eight years there and then was exiled for life to Kazakhstan.

Brilliant story, brilliant writing.

Description:
"First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" - Harrison Salisbury"



"For the Good of the Cause" (Russian: Для пользы дела/Dlja pol'zy dela) - 1963

Another great story about the downsides of the Soviet Union. A story of bureaucrats who are overdoing it. Who don't look for the benefit of the people, just for their own benefit.

This is only a short novella with less than a hundred pages and I do n't want to give too much away but the language is just as brilliant as in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and the people are described just as well.

Description:
"In For the Good of the Cause, Solzhenitsyn presents a remarkable cross-section of Soviet life. He runs the whole gamut, from ordinary students, workers, and teachers to the omnipotent officials in Moscow, terrifying in their faceless, Kafkaesque anonymity.
Like his world famous novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, For the Good of the Cause, set in a new provincial school, is a scathing indictment of the victimisation of ordinary, decent people by Soviet careerist bureaucrats. Solzhenitsyn presents the conflicts between right and wrong, between the freedom of the individual and the harshness of the system with absolute sincerity and conviction."



"Matryona's House" (Russian: Матрёнин двор/Matrjonin dvor) - 1963

Another great story where we get to know the "little man" or in this case the "little woman" who had to make do with what they were given or allowed to have. This story is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences while teaching after leaving the Gulag.

Description:

"In 1956, after leaving behind his ordeal in the gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wanted to get lost in a quiet corner of the USSR, and applied for employment as a mathematics teacher. While looking for accommodations in the town that was sent, saw the hut of Matrona, an elderly widow who lived with a lame cat and a goat for company and decided to stay there.
'Matryona's House' is the tale of an old peasant woman, whose tenacious struggle against cold, hunger, and greedy relatives is described by a young man who only understands her after her death."


"An Incident at Krechetovka Station" aka "We Never Make Mistakes" (Russian: Случай на станции Кречетовка/Sluchaj na stancii Krechetovka) - 1963
Apparently, this story is also based on real life events, an accident that happened during World War II. I can only repeat myself by saying that the author is a great storyteller.

Description:
"In 'An Incident at Krechetovka Station' a Red Army lieutenant is confronted by a disturbing straggler soldier and must decide what to do with him."

I will certainly read more by this fantastic author.


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

Thanks to some famous Russian novels, Siberia has become for us Westerners sort of a synonym not just for harsh living conditions (above all owing to snow and bitter cold during seemingly endless winters), but also for cruel punishment in political systems that don’t allow deviations from the established doctrine. The book that I’m reviewing today shows most powerfully how Stalin carried to extremes what Russian Tsars had begun long before him: forced labour camps for political opponents or innocent men and women who somehow got under suspicion. The novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn focuses on the usual ups and downs of camp routine that make the day of an ordinary inmate in a Stalinist GULAG. Systematic cruelty, hardships and penury can’t extinguish his humanity and his ability to enjoy the few pleasant moments of his miserable existence.

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (Алексaндр Исaевич Солженицын) was born in Kislovodsk, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (today: Russia), in December 1918. Already as a university student he had in mind to write a monumental work on World War I and the Russian Revolution, but then he became a soldier in World War II and towards its end he was arrested for Anti-Soviet propaganda. After eight years in labour camps, during which he secretly kept writing, he was sent into exile in Siberia and he almost died from cancer. In 1956 Aleksandr Solzhenytsin was allowed to return to Ryazan where he worked as a mathematics teacher and wrote in his spare time. Only in 1962, however, he dared his literary debut with the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича) which was an immediate national and international success. After the end of the Khrushchev era in 1964 the political situation made all further publications of his works in the Soviet Union impossible for about twenty-five years, so the novels Cancer Ward (Раковый Корпус: 1966) and The First Circle (В круге первом: 1968) could be brought out – legally – only abroad. These early works earned the author the Nobel Prize in Literature 1970, which he received in person only four years later when he had already been evicted and deported from the Soviet Union. His most noted later works are The Red Wheel (Красное колесо) series on the Russian Revolution, of which August 1914 (Август Четырнадцатого: 1971) is the first of four finished parts or knots, and The Gulag Archipelago (Архипелаг ГУЛАГ: 1973). In 1976 the author settled down in the USA to lecture at university along with writing. In 1994, after the fall of Soviet Communism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to his home country where he died in Moscow, Russia, in August 2008. 

The inmates of the forced labour camp in wintry Siberia have learnt to live only one day at a time and this One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who has already served eight of ten years for espionage (although like many others he only had the bad luck to have been a prisoner-of-war of the Germans), starts all but promising. When Shukhov wakes up his bones ache and he feels sick altogether, so he stays in his dirty, bug-infested cot after reveille instead of getting up at once. It is only a minor violation of the camp rules, but the guard immediately gives him three days in the punishment cell with work and takes him away to the commander’s office. However, it soon turns out that the guard only wanted someone to wash the floor of the guardroom and in the evening he won’t be put into the punishment cell after all. Relieved Shukov does his job and ponders about whether he’ll have enough time to get to the dispensary to report sick after the scant breakfast in the canteen that will inevitably leave him hungry. In the end, he makes it, but the orderly has already completed the day’s sick list and tells Shukov to join his brigade for work. Led by their foreman called Tyurin, the twenty-four men of the 104th brigade march off and join their usual unit working at the half-finished thermal power station. It’s only then that Shukov knows that Tyurin has scraped together enough bribe-beacon for the camp officers to prevent them from being assigned to a new building site in the plain fields without a place to warm up (temperatures in the morning are at -27°C) or to hide from the wind. And the day continues with more such small surprises that make camp life a little easier to bear and the day – almost – a happy day. 

It is obvious from the start that the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based on first-hand experience of everyday life in the forced labour camps or more precisely the ill-famed GULAGs which Stalin built in the most remote and unfriendly places of the Soviet Union from 1928 through his death in 1953. Despite all, the story that the third-person narrator tells from the point of view of an unconcerned observer is masterly fiction, not a memoir in the vein of the powerful accounts that holocaust survivors like Victor E. Frankl (»»» read my review of Man’s Search for Meaning) or more recently Manny Steinberg (»»» read my book notice of Outcry on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion) have produced ever since the end of World War II. The novella also reminds of the work of another Nobel laureate, namely the Hungarian Kertész Imre who in his novel Fatelessness from 1975 fictionalised the terror that he had experienced in Nazi concentration camps. Unlike these authors of fiction and non-fiction Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn didn’t attempt to show the grinding fight for survival of the average inmate during the entire period of detention, but an ordinary working day in the camps sufficed him to show the incredible suffering as well as the tiny pleasures that the GULAG system had in store. The story is written in a very concise as well as modest language and yet it evokes the atmosphere of the camp with incredible power as well as psychological depth. Once I had started reading my German translation of the book, I was hooked and couldn’t make myself put it away again unfinished. 

In my opinion One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn counts among the best classics of world literature although it neither is the first nor the last fiction work revolving around the horrors lived in forced labour camps of a despotic system. The Swedish Academy awarded the author the Nobel Prize in Literature with good reason. Usually, I avoid reviewing books on my blog that are still widely read and on school reading lists, but this one feels so important that I just can’t help recommending it too. After all we should never forget!

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2015/08/one-day-in-life-of-ivan-denisovich-by-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn.html

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's short novel of a day in a Stalinist camp is a story of human dignity, survival and faith. The Stalinist prisons were not for criminals, and they attempted to break the wills of those in the camps. Ivan, or Shukhov as he is referred mostly in novel, is essentially a dignified and proud character. The characterization is subtle. He is from a peasant background and not particularly intellectual, religious, or rebellious, but there is a quiet dignity and pride about him. He is simple, and very much the beautiful every man:

And although he had strictly forbidden his wife to send anything even at Easter, and never went to look at the list on the post--except for some rich workmate--he sometimes found himself expecting somebody to come running and say: 'Why don't you go and get it, Shukhov? There's a parcel for you.' Nobody came running. As time went by, he had less and less to remind him of the village of Temgenyovo and his cottage home. Life in the camp kept him on the go from getting-up time to lights out. No time for brooding in the past.

I liked this novel. I think it's hard to pinpoint what's particularly unique or special, but it is a straightforward and well told story. There seems to be such wonderful simplicity in the prose that gets across the character and the experience of camp life so well:

Shukhov's idea of a happy evening was when they got back to the hut and didn't find the mattresses turned upside down after a daytime search.

The book ends with a discussion of faith, religion and spirituality which is part of the survival of the camp. In his own way, Shukhov is spiritual in his actions and the way he carries himself. He has hope after all:

For a little while Shukhov forgot all his grievances, forgot that his sentence was long, that the day was long, that once again there would be no Sunday. For the moment he had only one thought: We shall survive. We shall survive it all. God willing, we'll see the end of it.

From my blog Aquatique. This would be my first book.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's short novel of a day in a Stalinist camp is a story of human dignity, survival and faith. The Stalinist prisons were not for criminals, and they attempted to break the wills of those in the camps. Ivan, or Shukhov as he is referred mostly in novel, is essentially a dignified and proud character. The characterization is subtle. He is from a peasant background and not particularly intellectual, religious, or rebellious, but there is a quiet dignity and pride about him. He is simple, and very much the beautiful every man:

And although he had strictly forbidden his wife to send anything even at Easter, and never went to look at the list on the post--except for some rich workmate--he sometimes found himself expecting somebody to come running and say: 'Why don't you go and get it, Shukhov? There's a parcel for you.' Nobody came running. As time went by, he had less and less to remind him of the village of Temgenyovo and his cottage home. Life in the camp kept him on the go from getting-up time to lights out. No time for brooding in the past.

I liked this novel. I think it's hard to pinpoint what's particularly unique or special, but it is a straightforward and well told story. There seems to be such wonderful simplicity in the prose that gets across the character and the experience of camp life so well:

Shukhov's idea of a happy evening was when they got back to the hut and didn't find the mattresses turned upside down after a daytime search.

The book ends with a discussion of faith, religion and spirituality which is part of the survival of the camp. In his own way, Shukhov is spiritual in his actions and the way he carries himself. He has hope after all:

For a little while Shukhov forgot all his grievances, forgot that his sentence was long, that the day was long, that once again there would be no Sunday. For the moment he had only one thought: We shall survive. We shall survive it all. God willing, we'll see the end of it.

From my blog Aquatique.

This would be my first book of the 5 book challenge.