“For years, with embarrassment in my heart, I refrained from printing this already finished book: the debt to the still living outweighed the debt to the dead. But now that the 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 the State Prize for it. The book that was hunted by the KGB, and which for the first time was able to see the light of day abroad.
background
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 the "Godfather", by which Stalin was meant. Military censorship reports on the "rebel" and at the end of the winter of 1945 he is arrested. The war is over, the compatriots are celebrating, and Solzhenitsyn is still being interrogated. And they are sentenced to 8 years in labor camps, and at the end of them - to eternal exile.
Later, he will describe all the horrors of the camps in his works. For many years they will be distributed by samizdat - without the permission of the authorities.
Write letters in small handwriting
Solzhenitsyn's first publications in the Novy Mir magazine (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 camp experiences. These letters from former prisoners did not pass by Alexander Isaevich: the "Gulag Archipelago" began with them.
Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's widow 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, the same victims of repressions as himself:
I dedicate
to all those who did not have enough life
tell about it.
And may they forgive me
that I didn't see everything
I didn't remember everything
didn't think of everything.
What is "GULAG"?
The action of the book takes place in the camps. Their network spread throughout the Union, so Solzhenitsyn calls it the Archipelago. Often the inhabitants of such camps were political prisoners. Alexander Isaevich himself survived the arrest, and each of his two hundred "co-authors".
Creativity of fans of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Photo: flickr.com / thierry ehrmann
The very word GULAG means the Main Directorate of Camps. In each such “island”, the 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 go free.
Government is against!
The ruling elite perceived Solzhenitsyn as an enemy - not only did his works undermine the authority of the Soviet government and criticized the political foundations, they also became known in the West.
The following years were very difficult for Solzhenitsyn. It was no longer printed in his native country, the KGB confiscated the writer's archive, searched his friends' houses and took away the found manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn. It is amazing how, under such conditions, the author was able to finish and save the novel. In 1967, the work was completed, but it could not yet see the light 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 found out about the incident a couple of weeks later. And he did two decisive actions: he sent a letter to the leadership of the USSR, in which he called for abandoning the communist regime, and instructed to publish the novel in the West.
The KGB tried to stop the writer. Through his ex-wife, the committee offered him "barter": he does not publish his "GULAG" abroad, and in return his "Cancer Ward" is 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 severely. In February, Alexander Isaevich was accused of treason, deprived of his citizenship and expelled from the country. And all Soviet libraries were ordered to confiscate and destroy any of Solzhenitsyn's books.
But the writer "annoyed" the authorities even more. With the royalties received from the publication, he founded the "Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families" - money was secretly transferred from there to political prisoners in the USSR.
The authorities began to change "anger to mercy" only with the beginning of perestroika. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was given back his citizenship. And they gave the State Prize of the RSFSR - for the same novel, for which almost 20 years ago they were expelled from the country. In the same year, the entire Gulag Archipelago was published for the first time at home.
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 scolded for two things. Firstly, Solzhenitsyn's calculations on the number of repressed people could not be entirely correct. Secondly, many were “jarred” by such a moment in the novel:
“... on a hot night in Omsk, when we, steamed, sweaty 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 were cowardly silent"
In this episode, some saw a call to the Americans to bomb the USSR. But Solzhenitsyn himself did not leave the Union until the very end and returned at the first opportunity.
It so happened that The Gulag Archipelago radically changed the whole life of its author. Because of him, Solzhenitsyn was expelled as a traitor. And then they called back, as if nothing had happened. But the writer fulfilled his civic duty - both to the living and to the dead.
"The Gulag Archipelago" in five quotes
About power:
This wolf tribe - where did it come from in our people? Is it not our root? not our blood? Ours. So that the white robes of the righteous do not have to be overwashed, let us each ask ourselves: if my life had turned out differently, would I not have become such an executioner? This is a terrible question if you answer it honestly.
About "readiness" for arrest:
We are enlightened and prepared from youth for our specialty; to the duties of a citizen; to military service; to take care of your body; to decent behavior; even to the understanding of the elegant (well, this is not very). But neither education, nor upbringing, nor experience in the least lead us to the greatest test of life: to arrest for nothing and to investigation for nothing.
About greed:
And the desire to cash in is their universal passion. How not to use such power and such lack of control for enrichment? Yes, it must be a saint! .. If it were given to us to find out the hidden driving force of individual arrests, we would be surprised to see that, with a general pattern of imprisoning, a private choice of whom to imprison, a personal lot, in three-quarters of cases depended on human self-interest and revenge and half of those cases - from the mercenary calculations of the local NKVD (and the prosecutor, of course, we will not separate them).
About Chekhov:
If Chekhov's intellectuals, who kept wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years, were told that in forty years there would be a torture investigation in Russia, 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, to drive a ramrod heated on a primus stove into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genital parts with a boot, and in the form of the easiest - to torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end, all the heroes would go to the madhouse.
On the destruction of literature:
Oh, how much ideas and labors have gone into this building! a whole dead culture. Oh, soot, soot from the Lubyanka pipes!! It’s more offensive that our generation will consider our generation stupider, mediocre, dumber than it was! ..
The writing
Many of us associate the name of A. I. Solzhenitsyn with the title of a work that revealed the truth about the events that took place in our state during the reign of the great tyrant, who immortalized himself and his deeds in sixty-six million killed and tortured (this is the figure that Solzhenitsyn calls ) and forever remaining the most mysterious and cruel person who has ever been in power in Russia. "The Gulag Archipelago" is not only a work about prisons and camps, it is also the deepest analysis of the period in the history of the Russian state, which later became known as the "epoch of the cult of personality."
The main theme of "Archipelago" I would call the truth. The truth about what happened in the Soviet Union in the thirties and forties. In the preamble of his narrative, Solzhenitsyn says so: “There are no fictitious events or fictional persons in this book. People and places are called by their proper names. If they are named by initials, then for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, then only because human memory has not preserved the names - and everything was just like that. Solzhenitsyn writes life itself, and it appears before us in all its nakedness, in the smallest details. She is teetering on the brink of death. The personality of a person, his dignity, will, thought are dissolved in the elementary physiological needs of an organism that is on the verge of earthly existence. Solzhenitsyn is tearing away the veil of lies that has blinded the eyes of many, including the most conscious part of our society - the intelligentsia.
Solzhenitsyn jokes about their white-and-pink dreams: “If Chekhov’s intellectuals, who were all wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty, forty years, would have been answered that in forty years there would be a torture investigation in Russia, they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into torture a bath with acids, naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, drive a ramrod heated on a primus into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genitals with a boot, and in the form of the easiest - torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat in a bloody " meat, - not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end, all the characters would have gone to a madhouse. "And, addressing directly to those who pretended that nothing was happening, and if it did, then somewhere in the distance, in the distance , and if nearby, then according to the principle “maybe not me”, Solzhenitsyn throws from all the “natives of the Archipelago”:
“While you were enjoying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, studying the influence of Heidegger and Sartre and collecting Picasso reproductions, traveling by compartment cars to the resort or completing the construction of dachas near Moscow, the funnels were constantly snooping around the streets, and the KGB were knocking on the doors” - “ organs never ate bread in vain”; “we have never had empty prisons, but either full or overcrowded.”
An interesting fact is that in his narrative Solzhenitsyn does not bring out the hero, but, as it were, generalizes millions of real destinies and characters in his study. The author recreates the general psychology of an inhabitant of a totalitarian state. Behind the doors is terror, and irresistible streams have already rushed to the camps, “people who are not guilty of anything, and therefore not prepared for any resistance, were seized. The impression was created ... that it was impossible to escape from the GPU-NKVD. Which is what was required. Peaceful sheep to the wolf in the teeth.
Among the factors that made all that horror possible, Solzhenitsyn points to the "lack of civic prowess" in the Russian people. This eternal obedience, which was brought up in the Russian peasant by centuries of serfdom, made it possible for the cult of personality. The organs were also strong in that they relied on the strongest thing in a person - natural instincts. A teenager whose growing up was not an easy process, who had problems with the opposite sex, who felt weak, is the ideal candidate for the GPU investigator. There is no more cruel person than a weak person who has gained power over the bodies and destinies of other people. Organs cultivated all the basest things in man. The beast in the Chekist was not limited by any framework. These individuals had nothing in common with humans. For what distinguishes a man from a beast was not very appreciated in the organs. Plus a coherent socialist theory. Plus the power of thieves in the camps. And the result is a monstrous genocide against the Russian people, which destroyed its best part and the consequences of which will be noticeable for several more centuries (during the Patriotic War of 1812, the French were called "basurmans" - how strong were the legends about the Tatar-Mongol yoke) .
In artistic terms, the Gulag Archipelago is also very interesting. The author himself calls his work "the experience of artistic research." With strict documentation, this is quite a work of art, in which, along with known and unknown, but equally real prisoners of the regime, another phantasmagoric person acts - the Archipelago itself, through the "pipes" of which people "flow" from island to island, digested by a monstrous totalitarian machine. Noah.
The Gulag Archipelago leaves a lasting impression. You can think about its meaning as “another nail in the coffin of Soviet-style communism” for a long time, but I believe that the main value of the “Archipelago” is in the education of that very “civil prowess”, the bearer of which is the author himself, who until a very old age retained the ability to see the essence of things, for which he still suffers (the new government, having seen Solzhenitsyn as an "eternal fighter", pushed him away, closed his broadcast on television). But we, who know the truth, will bring it to others.
The story is dedicated to the resistance of the living to the inanimate, of man to the camp. The Solzhenitsyn hard labor camp is a mediocre, dangerous, cruel machine that grinds everyone who gets into it. The camp was created for the sake of killing, aimed at the extermination of the main thing in a person - thoughts, conscience, memory.
Take, for example, Ivan Shukhov, "the local life ruffled from rise to lights out." And to remember his native hut "there were fewer and fewer reasons for him." So who is whom: camp - man? Or man - camp? The camp defeated many, ground them to dust. Ivan Denisovich goes through the vile temptations of the camp. On this endless day, the drama of resistance plays out. Some win in it: Ivan Denisovich, Kavgorang, convict X-123, Alyoshka the Baptist, Senka Klevshin, pom-brigadier, foreman Tyurin himself. Others are doomed to perish - film director Tsezar Markovich, "jackal" Fetyukhov, foreman Der and others
The camp order mercilessly persecutes everything human and implants the inhuman. Ivan Denisovich thinks to himself: “Work is like a stick, there are two ends in it: if you do it for people, give quality, if you do it for a fool, give it a show. Ivan Shukhov firmly remembered the words of his first foreman Kuzemin, an old camp wolf who had been imprisoned for 12 years since 1943. "Here, guys, the law is the taiga, but people live here too. In the camp, that's who dies: who licks bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather." This is the essence of camp philosophy. The one who loses heart dies, becomes a slave to sick or hungry flesh, unable to strengthen himself from the inside and resist the temptation to pick up leftovers or inform on a neighbor.
How can a person live and survive? The camp is an image both real and surreal, absurd. This is both commonplace and a symbol, the embodiment of eternal evil and the usual low malice, hatred, laziness, dirt, violence, thoughtlessness, adopted by the system.
Man is at war with the camp, for it takes away the freedom to live for himself, to be himself. "Do not expose yourself" to the camp anywhere - this is the tactic of resistance. “Yes, and you should never yawn. You must try so that no guard sees you alone, but only in the crowd,” such is the tactic of survival. Despite the humiliating system of numbers, people stubbornly call each other by their first names, patronymics, and last names. Before us are faces, and not cogs and camp dust, into which the system of people would like to turn.
To defend freedom in a hard labor camp means to depend as little as possible internally on its regime, on its destructive order, to belong to oneself. Apart from sleep, the camper lives for himself only in the morning - 10 minutes at breakfast, and at lunch - 5 minutes, and at dinner - 5 minutes. Such is the reality. Therefore, Shukhov even eats "slowly, thoughtfully." This is also liberation.
The main thing in the story is a dispute about spiritual values. Alyoshka the Baptist says that one should pray "not for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel. One should pray for the spiritual, so that the Lord removes evil scale from our hearts..." The story's finale is paradoxical for perception: "Ivan Denisovich fell asleep, quite satisfied ... The day passed, unclouded by anything, almost happy. If this is one of the "good" days, then what are the rest?!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tore a hole in the Iron Curtain and soon became a pariah himself. His books were banned and removed from libraries. By the time of the forced expulsion of the writer, "In the First Circle", "The Cancer Ward", "The Gulag Archipelago" had already been written. This was pursued with all the might of the state punitive machine.
The time for oblivion has passed. The merit of Solzhenitsyn is that he first spoke about the terrible disaster experienced by our long-suffering people and the author himself. Solzhenitsyn lifted the veil over the dark night of our history during the Stalinist period.
Only in May 1994, 20 years after his expulsion from Russia, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland. So what scared the then Soviet leadership in 1974? It seems to me, first of all, the meaning of the seven lines at the beginning of The Gulag Archipelago: “In this book there are no fictitious persons, no fictitious events. People and places are called by their proper names. If they are named by initials, then for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, it is only because the human memory has not preserved the names - and everything was just like that ... ”Was it necessary to fantasize, invent a person who spent eleven years on the islands of this terrible archipelago? In February 1945, the twenty-seven-year-old artillery captain, order bearer Sasha Solzhenitsyn was arrested because of criticism of Stalin discovered by censorship in his letters and sentenced to eight years, of which he spent almost a year during the investigation, three - in a prison research institute (the one completed in Rostov came in handy -on-Don Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University) and spent the four most difficult ones on general work in the political Special Camp. Plus three years in exile in Kazakhstan, after which he was rehabilitated by the decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1957.
I read the first pages of the “Archipelago ...” from the chapter “Arrest” just with curiosity: it was interesting to know how they were “taken” then, more than fifty years ago: “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested, there was a coffin in the room with his just dead child. The lawyers threw the child out of the coffin: they searched there too.” Or here's another: “Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, somehow got two tickets to the Bolshoi Theater in the Comintern, to the front rows. Investigator Kliegel courted her, and she invited him. Very tenderly, they spent the whole performance, and after that he took her ... straight to the Lubyanka.
There is still room for irony here. While preparing The Archipelago..., Solzhenitsyn got acquainted with the memoirs of the literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik, who escaped from the Archipelago to the mainland during World War II, where there is an episode of his meeting in 1938 in Butyrki with the former Prosecutor General of the country, Krylenko. He sent tens of thousands to the Gulag, and now he himself was under the bunk. And Solzhenitsyn ironically: “I imagine very vividly (I climbed myself): there are such low bunk beds that you can only crawl along the dirty asphalt floor in a plastun way, but the beginner does not immediately adapt and crawls on all fours. He will slip his head in, and the protruding ass remains outside. I think it was especially difficult for the supreme prosecutor to adapt, and his backside, which was not yet emaciated, stuck out for the glory of Soviet justice for a long time. A sinful person, with gloating pleasure I imagine this stuck ass, and in all the long description of these processes, he somehow calms me down. And this image of Krylenko's ass cuts into memory, like Napoleon's tight thighs from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
But the rest of the story is heartbreaking. Solzhenitsyn lists the simplest methods by which the will and personality of a prisoner are crushed without leaving marks on his body: “18. To force the defendant to kneel - not in some figurative sense, but literally: on his knees and so that he does not sit on his heels, but keeps his back straight. In an investigator's office or in a corridor, you can be forced to stand like this for 12 hours, and 24, and 48 ... Who is it good to put like that? Already broken, already leaning towards surrender. It's good to put women like that. Ivanov-Razumnik reports on a variant of this method: putting the young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the investigator urinated in his face! And what. Not taken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. It means that it works well on the proud...”
The longest and most oppressive part of the book is about the extermination camps. Especially pages about women, politicians, youngsters, repetitions, the camp world and places of especially strict imprisonment. Therefore, the thoughts of those who miraculously escaped from these places are so dear. It is amazing that even there, in prison, people were thinking about something, somehow reasoning. Let us take the definition of intelligentsia, which is surprising in its essence, which Solzhenitsyn gives precisely in this part: “Over the years, I had to think about this word - intelligentsia. We are all very fond of identifying ourselves with it - but not all of us relate to it ... Everyone who does not work (and is afraid to work) with his hands began to be attributed to the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn continues: “... if we do not want to lose this concept, we must not exchange it. An intellectual is not defined by professional affiliation and occupation. A good upbringing and a good family also do not necessarily raise an intellectual. An intellectual is one whose interests and will to the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not compelled by external circumstances and even in spite of them. The intellectual is the one. whose thought is not imitative."
In the epic of Solzhenitsyn, one can also feel a glimmer of hope for a light in the leaden shroud of clouds. After the war, when millions of Soviet people passed through Europe, looked at freedom and* democracy, this ray of light in the dark realm of the Gulag is already breaking through at every half-station. The anonymous Russian old woman met the writer at the Torbeevo station, when the prison car accidentally stopped at the station platform. “An old peasant woman stopped in front of our window with a lowered frame and through the window bars ... for a long time, motionlessly looked at us, tightly squeezed on the top shelf. She looked with that eternal look, which our people have always looked at the "unfortunate". Few tears trickled down her cheeks. So the clumsy one stood and looked as if her son lay between us. “You can’t look, mother,” the escort told her not rudely. She didn't even move her head. And next to her stood a girl about ten years old with white ribbons in pigtails. She looked very sternly, even mournfully beyond her years, wide-wide opening and not blinking her eyes. She looked so that, I think, she filmed us forever. The train started off gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and earnestly, unhurriedly crossed us.
Finished reading the novel. And it is believed, despite its oppressive intensity, that as long as there are old women who believe in God, and girls who remember everything, the new Gulag will not pass ... And Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel will remain only a wonderful literary monument to his victims.
A look at the Russian repressive system in the works of Solzhenitsyn
Plan:
Introduction
Artistic study of the work “The Gulag Archipelago”.
"One day of Ivan Denisovich" and its connection with history.
Conclusion
Introduction
Probably, every literary work, whatever it may be, by reflecting the realities of our life on paper through the word, is directed to the minds of readers and has a certain effect on it. This impact can be both direct and indirect.
Undoubtedly, the most striking example of direct influence can be considered journalistic works, which reflect the most pressing issues of public life. For a writer-publicist, a person, his life, fate and character are the real basis for his own views. The goal of such a writer is to convince his readers to accept his own point of view, which is achieved through facts, logical constructions and expressive images.
In a work of art, things happen a little differently. In order to penetrate into the essence of what is happening, one of the most important tools of knowledge used is fiction. It is thanks to fiction that the inner essence of the phenomenon is revealed much more convincingly than it could happen using only bare facts. As a result, we see that artistic truth, in terms of its power of influence on readers, is much more significant than the truth of fact.
The purpose of this essay was an attempt to consider the main aspects of Solzhenitsyn's work, concerning an objective assessment of the repressive system of the Soviet camps of the Stalin era.
The relevance of this research topic is obvious to this day, because, despite the fact that much of what our compatriots experienced during the time of repression is really scary, it would be even more terrible to consign the events of past years to oblivion. It is known that history develops in time in a spiral, many events repeat themselves, so no one can give a firm guarantee that what happened in those years will not happen again, but only in a more cruel form.
The merit of Solzhenitsyn in this regard was undoubted, because it was he who became the first to show the psychology of that time in his works. Solzhenitsyn was not afraid to tell the world about those secrets that many knew, but were afraid to reveal to other people. But Solzhenitsyn openly and truthfully began to illuminate the problems concerning our society and the individual in it. Of course, after some time others will appear, for example, V. Shalamov, who, in response to Solzhenitsyn's works, will say that “one can spend at least a lifetime in such a camp as Ivan Denisovich. This is an orderly post-war camp, and not the hell of Kolyma at all.
But now the most important thing is that everyone who has passed - no matter where exactly - described by Solzhenitsyn and other authors, the "circles of hell", deserve all respect and special attention. The novel “The Gulag Archipelago”, therefore, is first of all a reminder, a warning to the future generation of people, and only then a monument to all those who have not been able to tell about it in their lives.
The purpose of this work is not to track the relationship between the categories "truth of fact" and "artistic truth" in the works "The Gulag Archipelago" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by A. Solzhenitsyn. In fact, these works, which took a whole decade to create, have long become a real encyclopedia of camp life, the world of Soviet camps.
But before starting work, it is necessary to determine what the Gulag Archipelago is, because at the same time this work can be a memoir, an autobiographical novel, and even a historical chronicle? Solzhenitsyn himself defines the genre of his work as "the experience of artistic research." This definition is very accurate, it clearly articulates the goal that the writer set himself when writing the novel like nothing else: an artistic study of the camp as a phenomenon that plays a decisive role in the character of the state, the study of camp life and the person living in this environment. And at the same time, this definition can be perceived by the reader as a certain term that does not set a clear genre content on the one hand, and reflects the historical, documentary and philosophical orientation of the work, on the other.
Everyone knows that any dialogue, even the most vivid and seemingly memorable, if it is not fixed on paper, then after a few years it will no longer be possible to reproduce it with original accuracy. In the same way, the events taking place in the world cannot be conveyed in the entire objective completeness of the thoughts and experiences of its individual participants or witnesses. Here an important role is played by the author, who, being a master, restructures the material, turns documentary information into the world of what has already been directly seen, in order to reveal the inseparability of art and real life and their continuous interaction.
But for Solzhenitsyn, everything was somewhat different, in his works he made little use of the technique described above, because it was important for him to convey everything that fell on the pages of books without distortion. For Solzhenitsyn, it was very important to preserve that special imprint that time, power, history leaves on what is happening. It is impossible to deny all this, it is necessary to understand, accept and remember the accomplished facts, and also try to open the eyes of other people to them.
Solzhenitsyn managed in his works to depict life very fully, in all its "glory", and therefore "not every reader will fly with his eyes at least to the middle of the Archipelago", but I will try to reveal the main aspects of this author's work.
Artistic study of the work “The Gulag Archipelago”
The illegitimate heritage of the Gulag,
consanguineous child - hostel.
She opened her mouth on the Ust-Ulim highway.
Whatever one may say, but do not pass by.
Thunder and timpani of endless construction,
virgin epic lands.
Beds squeezed by a plywood wall.
One of them, out of ten, is mine.
And on the next one, with Panka Hairy,
teenager lives
from the breed of statues.
Strongly powerful and completely bald.
Dining room and toilet
in a frozen puddle, merged in the ice.
A haven for insolent rats.
Oh, is patience sent down to everyone
go into the light through the abomination of desolation!
And where it is, that blessed light,
when around, like me, the same people? ..
Simple words about holiness, about a miracle
Would I have believed at nineteen?
(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 must think, will remain such until the end of his life. At the same time, there are reasons that he, like all of us, is watching the changes taking place in our country with the hope of a 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 the peoples. Villainy, blood and lies are always accompanied by odes that do not stop for a long time even after the lie is exposed, the blood is mourned and loud repentance is already brought. So, maybe smart and honest opponents are more needed by our society than cheaply acquired and even sincere, but narrow-minded friends? And if so, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, with his unshakable stubbornness, is simply necessary for us now - we must know and hear him, and we have neither moral nor intellectual right not to know and not hear.
Even if we do not agree with everything that the author expressed in his Archipelago, but when we now settle accounts with our past, we are convinced that he opposed it almost all 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 a lot, having understood and experienced, we will read it differently, it is quite possible that not even in the way he would like. But this is precisely that long-awaited freedom - the freedom of the printed word and the freedom of reading, without which there is no and cannot be an active literary life, with undeniable benefit to society, which both literature and society have been creating on an equal footing 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 personality. It requires ordinary abilities and ordinary diligence from those who live in harmony with it, for which it rewards a quiet life. Not everyone can challenge him.
Standing against the current, it is difficult to resist its pressure. But on the other hand, those who resisted, 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 their fortitude and moral dedication. That they lived their lives not in lies.
This is how the life and creative path of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an outstanding contemporary Russian writer, is already seen today. To understand it means to understand a lot in the history of the outgoing 20th century. But, first of all, it is necessary to name the three “whales” 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 must get out of the state of shock into which the book plunges us. We - everyone - are shocked by the material that the writer unfolds, from his assessments that differ from those that were generally accepted. But we also experience shock from the need to make an honest confession to ourselves: so what, it was?
For each of us, this is a difficult 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 in the way: get away from a grumpy wife, move out from a boring neighbor, change jobs, leave the city, and finally, even change your passport under certain circumstances. In other words, start a new life. But is it possible to get away from the past? Moreover, it is not only yours, but also your people, your country, the past that has become history.
What was, was. Knowing what has been cannot be immoral. A people that forgets the past has no future. But one does not enter the future with a sense of shame. It is easier to believe that what Solzhenitsyn described is true. And today we speak 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 was about to open the floodgates of the ban, and outlined the very problem of the people's misfortune that had happened. It was brought with them by those who had just returned from prisons, camps and exile. It was also discussed at the official level, in the memorable report of N. S. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Then, in 1958, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, having taken a sip of this misfortune, conceived his "Gulag Archipelago". The publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich strengthened the writer's self-confidence. Letters went to him in which people told their fates, cited facts and details, and encouraged him to work.
As this truth was revealed, or rather, so far, this truth was only slightly revealed, the question of origins, causes, inspirers and performers arose more sharply. It was obvious that all repressions were part of the system, and every system has some kind of organizing principle, a core that holds it even when the components change. Repressions could not arise immediately, only in connection with the promotion of I.V. Stalin and those close to him to the first roles. Officially, repressions are still associated today with Stalin's personality cult, officially today they are recognized as a product of Stalinism, and they talk about the victims of Stalinist repressions.
This continues to be the subject of a rather sharp dispute, the formula about the 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 the Solovki of the 1920s. It does not include the expulsion abroad of hundreds of figures of Russian culture.
Solzhenitsyn quotes Marshal Tukhachevsky about the tactics of suppressing the peasant uprising in the Tambov province in 1921: "It was decided to organize a wide expulsion of bandit families. Extensive concentration camps were organized, where these families were previously imprisoned." In 1926, this was already perceived calmly as something normal in the practice of the young Soviet state.
What about "telling"?
At the very beginning of the first volume of The Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn names 227 of his co-authors (without names, of course): “I do not express my personal gratitude to them here: this is our common, friendly monument to all those who were tortured and killed.” “DEDICATED to all those who did not have enough life to tell about it. And they will forgive me that I didn’t see everything, didn’t remember everything, didn’t guess everything. This word of sorrow to all those who were swallowed up by the "hell mouth" of the Gulag, whose names have been erased from memory, disappeared from documents, mostly destroyed.
In the laconic preamble to his grandiose narrative, Solzhenitsyn remarks: “There are no fictitious persons or fictional events in this book. People and places are called by their proper names. If they are named by initials, then for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, then only because the human memory has not preserved the names - and everything was just like that. The author calls his work "the experience of artistic research." Amazing genre! With strict documentation, this is quite a work of art, in which, along with known and unknown, but equally real prisoners of the regime, there is another phantasmagoric character - the Archipelago itself. All these “islands”, interconnected by “sewer pipes”, through which people “flow”, digested monstrous machine of totalitarianism in liquid- blood, sweat, urine; an archipelago living its own life, experiencing either hunger, or malicious joy and merriment, or love, or hatred; the archipelago, spreading like a cancerous tumor of the country, with metastases in all directions; petrifying, turning into a continent within a continent.
The "tenth circle" of Dante's hell, 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, there is no need to resort to any kind of artistic “mysticism” - to recreate the “black magic” by means of fantasy and the grotesque, which turns people against their will this way, then so, to portray Woland with his retinue, to trace all the “royal things” together with the readers, to present the novel version of the “Gospel according to Pilate”. The very life of the Gulag, in all realistic nakedness, in the smallest naturalistic details, is much more fantastic and more terrible than any book "diaboliad", any, the most sophisticated decadent fantasy. Solzhenitsyn seems to be making fun of the traditional dreams of intellectuals, their white-and-pink liberalism, who are incapable of imagining to what extent human dignity can be trampled on, a person can be destroyed by reducing him to a crowd of "prisoners", break his will, dissolve thoughts and feelings in elementary physiological needs. an organism that is on the verge of earthly existence.
“If Chekhov’s intellectuals, who were all wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years, would have been answered that there would be a torture investigation in Russia, they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath with acids, torture naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, to drive a ramrod heated on a primus stove into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genital parts with a boot, and in the form of the easiest way - to torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end , all the heroes would go to the lunatic asylum.” And, speaking directly to those who pretended that nothing was happening, and if it did, then somewhere aside, in the distance, and if nearby, then according to the principle “maybe they will bypass me”, the author of “Archipelago” throws on behalf of millions of the Gulag population: “While you were enjoying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, studying the influence of Heidegger on Sartre and collecting reproductions of Picasso, traveling in compartment cars to the resort or completing the construction of dachas near Moscow, - and the funnels continuously darted through the streets and the KGB men knocked and rang at the doors ...” “Organs never ate bread in vain”; “we have never had empty prisons, but either full or excessively overcrowded”; “There was a cold-bloodedly conceived consistency and unflagging perseverance in knocking out millions and settling in the Gulag.”
Summarizing in his research thousands of real destinies, hundreds of personal testimonies and memories, an innumerable number of facts, Solzhenitsyn comes to powerful generalizations - both social, and psychological, and moral and philosophical. For example, the author of The Archipelago recreates the psychology of an arithmetic mean inhabitant of a totalitarian state who has entered - against his will - into a zone of mortal risk. Behind the threshold - the Great Terror, and irresistible flows to the Gulag have already rushed: "arrest epidemics" have begun.
Solzhenitsyn makes every reader imagine himself a "native" of the Archipelago - a suspect, arrested, interrogated, tortured. Prisoners of prisons and camps ... Anyone involuntarily imbued with the unnatural, perverted psychology of a person disfigured by terror, even one shadow of terror hanging over him, 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 like-minded people of the author, recruits more and more opponents of the inhuman regime, its irreconcilable opponents, fighters against it, which means more and more of its victims, future prisoners of the Gulag (as long as it 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! “Along the long crooked street of our life, we happily rushed or unhappily wandered past some kind of fences - rotten, wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast-iron fences. We did not think - what is behind them? We did not try to look beyond them with our eyes or mind - and that is where the country of the Gulag begins, very close, two meters from us. And yet we did not notice in these fences a myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. All, all these they were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly swung open, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, grab us by the hand, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they drag us like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate into our past life , slammed forever.
All. You are under arrest!
And you don't have anything to answer to this, except lamb vomit:
I huh?? For what??..
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and blow, from which the present is immediately shifted into the past, and the impossible becomes a full-fledged present.
Solzhenitsyn shows what irreversible, pathological changes take place in the mind 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 the “other” space - on the other side of the nearest fence with barbed wire. Especially striking, catastrophic is the change in the consciousness of a person brought up in classical traditions - sublime, idealistic ideas about the future and what is due, moral and beautiful, honest and fair. From the world of dreams and noble illusions, you suddenly find yourself in a world of cruelty, unscrupulousness, dishonesty, ugliness, dirt, violence, criminality: a world where you can survive only by voluntarily accepting its ferocious, wolf laws; into a world where it is not supposed to be a man, even mortally dangerous, and not to be a man means to break down forever, stop respecting yourself, bring yourself down to the level of the dregs of society and treat yourself the same way.
In order to let the reader feel the inevitable changes with him, to experience more deeply the contrast between dream and reality, A.I. Solzhenitsyn deliberately proposes to recall the ideals and moral principles of the pre-October "Silver Age" - so it is better to understand the meaning of the psychological, social, cultural, worldview revolution that took place. “Now, former prisoners, and even just people of the 60s, may not be surprised by the story about Solovki. But let the reader imagine himself 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, let it be shocked by the civil war, but still accustomed to the food, clothes, mutual verbal communication accepted by people. treatment...”. And that same “man of the silver age” suddenly plunges into a world where people are dressed in gray camp rags or in bags, have a bowl of gruel and four hundred, maybe three hundred, or even a hundred grams of bread (!); and communication - mate and thug jargon. - "Fantasy world!".
This is an external breakdown. And the inner one is tighter. Start with an accusation. “In 1920, as Ehrenburg recalls, the Cheka put the question before 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, declared to the prisoners as follows: “We will not bother to prove his guilt to him (the arrested person). Let he will prove to us that he had no hostile intentions.”
And on this cannibalistically simple straight line, countless memories of millions fit in the gap. What an acceleration and simplification of the consequence, unknown to previous mankind! A captured rabbit, trembling and pale, having no 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 himself find and lay out in front of the loafer - by the investigator evidence that he had no hostile intentions! And if he did not look for them (and where could he get them), then by the same token he brought to the investigation approximate proof of your guilt!
But this is only the beginning of the breaking of consciousness. Here is the next stage of self-degradation. Rejection of oneself, of one's convictions, of the consciousness of one's innocence (hard!). Still not hard! - Solzhenitsyn sums up, - yes, it is unbearable for the human heart: having fallen under a native ax - to justify it.
And here is the next step of degradation. “All the firmness of the imprisoned faithful was only enough to destroy the traditions of political prisoners. They shunned dissident classmates, hid from them, whispered about the terrible consequences so that non-party or Socialist-Revolutionaries would not hear - “do not give them material against the party!”.
And finally - the last (for the "ideological"!): to help the party in its struggle against enemies, even 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 an all-encompassing expansion that it did not require further. He knew and did not say - it's the same as what he did himself!). “And what way did they find for themselves? - ironically Solzhenitsyn. - What effective solution was suggested to them by their revolutionary theory? Their decision is worth all their explanation! Here it is: the more they plant, the sooner they will understand the mistake at the top! And therefore - try to name as many names as possible! Give as many fantastic testimonies on the innocent as possible! The whole party will not be arrested!
(But Stalin didn’t need everything, he only needed a head and seniors.)”.
The author cites a symbolic episode concerning the “communists recruited in 1937”: “In the Sverdlovsk transit bath, these women were driven through the line of guards. Nothing, take comfort. Already on the following hauls, they sang in their car:
“I don’t know another such country,
Where a man breathes so freely!”
It is with such a complex of world outlook, with such a level of consciousness that the well-minded 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 to know the essence of things. And the camp inmates, meeting them, these faithful communists, these “well-intentioned orthodox people”, these real “Soviet people”, “they say with hatred: “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 the theory of development saw loyalty to their development in the rejection of any development of their own.” 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 native Soviet power, in removing from everyone, including Lenin and Stalin, responsibility for the Great Terror, for state terrorism as the basis of their policy, for the bloodthirsty theory of class struggle, which makes the destruction of “enemies” , violence - a normal, natural phenomenon of social life.
And Solzhenitsyn delivers his moral verdict to the “well-intentioned”: “How could one sympathize with them all! But how well they all see what they suffered, they do not see what they are guilty of.
These people were not taken until 1937. And after 1938, very few of them were taken. Therefore, they are called the “set of the 37th year”, and so it would be possible, but so as not to obscure the overall picture, that even during peak months they were planted not only them, but all the same peasants, workers, and youth, engineers and technicians, agronomists and economists, and just believers.
The Gulag system reached its apogee precisely in the post-war years, since to those who had been sitting there since the mid-30s. “enemies of the people” added millions of new ones. One of the first blows fell on prisoners of war, most of whom (about 2 million) after their release were sent to the Siberian and Ukhta camps. “Foreign elements” from the Baltic republics, Western Ukraine and Belarus would have been exiled there. According to various sources, during these years the “population” of the Gulag ranged from 4.5 to 12 million. human.
The '37 set', very talkative, with access to print and radio, created the '37 legend, a two-point legend:
1. if when they were imprisoned under the Soviet regime, then only this year and only about it should one speak and be indignant;
2. planted - only them.
“And what is the high truth of the well-meaning? Solzhenitsyn continues to think. - And the fact that they do not want to give up a single previous assessment and do not want to learn a single new one. Let life whip through them, and roll over, and even move wheels over them - but they do not let it into their heads! And they do not recognize her, as if she does not go! This unwillingness to comprehend the experience of life is their pride! Prison should not affect their worldview! The camp must not be reflected! On what we stood - on that we will stand! We are Marxists! We are materialists! How can we change from the fact that we accidentally ended up in prison? Here is their inevitable morality: I was imprisoned in vain and, therefore, I am good, and everyone around is enemies and sits for the cause.
However, the fault of the “well-intentioned,” as Solzhenitsyn understands it, is not merely self-justification or an apologia for party truth. If the question was only in this - not so bad! So to speak, a personal matter of the communists. On this occasion, Solzhenitsyn, after all, says: "Let's understand them, let's not scoff. It was painful for them to fall. "They cut the forest - the chips fly," was their exculpatory peppy saying. And suddenly they themselves passed out into these chips. And further: “To say that they were hurt is to say almost nothing. It was inappropriate for them to experience such a blow, such a collapse - both from their own, from their native party, and apparently - for nothing. After all, they were not in front of the party guilty of nothing."
And in front of the whole society? Before the country? In front of millions of dead and tortured non-communists, in front of those whom the communists, including those who suffered from their own party, "well-meaning" prisoners of the Gulag, honestly and frankly considered "enemies" who must be destroyed without any pity? Is it in front of these millions of "counter-revolutionaries", former nobles, priests, "bourgeois intellectuals", "saboteurs and pests", "kulaks" and "sub-kulakists", believers, representatives of deported peoples, nationalists and "rootless cosmopolitans" - is it really in front of all of them who disappeared in the bottomless womb of the Gulag, are they innocent, striving to create a "new" society and destroy the "old" one?
And now, already after the death of the "leader of the peoples", "by an unexpected turn of our history, something, negligible, about this Archipelago came to light. But the same hands that screwed up our handcuffs now put out their palms conciliatoryly:" Don't! .. No need to stir up the past! .. Whoever remembers the old is out of his sight! "However, the proverb finishes:" And whoever forgets - that's two!". Some of the "well-meaning" people say about themselves: "If I ever get out of here, I will live as if nothing had happened" (M. Danielyan); someone - about the party: "We believed the party - and we were not mistaken." (N.A. Vilenchik); someone, working in the camp, argues: “in the capitalist countries, the workers are fighting against slave labor, but we, although slaves, work for the socialist state, not for private individuals. It is 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 homegrown executioners ("Why stir up the old? ..), who destroyed compatriots many times more than the entire civil war" . And for some "who do not want to remember," remarks Solzhenitsyn, "there has already been (and still will be) enough time to destroy all the documents clean." And in sum it turns out that there was no GULAG, and there were no millions of repressed people, or even the well-known argument: "they don't imprison us in vain." Like this maxim: “While the arrests concerned people I didn’t know or little known, my friends and I had no doubts about the validity of these arrests. But when people close to me and myself were arrested, and I met dozens of the most devoted communists in custody ...” Solzhenitsyn comments on this maxim deadly: “In a word, they remained calm while they imprisoned the society. "Their indignant mind boiled up" when they began to imprison their community.
The very idea of camps, this tool for "reforging" a person, whether it was born in the minds of the theoreticians 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. What are worth only, for example, the shameless theorisms of the Stalinist executioner Vyshinsky cited by Solzhenitsyn: "... the successes of socialism exert their magical (and molded: magical!) influence on ... the fight against crime." The jurist Ida Averbakh (sister of Rapp's general secretary and critic Leopold Averbakh) did not lag behind her teacher and ideological inspirer. In her programmatic book "From Crime to Labor", edited by Vyshinsky, she wrote about the Soviet corrective labor policy - "the transformation of the most vile human material ("raw materials" - do you remember? "Insects - remember? - A.S.) into full-fledged active conscious builders of socialism"" (6, 73). The main idea that roamed from one “scientific” work to another, from one political agitation to another: criminals are the social elements most “socially close” to the working masses: from the proletariat - within a stone's throw to the lumpen proletariat, and there it is very close " thieves "...
The author of The Gulag Archipelago does not restrain his sarcasm: “Join my weak pen in the chanting of this tribe! They were sung like pirates, like filibusters, like vagabonds, like runaway convicts. that they have a sensitive heart, they rob the rich and share with the poor. Oh, sublime associates of Karl Moor! Oh, rebellious romantic Chelkash! Oh, Benya Krik, Odessa tramps and their Odessa troubadours!
Isn't all world literature sang of thieves? We will not reproach Francois Villon, but neither Hugo nor Balzac passed this path, and Pushkin praised the thieves in the gypsies (And what about Byron?) But they never sang them so widely, so unanimously, so consistently, as in Soviet literature. (But those were lofty theoretical foundations, not only Gorky and Makarenko.)”.
And Solzhenitsyn confirms that “there is always a sanctifying lofty theory for everything. It is by no means the lightweight writers themselves who have determined that the thieves are our allies in building communism. "It is time to recall Lenin's famous slogan "Steal the loot!" , and the "communist" attitude to 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: a thieves' world crowded into a single "labour army" in a concentration camp, plus systematic violence and intimidation, plus a "ration scale plus agitation" that stimulates the re-educational process - that's all what it takes to build a classless society.
“When this harmonious theory descended on the camp land, it turned out this: the most inveterate, seasoned blatniks were given unaccountable power on the islands of the Archipelago, on camps and camps - power over the population of their country, over peasants, philistines and intelligentsia, the power that they they never had in history, never in any state, which they could not even think of 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, inaccurately! - in chanting, a real apology for improved slavery, the camp "reforging" of normal people into "thugs", into the nameless "most nasty human material" - Soviet writers, led by the author of "Untimely Thoughts" Gorky. "The falcon and the petrel breaks into the nest of lawlessness, arbitrariness and silence! The first Russian writer! Here he will prescribe them! Here he will show them! Here, father, he will protect! They expected Gorky almost like a general amnesty." The authorities of the camps "hid the ugliness and polished the window dressing."
Who, in Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, opposes the security officers and urks, the well-intentioned and the weak, the theorists and singers of the "re-education" of people into prisoners? All of them are opposed by Solzhenitsyn's intelligentsia. "Over the years, I had to think about this word - the intelligentsia. We all love to refer to ourselves, to it - but not everyone relates. In the Soviet Union, this word acquired a completely perverted meaning. Everyone who does not work (and is afraid of to work) with hands. All the party, state, military and trade union bureaucrats got here ... "- the enumerated list is long and dreary. "Meanwhile, for none of these signs a person can be enrolled in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we should not exchange it. An intellectual is not determined by professional affiliation and occupation. A good upbringing and a good family are also not necessary An intellectual is one whose interests and will to the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not compelled by external circumstances and even in spite of them. An intellectual is one whose thought is not imitative.
Reflecting on the tragic fate of the domestic intelligentsia, mutilated, dumb, perished in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn unexpectedly comes to a paradoxical discovery: "... The archipelago provided the only, exceptional opportunity for our literature, and perhaps for world literature. Unprecedented serfdom in the heyday of the 20th century in this one, nothing redeeming sense, opened a fruitful, albeit disastrous path for writers. This path, traversed by the author himself, and along with him by several other intellectuals - scientists, writers, thinkers (literally a few survivors!) - is the path of asceticism and chosenness. Truly the Way of the Cross! The gospel "way of the grain"...
“Millions of Russian intellectuals were thrown here not on an excursion: to be maimed, to die, and with no hope of return. For the first time in history, so many developed, mature, culturally rich people found themselves without imagination and forever in the shoes of a slave, slave, lumberjack and miner. So for the first time in world history (on such a scale) the experience of the upper and lower strata of society merged! A very important, as if transparent, but previously impenetrable partition, which prevented the upper ones from understanding the lower ones, melted away: pity. they were tormented by remorse that they themselves did not share this share, and therefore they considered themselves obliged to shout about injustice three times, while missing the pre-basic consideration of the human nature of the lower, upper, all.
Only the intelligent zeks of the Archipelago finally lost these remorse: they completely divided the evil lot of the people! Only by becoming a serf himself could an educated Russian man now (yes, if he rose above his own Grief) paint the serf peasant from within.
But now he no longer had a pencil, paper, time and soft fingers. But now the guards were shaking his things, looking into the digestive inlet and outlet, and the security officers - into the eyes ...
The experience of the upper and lower layers merged, but the bearers of the merged experience died...
Thus, unprecedented philosophy and literature were buried under the cast-iron crust of the Archipelago even at birth.
And only a few were given - whether by history, fate, 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 fulfilled it. Fulfilled, 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 the peasantry and part of the intelligentsia, and the other side of reality - the thieves' 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 nature of the state, raised certain questions to which there is no unambiguous answer, there are only subjective sensations. Yes, The Gulag Archipelago is a work of cruel realism, it contains many frankly inhuman episodes, but this is necessary. A kind of shock therapy, according to Solzhenitsyn, will not harm, but rather help society. We must know and accept history, no matter how inhumane it may seem, first of all, in order not to repeat everything from the beginning, to get past the pitfalls. Honor and praise to the author, who was the first to be able to portray what it was scary to think about 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 a general picture, then the work, which will be discussed further, affects in more detail precisely the inner world of a person who got on the other side of the wall on an absurd charge.
One day of Ivan Denisovich" and its connection with history
Today, the reader looks at many events and stages of our history with different eyes, seeks to evaluate them more accurately and definitely. The increased interest in the problems of the recent past is not accidental: it is caused by deep requests for renewal. Today it is time to say that the most terrible crimes of the 20th century were committed by German fascism and Stalinism. And if the first brought down the sword on other peoples, then the second - on his own. Stalin managed to turn the country's history into a series of monstrous crimes against it. In strictly guarded documents, there is a lot of shame and grief, a lot of information about sold honor, cruelty, about the triumph of meanness over honesty and devotion.
It was the era of real genocide, when a person was ordered: betray, testify perjury, 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 (mostly those who did not submit to the "top") were destroyed and imprisoned in camps. In many ways, this happened because the authorities were afraid 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 stores, objectionable publications were confiscated from libraries, churches, icons and other cultural values were destroyed. The past for the people has died, ceased to exist. Instead, a distorted history was created, which accordingly shaped the public consciousness. Romain Rolland in his diary wrote 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 in its path all those who resisted and those who disagreed. The country has turned into a single huge Gulag. For the first time, our domestic literature spoke about its terrible role in the fate of the Russian people. Here it is necessary to name the names of Lydia Chukovskaya, Yuri Bondarev and Trifonov. But AI Solzhenitsyn was among the first to speak about our tragic past. His story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" became a book of life and artistic truth, heralding the future end of the Stalin era.
The path of "objectionable" topics to the reader is thorny at any time. And even today there continue to be examples when one lie is replaced by another. The point is also that the totalitarian consciousness is not capable of any kind of enlightenment. Breaking free from the tenacious pincers of dogmatic thinking is very difficult. That is why for many years dullness and like-mindedness were considered the norm.
And so, from the standpoint of this merged experience - the intelligentsia and the people, who went through the inhuman way of the cross and experienced the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn puts his “camp” in the Soviet press
The story is “One day of Ivan Denisovich”. After long negotiations with the authorities, A.T. Tvardovsky receives permission from N.S. Khrushchev for the publication of "One day ...". In the 11th issue of "New World" for 1962, the story was published, its author suddenly becomes a world-famous writer. Not a single publication of the times of the "thaw", and indeed for many years Gorbachev's "perestroika", which continued it for many years, had a resonance and force of influence on the course of national history.
The slightly opened crack into the "top secret" world of the Stalinist gas chamber not only revealed one of the most terrible secrets of the 20th century. The truth about the Gulag (still very small, almost intimate, in comparison with the future monolith of the “Archipelago”) showed “to all progressive mankind” 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 merciless "reforging" of the "old" man.
As was the custom of all party leaders in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev tried to use Solzhenitsyn, along with the story, as a "wheel and cog" in 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 the 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 genuinely truthful works of art, no matter how negative aspects of life they touch, if they help the people in their struggle for a new society, unite and strengthen their strength.”
The condition under which the party supported works concerning the "negative aspects of life" was by no means accidental: art and literature - "from party positions" - are needed in order to help in the "struggle for the new society", and not against it. in order to unite and strengthen the forces of the communists, and not to split them up and disarm them in the face of an ideological adversary. It was far from clear to all party leaders and writers who applauded Khrushchev in 1962-1963 that Solzhenitsyn and Khrushchev pursued different goals, 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 within.
Only Solzhenitsyn understood this at the time. 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 Novomirovsky 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 XX Party Congress"; that some features of Shukhov “formed and became stronger 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 people precisely because they were Soviet in their souls, that they never identified the evil done to them with the party, with our system."
Perhaps the authors of critical articles did this in order to support Solzhenitsyn and protect his offspring from the attacks of the 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 the story could see the light of day 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 already by that time from socialist ideals, from the very idea of "Sovietness". "One day..." is just a small cell of a huge organism called Gulag. In turn, the GULAG is a mirror image 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. 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, more precisely, 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 it a man?.. This question is asked by the reader, who opens the first pages of the story and seems to be plunging into a nightmarish, hopeless and endless dream. All the interests of prisoner Shch-854 seem to revolve around the simplest animal needs of the body: how to “mow down” an extra portion of gruel, how not to start a cold under the shirt at minus twenty-seven during a stage shmon, how to save the last crumbs of energy in a weakened chronic hunger and exhausting work body - in a word, how to survive in the camp hell.
And this is not bad for the dexterous and savvy Russian peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Summing up the day he lived through, the main character rejoices at the successes achieved: for the extra seconds of morning nap he was not put in a punishment cell, the brigadier closed the percentage well - the brigade will receive extra grams of rations, Shukhov himself bought tobacco for two hidden rubles, and the disease that began in the morning was overcome on the masonry wall of the CHP.
All the events of the story seem to convince the reader that everything human is left behind barbed wire. The stage leaving for work is a solid mass of gray padded jackets. The names have been lost. The only thing that confirms the individuality is the camp number. Human life is devalued. An ordinary prisoner is subordinate to everyone - from the guard and escort who are in the service to the cook and foreman of the barracks, quiet prisoners like him. They can deprive him of lunch, put him in a punishment cell, providing him with tuberculosis for life, or even shoot him.
And yet behind all the inhuman realities of camp life there are human traits. They manifest themselves in the character of Ivan Denisovich, in the monumental figure of brigadier Andrei Prokofyevich, in the desperate rebelliousness of the captain Buinovsky, in the inseparability of the “brothers” - the Estonians, in the episodic image of an old intellectual who is serving his third term and, nevertheless, does not want to give up decent human resources. manners.
There is an opinion that it is time to stop remembering the horrors of the Stalinist repressions long gone, that the memoirs of eyewitnesses overflowed the book market of the political space. Solzhenitsyn's story cannot be attributed to the category of opportunistic "one-day" stories. The Nobel Prize winner is faithful 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, cheerful Russian spirit. Such are the peasants in the poem "To whom it is good to live in Russia." Everyone complains about their fate: both the priest and the landowner, but the peasant (even the last beggar) retains the ability to rejoice at the fact that he is alive.
So is Ivan Denisovich. And ingenuity is inherent in him: everywhere he manages to be the first, he gets everything for the brigade, not forgetting, however, at the same time himself. And sadness is alien to him. Small household successes bring joy to Shukhov, when his skill and ingenuity help to cheat cruel oppressors and overcome harsh circumstances.
The “Russian character” will not disappear anywhere. Maybe he is smart only with a practical mind. But his soul, which, it would seem, should have become hardened, hardened, does not lend itself to “corrosion”. Prisoner Shch-854 is not depersonalized, not dehumanized. He is capable of empathy and compassion. He worries about the foreman, who shields the brigade from the camp authorities. He sympathizes with the reliable Baptist Alyoshka, who does not know how to earn a little for himself on his reliability. Helps the weak, but not humiliated, who have not learned to “jackal”. Even the insignificant camp "moron" Fetyukov sometimes feels sorry for him, overcoming the healthy contempt of a man who managed to maintain his dignity in bestial conditions.
Sometimes Shukhov's pity reaches unrealistic limits: he often notices that you cannot envy both the guards and the watchmen on the towers, because they are forced to stand motionless in the cold, while the prisoner can warm himself on the masonry of the wall.
Love for work also makes Shukhov related to the characters of Nekrasov's poem. He is just as talented and happy in his work as a stonemason from Olonchan, who is able to “crush 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 prisoners related, turns them into a kind of family. An inextricable mutual guarantee binds them. The betrayal of one can cost the lives of many.
A paradoxical situation arises. Deprived of liberty, driven behind barbed wire, counted like a herd of sheep, prisoners 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 was appointed to the punishment cell, Shukhov and Kilgas lay down for themselves and the inexperienced Senka, and defend Brigadier Pavlo with his chest. Yes, of course, 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 secured a comfortable existence for itself by turning the prisoners into its personal slaves. The guards treat them with contempt, being fully convinced that they themselves live like human beings. But it is this world that has an animal appearance. Such is Warden Volkovsky, capable of whipping a man for the slightest offense. Such are the escorts who are ready to shoot a “spy” who was late for roll call - a Moldavian who fell asleep from fatigue at the workplace. Such is the overfed cook and his henchmen, who drive the prisoners away from the dining room with a crutch. It was they, the executioners, who violated human laws and thereby excluded themselves from the human society.
Despite the terrible details of camp life that make up the existential background, Solzhenitsyn's story is optimistic in spirit. It proves that even in the last degree of humiliation it is possible to preserve a person in oneself.
Ivan Denisovich does not seem to feel like a Soviet person, does not identify himself with the Soviet government. Let us recall the scene where the captain Buinovsky explains to Ivan Denisovich why the sun is at its highest at one o'clock in the afternoon, and not at 12 o'clock (according to the decree, time was set one hour ahead). And Shukhov's genuine astonishment: " Not even the sun theirs does it follow the decrees?“It’s wonderful that “theirs” in the mouth of Ivan Denisovich: I am me, and I live by my own laws, and they are they, they have their own rules, and there is a distinct distance between us.
Shukhov, a prisoner of 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, how the majority lived - it was difficult; When the war began, he went to fight and fought honestly until he was captured. But he has 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 survive?
It seems that everything in Shukhov is focused on one thing - just to survive: “Shukhov was beaten a lot in counterintelligence. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign - a wooden pea coat, if you sign - at least you live a little longer. each step. The morning began like this: "Shukhov never slept through the rise, he always got up on it - before the divorce there was an hour and a half of his time, not official, and whoever knows camp life can always earn extra money: sewing a cover for someone from an old lining mittens; give a rich brigadier dry felt boots right on the bed, so that he does not stomp barefoot around the heap, do not choose; or run through the supply rooms, where you need to serve someone, sweep or bring 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 warder see you alone, but only in the crowd." He has a special pocket sewn under his quilted jacket, where he puts the saved ration of bread to eat not hastily, “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 shoe knife was earnings, there was bread! It was a pity to quit. And Shukhov put it in a cotton mitt. "After work, bypassing the dining room (!), Ivan Denisovich runs to the mailbox to take a queue for Caesar, so that "Caesar ... Shukhov owes money." And so - every day. It seems that Shukhov lives one day , no, he lives for the future, thinks about the next day, wonders how to live it, although I'm not sure that they will be released on time, that they don’t “solder” another ten. Shukhov is not sure that he will be released, he will see his own, but he lives as if he is sure.
Ivan Denisovich does not think about the so-called accursed 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 what he’s in prison for, he doesn’t seem to be trying to comprehend what happened to him: “It is believed in the case that Shukhov was imprisoned for treason. And he testified that yes, he surrendered, wanting to change home, but returned from captivity because he was carrying out the task of German intelligence. What a task - neither Shukhov himself could come up with, nor the investigator. So they just left it - the task. " Shukhov addresses this issue for the only time throughout the story. His answer sounds too generalized to be the result of a deep analysis: "And why did I sit down? Because they didn't prepare for war in 1941, for that? What have I got to do with it?"
Why is that? Obviously, because Ivan Denisovich belongs to those who are called a natural, natural person. Natural man, 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 one straight slurry. How hot it went, spilled over his body - his insides are all fluttering towards the gruel. Good, good! Here it is, a short moment, for which the prisoner lives." "You can eat up two hundred grams, you can smoke a second cigarette, you can sleep. Shukhov just cheered up from a good day, he doesn't even feel like sleeping." "While the bosses sort it out, snuggle up somewhere warmer, sit down, sit, you'll still break your back. It's good if it's near the stove - wrap the footcloths and warm them a little. Then your feet will be warm all day long. And even without a stove - everything is fine." “Now it seems to have gotten used to the shoes: in October Shukhov received hefty, hard-nosed boots, with room for two warm footcloths. For a week as a birthday boy, he kept tapping with brand new heels. “Shukhov fell asleep quite satisfied. Today he had a lot of luck today: they didn’t put him in the punishment cell, they didn’t send the brigade to the Sotsgorodok, at lunch he mowed down porridge, didn’t get caught with a hacksaw on a shmon, worked in the evening with Caesar and bought tobacco. And he didn’t get sick , overcame. A day passed, nothing marred, almost happy. "
And Ivan Denisovich took root in Ust-Izhma, although the work was harder and the conditions were worse; goner was there - and survived.
Natural man is far from such an occupation as reflection, analysis; an eternally tense and restless thought does not pulsate in him, the terrible question does not arise: why? why? Ivan Denisovich’s thought “besides, everything returns, everything stirs up again: will they find soldering in the mattress? Will they be released in the medical unit in the evening? Will the captain be imprisoned or not? And how did Caesar get warm linen in his hands?
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 wholeness of consciousness largely explains Shukhov's vitality, 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.
Shukhov is trusted because they know: he is honest, decent, lives in good conscience. Caesar, with a calm soul, hides a food parcel with Shukhov. Estonians lend tobacco, they are sure that they will pay it back.
Shukhov's high degree of adaptability has nothing to do with opportunism, humiliation, loss of human dignity. Shukhov "strongly remembered the words of his first foreman Kuzemin: 'Here's who is dying in the camp: who licks bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather'".
These saving ways are sought for by people who are morally weak, trying to survive at the expense of others, "on someone else's blood." Physical survival is thus accompanied by moral destruction. Not that Shukhov. He is always happy to stock up on extra rations, get tobacco, but not like Fetyukov - a jackal who "looks into his mouth, and his eyes burn," and "slobbers": "Let's pull it once!" Shukhov will get a cigarette so as not to drop himself: Shukhov saw that “his teammate Caesar smoked, and smoked not a pipe, but a cigarette, which means you can shoot. But Shukhov did not ask directly, but stopped very close to Caesar and half-turned looked past him." Occupying a queue for a parcel for Caesar, he does not ask: “Well, have you received it?” - because it would be a hint that he was in line 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 common work - and the further, the stronger he established himself. 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 to life."
This attitude was formed back in that other life, in the camp it only received a test, it passed the test.
Shukhov is reading a letter from home. The wife writes about dyeers: “But there is still one new, fun craft - this is carpet dyeing. Someone brought stencils from the war, and since then it has gone on, and more and more such masters of dyeers are being recruited: they don’t belong anywhere, they don’t work anywhere, for one month they help the collective farm, just in haymaking and cleaning, but for that for eleven months the collective farm gives him a certificate that such and such a collective farmer has been released on his own business and there are no arrears for him. not a foot to the collective farm, and will also become a painter. And then they will rise from the poverty in which she is beating. "
"... Shukhov sees that people have blocked the direct road, but people do not get lost: they go around and thus live. Shukhov would have made his way around. Earnings, you see, are easy, fire. And it seems a shame to lag behind your villagers ... But Ivan Denisovich would not like to take on those carpets. For them, swagger is needed, impudence, to poke the police on the paw. Shukhov, on the other hand, has been trampling the earth for forty years, there are no half teeth and there is baldness on his head, he never gave or took a single with whom, and did not learn in the camp.
Easy money - they do not weigh anything, and there is no such instinct that, they say, you have earned.
No, not a light, or rather, not a light attitude towards life in Shukhov. His principle: earned - get it, but "do not stretch your belly on someone else's good." And Shukhov works at the "object" in the same way
In good faith, as well as at will. And the point is not only that he works in a brigade, but "in a camp, a brigade is such a device that not the authorities goad the prisoners, but the prisoners each other. It's like this: either everyone else, or everyone die."
For Shukhov, there is something more in this work - the joy of a master who is fluent in his work, feeling inspiration, a surge of energy.
With what touching care Shukhov hides his trowel. “A trowel is a big deal for a bricklayer, if he is light and handy. However, at each facility there is such an order: they received all the tools in the morning, handed them over in the evening. And what tool you grab tomorrow is out of luck. But one day Shukhov shortchanged the toolmaker and the best trowel healed. And now in the evening he hides it, and every morning, if the masonry is taken. And this is felt practical peasant thrift.
Shukhov forgets about everything during his work - he is so engrossed in the matter: "And how all thoughts were swept out of my head. Shukhov did not remember anything now and did not care, but only thought - how to put up and remove the pipe elbows so that they do not smoke."
“And Shukhov never saw a distant glare where the sun gleamed across the snow, nor how hard workers wandered around the zone from heaters. Shukhov saw only his wall - from the junction to 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 had previously been laid by a mason unknown to him, without understanding or hacking, and now Shukhov got used to the wall as with his own. " Shukhov is even sorry that it's time to finish work: "What, disgusting thing, the day at work is so short? As soon as you fall down before 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 brigadier also ordered - to spare the mortar, behind its wall - and they ran. But Shukhov is arranged in such a stupid way, and they can’t wean him in any way: he regrets every thing so that he doesn’t die in vain.” This is the whole Ivan Denisovich.
That is why the conscientious Shukhov is perplexed, reading his wife's letter, how can one not work in his village: "But what about haymaking?" Shukhov's peasant soul is worried, although he is far from home, from his own people and "you will not understand their life."
Labor is life for Shukhov. The Soviet authorities did not corrupt him, they could not force him to hack, to shirk. That way of life, those norms and unwritten laws by which the peasant lived for centuries, turned out to be stronger. They are eternal, rooted in nature itself, which takes revenge for the thoughtless, careless attitude towards it. And everything else is superficial, temporary, transient. That is why Shukhov is from another life, a past, patriarchal one.
Common sense. It is he who guides Shukhov in any life situation. Common sense is stronger than fear even before the afterlife. “I’m not against God, you understand,” Shukhov explains to Alyoshka, a Baptist, “I willingly believe in God. Only now I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Why do you think we are fools, promise us heaven and hell?” And then, answering Alyoshka's question why he doesn't pray to God, Shukhov says: "Because, Alyoshka, those prayers, like statements, either do not reach, or the complaint is denied."
A sober look at life stubbornly notices all the inconsistencies in the relationship between the parishioners and the church, or rather, the clergy, who are responsible for the mediating mission.
So Ivan Denisovich lives according to the old peasant rule: trust in God, but don’t make a mistake yourself! On a par with Shukhov are such as Senka Klevshin, the Latvian Kildigs, the captain Buinovsky, the assistant to the foreman Pavlo and, of course, the foreman Tyurin himself. These are the ones who, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “take the blow.” They are highly inherent in the ability to live without dropping oneself and “never dropping words in vain”, which distinguishes Ivan Denisovich. It is no coincidence, apparently, that most of them are rural, “practical” people.
The captain Buynovsky is also one of those “who take the blow,” but, as it seems to Shukhov, often with senseless risk. Here, for example, in the morning at the shmona, the warders “order the quilted jackets to be dismissed (where everyone hid the warmth of the barracks), shirts to unbutton - and they climb to feel if anything has been put on bypassing the charter.” “Buinovsky - in the throat, he got used to his destroyers, but there are no three months in the camp:
You have no right to undress people in the cold! You don't know the ninth article of the criminal code - they have. They know. You, brother, don’t know it yet.” And what was the result? Everything would have worked out." And Shukhov supported him: "That's right, groan and rot. And if you resist, you will break."
Senseless and aimless is the protest of the captain. He hopes only for one thing: "The time will come, and the captain will learn to live, but he still does not know how." After all, what is "ten days of the strict": "Ten days of the local punishment cell, if you serve them strictly to the end, it means to lose your health for life. Tuberculosis, and you won't get out of the hospitals."
In the evening the overseer came to the barracks, looking for Buynovsky, asked the brigadier, but he was getting dark, "the foreman pulls, save Buynovsky at least for the night, hold out until the check." So the warden shouted out: "Buinovsky - is there?" "Huh? Me!" replied the captain. So the quick louse is always the first to hit the comb," concludes Shukhov disapprovingly. No, the captain does not know how to live. Against its background, the practicality, non-vanity of Ivan Denisovich is even more visibly 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 ripped off the shabby front-line ones and gave camp, pig fur”); they work in the cold, and Caesar sits in the office warmly. Shukhov does not condemn Caesar: everyone wants to survive. But the fact that Caesar accepts the services of Ivan Denisovich as a matter of course does not adorn him. Shukhov brought him lunch in the office "cleared his throat, embarrassed to interrupt an educated conversation. Well, there was no need for him to stand here either. Caesar turned around, extended his hand for porridge, at Shukhov and did not look, as if the porridge itself had arrived through the air ... ". "Educated conversations" is one of the hallmarks of Caesar's life. He is an educated man, an intellectual. The cinema that Caesar is engaged in is a game, that is, a fictional, fake life (especially from the point of view of a prisoner). Caesar himself is also busy with a mind game, an attempt to move away from camp life. Even in the way he smokes, “in order to arouse a strong thought in himself, there is a graceful aestheticism, far from rough reality.
Caesar's conversation with convict X-123, a wiry old man, about Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible" is noteworthy: "objectivity requires acknowledging that Eisenstein is a genius. "John the Terrible" - isn't that brilliant? Dance of guardsmen with a mask! The 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, and original junction of shots. The purpose of art in this case 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 so important for Caesar. to justify Eisenstein, and most likely himself, Caesar says that only such an interpretation would be missed. the old man explodes. - So don't say you're a genius! Say that we're a toady, the dog's order has been fulfilled. Geniuses do not tailor the interpretation to the taste of tyrants!"
So it turns out that the "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 both 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, the silent witness of the dialogue, all this is "an educated conversation." But about "good feelings" Shukhov understands well - whether it is "that the brigadier is "in a good soul", or about how he himself "earned money" with Caesar. "Good feelings" are the real properties of living people, and Caesar's professionalism is, as Solzhenitsyn himself would later write, "education."
Cinema (Stalinist, Soviet cinema) and life! Caesar cannot but inspire respect for his love for his work, his passion for his profession; but one cannot get rid of the thought that the desire to talk about Eisenstein is largely due to the fact that Caesar sat warm all day, smoked his pipe, did not even go to the dining room ("he did not humiliate himself either here or in the camp," the author notes. He lives away from real camp life.
Here Caesar slowly approached his brigade, which had gathered, waiting for it to be possible to go to the zone after work:
How are you, Captain?
Gretom does not understand the frozen. An empty question - how are you?
But how? The captain shrugs his shoulders. - I’ve worked hard, straightened my back. "Caesar in the brigade" adheres to one rank, he has no one else to take his soul with. "Yes, Buinovsky looks at the scenes from" The Battleship ..." with completely different eyes: "... worms in meat just like rain creep. Were they really like that? I think they would have brought meat to our camp now instead of our shitty fish, but not mine, without scraping, they would have gone into the cauldron, so we would ... "
Reality remains hidden from Caesar. He spends his intellectual potential very selectively. He, like Shukhov, does not seem to be interested in "uncomfortable" questions. But if Shukhov, with all his being, is not intended not only to solve, but also to pose such problems, then Caesar, apparently, deliberately avoids them. What is justified for Shukhov turns out to be a disaster for the film director, if not direct guilt. Shukhova sometimes even feels sorry for Caesar: "I suppose he thinks a lot about himself, Caesar, but he doesn't understand life at all."
According to Solzhenitsyn, in life he understands more than other associates, including not only Caesar (an involuntary, and sometimes voluntary accomplice of Stalin's "Caesarism"), but also the captain
Both the brigadier and Alyoshka, the Baptist, all the characters in the story, Ivan Denisovich himself, with his simple peasant mind, peasant mind, and clear practical view of the world, Solzhenitsyn, of course, is aware of the fact that Shukhov does not need to be expected and required to comprehend 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 the long camp experience, the difficult historical experience of Soviet history. In the person of the quiet and patient Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recreated an image of the Russian people, almost symbolic in its generalization, capable of enduring unprecedented suffering, deprivation, bullying of the communist regime, the yoke of Soviet power and the thieves' lawlessness of the Archipelago and, in spite of everything, survive in this "tenth circle "hell. And at the same time preserve kindness to people, humanity, condescension to human weaknesses and intolerance to moral vices.
One day of the hero Solzhenitsyn, which ran before the gaze of a shocked reader, grows to the limits of a whole human life, to the scale of a people's destiny, to a symbol of an entire era in the history of Russia. "A day passed, not overshadowed by anything, almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added ..."
Even then, Solzhenitsyn, if he did not know, then had a presentiment: the period that the Bolshevik Party had wound up with the country was coming to an end. And for the sake of approaching this hour, it was worth fighting, regardless of any personal sacrifices.
And it all started with the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" ... From the presentation of a simple peasant's view of the Gulag. Perhaps if Solzhenitsyn had begun 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 come of it. The truth about the Gulag would not have seen the light of day in their homeland for a long time; foreign publications would probably have preceded domestic ones (if they had been 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 issue of Tvardovsky's magazine for 1962. On this occasion, Solzhenitsyn later wrote in his “Essays on Literary Life” “A calf butted an oak tree”: “I won’t say that such an exact plan, but I had a true hunch-premonition: they cannot remain indifferent to this peasant Ivan Denisovich the top peasant Alexander Tvardovsky and the riding peasant Nikita Khrushchev. And so it came true: not even poetry and not even politics decided the fate of my story, but this is its ultimate peasant essence, so much ridiculed, trampled and cursed with us since the Great Break.
Conclusion
Quite a bit of 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 a deep and, it seems, already irretrievable past. The word "anti-Soviet" has lost its sinister and fatal meaning for culture. 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 "are layered on top of each other, and such transitional periods of history are usually filled with sharp struggle, intense disputes, a clash of the old, trying to hold on, and the new, conquering semantic territories for itself. What is it not a pity to part with, and what is dangerous to lose, irretrievably lose?What cultural values turned out to be true, withstood the test of time, and which are imaginary, false, forcibly imposed on society, the people, the intelligentsia?
It would seem that in those days tyranny in the face of the state won a complete victory over literature and the artistic intelligentsia. As soon as at least one case of dissent, spiritual opposition arose somewhere, the whole power of the repressive-punitive system immediately fell upon the offender, depriving him of his freedom, livelihood and peace of mind. But even in such an environment of "terror", it was impossible to limit the inner freedom of the spirit, the responsibility of writers to the words they uttered. This did not allow them to remain silent, consigning to oblivion the reliable facts of history, which the state carefully concealed from the majority of the population.
Soviet literature, or rather, its "opposition" part did not call for "resistance to evil by force." Its strength was in another, albeit slow, gradual, but inevitable loosening of the totalitarian foundations, in the decomposition of the fundamental ideological principles, ideals of the totalitarian system, in the gradual exposure of faith in the infallibility and impeccability of the once chosen path.
The strength of Soviet opposition literature lay in its subtle but effective exposure of the cult of leaders. Solzhenitsyn himself later wrote about this: “I am not hopeful that you will want to benevolently delve into considerations that you have not requested in the service, although a rather rare compatriot who does not stand on the ladder subordinate to you, you can neither be dismissed from his post, nor lowered, not promoted, not awarded. Not encouraging, but I am trying to say here briefly the main thing: what I consider salvation and good for our people, to which all of you, and I, belong by birth. you are also subject to primary care, that you are not alien to your origin, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and native spaces, that you are not without nationality.
However, like many previous writers of the "other" Soviet literature, Solzhenitsyn made a mistake in dealing with the Soviet leaders, dealing with letters and essays, articles, stories, poems. Solzhenitsyn was seen as just another enemy, a traitor to the Motherland, who had to be fought. At best, he was recognized as a schizophrenic. In any case, it turned out that the “leaders” of the country and the writer from the opposition had nothing in common even on a common national basis.
Subsequently, another fighter against tyranny in the Soviet Union, Academician A.D. Sakharov writes about Solzhenitsyn as follows: "The special, exceptional role of Solzhenitsyn 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 secrecy. This role of Solzhenitsyn was very clearly manifested already in his story" One day of Ivan Denisovich" and now in the great book "The Gulag Archipelago", before which I bow." "Solzhenitsyn is a giant of the struggle for human dignity in the modern tragic world."
Solzhenitsyn spent his entire creative life trying to expose and overthrow communism in the USSR, he opened people's eyes to the Gulag Archipelago as the core of a misanthropic system. And all this time he was free from this system, he was free to feel, think, experience together with those who know from the inside how the repressive mechanism acts on a person.
Solzhenitsyn built a special structural composition that stretched from the fate of a simple prisoner Ivan Denisovich to the scale of the whole country, which is represented in it by islands interconnected by “sewer pipes”, human lives and social organization. In this composition, as if in advance, the author determines the attitude of readers to the Archipelago, which in fact is the main character.
Solzhenitsyn acted as a kind of first and last writer who worked in the genre of “artistic research experience”. Working in this direction, he managed to bring the problems of public morality closer to the reader so that the line between a person and a non-human became clearly visible. Relying on the example of his character Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn shows readers that it is the fortitude of a Russian person, his faith in himself, his ability to find a way out even in the most desperate situation that help him not to go beyond this line, to survive in a world of violence and lawlessness.
Just one day of the prisoner, who personifies the fate of more than one million people like him, managed to become a reflection of the history of our country, where “violence has nothing to hide behind, except lies, and lies have nothing to hold on to, except violence.” Having once embarked on the path of lies and violence, having chosen such a principle for itself, the leadership led the entire society along this path. This is how we lived for many years.
However, it is given to creative people, writers and artists, to see this lie under any mask, to see and win. “A lie can stand against much in the world - but not against art,” Solzhenitsyn said at the Nobel lecture. These words, like nothing else, characterize all his work. After all, it is not surprising that the Russian people have a proverb: “One word of truth will outweigh the whole world.”
And so it happened. Solzhenitsyn's work caused a striking resonance in the public mind. In the person of Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner of the Gulag, who took up his pen to tell people about the system of lies and violence that reigned in our society, Russian culture found a new source of its vitality.
Our duty is to keep in memory the feat of this man, because we have no right to forget what he did so that our society would finally know the truth about himself and those people who survived all the horrors of repression.
“Your cherished desire,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, addressing Soviet leaders in 1973, “so that our political system and ideological system do not change and stand like this for centuries. But this does not happen in history. Each system either finds a path of development or falls ". The way life turned out later proves the correctness of this great man, because the victory of the “word of truth” over the “world of violence” predicted in the “Nobel Lecture” really happened, no matter how hard our “leaders” tried to push it away.
Bibliography:
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: Memoirs and Portraits. M., 1989.
4. A. Solzhenitsyn A calf butted with an oak // Novy Mir. 1991. No. 6.
5. T.V.Gegina "The Gulag Archipelago" A.Solzhenitsyna: The Nature of Artistic Truth.
6. S. Zalygin Introductory article // New World. 1989. No. 8.
7. A.Zorin “Extramarital Legacy of the Gulag”// Novy Mir.1989. No. 8.
Historical epic A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
The abbreviation is included in the title of the book. Gulag, that is, the General Directorate of the State Security Camps USSR. The camps included in this system were scattered throughout the country like islands forming an archipelago. This gave Solzhenitsyn the basis for creating a metaphorical title for the work.
Created during the 1960s and 1970s, the epic novel is a continuation of the author's research into the history of Russia in the 20th century. In December 1973, the first volume of The Archipelago was published in Russian in Paris. In the USSR, this work was banned by censorship for many years and was released only in 1988.
The Gulag Archipelago, in many respects an autobiographical work by Solzhenitsyn, tells about the Soviet system that existed in the 1920s and 1950s. 20th century system of political repressions and camps for political prisoners.
The "Archipelago" traces the path that the convicts took "for treason" from arrest to the end of your sentence or life. Separate chapters of the work are devoted to the infamous camps on Solovetsky Islands, in Ekibastuz (on the territory of modern Kazakhstan), etc.
The novel-study "The Gulag Archipelago" is diverse in terms of issues, material, and styles of presentation. It combines historical investigation, sociological analysis, investigation materials, testimonies, an abundance of figures and statistical calculations, lyrical digressions and comments by the author. The narrative includes the memories and testimonies of many eyewitnesses of the events, letters and memoirs of 227 “camp inmates”. Solzhenitsyn himself called his book artistic research experience.
The author is interested in many problems related to the political history of Russia and the USSR. The writer's attention is also drawn to the policy of the Communist Party ( cm. CPSU), which appropriated to itself a monopoly on power and truth. This monopoly extended to the fate of individual members of the party itself and the leaders of the country, who were largely the victims of their own political decisions.
Solzhenitsyn was one of the first to depart from the official assessment of the causes of the first defeats Soviet army in 1941. at the beginning Great Patriotic War.
In the novel, Solzhenitsyn poses many moral problems, reflecting on the nature of evil beyond time and boundaries, on the inadmissibility of achieving even the most humane goal by inhuman means, on the collective guilt of the entire people before itself. The writer argues that the GULAG could have appeared as a phenomenon of the unity of victims and executioners through the fault of all those who were silent and obeyed when it was necessary to protest. The author encourages the reader "live no lies".
Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago became one of the most famous works of Russian literature of the 20th century. Excerpts from the epic novel are included in the school literature curriculum.
The title of the book came to be used in speech to refer to any system of political camps.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn:
- - in 1934-56, a division of the NKVD, which managed the system of forced labor camps ...
Russian encyclopedia
- - fix it. 1) Headquarters of the camps...
Universal additional practical explanatory dictionary by I. Mostitsky
- - a group of islands lying at short distances from each other. One and the same A. may include islands of different origin ...
Marine vocabulary
- - The Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps) was formed in the USSR in 1930 as a system of own OGPU camps. Her appearance was caused by the "influx" of prisoners from the village, which accompanied the policy of the CPSU on ...
Law Encyclopedia
- - a group of islands located close to each other and usually having the same origin and similar geol. structure...
Natural science. encyclopedic Dictionary
- - gr. islands lying at a short distance from each other, most often having the same origin and more or less similar geol. structure...
Geological Encyclopedia
- - a group of nearby islands in the ocean or sea, most often having the same geological structure and origin and considered as a single whole ...
Ecological dictionary
- - in the USSR in 1934 - the 56th division of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which managed the system of forced labor camps ...
Modern Encyclopedia
- - in the USSR in 1934-56, a division of the NKVD, which managed the system of forced labor camps ...
Big encyclopedic dictionary
- - The title of an essay in 3 volumes by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn on the history of repressions in the USSR...
Dictionary of winged words and expressions
- - R. GULA/Ga...
Spelling Dictionary of the Russian Language
- - GULAG, -a, husband. Reduction: the main administration of the camps, as well as an extensive network of concentration camps during the mass repressions. Prisoners of the Gulag...
Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov
- - GULAG m. 1. = Gulag The Main Directorate of Camps and Prisons, which was one of the bodies in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. 2. = Gulag Network of camps. 3. transfer....
Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova
- - Gulag m ....
Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova
- - GUL "...
Russian spelling dictionary
- - noun, number of synonyms: 1 management ...
Synonym dictionary
"GULAG ARCHIPELAGO" in books
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149. Breakdown of the mid-1950s. Apostle Paul in the Kengir camp. Communism and the Gulag Archipelago
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