The story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a true depiction of the Siberian everyday life of the victims of Stalin's repressions. The work allows the reader to imagine what fate awaited those who did not please the Soviet regime. At school, they study it in high school. The analysis of the work presented in the article will help you quickly prepare for the lesson and refresh your knowledge about the story before the exam.

Brief analysis

Year of writing - 1959.

History of creation- AI Solzhenitsyn conceived the work in the winter of 1950-1951, when he was in a camp in northern Kazakhstan. The idea was realized only 9 years later in 1959 in Ryazan.

Subject- The work develops the theme of the camp life of political prisoners, victims of the Stalinist regime.

Composition- A. I. Solzhenitsyn described one day in the life of a prisoner, so the time frame from morning to evening, or rather, from getting up to lights out, became the basis for the composition. The analyzed work is an interweaving of stories, reflections, in which details play an important role.

Genre- A story, although before publication the editor recommended A. Solzhenitsyn to call his work a story, and the author heeded the advice.

Direction- Realism.

History of creation

The history of the creation of the work is connected with the camp life of A. Solzhenitsyn. The writer conceived it in 1950-1951. Then he served time in northern Kazakhstan. Later, Alexander Isaevich recalled: “In 1950, on some long winter camp day, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought: how to describe our entire camp life?” He decided that a detailed description of one day in the life of those who were in "eternal exile" was enough. Alexander Isaevich began to implement the plan 9 years after returning from exile. It took about a month and a half to write the story (May-June 1959).

1961 - the year of writing a version of the work without some of the sharpest political moments. In the same 1961, Solzhenitsyn handed over the manuscript to the editor-in-chief of the journal Novy Mir, A. Tvardovsky. The author did not sign the work, but A. Berzer, an employee of the editorial office, added the pseudonym A. Ryazansky. The story made a “great impression” on the editor, as evidenced by the entry in his workbook.

The editors suggested that Alexander Isaevich change the name: and the manuscript was called “Sch-854. One day for one convict. The publishers also made adjustments to the genre definition, suggesting that the work be called a story.

The author sent the story to fellow writers and asked them to write reviews about it. So he hoped to advance his work for publication. However, Alexander Isaevich understood that the work might not pass censorship. They turned to N. Khrushchev for help, and he obtained permission to publish it. Solzhenitsen's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" saw the world on the pages of the Novy Mir magazine in 1962.

The publication of the work was a grandiose event. Reviews about him appeared in all magazines and newspapers. Criticism considered that the story became a destructive force for the hitherto dominant socialist realism.

Subject

For a better assimilation of the material on the story of A. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", its analysis should begin with a description of the motives.

In the literature of the "post-Stalin" period, the motives of repressions and exiles are actively developing. They occupy a special place in the work of writers who happened to be in the camps. The analyzed work reveals the theme of the life of political prisoners in exile. Main heroes stories - prisoners and guards.

A. Solzhenitsyn describes only one day in the life of a man exiled to the northern regions, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, which determined and the meaning of the name.

This is a peasant who honestly defended his homeland at the front. Shukhov was taken prisoner, but he managed to escape, for which he was sent into exile. Inhuman conditions of life could not kill a truly peasant soul. Ivan Denisovich retained his innocence and kindness. At the same time, he was cunning. The inner core helped him survive.

In addition to Ivan Denisovich, there are other images of prisoners in the work. With undisguised admiration, A. Solzhenitsyn tells about Alyosha the Baptist, who, under the pressure of conditions, did not renounce his views, about Ukrainians praying before eating. Also, the reader can watch the commander, who took care of his wards, like a real father.

Each image is a tool for revealing a certain facet of camp life. In the context of the main theme, the problems of the story are formed. Particular attention should be paid to such problems: human cruelty, the injustice of the regime, mutual assistance as a way of survival, love for one's neighbor, faith in God. The author only raises questions that are acute for his era, but the reader must draw his own conclusions.

story idea- to show how the political regime can destroy destinies, cripple human bodies and souls. A. Solzhenitsyn condemns the repressions so that the descendants do not make such mistakes.

Composition

The structure of the story is dictated by its content and the time frame of the events described. First, A. Solzhenitsyn talks about getting up at five in the morning. This is the exposition, which takes the reader to the camp barracks and introduces him to the main character.

The development of events - all the troubles that Ivan Denisovich gets into during the day. First, he is caught lying after the “rise”, then he is sent to wash the floors in the guard's room. Conversations with Alexei the Baptist and an agreement with a prisoner who received a rich package also belong to the development of events.

There are at least two climaxes in the work - the episode when the warder leads Shukhov to serve his sentence and the scene where Caesar hides food from the guards. The denouement - lights out: Shukhov falls asleep, realizing that he lived the day happily.

Main characters

Genre

A. I. Solzhenitsyn, at the urging of the editors, defined the work as a story. Actually, it's a story. In it, one can notice such signs of a small literary genre: a small volume, the author's attention is concentrated on Shukhov's storyline, the system of images is not very ramified. The direction of the work is realism, since the author truthfully describes human life.

Artwork test

Analysis Rating

Average rating: 4.2. Total ratings received: 733.

Frame from the film "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1970)

The peasant and front-line soldier Ivan Denisovich Shukhov turned out to be a "state criminal", a "spy" and ended up in one of Stalin's camps, like millions of Soviet people who were convicted without guilt during the "cult of personality" and mass repressions. He left home on June 23, 1941, on the second day after the start of the war with Nazi Germany, “... in February of the forty-second year, on the North-Western [front], they surrounded their entire army, and they didn’t throw anything to eat from the planes, and there were no planes. They got to the point that they cut hooves from horses that had died, soaked that cornea in water and ate, ”that is, the command of the Red Army left its soldiers to die surrounded. Together with a group of fighters, Shukhov ended up in German captivity, fled from the Germans and miraculously reached his own. A careless story about how he was captured led him to a Soviet concentration camp, since the state security agencies indiscriminately considered all those who escaped from captivity to be spies and saboteurs.

The second part of Shukhov's memoirs and reflections during the long camp work and a short rest in the barracks refers to his life in the countryside. From the fact that his relatives do not send him food (in a letter to his wife he himself refused to send parcels), we understand that the people in the village are starving no less than in the camp. His wife writes to Shukhov that the collective farmers make a living painting fake carpets and selling them to the townspeople.

Leaving aside flashbacks and incidental details about life outside the barbed wire, the whole story takes exactly one day. In this short period of time, a panorama of camp life unfolds before us, a kind of “encyclopedia” of life in the camp.

Firstly, a whole gallery of social types and at the same time bright human characters: Caesar is a metropolitan intellectual, a former filmmaker, who, however, in the camp leads a "lordly" life compared to Shukhov: he receives food parcels, enjoys some benefits during work ; Kavtorang - repressed naval officer; an old convict who was still in tsarist prisons and hard labor (the old revolutionary guard, who did not find a common language with the policy of Bolshevism in the 30s); Estonians and Latvians - the so-called "bourgeois nationalists"; the Baptist Alyosha - the spokesman for the thoughts and way of life of a very heterogeneous religious Russia; Gopchik is a sixteen-year-old teenager whose fate shows that repression did not distinguish between children and adults. Yes, and Shukhov himself is a characteristic representative of the Russian peasantry with his special business acumen and organic way of thinking. Against the background of these people who suffered from repression, a figure of a different series emerges - the head of the regime, Volkov, who regulates the life of prisoners and, as it were, symbolizes the merciless communist regime.

Secondly, a detailed picture of camp life and work. Life in the camp remains life with its visible and invisible passions and subtlest experiences. They are mainly related to the problem of obtaining food. They feed little and badly with a terrible gruel with frozen cabbage and small fish. A kind of art of life in the camp is to get yourself an extra ration of bread and an extra bowl of gruel, and if you're lucky, some tobacco. For this, one has to go to the greatest tricks, curry favor with "authorities" like Caesar and others. At the same time, it is important to preserve one’s human dignity, not to become a “descended” beggar, like, for example, Fetyukov (however, there are few of them in the camp). This is important not even from lofty considerations, but out of necessity: a “descended” person loses the will to live and will surely die. Thus, the question of preserving the human image in oneself becomes a matter of survival. The second vital issue is the attitude towards forced labor. Prisoners, especially in winter, work in hunting, almost competing with each other and brigade with brigade, in order not to freeze and in a peculiar way "reduce" the time from bed to bed, from feeding to feeding. On this stimulus the terrible system of collective labor is built. But nevertheless, it does not completely destroy the natural joy of physical labor in people: the scene of building a house by a team where Shukhov works is one of the most inspired in the story. The ability to work “correctly” (not overstraining, but not shirking), as well as the ability to get yourself extra rations, is also a high art. As well as the ability to hide from the eyes of the guards a piece of a saw that turned up, from which the camp craftsmen make miniature knives to exchange for food, tobacco, warm clothes ... In relation to the guards, who constantly carry out "shmons", Shukhov and the rest of the prisoners are in the position of wild animals : they must be more cunning and dexterous than armed people who have the right to punish them and even shoot them for deviating from the camp regime. To deceive the guards and the camp authorities is also a high art.

That day, which the hero narrates about, was, in his own opinion, successful - “they didn’t put them in a punishment cell, they didn’t kick out the brigade to Sotsgorodok (work in a bare field in winter - ed.), At lunchtime he mowed down porridge (he got an extra portion - ed.), the brigadier closed the percentage well (the system for evaluating camp labor - ed.), Shukhov laid the wall cheerfully, didn’t get caught with a hacksaw, worked part-time with Caesar in the evening and bought tobacco. And I didn't get sick, I got over it. The day passed, nothing marred, 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 ... "

At the end of the story, a brief dictionary of thieves' expressions and specific camp terms and abbreviations that are found in the text is given.

retold

Solzhenitsyn's Spiral of Treason Rzezach Tomasz

The story "One day of Ivan Denisovich"

In the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a truly great day has come.

In 1962, one of the leading Soviet literary magazines, Novy Mir, published his story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The action in it, as you know, is played out in a forced labor camp.

Much of what for many years resonated with excruciating pain in the heart of every honest person - the issue of Soviet forced labor camps - which was the object of speculation, hostile propaganda and slander in the bourgeois press, suddenly took on the form of a literary work containing an inimitable and unique imprint of personal impressions. .

It was the bomb. However, it did not explode immediately. Solzhenitsyn, according to N. Reshetovskaya, wrote this story at a rapid pace. Its first reader was L.K., who came to Solzhenitsyn in Ryazan on November 2, 1959.

“This is a typical production story,” he said. “And overloaded with details.” This is how L. K., an educated philologist, “a storehouse of literary erudition,” as he is called, expressed his competent opinion about this story.

This review is perhaps even stricter than Boris Lavrenev's long-standing assessment of Solzhenitsyn's early works. Typical production story. This means: the book, which in the Soviet Union of those years came out in the hundreds, is extreme schematism, nothing new either in form or in content. Nothing amazing! And yet it was L.K. who achieved the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The story was liked by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, and although he considered the author "a talented artist, but an inexperienced writer", he still gave him the opportunity to speak on the pages of the magazine. Tvardovsky belonged to those representatives of his generation, whose path was not so simple and smooth. This remarkable man and illustrious poet, by his nature, often suffered from the fact that he complicated some of the most ordinary problems of life. A communist poet who won the hearts of not only his people, but also millions of foreign friends with his immortal poems. The life of A. Tvardovsky, in his own words, was a permanent discussion: if he doubted anything, he simply and frankly expressed his views on objective reality, as if testing himself. He was true to fanaticism to the motto: "Everything that is talented is useful to Soviet society."

Tvardovsky supported the young author Solzhenitsyn, convinced that his work would benefit the cause of socialism. He believed into it, completely unaware that this experienced hack writer had already hidden several ready-made libels on the Soviet socialist system in different cities. And Tvardovsky defended it. His story was published - the bomb exploded. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was quickly published in the Soviet Union in three mass editions. And it was a hit with the reader. Letters came to Ryazan from Solzhenitsyn's former comrades in prison. Many of them recognized in the protagonist of this work their former foreman from the Ekibastuz camp. L. Samutin even came from distant Leningrad to personally meet the author and congratulate him.

“I saw in him a kindred spirit, a person who knows and understands the life we ​​have lived,” L. Samutin told me.

The story was immediately translated into almost all European languages. It is curious that this story was translated into Czech by a fairly well-known representative of the counter-revolutionary movement of 1968-1969, and one of the organizers of the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia, the son of a white émigré, a writer, especially enthusiastically welcomed its publication.

Solzhenitsyn immediately found himself where he had dreamed of climbing since Rostov times - on the top. Again first like at school. Malevich. His name was inclined in every way. It first appeared on the pages of the Western press. And the Solzhenitsyns immediately started a special folder with clippings of articles from the foreign press, which Alexander Isaevich, although he did not understand because of his ignorance of foreign languages, nevertheless often sorted through and carefully kept.

These were the days when he reveled in success.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was invited to the Kremlin and had a conversation with the person who brought the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" to life - N. S. Khrushchev. Without hiding his benevolence to Solzhenitsyn, he gave him a car, which he gave the nickname "Denis" in honor of his story. Then everything was done so that the writer, whom he believed, could move to a more comfortable apartment. The state not only provided him with a four-room apartment, but also allocated a well-maintained garage.

The path was open.

But was it a real success? And what caused it?

Prone to scientific analysis, L. K. makes the following discovery: “It is simply charming to find that out of 10 readers of Novy Mir who asked about the fate of Buinovsky’s captaincy, there were only 1.3 who were interested in whether Ivan Denisovich lived to be released. Readers were more interested in the camp as such, living conditions, the nature of work, the attitude of "prisoners" to work, the rules, etc."

On the pages of some foreign newspapers, one could read the remarks of more freely and critically thinking literary critics that attention is not yet a literary success, but a political game.

But what about Solzhenitsyn?

Reshetovskaya in her book describes that he was very upset by the review of Konstantin Simonov in Izvestia; disappointed to such an extent that Tvardovsky simply forced him to finish reading the article of the famous writer.

Solzhenitsyn became angry that Konstantin Simonov did not pay attention to his language. Solzhenitsyn should not be considered a literary dropout. In no case. He read a lot and understands literature. Therefore, he had to conclude: readers were interested not in the main character, but in the environment. A fellow writer with a sharp flair paid no attention to Solzhenitsyn's literary abilities. And the press focused more on the political aspect than on the literary merits of the story. It can be assumed that this conclusion forced Solzhenitsyn to spend more than one hour in sorrowful reflections. In short: for him, who already imagined himself an outstanding writer, this meant a catastrophe. And he was in a hurry to "go out into the light" at an accelerated pace. Having completed Matrenin Dvor and The Incident at the Krechetovka Station, he said to his wife: “Now let them judge. That first one was, let's say, a topic. And this is pure literature.

At that moment, he could become "a fighter for the cleansing of socialism from Stalin's excesses," as they said then. He could also become a fighter against "barbarian communism." Everything depended on the circumstances. At first, everything indicated that he was inclined to choose the former.

After the undeniable success that his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” had among readers, it was even rumored that Solzhenitsyn would receive the Lenin Prize. A broad discussion has unfolded around this issue in Pravda. Some were for, others against, as is always the case. But then things took a slightly different turn.

For Solzhenitsyn, this meant not only disappointment, but also - above all - a new choice of life path.

Everything spoke for the fact that he could safely go in the direction where the “arrow” was pointing.

As the daughter of the famous Soviet poet Solzhenitsyn stated, authoritarianism does not get along well with morality. She wrote indignantly: “Affirming the primacy of morality over politics, you, in the name of your personal political plans, consider it possible to transcend all limits of what is permitted. You allow yourself to unceremoniously use what you have overheard and peered through the keyhole, cite gossip that is not received first hand, do not even stop to “quote” A.T.’s nightly nonsense, which you assuredly recorded verbatim.” [The fact is that Solzhenitsyn in one of his "creations" allowed himself to portray Alexander Tvardovsky in a very unattractive light, slandering him, mixing him with dirt and humiliating his human dignity. - T. R.]

“Calling on people to “live not by lies”, you, with extreme cynicism… tell how you made deceit a rule in communicating not only with those who were considered enemies, but also with those who extended a helping hand to you, supporting you in difficult times, trusting you... You are by no means inclined to open up with the fullness that is advertised in your book.