lOOKS
297
movement of history into American sociology, it is disturbing to find
him
becoming, after his premature death, a political hero for so many
of our youthful radicals.
Dennis H. Wrong
A SOVIET "EASTERN"
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENI50VICH. By Alexander 501z–
henitsyn. Dutton; Praeger. $3.95.
There are books about which it seems almost improper and
insensltlve to speak of artistic merit. This is true above all of the
literature of the concentration camp. Now the Soviet Union has made
its first sanctioned contribution to this unfortunate genre in a short
novel entitled
One Day of Ivan Denisovich,
by Alevander Solzhenitsyn.
Prison literature, if it really be that and not a simulation, falls
between two possible poles, and they are represented in Russian literature
by Dostoevsky's
Notes from a Dead House
(1862) and Chekhov's
Sakhalin Island
(1894). The former is semi-autobiographical fiction;
the latter, conscientious reportage.
One Day
belongs distinctly on the
Dostoevsky side, although
to
refer to Solzhenitsyn as being "like the
young Dostoevsky" is not, I
think,
particularly helpful or meaningful.
But it is a book of high literary quality though certainly
not
the "literary
masterpiece" which it is called in the introduction to the Praeger
translation, and in most of the reviews I have seen, in an offhand
manner as though the matter needed no explanation or justification.
The structure of the novel is simple and modest enough-one
day (and Solzhenitsyn underlines the fact that this was a "good"
day) in the life of a concentration camp inmate named Ivan Denisovich
Shukhov. The author is concerned more with episode than with plot
as such, and we follow Ivan Denisovich through his whole daily
routine in the minutest detail: eating, dressing, working, going to
the barrel. All his attention is riveted on such things as his "kasha
that is not kasha but passes for kasha" or the best arrangement of the
shreds of clothing with which he attempts to fight off the bitter Siberian
cold. Ivan Denisovich's thoughts do not go beyond the next step, the
problem of how to muddle on somehow. The very absence of dramatic
events, the sheer inexorability of
it
all, convey a horror which is the
more dreadful for its slowness and prosaic quality. There
is
no hope in
