ANDREW
FIELD
this camp where "no one has yet reached the end of his sentence."
Ivan Denisovich is a Bruegel peasant plodding through one of Bosch's
infernal landscapes. Solzhenitsyn's medium, however, is not oil but
charcoal.
Even the title has an air of anonymity. As in Tolstoy's
Death of
I'van /lich,
the manner in which the protagonist is referred to by his
name and patronymic is the first clue that he is to be at once something
less and something more than an individual character. This approach
is not Solzhenitsyn's caprice; it merely repeats the reality of the model.
Ivan Denisovich is a number-Shch-854. True, he is a number with a
dogged determination to live, and ordinarily we should call
him
courageous . . . except that courage is an anomaly in a play in which
all the roles are bit parts. Anyone who manages to survive has this
sort of courage. "Now to Moscow. And the first order of business
is
to
survive," thinks Yuri Zhivago, and Ivan Denisovich echoes him when
he says, "We'll live through everything, God willing, and it will end."
The words are similar, but the contexts are entirely different. Ivan
Denisovich can ill afford Zhivago's heroic reserve. "Everything is
as
it
should be on Shukhov-go ahead, pinch his chest, yes, his soul too."
Some readers will be dissatisfied because fiction has come between
them and the facts they want to know. They will want a more straight–
forward,
Sakhalin-type
account. There are, of course, significant lacunae
in
One Dtry.
Many things are placed out of our field of vision. Death,
for example, is alluded to rather than directly presented. Solzhenitsyn
writes in the style of Hemingway, the one non-Russian whose work
exerts an important influence on Soviet writers today. The clipped and
dry "Hemingway manner" is, in fact, all but obligatory in contemporary
Russian war (and now, we may assume, prison) fiction . This taken into
account, Solzhenitsyn's approach of indirect statement may be seen
to be quite in keeping with the style and manner he is following, what–
ever the other contributing factors may be. The threads of cause and
effect cannot be too easily separated here, but then the writer,
as
differentiated from the sociologist, always must
be
exclusive. Solzhenitsyn's
representative character conveys the essence of these camps far more
forcefully than statistical data or collected personal accounts can. It
is the name Ivan Denisovich that will symbolize this black page in
modern Russian history.
Solzhenitsyn's language, which is as important as any character,
deserves special mention. It is, like prison language everywhere, a
unique linguistic outgrowth and is meant to have a strange effect even
on the native reader. Also, Solzhenitsyn's frequent usage of vulgarisms
