And We Are Frightened
Siegel, George
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENIsovICH, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker. Dutton. 160 pp. $3.95. ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, by Alexander...
...Why am I here...
...Alexander Solzhenitsyn never says "boo" but we are very frightened indeed...
...As The Times Literary Supplement remarks, "it seems mean and silly to suggest that a man's political opinions are bound to affect his ability to translate...
...Choosing a simple but shrewd peasant for his hero, he is able to dispense with rhetoric: there is no Russian breast-beating here...
...He'd finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon...
...The gang hadn't been chased out to work in the Socialist Community Development...
...Ivan Denisovich is a decent, ordinary, uncultured man...
...For the rest, Solzhenitsyn has heeded Chekhov's sage admonition: if you wish to write about harrowing things, keep your descriptions cold...
...It is a sign of the art of this book that one is always expecting something frightful to happen but that except for one chilling paragraph on the isolation cells nothing too terrible does take place...
...Shukhov cleared his throat...
...This is the story of a Russian peasant, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who taken prisoner by the Germans in the early years of the war manages to escape and find his way back to the Russian troops only to be unjustly condemned for treason and sentenced to ten years in a concentration camp...
...Dutton touted its entry as the only "authorized" version, while Praeger countered with a "press-release" stating that its version was NOT authorized by Moscow and denouncing Ralph Parker as "a fervent apologist for the Soviet regime...
...He hides his favorite trowel so that it won't be stolen...
...The others laughed at him fox this"), and he prides himself on the fact that "after eight years of hard labor, he was still no scavenger and the more time went on the more he stuck to his guns...
...There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like this in his sentence, from reveille to lights out...
...He'd brought some tobacco...
...For a moment the reader is startled...
...210 pp...
...Caesar had paid him off in the evening...
...ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...Solzhenitsyn himself is an intellectual who is conscious and who makes us conscious of much that Ivan Denisovich cannot grasp...
...Here he is listening to a discussion between Caesar and another prisoner about Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible: Too much art is no art at all...
...He'd had a lot of luck today...
...We think," they added, "that Mr...
...They hadn't found that piece of steel in the frisk...
...Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley...
...Even after eight years in camps . . . he couldn't stand things being wasted...
...Meanwhile, it is a pleasure to report that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a first rate piece of prose...
...The simultaneous appearance of two translations of Solzhenitsyn's remarkable concentration-camp novel climaxed a rat-race between rival publishers...
...The account of the building of a wall in sub-zero temperatures is one of the best things in the book...
...Because they didn't get ready like they should've in forty-one...
...Solzhenitsyn deserves better interpreters...
...Like candy instead of bread...
...Then don't call him a genius...
...Leo Tolstoy once said of Andreyev's rhetorical sto ries of the Russo-Japanese War: "Andreyev says 'boo' but I am not frightened...
...An insult to the memory of three generations of Russian intellectuals...
...Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy...
...But what other treatment of the subject would have been let through...
...He was afraid to butt in on this learned conversation...
...They hadn't put him in the cooler...
...After all, the Tyrant is dead although a wag at Harvard has suggested the formation of a Society for the Resuscitation of Stalinism (SRS) for the benefit of those intellectuals who feel that they cannot live without the Enemy...
...ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENIsovICH, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...Hal Let through, you say...
...Caesar Markovich, the one intellectual ("he smoked to help his mind come up with great ideas") among the prisoners he regards with a combination of respect, incomprehension and good-natured irony...
...Once in prison he is both resigned and alert...
...Once having sobered up, we would no longer regard the Ehren burgs and Yevtushenkos as either heroic "rebels" or conniving schemers...
...this is the only way to stay alive...
...he thinks he is back in one of those tedious five-yearplan novels but Solzhenitsyn succeeds —where his socialist realist predecessors with their hollow rhetoric ("we're building, comrades") failed—in restoring to work its genuine satisfactions...
...A genius doesn't adapt his treatment to the task of tyrants...
...He'd felt good making that wall...
...when it is used for commercial motives, it becomes specious indeed...
...Hm, hm...
...Knowing from experience that "there's nothing you can't do to a man," Ivan Denisovich preserves through all his trials a simple code: he doesn't take or give bribes, he doesn't squeal on other prisoners, he keeps up rudimentary table-manners ("He ate the [fish] eyes too when they were still in place, but when they'd come off and were floating around in the bowl on their own, he didn't eat them...
...The concluding sentences are masterful in their irony: Shukhov went to sleep and he was very happy...
...And the politics of it is utterly vile— vindication of a one-man tyranny...
...Ivan Denisovich is a bricklayer...
...Ivan Denisovich is rewarded for his virtues at the end: "Shukhov'd had such a good day, he didn't even feel like sleeping, he felt so great...
...GEORGE SIEGEL...
...Was that my fault...
...We have had quite enough by now of cold-war hot air...
...We ought today to look at Soviet life and literature coolly...
...The simple pleasures count: a drag on a cigarette butt, a rare extra portion of mush, the tension and relief of successfully smuggling something past the guards, above all, pleasure and pride in work...
...The three extra ones were because of the leap years...
...Praeger...
...And he'd gotten over that sickness...
...Call him a toady, say he carried out orders like a dog...
...That sentence will naturally make us think of Ernest Hemingway and it is surely no accident, as the Soviets are fond of saying, that in the November issue of Novy Mir that includes Solzhenitsyn's novel there is a translation of a Hemingway story...
...The boss had gotten them good rates for their work...
...he asks at one point...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
