Shaking the Ghost
Carden, Patricia
Shaking the Ghost One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenit-syn. Praeger. 210 pp. $3.95. Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature, edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward....
...The cement-mixing feat, which is the central incident of the novel, recalls such classics of the Soviet novel of production as Time Forward and Cement...
...Knopf...
...Work is even represented as a kind of rebellion against the authorities...
...The most interesting part of this first volume of memoirs is the description of Ehrenburg's years in Paris, before and during World War I, when he was a member of an artistic circle which included Picasso, Leger, and Modigliani...
...The response to American literature provides good material for an examination of the national madness which seized the Soviet Union in the postwar years...
...The novel shows detail by detail the brutal conditions of life in the camp, a life wasteful of human capacity and one which in some instances transforms men into beasts...
...Only in rare moments does Ehrenburg speak with a candor and irony which strikes home to the reader: "As for me, I did not experience any fear at the front, in Spain, or during air raids—only in times of peace, waiting for a ring or a knock at the door...
...Reviewed by Patricia Carden...
...Yet there is a perverse optimism at the core of the book...
...The other is a seeming lack of full sincerity in describing his responses to the events of these years...
...Alexander Tvardovsky, poet and editor of the Soviet literary journal Novy mir, says in the preface: "Whatever the past was like, we in the present must not be indifferent to it...
...The book is marred by two faults in the author's point of view...
...Their triumph is small and temporary, but it is a weighty counterbalance to the squalor and spiritual deprivation of their lives...
...The second half is composed of a series of chapters devoted to seven authors (Upton Sinclair, Jack London, O. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Howard Fast, and Ernest Hemingway) who have received particular attention from Russion critics...
...Some, such as Arzak's macabre fantasy, "This Is Moscow Speaking," have importance as pieces of social protest...
...The men are bound together by their devotion to their task...
...In each little contest of this particular day, Ivan Denisovich does come out on top...
...Only by going into its consequences fully, courageously, and truthfully can we guarantee a complete and irrevocable break with all those things that cast a shadow over the past...
...Yet even this section of the book is dissatisfying...
...One is the frequent tone of passionate self-justification...
...Work is what saves men from destruction in circumstances such as these...
...The famous faces are projected onto the surface of the book as if onto a screen...
...The first volume of Ilya Ehren-burg's memoirs, covering the first thirty years of his life, from 1891 to 1921, will not have the interest for the reader which the second volume (already published in Russian and presumably to be published in English) will have...
...As Professor Brown points out, the responses of Soviet readers to the American literature which is available to them cannot be judged on the basis of their critical responses...
...It is a desire which we can only praise...
...It is likely that J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is popular among Soviet and American students for many of the same reasons, none of them specifically connected with a denunciation of capitalist society...
...Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing, by Deming Brown...
...Professor Brown traces the increasing insularity in Soviet cultural life which finally reached the point of absurdity when a Soviet critic "embraced as a beneficiary of Soviet inspiration Sinclair Lewis—an outspoken enemy...
...An outsider who represents the authorities tries to stop their work, is silenced by the unspoken threat of the group...
...Princeton...
...308 pp...
...The group risks severe punishment to stay on overtime and finish the job...
...He manages to get an extra ration of food, to reinforce the shack in which he works against the cold, to finish up the piece of work he starts...
...It is in the second volume that Ehrenburg takes up the defense of Babel, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and other victims of Stalinist persecution, a defense which has made him I he leading spokesman for "thaw" in his own country and which is now earning him harsh criticism from less "progressive" elements...
...As Max Hayward explains in his introduction, "Most of the voices represented here are dissonant, not in any political sense, but in that they do not speak in that trite and monotonous accent which, owing to the long and bitter years of Stalin's dictatorship, is still regarded as the sole voice of Soviet literature...
...Others, such as Tendryakov's "Three, Seven, Ace," are works of art...
...The first part of the book is arranged historically by periods beginning with the 1920's and coming up to 1960...
...His hero, Ivan Denisovich, is a carpenter who was arrested on false charges of conspiracy with the Germans when he became separated from his fighting unit during World War II...
...By far the most interesting section of the book deals with the period from World War II to 1955...
...It is interesting to see how much the Soviet version of American life at this period corresponds to the facts of life in their own society...
...The literary merit of the novel is neither great nor small...
...most important thing about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for us as well as for Russians is the very fact of its publication...
...Tvardovsky reveals in these words one of the motives which must have influenced the men who made the decision to publish Solzhenitsyn's novel about life in the forced labor camps—the desire to shake off the ghost of Stalinism which haunts them yet...
...5.95...
...The range of material is wider than the title would indicate, including Evgeni Zamyatin's clearly "dissonant" essay, "On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy," as well as Babel's "The Journey" (one of the most clearly pro-Soviet of Babel's writings and the only previously unpublished piece of work to be included in the 1957 edition of Babel's works...
...Solzhenitsyn is no competitor of Dostoevsky, but he avoids the usual cliches of Soviet literature and handles his red-hot subject simply and honestly...
...338 pp...
...Pantheon...
...He has avoided the temptation to make a Soviet superman of Denisovich (the gang boss Tyurin comes nearer to this stereotype) and consequently manages to engage our full sympathy for the simple, likeable carpenter...
...People and Life 1891-1921, by Ilya Ehrenburg...
...The result is a selection of stories, poems, and criticism covering the whole Soviet period, written by the most varied authors, possessing for the most part a high degree of literary excellence, each piece worthy of consideration for its own sake...
...454 pp...
...It is significant that Solzhenitsyn, a scientist and intellectual, chooses a proletarian as his hero...
...Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature, edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward, is a valuable anthology of Soviet literature and criticism...
...In Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing, Deming Brown has put together in a readable form an impressive amount of information about the publication of American authors in the Soviet Union and the critical reception of American literature...
...Ehrenburg reveals little' to us about them...
...But here the mystique of work gains power...
...5.95...
Vol. 27 • June 1963 • No. 6
