The New York Times Book Review

Solzhenitsyn the Stylist

By MICHAEL SCAMMELL
AUG. 29, 2008

Michael Scammell teaches writing at the School of the Arts at Columbia and is the
author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography.

Most of the recent tributes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died earlier this month, have
concentrated on his titanic struggle against the Soviet regime, and rightly so. But what seems
to have gotten lost is the reason he was listened to in the first place namely, his virtues as
a writer. What I most remember from my first reading of One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (published in 1962 in the journal Novy Mir) isnt just the feeling that its author
had miraculously circumvented the censors, but the thrill of confronting an astonishing
stylistic tour de force.
1. What does Scammell mean when he says that Solzhenitsyn miraculously
circumvented the censors? What skills do you believe this would have required of
him in the production of the novel?

Here was a realistic story of labor camp life, based on Solzhenitsyns own eight years in
various camps, that leapt off the page in a living idiom that in places was racy to the point of
obscenity, an unheard-of phenomenon in published Soviet literature and rare in Russian
literature of any period. The language was rich in folk idioms and allusions, and laced with
ingenious neologisms. Their effect on sophisticated Moscow palates can be summed up in a
probably apocryphal remark attributed to Anna Akhmatova: Oh my God, socialist realism has
found its genius.

What Solzhenitsyn had done, in fact, was wrest from the dead language of socialist realism a
powerful colloquial style that proved an ideal instrument for mirroring the harsh world of the
camps and infusing it with a moral and ethical perspective antithetical to Communism. His
hero, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, was a striking new kind of Everyman, a Russian Sancho Panza
or Good Soldier Schweik, whose sly resourcefulness embodied the plight of the Russian people
under Communist rule. The small compound of the camp became a microcosm of the big
compound of the country as a whole, and readers instantly understood the comparison.
2. According to Scammell what did Shukhov and the gulag of the novel symbolise? How
did Solzhenitsyn achieve this in his production?

Solzhenitsyns technique is to have the author look over Shukhovs shoulder, as it were,
moving in and out of his stream of consciousness and showing us the camp through his eyes.
We watch him clamber down from his bunk at freezing dawn and be punished for arriving a
fraction late. We accompany him past snow-covered fences and barbed wire and the camps
punishment block, all lighted by the glare of searchlights from looming watchtowers. A cluster
of brigade leaders surround the camp thermometer. Dont breathe on it or itll go up, says
one. Not . . . likely! is the reply. Seventeen below zero! says a third. Cold enough to freeze
the blood in their veins, but not enough for work to be stopped.
3. What type of narrator does Solzhenitsyn use? Explain both the purpose and the effect
of his decision to use this type of narration.
Shukhov chews his starvation ration in the mess hall, marches to work, helps build a wall and
through the stories of his fellow prisoners presents an alternative history of the Soviet Union.
He himself is a typical Russian peasant, humble on the outside but inwardly rebellious:
Shukhovs file showed he was in for treason. Yeah, hed said it was true hed surrendered
because he wanted to betray his country, and had come back on a mission for German
intelligence. What that mission was neither he nor his interrogator could figure out, so it was
left like that a mission. Shukhovs thinking was simple. If you didnt sign you got a wooden
overcoat, if you signed you could at least hang on for a bit longer. He signed.
4. What does this quote reveal about the justification for Shukhovs arrest and
imprisonment? What does it reveal in regards to the judicial system and institutions
in Stalins USSR?

Ivan Denisovich could have been a one-shot wonder, but

Solzhenitsyn went on to publish a string of stories and two
big novels that confirmed the solidity of his talent. The two
big novels of Solzhenitsyns early period, The First Circle
and Cancer Ward (both 1968), feature men in
confinement, their intense relationships and urgent
speculations about free will, morality and spiritual values.
The urgent voice could only be Solzhenitsyns, that voice
reappeared, louder and more raucous than ever, in The
Gulag Archipelago, his three-volume masterpiece about
the Soviet labor camp system, published abroad in 1973.
Combining historical material with eyewitness testimony
and autobiography, Solzhenitsyn turned the ugly
bureaucratic acronym GULag into a worldwide synonym for
repression, while the wild poetry of the Russian title,
Arkhipelag Gulag, evoked a dead land of slithering
reptiles with yawning jaws ready to devour their victims
whole. Here, Solzhenitsyn offered what was truly a voice
from the netherworld, the hoarse, hectoring voice of a man
once buried alive and now speaking from the depths of his personal experience:
Down the long crooked path of our lives we happily rushed or unhappily wandered past a
variety of fences, fences, fences rotten wooden palings, clay embankments, brick and
concrete walls, iron railings. It never occurred to us to ask what was behind them, or to look or
even think about it. But that was where gulag country began, two yards away. . . . And then a
fatal door opened and four white hands, unused to work but tenacious, grabbed us by the leg,
arm, collar, cap, ear, and dragged us like a sack, and slammed the door to our past life shut
forever more. Youre under arrest! And all you can manage to bleat out is, M-me? What for?

5. Annotate this short immediately extract above.

 Its probably heresy to say so, but it seems censorship in its more benign
manifestations along with a skilled editor was good for Solzhenitsyns
prose, forcing some of the compression and ellipses that contribute so much
to the power of Ivan Denisovich and, to a lesser extent, the other early
novels. This may be partly why the four sprawling historical novels, in 10
volumes and more than 5,000 pages, that make up The Red Wheel (1993-
97), written after Solzhenitsyn went into exile in the United States in 1974,
seem so unsatisfactory to me. History and polemic overpower the fiction, and for non-Russian
readers the issues at stake dont appear to justify the effort of mastering them.
6. Why was the threat of censorship during the writing of One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich potentially beneficial to Solzhenitsyn and his style?

For political and commercial reasons, the early English-language translations of Solzhenitsyns
writings were done at top speed and mostly by second-rate translators. Luckily, Solzhenitsyns
authorial voice is so strong that it comes through even when muffled. Harry Willetts, managed
at last to find an English idiom adequate to the originals.
7. How does the translator Willetts ensure that a somewhat Russian voice or Russianess
is maintained in the translation?

8. Is it very obvious in your reading that the novel is a translation? How can you tell?

9. Why do you think it took such a long time to have a well translated version of
Solzhenitsyns novel?

Perhaps the ultimate test of an author is quotability. One favorite, much cited of late, is from
The Gulag Archipelago: Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and
evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but through
every human heart. Then there is the famous aphorism (a tad self-serving, perhaps) from
The First Circle: For a country to have a great writer . . . is like having another government.
Thats why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Style, of course, is inseparable from content, and I dont mean to undervalue the breadth and
depth of Solzhenitsyns oeuvre. But a writer captures readers to the extent he can lasso them
with his voice and persuade them he is worth listening to. In remembering Solzhenitsyn, I
would hate to lose sight of the irreverent, even playful, outsider and versatile stylist who
preceded the solemn historian and gloomy prophet.
10.According to the article, what was Solzhenitsyn first before an important historic
voice?

11. Do you agree with these positive, celebratory claims about Solzhenitsyns style?