In the Soviet Union it is in the literary periodicals that signs of change,
innovation or originality are most often detected, but it is rare indeed to
find together two works of such interest as those in the November number of
Novy Mir.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is a
sixty-six page novella, written apparently some time ago and stored away in
a bottom drawer in the hope that one day it could be printed. As Mr.
Tvardovsky, in a combined introduction and apologia for the story, somewhat
unnecessarily tells us, “the subject matter on which A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel
is based is unusual in Soviet literature”. Unusual it certainly is, being an
account of life in a postwar “correc-tive labour camp” in Siberia. Apart
from its literary merit the documentary interest of the story must be
immense; these camps have been much discussed and much described, but
hitherto the truth has been dulled in most westerners’ minds by a feeling
that everybody has some axe to grind. It has been assumed that the Russian
refugee will exaggerate and that the Russian communist will minimize. Now,
incredibly, these two are on common ground and it turns out that there has
been little exaggeration; it would, in this case, be almost impossible.
The narrative, which covers exactly one day in the camp from reveille to
lights-out, is mostly straight eye-witness description. There is little
reflection, either philosophical or political, and no conclusions are drawn.
Thoughts would stand out ridiculously in this account of a way of life where
the characters have hardly a minute to themselves. Just occasionally the
author takes time off for a few lines of pity and bitterness, as when he
catches the Baptist Alyosha reading his Bible and thinks how silly it was to
imprison the whole sect, since they were doing no harm. Greater interest is
to be found in the ghoulish yet fascinating details of camp life: the
convict number painted on the left knee; the little formal announcement made
every day before the march to the work compound, warning prisoners that they
will be shot if they try to escape; the private enterprise conducted in the
currency of parcels from relatives; and above all the cold and hunger – with
happiness measured in grammes and in degrees, in grammes of bread and in
degrees centigrade.
Yet for every hell there is an inner circle, and here it is the detention
block, of which we read:
"The walls there are of stone, the floor of cement; there is no window.
They heat the stove just enough so that the ice on the wall should melt and
lie on the floor in puddles. You sleep on naked planks. Daily bread ration –
300 grammes, and soup only on the third, sixth and ninth day.
Ten days! Ten days of detention here, if you sit them out right to the end,
mean that you lose your health for the rest of your life. Tuberculosis, and
you’ll never get out of hospital.
And anybody who has done fifteen days is already under the damp earth."
The style of writing is most unusual: staccato sentences of clipped,
colloquial Russian full of obscure camp jargon. The language is often on the
coarse side, with words and expressions not often printed in Soviet books.
Mr. Tvardovsky apologizes for these but acknowledges that in the
circumstances they are understandable.
The printing of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s book (an English version will be published
by Gollancz on January 31) is indeed an event, but perhaps a predictable
one, a continuation of the “uprooting of the personality cult”. More
striking, possibly, is the article by Viktor Nekrasov, author of the novels
Kira Georgievna and In the Stalingrad Trenches, called “On Both Sides of the
Ocean”. This is an account of his visit to Italy last March to attend the
Congress of the European Confederation of Writers. While he was there he met
a number of Italian communists and was impressed by their frankness and
vitality. “They are not dogmatists but neither are they revisionists”, he
writes. They explain to him some of their difficulties as campaigners for
communism:
"Every Italian – worker, official or peasant – has to choose. In order to
choose he has to know what is better. He reads newspapers and he can buy any
of them: the Vatican Osservatore Romano costs just the same as Unità. One
says one thing, the other the opposite. In one he reads that everything in
the Soviet Union is bad; in the other that everything is good. At any rate
that is what we used to write, that everything is good. Then it was
explained that not everything, far from everything . . . . We used to write
that Stalin was great, wise and infallible, and they believed us, many
people believed us. Now we are no longer writing about his infallibility,
rather about his sins, and people are asking us, 'What were you thinking
about before?'"
He was also asked about the selectiveness of Soviet publishing houses, and
recalls a visit to Leningrad by Alberto Moravia. The Italian asked Mr.
Nekrasov and some other Russians what they thought of Kafka: “We looked at
each other in silence and were unable to reply; at that time we had not even
heard of him.” He finds it hard to explain the Soviet reluctance to publish
Faulkner, Camus and Mlle. Sagan.
Mr. Nekrasov is, of course, a committed communist. His criticisms are
constructive and are aimed at the improvement and enlargement of the
communist movement. What is unique in the whole tone and con-tent of the
article is a desire to be fair, to give credit where credit is due, even to
one’s ideological enemies. With a few exceptions British journalists can
justly claim that, however anti-communist they may be, when they visit
Russia they do not ignore the good and report the bad. No attempt is made to
underplay the Soviet achievements in industry, science, construction and
general education. These achievements are undeniably great and must be
reported as such. But articles about the West in the Soviet press seem
hardly ever to avoid such subjects as unemployment, colour prejudice,
evictions of tenants or general moral degeneracy. One does not often find
the outright lie; it is simply that the attentions of Soviet correspondents
are confined to the dark side of the picture. This irritates westerners and,
it seems, Mr. Nekrasov too; he writes:
"I am reminded of the remarks of a certain not very clever journalist of
ours, with whom I was travelling in America. On the third or fourth day he
began to complain, 'When are they going to show us some slums? There’s
nothing for me to write about here, everything smooth, clean, comfortable .
. . .' When I see slums I am sorry for the people who live in them, and I am
not at all glad that these frightful houses and barracks still exist, even
though this is in the capitalist world, which is alien to me. The same
journalist said to me again, 'What the devil! Did you see there are Negroes
staying in our hotel! There were even a pair of them sitting in the
restaurant today.' It seemed to me that he was sorry that those two Negroes
were not thrown noisily out of the restaurant, so keen was he to get
material for an article!"
And this is why Mr. Nekrasov, while he gives a balanced account of the poverty
of the Italian south and of the strikes and labour movements of the north,
gives his readers, too, a glimpse of the unseen bright side of the
capitalist world. He writes that Italy is now going through a period of
economic boom, that the standard of living has sharply risen, that
unemployment has decreased and that new homes are being built on a large
scale.
The western press is criticized by Russians for making too much of “liberal
movements” in Soviet literature. As Mr. A. Dementiev writes in this same
number of Novy Mir, and as Mr. Ilyichev stated repeatedly in his speech of
December 17, Soviet writers may have their small differences, but they are
united in their main purpose, which is the attainment of communism. But
these differences are not small. Oceans separate Mr. Nekrasov, who realizes
it is possible to be fair and objective without prejudicing his beliefs,
from, say, Mr. Kochetov, who counts capitalist misery his greatest joy.
