The camp theme in the works of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. “Camp” theme in the works of A. Solzhenitsyn

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The “camp” theme again rises sharply in the twentieth century. Many writers testified to the horrors of camps, prisons, and isolation wards. They all looked at what was happening through the eyes of people deprived of freedom, choice, who knew how the state itself destroys a person through repression, destruction, and violence. And only those who have gone through all this can fully understand and appreciate any work about political terror and concentration camps. The camp is most reliably described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his legendary works “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “The Gulag Archipelago” and Varlam Shalamov in “Kolyma Tales”. "GULAG Archipelago" and " Kolyma stories"were written over many years and are a kind of encyclopedia of camp life. In their works, both writers, when describing concentration camps and prisons, achieve the effect of life-like persuasiveness and psychological authenticity; the text is filled with signs of uninvented reality. In Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" most The characters are genuine heroes taken from life, for example, brigadier Tyurin, captain Buinovsky. Only main character Shukhov's story contains collective image an artillery soldier of the battery that the author himself commanded at the front, and the prisoner Shch-262 Solzhenitsyn. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” are closely connected with the writer’s own exile in Kolyma. This is also proven by the high level of detail. The author pays attention to terrible details that cannot be understood without heartache- cold and hunger, sometimes depriving a person of reason, purulent ulcers on the legs, cruel lawlessness of criminals. In the story “The Carpenters,” Shalamov points to a dull closed space: “thick fog that no person could be seen two steps away,” “few directions”: the hospital, the shift, the canteen, which is symbolic for Solzhenitsyn. In the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” open areas of the zone are hostile and dangerous for prisoners: each prisoner tries to run across the areas between rooms as quickly as possible, which is the complete opposite of the heroes of Russian literature, who traditionally love the expanse and distance. The described space is limited to a zone, a construction site, a barracks. The prisoners are fenced off even from the sky: spotlights are constantly blinding them from above, hanging so low that they seem to be depriving people of air. But still, in the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, the camp also differs, is subdivided in different ways, since each person has his own views and his own philosophy on the same things. In Shalamov’s camp, the heroes have already crossed the line between life and death. People seem to show some signs of life, but they are essentially already dead, because they are deprived of any moral principles, memory, will. In this vicious circle, forever stopped time, where hunger, cold, bullying reign, a person loses his own past, forgets his wife’s name, loses contact with others. His soul no longer distinguishes between truth and lies. Even all human need for simple communication disappears. “I wouldn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies,” Shalamov points out in the story “Sentence.” The relationships between people and the meaning of life are clearly reflected in the story “The Carpenters.” The task of the builders is to survive “today” in the fifty-degree frost, and there was no point in making plans “further” than two days.” People were indifferent to each other. “Frost” reached the human soul, it froze, shrank and, perhaps, will remain cold forever. In Solzhenitsyn’s camp, on the contrary, there are living people, like Ivan Denisovich, Tyurin, Klevshin, Buchenwald, who maintain their inner dignity and “don’t lose themselves,” don’t humiliate themselves because of a cigarette, because of rations, and certainly don’t lick the plates , do not inform on their comrades for the sake of improving their own fate. The camps have their own laws: “In the camps, this is who dies: who licks the bowls, who hopes in the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather,” “Groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break”, “Whoever can do it will gnaw at him.” The camp, according to Solzhenitsyn, is a huge evil, violence, but suffering and compassion contributed to moral purification, and the state of hunger of the heroes introduces them to a higher moral existence. Ivan Denisovich proves that the soul cannot be captured, it cannot be deprived of its freedom. Formal release can no longer change inner world hero, his value system. Shalamov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, emphasizes the difference between a prison and a camp. The picture of the world is upside down: a person dreams of leaving the camp not to freedom, but to prison. According to Solzhenitsyn, life remains in the camps: Shukhov himself could no longer imagine his “existence” in freedom, and Alyoshka the Baptist is happy to stay in the camp, since there a person’s thoughts come closer to God. Outside the zone, life is full of persecution, which is already “incomprehensible” to Ivan Denisovich. Having condemned the inhumane system, the writer creates a genuine folk hero who managed to go through all the trials and preserve the best qualities of the Russian people. In Shalamov’s stories, it’s not just Kolyma camps fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which people live free people, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where everyone living in it is doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society. A representative of the memoir movement of “camp prose” was A. Zhigulin. Zhigulin’s story “Black Stones” is a complex and ambiguous work. This is a documentary and artistic narrative about the activities of the KPM (Communist Youth Party), which included thirty boys who, in a romantic impulse, united to consciously fight against the deification of Stalin. It is structured as the author's memoirs about his youth. Therefore, unlike the works of other authors, there is a lot of so-called “cash romance” in it. But at the same time, Zhigulin managed to accurately convey the feeling of that era. With documentary accuracy, the writer writes about how the organization was born and how the investigation was carried out. The writer very clearly described the conduct of the interrogations: “The investigation was generally conducted in a vile manner... The notes in the interrogation reports were also vilely kept. It was supposed to be written down word for word - how the accused answers. But the investigators invariably gave our answers a completely different color. For example, if I said: " Communist Party youth,” the investigator wrote down: “Anti-Soviet organization KPM.” If I said “meeting,” the investigator wrote “gathering.” Zhigulin seems to be warning that the main task of the regime was to “penetrate thought” that had not even been born, to penetrate and strangle it to its cradle. Hence the advance cruelty of the self-adjusting system. For playing with the organization, a semi-childish game, but deadly for both sides (which both sides knew about) - ten years of a prison-camp nightmare. This is how a totalitarian system works.

One of the most terrible and tragic topics in Russian literature is the theme of the camps. The publication of works on such topics became possible only after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, at which Stalin’s cult of personality was debunked. TO camp prose include the works of A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov, “Faithful Ruslan” by G. Vladimov, “The Zone” by S. Dovlatov and others.

In his famous story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” A. Solzhenitsyn described only one day of a prisoner - from waking up to lights out, but the narrative is structured in such a way that the reader can imagine the camp life of the forty-year-old peasant Shukhov and his entourage in its entirety. By the time the story was written, its author was already very far from socialist ideals. This story is about the illegality, the unnaturalness of the very system created by the Soviet leaders.

The prototypes of the central character were Ivan Shukhov, a former soldier of Solzhenitsyn’s artillery battery, and the prisoner writer himself, and thousands of innocent victims of monstrous lawlessness. Solzhenitsyn is sure that Soviet camps were the same death camps as the fascist ones, only they killed their own people there.

Ivan Denisovich got rid of illusions long ago; he does not feel himself Soviet man. The camp authorities and guards are enemies, nonhumans with whom Shukhov has nothing in common. Shukhov, the bearer of universal human values, which the party-class ideology failed to destroy in him. In the camp, this helps him to survive, to remain human.

Prisoner Shch-854 - Shukhov - is presented by the author as a hero of another life. He lived, went to war, fought honestly, but was captured. He managed to escape from captivity and miraculously made his way to “his own people.” “Counterintelligence beat Shukhov a lot. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; if you sign, you’ll at least live a little. Signed."

In the camp, Shukhov is trying to survive, controlling every step, trying to make money where he can. He is not sure that he will be released on time, that he will not be given another ten years, but he does not allow himself to think about it. Shukhov doesn’t think about why he and many other people are in prison; he’s not tormented by eternal questions without answers. According to the documents, he is imprisoned for treason. For carrying out the task of the Nazis. And neither Shukhov nor the investigator could come up with what task.

By nature, Ivan Denisovich belongs to the natural, natural people who value the process of life itself. And the prisoner has his own little joys: drink hot gruel, smoke a cigarette, eat a ration of bread, hide somewhere warmer, and take a minute’s nap.

In the camp Shukhov’s work saves him. He works with passion, is not used to slacking, and does not understand how one can not work. In life, he is guided by common sense, which is based on peasant psychology. He “strengthens” himself in the camp without dropping himself.

Solzhenitsyn describes other prisoners who did not break down in the camp. Old man Yu-81 is in prisons and camps, how much does Soviet power cost? Another old man, X-123, is a fierce champion of truth, deaf Senka Klevshin, a prisoner of Buchenwald. Survived torture by the Germans, now in a Soviet camp. Latvian Jan Kildigs, who has not yet lost the ability to joke. Alyoshka is a Baptist who firmly believes that God will remove the “evil scum” from people. Captain of the second rank Buinovsky is always ready to stand up for people, he has not forgotten the laws of honor. To Shukhov, with his peasant psychology, Buinovsky’s behavior seems a senseless risk.

Solzhenitsyn consistently depicts how patience and resilience help Ivan Denisovich survive in the inhumane conditions of the camp. The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published during the “Khrushchev Thaw” in 1962, caused a great resonance among readers, and opened the world the terrible truth about the totalitarian regime in Russia.

In the book created by V. Shalamov “ Kolyma stories“The whole horror of the camp and camp life is revealed. The writer's prose is amazing. Shalamov’s stories were published after the books of Solzhenitsyn, who, it would seem, wrote everything about camp life. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose literally turns the soul upside down and is perceived as a new word in the camp theme. In the style and author's view of the writer, one is struck by the height of spirit with which the stories are written, and the author's epic comprehension of life.

Shalamov was born in 1907 into the family of a Vologda priest. He began writing poetry and prose back in early years. Studied at Moscow University. Shalamov was first arrested in 1929 on charges of distributing an allegedly false political will of V. Lenin. The writer spent three years in camps in the Urals. In 1937, he was arrested again and sent to Kolyma. He was rehabilitated after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Twenty years in prisons, camps and exile!

Shalamov did not die in the camp in order to create an impressive force psychological impact a kind of Kolyma epic, to tell the merciless truth about life - “not life” - “anti-life” of people in the camps. The main theme of the stories: man in inhuman conditions. The author recreates the atmosphere of hopelessness, moral and physical impasse, in which people find themselves for many years, whose condition is approaching a “superhuman” state. “Hell on earth” can engulf a person at any moment. The camp takes away everything from people: their education, experience, connections to normal life, principles and moral values. They are no longer needed here. Shalamov writes: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards, not unwitting witnesses - engineers, geologists, doctors - neither superiors nor subordinates. Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, and if he has seen it, it is better for him to die.”

The narrator's tone is calm, the author knows everything about the camps, remembers everything, and is devoid of the slightest illusions. Shalamov argues that there is no such measure to measure the suffering of millions of people. What the author is talking about seems completely impossible, but we hear the objective voice of a witness. It tells about the life of the camp prisoners, about their slave labor, the struggle for bread rations, illnesses, deaths, and executions. His cruel truth is devoid of anger and powerless exposure, there is no longer any strength to be indignant, feelings have died. The reader shudders from the realization of how “far” humanity has gone in the “science” of inventing torture and torment for their own kind. Writers of the 19th century never dreamed of the horrors of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Kolyma.

Here are the words of the author, spoken on his own behalf: “The prisoner learns there to hate work - he cannot learn anything else there. There he learns flattery, lies, small and large meanness, and becomes an egoist. Moral barriers have moved somewhere to the side. It turns out that you can do mean things and still live... It turns out that a person who has committed mean things does not die... He values ​​​​his suffering too highly, forgetting that every person has his own grief. He has forgotten how to be sympathetic to the grief of others - he just doesn’t understand it, doesn’t want to understand it... He has learned to hate people.”

The poignant and scary story “Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief” tells us the state to which hunger can bring a person. Vaska sacrifices his life for food.

Fear, which corrodes personality, is described in the story “Typhoid Quarantine.” The author shows people who are ready to serve the bandit leaders, to be their lackeys and slaves for the sake of a bowl of soup and a crust of bread. The hero of the story, Andreev, sees in the crowd of such slaves Captain Schneider, a German communist, an educated man, an excellent connoisseur of Goethe’s work, who now plays the role of a “heel scratcher” for the thief Senechka. After this, the hero does not want to live.

The camp, according to Shalamov, is a well-organized state crime. All social and moral categories are deliberately replaced by their opposites. Good and evil for the camp are naive concepts. But still there were those who retained their soul and humanity, innocent people reduced to a bestial state. Shalamov writes about people “who were not, who were not able to and who did not become heroes.” The word “heroism” has a connotation of pomp, splendor, and short-lived action, but no one has yet come up with a word to define the long-term torture of people in the camps.

Shalamov’s creativity has become not only documentary evidence enormous power, but also the fact of philosophical understanding of an entire era, a common camp: the totalitarian system.

Slide 2

Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Aleshkovsky, Ginzbur, Dombrovsky, Vladimov looked at what was happening through the eyes of people deprived of freedom, choice, who knew how the state itself destroys a person through repression, destruction, and violence.

Slide 3

"Camp Prose"

“The Gulag Archipelago” and “Kolyma Stories” were written over many years and are a kind of encyclopedia of camp life. But still, in the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, the camp is different, subdivided in different ways, since each person has his own views and his own philosophy on the same things.

Slide 4

Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” are closely connected with the writer’s own exile in Kolyma. This is also proven by the high level of detail. The author pays attention to terrible details that cannot be understood without mental pain - cold and hunger, which sometimes deprive a person of reason, purulent ulcers on the legs, the cruel lawlessness of criminals.

Slide 5

In Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” most of the characters are genuine heroes taken from life, for example, brigadier Tyurin, captain Buinovsky. Only the main character of the story, Shukhov, contains a collective image of a soldier-artilleryman of the battery that the author himself commanded at the front, and the prisoner Shch-262 Solzhenitsyn.

Slide 6

I was a representative of those people who opposed Stalin - no one ever believed that Stalin and the Soviet government were one and the same... I was ready to love and hate with all my youthful soul. Since school I dreamed of self-sacrifice, I was sure that mental strength mine is enough for big things. Of course, I was still a blind puppy then. But I was not afraid of life and boldly entered into a struggle with it in the form in which my heroes fought with life and for life. teenage years- all Russian revolutionaries.

Slide 7

“I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies,” Shalamov points out in the story “Sentence.”

Slide 8

The camps have their own laws: “In the camps, this is who dies: who licks the bowls, who hopes in the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather,” “Groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break”, “Whoever can do it will gnaw at him.” The camp, according to Solzhenitsyn, was a huge evil, violence, but suffering and compassion contributed to moral cleansing.

Slide 9

Shalamov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, emphasizes the difference between a prison and a camp. The picture of the world is upside down: a person dreams of leaving the camp not to freedom, but to prison. In the story “Funeral Word” there is a clarification: “Prison is freedom. This the only place, where people, without fear, said everything they thought. Where they rest their souls."

Slide 10

According to Solzhenitsyn, life remains in the camps. Outside the zone, life is full of persecution, which is already “incomprehensible” to Ivan Denisovich. Having condemned the inhumane system, the writer creates a genuine folk hero who managed to go through all the trials and preserve the best qualities of the Russian people.

Slide 11

According to Shalamov, the whole country is a camp where everyone living in it is doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.

Slide 12

"Camp" theme in the twentieth century

Having gone through all the suffering and pain, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov turned out to be folk heroes who were able to convey the whole true picture of society of that time. And they are united by the presence of a huge soul, the ability to create and contemplate.

Slide 13

The dispute between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn is, firstly, about who and when became the cause of that disastrous temptation that brought down an avalanche of disasters on Russia - and not only on it - and, secondly, on methods of overcoming the consequences of this avalanche.

Shalamov, talking about Kolyma, wrote a requiem. “The Gulag Archipelago” was created by Solzhenitsyn as an instrument of political activity. Shalamov believed that Solzhenitsyn “sold his soul to the devil,” using camp themes for the purposes of political struggle, while literature should remain within the boundaries of culture: politics and culture are two incompatible things for Shalamov.

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Essay on literature:
The camp theme in the works of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn

"Camp theme" in the works of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn.

One of the most terrible and tragic topics in Russian literature is the theme of the camps.
The publication of works on such topics became possible only after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, at which Stalin’s cult of personality was debunked.
Camp prose includes the works of A. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov, “Faithful Ruslan” by G. Vladimov, “The Zone” by S. Dovlatov and others.
In his famous story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” A. Solzhenitsyn described only one day of a prisoner - from waking up to lights out, but the narrative is structured in such a way that the reader can imagine the camp life of the forty-year-old peasant Shukhov and his entourage in its entirety. By the time the story was written, its author was already very far from socialist ideals. This story is about the illegality, the unnaturalness of the very system created by the Soviet leaders.
The prototypes of the central character were Ivan Shukhov, a former soldier of Solzhenitsyn’s artillery battery, and the prisoner writer himself, and thousands of innocent victims of monstrous lawlessness. Solzhenitsyn is sure that the Soviet camps were the same death camps as the fascist ones, only they killed their own people there.
Ivan Denisovich got rid of illusions long ago; he does not feel like a Soviet person. The camp authorities and guards are enemies, nonhumans with whom Shukhov has nothing in common. Shukhov, the bearer of universal human values, which the party-class ideology failed to destroy in him. In the camp, this helps him to survive, to remain human.
Prisoner Shch-854 - Shukhov - is presented by the author as a hero of another life. He lived, went to war, fought honestly, but was captured. He managed to escape from captivity and miraculously made his way to “his own people.” “In counterintelligence they beat Shukhov a lot. And Shukhov’s calculation was simple: if you don’t sign, it’s a wooden pea coat; if you sign, at least you’ll live a little. He signed.”
In the camp, Shukhov is trying to survive, controlling every step, trying to make money where he can. He is not sure that he will be released on time, that he will not be given another ten years, but he does not allow himself to think about it. Shukhov doesn’t think about why he and many other people are in prison; he’s not tormented by eternal questions without answers. According to the documents, he is imprisoned for treason. For carrying out the task of the Nazis. And neither Shukhov nor the investigator could come up with what task.
By nature, Ivan Denisovich belongs to natural, natural people who value the very process of life. And the prisoner has his own little joys: drink hot gruel, smoke a cigarette, eat a ration of bread, hide somewhere warmer, and take a minute’s nap.
In the camp Shukhov’s work saves him. He works with passion, is not used to slacking, and does not understand how one can not work. In life, he is guided by common sense, which is based on peasant psychology. He “strengthens” himself in the camp without dropping himself.
Solzhenitsyn describes other prisoners who did not break down in the camp. Old man Yu-81 is in prisons and camps, how much does Soviet power cost? Another old man, X-123, is a fierce champion of truth, deaf Senka Klevshin, a prisoner of Buchenwald. Survived torture by the Germans, now in a Soviet camp. Latvian Jan Kildigs, who has not yet lost the ability to joke. Alyoshka is a Baptist who firmly believes that God will remove the “evil scum” from people. Captain of the second rank Buinovsky is always ready to stand up for people, he has not forgotten the laws of honor. To Shukhov, with his peasant psychology, Buinovsky’s behavior seems a senseless risk.
Solzhenitsyn consistently depicts how patience and resilience help Ivan Denisovich survive in the inhumane conditions of the camp. The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published during the “Khrushchev Thaw” in 1962, caused a great resonance among readers, and revealed to the world the terrible truth about the totalitarian regime in Russia.
The book “Kolyma Tales” created by V. Shalamov reveals all the horror of the camp and camp life. The writer's prose is amazing. Shalamov’s stories were published after the books of Solzhenitsyn, who, it would seem, wrote everything about camp life. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose literally turns the soul upside down and is perceived as a new word in the camp theme. In the style and author's view of the writer, one is struck by the height of spirit with which the stories are written, and the author's epic comprehension of life.
Shalamov was born in 1907 into the family of a Vologda priest. He began writing poetry and prose in his youth. Studied at Moscow University. Shalamov was first arrested in 1929 on charges of distributing an allegedly false political will of V. Lenin. The writer spent three years in camps in the Urals. In 1937, he was arrested again and sent to Kolyma. He was rehabilitated after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Twenty years in prisons, camps and exile!
Shalamov did not die in the camp in order to create a unique Kolyma epic, impressive in terms of its psychological impact, to tell the merciless truth about the life - “not life” - “anti-life” of people in the camps. The main theme of the stories: man in inhuman conditions. The author recreates the atmosphere of hopelessness, moral and physical impasse, in which people find themselves for many years, whose condition is approaching a “superhuman” state. “Hell on earth” can engulf a person at any moment. The camp takes away everything from people: their education, experience, connections to normal life, principles and moral values. They are no longer needed here. Shalamov writes: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards, not unwitting witnesses - engineers, geologists, doctors - neither superiors nor subordinates.” “Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot of things that a person should not know, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die.”
The narrator's tone is calm, the author knows everything about the camps, remembers everything, and is devoid of the slightest illusions. Shalamov argues that there is no such measure to measure the suffering of millions of people. What the author is talking about seems completely impossible, but we hear the objective voice of a witness. It tells about the life of the camp prisoners, about their slave labor, the struggle for bread rations, illnesses, deaths, and executions. His cruel truth is devoid of anger and powerless exposure, there is no longer any strength to be indignant, feelings have died. The reader shudders from the realization of how “far” humanity has gone in the “science” of inventing torture and torment for their own kind. Writers of the 19th century never dreamed of the horrors of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Kolyma.
Here are the words of the author, spoken on his own behalf: “The prisoner learns there to hate work - he cannot learn anything else there. He learns flattery, lies, small and large meanness there, becomes an egoist. Moral barriers have moved somewhere to the side. It turns out , you can do mean things and still live... It turns out that a person who has committed mean things does not die... He values ​​his suffering too highly, forgetting that every person has his own grief, he has forgotten how to be sympathetic to the grief of others - he. He just doesn’t understand him, doesn’t want to understand... He’s learned to hate people.”
The poignant and scary story “Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief” tells us the state to which hunger can bring a person. Vaska sacrifices his life for food.
Fear, which corrodes personality, is described in the story “Typhoid Quarantine.” The author shows people who are ready to serve the bandit leaders, to be their lackeys and slaves for the sake of a bowl of soup and a crust of bread. The hero of the story, Andreev, sees in the crowd of such slaves Captain Schneider, a German communist, an educated man, an excellent connoisseur of Goethe’s work, who now plays the role of a “heel scratcher” for the thief Senechka. After this, the hero does not want to live.
The camp, according to Shalamov, is a well-organized state crime. All social and moral categories are deliberately replaced by their opposites. Good and evil for camp are naive concepts. But still there were those who retained their soul and humanity, innocent people reduced to a bestial state. Shalamov writes about people “who were not, who were not able to and who did not become heroes.” The word “heroism” has a connotation of pomp, splendor, and short-lived action, but no one has yet come up with a word to define the long-term torture of people in the camps.
Shalamov’s work became not only documentary evidence of enormous power, but also a fact of philosophical understanding of an entire era, a common camp: the totalitarian system.

The camp theme is explored by Solzhenitsyn at the level of different genres - short story, large-scale documentary narrative ("artistic research" as defined by the writer himself), dramatic work and film script and occupies a particularly significant place in his work, opening it up to the reader with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and placing the “GULAG Archipelago” at the center. This place is determined by the fact that the camp turns out to be the most capacious symbol of Russian life in the post-revolutionary period.

With unity of theme different genres, being special ways of comprehending life, require different selection of material, create different types of conflict, and differ in the possibilities of expression author's position.

"The Gulag Archipelago", with all its unusualness artistic form, turns out to be the most characteristic expression of Solzhenitsyn - an artist and a person who refuses to accept traditional classifications and divisions both in literature and in life. His “artistic research”, from a modern point of view, belongs to journalism, if you look at it from other, more ancient cultures, say, antiquity, including art circle historical narrative, oratorical prose, aesthetic and philosophical works - of course, literature, artistry, which in its indivisibility corresponds to the global nature of the task.

“Archipelago...” made it possible to solve two tasks necessary for Solzhenitsyn - completeness of scope, which is expressed both in the desire for versatility in the study of camp life (everything), and in the large number of participants (all), and the most direct expression of the author’s position, the direct sound of his own voice .

Solzhenitsyn's address to dramatic form(“Republic of Labor”, included in the dramatic trilogy “1945” as the third part) seems completely natural precisely because the play, ideally requiring embodiment on stage, which limits the depicted world by the size of the stage area, by its very nature gravitates to a vision of this world as a certain integrity (the name of Shakespeare's Globe Theater directly indicates this). The direct and strong emotional impact of theater on the viewer also serves as an argument in the choice of form. But on the other hand, the depiction of a world in which a person is limited in the manifestation of his personal activity contradicts the very nature of a dramatic plot based on free action-choice. Apparently, it was precisely this, and not the inexperience of a newcomer unfamiliar with the capital’s theatrical practice, which Solzhenitsyn himself speaks of in the book “A Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” that led to artistic failure.

Only one turn of the camp theme is initially filled with drama (conflict manifested through action), and this is an attempt to gain freedom. The motives of life, death, fidelity, betrayal, love, retribution require dramatic implementation, while the brute and inhuman force of pressure and destruction (“tank” is at the same time real image and as a capacious symbol of this power) is most clearly embodied by means of epic depiction. Hence the script form of the tragedy “The Tanks Know the Truth!”, or rather, not just a script as the first step to the implementation of a finished work - a film, but an already completed literary work, where the use of two screens or an editing joint, specified by the author at the very beginning, is nothing more than an exposure of the epic technique of switching (spatial, temporal or emotional). Any exposure of the technique stimulates the consciousness of the reader/viewer’s perception, in this case either by enhancing the expressiveness of a single action by dividing it into elements in editing (in the scenes of the murder of informers there is a change of large frames: a chest - a hand waving a knife - a blow), or by creating a system of contrasts - from the contrast of time and place (a restaurant orchestra in the initial scenes of the frame, the present time - a camp orchestra returning to the past), the contrast of the inhabitants of these two worlds (clean restaurant audience - dirty camp prisoners) to the contrast of lies and truth, given visibly (the political instructor tells the soldiers horror stories about monsters, pests and anti-Soviet people - the botanist Mezheninov, Mantrova and Fedotov - and in the dark lower corner of the screen a reduced frame simultaneously flashes with a botanist peacefully darning a sock, with the bright faces of the boys).

It seems that there can be nothing more opposite in the solution of the camp theme than this script and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Let us note only some of the most notable cases: first of all, the contrast in the selection of events (death of prisoners buried in the earth; failed escape; undermining; murder of informers; murder of Gavronsky by informers; storming of a prison; liberation of a women’s barracks; tank attack; execution of survivors) - - events that are exceptional in the script, but routinely ordinary in the story: here even that little that can set a day apart from the ordinary (exemption from work due to illness or punishment cell for an offense) is given only as possible (in one case desirable, in another - - terrible), but not implemented.

Another important problem, which we will only outline here, is the problem of the author's voice. If in “One Day...” the author’s voice, separated from the hero’s voice, appears only a few times (a sign indicating the presence of the author’s point of view is the ellipsis, which at the beginning of the paragraph introduces the author’s voice, and at the beginning of one of the following paragraphs it returns us to the hero’s point of view): in the story about Kolya Vdovushkin, who is engaged in something “incomprehensible” for Shukhov literary work, or about Caesar, who smokes “to arouse a strong thought in himself and let it find something” - and each time this goes beyond the limits of the hero’s understanding or awareness. At the same time, there is no conflict between the points of view of the author and the hero. This is especially noticeable in the author’s digression about the lunching captain: “He was recently in the camp, recently on general works. Minutes like now were (he didn’t know it) especially important moments for him, transforming him from an imperious, loud naval officer into a sedentary, cautious prisoner, only by this sedentary activity could he overcome the twenty-five years of prison imposed on him,” giving way to the usual improperly direct speech: “But according to Shukhov, it’s correct that they gave it to the captain. The time will come, and the captain will learn to live, but for now he doesn’t know how.” Author's side note about Buinovsky: “He didn’t know this...” - contrasts the captain at the same time general knowledge both the author and Shukhov.

In a script, the author's voice has a different function. What is important here is not the combination or, on the contrary, the difference in the vision-knowledge of the author and the characters (in a “film” the author seems to see and tell everything that happens in front of him), but the common point of view of the author and the conventional viewer. Therefore, the author peers at the picture, as someone sitting in the hall peers at it, selects more precise words, clarifies the matter for himself and for us: “And suddenly from the outer row - a hefty guy with a stupid face - no, with a haunted face! - no, maddened with horror!<…>" People fall on the road at gunpoint: “<…>Maybe he killed someone?” -- ignorance and tense anticipation unite the narrator and the reader. And the folklore-song tonality of the experience becomes common: “As the wind lays down bread, so laid down a wave of prisoners. To the dust! on the road! (maybe they killed someone?) Everyone is lying down!”

But if it is important to establish the general author-reader field of emotional tension, then it is even more important to see what is happening, as it is with you, or rather what is happening with us: “<…>Motorcycles are flying. There are eight of them. Behind each is a machine gunner. It's all on us!<…>They move left and right to encircle us.

They beat. Here, in the auditorium, they beat me!”

The fact that tragedy, by its very classical structure, seems to be removed from ordinary life (characters - heroes of myths and history, kings and princes, religious ascetics and great criminals; events - disastrous and exceptional) has the most direct relation to the life of everyone, The founders of the genre, the Greeks, also knew. In the famous fourth of Stasimesophocles' "Oedipus the King", after the terrible truth of his life was revealed to the hero and the choir and the crimes were once again remembered - the murder of his father, copulation with his mother - which no one had ever done - the choir sings about the common share people:

People, people! O mortal race!

Life on earth, alas, is futility!

O ill-fated Oedipus! Your rock

Now that I understand, I will say:

There are no happy people in the world.

(Translated by S.V. Shervinsky)

The combination of “there” and “then” and “here” and “now”, “camp” and “ auditorium"—a way Solzhenitsyn found to express the common fate of those who survived the camp tragedy and those who were spared from it. Spared, but not liberated from involvement in it.

It is impossible to imagine anything like this in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The narrative here is addressless; it does not and cannot have a direct appeal to the outside. The type of narration, closed by the consciousness of the hero, is adequate to the picture of the world created in the story. The image of the camp, defined by reality itself as the embodiment of maximum spatial isolation and isolation from the big world, is realized in the story in the same closed time structure of one day. The stunning truthfulness that everyone who writes about this masterpiece by Solzhenitsyn talks about is set not only at the level of statements or events, but also at the very depth of the work - at the level of the chronotope.

The space and time of this world manifest their peculiarity in contrasting comparison with another or other worlds. Thus, the main properties of the camp space - its fenced off, closedness and visibility (the sentry standing on the tower sees everything) are contrasted with the openness and boundlessness of the natural space - the steppe. Inside there are units of closed space - a barracks, a camp, work facilities. The most characteristic feature of the camp space is the fence (with constant details of its structure: a solid fence - pointed posts with lanterns, double gates, wire, near and far towers - we meet here, and in the play, and in the script), and therefore, when developing a new object, “before doing anything there, you need to dig holes, put up poles and pull the barbed wire away from yourself - so as not to run away.” The structure of this phrase accurately reproduces the order and meaning of the image of space: first the world is described as closed, then as unfree, and it is on the second part (not in vain that it is emphasized intonationally) that the main emphasis falls.

What appears before us is a seemingly clear opposition between the camp world with its set of inherent signs (closed, visible, unfree) and the external world with its signs of openness, limitlessness and - therefore - freedom. This opposition is formalized at the speech level in calling the camp a “zone”, and the big world “will”. But in reality there is no such symmetry. “The wind whistles over the bare steppe - dry in summer, frosty in winter. For years, nothing grew in that steppe, and even more so between four barbed wires.” The steppe (in Russian culture an image-symbol of will, reinforced by the equally traditional and equally meaningful image of the wind) turns out to be equated to the unfree, barbed space of the zone: both here and there this life does not exist - “nothing has grown.” The opposition is also removed in the case when large, outside world is endowed with the properties of a camp: “From the stories of free drivers and excavator operators, Shukhov sees that the direct road to people was blocked<…>“.and, on the contrary, the camp world suddenly acquires alien and paradoxical properties: “What is good in a convict camp is freedom from the belly.”

We are talking here about freedom of speech - a right that ceases to be a socio-political abstraction and becomes a natural necessity for a person to say as he wants and what he wants, freely and without restriction: “And in the room they shout:

The mustachioed old man will take pity on you! He won’t trust his own brother, let alone you mugs!”

Words unthinkable in the wild.

The big Soviet world is showing new properties - it is deceitful and cruel. He creates a myth about himself as a kingdom of freedom and abundance and mercilessly punishes for encroachment on this myth: “In Ust-Izhmensky<лагере>If you say in a whisper that there are no matches in the wild, they’ll lock you up and they’ll rivet you into a new ten.” In the small world of the camp there is more cruelty, less lies, and the lie itself here is different - not politically abstract, but humanly understandable, associated with confrontation and hatred within the camp, on the one hand, the camp people, prisoners, on the other - everyone who above them, from the camp commander to the guard soldiers.

The main lie of the verdicts and testimony (“It is considered in the case that Shukhov was imprisoned for treason against his homeland”) remained there, beyond the threshold of the camp, and here the authorities seem to have no need for it, but it is characteristic that the prisoners feel that everything here is based on lies and that this lie is directed against them. The thermometer is lying, not giving enough degrees that could free them from work: “Yes, it’s wrong, it’s always lying,” someone said. “Will the right one be hanged in the zone?” And the prisoners’ own lies are a necessary part of survival: rations hidden by Shukhov in the mattress, two extra bowls stolen by him at lunch, bribes paid by the foreman to the contractor so that the brigade gets a better place to work, window dressing instead of work for the bosses - all this is formalized in firm conclusion: “Otherwise everyone would have died long ago, it’s a known fact.”

Other properties of the camp world are revealed in the second component of the chronotope characteristic - the characteristic of time. Its importance is given both in the title of the story and in the compositional symmetry of the beginning and end - the very first phrase: “At five o’clock in the morning<…>« -- precise definition the beginning of the day and - at the same time - the narrative. And in the last: “The day passed, unclouded, almost happy” - the end of the day and the story itself coincide. But this phrase is not quite the last, it is the last in the plot-event series. The final paragraph, separated by two empty lines, structurally recreates the image of time given in the story. The finale is divided into two parts: the first: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his period from bell to bell” - as if he embodies the unimaginable abstraction of the term “ten years”, translating it into an equally everyday unimaginable number of units for a person. in the second: “Because of leap years, three extra days were added...” - the respectful highlighting of three days (such a small number compared to thousands!) defines the attitude towards the day as the concentration of a whole life.

The antithesis “abstract time - real human time” is not the only one; The even more important opposition “someone else's - one's own” partially coincides with it. “Own” time has sensual concreteness - seasonality (“<…>Shukhov still has a lot of time to sit, winter-summer and winter-summer") or the certainty of the daily routine - getting up, leaving, lunch, lights out. Exact time measured by a clock is a bare abstraction: “None of the prisoners ever sees a clock in their eyes, and what are they for, a clock?”, and therefore unreliable; factual accuracy is questioned as a rumor: “They still say that the evening inspection takes place at nine.<…>And at five o’clock, they say, we get up.”

The maximum expression of not one's time is “deadline”. It is measured by abstract “tens” that do not depend on the case of the convicted person (“This period used to be so happy: everyone was given ten under the comb. But from forty-nine such a period began - everyone got twenty-five, no matter what”), in contrast to time, measured in moments, minutes, hours, days, seasons; “term” is not subject to the basic law of time - flow, movement: “How many times did Shukhov notice: the days in the camp roll by - you won’t look back. But the deadline itself doesn’t advance at all, it doesn’t decrease at all.”

The opposition “us versus foe” is one of the main ones in the story. It can also be spatial (for Ivan Denisovich, “his” space is, first of all, the place in the barracks where his 104th brigade is located; in the medical unit he sits on the very edge of the chair, “involuntarily showing that the medical unit is alien to him”) , and spatio-temporal: the past and home - the integrity of his life - are irrevocably distant and alienated from him. Now to write home - “what a waste of throwing pebbles into a deep pool. What has fallen, what has sunk, there is no response to that.” The former home space ceases to be familiar, it is perceived as strange, fabulous - like the life of those peasant painters about whom his wife talks in a letter: “they travel all over the country and even fly on airplanes.”<…>and money is being raked in by the thousands, and carpets are painted everywhere.”

Home is a necessary given for a person - it is not “there and then”, but “here and now”, and therefore a camp barrack becomes a home - after working in the cold, it is not scary to unbutton your clothes for a search:

«<…>let's go home.

That's what everyone says - “home”.

There’s no time to think about another house in a day.”

Just as the concept of “home” leads to the concept of “family” (family: “It is a family, a brigade,” Ivan Denisovich calls the brigade), so the space-time antithesis “one’s own - someone else’s” naturally becomes an antithesis within the world of people. It is set at several levels. Firstly, this is the most predictable opposition between prisoners and those who are assigned to manage their lives - from the head of the camp to the guards, guards and escorts (hierarchy is not very important - for prisoners, any of them is a “citizen boss”). The confrontation between these worlds, socio-political in nature, is strengthened by what is given at the natural-biological level. Constant comparisons of guards with wolves and dogs cannot be accidental: Lieutenant Volkova (“God marks the rogue,” says Ivan Denisovich) “doesn’t look any other way than a wolf,” the guards “got excited, rushed like animals,” “that’s all look out so that they don’t rush at your throat,” “here are the dogs, count again!” - about them, “let’s hit you in the forehead, what are you barking?” - about the chief of the guard.

Prisoners are a defenseless herd. They are counted by head:

« <…>look from behind or from front: five heads, five backs, ten legs”; "- Stop! - the watchman makes noise. - Like a flock of sheep. Sort it out in fives!”; lad Gopchik - “an affectionate calf”, “he has a tiny voice, like a kid’s”; Captain Buinovsky “locked up the stretcher like a good gelding.”

This opposition of wolves and sheep is easily superimposed in our minds on the usual fable-allegorical opposition of strength and defenselessness (“The Wolf and the Lamb”), or, as in Ostrovsky, calculating cunning and simplicity, but here another, more ancient and more general semantic layer is more important -- symbolism of sacrifice associated with the image of a sheep. For a camp theme, the general plot of which is life in the kingdom of non-life and the possibility (Solzhenitsyn) or impossibility (Shalamov) for a person to be saved in this non-life, the very ambivalence of the symbol of the victim, which combines opposite meanings death and life, death and salvation, turns out to be unusually capacious. The substantive value of the opposition lies in its connection with the problem moral choice: whether to accept the “law of wolves” for oneself depends on the person, and the one who accepts it acquires the properties of dogs or jackals serving the wolf tribe (Der, “the foreman from the prisoners, a good bastard, his brother the prisoner worse than dogs drives,” the prisoner, the head of the canteen, who, together with the warden, throws people around, is defined by the same word with the warden: “They manage without guards, regiments”).

Prisoners turn into wolves and dogs not only when they obey the camp law of survival of the strong: “Whoever can, gnaws at him,” not only when, betraying their own, they serve the camp authorities, but also when they renounce their personality, becoming a crowd - - this is the most difficult case for a person, and no one here is guaranteed against transformation. So the prisoners waiting in the cold for a recount turn into an angry crowd, ready to kill the culprit - a Moldovan who fell asleep and slept through the check: “Now he<Шухов>he was cold with everyone, and fierce with everyone, and it seems that if this Moldovan had held them for half an hour, he would have given his escort to the crowd - they would have torn apart a calf like wolves!” (for the Moldavian - the victim - the former name “calf” remains). The cry with which the crowd greets the Moldovan is a wolf howl:

“-Ah-ah! - the prisoners screamed! “Uh-oh!”

Another system of relations is between prisoners. On the one hand, this is a hierarchy, and the camp terminology - “morons”, “sixes”, “goners” - clearly defines the place of each rank. “On the outside, the brigade is all wearing the same black pea coats and identical numbers, but inside it is very unequal - they walk in steps. You can’t make Buinovsky sit with a bowl, and Shukhov won’t take on just any job, there’s something lower.” The antithesis “one's own - someone else's” turns out in this case to be an opposition between the top and the bottom in the camp society (“Shukhov was in a hurry and still answered decently (the brigadier is also the boss, he depends even more on him than on the head of the camp)”; paramedic Kolya He calls Vdovushkin Nikolai Semyonich and takes off his hat, “as if in front of his superiors”).

Another case is the selection of informers, who are opposed to all camp inmates as not quite people, as certain separate organs - functions that the authorities cannot do without. There are no informers - there is no opportunity to see and hear what is happening among people. “Our eyes were gouged out! They cut off our ears!” - Lieutenant Bekech shouts in the script, explaining in exact words what informers are.

And finally, the third and perhaps most tragically important case for Solzhenitsyn is the case of internal opposition - the opposition between the people and the intelligentsia. This problem, cardinal for the entire nineteenth century - from Griboyedov to Chekhov, is by no means removed in the twentieth century, but few people raised it with such acuteness as Solzhenitsyn. His point of view is the fault of that part of the intelligentsia that does not see the people. Speaking about the terrible stream of arrests of peasants in 1929-1930, which was almost unnoticed by the liberal Soviet intelligentsia of the sixties, who focused on the Stalinist terror of 1934-1937. - upon the destruction of his own, he pronounces as a sentence: “And yet Stalin (and you and I) did not have a more serious crime.” In “One Day...” Shukhov sees intellectuals (“Muscovites”) as a foreign people: “And they babble quickly, quickly, whoever says the most words. And when they babble like that, you rarely come across Russian words, listening to them is the same as listening to Latvians or Romanians.” In the same way, more than a century ago, Griboedov spoke about nobles and peasants as different peoples: “If by some chance a foreigner were brought here<…>he, of course, would have concluded from the sharp contrast of morals that our gentlemen and peasants come from two different tribes, which have not yet had time to mix up their customs and mores.” The harshness of the opposition is especially felt because Solzhenitsyn’s traditional national alienation has been practically removed: a common destiny leads to human closeness, and Ivan Denisovich understands the Latvian Kildigs, the Estonians, and the Western Ukrainian Pavlo. Human brotherhood is created not in spite of, but rather thanks to national distinction, which gives fullness and brightness great life. And one more motive (albeit maximally realized only in the script) - the motive of retribution - requires a multinational combination of people: in “Tanks” the unofficial tribunal condemning informers to death is the Caucasian Mohammed, the Lithuanian Antonas, the Ukrainian Bogdan, the Russian Klimov.

“Educated Conversation” - a dispute about Eisenstein between Caesar and the old convict X-123 (he is heard by Shukhov, who brought Caesar porridge) - models a double opposition: firstly, within the intelligentsia: the esthete-formalist Caesar, whose formula “art - - this is not what, but how,” is contrasted with the supporter of the ethical understanding of art X-123, for whom “to hell with your “how” if it doesn’t awaken good feelings in me!”, and “Ivan the Terrible” is “the most vile political idea - justification of individual tyranny,” and, secondly, the opposition of the intelligentsia - the people, and in it Caesar and X-123 are equally opposed to Ivan Denisovich. In the small space of the episode - just a page of book text - Solzhenitsyn shows three times - Caesar does not notice Ivan Denisovich: “Caesar is smoking a pipe, lounging at his table. His back is to Shukhov, he doesn’t see him.<…>Caesar turned around, extended his hand for the porridge, and didn’t look at Shukhov, as if the porridge itself had arrived by air<…>. <…>Caesar didn’t remember him at all, that he was here behind him.” But also " good feelings"The old convict is aimed only at his own people - for memory" three generations Russian intelligentsia,” and Ivan Denisovich is invisible to him.

This is unforgivable blindness. Ivan Denisovich in Solzhenitsyn's story is not just the main character - he has the highest authority as a narrator, although due to his modesty he does not at all pretend to this role. The main narrative device, which the writer abandons for the sake of the author’s speech only a few times, and very briefly, is indirect speech that forces us to see the depicted world primarily through the eyes of Shukhov and to understand this world through his consciousness. And therefore central problem story, coinciding with the problems of the entire new (with early XIX century) of Russian literature, - gaining freedom - comes to us through a problem that Ivan Denisovich recognizes as the main one for his life in the camp - survival.

The simplest formula for survival: “your” time + food. This is a world where “two hundred grams rule life”, where the scoop of cabbage soup after work occupies the highest place in the hierarchy of values ​​(“This scoop is now more valuable to him than his will, more valuable than all past life and all future life"), where it is said about dinner: “This is the short moment for which the prisoner lives!” The soldering hidden near the heart is symbolic. Time is measured by food: “The most satisfying time for a camp prisoner is June: every vegetable runs out and is replaced with cereal. The worst time is July: they whip nettles into a cauldron.” Treating food as a highly valuable idea and the ability to focus entirely on it determine the possibility of survival. “He eats porridge with an insensitive mouth, it is of no use to him,” they say about the old Qatari intellectual. Shukhov feels every spoonful, every bite he swallows. The story is full of information about what magara is, why oats are valuable, how to hide rations, how to eat porridge as a crust, what are the benefits of bad fats.

Life is the highest value, human duty is to save oneself, and therefore the traditional system of prohibitions and restrictions ceases to operate: the bowls of porridge stolen by Shukhov are not a crime, but a merit, a prisoner’s daring, Gopchik eats his parcels alone at night - and here This is the norm, “the right camper will be.”

Another thing is striking: although moral boundaries change, they continue to exist, and moreover, they serve as a guarantee of human salvation. The criterion is simple: you cannot change - neither to others (like informers who save themselves “on the blood of others”), nor to yourself.

The persistence of moral habits, be it Shukhov’s inability to “jackal” or give bribes, or “weaning” and conversion “according to the fatherland,” from which Western Ukrainians cannot be weaned, turns out to be not external, easily washed away by the conditions of existence, but the internal, natural stability of a person . This stability determines the measure human dignity as internal freedom in a situation of maximum external absence of it. And almost the only means that helps to realize this freedom and - therefore - allows a person to survive, is work, labor. "<…>This is how Shukhov is built (my italics - T.V.) in a foolish way, and they can’t wean him off: he spares every thing and every labor, so that they don’t perish in vain.” Work defines people: Buinovsky, Fetyukov, Baptist Alyoshka are assessed by what they are like in general work. Work saves you from illness: “Now that Shukhov has been given a job, it seems that he has stopped breaking.” Work turns “official” time into “your own”: “What, it’s disgusting, the working day is so short?” Work destroys hierarchy: “<…>Now his work is on par with the foreman.” And most importantly, it destroys fear: “<…>Shukhov, even though his convoy is now hounding him with dogs, ran back along the platform and took a look.”

Freedom not measured by height human feat(“The tanks know the truth!”), and by the simplicity of the daily routine, it is interpreted with all the more convincing as a natural necessity of life.

Thus, in the story about one day in the life of a Soviet camp inmate, two big topics Russian classical literature- the search for freedom and the holiness of people's labor.