Lev Losev. The magnificent future of Russia

23.06.2020

The work of A. Solzhenitsyn has recently occupied one of the important places in the history of Russian literature of the 20th century. The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, the novels “The Gulag Archipelago”, “The Red Wheel”, “Cancer Ward”, “In the First Circle” and others widely known throughout the world. The great books of each national literature absorb all the uniqueness, all the unusualness of the era. The main thing with which the people once lived becomes the collective images of their past. Of course, no literary work can absorb all layers of people's life; any era is much more complex than even the most gifted mind of a writer can understand and comprehend. The memory of an era is preserved only by the generation that saw it, lived in it, and those who were born later - they assimilate and preserve not the memory of the era, but its collective image; and most often this image is created by great literature, great writers. Therefore, the writer has a much greater responsibility for historical truth than the historian. If a writer distorts historical truth, no amount of scientific refutation will erase artistic fiction from the consciousness of the people - it becomes a cultural fact and is established for centuries. The people see his story as the writer saw and depicted it.

The path of a “writer concerned with the truth”, which was chosen by A.I. Solzhenitsyn demanded not only fearlessness - to stand alone against the entire colossus of the dictatorial regime: it was also the most difficult creative path. Because the terrible truth is that the material is very ungrateful and unyielding. Solzhenitsyn, having overcome his own suffering fate, decided to speak about suffering not on his own behalf, but on the people’s behalf. The writer himself has experienced and knows what the arrest of a person is, then interrogation, torture, prison and punishment cell, camp, guard dog, camp stew, footcloths, a spoon and a prisoner’s shirt, that there is also a prisoner himself, the same object, but still possessing life, guilty of nothing except that he was born for the sake of a suffering fate. Solzhenitsyn showed in his works that colossal and hitherto unprecedented state mechanism that ensured the people's suffering, the energy of this mechanism, its design, and the history of its creation. Not a single state, not a single people has repeated such a tragedy that Russia went through.

The tragedy of the Russian people is revealed in Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The Gulag Archipelago.” This is the story of the emergence, growth and existence of the Gulag Archipelago, which became the personification of the tragedy of Russia in the 20th century. Inseparable from the depiction of the tragedy of the country and people is the theme of human suffering, which runs through the entire work. The theme – Power and Man – runs through many of the writer’s works. What can the authorities do to a person and what suffering do they condemn him to? In “The Gulag Archipelago,” a sad, sarcastic note bursts into the frightening story about Solovki: “It was in the best bright 20s, even before any “cult of personality,” when the white, yellow, black and brown races of the earth looked at our country as to the light of freedom." In the Soviet Union, all information was blocked, but the West had information about repressions in the USSR, about the dictatorship, the artificial famine of the 30s, people dying, concentration camps.

Solzhenitsyn persistently dispels the myth of the monolithic and ideological cohesion of Soviet society. The idea of the regime's nationality is attacked and it is contrasted with the point of view of popular common sense. The Russian intelligentsia, whose consciousness was pierced by a sense of healthy duty to the people, the desire to repay this debt, carried within itself the traits of asceticism and self-sacrifice. Some brought the revolution closer, faith in the realization of the dream of freedom and justice, others, more perspicacious, understood that the dream could fail, freedom would turn into tyranny. And so it happened, the new government established a dictatorship, everything was subordinate to the Bolshevik Party. There was no freedom of speech, no criticism of the system. And if someone took the courage to express their opinion, then they were punished for it with years of camp life or execution. And he could have suffered for nothing, they fabricated a “case” under Article 58. This article picked everyone.

The “thing” in the system of a totalitarian state is not the same as in the legal system. “Deed” turns out to be a word, a thought, a manuscript, a lecture, an article, a book, a diary entry, a letter, a scientific concept. Any person can have such a “case”. Solzhenitsyn in “Archipelago” shows political prisoners under Article 58. “There were more of them than in tsarist times, and they showed greater steadfastness and courage than previous revolutionaries.” The main characteristic of these political prisoners is “if not a fight against the regime, then a moral opposition to it.” Solzhenitsyn objects to Ehrenburg, who in his memoirs called arrest a lottery: “... not a lottery, but mental selection. Everyone who was purer and better ended up on the Archipelago.” This spiritual selection pushed into the dense net of the NKVD the intelligentsia, who were in no hurry to testify to loyalty, morally opposed to the dictatorship, and it also brought to the Archipelago such as the hero of the “Circle” Nerzhin, who “all his youth he sharpened books until he was stupefied and from them he found out that Stalin ... distorted Leninism. As soon as Nerzhin wrote down this conclusion on a piece of paper, he was arrested.”

The author reveals “man’s resistance to the power of evil, ... the history of the fall, struggle and greatness of the spirit...” The country of the Gulag has its own geography: Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk, Kazakhstan... “This striped archipelago cut and dotted another, including the country, it crashed into its cities , hanging over its streets." It was not of his own free will that a person went to the country of the Gulag. The author shows the process of violent suppression of human consciousness, his “plunging into darkness,” how the “powerful machine” both physically and spiritually destroyed people. But then the artist proves that even in inhuman conditions one can remain human. Such heroes of the work as brigade commander Travkin, the illiterate Aunt Dusya Chmil, the communist V.G. Vlasov, Professor Timofeev-Resovsky prove that you can resist the Gulag and remain human. “It’s not the result that’s important...It’s the spirit! Not what was done - but how. “It’s not what has been achieved – but at what cost,” the author never tires of repeating, does not allow people to bend in faith. This conviction was gained by Solzhenitsyn himself on the Archipelago. Believers went to camps to suffer torture and death, but did not abandon God. “We noticed their confident procession through the archipelago - some kind of silent religious procession with invisible candles,” says the author. The camp machine worked without visible failures, destroying the body and spirit of the people sacrificed to it, but it could not cope with everyone equally. Outside remained the thoughts and will of a person for inner freedom.

The writer reliably spoke about the tragic fate of the Russian intelligentsia, disfigured, numb, and perished in the Gulag. Millions of Russian intellectuals were thrown here to be maimed, to die, without hope of return. For the first time in history, so many developed, mature, culturally rich people found themselves forever “in the shoes of a slave, a slave, a lumberjack and a miner.”

A. Solzhenitsyn writes at the beginning of his narrative that his book contains neither fictitious persons nor fictitious events. People and places are called by their proper names. The archipelago is all these “islands” connected by “sewage pipes” through which people “flow”, digested by the monstrous machine of totalitarianism into liquid - blood, sweat, urine; an archipelago living “its own life, experiencing now hunger, now evil joy, now love, now hatred; an archipelago spreading like a cancerous tumor of the country, metastasizing in all directions...”

Summarizing in his study thousands of real destinies, an innumerable number of facts, Solzhenitsyn writes that “if Chekhov’s intellectuals, who kept wondering what would happen in twenty to thirty years, were told that in forty years there would be a torture investigation in Rus', they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath of acid, torture naked and tied with ants, drive a ramrod hot on a primus stove into the anus, slowly crush the genitals with boots, “not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end”: many spectators would have had a crazy day.” .

A.I. Solzhenitsyn proved this by citing the example of Elizaveta Tsvetkova, a prisoner who received a letter from her daughter in prison, asking her mother to tell her if she was guilty. If she is guilty, then the fifteen-year-old girl will refuse her and join the Komsomol. Then the innocent woman writes to her daughter a lie: “I am guilty. Join the Komsomol." “How can a daughter live without the Komsomol?” - the poor woman thinks.

Solzhenitsyn, a former Gulag prisoner who became a writer in order to tell the world about the inhuman system of violence and lies, published his camp story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” One day of Solzhenitsyn’s hero grows to the limits of an entire human life, to the scale of the people’s fate, to the symbol of an entire era in the history of Russia.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner, lived like everyone else, fought until he was captured. But Ivan Denisovich did not succumb to the process of dehumanization even in the Gulag. He remained human. What helped him resist? It seems that in Shukhov everything is focused on one thing - just to survive. He doesn’t think about the damned questions: why are so many people, good and different, sitting in the camp? What is the reason for the camps? He doesn't even know why he was imprisoned. It is believed that Shukhov was imprisoned for treason.

Shukhov is an ordinary person, his life was spent in deprivation and lack. He values, above all, the satisfaction of basic needs - food, drink, warmth, sleep. This person is far from thinking and analyzing. He is characterized by high adaptability to inhuman conditions in the camp. But this has nothing to do with opportunism, humiliation, or loss of human dignity. They trust Shukhov because they know that he is honest, decent, and lives according to his conscience. The main thing for Shukhov is work. In the person of the quiet, patient Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn recreated an almost symbolic image of the Russian people, capable of enduring unprecedented suffering, deprivation, bullying of the totalitarian regime and, despite everything, surviving in this tenth circle of hell" and at the same time maintaining kindness towards people, humanity, leniency towards human weaknesses and intolerance towards moral vices.

Solzhenitsyn gave the hero of the story, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, not his own biography of an intellectual officer arrested for careless statements about Lenin and Stalin in letters to a friend, but a much more popular biography of a peasant soldier who ended up in a camp for a one-day stay in captivity. The writer did this deliberately, because it is precisely such people, in the author’s opinion, who ultimately decide the fate of the country and carry the charge of people’s morality and spirituality. An ordinary and at the same time extraordinary biography of the hero allows the writer to recreate the heroic and tragic fate of the Russian man of the 20th century.

The reader learns that Ivan Denisovich Shukhov was born in 1911 in the village of Temchenevo, that he, like millions of soldiers, fought honestly; after being wounded, he hurried to return to the front without completing his treatment. He escaped from captivity and, together with thousands of poor fellows from his encirclement, ended up in a camp as allegedly carrying out a task from German intelligence. “What kind of task - neither Shukhov himself nor the investigator could come up with. So they just left it as a task.”

Shukhov's family remains free. Thoughts about her help Ivan Denisovich maintain human dignity and hope for a better future in prison. However, he forbade sending parcels to his wife. “Although it was easier for Shukhov to feed a whole family in freedom than to feed himself alone here, he knew what those programs were worth, and he knew that his family couldn’t afford them for ten years; it was better without them.”

In the camp, Ivan Denisovich did not become a “moron,” that is, someone who, in return for a bribe or some kind of favors to his superiors, got a cushy job in the camp administration. Shukhov does not betray age-old peasant habits and “doesn’t let himself down”, doesn’t get destroyed because of a cigarette, because of rations, and certainly doesn’t lick plates and doesn’t inform on his comrades. According to a well-known peasant habit, Shukhov respects bread; When he eats, he takes off his hat. He doesn’t disdain making extra money, and “doesn’t stretch his belly for other people’s goods.” Shukhov never feigns illness, but when he becomes seriously ill, he behaves guiltily in the medical unit.

The character’s folk character emerges especially clearly in his work scenes. Ivan Denisovich is a mason, a stove maker, and a shoemaker. “He who knows two things with his hands can also handle ten,” says Solzhenitsyn.

Even in conditions of captivity, Shukhov protects and hides his trowel; in his hands, a fragment of a saw turns into a shoe knife. The peasant's economic mind cannot come to terms with the transfer of goods, and Shukhov, at the risk of being late for work and being punished, does not leave the construction site so as not to throw away the cement.

“Whoever works hard becomes like a foreman above his neighbors,” says the writer. Human dignity, equality, freedom of spirit, according to Solzhenitsyn, are established in work; it is in the process of work that prisoners make noise and even have fun, although the fact that prisoners have to build a new camp, a prison for themselves, is very symbolic.

Shukhov experiences only one day of camp throughout the story.

A relatively happy day, when, as Solzhenitsyn’s hero admits, “there were a lot of successes: he wasn’t put in a punishment cell, the brigade wasn’t sent out to the socialist town, he made porridge at lunch, the foreman closed the interest well, Shukhov laid the wall cheerfully, he didn’t get caught with a hacksaw on a search, I worked at Caesar's in the evening and bought some tobacco. And I didn’t get sick, I got over it.” Nevertheless, even this “unclouded” day leaves a rather painful impression. After all, a good, conscientious person, Ivan Denisovich, must constantly think only about how to survive, feed himself, not freeze, get an extra piece of bread, not provoke the anger of the guards and camp officers... One can only guess how hard it was for him in less happy days. And yet, Shukhov finds time to think about his native village, about how life is settled there, which he expects to be involved in after his release. He is worried that the men do not work on the collective farm, but increasingly go to latrine trades, earning money from dust-free work - painting carpets. Ivan Denisovich, and with him the author, reflects: “Easy money - it doesn’t give you any fun, and there’s no feeling that you’ve earned it. The old people were right when they said: what you don’t pay extra for, you don’t report. Shukhov’s hands are still good, they can do it, will he really not find any furnace work, no carpentry, no tin work in freedom?”

For a long time, debates among critics have not subsided: is Ivan Denisovich a positive hero? It was confusing that he professed camp wisdom, and did not rush, like almost all the heroes of Soviet literature, “into battle with shortcomings.” . Even greater doubts were raised by the hero’s adherence to another camp rule: “Whoever can do it, gnaws at him.” There is an episode in the story when the hero takes away a tray from a weakling, with great imagination he “steals” the roofing felt, and deceives the fat-faced cook. However, each time Shukhov acts not for personal benefit, but for the brigade: to feed his comrades, board up the windows and preserve the health of his fellow prisoners.

What caused the greatest bewilderment among critics was the phrase that Shukhov “he himself didn’t know whether he wanted it or not.” However, it has a very significant meaning for the writer. Prison, according to Solzhenitsyn, is a huge evil, violence, but suffering and compassion contribute to moral purification. “A wiry, neither hungry nor well-fed state” introduces a person to a higher moral existence and unites him with the world. No wonder the writer declared: “I bless you, prison, that you were in my life.”

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is not an ideal hero, but a very real one, taken from the thick of camp life. That's not to say he doesn't have his flaws. For example, he is timid like a peasant in front of any authorities. Due to his lack of education, he cannot conduct a learned conversation with Caesar Markovich. However, all this does not detract from the main thing in Solzhenitsyn’s hero - his will to live, the desire to live this life not to the detriment of others and the sense of justification of his own existence. These qualities of Ivan Denisovich could not be destroyed by the many years spent in the Gulag.

Other characters in the work are seen as if through the eyes of the main character. Among them there are those who evoke our sincere sympathy: brigadier Tyurin, captain Buinovsky, Alyoshka the Baptist, a former prisoner of Buchenwald, Senka Klevshin and many others. Both the “moron” and the former Moscow film director Tsezar Markovich, who got an easy and prestigious job in the camp office, are likable in their own way.

There are, on the contrary, those who evoke nothing but persistent disgust from the author, the main character and us, the readers. This is the former big boss, and now a degraded prisoner, ready to lick other people's plates and pick up cigarette butts, Fetyukov; foreman - informer Der; deputy head of the camp for the regime, a cold-blooded sadist, Lieutenant Volkova. The negative characters do not express any of their own ideas in the story. Their figures simply symbolize certain negative aspects of reality condemned by the author and the main character.

Another thing is that the heroes are positive. They have frequent disputes with each other, which Ivan Denisovich witnesses. Here is captain Buinovsky, a new man in the camp and not accustomed to local customs, boldly shouting to Volkov: “You have no right to undress people in the cold! You don’t know the ninth article of the criminal code!..” Shukhov, like an experienced prisoner, comments to himself: “They have. They know. This is something you, brother, don’t know yet.” Here the writer demonstrates the collapse of the hopes of those who were sincerely devoted to Soviet power and believed that lawlessness had been committed against them and that it was only necessary to achieve strict and precise compliance with Soviet laws. Ivan Denisovich, together with Solzhenitsyn, knows perfectly well that the dispute between Buinovsky and Volkov is not only senseless, but also dangerous for an overly ardent prisoner, that there is, of course, no mistake on the part of the camp administration, that the Gulag is a well-functioning state system and that those who find themselves in the camp they sit here not as a result of a fatal accident, but because someone above needs it. Shukhov laughs in his heart at Buinovsky, who has not yet forgotten his commander’s habits, which look ridiculous in the camp. Ivan Denisovich understands that the captain will have to humble his pride in order to survive the twenty-five-year sentence awarded to him. But at the same time, he feels that, having retained his willpower and inner moral core, the kavtorang is more likely to survive in the hell of the Gulag than the degenerate “jackal” Fetyukov.

Brigadier Tyurin, a camp veteran, tells the sad story of his misadventures, which began with the fact that back in 1930, the vigilant regiment commander and commissar kicked him out of the army, having received a message that Tyurin’s parents were dispossessed: “By the way, in the 38th, at the Kotlas transfer I met my former platoon commander, and they also gave him a ten. So I learned from him: both the regimental commander and the commissar were both shot in 1937. There they were already proletarians and kunaks. Whether they had a conscience or not... I crossed myself and said: “Still you exist, Creator, in heaven. You endure for a long time, but you hit hard..."

Here Solzhenitsyn, through the mouth of the foreman, recites the thesis that the repressions of 1937 were God's punishment for the communists for the merciless extermination of peasants during the years of forced collectivization. Almost all the characters in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich help the author express basic ideas about the causes and consequences of repression.

Prose by A.I. Solzhenitsyn has the quality of utmost persuasiveness in conveying the realities of life. The story he told about one day in the life of a prisoner was perceived by the first readers as documentary, “uninvented.” Indeed, most of the characters in the story are genuine people taken from life. Such, for example, are brigadier Tyurin, cavalry rank Buikovsiy. Only the image of the main character of Shukhov’s story, according to the author, is composed of a soldier of the artilleryman of the battery that Solzhenitsyn commanded at the front, and of prisoner No. 854 Solzhenitsyn.

The descriptive fragments of the story are filled with signs of uninvented reality. These are the portrait characteristics of Shukhov himself; a clearly drawn plan of the area with a watch, medical unit, barracks; psychologically convincing description of a prisoner's feelings during a search. Every detail of the behavior of the prisoners or their camp life is conveyed in almost physiological detail.

A careful reading of the story reveals that the effect of life-like persuasiveness and psychological authenticity produced by the story is the result not only of the writer’s conscious desire for maximum accuracy, but also a consequence of his extraordinary compositional skill. A successful statement about Solzhenitsyn’s artistic style belongs to the literary critic Arkady Belinkov: “Solzhenitsyn spoke in the voice of great literature, in the categories of good and evil, life and death, power and society... He spoke about one day, one case, one yard... Day, yard, and case “These are manifestations of good and evil, life and death, the relationship between man and society.” This statement by the literary critic accurately notes the relationship between the formal-compositional categories of time, space and plot with the nerve nodes of the problematics of Solzhenitsyn’s story.

One day in the story contains a cluster of human destiny. It is impossible not to pay attention to the extremely high degree of detail in the narrative: each fact is divided into smaller components, most of which are presented in close-up. The author is unusually carefully and scrupulously watching how his hero dresses before leaving the barracks, how he puts on a muzzle, or how he eats a small fish caught in the soup to the skeleton. Such meticulousness of the image should make the narrative heavier and slow it down, but this does not happen. The reader's attention not only does not get tired, but is even more sharpened, and the rhythm of the narrative does not become monotonous. The fact is that Solzhenitsyn's Shukhov is placed in a situation between life and death; the reader is charged with the energy of the writer's attention to the circumstances of this extreme situation. Every little thing for the hero is literally a matter of life and death, a matter of survival and dying. Therefore, the Shukhovs sincerely rejoice at every little thing they find, every extra crumb of bread.

The day is the “nodal” point through which all human life passes in Solzhenitsyn’s story. That is why chronological and chronometric designations in the text also have a symbolic meaning. “It is especially important that the concepts of “day” and “life” become closer to each other, sometimes almost becoming synonymous. This semantic convergence is carried out through the universal concept of “deadline” in the story. A term is both the punishment meted out to a prisoner, and the internal routine of prison life, and - most importantly - a synonym for human fate and a reminder of the most important, last term of human life.” Thus, temporary designations acquire a deep moral and psychological coloring in the story.

The location also played an unusual role in the story. The space of the camp is hostile to prisoners, the open areas of the zone are especially dangerous: every prisoner is in a hurry to run across the areas between rooms as quickly as possible, he is afraid of being caught in such a place, and is in a hurry to duck into the shelter of the barracks. In contrast to the heroes of Russian classical literature, who traditionally love the expanse and distance, Shukhov and his fellow prisoners dream of the saving closeness of the shelter. Barack turns out to be home for them.

“The space in the story is built in concentric circles: first the barracks are described, then the zone is outlined, then there is a passage across the steppe, a construction site, after which the space is again compressed to the size of the barracks.

The closure of the circle in the artistic topography of the story receives symbolic meaning. The prisoner's view is limited by a circle surrounded by wire. The prisoners are fenced off even from the sky. From above they are constantly blinded by spotlights, hanging so low that they seem to deprive people of air. For them there is no horizon, no normal circle of life. But there is also the prisoner’s inner vision - the space of his memory; and in it closed circles are overcome and images of the village, Russia, and the world arise.

The creation of a generalized picture of the hell to which the Soviet people were doomed is facilitated by the episodic characters introduced into the narrative with their tragic destinies. The attentive reader cannot help but notice that A. Solzhenitsyn traces the history of totalitarianism not from 1937, not from Stalin’s, as they said then, “violations of the norms of state and party life,” but from the first post-October years. A nameless old convict, who has been sitting since the foundation of Soviet power, appears very briefly in the story, toothless, exhausted, but, as always with A. Solzhenitsyn’s folk characters, “not to the weakness of a disabled wick, but to a hewn, dark stone.” A simple calculation of the terms of imprisonment of Ivan Denisovich’s fellow prisoners, carefully indicated by the writer, shows that Shukhov’s first brigadier Kuzmin was arrested in the “year of the great turning point” - in 1929, and the current one, Andrei Prokopyevich Tyurin, - in 1933, called in Soviet history textbooks the “year of victory” collective farm system."

A short story contains a whole list of injustices born of the system: the reward for courage in captivity was a ten-year sentence for the Siberian Ermolaev and the hero of the Resistance Senka Klevshin; Baptist Alyoshka suffers for his faith in God under the freedom of faith declared by the Stalin Constitution. The system is also merciless towards a 16-year-old boy who carried food into the forest; and to the captain of the second rank, the loyal communist Buinovsky; and to the Bendera resident Pavel; and to the intellectual Caesar Markovich; and to the Estonians, whose whole guilt is the desire for freedom for their people. The words of the writer that the Socialist town is being built by prisoners sound with evil irony.

Thus, in one day and in one camp depicted in the story, the writer concentrated the other side of life, which before him was a secret with seven seals. Having discussed the inhumane system, the author at the same time created a realistic character of a truly national hero, who managed to carry through all the trials and preserve the best qualities of the Russian people.

The farewell ceremony for the writer and public figure Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on Monday night at the age of 90, will be held on Tuesday at the Russian Academy of Sciences on Leninsky Prospekt, the Solzhenitsyn Public Foundation told RIA Novosti.

The famous Russian writer, Nobel laureate Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is the author of many works about the history of Russia.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s first work, the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published in Novy Mir in 1962, brought him worldwide fame. Then the stories "Matrenin's Dvor", "An Incident at Kochetovka Station", "For the Good of the Cause" and "Zakhar-Kalita" were published. At this point, publications stopped; the writer’s works were published in samizdat and abroad.

According to statistics, the peak of reader interest in Solzhenitsyn occurred in 1988-1993, when his books were printed in millions of copies. For example, in 1989, Novy Mir published an abridged magazine version of The Gulag Archipelago with a circulation of 1.6 million copies. The novel “In the First Circle” was published from 1990 to 1994 by ten (!) different Russian publishing houses with a total circulation of 2.23 million copies. “Cancer Ward” was reprinted nine times at the same time. But all records were broken by the manifesto “How to Build Russia,” published in September 1990 with a total circulation of 27 million copies.
In recent years, interest in this author has decreased somewhat. The epic "Red Wheel" was published in 1997 in only 30 thousand copies.

In 2006, the Vremya publishing house signed an agreement with Solzhenitsyn to publish his collected works in 30 volumes during 2006–2010 - the first in Russia and in the world. At the end of 2006, three volumes of the Collected Works were published with a circulation of three thousand copies. In accordance with the agreement with the publishing house, as each volume is sold, books will be printed in the required quantity.

Publication of the Collected Works of Solzhenitsyn began with the release of the first, seventh and eighth volumes. This inconsistency is due to the fact that it was very important for the writer to make the final copyright edits and see the epic “The Red Wheel” printed. It was planned just for the 7th and 8th volumes. It was “The Red Wheel,” where Solzhenitsyn explores in detail one of the most difficult and dramatic periods in the life of Russia - the history of the socialist revolution of 1917, that the writer considered the main book in his work.

The most famous works of the writer

Epic novel "The Red Wheel".

The first book of the epic, the novel “August the Fourteenth,” was published in 1972 in English. The first edition in Russia - Voenizdat, 1993 (in 10 volumes), reprint reproduction from the collected works of A. Solzhenitsyn (YMCA-PRESS, Vermont-Paris, vols. 11 - 20, 1983 - 1991).

Solzhenitsyn's main literary work. The author himself defined the genre as “narration in a measured time frame.”

According to Solzhenitsyn himself, he spent his whole life studying the period dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. “The Red Wheel contains a cluster of all this. I tried not to miss a single fact. I found the law of revolution - when this grandiose wheel spins, it captures the entire people and its organizers.”

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is the first published work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which brought him world fame. The story tells about one day in the life of a prisoner, Russian peasant and soldier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in January 1951. For the first time in Soviet literature, readers were shown truthfully, with great artistic skill, Stalin's repressions. Today “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has been translated into 40 languages of the world. In the West, a film was made based on this work.

The narrator settles in one of the villages in the outback of Russia called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which he lives is called Matryona Ignatievna Grigorieva or simply Matryona. The fate of Matryona, told by her, fascinates the guest. Gradually, the narrator understands that it is on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without reserve, that the entire village and the entire Russian land still hold together.

"GULAG Archipelago"

Written secretly by Solzhenitsyn in the USSR between 1958 and 1968 (finished on February 22, 1967), the first volume was published in Paris in December 1973. In the USSR, “Archipelago” was published in 1990 (the chapters selected by the author were first published in the magazine “New World”, 1989, No. 7-11).

The Gulag Archipelago is an art-historical study by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of the Soviet repressive system from 1918 to 1956. Based on eyewitness accounts, documents and personal experience of the author himself.
The phrase “GULAG Archipelago” has become a household word and is often used in journalism and fiction, primarily in relation to the penitentiary system of the USSR in the 1920s–1950s.

Novel "In the First Circle"

The title contains an allusion to the first circle of Dante's Hell.

The action takes place in the specialized institute-prison Marfino, an analogue of the one where Solzhenitsyn was kept in the late 1940s. The main theme of the institute is the development of a “Secret Telephony Apparatus”, which is being carried out in the “sharashka” on the personal instructions of Stalin. The central place in the narrative is occupied by the ideological dispute between the heroes of the novel Gleb Nerzhin and Sologdin with Lev Rubin. They all went through the war and the Gulag system. At the same time, Rubin remained a convinced communist. In contrast, Nerzhin is confident in the depravity of the very basis of the system.

Novel "Cancer Ward"(the author himself defined it as a “story”)

In the USSR it was published in samizdat, in Russia it was first published in the magazine “New World” in 1991.

Written in 1963-1966 based on the writer’s stay in the oncology department of a hospital in Tashkent in 1954. The hero of the novel, Rusanov, like the author himself in his time, is being treated for cancer in a Central Asian provincial hospital. The main theme of the novel is a person’s struggle with death: the writer conveys the idea that victims of a fatal disease paradoxically achieve the freedom that healthy people are deprived of.

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ALLEGORATIVE COMPONENTS OF SOLZHENITSYN'S WORKS

N.N. Stupnitskaya

Permanent metamorphoses occurring throughout human history require the formation of a specific personality that is capable, at the same time, of absorbing new trends in the development of society and preserving those moral foundations that are core to the independence of each person and society as a whole. From our point of view, literature, which has a huge number of expressive means in its arsenal, is most effectively able to cope with such a task. One of such means widely used by writers in their works is allegory.

The purpose of this article is to identify allegorical components and determine their role in Solzhenitsyn’s works.

Allegory, according to the Big Encyclopedic Dictionary, is a literary device that contains a hidden meaning. In a narrow sense, allegory is understood as allegory and similar techniques by which one phenomenon is characterized through another. In a broad sense, allegory is understood as a fundamental feature of art, as evidenced by A.A. Potebnya, who claims that “every time a poetic image is perceived and enlivened by the understander, it tells him something different and greater than what is directly contained in it.” Considering the problem of allegory N.P. Antipyev claims that in “a work of art the world is completely recreated. Because we encounter not a word that we know, but an image that is unknown to us.” Feelings and concepts that do not have a visible form become tangible precisely thanks to allegories, and embodied in an image, they help to most accurately express an abstract concept.

Allegory is a complex concept that includes irony (the comic use of words in the opposite meaning, for example, in I.A. Krylov - “clever head” in relation to Donkey), Aesopian language (the so-called secret writing, when the author replaces real images with animals, endowing them with appropriate characteristics, widely used by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin), allegory (artistic isolation of concepts through specific images, for example, the use of images of ancient gods in solemn odes of the 18th century - Mars as an allegory of war, Venus - an allegory of love), symbol ( an image that conveys both concrete and abstract content at the same time - a dog as a symbol of the old world in A.A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve”, personification (presentation of natural phenomena or inanimate objects in the role of actors, endowing them with the properties of a living being, such as , “grief is girded with a bast”).

Allegory is used for various purposes: irony creates a comic effect; Aesopian language is necessary due to political conditions, the impossibility of directly saying what is needed; the allegory refers to the general cultural context; the symbol shows the multifaceted connection between objects and so on.

Various types of allegories help to form moral ideas about the norms of social relations, patterns of behavior and contribute to the assimilation of spiritual and moral categories.

Reading a literary work is a special type of communication, aesthetic communication that affects the reader’s soul and has great educational significance. A.I. Solzhenitsyn recognized the power of the literary word and resorted to various stylistic means to deepen, clarify and enhance the impact of his texts.

Thus, it should be noted that when creating a portrait of a character, Solzhenitsyn often resorts to comparing him with an animal. Such a comparison is a fairly ancient poetic device, dating back to mythology. It is known that every nation had its own totem, most often some animal acted as a totem. In Russian literature, the comparison with an animal was often used by N.V. Gogol. G.A. Gukovsky noted that many of the characters in Dead Souls look like “... like animals, that is, of course, not like real, living animals, but like animals of folklore, fables, and ancient folk myth.” This technique is also found in direct or hidden form in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Chekhov. If we talk about Solzhenitsyn’s immediate predecessors, then, first of all, the name of E. Zamyatin should be mentioned. The author himself testifies to this: “Zamiatin is amazing in many respects. His portraits are incredibly bright and powerful. Sometimes with one or two words he gives a whole face. He did much more than Chekhov in this regard. Chekhov already made an attempt not to describe which eyes, which mouth, which nose, but to describe with some kind of comparison. To convey a face by comparison. Zamyatin goes much further; he sometimes captures a portrait in one word, as expressively as a painter. I believe that no one has reached the heights of a laconic portrait like Zamyatin - this is truly amazing.”

Solzhenitsyn avoided long descriptions, trying to characterize the character with some apt comparison. J. Niva called this technique “a playful animal metaphor.” “Humanity is a fabulous animal world. The humor of Russian folk tales and epics shines through in it.” The contrast between the two worlds: jailers and prisoners, is strengthened by the fact that it is also given at the natural biological level. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the guards are constantly compared to wolves and dogs: Lieutenant Volkova “otherwise, like a wolf<.>, doesn’t look”, the guards “got excited, rushed like animals”, “just look out so that they don’t rush at your throat.” Prisoners are a defenseless herd. They are counted head by head. This opposition of wolves and sheep, boa constrictors and rabbits easily overlaps in our minds with the usual fable-allegorical opposition of strength and defenselessness, calculated cunning and simplicity, but here another, more ancient and more general semantic layer is more important - the symbolism of sacrifice associated with the image of a sheep.

In the context of the era described by Solzhenitsyn, the ambivalence of the symbol of sacrifice, which combines the opposite meanings of 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 of moral choice: whether to accept such a cruel law of survival or not. The prisoners had to silently obey and had no right to fight, so the exposure of informants was perceived as an emergency and, naturally, could have a detrimental effect not only on the fate of Doronin (a character in the novel “In the First Circle”), but also on the fate of Shikin. “Nine grams for him, the bastard! - his first words came out with a hiss.” Hissing is a characteristic sign of a snake. It is known that when meeting a snake, a person experiences chilling horror and becomes numb with fear. Snakes have always been perceived as something hostile to humans. The comparison with a snake is a detail that unites the detective and the main informant - Siromakha.

Commitment to home and vitality are also expressed in the description of Spiridon’s appearance: “In his malakhai with funny ears falling to one side, like a mongrel’s, Spiridon went towards the watch, where prisoners except him were not allowed.”

In this case, the comparison of the character with an animal is based on external similarity, which, however, does not detract from the symbolic significance of this image.

A similar function is performed by the comparison with a horse when describing Potapov’s appearance. “Despite his limp, he walked quickly, kept his neck tensely arched, first forward and then back, squinted his eyes and looked not at his feet, but somewhere into the distance, as if he was hurrying with his head and eyes to get ahead of his middle-aged legs.” The symbolic richness of the image is beyond doubt - the horse in our minds is clearly associated with the ability to work without rest, with devotion and reliability.

An interesting type of allegory used by Solzhenitsyn in his works is the ironic indirect characterization of a character by interspersing indirect speech into the actorial narrative, which makes the text more psychologically rich. Thus, the characterization given by Stalin to Tito in the novel “In the First Circle”: “How many millions of people will she open the eyes of this vain, proud, cruel, cowardly, disgusting, hypocritical, vile tyrant! vile traitor! hopeless idiot! , is an indirect characteristic of the character himself.

“(Fools! And their indignation is stupid - as if he himself, and not the latest instructions, came up with this order!).” Personification allows Solzhenitsyn to show not only the illusory nature of the power of Lieutenant Colonel Klimentyev and other leaders, but also the impersonality of Soviet society, the dominant role in all spheres of life of which is given to instructions. Such anthropomorphism is determined by the writer’s worldview and perception of the life of Soviet society. However, it is precisely the dominance of instructions that allows Klimentyev to make concessions to prisoners. He understood that holiday evenings are the most difficult and sought to obtain permission for prisoners to erect a Christmas tree. “The instructions said that musical instruments were prohibited, but nothing was found about Christmas trees, and therefore they did not give consent, but they did not impose a direct ban either.” This state of affairs gave the lieutenant colonel the opportunity to authorize the installation of a Christmas tree in the Marfin special prison.

The symbolic richness of the description of Smolosidov, who was constantly in the room, “...for the whole day, without leaving the room for a minute, he sat by the tape, guarding it like a gloomy black dog, and looked at the backs of their heads, and that persistent heavy gaze of his pressed on their skull and brain”, indicates the special role of the character. The dog is associated in our minds with a guard who does not allow strangers to enter the territory entrusted to him, located on the border of two worlds. By introducing such a symbolic detail, the writer brought two worlds together in one room, nevertheless demonstrating their alienness and hostility to each other.

From our point of view, we should pay attention to the symbolism of color in the novel by A.I. Solzhenitsyn "In the First Circle". It is noteworthy that at the party Dinera is dressed in a black dress, Dotnara in a cherry one, which allegorically correlates the heroines with the kingdom of Dante’s Satan, symbolized by three satanic faces: red, yellow and black. By dressing Clara in a green dress, the writer separates the heroine from the representatives of the kingdom of darkness. Before calling the American embassy, Volodin notices the following colors: “The red “M” above the metro was slightly shrouded in a bluish fog. A black southern woman was selling yellow flowers." This color scheme symbolizes the hero’s immersion in the darkness of the underworld and the catastrophic nature of the character’s act, which separated him from the world of the “living,” that is, the free, and moving him to the world of the “dead,” that is, prisoners.

Oskolupov’s behavior during Roitman’s report on the results of his work is noteworthy. Foma Guryanovich did not take Rubin’s statement about the possible innocence of one of the suspects into account. He didn't even realize it was important. “Really not guilty of anything?.. The authorities will find it and sort it out.” The quote is an allegorical reference to the concept of original sin. The satirical effect is created by comparing Christian anthropology (the concept of “original sin”) and the atheistic thinking of the Bolsheviks, who did not realize the impossibility of imputing universal guilt from a human perspective.

It is noteworthy, in our opinion, another statement used by A.I. Solzhenitsyn, when Roitman spoke at a meeting about plans: “However, he sowed on stone.” In this regard, we recall Christ’s parable about the grains thrown by the sower: “Some fell on rocky places where there was not much soil, and soon sprang up because the soil was shallow. When the sun rose, it withered and, as if it had no root, withered away.” The widespread use of biblicalisms reveals one of the most important features of Solzhenitsyn’s artistic vision - the temporal in its connections with the eternal.

The material presented in this article allows us to conclude that A.I. Solzhenitsyn widely used different types of allegory, namely: irony, comparisons with animals, allegory, personification, symbols as allegorical elements in his works to enhance the impact on the reader, give depth to his works, demonstrate their ontological connection with moral principles and cultural the values of the people. The relevance of studying this aspect lies in the fact that it forces the reader to look for the hidden meaning of the allegory, to search for its origins and deep content, thereby plunging not only into the cultural history of the country, but also drawing lessons from it, drawing conclusions and finding application for them in the present. . Allegories make works richer, revealing its deeper meaning, connecting the past, present and future.

allegory Solzhenitsyn irony allegory

Literature

1. Antipyev N.P. Artistic communication: allegory. Bulletin of Irkutsk State Linguistic University. 2012. No. 1 (17). pp. 119-128.

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3. Bible. Books of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Canonical. [Reprinted from the Sinoidal edition]. Chicago, USA, 1990. 1226 p.

4. Large encyclopedic dictionary: [A-Z]. Moscow, St. Petersburg: Bolshaya ros. encycl.: Norint, 1997. 1434 p.

5. Bulgakov M.A. Master and Margarita. Baku: Azerneshr, 1988. 320 p.

6. Gukovsky G. A. Realism of Gogol. Moscow-Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1959. 531 p.

7. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Perm: Perm Book, 1994. 479 p.

8. Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. Moscow: Rosman, 2006. 584 p.

9. Niva Zh. Solzhenitsyn. Moscow: Fiction, 1992. 189 p.

10. Potebnya A. A. Aesthetics and poetics. Moscow: Art, 1976. 614 p.

11. Solzhenitsyn A.I. In the first circle. Moscow: Fiction, 1990. 766 p.

12. Solzhenitsyn A.I. Small collected works: in 7 volumes. Moscow: INCOM NV, 1991. T 3. 1991. 288 p.

13. Solzhenitsyn A.I. Journalism: in 3 volumes. Yaroslavl: Verkh.-Volzh. book publishing house, 1996. T. 2. 1996. 624 p.

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