Ideological and artistic features, composition, issues, images of Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Artistic features of one day by Ivan Denisovich Artistic originality of one day by Ivan Denisovich

04.05.2021

Category: Essays on the work "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

In the fate of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, events common to millions of his fellow citizens were intertwined with rare and even exceptional events. The work “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was conceived in 1950-1951, when the author worked as a mason in the Ekibastuz Special Camp. The story was written in three weeks in 1959.

The theme of the story became innovative. For the first time in Soviet literature, the life of the camp zone was depicted. The idea of the work - a story about one day in the life of a hero - corresponded to the genre of a short story. The authenticity of the plot events is confirmed by the fact that the heroes of the story have prototypes. Thus, the image of Shukhov absorbed the features of fellow soldier Solzhenitsyn, as well as his comrades in the camp, combined with the writer’s personal experience.

In addition, many of the heroes of this work have a documentary “base”: their depictions reflect the biographies of real prisoners. A three-dimensional picture of camp life was created using many portrait, everyday, and psychological details. Their depiction required Solzhenitsyn to introduce new layers of vocabulary into the text. At the end of the story there was a dictionary that included, in addition to words of camp jargon, explanations of the realities of life for Gulag prisoners.

At the center of the story is the image of a simple Russian man who managed to survive and morally withstand the harshest conditions of camp bondage. Very interesting in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is the narrative technique based on fusion, partial illumination, complementarity, interweaving, and sometimes on the divergence of the point of view of the hero and the author-narrator, who is close to him in his worldview. The camp world is shown primarily through Shukhov’s perception, but the character’s point of view is complemented by a more comprehensive author’s vision and point of view reflecting the collective psychology of the prisoners. The author's thoughts and intonations are sometimes added to the character's direct speech or internal monologue.

Little is known about the pre-camp past of forty-year-old Shukhov. Before the war, he lived in the small village of Temgenevo, had a family - a wife and two daughters, and worked on a collective farm. Actually, there is not so much of a peasant in him. Collective farm and camp life “killed” the “classical” peasant qualities in him. The hero does not show nostalgia for the village way of life. Thus, the former peasant Ivan Denisovich has almost no desire for Mother Earth, no memories of his wet-nurse cow.

Shukhov does not perceive his native land, his father’s house as a lost paradise. Through this moment, the author shows the catastrophic consequences of the social, spiritual and moral upheavals that rocked Russia in the 20th century. These shocks, according to Solzhenitsyn, greatly changed and disfigured the personality of the common man, his inner world, his nature.

The dramatic life experience of Ivan Denisovich, whose image embodies the typical features and properties of the national character, allowed the hero to derive a universal formula for human survival in the country of the Gulag: “... groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break.”

In Solzhenitsyn's works, artistic details play a huge ideological and artistic role. Among the most expressive is the repeated mention of Ivan Denisovich’s legs tucked into the sleeve of a quilted jacket: “He was lying on the top of the carriage, with his head covered with a blanket and pea coat, and in the quilted jacket, in one rolled up sleeve, with both feet stuck together.”

This detail characterizes not the character’s experiences, but his external life. It is one of the most reliable details of camp life. Ivan Denisovich puts his legs into the sleeve of his padded jacket not by mistake, not in a state of passion, but for purely rational reasons. This decision was prompted by his long camp experience and folk wisdom (“According to the proverb “Keep your head cold, your stomach hungry, and your feet warm”). At the same time, this artistic detail also has a symbolic meaning. She emphasizes the anomalousness of the entire camp life, the upside-down nature of this world.

One day from Shukhov’s camp life is uniquely unique, since it is not a conventional, not a “combined” day. This is a very specific day with clear time coordinates. But it is quite typical, consisting of many episodes and details that are typical for any of the days of Ivan Denisovich’s camp term: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.”

The creative path of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is extremely complex. His name arose in the late 60s, during Khrushchev’s “thaw”, flared up, frightening the supporters of “secretness” during the “stagnation”, and disappeared for many years. Solzhenitsyn came into his own as a writer when he was over forty: in 1962, the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published in Novy Mir. His ascent was very difficult. The story caused a lot of criticism. He was even accused of denigrating the Soviet regime and promoting an anti-hero. And only with the help of the important opinion of A.T. Tvardovsky, chief editor

If you trust the philosopher that history is created by special peculiarities, then it is easy to say that everything great in the world is accomplished by them. There is a lot of literature, and mysticism, and science, and, of course, all the other wonders of life. All these special features do not fall from the sky, but appear here on Earth. And among the titans of the 19th century, the position of Lev Mikolayovich Tolstoy appears especially bright. It is possible that Tolstoy himself, having spent his entire life as a waste of humanity, his creativity is also clearly distinguished from his predecessors and companions, since he showed the process of life between people and environments, the growth of an individual

And I’m tired of thinking. I, having taken a step from light sadness into the world of terrifying forebodings, stand above the black abyss. V. Fedorov Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn came to literature in the sixties having seen and experienced a lot, with an established character and his own theme. His first story, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” had the effect of a bomb exploding. The story “Matrenin's Dvor” is of a different plan, but the author, as in the first work, explores human psychology. A feature of Solzhenitsyn's prose is attention to the smallest details. Speaking about his heroes, the author notes insults

Solzhenitsyn Alexander Isaevich

During the classes

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

The purpose of the lesson: show the journalistic nature of the story, its appeal to the reader, and evoke an emotional response when analyzing the story.

Methodical techniques: analytical conversation, commented reading.

During the classes

1. Teacher's word. The work “One Day...” has a special place in literature and public consciousness. A story written in 1959 (and conceived in the camp in 1950), originally bore the name “Shch-854 (One day of one prisoner).”

2. Why is the story about the camp world limited to describing one day? Solzhenitsyn himself writes about the idea of the story: “ It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and thought: how should I describe the entire camp world - in one day... it’s enough to collect in one day as if from fragments, it’s enough to describe only one day of one average, unremarkable person with morning until evening. And everything will be. This idea came to me in 1952. In the camp. Well, of course, it was crazy to think about it then. And then the years passed. I was writing a novel, I was sick, I was dying of cancer. And now... in 1959, one day I thought: it seems that I could already apply this idea. For seven years she lay there just like that. Let me try to describe one day of one prisoner. I sat down and how it started pouring! With terrible tension! Because many of these days are concentrated in you at once. And just so as not to miss anything.” Written in 40 days.

3. Why did the author define the genre as a story? This emphasized the contrast between the small form and deep content of the work. Tvardovsky called the story “One Day...”, realizing the significance of Solzhenitsyn’s creation.

4. This work opened the patient to the public consciousness of the Thaw period. the theme of the country's recent past associated with the name of Stalin. The author was seen as a man who told the truth about a forbidden country called the “GULAG Archipelago.”

5. At the same time, some reviewers expressed doubts: Why did Solzhenitsyn portray as his hero not a communist who undeservedly suffered from repression, but remained true to his ideals, but a simple Russian peasant?

6. Plot- the events of one day are not the author’s fiction. The compositional basis of the plot is clearly lined time, determined by the camp regime.

7. Problematic question: Why does the hero consider the day depicted in the story to be happy? At first glance, because nothing happened that day that would worsen the hero’s situation in the camp. On the contrary, even luck accompanied him: he cut some porridge, bought some tobacco, picked up a piece of a hacksaw and didn’t get caught with it during a search - 54 , Caesar Markovich received the parcel ( 87-88), therefore, something was interrupted, the brigade was not sent to build the social town, he overcame it, did not get sick, the foreman closed the interest well, Shukhov laid the wall cheerfully. Everything that seems ordinary to Ivan Denisovich, to which he has become accustomed, is essentially terribly inhuman. The author’s assessment sounds completely different, outwardly calmly objective and therefore even more terrible: “ There were 3,653 such days in his period from bell to bell. Due to leap years, 3 extra days were added.”

8. And now here was the reason for Solzhenitsyn’s polemics with the official criticism of the 60s.

9. Solzhenitsyn writes seriously about the fact that this day is a good one, without any irony. There is absolutely no intonation here that, they say, what a person’s requests!

10. And negative criticism blamed Solzhenitsyn for this very thing, labeling him “a non-Soviet person”: no struggle, no high demands: he has messed up the mess, he is waiting for handouts from Caesar Markovich: 98 – 99 .

11. And according to Solzhenitsyn, this is really a happy day for Shukhov, although happiness is in a negative form: he didn’t get sick, he didn’t get caught ( 14 ), not expelled, not imprisoned. It was the truth, which did not tolerate half-truths. With this angle of view, the author guaranteed the complete objectivity of his artistic testimony, and the more merciless and sharp the blow was. From N. Sergolantsev’s article No. 4 – 1963 “October”: “ The hero of the story I.D. is not an exceptional person. This is an ordinary person. His spiritual world is very limited, his intellectual life is not of particular interest.

And by life itself, and throughout the history of Soviet literature we know that the typical national character, forged by our entire life, is the character of a fighter, active, inquisitive, active. But Shukhov is completely devoid of these qualities. He does not resist tragic circumstances in any way, but submits to them soul and body. Not the slightest internal protest, not a hint of a desire to understand the reasons for his difficult situation. Not even an attempt to learn about them from more knowledgeable people. His entire life program, his entire philosophy is reduced to one thing - to survive. Some critics were touched by such a program, they say, a man is alive, but in essence, a terribly lonely man is alive, having adapted to hard labor conditions in his own way, and truly not even understanding the unnaturalness of his position. Yes, Ivan Denisovich was muzzled, in many ways dehumanized by extremely cruel conditions. It's not his fault. But the author of the story is trying to present him as an example of spiritual fortitude. And what kind of resilience is there when the hero’s circle of interests does not extend beyond an extra bowl of gruel, poor earnings and warmth?

If summarize critic's judgments about Shukhov,

1) Ivan Denisovich adapts to non-human life, which means he has lost human traits,

2) Ivan Denisovich is the essence of animal instincts. There is nothing conscious, spiritual left in him,

3) He is tragically lonely, disconnected from other people and almost hostile to them.

4) And the conclusion: no, Ivan Denisovich cannot lay claim to the role of the folk type of our era. (The article is written according to the laws of normative criticism and relies little on the text).

12. Temporary organization.

What is the point of mentioning maternity time (Shukhov’s conversation with Buinovsky at the construction of a thermal power plant)? Time in the camp, scheduled minute by minute by the regime, does not belong to the person (“and the sun obeys their decrees»).

Why does Ivan Denisovich always get up when he wakes up, an hour and a half before the divorce? Why does he always eat slowly? Why is time so valuable after the recount?

Time in the camp does not belong to a person. That is why the morning moments are so significant for the hero.” 1.5 hours of your own time, not official time", and meal time - " 10 minutes at breakfast, 5 at lunch, 5 at dinner", When " the camp inmate lives for himself", and the time after recalculation, when " the prisoner becomes a free man».

Find chronological details in the story. Importance time categories The story is emphasized by the fact that its first and last phrases are dedicated specifically to time.

The day is the “nodal” point through which all human life passes in Solzhenitsyn’s story. That is why chronological designations in the text also have symbolic meaning. It is especially important that the concepts of “day” and “life” come closer to each other, sometimes almost becoming synonymous.

In which episodes do the narrative framework (memories of the characters) expand?

13. Spatial organization. Find the spatial coordinates in the story. What is special about the organization of space? The space in which the prisoner lives is closed, limited on all sides by barbed wire. And from above it is covered with the light of spotlights and lanterns, which “ so many... were stumbled upon that they completely brightened the stars.” The prisoners are fenced off even from the sky: the spatial vertical is sharply narrowed. For them there is no horizon, no sky, no normal circle of life.

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 to a circle surrounded by wire.

Find verbs of motion in the text. What is the motive in them? Small areas open space turn out to be hostile and dangerous, it is no coincidence that in verbs of motion ( hid, fussed, jogged, stuck, climbed, hurried, overtook, sneaked etc.) the moment of shelter is often heard. The heroes of the story are faced with a problem: how to survive in a situation where time doesn't belong to you, A space is hostile(such isolation and strict regulation of all spheres of life is evidence not only of the camp, but of the totalitarian system as a whole).

In contrast to the heroes of Russian literature, who traditionally love vastness, distance, and unconstrained space, Shukhov and his fellow prisoners dream of the saving closeness of the shelter. Barack turns out to be home for them.

How does the narrative space expand? But there is also the prisoner’s inner vision - the space of his memory; in it closed circles are overcome and images of Russia, the countryside, and the world arise.

14. Subject detail. Give examples of episodes in which the substantive detail, in your opinion, is the most detailed.

· psychologically convincing description of the prisoner’s feelings during the search;

· spoonwith a tattoo Ust-Izhma, 1944, which he carefully hides behind the boot of his felt boots).

· Climb - With. 7 ,

· a clearly drawn plan of the area with a watch, medical unit, barracks;

· morning divorce;

· the author unusually carefully, scrupulously watches how his hero dresses before leaving the barracks - 19 how he puts on a cloth muzzle;

· or how he eats a small fish caught in the soup to the skeleton. Even such a seemingly insignificant “gastronomic” detail, like fish eyes floating in a stew, is awarded a separate “frame” during the story;

· Scenes in the dining room – 50/1 ;

· detailed image of the camp menu – 13, 18, 34, 48, 93 ,

· samosad,

· about boots and felt boots – 10,

The hacksaw episode

· with receiving parcels, etc.

· What is the artistic function of detailed detailing?

There can be no trifles for a prisoner, because his life depends on every little thing(note how the experienced prisoner Shukhov noticed Caesar’s mistake in not handing over the parcel to the storage room before the check - 104 ). Every detail is conveyed psychologically specifically.

Such meticulousness of the image does not slow down the narrative, the reader's attention is further sharpened. 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 survival or death.

Moreover, the monotony of careful descriptions is skillfully overcome by the writer's use of expressive syntax: Solzhenitsyn avoids extended periods, saturating the text in short chopped phrases, syntactic repetitions, emotionally charged exclamations and questions.

Any detail of the description is transferred through the perception of the hero himself– that’s why everything makes you remember the emergency of the situation and the every-minute dangers that await the hero.

15. Character system. What parameters are set? Determine the main steps of the camp hierarchy. Clearly into 2 groups :guards and prisoners. But even among the prisoners there is a hierarchy (from the foreman to the jackals and informers).

What is the hierarchy of heroes in terms of their attitude towards captivity? They differ and attitude towards captivity. (From Buinovsky’s attempts at “rebellion” to Alyosha’s naive non-resistance).

What is Shukhov's place in these coordinate systems? In both cases, Shukhov finds himself in the middle.

What is unique about Shukhov’s portrait? The portrait sketches in the story are laconic and expressive (portrait of Lieutenant Volkovy - 22, prisoner Yu-81 (94 pages), head of the table (89), foreman Tyurin (31).

Find character sketches. Shukhov's appearance is barely outlined; he is absolutely inconspicuous. Portrait description of Shukhov himself(shaved, toothless and seemingly shrunken head; his way of moving);

16. Reproduce the hero’s biography, compare her with biographies of other characters.

His biography is the ordinary life of a man of his era, and not the fate of an oppositionist, a fighter for an idea - 44 . Solzhenitsyn’s hero is an ordinary person, a “man in the middle,” in whom the author constantly emphasizes normality and unobtrusive behavior.

What makes Shukhov the main character? Ordinary people, according to the writer, ultimately decide the fate of the country and carry the charge of folk 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 twentieth century. Ivan Denisovich was born in 1911, lived in the village of Temgenevo, with a characteristic Russian name, fought honestly, like millions of Russian soldiers, honestly, wounded, without treatment, he hurried to return to the front.

· Escaped from captivity and ended up in a camp along with thousands of poor fellows from his encirclement - allegedly carrying out a task from German intelligence.

· 8 years of wandering around camps, while maintaining inner dignity.

· Doesn't change age-old peasant habits And " doesn't drop himself", does not humiliate himself over a cigarette (unlike Fetyukov, he stands as if indifferently next to the smoking Caesar, waiting for a cigarette butt), because of rations, and certainly does not lick plates and does not denounce his comrades for the sake of improving his own fate.

According to a well-known peasant habit, Shukhov respects bread, carried in a special pocket, in a clean cloth; when he eats - removes hat.

· He does not disdain extra money, but always earns by honest work. And therefore, they are not able to understand how they can charge a lot of money for hack work (for painting “carpets” under a stencil).

· Conscientiousness, reluctance to live at someone else’s expense, or to cause inconvenience to someone force him to forbid his wife from collecting parcels for him in the camp, to justify the greedy Caesar and “ don’t stretch your belly for other people’s goods».

17. Compare Shukhov’s life position with the positions of other characters in the story: Buinovsky, Caesar Markovich, etc.

1) Caesar Markovich , an educated person. Intelligent, he received exemption from general labor and even the right to wear fur and a hat, because “ everyone stuck it to whoever needs it" But it is not this completely natural desire to alleviate one’s lot that causes the author’s condemnation, but his attitude towards people. He for granted accepts Shukhov's services (he goes to the canteen to get his rations, and takes a turn for the parcel). And although sometimes he treats Shukhov to a smoke and shares his rations, Ivan Denisovich interests him only when he needs him for some reason. The scene in the foreman's room is indicative in this regard. The characters argue about truth and beauty in art, but do not notice a living person, who for the author is the measure of all values.

Shukhov, who with difficulty obtained a bowl of porridge for Caesar, hurried through the frost to the foreman's room, patiently waits to be noticed and hopes to receive a smoke for his service. But the arguers sitting in the warmth are too engrossed in their conversation : 54.

2) Caesar will continue his debate about art with kavtoragng (conversation on watch) - 75-76 . Perhaps, from the point of view of an art critic, Caesar’s view of Eisenstein’s skill is more fair than Buinovsky’s rude words, but the correctness of the captain’s rank is determined by his position: Caesar came out of a flooded office, and Buinovsky worked all day in the cold. His position here is closer to Shukhov’s.

However, we note that rank in many ways and opposed Shukhov. Should be analyzed behavior Buinovsky in the morning bustle scene ( 23 – 24 ) and Shukhov’s assessment of his action. Shukhov himself does not rebel because he knows: “ Groan and rot. But if you resist, you’ll break,”- but also does not obey circumstances.

3) If we compare Shukhov with such heroes as Der (64), Shkuropatenko, Panteleev, we will notice that they, the same prisoners, themselves participate in the evil done to people, which the main character of the story is incapable of.

4) Which of the characters in the story professes moral principles similar to Shukhov? Tyurin, Kuzemin.

5) Analyze the words of foreman Kuzemin: page 5 . Are there analogues to these principles in Russian classical literature? Does Shukhov agree with his first foreman? Humiliate themselves (“ lick bowls"), saving your life at the expense of others (" knock") has always been unacceptable for folk morality; the same values were affirmed in Russian classical literature, but one should not expect help or compassion (" And don’t rely on the medical unit") is already a sad experience of the twentieth century. Shukhov, realizing that informers are the ones who survive, nevertheless, does not agree with his former foreman, since for him it is not about physical, but about moral death.

Shukhov’s task is not to become free, and not even just to survive, but to remain human even in inhuman conditions.

18. The originality of the story. Analyzing improperly direct speech as the leading method of narration, we will find out why, bringing his position closer to the position of the hero, Solzhenitsyn abandons the skaz form. Find episodes where the author's point of view takes precedence over the hero's point of view.

As a rule, these are episodes where we are talking about things that are beyond the understanding of the hero, so the author’s point of view here cannot coincide with the point of view of the hero. For example, in disputes about art, the hero cannot judge who is right.

In this case, the composition of the scenes itself becomes a means of expressing the author’s position.

19. Features of the language. Find proverbs in the text of the story. What is their originality and artistic function? How are the signs of peasant speaking and camp jargon combined in Ivan Denisovich’s language? In Ivan Denisovich's speech there are more dialect words and only 16 words of camp jargon than in the speech of other characters. The socially and individually colored, expressive peasant language turns out to be more resistant to camp vocabulary than neutral speech.

Indicative in this regard is the scene in which the brigade is waiting for a late Moldovan. The indignant crowd shouts a lot of abuse. Ivan Denisovich, indignant along with everyone else, limited himself to the word "plague».

Preservation of a word that could be classified as a means of linguistic expansion. What word formation methods does the author use? Match the found words with commonly used synonyms. What is the expressiveness, semantic capacity, richness of shades of Solzhenitsyn’s vocabulary?

Uses most often traditional ways of word formation and the morphemic composition existing in the language, but the unusual combination of morphemes makes the word exceptionally laconic, expressive, and creates new shades of meaning:

warmed up, got ready, got sick, squeezed, examined, settled down (the brigade not only sat down around the stove, but also tightly surrounded it), passed over (deceived and passed at the same time), in the pocket, testing, restraint, in the calm, haze, non-spill, drinking, trampled, annoyed) (-sya adds a shade of fussiness), rushing, little, little snow, scrunching up hardened fingers, attentive (slowly, attentively and thoughtfully), stumblingly, stridingly; zakoroykom (not just the edge, but the very edge), a burnt-out, a non-extractor (an extremely laconic designation of a person who is unable to get anything), a non-smoker (a cigarette butt that can be finished smoking); self-thinking, strong-willed, quick-witted; captivity (i.e. captivity)

20. Reflection of the era in the story , pp. 293 – 294, textbook.

21. The originality of Solzhenitsyn's hero. Created a special type of hero. This is not a fighter against the system, or even a person who has risen to the point of understanding the essence of his era (only a few are capable of this), but a “simple” person, a bearer of that people’s morality, on which, according to the author, the fate of the country depends. For a writer, the criterion for assessing a person is not his social significance, but his ability carry through his inhumane trials pure soul.

After many years of dominance in literature by a strong man who thirsted for freedom, going against circumstances and leading people with him, Solzhenitsyn returned to it the hero in whom he embodied peasant thoroughness And work habit, patience And prudence, ability to adapt to inhuman conditions, without humiliating himself, without participating in what is happening evil, ability to stay internally free in an atmosphere of total lack of freedom, to preserve your name, your language, your individuality.

Summing up results On his happy day, Shukhov often notes not what happened to him, but what did not happen to him: 111.

But among these “nots,” he is silent, perhaps, about the most important thing: on that day he did not cease to be human.

Sections: Literature

Goals:

deepen students’ understanding of the artistic originality of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s prose.
introduce students to the history of the creation of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
based on direct impressions from reading the story, conduct a comprehensive analysis of the work, considering the problems of the story, its plot and compositional features, and the originality of artistic images.
improve students’ skills in analyzing a work of art, developing the ability to identify the main, significant moments in the development of an action, determine their role in revealing the theme and idea of the work, and draw independent conclusions.
Working on the analysis of the work, students form their own attitude towards the events and characters of the story, thereby promoting the development of an active life position and the ability to defend their own point of view.
develop literary text research skills.
Using the example of the main character to cultivate the best human qualities.
cultivating an attentive attitude to words.

During the classes

I. Organizational moment. Explanation of the goals and objectives of the lesson

Teacher: Today we continue to study the work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. In the last lesson, we talked to you about the life of a writer, looking at creativity in general terms. In today’s lesson, our task will be to approach this issue in more detail: we will focus on the study and analysis of the story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

Name A.I. Solzhenitsyn usually causes controversy. Many, not knowing his work, are already preconceived that Solzhenitsyn is difficult, “difficult to understand”...

There are different attitudes towards what is incomprehensible. Some say: “I don’t understand this, but I’ll try to understand. And having understood, I’ll tell you whether it’s good or bad.” Others: “I don’t understand this, so it’s bad.” It would seem that you don’t understand, so try to understand, don’t boast about your ignorance.

Most of those who claim that they do not like Solzhenitsyn have either not read his works at all and judge the writer from hearsay, or, having briefly become acquainted with some of his works, do not give themselves the trouble to understand and appreciate the significance of the work of this remarkable man.

When getting acquainted with works of literature and art, do not make hasty conclusions: it is difficult, incomprehensible.... Remember: in order to understand, you need, as L.N. Tolstoy, “to force your mind to act with all its possible strength.”

II. Go to the topic of the lesson

1. Familiarize students with the history of the creation of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Student’s message “The history of the creation, appearance of the story in print and the public outcry caused by its publication” (individual homework of the student).

It is known that Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, having read the story in the manuscript, assessed the author’s moral position as follows: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant” and advised changing the name. During the “thaw” (early 60s), thanks to the support of A.T. Tvardovsky and the permission of N.S. Khrushchev, the story was published in 1962 in the magazine “New World” under the title “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, this was the first published work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. Published in 1962, the story caused a huge response from readers, gained worldwide fame and had a powerful impact not only on literature, but also on the course of history. According to A.T. Tvardovsky, the story showed “the camp through the eyes of a man,” but A.S. Zalygin proposed his own formula: personality is revealed through an event.

The story, published in Novy Mir, was extremely successful. But the reviews about him were controlled and tendentious. The editors of Novy Mir, delighted with the “article,” saw in the story a breakthrough to the camp theme, the truth in a specific form: “the camp through the eyes of a peasant is a very popular thing.” The hero was assigned the role of a fighter against the cult. The main critical reviews in the press, mostly liberal, were extremely focused and narrow: the story is a blow to Stalinism, a stage in the return of society to “Leninist origins.” It caused “ice drift” on a very narrow section of the fairway. All the critics loudly declared the change brought by the story: “A small story - and how spacious our literature has become” (I. Drutse). But this space turned out to be quite narrowed. Under those conditions, the character of Ivan Denisovich was not fully understood. The author’s artistic concept – the path of Russia, the village, is curved, Ivan Denisovich himself is warming himself by the fire, the “sparks” for which the Russian intelligentsia fanned – was not revealed.

The uniqueness and significance of Solzhenitsyn’s story lies in the revelation of the tragic picture of people’s lives under a totalitarian regime and, at the same time, the true national character that asserts itself in these circumstances.

2. Analytical work based on the text of the work.

a) Phonographic aspect of analysis. Vocabulary and lexical work on the title of the story. Conversation on questions:

– From the message we learned that the final title of the story was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Why do you think Alexander Isaevich changed the title of the story? What did the author want to convey to his reader through the title?

– What semantic connotation does this name contain? Compare: “Shch-854” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, what difference do you see? (The second title more fully reveals the essence of what is described: the story tells about one day of Ivan Denisovich, emphasizing his significance in relation to other heroes. The name “Shch-854” at first glance is understandable only to a narrow circle of readers, to those who bore camp number, and this name does not give any specifics: what is “Shch-854"?, who is “Shch-854"? Shch-854 is one of the penultimate in a thousand. Shch-854 is something non-specific, “blurry” "compared to Ivan Denisovich. By choosing the name of the main character, typification is achieved (the name Ivan is the most common: in the calendar it was found from 63 to 170 times and 25 percent of the peasants were truly Russian Ivans) of his image and social relevance (Denisovich - full of the vital forces of nature) Ivan Denisovich Shukhov corresponds to the writer’s ideal ideas about the qualities of the people’s spirit and mind that give hope for its revival; in the dignification of the hero by name and patronymic, the author’s respect for his hero is felt).

Student’s message “The meaning of the name of the main character of the story” (individual homework for the student).

Name Ivan goes back to the Hebrew name Yohanen, which translated meant “God has mercy”, “God’s favor, “goodness”. The name was endowed with such qualities as: handsome, rich, wonderful. It has more than a hundred derivatives. This name has become synonymous with the Russian peasant and is the most common: in the calendar it was found from 63 to 170 times (different years of publication) and 25 percent of the peasants were actually Russian Ivans.

Name Denis has a Russian folk form Dionysius, which comes from the Greek name Dionysios- the name of the god of wine, winemaking, the vital forces of nature, poetic inspiration and cheerful folk gatherings. After 1812, it was most often associated with the hero of the Patriotic War, Denis Davydov, so qualities such as masculinity and courage are attributed to him.

By giving such a name to his hero, the author wanted to emphasize the typicality of his hero and at the same time his originality. Solzhenitsyn’s hero is the most ordinary Russian person, a “man in the middle”, in whom the author constantly emphasizes normality and inconspicuous behavior. He is the bearer of that folk morality, on which, according to the author, the fate of the entire country depends.

– (Continuing the conversation.) Why did Solzhenitsyn make the peasant the central character of his story? (The peasant, according to the author, is the bearer of that folk morality on which the fate of the entire country depends. Solzhenitsyn’s criterion for assessing a person is not his social significance, but the ability to carry his soul pure through inhuman trials. In the peasant, Solzhenitsyn sees the embodiment of folk thoroughness and habit to work, patience and prudence, the ability to adapt to the most difficult living conditions, to remain internally free in an environment of total unfreedom, to preserve one’s name, one’s language, one’s individuality).

II. Go to the topic of the lesson

1. Familiarize students with the history of the creation of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Student’s message “The history of the creation, appearance of the story in print and the public outcry caused by its publication” (individual homework of the student).

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was conceived by A.I. Solzhenitsyn during general work in the Ekibastus special camp in 1950. The author himself recalled about the history of the creation of the story: “It was just such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner and I thought how I should describe the whole camp world - in one day... Let me try to write one day of one prisoner. I sat down and how it started pouring! With terrible tension!...”

The prototypes of the central character of the story were the real Ivan Shukhov, a former soldier-artilleryman of the battery that Solzhenitsyn commanded at the front, and the writer himself, who suffered the fate of the camp prisoner - Shch-262. The story was conceived in 1950, and completed in 1959 and was called “Shch-854”.

It is known that Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, having read the story in the manuscript, assessed the author’s moral position as follows: “The camp through the eyes of a peasant” and advised changing the name. During the “thaw” (early 60s), thanks to the support of A. T. Tvardovsky and the permission of N. S. Khrushchev, the story was published in 1962 in the magazine “New World” under the title “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, this was the first published work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. Published in 1962, the story caused a huge response from readers, gained worldwide fame and had a powerful impact not only on literature, but also on the course of history. According to A. T. Tvardovsky, in the story “the camp through the eyes of a man” appeared, but A. S. Zalygin proposed his own formula: a personality is revealed through an event.

The story, published in Novy Mir, was extremely successful. But the reviews about him were controlled and tendentious. The editors of Novy Mir, delighted with the “article,” saw in the story a breakthrough to the camp theme, the truth in a specific form: “the camp through the eyes of a peasant is a very popular thing.” The hero was assigned the role of a fighter against the cult. The main critical reviews in the press, mostly liberal, were extremely focused and narrow: the story is a blow to Stalinism, a stage in the return of society to “Leninist origins.” It caused “ice drift” on a very narrow section of the fairway. All the critics loudly declared the change brought by the story: “A small story - and how spacious our literature has become” (I. Drutse). But this space turned out to be quite narrowed. Under those conditions, the character of Ivan Denisovich was not fully understood. Artistic concept of the author – the path of Russia, the village, is crooked, Ivan Denisovich himself is warming himself by the fire, the “sparks” for which the Russian intelligentsia fanned were not revealed.

b) Analytical work on the genre correlation of the work. Continuing the conversation with students:

A. I. Solzhenitsyn defined the genre of his work as a story. Tell me, please, what is called a story? (A short story is a short narrative work dedicated to a single event in a person’s life, without a detailed depiction of what happened to him before and after this event.)

What do you know about story composition? (The following parts can be distinguished in the composition of a story: exposition, plot, climax, denouement.)

– Explain what the above parts are. (Exposition is the introductory, initial part of the plot, where the author gives an initial idea of the time, place of action and the hero. Plot is the event from which the action begins and on which the development of subsequent events depends. Climax is the moment of highest tension in the development of the action. Denouement is the event , which ends the action.)

c) Analytical work on the plot and composition of the story.

(Next, together with the students, we work on the plot-compositional scheme of the story, with the help of which further analytical work will be carried out. On the board we draw // draw the plot-compositional scheme of the story, determining which point of the scheme corresponds to this or that episode of the work. At the moment of constructing the diagram Each item corresponding to a particular episode is discussed.)

The composition of the story includes the following parts:

An exposition is an introductory part (optional part), which at the initial stage of analyzing a work of art helps answer a number of questions: Where?, When?, what's happening? and gives an initial idea of the current characters.
The plot is the event with which the action begins.
Development of action.
Climax is the highest point in the development of action.
Decline of action.
Denouement is the event that ends the action.

Similarly, any story, as well as other works of art of a small epic form, can be represented in the form of the following graphic diagram:

Further, during analytical work, the correspondence of one or another episode of the work to the corresponding point of the scheme is determined. As a result of the analysis, a plot-compositional scheme is obtained, which clearly helps to present the chain of events that make up the plot of the work and to reveal the structural features of the work being studied.

As the analysis progresses, the ability to give individual and generalized characteristics of the characters improves, the idea of the form of the narrative and the image of the narrator develops, and the knowledge of composition and plot deepens. Given the commonality of individual compositional techniques in various works, I try to convey to students the idea that? that each work of art is individual. For example, students were interested to learn that I. A. Bunin’s story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” has a ring composition, and in A. S. Pushkin’s “The Snowstorm” the climax merges with the denouement. When studying the story “The Fate of a Man” by M. A. Sholokhov, we paid attention to its compositional features: the story is built in the form of a “story within a story” and represents the memory of the main character, Andrei Sokolov, and were able to justify the author’s use of this technique - the memory increases the time of the story and emphasizes readers' attention to the importance of the problem posed.

Practice shows that such a system of work on the analysis of prose works activates mental activity, awakens interest in literature and provides ample opportunity for independent analysis of works of art.

Many teachers complain that reading interest levels are declining. And I have had and still have students who do not like or do not want to read. And this technology helps them visually imagine the chain of events that the author is talking about. Having attended such a lesson, without even reading the work, they get a fairly broad understanding of it. Practice shows that after a while such students begin to read a little and try to create a plot-compositional scheme on their own (this is homework).

I have publications on this technology:

– in the collection “Literary Education: Concepts, Technologies, Experience”, published by the publishing house “Belig” in 2002, I have published my article “Analysis of the composition of a work of small epic form in the 8th grade”,

– in the anniversary collection “Philological Education: Problems and Prospects”, published as materials of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference by the Buryat State University Publishing House in 2007, my article “Plot-compositional analysis of a literary work and reading development of schoolchildren” was published,

and developing many lessons. I chose a lesson on the works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn, since I myself like the writer’s work and a lot is connected with his works in my teaching life: I conducted open lessons, made a presentation of my pedagogical technology.

In developing the lesson, I have a stage that I called “Analytical work on the plot and composition of the story.” At this stage of analyzing a work of art, we draw up its plot-compositional scheme (the students had homework: read the story and try to draw up a diagram on their own - they already have this skill. We worked using this technology, studying Korolenko’s essay “Paradox”, Green’s stories “The Green Lamp”, Bunin’s “Mr. from San Francisco”, Sholokhov’s “The Fate of a Man”). To make it more clear what we end up with, I would like to present the plot and compositional scheme of the story. But I don’t know how to do it on a computer. Therefore, I am attaching a handwritten version.

When developing the lesson, I used materials from teaching aids:

Agenosov V.V. Russian literature of the 20th century. Lesson-based developments. Methodological recommendations for teachers. – M., Bustard, 2002.
Journal “Russian language and literature in secondary educational institutions of Ukraine”, No. 1, 1992; article “What’s in your name?...”
Sanzhadaeva Ts.Kh. Methodology for studying 20th century prose in the Buryat school. – Ulan-Ude, Belig, 2005.
Is there exposition in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”?

What is the role of exposition in a story? (It “immerses” the reader in artistic time and artistic space: it gives an initial idea of the time, the place of action, the hero. “At five o’clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks... Shukhov did not get up ...")

In the exhibition, the author notes: “Shukhov never missed the climb, he always got up on it...”. Why does Ivan Denisovich always get up when he wakes up, even though “there was an hour and a half before the divorce”? (Time in the camp, scheduled minute by minute by the regime, does not belong to the person, so not only the morning “an hour and a half of his time, not the official one” are so significant for the hero, but also the meal time - “ten minutes at breakfast, and five at lunch, yes five at dinner,” when “the camp inmate lives for himself,” and the time after the recount, when “the prisoner becomes free.”)

Why didn’t Shukhov, who always gets up when he rises, get up this time? (“Ever since the evening he had been uneasy, either shivering or aching... He was on duty - I remembered - One and a half Ivan... of all the duty officers, he was easygoing: he didn’t put him in a punishment cell, or he didn’t drag him to the head of the regime. So You can lie down..."

In the exhibition we learn the life philosophy of the main character. What is it? (“...Shukhov firmly remembered the words of his first brigadier Kuzemin - he was an old camp wolf, he had been in prison for twelve years by the year nine hundred and three, and he once said to his reinforcements, brought from the front, in a bare clearing near a fire:

- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. In the camp, this is who is dying: some lick the bowls, some rely on the medical unit, and go to the godfather’s door.” These words of Kuzemin constitute the principle of Shukhov’s camp life, but in addition to this, he follows two more camp wisdoms: “Griek and rot. But if you resist, you will break”, “Whoever can do it will gnaw at him.”)

– Which episode of the story is the plot of the story? (“Shukhov decided to go to the medical unit. And then someone’s powerful hand pulled off his padded jacket and blanket.”)

What is their role? How do these episodes reveal the main character's character?

What is the artistic function of detailing individual moments in the life of a camp inmate? (As examples of detailed detailing, one can cite episodes of getting up, dressing the hero, a detailed presentation of the camp menu, discussions about bread rations, boots and felt boots, etc. The author thereby emphasizes that for a camper there can be no trifles, because every little thing his life depends.)

Describing the bustle before going to work, the author builds a semantic chain. Define it and reveal its role to reveal the idea of the entire work. (The author builds the following semantic chain: the jackal Fetyukov - the head of Volkova’s regime - the guards became angry like animals. It shows how the camp depersonalizes people: people reach a primitive state, becoming like animals. And, emphasizing the idea that the camp is a reflection of the whole world of the totalitarian system , the author criticizes the system in which people are depersonalized, and says that you need to have enormous willpower, you need a special moral core in order to remain human in this world.)

Which episode of the story can be designated as the climax? Why does the author make the laying of the wall the highest point in the development of the plot? (Spiritualized work reveals the truth of each person; laying a wall unites many people in a single impulse, and this impulse shows that the system has not completely broken a person. Work is the moral core that helps one remain human in the world of the camp.)

- How does the story end? What is the denouement? (“Shukhov fell asleep completely satisfied. There were a lot of successes that day...”)

Why does the hero consider the day depicted in the story to be happy? (Summing up his happy day, Shukhov often notes not what happened to him, but what did not happen: “they didn’t put him in a punishment cell,” “they didn’t kick him out,” “he didn’t get caught.” But among these “nots,” he is silent , perhaps, about the most important thing: on that day he did not stop being human!)

Having examined the plot of the story, we saw that the plot narrative contains a description of one day of one prisoner. But is the author talking about only one day of Shukhov (and only Shukhov?)?

How does the author achieve expansion of temporal space? (The author achieves the expansion of temporary space due to the ring composition: “...There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his period from bell to bell,” through additional instructions: “as always,” “this game goes on every day,” and also through the symbolism of the concept of day and its connection with the concepts of term and life: day - term - life - the fate of a person - the fate of the people.)

What features in the composition of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” can be noted? (The story has a ring composition; the final sentences of the work help determine this: “... Such days...”. In compositional terms, the entire story is structured as the improperly direct speech of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Solzhenitsyn preferred this form of storytelling because it helps as much as possible bring together the point of view of the hero - the man and the author himself. When it is necessary to tell not only about what the hero of the work himself could put into words, but also about things inaccessible to his understanding, this manner of narration turns out to be the most acceptable.)

– What can be said about the spatial organization of the story? Find the spatial coordinates in the work? (The space in which the heroes live is closed, limited on all sides by barbed wire, even when the column “goes out into the steppe”, it is accompanied by “a convoy, to the right and left of the column at twenty paces, and one after another at ten paces”, from above it is obscured by the light of searchlights and lanterns, of which “so many... were stuck that they completely illuminated the stars." Small areas of open space turn out to be hostile and dangerous, it is no coincidence that in the verbs of motion - hid, slammed, jogged, stuck, climbed, hurried, overtook, threw - the motive of shelter often sounds. With this, the author once again shows that the heroes are faced with a problem: how to survive in a situation when time does not belong to you, and space is hostile, and notes that such isolation and strict regulation of all spheres of life - a property not only of the camp, but of the totalitarian system as a whole.)

d) Analytical work on the character system.

– What parameters set the system of characters in the story? What is the place of the protagonist in this system? (The heroes of the story are clearly divided into two groups: guards and prisoners. But among the prisoners there is also a hierarchy (from the foreman to the jackals and informers). They also differ in their attitude towards captivity (from Buinovsky’s attempts at “rebellion” to the naive non-resistance of Alyoshka, a Baptist). In both cases, Shukhov finds himself in the middle. The portrait sketches are extremely laconic and expressive, Shukhov’s appearance is barely outlined, he is absolutely inconspicuous. His biography is the ordinary life of a man of his era. Solzhenitsyn’s hero is an ordinary person, a “man in the middle”, in which the author constantly emphasizes normality, discreet behavior.)

– Which heroes does the author single out from the crowd? Why? (The author gradually begins to single out different types of human characters from the general mass: the Baptist Alyoshka (if a person is strong in his faith, nothing can break him), the intellectual Caesar Markovich (in the actions of this hero the author does not condemn his completely natural desire to ease his fate, but criticizes his arrogant attitude towards people), kavtorang Buinovsky (Buinovsky personifies the type of ideologized person, he was created by new times, is not burdened by the knowledge of the diversity of life forms and their paradoxical transformation, the quantitative characteristics of the right person in him have not turned into qualitatively new ones. Therefore, he is not can soberly correlate his previous status with the camp one in order to begin to live wisely; not yet three months have passed since he ended up in the camp, he still has to gradually transform “from an imperious, loud naval officer into a sedentary, cautious prisoner”), Latvian Kildigs, Senka Klevshin, brigadier Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, Yu - 81 (the condensed symbolism of the image of prisoner Yu - 81 is obvious, it is designed to evoke strong impressions in the reader and give scope for thought: tragic dignity, stony perseverance, ethical maximalism, detachment from vanity remind us of the biblical passion-bearer Job; everything in the camp is filled with ugliness and violence, but even in this world many remain human - a totalitarian state cannot completely destroy the moral principle in people, which manifests itself in human dignity.)

– What makes Ivan Denisovich stand out among these heroes? (Ivan Denisovich stands out for his special character; he has his own spiritual space, internal stability, consciousness is not naive and meek, the hero responds extremely intelligently and faithfully to all events and conversations; he lives with an amazing understanding of what is happening and an aversion to lies; he has a normal folk rating system.)

– What is the author’s idea expressed in the story? (The tragedy of Ivan Denisovich reflects the tragedy of the entire Russian peasant world, which in the 20th century fell under the “red wheel” of the Russian revolution - this is the author’s idea.)

III. Conclusion. Generalization of the results of the work. Summarizing. Conclusions. Homework

In the fate of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, events common to millions of his fellow citizens were intertwined with rare and even exceptional events. The work “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was conceived in 1950 – 1951, when the author worked as a mason in the Ekibastuz Special

Camp. The story was written in three weeks in 1959.

And also his camp comrades in connection with the writer’s personal experience.

In addition, many of the characters in this work have a documentary “base”: their depictions reflect the biographies of real prisoners. A three-dimensional picture of camp life was created using many portrait, everyday, and psychological details. Their depiction required Solzhenitsyn to introduce new layers of vocabulary into the text. At the end of the story there was a dictionary that included, in addition to words of camp jargon, explanations of the realities of life for Gulag prisoners.

This detail characterizes not the character’s experiences, but his external life. It is one of the most reliable details of camp life. Ivan Denisovich puts his legs into the sleeve of his padded jacket not by mistake, not in a state of passion, but for purely rational reasons. This decision was prompted by his long camp experience and folk wisdom (“According to the proverb, “Keep your head cold, your stomach hungry, and your feet warm”). At the same time, this artistic detail also has a symbolic meaning. She emphasizes the anomalousness of the entire camp life, the upside-down nature of this world.

One day from Shukhov’s camp life is uniquely unique, since it is not a conditional, not a “combined” day. This is a very specific day with clear time coordinates. But it is quite typical, consisting of many episodes and details that are typical for any of the days of Ivan Denisovich’s camp term: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.”

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Shukhov and others: models of human behavior in the camp world

At the center of A. Solzhenitsyn’s work is the image of a simple Russian man who managed to survive and morally withstand the harshest conditions of camp captivity. Ivan Denisovich, according to the author himself, is a collective image. One of his prototypes was the soldier Shukhov, who fought in Captain Solzhenitsyn’s battery, but never spent time in Stalin’s prisons and camps. The writer later recalled: “Suddenly, for some reason, Ivan Denisovich’s type began to take shape in an unexpected way. Starting with the surname - Shukhov - it fit into me without any choice, I did not choose it, and it was the surname of one of my soldiers in the battery during the war. Then, along with this surname, his face, and a little bit of his reality, what area he was from, what language he spoke" ( P. II: 427) . In addition, A. Solzhenitsyn relied on the general experience of Gulag prisoners and on his own experience acquired in the Ekibastuz camp. The author's desire to synthesize the life experience of different prototypes, to combine several points of view, determined the choice of the type of narrative. In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” Solzhenitsyn uses a very complex narrative technique based on alternate merging, partial combination, complementarity, interflow, and sometimes divergence of points of view of the hero and the author-narrator close to him in his worldview, as well as some generalized view expressing moods 104th brigade, column or in general of hard-working prisoners as a single community. The camp world is shown primarily through Shukhov’s perception, but the character’s point of view is complemented by a more comprehensive author’s vision and point of view reflecting the collective psychology of prisoners. The author's thoughts and intonations are sometimes added to the character's direct speech or internal monologue. The “objective” third-person narration that dominates the story includes direct speech that conveys the point of view of the main character, preserving the peculiarities of his thinking and language, and speech that is not the author’s own. In addition, there are inclusions in the form of a narrative in the first person plural, such as: “And the moment is ours!”, “Our column reached the street...”, “This is where we have to squeeze them!”, “The number is one harm to our brother.” …" etc.

The view “from the inside” (“the camp through the eyes of a man”) in the story alternates with the view “from the outside”, and at the narrative level this transition is carried out almost imperceptibly. Thus, in the portrait description of the old convict Yu-81, whom Shukhov looks at in the camp canteen, upon careful reading one can detect a slightly noticeable narrative “glitch”. The phrase “his back was perfectly straight” could hardly have been born in the minds of a former collective farmer, an ordinary soldier, and now a hardened “prisoner” with eight years of experience in general labor; stylistically, he falls somewhat out of Ivan Denisovich’s speech structure and is barely noticeably dissonant with him. Apparently, here is just an example of how inappropriately direct speech, conveying the peculiarities of the thinking and language of the main character, is “interspersed” someone else's word. It remains to be seen whether it is copyright, or belongs to Yu-81. The second assumption is based on the fact that A. Solzhenitsyn usually strictly follows the law of “linguistic background”: that is, he constructs the narrative in such a way that the entire linguistic fabric, including the author’s own, does not go beyond the circle of ideas and word usage of the character in question . And since the episode talks about an old convict, we cannot exclude the possibility of the appearance in this narrative context of speech patterns inherent specifically to the Yu-81.

Little is known about the pre-camp past of forty-year-old Shukhov: before the war, he lived in the small village of Temgenevo, had a family - a wife and two daughters, and worked on a collective farm. Actually, there is not so much “peasant” in it; the collective farm and camp experience overshadowed and supplanted some “classical” peasant qualities known from works of Russian literature. Thus, the former peasant Ivan Denisovich has almost no desire for his mother earth, no memories of his wet-nurse cow. For comparison, we can recall what a significant role cows play in the destinies of heroes of village prose: Zvezdonya in F. Abramov’s tetralogy “Brothers and Sisters” (1958–1972), Rogulya in V. Belov’s story “A Habitual Business” (1966), Zorka in the story V. Rasputin “Deadline” (1972). Remembering his village past, a former thief with extensive prison experience, Yegor Prokudin, tells about a cow named Manka, whose belly was pierced by evil people with a pitchfork, in V. Shukshin’s film story “Red Kalina” (1973). There are no such motives in Solzhenitsyn's work. Horses in the memoirs of Shch-854 also do not occupy any noticeable place and are mentioned in passing only in connection with the theme of criminal Stalinist collectivization: “They threw them into one heap<ботинки>, in the spring yours won’t be there. Just like they drove horses to the collective farm"; “Shukhov had such a gelding before the collective farm. Shukhov was saving it, but in the wrong hands it was quickly cut off. And they took off his skin." It is characteristic that this gelding in the memoirs of Ivan Denisovich appears nameless, faceless. In works of village prose telling about peasants of the Soviet era, horses (horses), as a rule, are individualized: Parmen in “A Habitual Business,” Igrenka in “The Deadline,” Veselka in “Men and Women” by B. Mozhaev, etc. . The nameless mare, bought from a gypsy and “thrown her hooves away” even before her owner managed to get to his kuren, is natural in the spatial and ethical field of the semi-lumpenized grandfather Shchukar from the novel by M. Sholokhov “Virgin Soil Upturned”. It is not accidental in this context that the same nameless “calf” that Shchukar “pitted” so as not to give it to the collective farm, and, “out of great greed”, having eaten too much boiled brisket, was forced to continuously run “until the wind” into the sunflowers for several days .

The hero A. Solzhenitsyn does not have sweet memories of holy peasant labor, but “in the camps, Shukhov more than once recalled how they used to eat in the village: potatoes - in whole frying pans, porridge - in cast iron, and even earlier, without collective farms, meat - in slices healthy. Yes, they blew milk - let the belly burst." That is, the village past is perceived more by the memory of a hungry stomach, and not by the memory of hands and souls yearning for the land, for peasant labor. The hero does not show nostalgia for the village “lady,” for peasant aesthetics. Unlike many heroes of Russian and Soviet literature who did not go through the school of collectivization and the Gulag, Shukhov does not perceive his father’s house, his native land as a “lost paradise”, as some kind of hidden place to which his soul is directed. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that the author wanted to show the catastrophic consequences of the social, spiritual and moral cataclysms that shook Russia in the 20th century and significantly deformed the personality structure, inner world, and the very nature of the Russian person. The second possible reason for the absence of some “textbook” peasant traits in Shukhov is the author’s reliance primarily on real life experience, and not on stereotypes of artistic culture.

“Shukhov left home on the twenty-third of June forty-one,” he fought, was wounded, refused the medical battalion and voluntarily returned to duty, which he regretted more than once in the camp: “Shukhov remembered the medical battalion on the Lovat River, how he came there with a damaged jaw and - that's a damn thing! “I returned to duty with good will.” In February 1942, on the Northwestern Front, the army in which he fought was surrounded, and many soldiers were captured. Ivan Denisovich, having spent only two days in fascist captivity, escaped and returned to his own people. The denouement of this story contains a hidden polemic with the story of M.A. Sholokhov’s “The Fate of a Man” (1956), the central character of which, having escaped from captivity, was accepted by his own people as a hero. Shukhov, unlike Andrei Sokolov, was accused of treason: as if he was carrying out a task from German intelligence: “What a task - neither Shukhov himself nor the investigator could come up with. So they just left it as a task.” This detail clearly characterizes the Stalinist justice system, in which the accused himself must prove his own guilt, having previously invented it. Secondly, the special case cited by the author, which seems to concern only the main character, gives reason to assume that so many “Ivanov Denisovichs” passed through the hands of investigators that they were simply not able to come up with a specific guilt for each soldier who was captured . That is, at the subtext level we are talking about the scale of repression.

In addition, as the first reviewers (V. Lakshin) noted, this episode helps to better understand the hero, who came to terms with monstrously unfair accusations and sentences, and did not protest and rebel, seeking “the truth.” Ivan Denisovich knew that if you didn’t sign, they would shoot you: “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, you’ll at least live a little longer.” Ivan Denisovich signed, that is, he chose life in captivity. The cruel experience of eight years of camps (seven of them in Ust-Izhma, in the north) did not pass without a trace for him. Shukhov was forced to learn some rules, without which it is difficult to survive in the camp: he is not in a hurry, he does not openly contradict the convoy and the camp authorities, he “groans and bends,” and does not “stick his head out” once again.

Shukhov alone with himself, as an individual, differs from Shukhov in the brigade and, even more so, in the column of prisoners. The column is a dark and long monster with a head (“the head of the column was already being torn apart”), shoulders (“the column in front swayed, its shoulders swayed”), a tail (“the tail fell onto the hill”) - absorbs the prisoners, turns them into a homogeneous mass. In this crowd, Ivan Denisovich changes imperceptibly to himself, assimilates the mood and psychology of the crowd. Forgetting that he himself had just been working “without noticing the bell,” Shukhov, along with other prisoners, angrily shouts at the Moldovan who has committed a fine:

“And the whole crowd and Shukhov are getting angry. After all, what kind of bitch, bastard, carrion, scoundrel, Zagrebian is this?<…>What, you haven’t worked enough, you bastard? The official day is not enough, eleven hours, from light to light?<…>

Woohoo! - the crowd cheers from the gate<…>Chu-ma-a! Schoolboy! Shushera! Disgraceful bitch! Nasty! Bitch!!

And Shukhov also shouts: “Chu-ma!” .

Another thing is Shukhov in his brigade. On the one hand, a brigade in a camp is one of the forms of enslavement: “a device so that it is not the authorities who push the prisoners, but the prisoners push each other.” On the other hand, the brigade becomes for the prisoner something like a home, a family, it is here that he is saved from camp leveling, it is here that the wolf laws of the prison world recede somewhat and the universal principles of human relationships, the universal laws of ethics come into force (albeit in a somewhat reduced and distorted form). It is here that the prisoner has the opportunity to feel like a human being.

One of the culminating scenes of the story is a detailed description of the work of the 104th brigade on the construction of the camp thermal power plant. This scene, commented on countless times, makes it possible to better understand the character of the main character. Ivan Denisovich, despite the efforts of the camp system to turn him into a slave who works for the sake of “rations” and out of fear of punishment, managed to remain a free man. Even hopelessly late for his shift, risking being sent to a punishment cell for this, the hero stops and once again proudly inspects the work he has done: “Eh, the eye is a spirit level! Smooth!" . In an ugly camp world based on coercion, violence and lies, in a world where man is a wolf to man, where work is cursed, Ivan Denisovich, in the apt expression of V. Chalmaev, returned to himself and others - albeit for a short time! - a feeling of original purity and even holiness of work.

On this issue, another famous chronicler of the Gulag, V. Shalamov, fundamentally disagreed with the author of “One Day...”, who in his “Kolyma Stories” argued: “In the camp work kills - therefore anyone who praises camp labor is a scoundrel or a fool.” In one of his letters to Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov expressed this idea on his own behalf: “I put those who praise camp labor on the same level as those who hung the words on the camp gates: “Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism"<…>There's nothing more cynical<этой>inscriptions<…>And isn’t praising such work the worst humiliation of a person, the worst kind of spiritual corruption?<…>In the camps there is nothing worse, more humiliating than deadly hard physical forced labor.<…>I, too, “pulled on as long as I could,” but I hated this work with every pore of my body, every fiber of my soul, every minute.”

Obviously, not wanting to agree with such conclusions (the author of “Ivan Denisovich” became acquainted with the “Kolyma Tales” at the end of 1962, having read them in the manuscript, Shalamov’s position was also known to him from personal meetings and correspondence), A. Solzhenitsyn in a book written later “The Gulag Archipelago” will again speak about the joy of creative work even in conditions of unfreedom: “You don’t need this wall for anything and you don’t believe that it will bring the happy future of the people closer, but, pathetic, ragged slave, this creation of your own hands has you yourself smile at yourself."

Another form of preserving the inner core of personality, the survival of the human “I” in conditions of camp leveling of people and suppression of individuality is the use by prisoners in communication with each other of first and last names, and not prisoners’ numbers. Since “the purpose of a name is to express and verbally consolidate the types of spiritual organization”, “the type of personality, its ontological form, which further determines its spiritual and mental structure”, the loss of a prisoner’s name, its replacement with a number or nickname can mean a complete or partial disintegration of the personality , spiritual death. Among the characters in “One Day...” there is not a single one who has completely lost his name, turned into room. This applies even to Fetyukov, who has lowered himself.

Unlike camp numbers, the assignment of which to prisoners not only simplifies the work of guards and guards, but also contributes to the erosion of the personal identity of Gulag prisoners, their ability to self-identify, a name allows a person to preserve the primary form of self-manifestation of the human “I”. In total, there are 24 people in the 104th brigade, but fourteen are singled out from the total mass, including Shukhov: Andrei Prokofievich Tyurin - brigadier, Pavlo - pombrigadier, cavalry rank Buinovsky, former film director Caesar Markovich, “jackal” Fetyukov, Baptist Alyosha, former prisoner of Buchenwald Senka Klevshin, the “informer” Panteleev, the Latvian Jan Kildigs, two Estonians, one of whom is named Eino, sixteen-year-old Gopchik and the “hefty Siberian” Ermolaev.

The surnames of the characters cannot be called “talking”, but, nevertheless, some of them reflect the character traits of the heroes: the surname Volkova belongs to the animal-like cruel, evil head of the regime; the surname Shkuropatenko - to the prisoner, zealously performing the duties of a guard, in a word, “in the skin.” Alyosha is the name of a young Baptist who is completely absorbed in thoughts about God (here one cannot exclude an allusive parallel with Alyosha Karamazov from Dostoevsky’s novel), Gopchik is a clever and roguish young prisoner, Caesar is a metropolitan intellectual who imagines himself an aristocrat, rising above ordinary hard workers. The surname Buinovsky is a match for a proud prisoner, ready to rebel at any moment - in the recent past, a “ringing” naval officer.

Fellow brigades often call Buinovsky rank, captain, less often they address him by his last name and never by his first name and patronymic (only Tyurin, Shukhov and Caesar are awarded such an honor). He is called a kavtorang, perhaps because in the eyes of prisoners with many years of experience, he has not yet established himself as a person, he remained the same, pre-camp person - person-social role. Buinovsky has not yet adapted to the camp; he still feels like a naval officer. That’s why, apparently, he calls his fellow brigadiers “Red Navy men,” Shukhov “sailor,” and Fetyukova “salagoy.”

Perhaps the longest list of anthroponyms (and their variants) for the central character: Shukhov, Ivan Denisovich, Ivan Denisych, Denisych, Vanya. The guards call him in their own way: “eight hundred and fifty-four,” “pig,” “bastard.”

Speaking about the typicality of this character, one must not miss that the portrait and character of Ivan Denisovich are built from unique features: the image of Shukhov collective, typical, but not at all averaged. Meanwhile, critics and literary scholars often focus specifically on the typicality of the hero, relegating his unique individual characteristics to the background or even calling them into question. Thus, M. Schneerson wrote: “Shukhov is a bright individual, but, perhaps, typological traits in him prevail over personal ones.” Zh. Niva did not see any fundamental differences in the image of Shch-854 even from the janitor Spiridon Egorov, the character in the novel “In the First Circle” (1955-1968). According to him, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is “an outgrowth” of a big book (Shukhov repeats Spiridon) or, rather, a compressed, condensed, popular version of a prisoner’s epic,” “a “squeeze” from the life of a prisoner.”

In an interview dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the release of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, A. Solzhenitsyn seemed to speak out in favor of the fact that his character is a predominantly typical figure, at least that’s what he thought of: “From the very beginning I thought of Ivan Denisovich as understood that<…>this must be the most ordinary camp inmate<…>the most average soldier of this Gulag" ( P. III: 23). But literally in the next sentence the author admitted that “sometimes a collective image comes out even brighter than an individual one, it’s strange, this happened with Ivan Denisovich.”

To understand why the hero of A. Solzhenitsyn managed to preserve his individuality in the camp, the statements of the author of “One Day...” about “Kolyma Tales” help. In his assessment, there are “not specific special people, but almost only surnames, sometimes repeating from story to story, but without the accumulation of individual traits. Assume that this was Shalamov’s intention: the cruelest camp everyday life wears down and crushes people, people cease to be individuals<…>I do not agree that all personality traits and past life are completely destroyed: this does not happen, and something personal must be shown in everyone.”

In the portrait of Shukhov there are typical details that make him almost indistinguishable when he is in a huge mass of prisoners, in a camp column: two-week stubble, a “shaved” head, “half of his teeth are missing,” “the hawk eyes of a camp prisoner,” “hardened fingers,” etc. He dresses just like the majority of hard-working prisoners. However, in the appearance and habits of Solzhenitsyn’s hero there is also individual, the writer endowed him with a considerable number of distinctive features. Even the camp gruel Shch-854 eats differently from everyone else: “He ate everything in any fish, even the gills, even the tail, and he ate the eyes when they came across them on the spot, and when they fell out and swam separately in the bowl - big fish eyes - did not eat. They laughed at him for that." And Ivan Denisovich’s spoon has a special mark, and the character’s trowel is special, and his camp number begins with a rare letter.

It’s not for nothing that V. Shalamov noted that “art fabric<рассказа>so subtle that you can tell a Latvian from an Estonian.” In A. Solzhenitsyn’s work, not only Shukhov, but also all the other camp inmates singled out from the general mass are endowed with unique portrait features. So, Caesar has a “black, fused, thick mustache”; Baptist Alyosha - “clean, washed”, “eyes, like two candles, glow”; Brigadier Tyurin - “his shoulders are healthy and his image is wide”, “his face is covered in large mountain ash, from smallpox”, “the skin on his face is like oak bark”; Estonians - “both white, both long, both thin, both with long noses, with big eyes”; Latvian Kildigs - “red-faced, well-fed”, “ruddy”, “thick-cheeked”; Shkuropatenko - “a crooked pole, staring like a thorn.” The portrait of a prisoner, the old convict Yu-81, is the most individualized and the only one presented in detail in the story.

On the contrary, the author does not give a detailed, detailed portrait of the main character. It is limited to individual details of the character’s appearance, from which the reader must independently recreate in his imagination the complete image of Shch-854. The writer is attracted by such external details, from which one can get an idea of the inner content of the personality. Responding to one of his correspondents who sent a homemade sculpture “Zek” (recreating the “typical” image of a camp prisoner), Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Is this Ivan Denisovich? I'm afraid it's still not<…>Kindness (no matter how suppressed it may be) and humor must definitely be visible in Shukhov’s face. On the face of your prisoner there is only severity, coarseness, bitterness. All this is true, all this creates a generalized image of a prisoner, but... not Shukhov.”

Judging by the above statement of the writer, an essential feature of the hero’s character is responsiveness and the ability to compassion. In this regard, Shukhov’s proximity to the Christian Alyosha cannot be perceived as a mere coincidence. Despite Ivan Denisovich’s irony during a conversation about God, despite his statement that he does not believe in heaven and hell, the character of Shch-854 also reflected the Orthodox worldview, which is characterized primarily by a feeling of pity and compassion. It would seem difficult to imagine a situation worse than that of this disenfranchised camp inmate, but he himself not only grieves about his own fate, but also empathizes with others. Ivan Denisovich feels sorry for his wife, who for many years raised her daughters alone and pulled the collective farm burden. Despite the strongest temptation, the always hungry prisoner forbids sending him parcels, realizing that it is already difficult for his wife. Shukhov sympathizes with the Baptists, who received 25 years in the camps. He also feels sorry for the “jackal” Fetyukov: “He won’t live out his term. He doesn’t know how to position himself.” Shukhov sympathizes with Caesar, who has settled well in the camp, and who, in order to maintain his privileged position, has to give away part of the food sent to him. Shch-854 sometimes sympathizes with the guards (“<…>they also don’t need butter to trample on towers in such frost”) and the guards accompanying the column in the wind (“<…>They are not supposed to tie themselves with rags. The service is also unimportant").

In the 60s, critics often reproached Ivan Denisovich for not resisting tragic circumstances and for accepting the position of a powerless prisoner. This position, in particular, was substantiated by N. Sergovantsev. Already in the 90s, the opinion was expressed that the writer, by creating the image of Shukhov, allegedly slandered the Russian people. One of the most consistent supporters of this point of view, N. Fed, argued that Solzhenitsyn fulfilled the “social order” of the official Soviet ideology of the 60s, which was interested in reorienting public consciousness from revolutionary optimism to passive contemplation. According to the author of the Young Guard magazine, official criticism needed “a standard of such a limited, spiritually sleepy, and in general, indifferent person, incapable not only of protest, but even of the timid thought of any discontent,” and similar demands Solzhenitsyn’s hero allegedly answered in the best possible way:

“The Russian peasant in the work of Alexander Isaevich looks cowardly and stupid to the point of impossibility<…>Shukhov's whole philosophy of life comes down to one thing - survival, no matter what, at any cost. Ivan Denisovich is a degraded person who only has enough will and independence to “fill his belly”<…>His element is to serve, bring something, run to the general rise through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, etc. So he runs around the camp like a dog<…>His servile nature is dual: Shukhov is full of servility and hidden admiration for high authorities, and he has contempt for lower ranks<…>Ivan Denisovich gets true pleasure from groveling before wealthy prisoners, especially if they are of non-Russian origin<…>Solzhenitsyn's hero lives in complete spiritual prostration<…>Reconciliation with humiliation, injustice and abomination led to the atrophy of everything human in him. Ivan Denisovich is a complete mankurt, without hopes or even any light in his soul. But this is an obvious Solzhenitsyn’s untruth, even some kind of intent: to belittle the Russian people, to once again emphasize his supposedly slavish essence.”

Unlike N. Fedya, who assessed Shukhov in an extremely biased manner, V. Shalamov, who had 18 years of camp experience behind him, in his analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s work wrote about the author’s deep and subtle understanding of the hero’s peasant psychology, which manifests itself “in both curiosity and naturally tenacious intelligence, and the ability to survive, observation, caution, prudence, a slightly skeptical attitude towards the various Caesar Markovichs, and all kinds of power that has to be respected.” According to the author of “Kolyma Stories,” Ivan Denisovich’s “intelligent independence, intelligent submission to fate and the ability to adapt to circumstances, and distrust are all traits of the people.”

Shukhov's high degree of adaptability to circumstances has nothing to do with humiliation or loss of human dignity. Suffering from hunger no less than others, he cannot allow himself to turn into a semblance of Fetyukov’s “jackal,” scouring garbage dumps and licking other people’s plates, humiliatingly begging for handouts and shifting his work onto the shoulders of others. Doing everything possible to remain human in the camp, Solzhenitsyn’s hero, nevertheless, is by no means Platon Karataev. If necessary, he is ready to defend his rights by force: when one of the prisoners tries to move the felt boots he had put out to dry from the stove, Shukhov shouts: “Hey! You! ginger! What about a felt boot in the face? Place your own, don’t touch anyone else’s!” . Contrary to the popular belief that the hero of the story treats “timidly, peasant-like, respectfully” those who represent the “bossies” in his eyes, we should recall the irreconcilable assessments that Shukhov gives to various kinds of camp commanders and their accomplices: foreman Der - “pig face”; to the guards - “damned dogs”; to the nachkar - “dumb”, to the senior in the barracks - “bastard”, “urka”. In these and similar assessments there is not even a shadow of that “patriarchal humility” that is sometimes attributed to Ivan Denisovich with the best intentions.

If we talk about “submission to circumstances,” which Shukhov is sometimes reproached for, then first of all we should remember not him, but Fetyukov, Der and the like. These morally weak heroes who do not have an internal “core” are trying to survive at the expense of others. It is in them that the repressive system forms a slave psychology.

The dramatic life experience of Ivan Denisovich, whose image embodies some typical properties of the national character, allowed the hero to derive a universal formula for the survival of a person from the people in the country of the Gulag: “That’s right, groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break.” This, however, does not mean that Shukhov, Tyurin, Senka Klevshin and other Russian people close to them in spirit are always submissive in everything. In cases where resistance can bring success, they defend their few rights. For example, by stubborn silent resistance they nullified the commander’s order to move around the camp only in brigades or groups. The convoy of prisoners offers the same stubborn resistance to the nachkar, who kept them in the cold for a long time: “I didn’t want to be with us like a human being - at least now I’ll burst into tears from screaming.” If Shukhov “bends”, it is only outwardly. In moral terms, he resists a system based on violence and spiritual corruption. In the most dramatic circumstances, the hero remains a man with soul and heart and believes that justice will prevail: “Now Shukhov is not offended by anything: no matter the long term<…>there will be no Sunday again. Now he thinks: we’ll survive! We will survive everything, God willing, it will end!” . In one of the interviews, the writer said: “But communism choked, in fact, in the passive resistance of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Although outwardly they remained submissive, they naturally did not want to work under communism" ( P. III: 408).

Of course, even in conditions of camp unfreedom, open protest and direct resistance are possible. This type of behavior is embodied by Buinovsky, a former combat naval officer. Faced with the arbitrariness of the guards, the cavalry guard boldly tells them: “You are not Soviet people! You are not communists! and at the same time refers to his “rights”, to Article 9 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits mockery of prisoners. Critic V. Bondarenko, commenting on this episode, calls the kavtorang a “hero”, writes that he “feels like an individual and behaves like an individual”, “in case of personal humiliation he rebels and is ready to die”, etc. But at the same time, he loses sight of the reason for the character’s “heroic” behavior, does not notice why he “revolts” and is even “ready to die.” And the reason here is too prosaic to be a reason for a proud uprising, much less a heroic death: when a column of prisoners leaves the camp for the work area, the guards write down from Buinovsky (to force him to hand over his personal belongings to the storeroom in the evening) “a vest or a navel of some kind. Buynovsky - in the throat<…>". The critic did not feel some inadequacy between the statutory actions of the guards and such a violent reaction of the captain, did not catch the humorous shade with which the main character, who in general sympathized with the captain, looked at what was happening. The mention of the “napuznik”, because of which Buinovsky came into conflict with the head of the regime Volkov, partly removes the “heroic” aura from the action of the kavtorang. The price of his “vest” rebellion turns out to be generally meaningless and disproportionately expensive - the cavalryman ends up in a punishment cell, about which it is known: “Ten days in the local punishment cell<…>This means losing your health for the rest of your life. Tuberculosis, and you can’t get out of the hospital. And those who served fifteen days of strict punishment are in damp ground.”

Humans or nonhumans?
(on the role of zoomorphic comparisons)

The frequent use of zoomorphic comparisons and metaphors is an important feature of Solzhenitsyn’s poetics, which has support in the classical tradition. Their use is the shortest way to creating visual, expressive images, to identifying the main essence of human characters, as well as to an indirect, but very expressive manifestation of the author's modality. The likening of a person to an animal makes it possible in some cases to abandon the detailed characterization of characters, since the elements of the zoomorphic “code” used by the writer have meanings firmly anchored in the cultural tradition and therefore easily guessed by readers. And this perfectly corresponds to Solzhenitsyn’s most important aesthetic law - the law of “artistic economy”.

However, sometimes zoomorphic comparisons can also be perceived as a manifestation of the author’s simplified, schematic ideas about the essence of human characters - first of all, this applies to the so-called “negative” characters. Solzhenitsyn’s inherent penchant for didacticism and moralizing finds various forms of embodiment, including manifesting itself in his actively used allegorical zoomorphic similes, which are more appropriate in “moralizing” genres - primarily in fables. When this tendency powerfully asserts itself, the writer strives not to comprehend the subtleties of a person’s inner life, but to give his “final” assessment, expressed in an allegorical form and having an openly moralizing character. It is then that an allegorical projection of animals begins to be discerned in the images of people, and an equally transparent allegory of people begins to be discerned in the animals. The most typical example of this kind is the description of the zoo in the story “Cancer Ward” (1963–1967). The frank allegorical orientation of these pages leads to the fact that the animals languishing in cages (marked goat, porcupine, badger, bears, tiger, etc.), which are considered in many respects by Oleg Kostoglotov, who is close to the author, become primarily an illustration of human morals, an illustration of human types behavior. There is nothing unusual about this. According to V.N. Toporova, “animals for a long time served as a kind of visual paradigm, the relationships between the elements of which could be used as a certain model of the life of human society<…>» .

Most often zoonyms, used to name people, are found in the novel “In the First Circle”, in the books “The Gulag Archipelago” and “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree”. If you look at Solzhenitsyn’s works from this angle, then Gulag archipelago will appear as something like a grandiose menagerie, which is inhabited by the “Dragon” (the ruler of this kingdom), “rhinoceros”, “wolves”, “dogs”, “horses”, “goats”, “gorilloids”, “rats”, “hedgehogs” , “rabbits”, “lambs” and similar creatures. In the book “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree,” the famous “engineers of human souls” of the Soviet era also appear as inhabitants of an “animal farm” - this time a writer’s: here there is K. Fedin “with the face of a vicious wolf”, and the “polkanist” L. Sobolev, and “wolfish” V. Kochetov, and “fed up fox” G. Markov...

He himself is inclined to see in characters the manifestation of animal traits and properties, A. Solzhenitsyn often endows this ability with heroes, in particular, Shukhov, the main character of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The camp depicted in this work is inhabited by many animal-like creatures - characters that the heroes of the story and the narrator repeatedly name (or compare to) dogs, wolves, jackals, bears, horses, rams, sheep, pigs, calves, hares, frogs, rats, kites etc.; in which the habits and properties attributed or actually inherent to these animals appear or even prevail.

Sometimes (this happens extremely rarely) zoomorphic comparisons destroy the organic integrity of the image and blur the contours of character. This usually happens when there are too many comparisons. The zoomorphic comparisons in Gopchik’s portrait characteristics are clearly redundant. In the image of this sixteen-year-old prisoner, who evokes fatherly feelings in Shukhov, the properties of several animals are contaminated: “<…>pink, like a pig" ; “He is an affectionate calf, he fawns over all the men”; “Gopchik, like a squirrel, is light - he climbed up the rungs<…>" ; “Gopchik runs behind like a bunny”; “He has a tiny little voice, like a kid’s.” A hero whose portrait description combines features piglet, calf, squirrels, bunnies, baby goat, and besides, wolf cub(presumably, Gopchik shares the general mood of the hungry and chilled prisoners who are being kept in the cold because of a Moldovan who fell asleep at the facility: “<…>If only this Moldovan had held them for half an hour, it seems, and given his convoy to the crowd, they would have torn a calf to pieces like wolves!” ), it is very difficult to imagine, to see, as they say, with your own eyes. F.M. Dostoevsky believed that when creating a portrait of a character, the writer must find the main idea of his “physiography.” The author of “One Day...” in this case violated this principle. Gopchik’s “face” does not have a portrait dominant, and therefore his image loses its clarity and expressiveness and turns out to be blurred.

The easiest way would be to consider that the antithesis bestial (animal) - humane in Solzhenitsyn's story comes down to the opposition of executioners and their victims, that is, the creators and faithful servants of the Gulag, on the one hand, and camp prisoners, on the other. However, such a scheme is destroyed upon contact with the text. To some extent, in relation primarily to the images of jailers, this may be true. Especially in episodes when they are compared to a dog - “traditionally a “low”, despised animal, symbolizing man’s extreme rejection of his own kind.” Although this is most likely not a comparison with an animal, not a zoomorphic likening, but the use of the word “dogs” (and its synonyms - “dogs”, “polkans”) as a curse word. It is for this purpose that Shukhov turns to such vocabulary: “How much for that hat they dragged into the condo, damn dogs”; “At least they knew how to count, dogs!” ; “Here are the dogs, counting again!” ; “They govern without guards, Polkans,” etc. Of course, to express his attitude towards the jailers and their accomplices, Ivan Denisovich uses zoonyms as curse words not only with canine specifics. So, the foreman Dair for him is a “pig’s face”, the privateer in the storage room is a “rat”.

In the story there are also cases of direct likening of guards and wardens to dogs, and, it should be emphasized, to evil dogs. Zoonyms “dog” or “dog” are usually not used in such situations, dog the actions, voices, gestures, and facial expressions of the characters receive color: “Oh, fuck you in the forehead, what are you barking?” ; “But the warden bared his teeth...” ; "Well! Well! - the warden growled,” etc.

The correspondence of the external appearance of a character to the internal content of his character is a technique characteristic of the poetics of realism. In Solzhenitsyn’s story, the brutal, “wolfish” nature of the head of the regime corresponds not only to his appearance, but even to his last name: “Here God marks a rogue, he gave him a last name!” - Volkova doesn’t look any other way than a wolf. Dark, and long, and frowning - and rushes quickly." Hegel also noted that in fiction the image of an animal is usually “used to designate everything bad, evil, insignificant, natural and unspiritual.”<…>". The likening of the GULAG servants to predatory animals in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has a completely understandable motivation, since in the literary tradition “the beast is, first of all, instinct, the triumph of the flesh,” “the world of flesh freed from the soul.” Camp guards, guards, and superiors in Solzhenitsyn’s story often appear in the guise of predatory animals: “And the guards<…>rushed like animals<…>". Prisoners, on the contrary, are likened to sheep, calves, and horses. Buinovsky is especially often compared to a horse (gelding): “The horseman is already falling off his feet, but he’s still pulling. Shukhov had such a gelding too<…>" ; “The cavourang has become very haggard over the past month, but the team is pulling”; “The cavorang secured the stretcher like a good gelding.” But Buinovsky’s other teammates during the “Stakhanovist” work at the thermal power plant are likened to horses: “The carriers are like puffed-up horses”; “Pavlo came running from below, harnessing himself to a stretcher...”, etc.

So, according to the first impression, the author of “One Day...” is building a tough opposition, at one pole of which are the bloodthirsty jailers ( animals, wolves, evil dogs), on the other - defenseless “herbivorous” prisoners ( sheep, calves, horses). The origins of this opposition go back to the mythological ideas of pastoral tribes. So, in poetic views of the Slavs on nature, “the destructive predation of the wolf towards horses, cows and sheep seemed<…>similar to the hostile opposition in which darkness and light, night and day, winter and summer are placed.” However, the dependency-based concept man's descent down the ladder of biological evolution to the lower creatures from who he belongs to - the executioners or the victims, begins to slip as soon as the images of prisoners become the object of consideration.

Secondly, in the system of values firmly internalized by Shukhov in the camp, rapacity is not always perceived as a negative quality. Contrary to a long-established tradition, in some cases even likening prisoners to a wolf does not carry a negative evaluative value. On the contrary, Shukhov behind his back, but respectfully calls the most authoritative people in the camp for him - the brigadiers Kuzyomin (“<…>the old one was a camp wolf") and Tyurin ("And you need to think before going after such a wolf<…>""). In this context, likening a predator does not indicate negative “animal” qualities (as in the case of Volkov), but positive human ones - maturity, experience, strength, courage, firmness.

When applied to hard-working prisoners, traditionally negative, reducing zoomorphic analogies do not always turn out to be negative in their semantics. Thus, in a number of episodes based on the likening of prisoners to dogs, the negative modality becomes almost invisible, or even disappears altogether. Tyurin’s statement addressed to the brigade: “We won’t heat up<машинный зал>- we’ll freeze like dogs...”, or the narrator’s look at Shukhov and Senka Klevshin running to the watch: “They’re on fire like mad dogs...” do not carry a negative assessment. Quite the opposite: such parallels only increase sympathy for the characters. Even when Andrei Prokofyevich promises to “blow the forehead” of his fellow brigade members who are huddling near the stove before setting up a workplace, Shukhov’s reaction: “Just show a beaten dog the whip,” indicating the submissiveness and downtroddenness of the camp inmates, does not discredit them at all. The comparison with a “beaten dog” characterizes not so much the prisoners as those who turned them into frightened creatures who did not dare disobey the foreman and the “superior” in general. Tyurin uses the “crowded conditions” of prisoners already formed by the Gulag, moreover, caring for their own good, thinking about the survival of those for whom he is responsible as a foreman.

On the contrary, when it comes to the capital’s intellectuals who find themselves in the camp, who, if possible, try to avoid general work and generally contacts with “gray” prisoners and prefer to communicate with people in their own circle, the comparison is with dogs (and not even vicious ones, as in the case of guards, but only possessing a keen sense) hardly indicates the hero and narrator’s sympathy for them: “They, Muscovites, smell each other from afar, like dogs. And, having come together, they all sniff, sniff in their own way.” The caste alienation of Moscow “eccentrics” from the everyday worries and needs of ordinary “gray” prisoners receives a veiled assessment through a comparison with sniffing dogs, which creates the effect of an ironic reduction.

Thus, zoomorphic comparisons and likenings in Solzhenitsyn’s story have an ambivalent character and their semantic content most often depends not on traditional, established meanings of the fable-allegorical or folklore type, but on the context, on the specific artistic tasks of the author, on his worldview.

Researchers usually reduce the writer’s active use of zoomorphic comparisons to the theme of the spiritual and moral degradation of a person who found himself a participant in the dramatic events of Russian history of the 20th century, drawn by the criminal regime into the cycle of total state violence. Meanwhile, this problem contains not only socio-political, but also existential meaning. It has the most direct relation to the author’s concept of personality, to the writer’s aesthetically translated ideas about the essence of man, about the purpose and meaning of his earthly existence.

It is generally accepted that Solzhenitsyn the artist proceeds from the Christian concept of personality: “For a writer, a person is a spiritual being, a bearer of the image of God. If the moral principle disappears in a person, then he becomes like a beast, the animal, the carnal, predominates in him.” If we project this scheme onto One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, then, at first glance, it seems to be fair. Of all the portrait-presented characters in the story, only a few do not have zoomorphic likenings, including Alyoshka the Baptist - perhaps the only character who can lay claim to the role of “bearer of the image of God.” This hero was able to spiritually resist the battle with the inhumane system thanks to his Christian faith, thanks to his firmness in upholding unshakable ethical standards.

Unlike V. Shalamov, who considered the camp a “negative school,” A. Solzhenitsyn focuses not only on the negative experience that prisoners acquire, but also on the problem of stability - physical and especially spiritual and moral. The camp corrupts and turns into animals, first and foremost, those who are weak in spirit, who do not have a strong spiritual and moral core.

But that's not all. For the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the camp is not the main and only reason for the distortion in man of his original, natural perfection, the “godlikeness” inherent, “programmed” in him. Here I would like to draw a parallel with one feature of Gogol’s work, which Berdyaev wrote about. The philosopher saw in “Dead Souls” and other works of Gogol “an analytical dissection of the organically integral image of man.” In the article “Spirits of the Russian Revolution” (1918), Berdyaev expressed a very original, although not entirely indisputable, view of the nature of Gogol’s talent, calling the writer an “infernal artist” who had a “completely exceptional sense of evil” (how can one not recall the statement of Zh. Niva about Solzhenitsyn: “he is perhaps the most powerful artist of Evil in all modern literature”?). Here are a few statements by Berdyaev about Gogol, which help to better understand Solzhenitsyn’s works: “Gogol has no human images, but only muzzles and faces<…>He was surrounded on all sides by ugly and inhuman monsters.<…>He believed in man, looked for the beauty of man and did not find it in Russia.<…>His great and incredible art was given the power to reveal the negative sides of the Russian people, their dark spirits, everything that was inhuman in them, distorting the image and likeness of God.” The events of 1917 were perceived by Berdyaev as confirmation of Gogol’s diagnosis: “In the revolution, the same old, eternally Gogol’s Russia, inhuman, half-animal Russia, mug and face, was revealed.<…>Darkness and evil lie deeper, not in the social shells of the people, but in their spiritual core.<…>The revolution is a great manifester and it revealed only what was hidden in the depths of Russia.”

Based on Berdyaev’s statements, we will make the assumption that, from the point of view of the author of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the Gulag exposed and revealed the main diseases and vices of modern society. The era of Stalinist repressions did not give rise to, but only aggravated, brought to the extreme hardness of heart, indifference to the suffering of others, spiritual callousness, unbelief, lack of a solid spiritual and moral foundation, faceless collectivism, zoological instincts - everything that accumulated in Russian society over several centuries. The GULAG was a consequence, the result of the erroneous path of development that humanity chose in modern times. The Gulag is a natural result of the development of modern civilization, which abandoned faith or turned it into an external ritual, which put socio-political chimeras and ideological radicalism at the forefront, or rejected the ideals of spirituality in the name of reckless technical progress and slogans of material consumption.

The author’s orientation to the Christian idea of human nature, the desire for perfection, for the ideal, which Christian thought expresses in the formula of “Godlikeness,” can explain the abundance of zoomorphic likenings in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” including in relation to the images of prisoners. As for the image of the main character of the work, then, of course, he is not a model of perfection. On the other hand, Ivan Denisovich is by no means an inhabitant of a menagerie, not an animal-like creature who has lost the idea of the highest meaning of human existence. Critics of the 60s often wrote about the “down-to-earthness” of Shukhov’s image, emphasizing that the hero’s range of interests did not extend beyond an extra bowl of gruel (N. Sergovantsev). Such assessments, which are heard to this day (N. Fed), come into clear contradiction with the text of the story, in particular, with the fragment in which Ivan Denisovich is compared to a bird: “Now he, like a free bird, fluttered out from under vestibule roof - both in the zone and in the zone!” . This comparison is not only a form of stating the mobility of the protagonist, not only a metaphorical image characterizing the speed of Shukhov’s movements around the camp: “The image of a bird, in accordance with the poetic tradition, indicates freedom of imagination, the flight of the spirit directed to the heavens.” A comparison with a “free” bird, supported by many other similar portrait details and psychological characteristics, allows us to conclude that this hero has not only a “biological” survival instinct, but also spiritual aspirations.

Big in small
(art of artistic detail)

An artistic detail is usually called an expressive detail that plays an important ideological, semantic, emotional, symbolic and metaphorical role in a work. “The meaning and power of detail lies in what is contained in the infinitesimal whole". Artistic detail includes details of historical time, life and way of life, landscape, interior, portrait.

In the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, artistic details carry such a significant ideological and aesthetic load that without taking them into account, it is almost impossible to fully understand the author’s intention. First of all, this refers to his early, “censored” work, when the writer had to hide, take into subtext the most intimate of what he wanted to convey to the readers of the 60s, accustomed to the Aesopian language.

It should only be noted that the author of “Ivan Denisovich” does not share the point of view of his character Caesar, who believes that “art is not What, A How". According to Solzhenitsyn, truthfulness, accuracy, and expressiveness of individual details of an artistically recreated reality mean little if historical truth is violated and the overall picture, the very spirit of the era, is distorted. For this reason, he is rather on the side of Buinovsky, who, in response to Caesar’s admiration for the expressiveness of details in Eisenstein’s film “Battleship Potemkin,” retorts: “Yes... But the sea life there is puppet-like.”

Among the details that deserve special attention is the camp number of the main character - Shch-854. On the one hand, it is evidence of a certain autobiographical nature of Shukhov’s image, since it is known that the camp number of the author, who served time in the Ekibastuz camp, began with the same letter - Shch-262. In addition, both components of the number - one of the last letters of the alphabet and a three-digit number close to the limit - make one think about the scale of repression, prompting the astute reader that the total number of prisoners in one camp alone could exceed twenty thousand people. It is impossible not to pay attention to one more similar detail: the fact that Shukhov works in the 104th (!) Brigade.

One of the first readers of the then handwritten “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Lev Kopelev, complained that A. Solzhenitsyn’s work was “overloaded with unnecessary details.” Critics of the 60s also often wrote about the author’s excessive passion for camp life. Indeed, he pays attention to literally every little detail that his hero encounters: he talks in detail about how the barracks, clapboards, punishment cells are arranged, how and what the prisoners eat, where they hide their bread and money, what they wear and dress in, how they earn extra money, where they get the smoke, etc. Such increased attention to everyday details is justified primarily by the fact that the camp world is given in the perception of the hero, for whom all these little things are of vital importance. The details characterize not only the way of camp life, but also, indirectly, Ivan Denisovich himself. Often they provide an opportunity to understand the inner world of Shch-854 and other prisoners, the moral principles that guide the characters. Here is one of these details: in the camp canteen, prisoners spit fish bones they find in the gruel onto the table, and only when a lot of them accumulate, does someone brush the bones off the table onto the floor, and there they “grind”: “And don’t spit the bones directly on the floor.” - seems to be considered sloppy.” Another similar example: in the unheated dining room, Shukhov takes off his hat - “no matter how cold it was, he could not allow himself to eat in a hat.” Both of these seemingly purely everyday details indicate that the disenfranchised camp inmates retained the need to observe norms of behavior, unique rules of etiquette. The prisoners, whom they are trying to turn into work animals, into nameless slaves, into “numbers”, remained people, want to be people, and the author speaks about this also indirectly - through a description of the details of camp life.

Among the most expressive details is the repeated mention of Ivan Denisovich’s legs tucked into the sleeve of his padded jacket: “He was lying on top linings, covering his head with a blanket and pea coat, and in a padded jacket, in one sleeve turned up, putting both feet together”; “Legs again in the sleeve of a padded jacket, a blanket on top, a peacoat on top, sleep!” . This detail was also noticed by V. Shalamov, who wrote to the author in November 1962: “Shukhov’s legs in one sleeve of a padded jacket - all this is magnificent.”

It is interesting to compare Solzhenitsyn’s image with the famous lines of A. Akhmatova:

My chest was so helplessly cold,

But my steps were light.

I put it on my right hand

Glove from the left hand.

The artistic detail in "Song of the Last Meeting" is sign, carrying “information” about the internal state of the lyrical heroine, so this detail can be called emotional and psychological. The role of detail in Solzhenitsyn’s story is fundamentally different: it characterizes not the character’s experiences, but his “external” life - it is one of the reliable details of camp life. Ivan Denisovich puts his legs into the sleeve of his padded jacket not by mistake, not in a state of psychological affect, but for purely rational, practical reasons. This decision was prompted by his long camp experience and folk wisdom (according to the proverb: “Keep your head cold, your stomach hungry, and your feet warm!”). On the other hand, this detail cannot be called purely domestic, since it also carries a symbolic load. The left glove on the right hand of the lyrical heroine Akhmatova is a sign of a certain emotional and psychological state; Ivan Denisovich’s legs, tucked into the sleeve of a padded jacket, are a capacious symbol inversion, anomalies of the entire camp life as a whole.

A significant part of the subject images of Solzhenitsyn’s work is used by the author to simultaneously recreate camp life and to characterize the Stalinist era as a whole: a parachute barrel, clapboard, rag muzzles, front-line flares - a symbol of the war between the authorities and their own people: “Like this camp, Special, they started - there were too many front-line flares at the guards, as soon as the lights went out - they showered flares over the zone<…>the war is real." The symbolic function in the story is performed by a rail suspended on a wire - a camp resemblance (more precisely - substitution) bells: “At five o’clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks. An intermittent ringing faintly passed through the glass, frozen into two fingers, and soon died down: it was cold, and the warden was reluctant to wave his hand for a long time.” According to H.E. Kerlot, bell ringing - “a symbol of creative power”; and since the sound source hangs, “all the mystical properties that are endowed with objects suspended between heaven and earth apply to it.” In the “inverted” desacralized world of the Gulag depicted by the writer, an important symbolic substitution occurs: the place of a bell, shaped like the vault of heaven, and therefore symbolically connected with the world to the heavenly, occupies "picked up by a thick wire<…>a worn-out rail”, hanging not on a bell tower, but on an ordinary pole. The loss of the sacred spherical form and the replacement of the material substance (hard steel instead of soft copper) correspond to a change in the properties and functions of the sound itself: the blows of the guard's hammer on the camp rail remind not of the eternal and sublime, but of the curse that hangs over the prisoners - of exhausting forced slave labor, bringing people to an early grave.

Day, term, eternity
(about the specifics of artistic time-space)

One day of Shukhov’s camp life is uniquely unique, since it is not a conventional, not a “prefabricated”, not an abstract day, but a completely definite one, having precise time coordinates, filled, among other things, with extraordinary events, and, secondly, extremely is typical, because it consists of many episodes, details that are typical for any of the days of Ivan Denisovich’s camp term: “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.”

Why does one single day of a prisoner turn out to be so meaningful? Firstly, for extra-literary reasons: this is facilitated by the very nature of the day - the most universal unit of time. This idea was exhaustively expressed by V.N. Toporov, analyzing the outstanding monument of ancient Russian literature - “The Life of Theodosius of Pechersk”: “The main quantum of time when describing the historical micro-plan is the day, and the choice of the day as time in the Life Book is not accidental. On the one side,<он>self-sufficient, self-sufficient<…>On the other hand, the day is the most natural and from the beginning of Creation (it itself was measured in days) a unit of time established by God, acquiring a special meaning in connection with other days, in that series of days that determines “macro-time”, its fabric, rhythm<…>The temporal structure of the life cycle is precisely characterized by the always assumed connection between the day and the sequence of days. Thanks to this, the “micro-plane” of time correlates with the “macro-plane”; any specific day, as it were, approaches (at least potentially) to the “big” time of Sacred History<…>» .

Secondly, this was originally A. Solzhenitsyn’s idea: to present the prisoner’s day depicted in the story as the quintessence of his entire camp experience, a model of camp life and existence in general, the focus of the entire Gulag era. Recalling how the idea for the work arose, the writer said: “there was such a camp day, hard work, I was carrying a stretcher with a partner, and I thought how I should describe the entire camp world - in one day” ( P. II: 424); “It is enough to describe just one day of the simplest worker, and our whole life will be reflected here” ( P. III: 21).

So, anyone who considers A. Solzhenitsyn’s story to be a work exclusively on a “camp” theme is mistaken. Artistically recreated in the work, the day of the prisoner grows into a symbol of an entire era. The author of “Ivan Denisovich” would probably agree with the opinion of I. Solonevich, a writer of the “second wave” of Russian emigration, expressed in the book “Russia in a Concentration Camp” (1935): “The camp is no different from “freedom” in any significant way. If it is worse in the camp than in the wild, it is not much worse - of course, for the bulk of the camp inmates, workers and peasants. Everything that happens in the camp happens in the wild. And vice versa. But only in the camp is all this more visible, simpler, clearer<…>In the camp, the foundations of Soviet power are presented with the clarity of an algebraic formula.” In other words, the camp depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s story is a smaller copy of Soviet society, a copy that retains all the most important features and properties of the original.

One of these properties is that natural time and intra-camp time (and more broadly, state time) are not synchronized and move at different speeds: days (they, as already mentioned, are the most natural, God-established unit of time) follow their “own course” , and the camp term (that is, the time period determined by the repressive authorities) hardly moves: “And no one has ever had an end to their term in this camp”; "<…>The days in the camp are rolling by - you won’t look back. But the deadline itself doesn’t advance at all, it doesn’t decrease at all.” In the artistic world of the story, the time of prisoners and the time of the camp authorities are also not synchronized, that is, the time of the people and the time of those who personify power: “<…>prisoners are not given a clock; the authorities know the time for them”; “None of the prisoners ever sees a watch, and what do they need, a watch? The prisoner just needs to know: is it time to get up soon? How long until divorce? before lunch? until lights out? .

And the camp was designed in such a way that it was almost impossible to get out of it: “every gate always opens into the zone, so that if the prisoners and the crowd pressed on them from the inside, they could not drop them out.” Those who turned Russia into a “GULAG archipelago” are interested in ensuring that nothing changes in this world, that time either stops altogether, or at least is controlled by their will. But even they, seemingly omnipotent and omnipotent, are unable to cope with the eternal movement of life. An interesting episode in this sense is in which Shukhov and Buinovsky argue about when the sun is at its zenith.

In the perception of Ivan Denisovich, the sun as a source of light and heat and as a natural natural clock that measures the time of human life, opposes not only the cold and darkness of the camp, but also the very authorities that gave birth to the monstrous Gulag. This power poses a threat to the entire world, as it seeks to disrupt the natural course of things. A similar meaning can be seen in some “sunny” episodes. One of them reproduces a dialogue with subtext conducted by two prisoners: “The sun had already risen, but there were no rays, as if in fog, and on the sides of the sun there stood - weren’t they pillars? - Shukhov nodded to Kildigs. “But the pillars don’t bother us,” Kildigs waved it off and laughed. “As long as they don’t stretch the thorn from pillar to post, look at this.” It is no coincidence that Kildigs laughs - his irony is aimed at the power that is straining, but in vain, trying to subjugate the whole of God's world. A little time passed, “the sun rose higher, dispersed the haze, and the pillars disappeared.”

In the second episode, having heard from captain Buinovsky that the sun, which in “grandfather’s” times occupied the highest position in the sky at exactly noon, now, in accordance with the decree of the Soviet government, “stands highest at the hour,” the hero, by simplicity, understood these words literally - in the sense that it obeys the requirements of the decree, nevertheless, I am not inclined to believe the captain: “The cavalryman came out with a stretcher, but Shukhov would not have argued. Does the sun really obey their decrees? . For Ivan Denisovich, it is quite obvious that the sun does not “submit” to anyone, so there is no reason to argue about this. A little later, being in the calm confidence that nothing can shake the sun - not even the Soviet government, along with its decrees, and wanting to make sure of this once again, Shch-854 looks at the sky again: “And Shukhov checked the sun too, squinting, - about the commander’s decree.” The absence of references to the heavenly body in the next phrase proves that the hero is convinced of what he never doubted - that no earthly power is able to change the eternal laws of the world order and stop the natural flow of time.

The perceptual time of the heroes of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is correlated in different ways with historical time - the time of total state violence. Physically being in the same space-time dimension, they feel themselves almost in different worlds: Fetyukov’s horizons are limited by barbed wire, and the center of the universe for the hero becomes the camp garbage dump - the focus of his main life aspirations; former film director Caesar Markovich, who avoided general work and regularly receives food parcels from the outside, has the opportunity to live with his thoughts in the world of film images, in the artistic reality of Eisenstein’s films recreated by his memory and imagination. Ivan Denisovich’s perceptual space is also immeasurably wider than the territory fenced with barbed wire. This hero correlates himself not only with the realities of camp life, not only with his village and military past, but also with the sun, moon, sky, steppe expanse - that is, with the phenomena of the natural world that carry the idea of the infinity of the universe, the idea of eternity.

Thus, the perceptual time-space of Caesar, Shukhov, Fetyukov and other characters in the story does not coincide in everything, although plot-wise they are in the same temporal and spatial coordinates. The locus of Caesar Markovich (Eisenstein's films) marks a certain distance, the distance of the character from the epicenter of the greatest national tragedy, the locus of Fetyukov's "jackal" (garbage dump) becomes a sign of his internal degradation, Shukhov's perceptual space, including the sun, sky, steppe expanse, is evidence of the hero's moral ascent .

As you know, artistic space can be “point”, “linear”, “planar”, “volumetric”, etc. Along with other forms of expressing the author’s position, it has valuable properties. Artistic space “creates the effect of “closedness,” “dead end,” “isolation,” “limitedness,” or, on the contrary, “openness,” “dynamism,” “openness” of the hero’s chronotope, that is, it reveals the nature of his position in the world.” The artistic space created by A. Solzhenitsyn is most often called “hermetic”, “closed”, “compressed”, “densified”, “localized”. Such assessments are found in almost every work devoted to “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” As an example, we can quote one of the most recent articles about Solzhenitsyn’s work: “The image of the camp, given 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.”

These conclusions are partly true. Indeed, the general artistic space of “Ivan Denisovich” is composed, among other things, of the closed-boundary spaces of the barracks, medical unit, canteen, parcel room, thermal power plant building, etc. However, such isolation is overcome by the fact that the central character constantly moves between these local spaces, he is always on the move and does not stay long in any of the camp premises. In addition, while physically being in the camp, Solzhenitsyn’s hero perceptually breaks out beyond its boundaries: Shukhov’s gaze, memory, and thoughts are also directed to what is behind the barbed wire - both in spatial and temporal perspectives.

The concept of spatiotemporal “hermeticism” does not take into account the fact that many small, private, seemingly closed phenomena of camp life are correlated with historical and metahistorical time, with the “big” space of Russia and the space of the whole world as a whole. At Solzhenitsyn's stereoscopic artistic vision, therefore the author’s conceptual space created in his works is not planar(especially horizontally limited), and volumetric. Already in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” this artist’s inclination to create, even within the confines of works of small form, even within a chronotope strictly limited by genre boundaries, a structurally comprehensive and conceptually holistic artistic model of the entire universe, was clearly evident.

The famous Spanish philosopher and cultural scientist José Ortega y Gasset in his article “Thoughts on the Novel” said that the main strategic task of the artist of words is to “remove the reader from the horizon of reality,” for which the novelist needs to create “a closed space - without windows and cracks, so that the horizon of reality is indistinguishable from the inside.” The author of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “Cancer Ward”, “In the First Circle”, “The Gulag Archipelago”, “The Red Wheel” constantly reminds the reader of the reality located outside the internal space of the works. By thousands of threads, this internal (aesthetic) space of a story, novel, “experience of artistic research,” historical epic is connected with an external space, external to the works, located beyond them - in the sphere of extra-artistic reality. The author does not seek to dull the reader’s “sense of reality”; on the contrary, he constantly “pushes” his reader out of the “fictional” and artistic world into the real world. More precisely, it makes interpenetrable that line which, according to Ortega y Gasset, should tightly fence off the internal (actually artistic) space of a work from the “objective reality” external to it, from real historical reality.

The event chronotope of “Ivan Denisovich” is constantly correlated with reality. The work contains many references to events and phenomena that are outside the plot recreated in the story: about the “father with a mustache” and the Supreme Council, about collectivization and the life of the post-war collective farm village, about the White Sea Canal and Buchenwald, about the theatrical life of the capital and Eisenstein’s films, about the events of the international life: "<…>they argue about the war in Korea: because the Chinese intervened, there will be a world war or not” and about the past war; about a curious incident from the history of allied relations: “This is before the Yalta meeting, in Sevastopol. The city is absolutely hungry, but we need to show the American admiral. And so they made a special store full of products<…>" etc.

It is generally accepted that the basis of the Russian national space is the horizontal vector, that the most important national mythologeme is Gogol’s mythologeme “Rus-troika”, which marks the “path to endless space”, that Russia “ rolls: her kingdom is the distance and breadth, the horizontal.” Kolkhoz-Gulag Russia, depicted by A. Solzhenitsyn in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” if rolls, then not horizontally, but vertically - vertically down. The Stalinist regime took away from the Russian people endless space, deprived millions of Gulag prisoners of freedom of movement, concentrating them in closed spaces of prisons and camps. The rest of the country's inhabitants, primarily the unpassported collective farmers and semi-serf workers, also do not have the opportunity to move freely in space.

According to V.N. Toporov, in the traditional Russian model of the world, the possibility of free movement in space is usually associated with such a concept as will. This specific national concept is based on “an extensive idea, devoid of purposefulness and specific design (there! away! outside!) - as variants of one motive “just to leave, to get out of here”.” What happens to a person when he is deprived will, deprived of the opportunity to at least try to find salvation from state tyranny and violence in flight, in movement across the endless Russian expanses? According to the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who recreates just such a plot situation, the choice here is small: either a person becomes dependent on external factors and, as a result, morally degrades (that is, in the language of spatial categories, slides down), or gains internal freedom, becomes independent of circumstances - that is, chooses the path of spiritual elevation. Unlike will, which among Russians is most often associated with the idea of escaping from “civilization,” from despotic power, from the state with all its coercive institutions, Liberty, on the contrary, is “an intensive concept that presupposes a purposeful and well-formed self-deepening movement<…>If freedom is sought outside, then freedom is found within oneself.”

In Solzhenitsyn’s story, such a point of view (almost one to one!) is expressed by the Baptist Alyosha, addressing Shukhov: “What is your will? In freedom, your last faith will be swallowed up by thorns! Be glad you're in prison! Here you have time to think about your soul!” . Ivan Denisovich, who himself sometimes “didn’t know whether he wanted it or not,” also cares about preserving his own soul, but understands this and formulates it in his own way: “<…>he was not a jackal even after eight years of general work - and the further he went, the more firmly he became established.” Unlike the devout Alyosha, who lives almost by the “holy spirit” alone, the half-pagan, half-Christian Shukhov builds his life along two axes that are equivalent to him: “horizontal” - everyday, everyday, physical - and “vertical” - existential, internal , metaphysical." Thus, the line of approach of these characters has a vertical orientation. The idea verticals“associated with upward movement, which, by analogy with spatial symbolism and moral concepts, symbolically corresponds to the tendency towards spiritualization.” In this regard, it seems no coincidence that it is Alyoshka and Ivan Denisovich who occupy the top places on the carriage, and Tsezar and Buinovsky - the bottom: the last two characters have yet to find the path leading to spiritual ascent. The writer, based also on his own camp experience, clearly outlined the main stages of the ascent of a person who found himself in the millstones of the Gulag in an interview with Le Point magazine: the struggle for survival, comprehension of the meaning of life, finding God ( P. II: 322-333).

Thus, the closed framework of the camp depicted in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” determines the movement of the story’s chronotope primarily not along a horizontal, but along a vertical vector - that is, not due to the expansion of the spatial field of the work, but due to the development of spiritual and moral content.

Solzhenitsyn A.I. A calf butted an oak tree: Essays lit. life // New world. 1991. No. 6. P. 20.

A. Solzhenitsyn recalls this word in an article devoted to the history of relations with V. Shalamov: “<…>very early on, a dispute arose between us about the word “zek” that I had introduced: V.T. strongly objected, because this word was not at all common in the camps, even rarely anywhere, while prisoners almost everywhere slavishly repeated the administrative “ze-ka” (for fun, varying it - “Polar Komsomolets” or “Zakhar Kuzmich”), in other camps they said “language”. Shalamov believed that I should not have introduced this word and that it would never catch on. And I was sure that he would get stuck (it is verbose, and inflected, and has a plural form), that language and history were waiting for him, it was impossible without him. And he turned out to be right. (V.T. never used this word anywhere.)” ( Solzhenitsyn A.I. With Varlam Shalamov // New World. 1999. No. 4. P. 164). Indeed, in a letter to the author of “One Day...” V. Shalamov wrote: “By the way, why “zek” and not “zek”. After all, this is how it is written: s/k and bows: zeka, zekoyu” (Znamya. 1990. No. 7. P. 68).

Shalamov V.T. Resurrection of Larch: Stories. M.: Artist. lit., 1989. P. 324. True, in a letter to Solzhenitsyn immediately after the publication of “One Day...” Shalamov, “stepping over his deep conviction about the absolute evil of camp life, admitted: “It is possible that this kind of passion for work [as in Shukhov] and saves people"" ( Solzhenitsyn A.I. A grain landed between two millstones // New World. 1999. No. 4. P. 163).

Banner. 1990. No. 7. P. 81, 84.

Florensky P.A. Names // Sociological research. 1990. No. 8. P. 138, 141.

Schneerson M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Essays on creativity. Frankfurt a/M., 1984. P. 112.

Epstein M.N.“Nature, the world, the hiding place of the universe...”: A system of landscape images in Russian poetry. M.: Higher. school, 1990. P. 133.

By the way, jailers also turn to zoonym words to express their contempt for prisoners, whom they do not recognize as people: “Have you ever seen how your woman washed the floors, pig?” ; “- Stop! - the watchman makes noise. - Like a flock of sheep"; “- Let’s figure it out five by one, sheep’s heads<…>" etc.

Hegel G.V.F. Aesthetics. In 4 vols. M.: Art, 1968–1973. T. 2. P. 165.

Fedorov F.P.. Romantic artistic world: space and time. Riga: Zinatne, 1988. P. 306.

Afanasyev A.N. Tree of Life: Selected Articles. M.: Sovremennik, 1982. P. 164.

Compare: “The wolf, due to its predatory, predatory nature, received in folk legends the meaning of a hostile demon” ( Afanasyev A.N.

Banner. 1990. No. 7. P. 69.

Kerlot H.E. Dictionary of symbols. M.: REFL-book, 1994. P. 253.

An interesting interpretation of the symbolic properties of these two metals is contained in the work of L.V. Karaseva: “Iron is an unkind, infernal metal<…>metal is purely masculine and militaristic”; “Iron becomes a weapon or reminds of a weapon”; " Copper- matter of a different nature<…>Copper is softer than iron. Its color resembles the color of the human body<…>copper - female metal<…>If we talk about the meanings that are closer to the mind of the Russian person, then among them, first of all, will be the churchliness and statehood of copper”; “Copper resists aggressive and merciless iron as a soft, protective, compassionate metal” ( Karasev L.V.. Ontological view of Russian literature / Ross. state humanist univ. M., 1995. pp. 53–57).

National images of the world. Cosmo-Psycho-Logos. M.: Publishing house. group “Progress” - “Culture”, 1995. P. 181.

Toporov V.N. Space and text // Text: semantics and structure. M.: Nauka, 1983. pp. 239–240.

Nepomnyashchiy V.S. Poetry and fate: Above the pages of the spiritual biography of A.S. Pushkin. M., 1987. P. 428.

Kerlot H.E. Dictionary of symbols. M.: REFL-book, 1994. P. 109.

Ideological and artistic features, composition, issues, images of Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Artistic features of one day by Ivan Denisovich Artistic originality of one day by Ivan Denisovich

During the classes

I. Organizational moment. Explanation of the goals and objectives of the lesson

II. Go to the topic of the lesson

III. Conclusion. Generalization of the results of the work. Summarizing. Conclusions. Homework

Essays on topics:

Shukhov and others: models of human behavior in the camp world

Humans or nonhumans? (on the role of zoomorphic comparisons)

Big in small (art of artistic detail)

Day, term, eternity (about the specifics of artistic time-space)

Humans or nonhumans?
(on the role of zoomorphic comparisons)

Big in small
(art of artistic detail)

Day, term, eternity
(about the specifics of artistic time-space)