Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In June we will be reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for our State of the Nation category - who's in?

I should be able to work this one in, but it won't be till later in the month

Yes, I would like to.

I've started :-)

OMG! I got a clean sweep of nominations! Do I need to do a speech?

Phil wrote: "OMG! I got a clean sweep of nominations! Do I need to do a speech?"

You don't get your trophy if you don't make a speech ;-)

Phil wrote: "OMG! I got a clean sweep of nominations! Do I need to do a speech?"

that really is quite cool, having both nominations win
as a "speech" we'll settle for you reading them both and contributing to both discussions! ;o)

So this was really good too! I guess we should always vote Phil!

Finally got a chance to start this today--I'm already about half-way through.

We'll see how it ends, but I'm wondering if this kind of literature loses some of its effectiveness now that the gulags are gone. It seems to me that the real power behind books like One Day is that they actually confronted the system, and ripped away the secrecy. Now that the system has been exposed, books like this don't seem as immediate.

Of course, books about the human experience within prison systems will always be relevant--but as an attack on a system that no longer exists (at least in this place at this time) it seems less effective to me. I had the same feeling when I read Cataract by Mykhaylo Osadchy recently (one of the Boxall 1001), though that book had other problems too.

I guess the best way I can describe this is if I were to read a Holocaust survivor's book, it would have intrinsic merit. If I read a book where someone was attacking the Nazis for what happened behind the gates of Auschwitz, I would find the story less interesting. Does that make sense? I haven't finished Ivan Denisovitch, so maybe there is more to it yet, but didn't anyone else feel the same way? or am I way off base?

You’re not way off base, Bryan. I think books speak to us in distinctive ways at different times in our lives. Reading War and Peace was, for me, a wholly new experience at fifty from when I first read it at thirty-two. When you have time, scan through Night, Elsie Wiesel’s recalling of his experiences in the death camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, or Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows in which the central character returns to Moscow after thirty years in the Gulag, to see if your reaction to those books is similar to what you felt reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think you’ll feel reassured.

Frances wrote: "You’re not way off base, Bryan. I think books speak to us in distinctive ways at different times in our lives. Reading War and Peace was, for me, a wholly new experience at fifty from when I first ..."

Hello Frances--I've read both the Wiesel and the Grossman you mention--I think both of them are very powerful...the Grossman is one of my all-time favorites. These are exactly the kind of books I'm thinking of when I mentioned that books relating to the experience of events are timeless, whereas books that about the conditions themselves seem to lose their relevancy. Thanks for mentioning them

Bryan, I'm so glad you've read Vasily Grossman's work. He deserves to take his place alongside the other great Russian writers. I think his book A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army may have the immediacy of presence you refer to, but I'm not sure.

Frances wrote: "Bryan, I'm so glad you've read Vasily Grossman's work. He deserves to take his place alongside the other great Russian writers. I think his book A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Ar..."


Actually, I've read that one as well--I still need to get to Life and Fate though. The length keeps putting me off.

I think I'd like to backtrack a little bit on Denisovitch, now that I've finished it. I feel I have a pretty good idea what Solzhenitsyn was trying to do--to not only raise awareness of the Gulag system, but by irony to drive home the awfulness of the conditions by showing us a 'good' day in Ivan's life.

I feel like there are two sides to this--one, and which may have been the driving force behind Solzhenitsyn writing the book, was to reveal this underside of the Soviet system. This isn't done in a 1984 kind of way...as a warning per se (though it could function that way)...but rather as a kind of expose. Interesting that I had just read Sinclair's The Jungle before this--in a way, the two books have some parallels. Solzhenitsyn revealed the camp system, Sinclair revealed the immigrant's lot. Because these things don't exist in this exact form any longer, the revelations lose their power. (I'm not disavowing current injustices--only that they've changed appearances and labels since these periods)

So the other side of the coin is the human reaction to extreme circumstances, which is what makes books like these relevant to me even though the conditions they were written under have changed. The Jungle has its flaws, but the polemical side carries me along. Ivan Denisovich is subtler, more accomplished--the kind of style I wish The Jungle had adopted (I think it would have been even more powerful), but that wasn't Sinclair's aim, I don't suppose. At any rate, I had a pretty good idea Denisovich was going to end the way it did, but still, by the time I got there, I was more affected than I thought I would be. I think it still deserves a place in the ranks of this kind of literature.

BTW: One of the things I appreciated so much about Grossman's Everything Flows was it concentrated specifically on the human experience to the injustices the main character suffered. It also seemed very perceptive to me about how people who didn't suffer the injustice, but had to live within the regime interacted with their fellows. To me, it was less about Stalinism and more about how we react when living in a similar system. It's like the roles people adopt within their birth order--this imposed system from above forces people into roles that they didn't choose and are nearly helpless to throw off.

Well, it's been a long time since I've read ODitLoID and it's not lost its power. I think parts of its power in in making these awful conditions, these terrible injustices, seem everyday and just the will of the system. As has been said, this is one of Shuckov's good days, when everything went right for him and all he really had to contend with was the bitter cold. It's also important to remember that, in the west, in the early sixties (and a long time later too) Stalin still had his apologists and soome groups looked at the USSR with envy and saw in them a great step forward in social justice and liberty. Ivan Denisovich is vastly important as a real life from contemporary Russia.

The sparse, clean style lets the protagonist, his resourcefulness, his still-strong sense of morality, his sense of belonging, his lack of anger at "the system", shine through. His joy at an extra 200g of bad bread, the purpose in building a wall for your own pride without a guard looking over your shoulder .... This was Solzhenitsyn's own life for a decade.

Yes, its world might be gone. But this is still a hugely important book and has a rightful place in this list.