Books: Survival in Siberia

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (160 pp.)—Alexander Solzhenltsyn —Duffon ($3.95).

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (210 pp.)—Alexander Solzhenitsyn —Praeger ($3.95).

Last November a Soviet magazine ran the harshest indictment of Stalinism ever printed in Russia: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel dealing with life in one of Stalin’s Siberian concentration camps (which Khrushchev claims to have shut down). On orders from above, the Russian press heaped extravagant praise on the novel. People queued up far into the night for copies at Moscow newsstands; 95,000 were sold in a single day.

The importance of the book was not lost on two U.S. publishers who raced to be first in print. It was a dead heat. Both versions appeared the same day at the same price. Dutton, offering the “authorized” version, is paying royalties to the Soviet government. Praeger is pirating the book on the ground that Russia, which refuses to join world copyright agreements, pirates U.S. books. Publisher Frederick Praeger was so excited by his steal that he locked one translator in his Greenwich Village house for eleven days, and moved in two editors, two typists, and “enormous quantities of Scotch.” The Scotch did not help. The Praeger translation is much the sloppier of the two, neither of which is Nobel Prize material. But the raw reality of Solzhenitsyn’s novel survives both.

Perpetually Cold. Solzhenitsyn writes authoritatively of a Siberian labor camp because he spent eight years in one. Twice decorated in World War II. he nevertheless was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin, served his full sentence, and then was forced to stay in exile in Siberia. Only after Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech was he allowed to return; he now teaches school in a town southeast of Moscow.

Dryly and precisely, Solzhenitsyn describes life at the camp, piling horror on top of horror, until the place seems too monstrous to be believed. One day in the life of the peasant hero Ivan Denisovich Shukhov seems a lifetime.

The treatment of prisoners was just short of murder. Outside on the windy steppes the average winter temperature was 17° below. Inside the barracks, the ceilings were always coated with frost. Every day the prisoners were sent out to do senseless, back-breaking labor. Meals were always the same watery gruel with chunks of rotten fish (Shukhov was jeered because he refused to eat fish eyes when they were floating free in the soup). The guards made the prisoners undress outside to be frisked, beat them with birch clubs, threw any who talked back into a barely heated “cell,” where a ten-day sentence meant a probable case of tuberculosis and 15 days meant certain death.

The Triumph of a Sausage. The plot of the novel is simply how many prison rules Shukhov will get away with breaking in a single day. After eight years in the camp, he has an animal cunning for finding food and avoiding punishment. He knows when to press forward, when to hang back, whom to be near, whom to avoid. In a complex series of maneuvers, any one of which could land him in the cell, he wangles an extra bowl of soup, some tobacco, and—his triumph—a slice of sausage, which he exultantly swallows in bed: “the brief moment for which a prisoner lives.” In a gruesome way, the novel has a happy ending, for Shukhov goes to sleep quite pleased with his day’s adventures.

One Day is less a literary than a political phenomenon. It lacks the intense psychological probing of the great prison accounts of a Dostoevsky or an Ivo Andric. Even its political significance, which is considerable, should not be exaggerated. Stalin may be fair game for critics in Russia, but the Communist Party and ideology are still off limits. Another novelist, Victor Nekrasov, was recently reprimanded by Izvestia (TIME, Feb. 1) for his comments on traveling in the U.S. He made the mistake, scolded Izvestia, of “painting a fifty-fifty picture of American life,” and even “applying his fifty-fifty rule to a comparison of America and Russia.”