Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin

Abstract

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.