Abstract
Faith is a vital element in the works of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer who experienced the notorious Gulag and difficultly in a strongly atheistic country. However, faith is never a simplistic topic for Solzhenitsyn, especially writing in a time when religion was officially shoved aside from the public discourse. In the light of a set of views on religion inferred from Terry Eagleton’s essay, this paper aims to explain the anomalous religiosity as seen in the narrators of Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and short story “Matryona’s House.” According to the Eagleton’s model, there are three stages of religiosity, namely, 1) omission of religion’s otherworldly and pure ritualistic elements, 2) acceptance of mentally-empowering potentials of religion, and 3) internalization of the humanistic values of religion. The analysis concludes with a notion that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and “Matryona’s House” represent an evolution of faith that has gone through a period of challenge. On a sidenote, the analysis also confirms the dialogic nature of Solzhenitsyn’s works, in which one topic is presented through contradictory voices.
Highlights
Asked about the meaning of faith in his life in an interview with Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp from Der Spiegel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn answers that for him ―faith is the foundation and support of one‘s life‖ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Neef, & Schepp, 2007)
Mahoney, the writer of a recent book The Other Solzhenitsyn, when we read two of Solzhenitsyn‘s earliest works, i.e. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ( One Day) and ―Matryona‘s House,‖ we will see that what he means by ―spirituality‖ or ―faith‖ appears to be more complex than what is commonly known in the society
The novel closes with a discussion of Ivan Denisovich and Alyosha on faith which, one will find, towers in its significance among everything else presented in the novella because the dialog wraps up the day‘s experience or gives meaning to the menial things that Shukhov has gone through that day
Summary
Asked about the meaning of faith in his life in an interview with Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp from Der Spiegel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn answers that for him ―faith is the foundation and support of one‘s life‖ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Neef, & Schepp, 2007). Later does he find, after his encounter with the Dominican clergy, that the whole doctrine of Christianity, especially those related to the life and death of Jesus, has much relevance with human existence Come his second and third views of religion. It is possible to see these three gradually-evolving views as stages of how faith survives in one‘s experience of faith These three gradually-evolving views, I argue in this article, are observable in the two earlier Solzhenitsyn‘s stories, i.e. One Day and ―Matryona‘s House.‖ In the following discussion, in addition to Eagleton‘s demonstration of the three views of religion and religiosity, I will refer to several critical works on One Day and ―Matryona‘s House‖ to shed light on the discussion
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