by Viv Groskop
8. How to Keep Going When Things Go Wrong: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Or: Don’t forget to take your spoon to prison with you)
‘One must never stop praying. If you have real faith you tell a mountain to move and it will move …’
There’s a line in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that sounds odd but is instantly graspable: ‘Don’t open your belly to what doesn’t belong to you.’ In the context of the book, it’s about leaving another prisoner’s food package alone. It’s about not coveting things that you can’t have. It’s a warning about wishing too hard to go to Moscow. It relates back to the supposed non-clown who was an animal trainer but still looked like a clown. Don’t be delusional about who you are. And it relates back to the massive hedgehog I myself had become. Don’t become so fixed on one idea that you lose sight of reality.
During that obsessive year in Russia, I had tried so hard to be someone different that I had become a stranger to myself. (Can I get away with saying that I had become a bit prickly, keen on eating berries and snuffling around in the undergrowth of the Russian language? Hmm.) Everyone else could see it, I expect, in the same way that they could see the clown was wearing a clown costume and therefore couldn’t be anything other than a clown. Deep inside, I knew I wasn’t really Russian and couldn’t stay there for ever and marry my Ukrainian boyfriend who didn’t even really like me all that much. I just wanted so desperately to escape and to live up to the promise of my name and to feel like I authentically belonged somewhere. I had a few drama-queen weeks of telling myself that I wouldn’t complete my university degree and that I would stay in Russia. But I knew it was all hollow. I said my goodbyes, went home and got on with my life.
Over the next few years, I started a career as a writer in London and travelled frequently to Russia. God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, drifted into the background. I eventually got a job as a contributing editor for a Russian magazine, which meant I could go to Moscow as often as I liked. I met my husband, who turned out to be not from any Russian-speaking country but instead an Englishman from a place forty-two miles away from where I grew up. A not-so-secret part of me still thought I was a bit Russian, and even after I had settled down and was pregnant with my first child, I took a Master’s degree, as if to prove it. It was like I had given up but I wanted to show that I hadn’t quite given up. For a while, I felt I had resolved the conundrum set in Three Sisters: I had the best of both worlds. I didn’t have to choose after all.
When the email arrived that revealed the truth about where I was from, I had stopped thinking about my name for a long time. I didn’t need to think about it, as I’d come to believe the truth in my own mind. I had always ignored the fact that no one I ever met in Russia recognized the name Groskop and instead focused on the fact that people loved to say that I looked and sounded as if I had a Russian soul. I didn’t go around telling people I was Russian. But I didn’t need to. Everything about the way I had set up my life made it seem as if I was at least a bit Russian.
Then, when I was in my late twenties, my father received a message from a relative we didn’t know about, a cousin in Canada. It was extremely rare for us to receive any kind of correspondence or news from anyone with the name Groskop. We were the only Groskops. The only other ones of us left were Groscops, which, as discussed, was really not the same thing at all. But here was another Groskop. We knew nothing about him. But he seemed to know an awful lot about us.
I now can’t remember exactly when this email arrived, but it must have been at some point in the late 1990s, maybe a bit after that. My grandfather died in the spring of 2001, so it must have been at some point shortly before that. This cousin had traced our family tree back and sent over several documents which, in scratchy fountain pen ink, showed all my grandfather’s relatives, mostly people we knew about. It all looked familiar and genuine. Here were uncles and brothers and all kinds of names my grandad recognized but had not thought about in years. He knew all these people. There were a few names that were new to most of us in the family, but my grandad could immediately place them and say who they were. My grandmother, even though she wasn’t born into our family but had married into it, also recognized these ‘new’ names and started telling stories about people she had met fleetingly in the 1940s. It was definitely our family tree, there was no question about it.
This cousin traced the family tree back to my great-great-grandfather. His name was Gershon, and he had come to Stockton-on-Tees in 1861. It listed all his children and their descendants, right down to my generation. All the names and places were correct. They’d started out in Stockton as market traders, then many of the men went on to work as boilermakers. As the work dried up, a contingent of Groskops moved to Barry Island in Wales, again to work as boilermakers. It all made sense: my grandad was born in Barry. Finally, these documents listed the birthplace of Gershon, the place he had left: Łódź, Poland. So, he was Polish. And, judging by all the names, clearly, we were Jewish. I had been in the ballpark. But I had been in the wrong ballpark, or at least several hundred miles out. I had learned the wrong language and absorbed the wrong identity. I wasn’t Russian. I was just someone who had opened their belly to what didn’t belong to them. It didn’t feel good.
The ‘belly’ scene in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich comes towards the end of the book. It’s near the end of the day. The inmates of a Soviet prison camp are about to be counted before being sent to their barracks for the night. Ivan Denisovich has had an eventful day, full of the minor setbacks and small personal triumphs that make up camp life. That night, it becomes obvious that Tsezar, one of the other men in Ivan Denisovich’s barracks, has received a parcel. Inmates were, theoretically, allowed to receive these from time to time, although actually taking possession of them was another matter. You might have to bribe one guard with cigarettes to let you collect it, and another to let you take it up to your bunk. Once you had your parcel, you would be swamped with requests for barter and exchange. If no one stole any of the contents, then it was a lucky day indeed.
In this scene, Tsezar’s parcel is full of all the things everyone – including Ivan Denisovich – most wants and is rarely allowed to have: ‘sausage, condensed milk, a plump smoked fish, pork-fat, rusks, biscuits, two kilogrammes of lump sugar and what looked like butter, as well as cigarettes and pipe tobacco’. Ivan Denisovich doesn’t have to see the contents of the package to know what’s in it. He knows in one sniff what he’s missing.
For Solzhenitsyn, this immediately becomes a moment to demonstrate how important self-denial is, and not just because of an ascetic desire to be better than everyone else in the camp and resist temptation. (Although Solzhenitsyn was all about being an ascetic. Seriously, he was virtually like a character out of the Bible. He even looked like God.) No, resisting temptation is not about displaying your self-control. Rather, it’s an opportunity to display your humanity. Be patient. Wait your turn. Be gracious about others having more than you. This is the behaviour that will, ultimately, make you a better person. Your humanity is your identity. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t say any of this. But it’s all there in Ivan Denisovich’s reaction. He asks for nothing, he expects nothing. He notices that Tsezar looks drunk on the acquisition of all these marvellous worldly goods. But he, Ivan Denisovich, is able to walk away feeling grateful that Tsezar has given him a spare crust of bread. ‘Don’t open your belly to what doesn’t belong to you.’
The mention of ‘belly’ – representing hunger, desire and instinct, all the things which make us human but which you are supposed to suppress in prison – is not coincidental. Many of Ivan Denisovich’s thoughts are about food and whether he will get more or less to eat on any particular day. At the end of this day, he notes it’s been a good one because he got some extra porridge (kasha). And then there’s his spoon, which he eats with. Ivan Denisovich’s spoon is his pride and joy. It represents personal freed
om and the joy of individuality. He has something no one else has: he has his own spoon. He must hide it, of course, because no one must know that you’ve kept a scrap of individuality about your person. He keeps it in his valenki, his boots. It represents his dignity and the part of him that no one can touch. He calls it his ‘baby’. That spoon gives him hope. As long as he is not licking plates but is using his spoon, he is still a human being. The way to keep going in the worst of circumstances? Hold on to who you really are.
One other memorable aspect of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the way Solzhenitsyn writes about smell and the nose. It’s not just the scents that he evokes, although he does this a lot. Obviously, it doesn’t take very much imagination to understand what it must be like to be in prison, where you’re not allowed the basic small joys of life, like the smell of a freshly baked loaf or newly mown grass, everyday olfactory experiences that – yes, again – make us human without even realizing it. Every single smell is heightened and Ivan Denisovich’s nose is sensitive to every single nuance. But it’s not just about sense of smell. It’s also about being led – literally – by your nose. There’s barely any peripheral vision. It’s all about looking down. This works two ways. First, it shows the limited perspective of Ivan Denisovich’s world, but, second, it indicates a means of escape. Another way to keep going in the face of disappointment? Sniff out the truth. Sniff out the direction in which hope lies.
Published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the only work by Solzhenitsyn to appear in the USSR during the Soviet period. The 95,000 copies printed sold out instantly and began changing hands on the black market for an extortionate-at-the-time $10 a copy. Everything else he wrote (Cancer Ward, August 1914, The Gulag Archipelago) came out in the West, culminating in his Nobel Prize in 1970, which he decided not to go to Stockholm to collect, in case he was not allowed back into Russia. As it was, he got expelled in 1974, when the Soviets had had enough of him.
When One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was first reviewed in The New York Times in 1964 (‘short, sparsely told, eloquent, explosive … It took Premier Khrushchev’s personal okay to get the story published’), Solzhenitsyn was described as ‘a forty-four-year-old mathematics teacher in the old Russian town of Ryazan’. This gives some idea of the way his voice was initially received: this was not about the discovery of an exciting new writer, it was about an ordinary citizen who had managed to get their voice heard. This was something different to how the more obviously literary Pasternak was viewed. Solzhenitsyn’s was the true voice of dissidence, straight from the prison cell. He was known as Russia’s conscience, the man who had carried the truth about the camps out ‘on the skin of my back’.
The great strength of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that it parachutes you straight into the world of the camp prisoner, with Alyosha the Baptist (from Alexey, diminutive fans) and Ivan Buinovsky, the ex-naval captain, as your bunkmates. The writing is immediate, diary-like and detailed. Because it focuses on one day – to illustrate the fact that every day is very much like the next – Solzhenitsyn can afford to zoom in on the minutiae of camp life: the sorry patch of fabric with a number sewn on which hangs off a spot on his trousers just above the left knee; the milky-white liquid in the thermometer that never quite seems to dip below minus 41 degrees (the point at which camp labour is called off); the ‘putrid little bits of fish’ underneath the leaves of boiled black cabbage. This is the opposite of a bird’s-eye view. All Ivan Denisovich can see are the things within his immediate vicinity; ideally, below him. It’s the account of someone whose head is bowed.
His spirit, though, is not broken: he has found a way to survive in these quashed circumstances. There are systems to follow (store your boots in the right place, don’t eat your bread until later in the day) and rules to be observed (take your hat off to a guard five paces before passing him and replace it two paces after). Through Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn opens up the world of the zek (political prisoner). Ivan Denisovich has no reason to be in prison. He knows it, and he suspects his captors know it. Having fought in the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He admits this instead of concealing it. And so he is accused of being a ‘German spy’ and is sentenced to ten years’ forced labour. (Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in similar circumstances, from 1945 to 1953, except his ‘crime’ was to write derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter. He was convicted of ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’.)
The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was personally authorized by Khrushchev, who said, ‘There’s a Stalinist in each of you. There’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.’ In some ways, Solzhenitsyn’s fate was tied to Khrushchev’s from then on, which meant that, after 1964, when Khrushchev was deposed, things were never going to go well for the writer. Solzhenitsyn was declared a ‘non-person’ again in 1965, and the KGB seized a lot of his work. In the case of Solzhenitsyn, and so many Russian writers, they were often from an early age convinced that it was their ‘fate’ to catalogue the moral state of their country; they were never prey to the First World problem of writer’s block or a crisis of self-esteem. That’s surprising in some ways, as you’d think the prospect of a knock on the door by the KGB could go either way. You either think: ‘What I have to say is so worth saying it’s worth dying for.’ (Personally, I am a moral coward and I just don’t think I could write under those conditions.) Or you think: ‘Really, my writing is not so great, comrades. I just won’t do any.’ (I see this excuse as attractive.) Clearly, this happened, if not consciously, across the Soviet Union for many decades, because there has not been a huge cache of secret brilliant literature that has been unleashed since the USSR collapsed. Luckily for Solzhenitsyn, he thought things like this: ‘It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.’ The KGB tried to poison him with a biological weapon (probably ricin) in 1971, which left him severely ill but alive. And they expelled him in 1974.
The New York Times once described Solzhenitsyn as a figure of ‘almost biblical moral severity’. You only have to look at a picture of him to see that this hyperbole is possibly an understatement. He was the definition of dour and, despite having many reservations about the Soviet system, having been persecuted under it for many years, as a writer he embodied everything about that most Soviet of definitions, Stakhanovite, no matter which country he was working in. (Stakhanov was a miner who in 1935 was said to have exceeded his day’s quota of coal by fourteen times. He became the poster boy for increased productivity.) Solzhenitsyn’s method for surviving when things went wrong was to put his nose to the grindstone and write. He produced vast quantities of work and was still writing when he died, at the age of eighty-nine, in 2008. One of my favourite stories comes from when he was living in America and headed off to his shack every day to write for hours on end. At the time, he was extremely infirm. His wife said, ‘He hasn’t left the house for five years. He’s missing a vertebra … But every day he sits and works.’ That’s all you need to know about Solzhenitsyn. He’s missing a vertebra. But every day he sits and works.
Now, let’s be honest about Solzhenitsyn. He is a literary giant. He is one of the greats. No discussion of Russian literature in the twentieth century is complete without him. If one literary figure embodies the Soviet period, it’s him. But no one – and I mean no one – reads him for pleasure, not even, I suspect, himself, as, judging by everything I have read about him, he was not one to indulge in pleasures of almost any sort. Maybe there’s a book out there that details his fun side (‘Solzhenitsyn’s guilty pleasures include mint humbugs and re-runs of Tom and Jerry’), but I have yet to find it. He is not the Roald Dahl of Soviet literature. He is completely terrifying in his intensity. If Dostoevsky is a hedgehog and, when I was a bit obsessive, I was a porcupine, then Solzhenitsyn is a giant African porcupine. Like most people, when I first read Solzhenitsyn, I read him because
I was compelled to, not out of choice. Most people read Solzhenitsyn out of a sense of duty, and rightly so. His readership continues to grow, years after his death, and years after his writing was directly relevant and hugely urgent. His work endures because we want to understand totalitarianism and, on a more personal and relatable level, we want to experience the intimacy of being a victim of totalitarianism. Which, let’s face it, you are much better off doing within the confines of someone else’s writing than in real life. Anyway, if you have the slightest interest in Russia, how can you not read a man whose work Brezhnev called ‘filthy, anti-Soviet slander’? Brezhnev said this about The Gulag Archipelago before he or anyone in his entourage had actually read it, because why would you bother reading a book before pronouncing on it? ‘No one has had a chance to read the book, but its essential contents are already known,’ said Brezhnev. He could have had a great time writing Amazon reviews.
I had practical reasons, though, for solemnly nodding my way through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Which is, by the way, the best place to start with Solzhenitsyn’s work, and a suitable read for anyone in their late teens, as I was at the time. (This was ten years before I realized I was not Russian but, basically, Jewish. I guess if I had known this all along, I could have just been enjoying myself and reading Woody Allen instead of trying to understand the Gulag. Not that I’m bitter or anything.) When I was preparing for my university interview, I knew that the Russian lecturer would be likely to ask me a) what I knew about Soviet power (real answer: very little, except that Gorbachev has a birthmark) and b) what twentieth-century Russian literature I had read. I knew a fair amount about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. But I knew that would be seen as a baseline requirement and not impressive enough. I needed to have read something more contemporary. And fast. Enter Solzhenitsyn and a book that is very short (just over a hundred pages), easy to read and a brilliantly graspable guide to some of the darkest aspects of Soviet life. It was the perfect package. I took it to my first university visit with me and read it in my room the night before the interview, shivering under the covers because I couldn’t work out how to turn on the heater (and imagining melodramatically and idiotically to myself that this was not unlike the conditions which Ivan Denisovich Shukhov faced as a prisoner).