Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

Suzanne de Ridder
English A1
May 11, 2005

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Commentary on pages 69-70

During Soviet times, it was common use for the government to censor writers on what they wrote in order to restrict them from expressing opinions that might hurt the sovereignty of the Soviet State. Sometimes, this close scrutiny even resulted in imprisonment, which when one remembers the cruel nature of the Soviet labour camps, meant an almost certain death.
Even writers who are now praised around the world for their ingenious writing skills and magnificent minds, were then seen as an eminent threat. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was one of them.
Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich barely passed the censorship.
The same counts for the passage indicated. Solzhenitsyn strongly emphasises how the prisoners were seen as inferiors- a fact that can be derived from the euphemism he uses to indicate the latter. He calls all prisoners by their numbers, pointing out that the prisoners are nothing more than insignificant parts of a whole. "Beyond him, prisoner B-219…opposite him sat Kh-123…" (p.69) By mentioning how Tsezar does not notice Ivan, he shows how the guards do not see the prisoners as individuals and often do not notice them at all. "He had his back to Shukov [Ivan] and didn't see him…Tsezar turned round and held his hand out for the bowl, without even looking at Shukov…so he turned on his heel and left quietly"
By using conversation, Solzhenitsyn is able to express his opinions through the words of Kh-123. Tsezar is of the opinion that the filmmaker Eisenstein is a genius, but Kh-123 refuses to agree. By using the paradox "so much art in it that it ceases to be art", Kh-123 points out that the movie is a fake, expressing fake views and falsely passing as art. In addition, he loathes the fact that the movie attempts to justify a "tyrannical individual". Returning to the subject of censorship, we can discern that Solzhenitsyn is denouncing the type of artists who silence their own political views to promote a repulsive, dominant ideology just so their work will be published. The "tyrannical individual" therefore becomes a euphemism for Stalin, and consequently, anyone who follows him is "a dog carrying out a master's