by Nels Griffin

Created on: July 26, 2009

A titan of Russian literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed on August 8th 2008. This is a tribute to his seminal work One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.

A Sum Greater Than The Parts?

What is a satisfactory conclusion to another mans summation? What place does the observer have in judging the vision of the artist? Under what pretext can the hearer judge the mind of the master? In so much as the infant cannot judge the method of his conception, so a man cannot sit from afar in the seat of arbitration, and weigh the worth of another mans conclusions. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, the author cinches up his story like a rope, fastened tightly around the waist in place of a leather belt, with the conclusion, A Day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. But was his conclusion enough? Was it Satisfactory? This was Solzhenitsyn's story, and like a line entry at the end of the day's blotter, it is a reconciliation of his experience, the sum of real parts of his life. Although the specific abstracted contents of his narrative of twenty-four hours in a Siberian Gulag are fictional, the general circumstances are an intrinsic part of the character of the author. As Emerson said in regard the recounting of the past, In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. So pure is the distillation of Solzhenitsyn's narrative that one cannot help but be intoxicated by its sincerity. Upon this precept any thinker is drawn to consider the parts that make up One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.

Francis Bacon once wrote, Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set Virtue triumphs from amidst the thin walls of a ramshackle work camp in the form of a plain set man. In Solzhenitsyn's narrative the Protagonist Ivan Denisovich or Shokhov as he is known, moves through the story at a deliberate gait. His actions, his words, his and character are not above par, they are not beyond reproach, yet they immortalize the virtues that can radiate from the depths of man. Ask of favors when in need, and repay just dues on time, can be seen in a borrowed pinch of tobacco. For work is what makes life, as sloth is poison to the soul, radiates from the vigor that seems imbued in the worn body of Shukhov. Solzhenitsyn's triumph of the will over oppression plays out, not in melancholy pining, but rather the circumspect honesty, that even when striped of nearly all dignity life itself is good. There

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