Читать книгу Filming the Unfilmable - Ben Hellmann - Страница 6

When the Nobel-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89, his legacy was summed up as rallying ‘against all forms of what he saw as spiritual darkness’,[22] although his stance could frequently be characterised as ‘conservative moralising’[23] and was sometimes perceived to be ‘domineering and self-righteous’.[24] Yet all the observers unanimously praised Solzhenitsyn for the role he had played in revealing to the world the nature of the Soviet penitentiary system and the Soviet regime in general. Such revelations had began long before Solzhenitsyn,[25] but only the appearance of his story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, printed in 1962 by special permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as part of his policy of de-Stalinisation, managed to capture the attention of a broad cross-section of readership across the globe. The story has been labelled a ‘sensation’ by The Times, The Guardian and The New York Times,[26] and one reader called it ‘a Day that shook the world’.[27] In December 1963, as a sign of its wide recognition in Solzhenitsyn’s native country, the Novyi mir magazine and the Central State Archive for Literature and Art (TsGALI) nominated One Day for a Lenin Prize, one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious annual awards. However, with the deposition of Khrushchev in 1964 and a moderate re-Stalinisation under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, the ‘hard-liners, who feared that Solzhenitsyn had opened a Pandora’s box from which the evils of the Soviet system would escape and sweep the regime away’,[28] did everything within their power to block the author’s further publications in his homeland. Solzhenitsyn’s two major novels, The First Circle (1968) and Cancer Ward (1968-69), came out in the West without the required permission of the Soviet authorities. In November 1969, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, and in February 1974, after the publication in December 1973 in Paris of the first volume of his non-fictional Gulag Archipelago – called by the American statesman George F. Keenan ‘the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levelled in modern times’[29] – was deported from the Soviet Union ‘for the systematic execution of actions incompatible with Soviet citizenship and harmful to the USSR’,[30] to return only in 1994.

In all these and subsequent years, even The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume opus magnum on political repressions in Soviet Russia in 1918-1956, could not fully surpass One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in importance, possibly because the latter, a slender book in an easily accessible fictional form, seems to contain in a nutshell most of what the average reader needs to know about life in a Stalin’s labour camp and, at the same time, generates a universal appeal by serving as an ‘affirmation of man’s will for survival and his capability of achieving and maintaining dignity under almost unbelievably inhuman conditions’.[31] One Day’s lasting significance was re-emphasised by the decision of the BBC Russian Service to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication by broadcasting its entire text, read by the author, to listeners in the Soviet Union, on a short wave frequency. In his interview with the journalist Barry Holland that accompanied the broadcast in November 1982, Solzhenitsyn compared the publication of One Day in the Soviet Union, which had occurred thanks to a collaboration of several outstanding personalities and a conflagration of improbable circumstances, to a situation when objects would start lifting off the ground, or cold stones would become red-hot, for no apparent reason, defying the laws of physics.[32] In his later memoirs, recalling how he was recording One Day for this broadcast, Solzhenitsyn talked, perhaps immodestly but not inappropriately, of sensing the story’s timeless nature.[33] A recent Swiss article reaffirms this sensation, well familiar not only to One Day’s author but to many other people, by quoting the Soviet literary critic Vladimir Lakshin, who claimed in 1964 that the story is ‘destined to a long life’.[34]

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was written in 1959, revised and submitted for publication in 1961, first published in the November 1962 issue of the Novyi mir literary magazine[35] and then appeared as a separate edition in the Roman-gazeta series (no. 1, 1963) and under the imprint of the Sovetskii pisatel’ publishers (also in 1963). Ten years later, its full, uncensored version – known as the ‘canonical’ one[36] – was issued in a book form in Paris by YMCA-Press. By 1973, One Day was translated into more than thirty languages, including Afrikaans, Albanian, Bengali, Chinese, Hebrew, Icelandic, Malayalam and Slovene (with at least two different translations available in Czech, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish; at least three, in German; at least four, in Greek; and at least five, in English, German, Japanese and Spanish).[37]

Solzhenitsyn’s story describes one day in a high-security labour camp, where convicts are required to wear identification numbers on their clothes, in Kazakhstan in January 1951. The main character is a peasant prisoner called Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who received a ten year sentence on accusations of spying for the Germans, as he had been held by the Germans for several days on the Northwest front in early 1942, and then escaped and rejoined the Russian troops (ostensibly to carry out the instructions of the Nazi intelligence). Shukhov’s day in the camp, from getting out of bed at 5am to lights out at 10pm, includes both a routine action (such as having his three daily meals and marching to work and back) and exceptional features (such as being ordered to wash the floor in a guards’ room as a punishment for getting up late, unsuccessfully trying to obtain exemption from work on medical grounds, deceiving the cook into parting with two extra bowls of gruel at lunchtime and erecting a brick wall at a power station construction site).

A number of inmates from Ivan Denisovich’s team (known as Team 104) are also focused upon. These include the Baptist Alyoshka, convicted for his religious beliefs; the naval captain Buinovsky, falsely accused of spying for the British; the Latvian Kilgas,[38] two Estonians (one of whom is called Eino, while the other’s name is not given) and two Ukrainians (Gopchik and Pavlo), arrested in the aftermath of Stalin’s takeover of the Baltic States and Western Ukraine; Senka Klevshin, a former prisoner of Buchenwald, now serving time in a labour camp back home; Fetyukov, a former high-ranking official, now reduced to cadging cigarette butts and licking out other people’s bowls; Tsesar Markovich, a former film director, now holding a cushy job as a norm checker’s assistant at the construction site office; and the team leader Andrei Prokofievich Tyurin, the son of a kulak.

The book’s world-wide popularity (by the mid-1960s, its composite print run, including the translations, had reached a million copies[39]) made it natural to expect that it would be considered for film adaptation. Soon after One Day’s publication, Solzhenitsyn received several offers to turn it into a film in the Soviet Union, but he declined them all, because, according to his first wife Natalya Reshetovskaia, at that point in time he was against making a film version of the book as a matter of principle, believing that every work of art could have only one optimal form of expression.[40] The post-1964 political changes, unfavourable to Solzhenitsyn, put paid to further attempts to adapt his works for the Soviet screen (although the Lenfilm studios were briefly entertaining the possibility of filming his short story ‘Sluchai na stantsii Kochetovka’ <An Incident at Kochetovka Station> and even talked about signing a contract to that effect).[41] As for the film industries in the West, from their point of view, One Day

lacked, to say the least, a certain glamorous appeal. Presumably, the motion picture studios’ reports on the subject would have contained a resume as follows: ‘Set in Siberia, in Soviet prison camp. Lots of snow. Lots of long Russian names. No women. No escapes. No violence. <…> CONCLUSION: Depressing. Dismal locale. RECOMMENDATION: Not for us’.[42]

It took the resolve and determination of one person, the British-trained theatre and television director Casper Wrede, and the commitment of those he had inspired to assist him, to make the idea of adapting One Day for the screen a reality. To fill in a gap in Solzhenitsyn studies,[43] this study discusses little-known facts, partly drawn from archival sources, about the film’s pre-production and production history, compares the film to the book and analyses the film’s reception and impact, especially in some Scandinavian countries, Britain and the US, against the background of Solzhenitsyn’s complex relationship with the art of filmmaking.