Читать книгу Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? - Elisa Kriza - Страница 12

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote three prominent works that deal directly with the Soviet prison camp system: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1968), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975).[24] These three works vary widely in a number of different ways—length, style, authorial voice—and they relate to their subject matter diversely. Solzhenitsyn presents these works as belonging to certain genres. For example, he defines his first work as a povest,[25] a Russian genre that denotes a short novel with a plot focusing on one main character. The First Circle is described by its author as a polyphonic novel, as it constantly changes its point of view. Solzhenitsyn’s much longer work The Gulag Archipelago (1973-5) bears the intriguing subtitle “an experiment in literary investigation” and has a very versatile structure.

Hans Robert Jauss points out that among the factors which predispose readers towards a text are its assigned genre, its topic, and its relation to other similar works.[26] As I will show, debates within the reception of Solzhenitsyn’s camp-related literature have often revolved around the genre-definition of these works, the authorial voice in them, the topic, and their relation to Soviet literature of their time. All these questions are closely related and all affected the way the work was later canonized. But what made these issues both so relevant and so contentious?

The apparent simplicity of defining the genre of a work hides an unexpected depth and complexity in the case of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre. Even the genres of his two first camp-related works—which at least seem to have a more standard genre definition—have been disputed since their publication. Not only is there a disagreement over the definition of what type of literary work they are, sometimes the real issue is if they are literature at all. Because of their subject matter—life in Soviet prison camps—some scholars consider these books to be history rather than literature; other readers disagree completely and see them as fictional literature that can and should be weighed in aesthetic terms.

Not only does the topic complicate the categorization of Solzhenitsyn’s camp literature: the fact that he is a survivor of the Soviet prison camp system sparks speculation about autobiographical aspects of his work. The role played by the author’s autobiographical experiences in his books affect their genre definition. Hence, some readers may wonder if First Circle and Ivan Denisovich are memoirs. Indeed, it would be easier to see the autobiographically inspired Ivan Denisovich and First Circle as memoirs, if there was clarity as to the relationship between the point of view and the author in these works. But there is great confusion as to whose the authorial voice is in these works—and this issue becomes even more challenging when it comes to The Gulag Archipelago.

As will later become clear, one possible understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s camp-related literature is to define it as witness literature. In order to discuss how this term might or might not apply and the issues connected with it, it will be necessary to begin by discussing other difficulties connected with the categorization of these works’ genre. For example, the possible adherence to Socialist Realism of these works needs to be clarified as a step in the quest to define how the content of the books relates to reality, realism, and ideology. Are they spontaneous testimonies or carefully crafted literary works? Many scholars and reviewers perceived Ivan Denisovich as a unique and innovative work; however, others were more sceptical: they saw it as just another Socialist Realist novella with a “new” topic. In the following section, I will look at the roots of this disagreement.