Mans Tragedy in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch Essay

Man's Tragedy in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch Solzhenitsyn's turning to history has extremely important consequences for his total literary heritage. As he himself has said, "Literature that is not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of literature." To be true literature, "the pain and fears of society must be held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers which threaten it." History to Solzhenitsyn, as to Leo Tolstoy, is the theater and the arena in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale. This is not to say that Solzhenitsyn actually "writes history," meaning by that a formal history text. Rather, his novel August 1914 is a vehicle for the telling the larger story of the human condition. As in One Day, characters are minutely inspected in order best to understand the historical environment in which they participate as well as being affected by it. In other words, history at its present juncture provides Solzhenitsyn with concrete, "living" referents or the actual background against which the moral fiber of realistically depicted characters are not only revealed but above all tested and tempered. As in the later work, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's historical novel about Leninist-Stalinist terror and the labor-camp system, so in August 1914 events do not simply "happen," as though they were products of the action of Fate. It is precisely over the issue of Why Events Happen that Solzhenitsyn parts company with the great Russian writer, Tolstoy, who himself used history (War and Peace) as a mea... ...," not by means of dogmatic insistence upon "historical law" and "ultimate truth." So, for Solzhenitsyn, man's Tragedy does not consist in his being ground under by an historical juggernaut, a dumb force guided by inexorable historical laws, impersonal forces, economic determinism, and so forth. Instead, man makes his own history. Ideologies, religions, policies do help shape the lines along which history will be made, but above all for Solzhenitsyn, it is men who make history. It is they who can be blamed. So can the makers of ideologies be blamed for the postulates they develop and the consequences which result from them. "Who is to blame?" the author of Gulag Archipelago asks in the chapter entitled, "The Law Becomes a Man." He answers, with bitter irony: "Well, of course, it obviously could never be the Over-All Leadership!" Man's Tragedy in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch Essay Man's Tragedy in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch Solzhenitsyn's turning to history has extremely important consequences for his total literary heritage. As he himself has said, "Literature that is not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of literature." To be true literature, "the pain and fears of society must be held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers which threaten it." History to Solzhenitsyn, as to Leo Tolstoy, is the theater and the arena in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale. This is not to say that Solzhenitsyn actually "writes history," meaning by that a formal history text. Rather, his novel August 1914 is a vehicle for the telling the larger story of the human condition. As in One Day, characters are minutely inspected in order best to understand the historical environment in which they participate as well as being affected by it. In other words, history at its present juncture provides Solzhenitsyn with concrete, "living" referents or the actual background against which the moral fiber of realistically depicted characters are not only revealed but above all tested and tempered. As in the later work, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's historical novel about Leninist-Stalinist terror and the labor-camp system, so in August 1914 events do not simply "happen," as though they were products of the action of Fate. It is precisely over the issue of Why Events Happen that Solzhenitsyn parts company with the great Russian writer, Tolstoy, who himself used history (War and Peace) as a mea... ...," not by means of dogmatic insistence upon "historical law" and "ultimate truth." So, for Solzhenitsyn, man's Tragedy does not consist in his being ground under by an historical juggernaut, a dumb force guided by inexorable historical laws, impersonal forces, economic determinism, and so forth. Instead, man makes his own history. Ideologies, religions, policies do help shape the lines along which history will be made, but above all for Solzhenitsyn, it is men who make history. It is they who can be blamed. So can the makers of ideologies be blamed for the postulates they develop and the consequences which result from them. "Who is to blame?" the author of Gulag Archipelago asks in the chapter entitled, "The Law Becomes a Man." He answers, with bitter irony: "Well, of course, it obviously could never be the Over-All Leadership!"