One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

There are many interesting ways to spend your time in the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has spent a lot of his incurring most of the suffering which the country's twentieth century history has to offer. After studying mathematics and physics for ten years he was drafted into the Soviet Army at the beginning of World War II. He served as an artillery officer in East Prussia and Germany, was decorated twice for bravery, and then sentenced to ten years in a labor camp hauling logs and laying bricks. Tass called his offence a "baseless political charge," probably incurred by speaking derogatorily of Stalin. In 1953 Stalin died and Solzhenitsyn was released from camp and exiled to East Asia with millions of other political prisoners. Following Krushchev's repudiation of the Stalin regime in 1956 Solzhenitsyn returned home to Rostov and was permitted to reach mathematics at the local grammar school. There he started a writing career which so far has produced four novels, several books of short stories, and a play. He also contracted cancer (the progress of which was arrested), won a Nobel Prize which he has not been able to leave the Soviet Union to receive, and paid as little attention as possible to the Soviet Police who continually follow him and have searched through his papers several times when he was away from home.

His first novel. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicts just a part of this endurance. Accused of being a spy after escaping from German occupied territory. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sentenced to ten years in a special Siberian labor camp for "class dangerous elements", like the camp Karaganda where Solzhenitsyn spent eight years. Solzhenitsyn considers only the day of one victim of Stalin's forced industrialization and intensification of totalitarian control. But it is estimated that about four million people died in the labor camps between 1927 and 1940, not by premeditated genocide but from the disease, fatigue, and starvation that Ivan Denisovich suffers in every one of his three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.

Because the particular problems of a labor camp inmate, like the particular problems of a heroin addict, are not like any other predicament they are especially difficult to portray. Solzhenitsyn conveys the prisoners' destitution by alternating between dead pan description of bodily pain and cowering before nameless authorities, and emphasis on the miniscule occurrences that bring relief from suffering. Ivan finds a hacksaw blade, gets a little tobacco, and uses his favorite spoon. These few moments in Ivan's day when he feels he can do something that he wants to do punctuate the bleak narrative description of camp routine.

But Ivan's moments of joy are always only diversions from his desperation. He sits down to dinner and takes off his hat: "The sacred moments had come...He tasted one bowl, he tasted the other. Not bad--there was some fish in it...He dug in. First he only drank the broth, drank and drank. As it went down filling his whole body with warmth, all his guts began to flutter inside him at their meeting with the stew. Goo--ood!" It is explicit that Ivan is locked into a fate from which he cannot return home. "No one ever left the camps alive." His day evokes more a feeling of melancholy than horror because the situation is so hopeless.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about this predicament so successfully it is a shame that Casper Wrede perverts it for such useless motives in his film. The rare moments of joy in One Day are the most consequent in telling of Ivan's character. In Solzhenitsyn's novel they arise from an innate hope which constitutes Ivan's endurance. In the film Ivan appears to rasie himself above his suffering by a superhuman effort of will. He becomes a willful hero rather than Solzhenitsyn's enduring stoic. But there is no possible point of departure for his courage and his emotional moments seem merely histrionic. His day becomes a sublime epic pathetically turning into an unsuccessful melodrama.

The concurrent brutality of nameless authority and unceasing Arctic frost define Ivan's world. Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cameraman, has filled Siberia with beautiful winter horizons of shining white snow, deep blue sky, and soft yellow prison search lights. The harshness of the sub-zero temperatures seem more like the sting in the air of a winter carnival. The beautiful landscapes are totally inappropriate. Wrede's depiction of the guards may be more accurate, but everything is so beautiful one can hardly be bothered to notice them.

TomCourtenay's Ivan is a large part of the problem. His face is too expressive and his presence too strong to portray a lisping, faceless prisoner. His third person narration throughout the film locates him as a sophisticated, detached observer who understands all his own pain. But this observation is completely incongruous with the ingenuous naiviete with which he asks a fellow prisoner "Where does the moon go each month if it doesn't break up into the stars?"

The ambiguity recurs in each of Ivan's moments of passion. Every prisoner is responsible for keeping the large white letters on his uniform legible. Ivan shuffles through the snow to the old painter who traces the outline of "S 854" on his cloth cap. An expression of grief passes over Ivan's face. But Wrede cannot decide if this is the expression of the naive and crafty peasant or the existential hero locked in an unjustified fate.

The three eating scenes successfully convey the pain fundamental to Ivan's state. But only because the image of a worn, cold body gaping over a breakfast of sticky yellow boiled grass cannot help but be effective. Courtenay is a convincing actor; but his pained body cannot sustain the entire film.

After breakfast Ivan and his work group go off to a construction sight two miles away to lay bricks. The guards bark at them to march in rows of five and to the sound of ringing bells a long column of dark suited men walk against the snow and sky. As they approach the work sight Ivan tells us in his third person voice that the prisoner's food is rationed according to the work rate his group achieves. The prisoners are not goaded by guards but by one another: "The authorities had found a way to make us work."

The workers build up each others' enthusiasm with such lines as "Ivan you lay the bricks and I'll carry the mortar. We'll work twice as fast that way." Like almost all the dialogue in the film this line is admirably a direct translation from Solzhenitsyn's novel. But it is spoken by a wide eyed young man with all the fresh enthusiasm of a high school quarterback preparing for the next play. Solzhenitsyn can tone down the sense of imminent death in his novel because his Russian audience was well aware of the destitution of the prisoners' lives, but a similar deemphasis is the film is ridiculous.

The film is unsuccessful even when a prisoner merely tells of his own oppression. The work group sits around a fire in a half constructed building and Tiurin, the group leader, relates the events leading to his imprisonment the was discharged from the army for being a kulak's son and arrested after jumping a train without travelling papers). Ivan's concurrent narration renders the story as poignant as a rehearsed documentary.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an important book about a significant historical event. The ineptitude and wrong-headedness with which the film was made is overwhelming. One could almost be titillated by the fine qualities which Ivan's suffering has evoked. As the day ends Ivan rushes to finish the wall he is working on. He leans back to see the sun setting over the ice-encrusted bricks. The camera rests on the image for several seconds. What is supposed to be beautiful here? The sunset reflected in the ice? Yes, they usually are, but Wrede continually forgets that the wall was made by a slave for Stalin who statistically had a very good chance of dying before his term was finished.