A Different Education

To understand Solzhenitsyn, one has to understand Ivan Denisovich, the character, and what he stands for. For his hero Solzhenitsyn did not choose a member of the liberal intelligentsia, who filled the Soviet camps in those days. In fact, Solzhenitsyn had a rather disdainful attitude toward liberals. He considered them people with a backbone that was either too fragile or too elastic. His hero was not a rebel against the camp regime, someone who considered that regime to be abnormal and contradictory to common sense. Ivan Denisovich has accepted the camp as given, a stage set on which the is merely an actor who must play a part, whether he likes the set or not. Ivan Denisovich's main goal is to survive. Therefore, he does not waste too much energy on the high-flown discussions of the intellectuals in the camp barracks, and listens to them only halfheartedly.

[...] What can you cut with talk of art? Ivan Denisovich is much more interested in the tangible tools needed for survival, and he is careful with the smallest trifle that could help him. He hides a spoon inside his felt boot; he keeps a crust of bread wrapped in a white rag so that he can wipe every last bit of gruel from his bowl.

Ivan Denisovich is surrounded by people who are much better educated than he is. Captain Buinovsky, for instance, still speaks to people as if he were their commander, teaching them not to pick up butts from the ground and smoke them, as it was unsanitary and could lead to contracting syphilis from the original smoker. Yet all his virtues did not help the captain or make him any smarter, for he ended up in solitary anyway. And what about the three camp artists, Ivan Denisovich reasons, what good are all their diplomas? Just to touch up numbers on camp clothes?

Ivan Denisovich has a different education--he knows how to stay out of solitary and how to hide a piece of hacksaw blade in his mitten. In the camp, an extra piece of bread acquired by hook or by crook is the only diploma of higher education that counts. Everything that takes place in the square of the camp zone under the theatrical lighting of the ruthless projectors beating down from the watchtower is the stage play in which Ivan Denisovich feels he has the leading role. The philosophizing intellectuals who surround him are helpless in matters of daily life and play only marginal roles.

from Yevgeny Yevtushenko's introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.