DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

**Sillaycheg** · 07-14-2008, 07:27 PM

I too read Denisovich too early, before I really appreciated how monstrous the whole Gulag system of slave labour was. Nowadays, after my years of translating Estonian literature and reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag, I understand much more.

So, what Stewart discovered in Latvia, I discovered in Estonia. Denisovich is perhaps Solzhenitsyn's best book, not least because it is short and, as Bjorn says, strips the whole problem down. The thing that has to be remembered is that this is not a fairy-tale, a Kafka?sque story, but what Solzhenitsyn experienced personally. This is as real as the descriptions of Auschwitz by people who survived.

Yet for some incomprehensible reason, while Holocaust literature has become a whole cottage industry, with even people who never experienced the horrors cashing in on the game, relatively few Western intellectuals have been prepared to acknowledge that murdering people by overwork in Siberia (nice and slowly...) is as criminal as gassing them.

*

The Denisovich book originally appeared quite legally in Russian in the Soviet Union in 1962, during one of the many thaws they had in the Soviet Union, and was translated into Estonian, appearing in that language in 1963. The translator was the ethnologist and filmmaker Lennart Meri, who would later become President of a liberated Estonia, in 1991.

An amusing trick was then played. The Soviet censors had allowed Denisovich to be published freely in that tiny Baltic language, where it could do no harm. But it sold out immediately: original print-run 40,000 copies in a country of only one million native-speakers of Estonian. The Soviet censors began to see that maybe the book was a bit dodgy. So: no reprint.

What did exile Estonians in Sweden do? They found some second-rate paper, similar to what was used in the Soviet Union, and printed facsimile copies, one of which is in front of me as I write. The clever part of this ruse was then to take lots of these facsimile copies to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (i.e. Estonia). The customs people, all trained KGB officers of course, couldn't stop this import because to them it just looked as if some weird Westerners were importing Soviet books to the Soviet Union. How many of these facsimile copies were printed, I do not know.

*

As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget: Stalin and Hitler made a cosy friendship pact in 1939, termed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocal they divided Europe into their respective spheres of influence. (The three Baltic countries were all in the Russian half.) Paranoid Stalin also murdered loads of Soviet generals shortly before WWII, when they would have been rather useful, once the Pact broke down and the Soviet Union was at war with Hitler's Germany.

07-14-2008, 07:27 PM	#5
Sillaycheg Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 494 Senior Member	I too read Denisovich too early, before I really appreciated how monstrous the whole Gulag system of slave labour was. Nowadays, after my years of translating Estonian literature and reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag, I understand much more. So, what Stewart discovered in Latvia, I discovered in Estonia. Denisovich is perhaps Solzhenitsyn's best book, not least because it is short and, as Bjorn says, strips the whole problem down. The thing that has to be remembered is that this is not a fairy-tale, a Kafka?sque story, but what Solzhenitsyn experienced personally. This is as real as the descriptions of Auschwitz by people who survived. Yet for some incomprehensible reason, while Holocaust literature has become a whole cottage industry, with even people who never experienced the horrors cashing in on the game, relatively few Western intellectuals have been prepared to acknowledge that murdering people by overwork in Siberia (nice and slowly...) is as criminal as gassing them. * The Denisovich book originally appeared quite legally in Russian in the Soviet Union in 1962, during one of the many thaws they had in the Soviet Union, and was translated into Estonian, appearing in that language in 1963. The translator was the ethnologist and filmmaker Lennart Meri, who would later become President of a liberated Estonia, in 1991. An amusing trick was then played. The Soviet censors had allowed Denisovich to be published freely in that tiny Baltic language, where it could do no harm. But it sold out immediately: original print-run 40,000 copies in a country of only one million native-speakers of Estonian. The Soviet censors began to see that maybe the book was a bit dodgy. So: no reprint. What did exile Estonians in Sweden do? They found some second-rate paper, similar to what was used in the Soviet Union, and printed facsimile copies, one of which is in front of me as I write. The clever part of this ruse was then to take lots of these facsimile copies to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (i.e. Estonia). The customs people, all trained KGB officers of course, couldn't stop this import because to them it just looked as if some weird Westerners were importing Soviet books to the Soviet Union. How many of these facsimile copies were printed, I do not know. * As for the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, never forget: Stalin and Hitler made a cosy friendship pact in 1939, termed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocal they divided Europe into their respective spheres of influence. (The three Baltic countries were all in the Russian half.) Paranoid Stalin also murdered loads of Soviet generals shortly before WWII, when they would have been rather useful, once the Pact broke down and the Soviet Union was at war with Hitler's Germany.
	Quote