Ivan Denisovich on Trial: Soviet Writers, Russian Identity, and Solzhenitsyn’s Failed Bid for the 1964 Lenin Prize

On 19 November 1962, high-ranking party officials flocked to the Kremlin to attend a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CC CPSU) on the subject of economic development. A surprise was waiting for them in the bookstalls set up in the Kremlin for the delegates. Alongside the red book of materials for the Central Committee’s discussion was the light blue cover of Novyi mir, the Soviet journal that most enthusiastically supported Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization expounded at the 20th and 22nd Party Congresses. Thousands of copies of the issue of Novyi mir that featured Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s groundbreaking novella on everyday life in the Stalinist Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had been rushed, hot off the presses, to the Kremlin bookstalls. From the tribunal of the plenum, First Secretary Khrushchev gave the novella his full-throated endorsement.¹

On 1 December 1963, the Novyi mir editor and renowned Russian poet Aleksandr Tvardovskii wrote in his diary about his new top priority: securing a Lenin Prize, the highest award in Soviet literature, for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Tvardovskii noted that, in a sign that enthusiasm for the novella was waning in some quarters, the Moscow branch of the RSFSR Writers’ Union had failed to nominate the work for the 1964 Lenin Prize.² Nevertheless, it was ultimately included in the list for consideration by the Lenin Prize Committee after receiving two nominations from prominent cultural institutions: the Central State Archive of Literature and Art and Novyi mir itself.³

Despite Khrushchev’s and Tvardovskii’s support for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s novella failed to win the Lenin Prize in April 1964. Those scholars who have discussed Solzhenitsyn’s failed bid for the prize have interpreted it (correctly) as a sign of crumbling support for Khrushchev’s Thaw in general and Solzhenitsyn’s work in particular on the part of the Central Committee.⁴ Heretofore unexamined in the secondary literature, the transcripts of the debates over One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that took place at the Lenin Prize Committee in 1964 reveal more than just waning support for de-Stalinization, however. They give insight into the major debates taking place in the Soviet literary world during the twilight of the Thaw. These transcripts show that in 1964, much of the discussion of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich hinged on Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of the Russian peasantry and nation as embodied in the character of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Where one expects to find lengthy discussions of the Gulag, one finds instead polemics from the country’s top writers on whether or not Ivan Denisovich is a true representative of the Russian people. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the transcripts show that Solzhenitsyn’s most vocal critics on the committee came from among the Russian writers, who argued that the novella’s main character played into prerevolutionary stereotypes of the Russian peasantry as passive and politically disengaged. Solzhenitsyn’s Russian critics argued that the Russian peasantry was in fact progressive and revolutionary in its nature. To suggest otherwise, they insisted, was an affront to the Russian nation. Today it may seem strange that Solzhenitsyn, a committed Russian nationalist, was accused of insulting the Russian nation at the Lenin Prize Committee in 1964. Yet the arguments made by Solzhenitsyn’s Russian critics, though rarely analyzed, are deeply revealing.⁵ They illustrate a clash between two conceptions of the Russian peasantry: one that was, in Stalin’s famous formulation, “national in form but socialist in content” and one that bore the influence of prerevolutionary conceptions of the peasantry.

The debate over One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the most important literary work published during the Thaw, demonstrates that conversations about the peasantry and national identity were an integral part of the Thaw and de-Stalinization. Since the earliest days of the Thaw, Novyi mir had attempted to “de-Stalinize...