“I was in 1950, on some long winter camp day, dragging a stretcher with my partner and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail … and the day of the simplest hard worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And you don’t even need to whip up some horrors, you don’t need it to be some special day, but an ordinary day, this is the day that makes up the years. I thought so, and this idea remained in my mind, for nine years I did not touch it, and only in 1959, nine years later, I sat down and wrote. «
In the summer of 1956, freed after 11 years of prisons, camps and exile, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn moved from Kazakhstan to Central Russia, began to teach mathematics to village children in the Vladimir region, a year later settled in Ryazan, where he taught physics and astronomy at secondary school No. 2. There and the story was written, in May-June 1959.
“I did not write it for long at all, only 40 days, less than a month and a half. It always turns out this way if you write from a dense life, the way of life of which you know too much and … you just fight off unnecessary material, just so that the excess does not fit, but to accommodate the most necessary. «
I wrote it and hid it. And he ventured to offer it to the press — only more than two years later, after Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s «personality cult». In November 1961, Moscow friends took the manuscript (printed on both sides, without margins and spaces between the lines, the title — «Shch-854», and without the name of the author) to the «New World». The editor of the prose department, Anna Samoilov-na Berzer, immediately understood the price of the amazing novelty and handed it over to the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, with the words: «The camp through the eyes of a peasant is a very popular thing.» (“In six words it was impossible to get more precisely into the heart of Tvardovsky,” Solzhenitsyn later assessed.)
© & ℗ A. Solzhenitsyn (heirs)
© & ℗ SP Vorobiev V.A.
© & ℗ ID SOYUZ
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