Two Classic Novella Reviews

White Nights by Dostoevsky and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn

This month I read two novellas by Russian authors and had very different reactions to them.

First I read White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was published in 1848 during the early part of the author's career. It was first published in a literary magazine, Notes from the Fatherland, as a short story. Later it was published in a book, White Nights and Other Stories. Now one can buy it as a stand alone, making it a rather short novella, at 62 pages. It is my Classics Club Spin selection for this Fall.

The story is set in St. Petersburg and opens with the unnamed narrator walking around the city in the summer, dejected and alone. One evening he happens upon a woman who is also alone and he ends up fighting off her would-be attacker. The two strike up a friendship, of sorts, meeting several more nights for conversations where they share their stories of loneliness and woe. The narrator falls in love with the woman but she is promised in marriage to another. 

Honestly, I do not recall how or when I heard about White Nights but what I heard made me want to read it. Reviewers gushed about the beauty of this love story. I had high expectations, which were quickly dashed as soon as I started reading. I love a good love story as much as anyone but it fell flat for me.

First, the setting is almost obscure. I couldn't picture anything. I even missed a reference to St. Petersburg and thought they were in Moscow. Secondly, the dialogue between the two characters is impossibly long-winded and repetitive. Paragraphs of one-sided dialogue went on and on for pages. Lastly the action was hard to figure out. Why are you doing this and how do you know where to go? Questions kept coming to my mind. The happiness at the end of the story almost presented itself as a plot twist. Where did that come from? 

Clearly I did not like the story and rated it with 2 stars. I am very out-of-step with those reviewers on Goodreads who think White Nights is a beautiful love story. Sigh. This is not a book I will recommend to anyone.

Second, my husband and I recently listened to the audiobook of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This novella was published in 1962.  The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and features one day in the life of a prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Shukhov is sentenced to ten years of hard labor in a gulag. He was accused of being a German spy during WWII but really he was innocent, just captured by the Germans briefly.

At the beginning of story Shukhov wakes up late in his bunk feeling unwell. He thinks he will go to the dispensary to report his illness but because he gets up late he is assigned to clean the guardhouse as punishment. From there his day unfolds like so many he has already lived and thousands more to come. He and his squad are assigned to work in the freezing cold without tools or proper supplies using their own ingenuity to get by. Labor means food so they work hard at their jobs. At one point Shukhov, a bricklayer by trade, finds himself almost enjoying his job of laying the bricks and squaring the wall they are building. The team has to work quickly because the conditions are so cold, if they dilly-dally at all the mortar will harden in the mixing container. By the end of the day, Shukhov looks back and thinks it was a good one: He got some extra food; Had some fine interactions with other prisoners; and he didn't get assigned to solitary confinement for getting up late.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn started writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1957 after he was released from exile. In 1945 he was sent to a forced labor for writing derogatory comments about Stalin and the war (WWII). In 1953 he was released from the gulag but sent into exile in Siberia until Stalin's death. In 1962 this story was cleared for publication by Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was the first thing published about the Soviet gulags. In 1964 One Day was considered for the Lenin Prize, a top literary prize in Russia. Though it didn't win, it is amazing it was even considered. Later that year Khrushchev was ousted from power and the open door which allowed this story to be published was slammed shut. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Russian Writers' Union but the world was watching. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 but later he had his citizenship stripped and was exiled from his motherland. At the same time all of his books and writings were removed from libraries across Russia. Not until Gorbachev came into power in the 1980s, did his books once again circulate freely.  "The Soviet Union was destroyed by information – and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn's One Day" (Wiki).

Don and I were both amazed by the book and the information we learned of the author (which we read about after we finished listening.) Don read the book in high school but remembered some of the details differently. This may have been a translation issue. We learned there have been six translations of the text, the first five from the censored text. Only the sixth, done in 1991 by H.T. Willett, is from the canonical Russian text and approved by Solzhenitsyn. So if you chose to read this novella, choose an edition translated by Willett! Don rated the book a smidge higher than me with 5 stars to my 4.5. Some of the details were a bit murky to me so I downgraded it a half a star. I was nit-picking. Don said he had to give the book 5 stars because where it stands in history. Good point. Either way, we both recommend it.

-Anne