Short Story Criticism | Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr - Abraham Rothberg (essay date 1971)

Abraham Rothberg (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: "One Day, Four Decades," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels, Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 19-59.

[In the following excerpt, Rothberg focuses on the naturalness of language and "sober, documentary tone" in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.]

Solzhenitsyn not only staked out new territory for contemporary Soviet writers by dealing directly and candidly with the [prison labor] camps in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he also explored new terrain in the use of language, exploiting a combination of prison, peasant, and pornographic slang unusual in the idiom of Soviet books. Especially objectionable to such conservatives as Kochetov, for example, was his use of the four-letter words and the "mother-oath" words for which Russian is notorious. Yet his use of colloquial speech is both apt and powerful, and he never uses vulgar language for show or...

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