On the language of Ivan Denisovich. 1964

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
On the language of Ivan Denisovich. 1964
Typed letter signed to Tatiana Grigorievna [Vinokur], Ryazan, 31 May 1964.

In Russian. 1½ pages, 146 x 205mm.

On the language of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn praises the recipient's essay on the philology of Ivan Denisovich: 'Reading it gave me a fair amount of satisfaction ... from a professional point of view, the language was the most difficult and interesting, all its layers and transitions. I am grateful to you for your observation and understanding'. He goes on to discuss his use of informal language or neologisms, and his relationship with the canonical Explanatory Dictionary of V.I. Dal: 'My relationship with Dal is somewhat more complex than you presented in your work. If a word is heard in everyday life, is it really so important to check whether Dal has it? It already has the right to exist. The most important thing that my long-standing (and constant) contact with Dal gives me is a sense of the spirit of the language. When one manages to maintain this sensation in oneself ... it is easy to judge whether [a word] is in the spirit of the language or not'; if it is, 'it is necessary ... to accept it at once, without thinking about whether it is in the dictionary or whether it is "new"'.

Solzhenitsyn's first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), was an epoch in the Soviet Union's literary life, marking the first open discussion of the gulags; it was specifically mentioned in the citation for Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Price award. By the time of the present letter, however, the 'Krushchev Thaw' was nearing an end, and after Krushchev's fall in October 1964 publication of Solzhenitsyn's works was abruptly stopped. Tatyana Grigorievna Vinokur (1924-1992) was a specialist at the Institute of Russian Language at the USSR Academy of Sciences.

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