SOURCE: “The Subtext of Christian Asceticism in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 661-76.

In the following essay, Kobets examines elements of Christian asceticism in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. According to Kobets, “While the novella contains a variety of coded and overtly stated themes relating to Christian cosmogony, mythology, ontology, and ritual, the most dominant theme is that of Christian asceticism.”

The phenomenology of Christian asceticism has long been a part of the Russian literary tradition. It has served Russian writers as a rich source of ideas, images, literary themes, and techniques. Representatives of different types of Russian Christian asceticism (saintly monks, hermits, pilgrims, holy fools, etc.) populate the pages of Russian classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They may exhibit the traditional behavioral modalities of the ascetic (Tolstoy...