The Love Girl and the Innocent: Victory Celebrations. Prisoners

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A play translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. The action is set in a Stalinist labour camp similar to the one where the author himself served an 8 year term.

Genres: Plays

Paperback

Published December 31, 1986

About the author

also known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.

This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.

Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...

Reviews

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We clutch at life with convulsive intensity—that's how we get caught. We want to go on living at any, any price. We accept all the degrading conditions, and this way we save—not ourselves—we save the persecutor. But he who doesn't value his life is unconquerable, untouchable. There are such people! And if you become one of them, then it's not you but your persecutor who'll tremble!" (108)

This collection of three early plays (1951-1953) by Solzhenitsyn includes Victory Celebrations, Prisoners, and The Love-Girl and the Innocent. The plays were surprisingly good—especially the first two, which were actually composed orally by Solzhenitsyn while he was on gang labor in the Gulag. Imagine that. While The Love-Girl made it to dress-rehearsal stage in Moscow, it was banned at the last moment. It was finally produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981. The other two plays have never been performed in public.

Aside from the (at times wavering) dramatic interest of the plays, they have important historical value, given that they all center on events of the year 1945—particularly on the advance of the Russian army into East Prussia and the 'repatriation' of former Russian prisoners of war to the Gulag labor camps. Imagine having fought for your country, having been taken prisoner, and then—rather than being welcomed back home as a hero—you are treated as a traitor, an inevitable conspirator, and sent to hard labor to languish in the camps. Solzhenitsyn spells it out in great, lingering detail. He saw and lived it all.

[Zach Hollifield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of Solzhenitsyn’s earliest works, at least one “composed” and memorized while a prisoner in the Gulag (“Prisoners”).

The plays are really good in and of themselves, but if you’ve read Solzhenitsyn’s later novels then you’ll enjoy them even more because they show Solzhenitsyn the writer taking shape. Because of this, I would recommend only reading after being well aquatinted with Solzhenitsyn’s novels (“Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “In the First Circle,””Cancer Ward”) and perhaps some of his better known short stories (“Matryona’s House,” “We Never Make Mistakes,” “For the Good of the Cause”).

Not all three are on the same level.

I would say “Victory Celebrations” is 4 stars, the ending of which raises it from 3.5.

“Prisoners” is the best of the three and does the best job at absorbing the reader. It is clearly a precursor to Solzhenitsyn’s “In the First Circle.” 5 stars, 6 if possible. If I reread any of them it will be this one. The most clear forerunner of Solzhenitsyn’s future as a literary giant.

The most popular of these three plays is “Love-Girl and the Innocent.” Maybe it was because of that that I was disappointed in it. Still a fine play, but I expected more due to is greater renown. 4 stars but barely and it’s only because of the gut wrenching love story which develops very late and should have been the focus from the get go.

[Gene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Russian novels are always a little confusing to me. I don't know if it's the number of and unfamiliarity of the names. But I still enjoy them immensely. Solzhenitsyn's work here is a series of plays related to life in work or prison camps in the Soviet Union after World War II. I found my head spinning trying to follow all the characters and their individual circumstances. I'm sure if performed on the stage, it would be much easier to keep clear, but in this mode I struggled. The plays still did a good job relating life in these prison conditions. I was able to see the conditions through the eyes of those in positions of leadership and those whose freedom had been stolen away. The difficulty of maneuvering in such a dreadful situation makes me wonder if people from the first-world countries would have the capacity or the will to survive the way some of the prisoners in the stories did. And so many moral choices present themselves: Do you compromise your beliefs for mere survival? Do you join in on acts of crime in order to protect your own life? How does one love his neighbour as himself in such a setting?

Solzhenitsyn also makes clear that the Western allies knowingly abandoned the fate of Soviet prisoners of war back to a country that only wanted them back to imprison them. It amounted to nothing short of an atrocity. The Soviet Union treated its traitors better than it did its prisoners of war returned to them. It was a sick system that feared those who had any taste of liberty, and so needed to confine and control these potential trouble-makers.

It's good to remember that there are nations still violating the human rights of those who have not committed any real crimes against persons or their property. All they have done is to have believed the "wrong" things or spoken what would challenge the power of the state. God give grace and hope to them. And let those of us living in freedom make sure we raise awareness of this outrage as it occurs in the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and elsewhere.