Groundhog Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: The perils of teaching Russian literature in today's Russia

I was chatting online with some former students about how books by Metropolitan Tikhon had appeared on our syllabus, and one girl told me she’d had a nightmare about the state exam – she had to write an end-of-year essay and was required to use a certain number of novoyaz [Newspeak] terms. She tried, but couldn’t remember enough of them.

What really made me angry was the short story “Levsha”^[1] – that Levsha was a drunkard who is being presented as a Russian genius. Look how great he is, better than anyone. He may have a terrible life, and he drinks, but what a jack of all trades! When he wants to he can work wonders, and he doesn’t want to live in that nice, clean Europe of yours.

We had a situation just like in Mozart and Salieri.^[2]In Pushkin’s version, Mozart seems to realize that he’s going to be poisoned, but he guesses he can give Salieri a chance to preserve his humanity. And when I was deciding what I would say during the lesson, I realized that someone could complain about me, and I even knew who. But still, I didn’t want to believe that the children who’ve been in your homeroom for four years, and with whom you’ve had good relations, would go and inform to the cops. I gave them the opportunity to stay human, but they didn’t take it.

These are all stories told by Russian literature teachers who have devised strategies for staying out of the clutches of the state Leviathan. The first, whom we’ll call Inga Ryzhova (her name has been changed for her safety), teaches at a small online private school, a propaganda-free oasis whose enrollments have increased by an order of magnitude this year. The second is from a teacher we’ll call Olga Kiselyova, who has twice had to change jobs since Russia’s War on Ukraine began, seeking a post where she wouldn’t be required to lie to her students. The third is Natalya Taranushenko, who last summer had to flee the country in a single day.

While last year the authorities focused primarily on reshaping how history was being taught, this year it is the language and literature classroom that is being scrutinized. Schoolchildren are being prohibited from using foreign words or mentioning Manga or comics in their compositions, but more importantly, there have been major changes to the high school reading list. Almost all books that were introduced after the fall of the Soviet Union are now off limits. Bans have been placed on works about the gulag or that are critical of fascism or militarism or that promote personal liberty as a value – everything from Orwell’s 1984 to the avant-garde poetry of the conceptualist Dmitry Prigov. These books have been replaced with poems about the siege of Leningrad and the book The Fall of the Empire: A Russian Lesson (Гибель империи. Российский урок), written by Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, reputedly Putin’s spiritual advisor.

These changes are part of an effort to indoctrinate children, but at the same time they show that the authorities haven’t clearly formulated the ideology they want to indoctrinate them with. It appears as if the Soviet-era template for teaching literature is being restored, since some mind-numbing propagandistic works removed back in the 1990s have been put back on the reading list. One example is Nikolai Ostrovsky’s autobiographical novel, How the Steel was Tempered (Как закалялась сталь), which extols the triumphs of socialism. But then we have Shevkunov’s book, which laments the collapse of tsarism and condemns the revolution.

Also in seeming contradiction to the current glorification of absolutism is the old habit of extolling the Decembrists, the freedom-loving tsarist officers who in 1825 rebelled against the regime and were subsequently seen as the forebears of the twentieth-century revolutionaries. Russian schoolchildren have long been told that Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) had really wanted to write a novel about the Decembrists and that the protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (serialized between 1825 and 1832) had maybe been getting ready to join the rebels. “Russian Women,” an 1872 poem by the leftist literary figure Nikolai Nekrasov, about the heroism of the Decembrists’ wives who shared the hardships of Siberian exile with their heroic husbands, remains on the syllabus. These works, that, as if out of habit, are still being taught, make for strange bedfellows alongside the idea that all power comes from God and any act of rebellion can only be explained by Anglo-Saxon treachery.

Another stunning paradox is that, just as authors writing about Stalinist repression – Varlam Shalamov, Vasily Grossman, Yuri Trifonov – are being banned from the classroom, the most famous work on the subject, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has been allowed to remain. Rumor has it that this has to do with personal ties between the author’s wife and Vladimir Putin. There is something to these rumors: Natalya Solzhenitsyna does indeed have friends in the Kremlin, and, these days, that seems to be all that counts in the making of policy, including high school syllabi, as seen in the example of Putin’s good friend Tikhon Shevkunov. But you don’t really need conspiracy theories to explain this: on a more down-to-earth level, the school curriculum is a sluggish, conservative matter. Once something enters the canon, it tends to stay there by inertia.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a gulag prisoner, entered the literature classroom after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The literature curriculum began with oral folk tales and gradually made its way to the twentieth century,” recalls Natalya Taranushenko, who taught literature during the late Soviet period in the town of Protivno, Moscow Oblast. The nineteenth-century classics generated interesting discussions, but when the time came to cover the Soviet period, teachers had to teach socialist realist works of questionable literary value. “Goodness, what was there worth teaching? ‘And the snowflakes fell on Lenin’s coffin’? ^[3] You don’t know what kind of lesson plan to make, what to say, what to give the children.” To alleviate the tedium of studying sappy socialist realist poetry, for both her own sake and that of the children, Taranushenko says she spent more time on the nineteenth century, but in the 1990s everything changed. Suddenly, restrictions were lifted. “Everything that had been hidden in desk drawers, everything that was printed in the West! I remember we coordinated who would subscribe to which journal so we’d be able to read them all, and we read voraciously, and it seeped into the classroom – it was a very interesting time. The country was caught up in the business of switching to a new system, and schools were the last things on anyone’s mind. Nobody was asking anything of us, and we had total freedom to think and write what we wanted. But of course the biggest impression was made by One Day in the Life – that one day perfectly reflected life in the camps and the battle between the totalitarian state and the individual. Triumphing in this battle was inconceivable – the only victory possible was to preserve your humanity! To avoid becoming a cog, a jackal, or labor camp dust! For children in the 1990s, this was a revelation!”

Then came Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant return to Russia in 1994 and his transformation into the top contemporary classic author, with his other works also entering the curriculum. Over the past 30 years, Solzhenitsyn has become as well-established a classroom staple as Lev Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, and the Decembrists.

The situation is similar for Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, an iconic text for Soviet readers. Copies were made on countless home typewriters, passed around, and devoured in a single night. As soon as teachers were given the freedom, they of course began reading the book with their students, among the vast majority of whom it was their most beloved work. In this case it was not so much the work’s political context as the narrative’s captivating magical-realist elements that teenagers were wild about and, of course, the risqué storyline about the affair between a disgraced writer and a decadent beauty cheating on her husband, who had earned a place of honor under the totalitarian regime due to some unspecified achievement. The book is still allowed despite being permeated with contempt toward everything Soviet and its themes of censorship, the destruction of freedom of expression, and the elevation of lies and mediocrity – processes analogous to what is happening in Russia today. A recent film adaptation that is replete with references to contemporary events caused an outcry among pro-war Russians, and many believe it was allowed to continue showing in theaters only because it was based on a work permitted in the classroom. Indeed, it would be odd to ban a film that faithfully follows the plot of a book every high schooler is required to read.

But the most glaring contradiction in the Russian literature classroom has to do with attitudes toward war, in particular in discussions of War and Peace and the well-known pacifism of its author, who served as an officer in several campaigns before becoming an ardent opponent of war and violence in general. The pacifist ideas reflected in Tolstoy’s works have been traditional fodder for student papers and exam questions. “There are standard treatments of this subject people don’t put much thought into,” says Olga Kiselyova, “and in any context they will be perceived the same way they always have been.” Kiselyova taught Russian language and literature in rural Kaluga Oblast, but in 2022, after sending her students off for summer vacation, she decided to quit. One of her main reasons was the incongruity between what was being taught and the surrounding reality. She explains:

The school director was also a literature teacher, and she had to discuss difficult moral dilemmas in her classes while turning a blind eye to the war. In other words, she had to teach “thou shalt not kill” while simultaneously approving of killing… I couldn’t understand how they could do it, how all those teachers tacitly accepted the agenda that was handed down by higher-ups. There wasn’t a single conversation about this being wrong or anything like that. Probably they just don’t like to think about it – “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” If tomorrow they’re told to change their opinion, they’ll do it without batting an eye.

This is not the first time Russian students and teachers have had to ignore logical contradictions: an analogous situation existed in the postwar Soviet Union. The slogan “лишь бы не было войны” (just let there be no war) was sacred, and the peace dove featured prominently in Soviet symbolism, holding the flags of Soviet republics in its beak, flying over the Kremlin star, and with the hammer-and-sickle in the background. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was threatening the world with an atom bomb, sending tanks into Prague, and waging war in Afghanistan. But Natalya Taranushenko sees a difference between then and now:

Back then, people were saying that the West – the imperialist sharks – don’t understand us, but we’re for peace throughout the world, we’re willing to find common ground. Of course that was a false front, but [state media] never said that war was good, that would have been unthinkable – the generation that knew war was still living. It would never have occurred to anyone to laugh at Afghan children or anything like the malicious commentaries we’re hearing now. But now there is so much gloating coming out of our television screens and glee over the grief of Ukrainian civilians. Our children hear it all, and their developing brains have a hard time telling lies from truth. Furthermore, the government is not transmitting the idea that military operations are being conducted for the sake of peace; what we have now is denazification and demilitarization. What is that? What is it for?

Taranushenko attributes teachers’ lack of reflection to historical trauma:

In the 1990s, it seemed as if the system had been destroyed, but now it has returned, and fear has returned with it. We have the experience of generations etched deep inside us. About five years ago, a fellow literature teacher told me that she had a dacha with a little potato patch. Her husband developed back trouble, and he said, “Let’s hire  someone to prepare the plot.” But his wife refused. “What if something happens, and we have a hired worker!“ she said. I asked her what she meant, and she told me her grandmother had been branded a kulak!^[4] Her grandmother told her that they had ten children, and they were all put in unheated cattle cars and sent off to somewhere in Kazakhstan or beyond the Urals – I don’t exactly remember – and only two of the children survived. The rest died along the way. Imagine: she’s 65 and the anti-kulak campaign was almost a hundred years ago! So much time has passed, and the terror is still in the subconscious; it won’t let it go!

Taranushenko admits to many fears, including fear of the state, but she still acted with exceptional courage. In one class she drew a parallel between the suffering of Anne Frank and a Ukrainian girl hiding from Russian bombs. After that class, some parents submitted a complaint to the police, and, after a lot of controversy, criminal charges were brought against her.

All teachers who tried to openly discuss the war when it first began had to gradually censor themselves and exercise extreme caution. Many switched to private schools, although even there it wasn’t always possible to find the likeminded. “At first we were told there would be a free atmosphere and humanistic values, but then the policy changed,” says Kiselyova, who in September 2022 began teaching at an elite private school outside Moscow. Her guess is that the school’s founders have ties to the authorities and in the end they had to demonstrate loyalty. “I had to do the ‘letters to a soldier’ thing,” she told us, referring to the widespread practice of assigning children the task of writing to the front to support the troops “defending the motherland.” The letter writing is typically assigned by either the homeroom or language arts teacher.

I couldn’t impose my own opinion; I could only tell them how the letters should be structured and provide a brief introduction. And I talked about how nothing is more precious than human life, nothing is more important than peace, and some children actually wrote about that, about the fact that we need peace. But at that age everything depends on the family, and many wrote in a very prowar way, drew tanks, and said that Russia is a great power holding back European aggression.

As a result, Kiselyova again decided to quit and now hopes that, in her new job, she won’t have to take part in anything of that sort. It is interesting that neither during the interview nor in subsequent meetings did she ever explicitly discuss her political position directly with her employer. Such views are always expressed in Aesopian language rather than in plain Russian.

In the classroom as well, there is much that can be explained about permitted topics without making overt statements. Inga Ryzhova said, “We read The Government Inspector,” Nikolai Gogol’s famous comedy that unambiguously pokes fun at the hypocrisy of government officials, and a boy commented to her: “That sure is relevant today!” She agreed with him and the two understood one another perfectly well. Ryzhova’s students were also deeply moved by Anna Akhmatova’s autobiographical poetic cycle Requiem, about a woman whose son is arrested during the Stalinist Terror.

One girl asked why she wasn’t banned. Why is Akhmatova on the reading list? I told her, “Well, she’s a classic,” but I didn’t go into details. But in fact right there we have all the things that we now understand very well: exile, the tears of the people, those 17 months of numbness [endured by the poem’s mother] – there’s a sense that the children are feeling exactly that same sense of uncertainty as in Requiem. We don’t know what will happen in the future and they don’t understand what awaits them, so this is very familiar to them.

In essence, all the Russian classics – which raise many questions about personal choice, the ability to go against society, crime and punishment, repentance and forgiveness – conflict with the official narrative. But they can be read in different ways. Take War and Peace, which, because of its length, cannot be covered in its entirety. Teachers can pick and choose the parts they want to focus on. They can cover the horrors of a military hospital and focus on Tolstoy’s central point: that war is monstrous and good for nothing but satisfying the ambitions of the powerful while relegating ordinary people to senseless suffering. Or they can delve into the chapter about General Kutuzov’s brilliant conduct of the Battle of Borodino.

In other words, it all depends on the teacher, and teachers have always tended to use readymade templates rather than teaching children to think for themselves. Now, even those who have tried to provide children with critical thinking skills are scared and forced to be extremely cautious. Even Inga Ryzhova, despite the friendly, oppositionist atmosphere at her school, says that to be on the safe side she never gives her students links to the lectures on Russian classics by the writer and literary critic Dmitry Bykov, now in exile. In the past, these lectures were valuable teaching tools, but you can’t assign a “foreign agent.”^[5]

Ultimately, the biggest change for literature teachers isn’t the updated reading list but the return of fear. The teachers consulted for this article all agree that the reading list does not significantly influence what’s discussed in the classroom. This is especially true for high school seniors (eleventh graders in the Russian system). The senior year is when contemporary literature is covered, and these students are so busy preparing for their exams that they don’t get much else done. And only at the top schools in major cities do students take a deep dive into labor-camp prose and conceptualist poetry. In the provinces, the study of contemporary literature rarely extends beyond Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, the removal of certain authors from the program is an important signal. It serves to intensify fear and marks a return to the traditional interaction between the state and teachers, who had better understand what is and isn’t permitted.

In 2023 Svetlana Olontseva, a writer and a teacher of literature and Russian, released her debut novel, Dyslexia, which incorporates many of the details of her work in a rural school. She shows that, over the past thirty years, very little has changed in the educational system in areas far from big cities, citing the famous Soviet philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, who began his career during the Khrushchev thaw by making sense of post-Stalinist society. Dyslexia’s female protagonist ponders his ideas:

“Hell is endless repetition,” Mamardashvili wrote, when “something is happening, but we don’t learn from the experience,” Sanya read back then. It just keeps infinitely repeating. If nothing changes, that means nothing happened, you can’t consider it to have happened. And it will repeat and repeat and repeat, a thought being frequently expressed by political bloggers in various ways.

Sanya goes to school and runs into the past. Into the indestructible USSR. The smell of cabbage soup, the prison corridor, the black windows, the portrait of the vozhd, the honor board. In the place where lessons are being created, lessons are not being learned.

Natalya Taranushenko, who has had decades of experience observing the situation in the country and the school, describes what is happening in similar terms. “Usually, when we were studying Solzhenitsyn, I started by saying that you can’t live in Russia and not read One Day in the Life.” She’s not only referring to the book’s historical importance, but to the real threat of winding up in the protagonist’s situation: “You have to understand how to behave, just in case!” Since she began reading Solzhenitsyn with her eleventh graders long ago, Taranushenko says she has always returned to this thought with them. But she says that around the late 2000s and early 2010s there was a moment when she began to wonder whether this thought was no longer relevant and there was no point in alarming the children or over-dramatizing things. “And then I suddenly realized that here it is – it’s at the threshold, it’s almost here. And the bitter experience of the political prisoner Ivan Denisovich suddenly has new relevance. Russia has an amazing fate. We have come full circle, not even in a spiral, just an infernal circle.”