“No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Russian writer and one of the most famous Soviet dissidents

“Pierre Daix? The name won’t necessarily ring a bell for anyone today. Pierre Diax was both a writer and journalist, a member of the French communist party, a resistant and deportee, and he held an official function in the inner workings of the Party, working in the communication channels destined for intellectuals. After Stalin’s death, he welcomed the questioning of the legacy of Stalin, and it is in this capacity that said communist came to preface the first French publication of the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. After all, what could be more natural? Published in an official Sovietic review, Solzhenitsyn is an author who allows one – or at least so one might think – to question the regime of Stalin without rejecting communism altogether. Little by little, Pierre Daix began to admit at least a part of the Soviet reality: yes, there are camps; yes, he refused to see them, being a former deportee of Mauthausen; yes, his old companions held in war-time captivity by the Russians were immediately sent to the Gulag upon their return to Germany; yes… etc. In What I Know of Solzhenitzyn, a book published in 1973, Pierre Daix describes his discovery of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, through his reading of the soviet magazine Novy Mir. The testimony is interesting because it speaks a lot about the surprise stirred-up by the author (Solzhenitzyn) and his book, because of its literary and linguistic brilliance. “The Novy Mir issue had been left on the coffee table,” writes Pierre Daix, “and I picked it up. I expected to find simple Russian, the Russian found in the newspapers, which I could figure out easily. Right from the beginning the narrative was totally incomprehensible for me. Not only did I lack the vocabulary, but I couldn’t even construct the grammatical phrases. I sensed that they had a deep slow rhythm of their own, and that they followed one another in a rigorous succession. The meaning of the sentences, however, continued to escape me. “It’s Proust, Flaubert…” – I hadn’t heard Elsa approach me (editor’s note: he is speaking of Elsa Triolet, writer and wife of L. Aragon). What she said to me seemed absurd. She laughed, a bit taken aback. “That’s real Russian prose,” she continued, “at its best, Pierre. A veritable classic. It’s extraordinary. I don’t know how to explain it to you. It’s as if, here in France, you were to come across the first book of an unknown author, which you had heard about but only by way of anecdote, and then you discover upon reading that it is magnificent, like nothing that has been written since Proust, since Flaubert. Well, that author you are reading — he’s like the two in one. Add Céline into the mix to account for the popular language. It’s unbelievably rich… it’s impossible to really translate.”

L’Homme nouveau
Journalist