The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Book Overview

The action of this full-length play is set in 1945 in a Stalinist slave-labor camp similar to the one where the author himself served an eight-year term. It is basically a love story of two prisoners: Nemov, the "innocent," a new prisoner who is unwilling to compromise in order to survive, and Lyuba, a girl who tells him that in the labor camp integrity is a passport to death. He tries desperately to keep his honor and self-respect while she tries to convince him that he must compromise.

The love story is told gradually and intermittently against the background of labor-camp life. The large number of characters on stage, working, arguing and fighting, emphasizes the cruel, unprivate world in which the pair have to live their lives. Finally the "innocent" realizes that if he will share Lyuba with one of the higher-ups, he will then have everything: extra food, a comfortable job and the woman he loves. All he has to do is make that one compromise.

The Love-Girl and The Innocent was accepted for performance in 1962 by the Moscow Contemporary Theatre but was then banned. It has never been performed in Russia, as the author complained in his courageous letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers, reprinted in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition of Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn's works have been barred in the Soviet Union since 1966 and he was recently expelled from the Russian Writers' Union. The publication of Solzhenitsyn's play in England and America marks its first appearance in print in any language.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374508402
• ISBN13: 9780374508401
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 131 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Campland

When we get annoyed at Solzhenitsyn's lack of insight in contemporary politics (for instance, when he applauds the Russian intervention in Chechnya), we can turn back to his depictions of life in the Soviet work camps and delight in the fact that he used to be different (when the ruling was an enemy suiting his conservative and slavophile ideas, as one is tempted to add). 'The Love-Girl and the Innocent' is a brilliant play about the inhuman world of the camps, that have their own rules, and where nothing of the world outside matters. The 'Innocent' is a newly arrived prisoner, who still bears idealism and is reluctant to adopt the camp techniques of survival. His love for Lyuba, one of the many women forced by circumstances to sell themselves for privileges and rations, tempts him to compromise with himself and betray his moral and emotional loyalties.