ORDERS IN CAMPS (АLEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN’S “ONE DAY OF IVAN DENISOVICH” AND “FATELESSNESS” BY IMRE KERTESZ)

The author of this paper examines the general methods of creating metaphors and similes for the manifestation of experience in the outstanding works of camp prose “One Day of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész. The analysis focuses on such contrasting images of the presentation of campmen and guards, as the chaotic flow and murderous order, hard labor and peaceful life. Solzhenitsyn’s frugal camp prose is balanced not only by the stylistic peculiarities of the narrator’s speech, but also by the tropes that reinterpret traditional poetic means. In our analysis, the focus is on the tropes in the text of the novel “One Day of Ivan Denisovich.” We selected the verbal constructions that echo the most famous work of Hungarian camp literature. Thus, metaphorization serves in modern literature also for intertextual tasks. But the Hungarian writer, on the other hand, faces the problem of how to tell his own story, which is shared by millions of people, without the cliches of the literary canon. “Staying in Hell” is how the character’s days in the labor camp are described. The protagonist of “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész, is Gyuri Köves, an adolescent, who must understand the purpose of his hard work in the camp. For this he first has to familiarize himself with the alien world and master the terms and reinvent them. This process is presented through similes and metaphors related to human actions. It may seem strange to compare the works of two writers who have little in common: both Nobel laureates are writing about genocide, both writers experienced the horrors of concentration camp life. At first glance, the authors talk about different camps: Imre Kertész depicts the deportation of Hungarian Jews to fascist concentration camps ordered by the German occupiers, in Solzhenitsyn’s story the place of action is one of the Gulag camps, in which there were political prisoners, “unreliable” people, condemned as enemies of the Soviet people. However, with a seemingly obvious difference, the essence of the camps is the same: in both cases it is a mechanism of repression, a means of physical and moral destruction of a human being. In the works of Russian and Hungarian writers, a common place is found — when depicting the life of prisoners, the authors pay a lot of attention to the description of the work. For Solzhenitsyn and Kertész, labor becomes a means of revealing the personality of the prisoner, it is in the situation of work that the philosophy of the hero, his attitude to the world and to others is revealed. Thus the typological similarity of the two authors lies in the fact that they show their characters in the circumstances of unfreedom and labor for them becomes the essence of being primarily human and, of course, social.