Abstract

The article aims to explore the relationship between literature and cinema based on the film One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, based on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work of the same name and Caspar Wrede’s 1970 film.
Having as its theme the testimony about the spiritual resistance of a man, Ivan, in a Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novel points to the concentrationary universe captured by the Finnish director’s lenses in a dense drama and with a narrative marked by small details and the ethics of character’s day-to-day life.
Solzhenitsyn’s literary work acutely expresses what Hermann Broch called “ethical literature”, as a “vehicle for leading humanity closer to a total understanding of the world”. If on the one hand this is the dimension of the written work, on the other hand Wrede’s film presents itself as ethical cinema in the sense intended by Andrei Tarkovsky, that is, of images that lead to infinity.
Therefore, the article intends to explore the relationship between ethics, cinematographic art and literature in a dialogue capable of weaving links with the theme of testimony, fundamental in Solzhenitsyn’s work.