The Love-Girl and The Innocent - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The prisoner Nemov, apparently the story's hero, is an honest man serving a term of 10 years for violations of Article 58. At the play's start, Nemov is the production chief of his work group and is later replaced by, Prisoner Engineer Khomich. One of the play's clear recurring themes is the idea that Nemov's honesty is worthless in the face of the realities of camp life. All of the characters who prosper in the play can only do so by means of moral compromises.

The most accessible and traditional plot element is the romance between the two prisoners Nemov (the "innocent" of the title) and Lyuba (the "love-girl"). Nemov learns that Lyuba is having sex with the camp doctor Mereshchun in exchange for better food and living conditions. When Nemov demands that she stop seeing Mereshchun, Lyuba refuses and a conflict arises.

This lovers' conflict does not arise until almost the end of the play, in the final scene of Act III. Their dilemma is apparently resolved in the very brief Act IV, at the end of which an injured and dejected Nemov watches Lyuba enter Mereshchun's office yet again.

The title of the play suggests that the romance of Nemov and Lyuba is meant to be the central plot element, but the romance occupies relatively little stage time. Most of the play is spent in developing the characters of Nemov and Lyuba as they live and work in total ignorance of each other, and in exploring the realities of camp life. Much of the play develops characters and situations that have little or nothing at all to do with the specifics of the romance.

Works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Poetry
  • Prose Poems (1958–1960)
  • Prussian Nights (1974)
Plays
  • The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969)
  • Candle in the Wind (1960)
Novels
  • The First Circle (1968)
  • Cancer Ward (1968)
  • The Red Wheel
    • August 1914 (1971)
    • November 1916 (1985)
    • March 1917 (1989)
    • April 1917 (c. 1991
Short fiction
  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
  • An Incident at Krechetovka Station (1963)
  • Matryona's Place (1963)
  • For the Good of the Cause (1963)
Non-fiction
  • One Word of Truth (1970)
  • A lenten letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia (1972)
  • The Gulag Archipelago (1973–78)
  • Letter to Soviet Leaders (1974)
  • The Oak and the Calf (1975)
  • Warning to the West (1975–76)
  • Lenin in Zürich (1976)
  • A World Split Apart (1978)
  • Mortal Danger (1986)
  • Rebuilding Russia (1990)
  • Invisible Allies (1992)
  • The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century (1995)
  • Russia under Avalanche (1998)
  • Two Hundred Years Together (2003)

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