222 114 72MB
english Pages 1080 Year 1984
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SOLZHENITSYN
Solzhenitsyn during his
first
months
as a prisoner (Sc\
il)
SOLZHENITSYN A BIOGRAPHY vi
Michael Scammell
WW-
NORTON New
York
•
&
COMPANY
London
The
following works by Alexander Solzhenits\n have been consulted in the preparation of this
biography: August 1914. Translated by Michael Glenny. Copyright 1972. Farrar, Straus
& Giroux.
Cancer
Ward. Translated bv Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. Copyright 1969. Farrar, Straux The First Circle. Translated by Thomas Whitney. Copyright 1968. Harper Giroux.
Row
.
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol.
1.
& &
Thomas Whitney. Copyright 1975. HarTranslated by Thomas Whitney. Copyright 1975.
Translated by
The Gulag Archipelago, \'ol. 2. & Row. The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 3. Translated by Harry Willetts. Copyright Harper & Row The Oak ami the Calf. Translated by Harry Willetts. Copyright 1979. 1978. Harper & Row Prussian Sights. Translated bv Robert Conquest. Copyright 1977. P^arrar, Harper & Row Stories and Prose Poems. Translated by Michael Glenny. Copyright 1971. Straux & Giroux.
per
.
.
Farrar, Straus
The works
&
Giroux.
published bv Harper
tk
Row
Publishers, Inc. have been quoted with their permis-
sion.
Copyright
©
1984 by Michael Scammell
.\11
Published simultaneously
rights reserved. in
Canada by Stoddart,
General Publishing Co. Ltd,
Don
.Mills,
a subsidiary
of
Ontario
Printed in the United States of America.
First Edition
The
te.xt
of this hook
is
composed in Janson,
"^'ith
display type set in Centaur.
Composition and manufacturing by The .Vlaple-Vail Book .Manufacturing Group.
Book design by .\ntonina Krass
Librar\' of
Congress Cataloging
in Publication
Data
Scammell, .Michael. Solzhenitsyn
:
a
biography.
Bibliography; p. Includes index. I.
Solzhenitsyn, .\leksandr Isaevich, 1918-
— Biography.
2.
Authors, Russian
Biography.
PG3488.04Z873
I.
— 20th century
Title.
891.73'44[B]
1984
83-42647
ISBN D-m-DlflDE-M W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 37 Great Russell Street, London WClB 3NU
12
3
4
5
6
7
8 9
SCAnriELL
LK memory of my father and my mother, Frederick and (Constance Scammell,
In
who
did
not live to see
this book completed
Solzhenits\n speaks from another tradition and is
impressive: his voiee
is
aneientness tempered in the is
that of the old Russian Christianity hut
ity that
centur\' tion
test.
me,
it is
Christian-
a
has passed through the central experience of our
— the dehumanization of the — and has emerged
camps
history
this, for
modern but aneient. It is an modern world. His ancientness
not
is
totalitarian concentra-
intact
and strengthened.
If
the testing ground, Solzhenitsxn has passed the
His example
not intellectual or political or even, in
is
the current sense of the word, moral. \\ e have to use an
even older word, tone
—
a hint
a
word
that
still
of death and sacrifice:
false testimonies, a
w
riter
—
retains a religious overn-itiiess.
becomes the w
()cta\
ic)
In a century of
itness to
man.
Paz, "Pol\ os de aquellos lodos"
(Dust after Mud), Plural, no. 30 (March 1974)
Rien ne vous tue un senter
homme comme
d'etre oblige
de repre-
un pays.
—Jacques \ ache,
letter to
Andre Breton
CONTENTS Preface
1
Acknoii^ledgements
1
1 ]
Out
3
Farewell to the Old World
of Chaos and Suffering
Childhood
2] ]
Marriage
5]
25
39
Writer and Communist
4]
60
73
93
Fighting for the Fatherland
6]
7]
8]
2
Arrest
i
i
2
126
An Enemy of the Toiling Masses 144 Two Are AN Organization 160 9] First Steps in the Archipelago
10]
To THE New Jerusalem
11]
203
Special-assignment Prisoner
13]
In
14] 1
190
among the Trusties
Life
12]
5]
THE First Circle
176
220
239
The Parting of the Ways 255 Not Quite Siberia 270 16] 17]
18]
A Son
of
Gulag
289
Exiled "in Perpetuity" 19]
20]
Cancer Ward
314
334
Matryona's Place
356
[
I
Contents
2]
2
The Schoolmaster from Ryazan
1 ]
On
2 2]
Breakthrough
2 3]
A True
24] 2 5
First
26]
2
Enter the
9]
450
480
KGB
5
496
1
528
Period of Adjustment
The Best Form
]
427
464
The Turning-point
A
3 1]
542
of Defence
563
Letter to the Writers' Congress
3 3]
Playing the Western Card
34]
3
Wave
Doubts
Not Another Pasternak
30]
3
391
Lenin Prize Candidate
]
2 8]
3 2
of the
372
410
Helper of the Party
The Crest
]
2 7
THE Threshold
Portrait of the Artist at Fifty
5]
6]
585
612 63
Expulsion from the Writers' Union 3
The Taming of Now Mir 678 The Nobel Prize 697 8] The Start of a Vast Enterprise
653
7]
3
39]
Death OF A Poet
40] 4
Whose
1 ]
42] 4
3]
44
Anyway?
Is It
Divorce
750
770
The Gllag Archipelago
Deported
45] First
Months
in
the West
Clarifications
48] 49]
On
787 8
THE Move
1 ]
The Sage 5 2
]
of
882
904
Vermont
Epilogue Notes
931
950
974
995
Select Bibliography
Index
847
864
Talking TO THE Europeans
50]
1
829
Taking Positions
47]
5
737
Coming into the Open
]
46]
Life
719
1019
1025
Photographs follow pages 336 and 644
PREFACE
Writing the hiographx of ing as to call for
a living
man
some explanation.
is
sufficiently
hazardous an undertak-
Ihe very word "biography" provokes
expectations of candour and disclosure that are often precluded
w hen one
simply not feasible to exercise that close scrutin\ of private emotions, subconscious desires, and deep-seated motives
writes about a contcmporarv.
It is
that are the stock-in-trade of the post-i'reudian biographer. to inspect
anv but
a tin\- fraction
Nor
throw light into obscure corners of the subject's continuing and therefore incomplete: there
is
life.
It is
mav
possible
a story that is still
always the possibility that some
new event, some new w ork, or some new revelation will occur perhaps transform our perception of w hat has gone before. Or ject
is it
of the letters and private papers that can
to
modify or
that the sub-
turn, in old age, to reveal a facet of his character that had been
till then. For these reasons, the present work aspires more than a biographical chronicle, a portrait "from the outreiving less on psychological analysis than on an examination of the
completely unremarked to being little
side,"
biographical and historical facts available to me.
This simple caveat would apply to the biography of any contemporary, and the adjustment the reader needed to make would not be very great. But there are special problems encountered in writing about a person who has lived the greater part of his life in the Soviet Union that immensely complicate the task of the biographer and that the reader needs to understand to avoid certain types of frustration.
Though
these problems are general, they
take on an extra dimension in the case of such a controversial figure as Alex-
ander Solzhenitsvn.
The
first
great difficulty to be contended 13
w
ith
is
that for sixty-five years
Preface
[14]
the Soviet government has laboured systematically to destrov
all
notions of
nowhere and at no time have governments been addicted to the truth. But nowhere in the modern world has such a prolonged and determined assault been carried out bv so powerful a government, and now here is the divorce between observable reality and the picture of that reality presented by the authorities greater and more striking than in the Soviet Union. The ferocity of this assault has a dual
objective truth. This
is
not at
first
sight surprising:
purpose: to distort or destroy the individual's perception of realitv, and to
conquer that perception and remould
it
according to the government's wishes.
But since the exigencies of politics are inevitably short-term and changeable, whereas reality and our perception of it are (or should be) long-term and more or less durable, there is a permanent conflict between observable reality and the need to distort it, which leads to such demonstrable Soviet absurdities as doctored photographs of the changing leadership, where faces are erased one bv one, or the distribution of substitute pages for the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, to be pasted in over articles about individuals w ho have fallen into
disgrace.
One w work today,
not find Solzhenitsvn in that or anv other Soviet reference
ill
for in his case, the Soxiet
mania
for rewriting history has reached
absurd heights. At the time of his literary debut (with Khrushchev's express appro\al), he
w as
hailed as "a true helper of the Party" and "a writer
w ith
a
rare talent" in the tradition of Tolstoy. In printing the bare facts of his biog-
raphy, the newspapers emphasized his distinguished war record and played
down
the facts of his imprisonment and exile, pointing out that he had suf-
fered from "groundless political accusations" from
exculpated.
A
tigious literary it.
When
which he had since been
year later he w as nominated for the Soviet Union's most pres-
aw ard, the Lenin Prize, and only narrowly missed w inning
the attitude of the authorities began to change, so did "history."
Solzhenitsvn became "a mediocre writer with an exaggerated view of his ow n
importance," w ho had "abandoned his conscience" and w as socially dangerous.
and
This later escalated to "corrupt self-seeker" and "internal emigre, alien
and culminated in accuhad "surrendered to the Ciermans," had "fought with Vlasov against Soxiet forces," and had even "worked for the Gestapo." More recently, since being expelled from the USSR, he has been accused of ha\'ing worked (from the beginning of his career) for the CL\. Much of this is patently absurd and can be dismissed as the inevitable consequence of the fluctuations of the Part\ line. But it also presents some special problems, not all of w hich can be overcome bv even the most assiduous biographer, especially if he is working in the West. For example, one is obliged to resort to Soviet sources, while knowing that little credence can be given to printed information without a careful verification of the facts. But they cannot be simply discounted or "reversed" either, for they quite often turn out to be correct, or correct in part. Generally speaking, working in a subject area affected by Soviet propaganda is like working in a mighty blast hostile to the entire life of the Soviet people,"
sations that he
Preface of wind,
learn to lean into
^'oii
it
[15]
order to sta\ upright, but there
in
ever-present danger that you will lean too far
blow ing for
moment,
a
fall flat
on vour
— and,
if
the
is
an
wind should stop
face.
.\nother problem that cannot be v\ished awa\-
the difhcultx' of access
is
and sources. The Soviet Union, as Solzhenitsvn has graphicallv shown, is still run more or less along the lines of a giant concentration camp. The borders are sealed, foreign visitors are grudgingK admitted under the most stringent conditions, and travel is restricted to a tin\- proportion of the country. 1 o understand what this means for the foreign biographer, one to places
should
to
tr\
imagine w riting the biograph\- of
Greene while restricted to travelling
w ithin
w hich thev
the capital cities of the countries in
a
Hemingwav
a radius
lived
or a Ciraham
of twentv-five miles of
and along rigidlv defined w ith no access to their
corridors to specified resorts and places of interest, but birthplaces and the various
brought up, or to the people ative years.
closed to
me
my own
In
since 1973,
towns or villages in w hich thev lived and were who might have know n them during their form-
case,
even these restricted
when
I
on dissident writers confiscated
was detained as
at
possibilities
Moscow
contraband, and
mv
w riter Lvdia Chukovskava. Unfortunately, the problem of access to sources that be resolved simply by staving awa\' and communicating
have been
mv
airport,
activities
notes
used as
a
pretext to vilify the Soviet
cannot
this creates
at a distance.
Soviet mails are closeh' watched, and telephones are often tapped:
it
The takes
more than ordinary courage and ingenuity for a Soviet citizen to communiWorse still, manv of Solzhenitsvn's friends and relatives in the Soviet Union or even those who simplv supplied him w ith
cate with a foreigner.
information for his books
and
their lives
made
— — have
unbearable.
nitsvn has also scored
been subjected to svstematic harassment official campaign to discredit Solzhe-
The
some notable
successes.
Two
of the closest friends of
childhood and youth, Nikolai V'itkevich and the now deceased Kirill Simonyan, were induced to speak out against him after his expulsion. His aged
his
was persuaded to part w ith some of her memoirs and make disparaging remarks about Solzhenitsvn's familv in her dotage. And the natural grief and resentment of his first w ife, Natalia Reshetovskava,
aunt, Irina Shcherbak,
after her
acrimonious divorce from her husband, were exploited bv the
w hen they obtained her memoirs, carefullv edited them, and pubthem in a tendentious and distorted form.
authorities lished
—and partlv because — Solzhenitsvn made
Partlv as a result of this unremitting pressure
answered while
it
in the Soviet Union, to maintain an almost complete silence about and w hen he did release certain facts, to do so onK w hen he regarded "safe" or w hen the\ furthered his struggle with the authorities. In
as
this sense, the facts of his
biographv became
described or passed over depending on
w here
a
weapon
in that struggle, to
the ad\antage lay.
I
his
The Oak and
the Calj\
w here one w as struck bv the abundance of
be
emerged
with great claritv from Solzhenitsvn's revealing (but also misleading) oir.
it
a rule,
still
his past,
them
to certain psychological imperatives
mem-
military
Preface
[i6]
metaphors employed in the narrative. His life was described in terms of constant attack and retreat, bridgeheads, flanking movements, cavalry charges, and artillery bombardments. There was little room (or desire) for objective analysis and dispassionate debate, and the biographer who tries to follow him is in danger of being swept off his feet. After his expulsion to the West, Solzhenitsyn did not significantly change his attitude to these matters and still
attempted to exercise some control over discussion of his biography; but,
of course, the immediate danger to himself had receded and the intensity of his
concern w as somewhat diminished. In the light of these obstacles,
it is
natural to ask
\\
hether the attempt
is
and w hat the attitude of Solzhenitsyn himself is to such an enterprise. 1 here have been a number of attempts to w rite his biography before, most notably by David Burg and George Feifer in 1970. At that time Solzhenitsyn was still in the Soviet Union, and his struggle to manage the facts of his biography was at its height. After initially seeming to favour their plan, he turned against them and denounced them, pronouncing an anathema on biographies of him generally that has maintained its force to this day. Burg and Feifer went ahead and published their book in 1972. It was an adequate summary of w hat was know n at that time and certainly did not cause Solzhenitsyn any harm, but it suffered from the crippling limitations that applied to anyone writing about Solzhenitsyn's past as early as 1972, and inevitably was padded w ith speculation and superfluous detail. Since then, the situation has changed considerably. In 1971 Solzhenitsyn published August I9M, with much information about his mother and his mother's family, and rather less about his father's family. After this came an attempt by the Soviet authorities to exploit this information for their own ends, to w hich Solzhenitsyn replied with further details in a series of interviews w ith Western correspondents. 1 hen came the three volumes of 7 he Gulag Archipelago, containing many pages and even chapters of autobiography; The Oak and the Calf, which is all autobiography; and more recently the publication of Solzhenitsyn's early pla\s in Russian, in w hich there is again a significant autobiographical element. Meanwhile, two of his closest associates from his labour-camp years, Lev Kopelev and Dimitri Panin, have emigrated to the West and published memoirs that cover their time spent with Solzhenitsyn; and Natalia Reshetovskaya's memoirs, though captured and doctored by the Soviet authorities, contain a mass of valuable information, \\
orth making at
especially
when
There
is
all
juxtaposed with some of the other sources just mentioned.
thus no comparison
Solzhenitsyn w as
now with
the situation as
it
obtained
when
Union, but the key to writing a successful biography has nevertheless lain, all along, in his attitude and his willingness to co-operate. Without that willingness, many key sources, even in the West, would still refuse to talk. Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn's attitude to a biography did change after his arrival in the West, though not at once, not without still
in the Soviet
considerable misgivings and hesitations, and not without regrets after the
work had
started.
Prf.facf. I
here.
he dc'tailctl reasons w In this happened would take too long to describe SutHce it to sa\ that my interest in \\ riting Sol/.henitsyn's biography
dates back to 1970, that theirs.
I
is,
make
did in tact
to the time
when
liurg
beginning but, owing to
a
ran into serious difficulties and abandoned
rial,
nits\
Dr
[17]
n w
as expelled,
I
w as
in regular contact
at
1
By
1974,
when
mate-
Solzhe-
two
little
seryices for Sol-
Heeb's request. In February 1974, when Solzhenitsyn's expul-
was
New
York reyising the .\merican translation of me w hat racing fans an inside track with Solzhenitsyn. VVe did not meet until the mentioned the idea of a biograph\' and 1974, and when we did,
sion took place,
\()lume
were writing
l-eifer
with Solzhenitsyn's Swiss law yer,
Ileeb, and had been able to carr\- out one or
zhenitsyn
it.
and
a lack ot tirst-hand
I
in
of The Gulag Archipelago. This naturalh gaye
would call autumn ot
I
requested his co-operation.
His response was affable but guarded. An early draft I showed him reminded him, he w rote, of looking at his reflection in a puddle across which "a strong breeze was blowing." I lis likeness was there, but almost unrecognizable. 1 urged that the best v\ ay to put an end to (mostly Soyiet) misrepresentations of his life was to allow a reliable and accurate biograph\- to appear, and pointed out that this could be done onK' w ith his appnnal and help. Solzhenitsyn telt that it was possible only if it were to be an authorized biograph\-, but authorization would require unstinted attention and concentration on his part, and he w as not prepared to diyert time from other projects that were precious to him. The discussion, mainly by letter, extended o\er many months. I was unhappy with the concept of authorization, since it implied a degree of superyision to which I was unwilling to commit myself and w hich would compromise the book's independence. On the other hand, I understood that it w as difficult for Solzhenitsyn to abandon his all-or-nothing position, because
Union and
it
expressed the logic of his entire career
in the Soyiet
reflected psychological driyes that could not lightly be set aside.
we agreed on a compromise more English than Russian: I was w hat questions I liked, and Solzhenitsyn would repl\ at w hateyer length and in w hatexer detail he thought fit. In practice, this meant a yisit to his house in X'ermont (in the strictest secrecx) in the summer of 1977, and a stay there of one week, during which time I questioned him for one to three hours each day after his w riting w as finished. Solzhenitsyn showed me his juyenilia and some early works, placed certain letters and documents at m\' disposal, and allowed me to browse through and question him on his photograph albums. He allowed me to interyiew his second w ife, Natalia Syetloya, and authorized me to interyiew one or tw o close friends and a relatiye by marriage, X'eronica Stein (a cousin of his first w ife). After our initial interyiews, I continued to send Solzhenitsyn supplementar\- questions by letter, and he would send brief answers, but this procedure did not suit Solzhenits\n's temperament or w ork habits, and he cut it short in 1979. The termination of relations was friendly but final and is important to an understanding of some of w hat follows. OccaEyentually,
free to ask
Preface
[i8]
most precise and detailed data w ill be accompanied bv speculawhich produces an unfortunate impression of imprecision. This stems from the impossibilit\', since 1979, of obtaining direct answ ers from Solzhenitsyn to even the simplest questions of fact, often sionallv, the
tion about the surrounding events,
in cases I
\\
here alternative sources of information are not available. (Perhaps
me
should add that 95 per cent of the information Solzhenitsvn gave
when he
Fortunatelv, this impediment w as mitigated at a late stage in
mv work
returned to central Russia from
bv
con-
to the age of thirty-seven,
cerned his ancestry and early
up
life
exile.)
most unexpected development. In 1982
a
I
received a message that Sol-
who lives in Moscow had learned w as w riting and w as anxious for me to hear her side of the storv of her relations w ith Solzhenitsvn. She felt that she had been unfairlv maligned by Solzhenitsyn in his memoir and in certain of his public statements and wished to vindicate herself and rehabilitate her reputation. Moreover, she now realized and regretted, it seems, the wav in w hich the Soviet zhenits\n's
first
wife, Natalia Reshetovska\a,
of the biography
authorities
,
I
had manipulated her memoirs, and therefore had
reason for w ishing to set the record straight.
As
a result,
respondence with her, and between March 1982 and a series
I
Mav
this additional
entered into cor1983 she sent
me
of letters touching upon her relationship w ith her former husband,
some excerpts from her rewritten memoirs. She willinglv answered the various questions I put to her, including manv concerning together with
uncontroversial aspects of her earlv not
mv
to trv
how
and give this
actions.
life
with Solzhenitsyn.
It
was not and
is
intention to take sides in the often bitter quarrel between them, but a fair
account of their joint
life
and
their parting
and
to
show
important relationship affected Solzhenitsvn's work and public In the perhaps controversial
and undoubtedlv painful matter of
Resheto\ska\a's attempted suicide in 1970,
I
should make
it
clear that
I
received
a circumstantial account of this episode from "both sides" (first from Solzhenitsvn's side via his cousin-in-law, and then from Reshetovskaya) and that the accounts matched in everv important detail. do not expect mv biographv to be anvthing other than controversial, at least among those in w hom Solzhenitsvn's w ork evokes strong emotions. In a Hash of insight concerning m\ possible treatment of her problems w ith her former husband, Reshetovskava once wrote that "vou w ill probably end up pleasing neither side" w hich is all too likelv an outcome (and w ill probabl\- extend to political matters no less than personal ones). Solzhenitsyn's is a personalitv that is w rit uncommonlv large. It w ould be idle to deny that he is a man w ith substantial faults, as well as w ith some towering virtues. Some I
—
have called him
a saint, a
prophet,
a political visionarv, a living literary clas-
Others think him a megalomaniac, a monster of egotism, and a literary mediocritw At one time one almost never heard a word against him; he w as lionized and idolized. Since then the pendulum has sw ung back again, and
sic.
he
is
now more often denounced as embittered or ignored as irrelevant. pendulum has been a reaction against exces-
Insofar as the sw ing of the
Preface
[ i
9]
and often insincere adulation, it is health\ and to be welcomed, and it is no part of mv intention to "redress the balance." M\- aim has been not to act as advocate or judge, but to illuminate and explain a (]uintessential Russian and a major figure ot our era. This hgure indisputablx" merits close stud\ in in m\' his own right, but there is mf)re to it than that. It would be a pit\ view, if controvers\- o\er Sol/.henits\n's personalitx' and opinions w ere to cloud our understanding of that societ\ and that political order from w hich he sprang, for it has definitely been part of my plan to examine that societx through the prism of one exceptional man's life and career. That is important for two reasons. In the first place, it is impcjssible to understand Solzhenitsyn without grasping the nature of the societv in w hich he was born and lived, and the price he paid for achiexing what he did. Secondly, that society also merits study. One is aware that millions of words have been spilled already on the subject of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik putsch, the Leninist experiment, and the societ\" that resulted from them. Solzhenitsyn himself has added significantly and invaluabh' to their volume, and he continues to do so. Yet the debate is far from concluded. B\ its restitution of medieval and in some respects barbarous social and political sive
,
forms and their continuance into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century,
temporarv aberration of European temporarv than the similar phenomenon of nazism) or the beginning of the end, the start of a general collapse of our civilization into barbarism? Whatever the case, it seems to me of vital importance to come to grips the Soviet state defies
much
culture (though
all
logic. Is this a
less
with this phenomenon and understand
matized it
it
in 1917.
with
To
a
it.
It is
the question of the age.
And
and career, w ith all his faults and failings, has draforce and consistencv unprecedented since Lenin first posed
Solzhenitsyn, in his
life
studv this
life,
therefore,
is
also to studv the question.
Leonia,
New
Jersev
July 1983
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The
writing of this biography would not have been possible witiiout the co-
operation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in
Zurich
Vermont
in
who first discussed the me to spend a week am extremelv grateful
1974 and kindly invited
in the
summer
of 1977.
I
unique indulgence and for the wise tolerance of sight of the finished product. for
I
am
project with at his
to
b\' letter until
him
me in
for this
his decision not to require a
similarly grateful to Natalia Solzhenitsyn
consenting to be interviewed and for generously answering
mentary questions
house
our correspondence ended
my
in 1979.
supple-
Another
on Solzhenitsyn's life between his return from West w as Solzhenitsyn's cousin by marriage, \ eronica Stein (together with her husband, Yuri), for w hose selfless assistance I am also grateful; and in the final stages of w riting this book, I received invaluable assistance, by letter, from Solzhenitsyn's first w ife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, who showed me some chapters from her revised memoirs and willingly answered every question I put to her. Among the many people who have been friends or associates of Solzhenitsyn at one time or another and who answered questions or supplied me with information, I would particularly like to thank Irina Alberti, Heinrich Boll, Claude Durand, Efim Etkind, Alexander Gorlov, Dr Fritz Heeb, Per Hegge, Peretz Hertzenberg, Lev Kopelev, Naum Korzhavin, Madimir Maximov, Zhores Medvedev, Victor Nekrasov, Raisa Orlova, Dimitri Panin, Maria Rozanova, the late Janis Sapiets, the late Father Alexander Schmemann, Andrei Sinyavsky, Nikita Struve, and Sigmund Widmer. Others who contributed to this book with help or information and w hom I would like to thank include Mikhail Agursky, Bayara Aroutunova, Mark rich source of information
internal exile
and
his expulsion to the
— Acknowledgements
[22]
Bonham Fritz,
Carter, Nicholas Bethell, Vladimir Bukovsky, Valeri Chalidze, Paul
Alexander Ginzburg, the
late
Evgenia Ginzburg, Michael Glenny, Xenia
Edward
Winthrop Knowlton, Oskar Luboshitz, Dr Eva Martin, Galina Nekrasova, Petr Pasek, Boris Sachs, Raissa Scriabine, Maria Slonim, Victor Sparre, Dieter Steiner, Vladimir Voinovich, Anna Voloshina, Thomas Whitney, Irina Zholkovskaya, and Ilya Zilberberg.
Howard Johnson,
Alexis Klimoff,
Krause, Frances Lindley, Pavel Litvinov,
Kline,
Dr Emil
acknowledge the patient assistance and encouragement over this book William \\'eatherb\' (whose idea it was), Philippa Harrison, James Cochrane, and Starling Lawrence and especially the unobtrusive erudition of my copy editor, Otto Sonntag, whose innumerable improvements are invisible to anvone but myself. My thanks also go to Dr Michael Nicholson, formerly of the University of Lancaster and now at Oxford University, the most selfless and encyclopaedically informed of Solzhenitsyn scholars, who read the entire book in manuscript form and offered me all kinds of invaluable advice and information; to the eagle-eyed and similarly well informed Dr Martin Dewhirst of Glasgow University, who also read the manuscript; and to Tatyana Litvinova, who read and commented on most of that part of the book that deals with Solzhenitsyn's life inside the Soviet Union. I am indebted more than I can say to Natalia Lusin of Columbia University, New York, for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript, for compiling the source notes and bibliography, and for helping to see the book through the final stages of its I
should
like to
of the various editors
—
who watched
preparation for the press.
The many
typists
who worked on
wanderings include Jean Dick,
Anne
Christopher Packard, and Batya Harlow.
and the
rest of the staff at the
cheerful assistance in tracking to
quote from an unpublished
Khan
for assistance in
the manuscript during
Pattinson, I
should
Radio Liberty
down article
Nancy Boensch, like to
library, in
information; Alan
on Solzhenitsvn's
me
solvent as
I
author's
thank Sara Hassan
New Lew
York, for their for permission
stay in Zurich;
reproducing some photographs; and
ager, Geoffrey Clark, for keeping
its
Patrick Merla,
my
Anwar
bank man-
overran deadline after dead-
line. I
am
grateful to the
W.
Averell Harriman Institute for the
Study of the Soviet Union (formerly the Russian Institute),
at
Advanced Columbia
University, for an appointment as a senior visiting fellow in 1981-83; to the
New
York Institute for the Humanities for making me a visiting scholar in 1981-82 and a fellow in 1982-84; and to the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, and the Arts Council of Great Britain, for financial assistance while I was writing this book. I cannot omit the customary, and in this case richly deserved, thanks to my patient and understanding wife, Erika, for her unswerving support over an unduly long period of literary gestation (not to speak of her assistance with typing and other chores); and to my long-suffering children, Catherine, Stephen, Lesley, and Ingrid, who will now have to find a new subject for their unfilial jokes.
SOLZHENITSYN
I
OUT OF CHAOS AND SUFFERING IF GOD with
PRESIDED ovcf the birth of Alexander Solzhenitsvn, he w appropriate omens, for the ehild
\\
as
as lavish
born into an atmosphere of
chaos and suffering that rivalled anything he was to experience
in his later
months before his birth his voung father had died in excruciating pain from wounds received in a hunting accident. I lis griet-stricken, pregnant mother had rejoined her family in a nearby summer resort, only to find herself in the thick of the pitched battle that w as then raging betw een Reds life.
Six
W hites
Lenin and his in Russia's C^ivil \\ ar. In Petrograd and Moscow band of Bolsheviks w ere fighting ferociously to consolidate their coup d'etat, and the w hole of Russia w as awash with blood. December 1918 in his uncle's \illa in KisSolzhenits\n was born on lovodsk, a fashionable spa in the Caucasus Mountains, in southern Russia. His dead father, Isaaki Solzhenitsvn, would have been twenty-seven years old at the time of his son's birth. His mother, Taissia Solzhenitsyn, was
and
,
small
1
1
twentv-three.
The
its
Solzhenitsvn familv w as not special enough to have kept track of ancestrv. A supposed forebear, Philip Solzhenits\n, is known to have
colony of peasants outside the tow n of Bobrov, in the central Russian province of Voronezh, at the time of Peter the Great. In 1698, enraged b\' some routine act of rebelliousness, Peter had ordered the
been living
in a free
colony to be burnt to the ground and had forced its inhabitants to move elsewhere. About a hundred years later another Solzhenitsyn, Alexander's
was con\icted of ha\ ing participated in another peasant \'oronezh and was exiled to the just conquered virgin lands in
great-great-grandfather, rebellion in
the south
—
a traditional
method of colonizing new 25
territory at that time.
SOLZHENITSYN
[26]
There was thus a tradition of stubbornness and independence in the which was to stand them in good stead when they were sent to the new ly created province of Stavropol, a wedge of territory on a low plateau betw een the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Plain. To the north and south were the two major "hosts," as they were called, of the Kuban and family,
Terek Cossacks,* who had helped conquer these territories and been installed here by Catherine the Great to secure the new frontiers. There were some Cossacks in Stavropol, too, but not many, for this area had been reserved by the crown.
The
chief colonists were the so-called inogorodniye or "outsiders," ,
somewhat contemptuous name applied by Cossacks to non-Cossack Russians and subsequently adopted by the latter as a normal mode of descripthe
tion.
lush
The Solzhenitsyns were non-Cossack Russians, or "outsiders." The land they found in Stavropol Province was less fertile than valleys of the Kuban and Terek rivers, but there was plenty
According to Solzhenitsxn himself, the Solzhenitsyns and let
loose in the wild steppe country
lived in it
up
harmony,
v\'ith
beyond the
Kuma
their fellows
River,
in the
of
it.
"were
where they
land in such abundance that they didn't have to divide
They sowed where they ploughed, sheared sheep where their down roots."' next generation of Solzhenitsyns we know nothing, except the
in strips.
carts took
Of
them, and put
the
the Voronezh rebel's son and Solzhenitsvn's great-grandfather, Efim, which survives in the patronymic of Solzhenitsvn's grandfather, Semyon Efimovich. But with Grandfather Semyon we enter the second half of the nineteenth century and the era of photography. A sole surviving faded snapshot shows him standing, tall and self-consciously erect, in a field of corn, gazing firmly into the camera lens. Balding, with bristling Victorian mustaches and a full beard, and wearing a striped shirt, cravat, waistcoat, and jacket, he
name of
looks the very picture of a self-confident
The
yeoman
farmer.
was know n kxallv as Sablia, after the man\'branched shallow stream that flowed through it in winter (in summer it was usually dry), though it is now marked on the map as Sablinskoye. It was a typical south Russian settlement, consisting of a single main street lined w ith adobe houses, each with its ow n yard and kitchen garden at the back and outbuildings for the livestock. By the 1880s it had a parish church and a parish school and w as a posting stage on the broad, muddy road that wound its way from the town of Stavropol, the provincial capital, to Georgievsk, forty miles away, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. There was little to distinguish this place, except perhaps the view of the distant mountains, which had so captivated Lev Tolstoy when he drove through here in 1851 on his w ay to join the Terek Cossacks. Early one morning, he writes, he was stunned by these "gleaming white colossi w ith their delicate silhouettes and village
where they
li\ed
the distinct contours of their
summits etched against the distant sky."- It is model and hero passing this way
pleasant to think of Solzhenitsyn's literary
*The Cossacks of southern Russia generally took their name from the river along w hich they settled. The Kuban and the Terek were the principal rivers of the North Caucasus.
— t
Out some 70 years
of
Chaos and Suffering
l)efore his disciple's birth,
when
the Solzhenitsvns
[27] still
toiled
Did Sol/.henitsyn think of that when, 120 vears later, he devoted the opening pages of August 1914 to an evocation of that same mountain scenery (and was there an element of competition in that opening)? The Solzhenitsyn farm was about six miles east of Sablia and consisted of a low clay farmhouse and a cluster of outbuildings standing in the midst of the open steppe, surrounded by fields. This isolation was a distinctive feature of the Russian South, hi the North, the vast majorit\- of the peasants were serfs or share-croppers, living on their ow ners' land and pa\ ing tribute in the form of goods, taxes, or labour. 1 here the land w as managed collectively, divided into strips and allocated on a familv basis, under a feudal system whose inicjuities were to provide much of the fuel for the Re\()lution when it eventually came. In the South, with land available in such abundance, independence w as the rule, the peasants either ow ning or leasing lartje parcels of land and working as individual farmers, ihis bred an entirely different spirit from that pre\ailing in the North and was to leave its mark at
the plough.
on Solzhenitsyn,
Semyon, his elder sons.
too.
Solzhenitsyn's grandfather, worked the farm with the help of
He
married twice. By his
first
wife, Pelageya, he had three
sons and two daughters, and by his second, Marfa, a son and a daughter. The gap between their ages w as considerable. Konstantin, the eldest of the first three sons, was over twenty w hen the youngest, Isaaki, w as born. The middle son was \'asil)', and in between came the two daughters, Evdokia and Anastasia. .Vlarfa's two children, considerably younger than Isaaki, were Ilya
and Maria.' Solzhenitsyn maintains that his paternal grandfather was not particu-
and that several pairs of oxen and horses for ploughing, a dozen a couple of hundred sheep were the sum total of his disposable wealth. And it seems that he employed no hired labourers, so that his land could not ha\ e been particularly extensive. But after Semvon's remarriage to Marfa, a rift appears to have opened up between Semyon and the two older sons. Marfa, according to Solzhenitsyn, was "energetic and greed\-," anxious to take over the family property for herself and her two children, and Konstantin and Vasily w ere sufficiently well off to move away and bu\' farms of their own. Meanwhile, the two daughters, Evdokia and Anastasia, were married and moved to the neighbouring villages of Kursavka and Nagutskoye.* Solzhenitsyn's father, Isaaki, who was born on 6june 1891 (Old Style), had been just a child when his mother died and was replaced by an unwelcome stepmother. Solzhenitsyn believes that he felt his orphanhood keenly, but he was set apart from his older brothers and sisters in another way, too larly rich
cows, and
*Coincidentally the birthplace of Yuri Andropov. t Until the Revolution, Russia
adhered to the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind
the Gregorian calendar, used in Europe and most of the rest of the world. Isaaki was born on 19
May
according to the Gregorian calendar.
SOLZHENITSYN
[28]
first and only one of the family to receive a proper education. Whereas the others had merely attended the local parish school, before joining their father on the farm, Isaaki had gone on to secondary school and then
he was the
to the
unheard-of heights of a gymnasium
in Pyatigorsk, the biggest
of the
Caucasian mountain spas. It had not been accomplished without a struggle. Semvon saw no reason why his third son shouldn't do exactly as the first two join him on the land. For a whole year he had refused to yield demands for a proper schooling, while Isaaki marked time on the farm. But in the end Isaaki's stubbornness had w on through, and he w ent to Pvatigorsk. After four years at the gymnasium the whole process was repeated, and another year passed before Isaaki was allowed bv his disgruntled and sceptical father to go on to university. 1 his was in 1911, when Isaaki was
had done and to Isaaki's
twenty.
He went
first
to the University of
1914 Solzhenitsvn
tells a
Kharkov,
in the
Ukraine. In August
story of Isaaki's being refused admission because
name, the Orthodox Christian "Isaaki," was confused with the Jewwhich would have made him subject to the limitations on universitN' admissions for the Jews. Solzhenitsvn heard this story from a distant relative, but he now believes it to be mistaken. It seems to be true, however, that Isaaki's peasant name, which he had been given in honour of the obscure saint Isaac the Dalmatian, on w hose name-day he was born, struck university ears as outlandish and quaint and w as already old-fashioned in the central parts of Russia. But Kharkov, in any case, did not suit Isaaki very well. The gymnasium in P)'atigorsk had been of a \er\' high intellectual standard, whereas this new ly opened provincial university, whose only virtue was that it w as cheap and fairly close to home, was mediocre. The following year, in 1912, overcoming any residual opposition from his father, Isaaki transferred to the his first
ish "Isaak,"
University of le
I
Moscow.
was now
at
the top of the educational ladder and began to enter fully
into the intellectual life of the time. In the short period of ten years, he
made Yet
the leap from peasant to
it
Isaaki
membership
in the
had
metropolitan intelligentsia.
was not plain sailing. Sensitive to his origins and loyal to his roots, torn by the conflict betw een the pull of his peasant past and his
w as
hopes for a brilliant future. His ambition,
like that
of generations of schol-
was somehow to link these two worlds ot past and future, to be a bridge betw een them and perhaps to narrow the gap for future generations. But the task was uphill, and human nature, as he found it in himself and others, unregenerate. According to Solzhenitsvn's description of his father in August 1914, Isaaki was very attached to his native village and always returned to work on the family farm during his vacations. But he grew increasingly estranged from his roots as his education progressed, and he w as teased bv the villagers arship boys before and since,
for his city clothes
*The their
and
his luinuhiik, or "populist,"* opinions.
Russian populists were Utopian
name from
188()s.
the Russian narod,
Herzen was
a
socialists
who
He
regarded
took their inspiration from Proudht)n and
meaning "people." Ihev were
influential in the 187()s
forerunner and Mikhailovskv their chief theoretician.
and
Out
of
Chaos and Suffering
[29]
himself as "someone w ho had received an education in order to use benefit of the people
the word, and
\\
The two
and
\\
ho would go back
to the people
w
ith
it
for the
the book,
ith l()\e."
intellectual
movements
that appear to ha\e influenced the
most (and that were to be not w ithout influence on Solzhenits\ n himself) were populism and lolstox anism,* both of w hich were well past their peak by 1912 and would have been regarded as distinctly oldfashioned in Moscow. The populists had long since been supplanted in the public esteem bv the anarchists, the anarchists bv the Socialist Revolutionaries and increasingly by the Social Democrats, which was the innocuoussounding official name of w hat was in effect the (Communist Party. Karlicr that same year, in fact, in Prague, a then obscure law\er bv the name of Vladimir Ulyanov (alias Lenin) had taken over the leadership of the Social Democratic Party and was laving the foundations of a tightiv knit conspiratorial group that had taken the name of Bolsheviks. .And shortlv afterw ards the Party was joined bv a lapsed seminarist named losif Dzhugashx ili (alias Stalin), whose views on revolutionary development far outstripped, in their ruthlessness, the theories of the fierce-sounding Socialist Revolutionaries and idealistic Isaaki the
anarchists.
When war
broke out between Russia and Germany, on
August 1914, on the family farm in the south and helping his father in the fields. Two manifestos declaring war on Germany and .\ustria were read aloud in the Sablia village church and then posted in the church square. A commission of local worthies w as appointed to deal w ith requisitions. Sablia's horses were rounded up and handed over to the district centre for use as remounts bv local detachments of the Cossack cavalry. But w hen the time came for the villagers to be recruited, they were sent to the infantr\ for Russian "outsiders" could not be admitted to the exclusive Cossack regi1
Isaaki vxas holidaving
,
ments.
The
Solzhenitsyn brothers escaped the recruiters' attention completely.
Konstantin was too old. X'asilv was passed over because he had several gers missing
And
from one hand.
their stepbrother, Ilya,
Isaaki
was excused because he was
w as too young. Rather
a
fin-
student.
surprisingly, in the light
of his Tolstoy an and pacifist views, Isaaki decided to enlist.
Whether
this
was the fruit of impulse, reinforced by the w ave of patriotic feeling that swept the country after the declaration of war, or w hether it w as in response to some deeper imperative in Isaaki's nature, we do not know. But his decision was to make a lasting impression on Solzhenitsyn when he subsequcntl) learned of it, and it was with the story of his father's enlistment that Solzhenitsyn opened August 1914 and his epic on the fate of twentieth-century Russia.
Within
a
month
of the declaration of war, Isaaki was in
Moscow. HavHeavx
ing completed an officer-training course at the Sergiev School of Artillery,
he was dispatched to the front to commence his service with Field
*Tolstovanism was an
ill-defined philosophico-religious
about nonresistance to violence and the need for
a
movement
inspired by Tolstoy's ideas
kind of agrarian socialism
in Russia.
[30]
SOLZHENITSYN
Marshal Bryusov's First Grenadier Artillery Brigade. Little is known of his wartime career, except that he served for part of the time as an artillery lookout and was mentioned in dispatches for having personally rescued several boxes of ammunition from a fire started by enemy shells. He ended the w ar w ith three medals, including the George and Anna crosses."^ There \\ as also the episode of his election to the Brigade Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies. In February 1917 the February Revolution had led not onlv
and the setting up of a provisional government and elect a constitutent assembly but also to the establishment of a popular assembly known as the Petrograd Soviet (the word soviet in Russian simply means "council," but it had acquired new meaning during the abortive revolution of 1905, when a famous workers' "soviet" had arisen spontaneously in St Petersburg out of the general strike committee and temporarily wielded power). The most significant single act of the Petrograd Soviet was the handing down, in March 1917, of "Order No. 1," which stipulated that soldiers should be allowed to keep possession of their arms when not on active service, that they should form their own councils, or "Soviets," to elect delegates to the national Soviet in Petrograd, and that they should carry out only those orders that had been issued or approved by the Petrograd Soviet (except while on duty). 1 he main thrust of Order No. 1 w as against the traditional draconian discipline of the tsarist army and the despotic privileges of an entrenched officer caste. These had already led to widespread demoralization and mass desertions, which Order No. 1 merely intensified. But the situation was complicated by the fact that the Russian army in wartime had hundreds of thousands of volunteer officers (of whom Isaaki was one) who were remote from the career officers and their code. Isaaki Solzhenitsvn apparently sympathized with his soldiers and the introduction of the Soviets and allow ed himself to be elected as a deputy.' It was at about this time that he made the acquaintance of Taissia Zakharovna Shcherbak in Moscow. Taissia, the daughter of a wealthy landowner of Ukrainian origin, was also from the South. Her father's estate was near in the same region of the North Caucasus as the Solzhenitsyn farm Armavir, in the Cossack Kuban, just north of Stavropol. Like Isaaki, Taissia had attended boarding-school in P\atigorsk and must even have been there at the same time as he, though the two had never met. Later she studied at the exclusive Andreyeva Gymnasium, in Rostov-on-Don, and in 1912 had moved to the Golitsyn Academy of Agriculture, in Moscov\'. Isaaki had gone on a brief leave to Moscow in the spring of 1917 and met Taissia at some kind of student celebration. It seems to have been a genuine instance of that time-honoured romantic formula of lo\e at first sight. Isaaki was able to remain in the capital for only a few days, and it is not clear whether he made any further visits to Moscow, yet a mere four months later, in August 1917, the pair w ere married at the Belorussian front, in a special ceremony conducted by the brigade chaplain. Taissia returned to Moscow and Isaaki continued to the abdication of the tsar to call a general election
—
his service.
C) U T
()
F
(
]
H A () S A N D S U
FFK
October 1917* the Bolsheviks carried out
In
R NG I
|
to hold a
second congress
at
On
the end of October.
congress opened, Lenin ordered a coup
d'etat, t(K)k
I |
The i\'trograd
their coup.
Soviet had called the First All-Kussian (Congress of So\iets in June and
due
3
was
the night before the
over the congress, announced
the dissolution of the Provisional (lovernnient, and established the Bolshe-
—
vik-dominated Council of People's Commissars to rule the countr\ ostensibly until the Constituent Assembly could be elected. In November, w hen the eagerly awaited elections took place (the
and
first
in the entire history of Russia), the Bolsheviks
last fullv free elections
came out
They had no however, and when the
the second-largest
party, with 24 per cent of the vote.
intention of listening to the
wishes of the electorate,
C>)nstituent
the following January, they failed, it.
first
attempted to dominate
it
Assemblv met
and then, having
ordered the executive committee of the Congress of Soviets to dissolve
The assembh' never met
An
again.
important aim of Lenin's was to sign
a separate peace treatv w ith the Germans, but the German demands were so exorbitant that not even he could s\\ allow them at the time. The war therefore dragged on through the winter of 1917. Russian morale was at an all-time low with revolution raging not only behind the lines but w ithin the armed forces as well, and with mass desertions, the Russian armv w as in no condition to fight back. The Germans easily advanced to the Black Sea in the south and almost to Petrograd in the ,
north. In February 1918 the Russians sued for peace and in
March signed
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding Finland, the Baltic states, and large areas
of the Ukraine to the enemy. Isaaki
remained
at his post to the bitter
end, setting an example of patri-
otism and devotion to duty that subsequently became
a
bvword
in the Sol-
zhenitsyn family and deeply influenced his son's attitudes tw entv years
when
abandoned
Moscow in the
his unit
and made
his
shortly after the October
way
south to join Taissia. She had
coup and w
as
now
staying
left
w ith her family
Caucasian resort of Kislovodsk.
Kislovodsk aims and style
was
later,
faced with another world war. But in March, after Brest-Litovsk, Isaaki
a typical
at this
time was also under
sat rather
a
Soviet administration,
whose
oddly with the character of the place. Kislovodsk
nineteenth-century spa, famous for
its
Narzan mineral waters,
luxuriant vegetation and associations with high society. Perched in a narrow glen, the
summer
most romantic, inaccessible, and exclusive of that cluster of elegant Caucasus .Mountains, it frankly
resorts at the northern tip of the
proclaimed in the
its
dedication to the epicurean delights of taking the waters, strolling
shade of
its
gossiping in the
celebrated poplar avenue, gaming in the casino, or simpl)'
pump room
the idle pleasures of the rich,
of the Narzan Gallery.
whose sumptuous
villas
It
was
w ere
a
monument
to
scattered pictur-
esquely on the lower slopes of the mountainside, and the new tow n "Soviet"
was hard put *
to find a role for itself.
During the early months of 1917
According to the Old Style Russian calendar
lution. Since the calendar
each year.
(see note p. 27),
it
chose
hence the name October Revo-
reform of 1918, the Revolution has been celebrated on
7
November
SOLZHENITSYN
[32] to adopt a
more or
less neutral posture, neither
condoning the old ways nor,
other than in rhetoric, condemning them, w hile the struggle for power in the
country raged elsew here.
was staying with her wealthy elder brother, Roman Shcherbak, summer villa on Sheremetvev Street. Life here was still luxurious, and Isaaki was made doubly welcome as an officer and Taissia's husband. He was introduced to Taissia's parents, Zakhar and Evdokia Shcherbak, who had recently been forced off their estate near Armavir bv a local Bolshevik rising and had come to Kislovodsk to await events. Here also was Taissia's elder sister, Maria, who lived nearby in Tolstoy Street with her husband, a landowner named Afanasy Karpushin, w ith whom Zakhar and Evdokia were staying."^ Taissia
and
his wife, Irina, in their
Isaaki did not
remain there long.
It
seems that he found the idleness and
luxurv of Kislovodsk irksome after the rigours of the front. against his belief in the simple
life.
And
it
is
Thev offended
possible that there were also
between them. His father- and mother-in-law were shocked and embittered bv the violent sequestration of their estate. Roman, Irina, and the Karpushins must have been of like mind (presumablv Karpushin had lost his estate as well), but Isaaki, with strong sympathies for the new Soviet political differences
regime,
may
well have taken a different view, or at the very least have remained
uncommitted
until the situation
the necessary formalities, he
grew
made
clearer.
At
all
events, after observing
an
his excuses, left Kislovodsk, taking
already pregnant Taissia with him, and travelled the sixty-odd miles east-
wards
to his father's
farm
in Sablia. It
bare three months of married
life
was
there, a
few weeks
later, after a
with Taissia, that he suffered his tragic
accident.'
The exact circumstances of the accident are shrouded in obscurit\ It seems that on 8 June 1918 Isaaki went hunting for small game with a friend on the flat, prairie-like steppe around the farm. Thev were travelling in a horse-drawn cart. At one point Isaaki stood up in the stationary cart to disembowel a freshly shot hare, and in a moment of carelessness leaned his cocked shotgun against the cart's side. The horse started, as if bitten bv a fly. Ihe cart gave a jerk, and the shotgun fell and exploded, peppering Isaaki's chest and abdomen with shot. The\' immediately returned to the farm, and from there Isaaki was dri\en, .
tow n of Georgievsk, some forty miles southwas that same dirt road that Tolstoy had once travelled, and it w as not much changed either, being pitted with those ruts and potholes that have
still
in the cart, via Sablia to the
west.
It
been the hallmark of Russian provincial roads since time immemorial.
unsprung
cart
was obliged
wounded man's
sufferings
pain coursing through his
The
minimize the spasm of agonizing
to proceed at a funereal pace to
—every body—and
lurch, every it
jolt,
sent a
took them tw enty-four hours to cover
the forty miles to Georgievsk. Isaaki
w as admitted
to the hospital
without delay and speedily operated
on. But conditions in Cieorgievsk at this time were already beginning to suf-
Out
OK (^HAOS AND SUFFKRING
I33I
War. Fsscntial services were breaking down. were poor. The operation v\as hastv and slapdash, not all the shot was removed (nor the wad, vv hich had entered his chest as well), and the after-care was perfunctory. The wounds turned septic, and within a week Isaaki was dead. The date was 15 |unc 191 S. Isaaki was four days short of his twenty-eighth birthda\-. Taissia, who had accompanied her husband in the cart and w atched him die, was ill-equipped to bear the shock of this sudden widowhood. V'ivacious, sensitive, and delicate, she had led a life that till now was cossetted and carefree, shielded by the great w ealth of her father and the loving attention that had been her birthright as the youngest and most gifted of his three children. Pour happy years at boarding-school had been followed b\- four more at Moscow University, a romantic w hirlwind marriage to a handsome young officer, and finally the promise of a child to bless their union. But now, her voung officer was dead, and the child would be born fatherless at a moment when Russia was in the throes of an unprecedented catacKsm. Fortunately, she was not entirely alone she had alreadv summoned her brother, Roman, and her sister-in-law, Irina, from Kislovodsk. Irina was Taissia's closest female relative. Onlv seventeen when married off bv a sick and dving father to the wealthy Roman Shcherbak, Irina was eleven years younger than her husband and only six years older than Taissia, to whom she felt draw n at once. Her marriage had not been a great success, and she had taken refuge in the consolations of religion and art. She w as a woman of firm principles and strongh' held convictions, tenacious and dedicated, the ideal companion in a crisis; and she and Roman had answered I aissia's call fer
from the
cttccts ot the (>i\il
Professional standards and disciphne
—
with alacrity.
She had arrived was
failing,
son.
I
am
spoken Isaaki
is
in
time to see Isaaki die, and in old age, w hen
memory
she claimed to recall his dving words to her: "Take care of
sure
I
am going to have a
—there seems
not clear
w as convinced
his child
to
have been
would be
mv
Whether these words w ere actualh
son.'"^
a
son
a tradition in the
—and
family that
they were, they w ere
if
more probably addressed to Taissia than to her sister-in-law However, Irina was to take as passionate an interest in her nephew 's upbringing as she had earlier in Taissia's, and her subsequent influence on Solzhenitsvn was to be both permanent and deep. Her recollection (uttered long years after Taissia's .
death) therefore has a certain retrospective logic to
it,
but cannot be taken
literally.
Georgievsk was only
fifty
miles from Kislovodsk, and after burying Isaaki
town cemetery, Taissia returned with Roman and Irina to the treeshaded villa on Sheremetvev Street. By now the residents of Kislovodsk had in the
little
stomach for the pleasures of spa
life,
for the situation in the tow n, as in
the rest of Russia, had deteriorated dramatically. tion in central Russia, the Bolsheviks
Having secured
had launched
a
south, immediately after the signing of the peace treaty with tov had been recaptured
their posi-
major offensive
in the
Germany. Ros-
from the White X'olunteer Army, and Bolshevik
SOLZHEMTSVN
[34]
Don
forces overran both the
Cossack
capital ot
No\ocherkassk and the Kuban
Cossack capital of Ekaterinodar, the main centres of White resistance.
The
seemed, was about to be incorporated into the freshlv proclaimed Soviet state. At the same time, a new and harsher form of Bolshevik power was returning to those parts of the Caucasus alreadv in pro-
North Caucasus,
it
Bolshevik hands, including the mountain resorts. Nikolai Zernov, w ho was living in the neighbouring resort of Essentuki at
the time, tw elve miles from Kislovodsk, has described the second Bolshe-
vik takeover in his reminiscences.
On
10
March
1918, he writes, a battered
main square and ground to motlev assortment of armed men but none of them local, who leapt
old lorrx living the red flag had crawled into the
was
a halt. It
overflow ing w ith
tilled to
a
"of indeterminate origin and nationalitv,"
out and proclaimed the resort "an inalienable part of the Soviet Socialist
Republic." after which thev repaired to the Metropole Hotel, expelled residents,
and
A
settled in.
its
small group of curious onlookers, including Zer-
nov, had "listened to this declaration in silence before dispersing to their
homes.
'"^
On the surface,
life
had not changed much
at flrst.
The shops had
staved
open, the schools had continued to teach, and people had gone about their
much
But the Civil U'ar and the struggle for power, combv both sides on an all-or-nothing policv in everv aspect of the struggle, had opened a Pandora's box of bitterness, resentments, hatreds, and revenge, so that, beneath the surface, changes had begun at once. The first sign had been the institution of sw eeping searches business
bined w
of
all
as before.
ith the ruthless insistence
weapons
the houses of the better-off inhabitants, ostensiblv in quest of
but in realitv extending
much w ider
than that. According to Zernov, "gangs
of rampaging and frequentlv drunk Bolsheviks went round bursting into
w capons, confiscating gold and valuables, and looking This was followed b\- the imposition of compulsorv financial levies, w hich frequentlv took no account of the victim's abilitv to pav and were backed bv threats of arrest if the monev was not forthcoming. Finallv, to reinforce these methods, the new authorities rounded up the most prominent local citizens and announced that thev w ould be held as hostages against the good conduct of the town's inhabitants and the pavment of the levies. These hostages were removed to the administrative centre ot Pyatigorsk, and it w as assumed that thev would return to their homes w hen sufficient monev had been collected. Suddenlv, however, the walls of the town w ere festooned w ith ill-printed proclamations declaring that all the hostages houses,
demanding
all
for supplies of food."
had been "liquidated" of the people."
It is \\
difficult to
ho
falls
for
consequence of the
convcv
to
class struggle
and
as
"enemies
the populace, writes Zernov, was indescribable.
anvone who hasn't experienced it the feelings of a man earmarked for liquidation in the inter-
into the categorv of individuals
ests of achieving
ment
as a
The shock to
some
.
.
.
the
Communist
particular action.
Utopia. In such cases death
It is
is
not
a
punish-
an inevitable consequence of the victim's
Out
Chaos AND Suffering
OF
[35]
... In times to come the systematic destruction of "parasites" and as a daily occurrence in the Communist countries uas blunt the conscience of mankind, but in 1918 these "sacramental" murders,
social origin.
"enemies of the people" to
w hich were meant
to signify "a leap
from the world of necessity into the realm phenomenon and had a
of freedom," according to .Marx, were a totally new shattering impact on us.'"
In Kislovodsk the situation was, for
it
if anything, worse than in Essentuki, had become the temporary headquarters of the commander-in-chief of
the Revolutionary
Army
of the North (Caucasus, Avtonomov,
who installed The large
himself in a luxurious armoured train at the Kislovodsk terminus.
Bolshevik garrison behaved pretty
rounding
district.
The
garrison
much
as
it
commander,
pleased in the town and sura
former coach driver named
Sorokin, was aided in his terrorization of the populace bv the chairman of the Kislovodsk
Tow n
Soviet, Tulenev, a former
fitter,
w ho not
onl\' loathed
the local bourgeoisie but was also at daggers draw n w ith the moderate Avto-
nomov and opposed him at every turn. After a few weeks in Kislovodsk, x^vtonomov moved north and w as recalled to Moscow on charges of plotting against the Soviet regime,
w
hile the
tow n was virtuallv taken over bv two
new commissars, Axelrode and Gay. The latter had a strikingly beautiful wife, Xenia, a former singer and dancer who was particularly fond of throwing grand parties, at
which she would appear decked out
in the
extravagant
jewellery extorted from hostages in exchange for sparing their lives.
who
refused, or couldn't pay,
were executed
Those
in the cellars of a neighbourincr
villa."
This w
which the pregnant Taissia was plunged at She had little choice of where to go. She had known her husband's family for onl\- a few w eeks, and there w as no question of staying on the somewhat primitive Solzhenitsyn farm in the later stages of her pregnancy. Her father's estate near Armavir was still occupied bv revolutionar\- forces, and her entire famil\- w as still holed up in Kisloxxxlsk. Because of their great wealth, they were naturally in a precarious position. Together with Kislovodsk's other prominent families, they went in daily fear of their lives, staying indoors as much as possible and making the sign of the cross over their closed shutters each night in the hope that this might w ard off the search parties. But it didn't. One night a gang of armed men burst into the house and took Roman aw av as a hostage. There w as a certain irony in this, since of all the Shcherbaks, Roman was the most liberal and most sympaas the situation into
the beginning of June 1918.
A lifelong admirer of the later Tolstoy and of Maxim Gorky, he w as, despite his conspicuous wealth, a fervent opponent of tsarism and a firm advocate of social and political change. For his captors this was irrelevant he was the class enemy, whatever his political views. He was taken immediately to Pyatigorsk, throw n into a cell, and condemned to death. The intrepid Irina refused to be cowed by this blow Gathering together thetic to the Revolution.
—
.
as
much
jew ellerv
and money
as she could, she followed him to the Bolshevik
SOLZHENITSYN
[36]
headquarters in Pyatigorsk. For
a
young woman
this
\\
as
no easy thing to
summer in Pyarunning the gauntlet of jeering, undisciplined guards and confrontvoung commissar who not only had the pow er of life and death over
do. Zernov's sister Sophia had gone on a similar errand that tigorsk,
ing a
her but was also
known
was able
to
young women. She had emerged Combining eloquence with bribery, she
for his taste for
unscathed, as did Irina in her turn.
'purchase Roman's release. events in Kislovodsk were being watched from
Meanw hile,
a different
vantage point by Colonel A. G. Shkuro, a retired Cossack officer
who had
onlv recently returned from fighting in the First World War. Shkuro was
a
prominent Kuban Cossack who had distinguished himself in the war by his bravery and his uncharacteristically democratic handling of his subordinates. Unlike most Cossack officers, he had no monarchist sympathies and was wholeheartedly in favour of the February Revolution, the Provisional Government, and the Constituent Assembly. He had even welcomed the establishment of Soviet power, and at one point had been invited to join the Bolsheviks by Avtonomov, but had declined (it is possible that their meeting had something to do with Avtonomov's subsequent recall to Moscow and fall from grace). He preferred for the moment to sit on the sidelines. By the early summer of 1918 the situation all over the North Caucasus was chaotic.'"* The high tide of enthusiasm for Soviet power that had engulfed '"^
most of the Kuban, Stavropol Province, and the mountain resorts in early 1918 was already receding. In the South, whatever the position might have been in central Russia, the proportion of political idealists and convinced socialists to thugs and adventurers in the Bolshevik ranks was very small, and the latter's terroristic policies had disgusted and alienated nine-tenths of the population, especially after Lenin's proclamation of the "Red Terror." Shkuro was well aware of the mutinous feelings these policies had engendered among the Cossacks, for he had a wide network of friends and informants in the villages on the strength of his wartime reputation. In Mav 1918 he formed a guerrilla army and raised a Cossack rebellion. Soon the entire region \v as ablaze with civil war. The rebellion centred at first on the mainly Cossack village of Soldatsko-Alexandrovskoye, about a dozen miles east of the Solzhenitsyn farm at Sablia, before spreading to other areas. Around Sablia itself, however, the villages were more mixed, with Russian colonists outnumbering the Cossacks. These, though not siding with the Soviets, appear to have remained neutral and uncommitted. Meanwhile, the tide was turning against the Soviets in the rest of the North Caucasus. Rostov had fallen to the Volunteer Army in May. In June there had been a White officers' rising in Stavropol that led to bloody street fighting but ended in failure. In July, the town finally fell to the Volunteers, and a White administration was installed. In the same month Red forces abandoned Armavir, where the Shcherbaks had their estate, and in August they were forced out of the Kuban capital of Ekaterinodar. During the next three months the fighting raged back and forth over the countryside, many
Out
of (^IhAOS and SuKKKRINti
villages being repeatedly taken ant! retaken
towns and
1)\
[37
I
either side, lor the
long-suffering civilian populace, the consequences were catastrophic. Kach side,
upon occupying
a fresh \illage
or town,
adversaries there, rel\ ing on denunciations for ringleaders
would be shot or hanged, causing
would attempt its
to identify
its
information. The supposed
ripples of hatred
and \engeful-
would be imposed until the next battle. \\ hen the opposing side pre\ailed, the w hole sequence would be repeated in reverse. On top of this, both sides fought for
ness to run through their families and friends, and an uneasx' calm
much
of the time in guerrilla st\le, with all the gratuitous violence that that form of warfare brings in the form of ambushes, lightning raids, recjuisitions, and the taking of hostages. Unfortunately, we ha\e no information about the Solzhenitsvn family during this violent period. We may speculate that Sennon and his sons, as reasonably prosperous and successful peasants, would not have been attracted to the doctrines of the Bolsheviks, w ho deliberately espoused the cause of the landless labourers
brethren.
On
and the poorest peasants and incited them against
not exclusively, Cossack led, so
Cossacks, found themselves ries
their
the other hand, the White opposition was primarily, though it is
possible that the Solzhenitsyns, as non-
somew here
in the
middle. In the existing histo-
of the period, the village of Sablia figures neither as
a
Bolshevik nor as
a
White stronghold and was the site of no notable battles. In September 1918 Shkuro's Cossack partisans invaded Kisloxodsk, took three thousand prisoners, and executed the local Bolshevik leaders, including Alexander Gay and his wife, Xenia. Xenia, according to Zernov, demanded permission to smoke a last cigarette before coolly ascending the gallow s. Her defiant last words were "Us today, you tomorrow!"'-* The truth of these words was already being illustrated in neighbouring Pyatigorsk, which still had not fallen to the Whites. On the night of 18 September, while Shkuro was executing Red prisoners in Kislovodsk, a Polish Bolshevik named Andziewski cut off the heads of 155 hostages by the light of specially kindled fires. A few days later, Shkuro was forced to v\ithdraw from Kislovodsk and the Reds took over again, bringing another harvest of executions, but at the end of December Shkuro launched a fresh offensive on the mountain resorts and this time was successful. On 5 January 1919 he captured Pyatigorsk and Essentuki, and one day later, Kislovodsk.
On
6 January
the populace,
I arrived in Kislovodsk and was given a tumultuous welcome by which had suffered grievously under the Bolshevik regime. The
town had also suffered. Many houses had been pillaged, and the celebrated poplar avenue had been cut down. The Red butchers had slaughtered hundreds of the townsfolk w ith sword and bullet. Since it was Epiphany there w as the Blessing of the Waters and a thanksgiving mass, after which I held a parade of my troops.'^ *This slogan, reversed, was to become a favourite saying in Soviet labour camps: "\'ou today, me tomorrow " meaning vou will die todav (or may you die today), and 1 will die tomorrow (or, w ith luck, never).
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[38] Is it
fanciful to
suppose that the Shcherbaks attended that thanksgiving
mass, in the beautiful church of St Panteleimon on the
hill
overlooking Irina's
dacha? Zakhar and Evdokia were outstandinglv pious believers
in the old
Orthodoxy, and Irina had been devout from childhood. As for Taissia, on this occasion she had particular reason to thank the Lord. Less than three \\ eeks previously, on 1 December 1918, amid the chaos and the carnage, she had given birth to a son. She named him Alexander, and he was christened in that selfsame church on the hill. tradition of Russian
1
2
CHILDHOOD
TAissiA
WAS, WITH the possible exception of Roman, the least rehgious of the Shcherbak family. Although raised by her parents in an atmosphere of old-fashioned pietv and devotion (her aunt Ashkelaya was a nun), later to be reinforced bv the arrival of the devout Irina in their household, she seemed to have had all of this knocked out of her by her progressive boarding-school in Rostov. Morning and evening genuflections before the icon in her room had given \\ a\' to amused contempt tor the rituals ot an abandoned cult, and holida\s at home had become an embarrassing bore, involving, as thev did, repeated familv excursions to church and the strict
member
observance of
all
cow, she had
\\
religious fast-davs
illinglv follow
and holidays. Later,
Mos-
as a student in
ed the prevailing university trends of atheism
and anticlericalism, delighted with this opportunitv to slough ott her provincial intellectual baggage. But now, amid the heightened terrors and apocalyptic fears engendered bv the Civil War, she found herself, like so many others, turning back to the church again. "The atmosphere created in the Caucasian resorts," writes Zernov, "encouraged our religious enthusiasm.
...
It
was on the eve of a spiritual renaissance, that would reveal to a penitent people the lineaments of our Saviour, and teach Russians how to found their
seemed
to us that Russia
the church, purified radiant lives
bv her
No
on brotherlv love."
suffering,
doubt, Taissia partook of these emotions
when
she attended church herself. Father Alexei, the resident priest at St Pantelei-
mon's, was famous throughout the region for the fervency of his prayer, his religious
message
a
balm
to the strife-torn
and war-weary inhabitants
ot bat-
tered Kislovodsk.'
The
entire reejion,
and indeed most of the Caucasus, w
39
as for the
time
SOLZHENITSYN
[40]
being firmly in the hands of the Whites. eral
The Volunteer Army,
led
by Gen-
Denikin, soon began to press northwards to Moscow. With Admiral
Kolchak advancing through Siberia, it began to look as if the Red forces ould be rolled back and the Bolsheviks defeated. So, at least, it appeared to the people in southern Russia and also, at last, to Russia's former allies in the \\ ar, w ho belatedly sent expeditionary forces, munitions, and supplies. As a consequence of these changes the Shcherbak family reshuffled itself. Zakhar and Evdokia left Maria's house to return to their estate near Armavir, while Taissia and the infant Solzhenitsvn moved in with Maria to take their place. Maria was less educated than Taissia, having gone straight from boarding-school, at the age of seventeen, to be married to Karpushin. Karpushin had died of tvphus the preceding vear, however, and so Maria w as all alone. A comparatively simple soul, generous and kind-hearted, she welcomed them with open arms, and it was here, on aptly named Tolstov Street, that Solzhenitsvn was to spend the first six vears of his life.Bv the summer of 1919 the \\ hite armies of Denikin and General Wrangel had penetrated as far north as Orel and Saratov and were poised to strike at Moscow a mere two hundred miles awav. The entire South and East were in their grasp, and it seemed onlv a matter of time before the Bolsheviks would be overcome and the old order restored. But appearances were highly deceptive. Just as the old Russia had not so much been conquered as it had simph' collapsed from inertia, incompetence, and corruption, so the Civil War was not so much won by the Reds as lost by the Whites, who had absolutely nothing new to offer. On the contrary, all the vices of the old regime had survixed on their territory and been magnified by them. Shkuro, when he met the leaders of the Volunteer Army, was appalled by their ignorance and dismayed by their blind arrogance and lofty disdain for the comv\
,
mon
people. Denikin and his generals
made no
secret of their
contempt
for
the democratic reforms of the February Revolution and short-lived Constit-
uent Assembly, nor did they hide their determination to restore the tsar and
And in the field their local commanders proved ever\ bit and ferocious as those of the Reds. In the town of Stavropol, for instance. General Uvarov instituted a policy of mass executions of peasants and w orkers as reprisals for former Red successes, w hile in the surrounding countryside General Pokrovsk\ conducted mass hangings in every village he came to, making no attempt to establish or prove the guilt of his victims. In this way the Whites were but a mirror image of the Reds, the extremes overcame the middle, and the stage was set for a war of devastation and attrition that would decimate the innocent population. In purely military terms, too, the Whites proved unequal to their task. By the end of the summer the Red Cossack cavalry, led by Budenny and Dumenko, had stemmed the White advance, blocking their w av to Moscow and driving them south again. This Red offensive continued all through the autumn and winter, and by February 1920 they had reoccupied Rostov and driven the Whites back into the Caucasus, onto the territory whence they had started out. the tsarist regime.
as savage
(Childhood (vonditions in the South during these
were appaUing.
One
of the
many
|
last, hitter
phases of the
English officers fighting
\\
ith
(>ivil
the
4
i |
War
liritisli
II. N. II. Wilhamson, later descril)ed in hook how the whole c()inur\side had been laid waste hv the see-saw fighting and how the stations and the villages grew shabbier with every visit he made to them. Windows were boarded up, the hammer anti sickle had been scraw led on some of the houses and the doors daubed w ith red j^aint during the last Red occupation, and machine-gun bullets had marked the applicable to both Retls and Whites, facades. "I'he posters w ith their slogans 'War to the Finish' and 'Death Is Better Than Slavery' grew more tattered everv time I saw them.'" Williamson noted the breakdown of agriculture, the shortage of food owing to the harsh requisitions policv of both Reds and Whites, and the ever-growing menace of typhus, w hich raged unchecked over thousands of square miles of southern Russia. " I'he disease had spread like wildfire and whole trainloads of people perished unattended or froze to death because thev were too weak to help themselves. Iheir bodies, fro/.en stiff like logs, were dumped alongside the track, stripped of boots and clothing, which onlv passed on the disease to the healthv who removed them.""* This epidemic took a heavy toll of the Solzhenitsvn familv, carrving aw av both of Solzhenitsvn's paternal grandparents, Semvon and Marfa, his uncle
I\xpecUlionary Fu)rce there, C^aptain
his
—
—
Vasilv, and his aunt Anastasia.** In
March 1920
Volunteer
the
White
resistance finally collapsed, and the
rump
of
Army was
evacuated from Novorossiisk bv the British. Throughout the Caucasus there was a wave of revenge killing, and in Armathe
vir there
was
a veritable
pogrom by
the Reds. Zakhar and FA'dokia were
obliged to abandon their estate for the second and
Kislovodsk, taking with them a few sticks bles they could transport. sia,
last
time and
back to
flee
rniture and whatever
Ihere they moved inlWce more w
ith
mova-
Maria, Tais-
and the infant Solzhenitsyn. Bolshevik rule
of
of^''
now came
"War Communism"
to the
Caucasus
to stav,
and with
it
the policy
that had already been instituted in the rest ot Russia.
In the countryside this
meant the
forcible expropriation of
all
landowners,
the establishment of "committees of poor peasants" to confiscate produce
from the better-off ones, and the unleashing of armed food detachments from the towns to requisition grain and other foodstuffs.
At the same
time,
all
business and industry was nationalized and a system of barter introduced in place of private trade.
The
results, here as elsewhere,
were catastrophic. The
already ravaged and pillaged agricultural system simply collapsed,
and industry came to
a halt,
and only
a flourishing black
all
trade
market and increas-
ingly savage requisitions prevented a famine of epidemic proportions.
Throughout the first year of Bolshevik rule the Shcherbaks remained marooned in their mountain resort of Kislovodsk. In the winter of 1920, like everyone else, they had virtually starved, selling off their furniture and possessions at derisory prices to buy food. The infant Solzhenitsyn was presumably secure and oblivious of these hardships. Many years later he was to recall the reassuring icon that hung in one corner of his room, suspended in
SOLZHENITSYN
[42]
the angle between wall and ceiling and tilted
dow n\\ ards
so that
its
holv face
seemed to be gazing directly at him. At night the candle in front of it would flicker and shudder. And at that magic moment between waking and sleeping, the radiant visage seemed to detach itself and float out over his bed, like a true guardian angel. In the mornings, instructed by his grandmother Evdokia, he would kneel before the icon and recite his pravers.^ Onlv rarely did the outer chaos impinge on his world. His earliest memwhen ory of it comes from one of his regular visits to St Panteleimon in 192 he was nearly three. 1
I
remember
\\
as
with
rupted.
I
mv \\
I
\\
as in
church. There were
of people, candles, vestments.
mother, then something happened: the service
anted a better view, so
my
looked over the heads of the crowd. aisle
lots
I
mother held saw,
filing
me up
\\
as
at
arm's length and
arrogantly
when
the government
was confiscating church property
I
brusquely inter-
dow n the
of the nave, the sugar-loaf "Budennv" hats of Soviet soldiers.
period
,
all
I
central
It \\
as the
over Russia.
most respects, life for the small boy was the same as for any other But not for Taissia. By the winter of 1921 her resources had run out. Maria had just remarried, this time choosing an enormously tall and affable ex-guardsman by the name of Fyodor Garin. Garin had three children of his ow n from a former marriage, tw o girls and a boy, and although he and Maria were happy to have Taissia and Solzhenitsyn stay on, the house w as now somewhat crowded. Zakhar and Evdokia were also living there again and had now here to go. Besides, there was no work for Taissia in Kislovodsk. Judging that Alexander was old enough to stand a temporary separation and In
child.
bv Maria, Taissia moved to the large some difflcult)', she successfully took a coLif,'je in shorthand and typing and found a post as a secretary. Almost at the same time, Roman and Irina abandoned the villa on Sheremetyev Street and moved a short way down the railw av line to the quiet hamlet of Minutka. In their case the move was dictated by prudence. There were too many people in Kislovodsk w ho knew of Roman's former arrest and miraculous release, and the chances were that the new Bolshevik administration might choose to settle old scores. For Roman and Irina, as "socially alien" elements, it w as the first of a long and exhausting series of moves to forestall "revolutionary revenge." Solzhenitsyn spent the next tw o and a half years living w ith his Aunt Alaria (or "Marusia," as he called her), his new uncle, and his three newcousins, with w hom he pla\ed throughout the winter months, spending his summers w ith Irina and Roman ("Auntie Ira and Uncle Romasha") in Minutka. But in 1924 Maria's villa was confiscated. She and Garin decided to move to Georgievsk and w ith what remained of Maria's money bought a small adobe house, which they divided into two. One large, self-contained room w as for the use of Zakhar and Evdokia, and the rest for themselves. The old couple, however, found it difficult to settle. Zakhar, in particular, that he
would be well looked
after
seaport and regional centre pf Rostov-on-Don, where, with
Childhood was drawn back the question for
Armavir, and although
to his old estate near
him
to reoccupv
it,
[4
he and Evdokia moved for
it
a
3
J
was out of
while to the
nearby village of Gulkevichi, where Zakhar had many relations. I here they lived with one of his cousins and were supported bv gifts of food from the familv and from some of Zakhar's former employees.
now five, did not go with his aunt Maria to Georgievsk. were also moving to Novocherkassk, the Don Cossack couple of hundred miles to the north, not far from Rostov. Having
Solzhenitsvn,
Roman and capital, a
—
Irina
established themselves there in the
autumn
of 1924, they returned to collect
bov and take him back with them bv train on the eve of his sixth birthday. In some later verse, he was to recall this first journev of his, the long train ride, the mvsterious drive after dark dow n the snowbound Kreshchenskv Boulevard in Novocherkassk, and the strange sights and sounds of a large town. He also wrote vividlv of a church procession at midnight being jeered the
bv
hostile students,
an interesting prefiguration of his story "The Easter
Procession," describing a similar scene in Peredelkino fortv years
few davs
after his arrival in
Novocherkassk, he was taken
to
later.
A
Rostov to be
reunited with his mother.*^
There
is
a
posed picture of him
at the
age of
six,
taken just atter his
showing a stockv bov in a striped smock holding a toy popgun in the "present arms" position. The face is broad, round, and intelligent, w ith a high forehead and closely cropped hair, but what most captures the attention is the alert gaze of the eves and the expressive mobility of the brows above them. Yet the studied smartness of this studio photograph is also a little misleading, for apparenth- there was much of the unlicked urchin about him w hen he first arrived from Kislovodsk. Preoccupied w ith the greater cares of her new familv and difficult living conditions. Aunt Maria had given him a free rein in Kislovodsk, while his troubled grandparents had had distractions of their own. From Grandfather Zakhar, a Ukrainian peasant by birth (despite his later wealth), and from Maria, he had acquired a distinct Ukrainian accent that has remained with him to the present day. Even now he speaks with a soft, guttural southern^ "like Brezhnev," as he jokingly remarked on one occasion*^ and tends to slip dialect w ords into his speech when he is not paving attention. The Ukrainian dimension has remained arrival in Rostov,
—
—
important to him: "Ukrainian and Russian are intermingled in my blood, in heart, and in mv thoughts," he was to write in volume 3 of The Gulag
mv
Archipelago.^^'
Somewhat because
it
surprisingly, he took to the city of Rostov at once, perhaps
displayed some of the colour, variety, and liveliness that were
missing from Kislovodsk.
*The New Economic
Bv now
the
New
Policy was introduced by Lenin in
Economic March
Polic\
still
(NEP)* had
1921 to cope with a disastrous
popularity of the Bolshevik go\ernment and with a rising tension in the country, symbolized bv the Kronstadt Rebellion in Petrograd the preceding month. The policy allowed for the controlled and limited admission of market forces into the economy and w as designed
drop
in the
above
all
to placate a hostile peasantry.
SOLZHENITSYN
[44]
in force for nearly three years
been
conditions of everyday Hfe.
As
and
in that
the rigours of
time had transformed the
War Communism
receded and
normal trade relations were resumed, food became more plentiful in the shops, consumer goods began to reappear, and everyday life reverted to a simula-
crum
of what
it
had been before the Revolution. felt and noticed in Rostov. Throughout
This was particularly the city had been noted as
a
its
history
prosperous trading centre, important both as an
produce of southern Russia and
outlet for the rich agricultural
as a
magnet
goods and investment from the v\ealthy countries of western Europe. The English writer Stephen Graham has written that in 1911 the main street of for
Rostov was "an 'emporium' of steam-ploughs, harvesting machines, threshing machines, cranes, fire engines, butter factory machinery and the rest,
imported from abroad."
And
all
every other kind of import was on display,
from "Tottenham Court Road furniture, Sheffield cutlery," English and clothes to "Persian rugs, Caucasian silks, and Turkish fruits and sweetmeats."" The picturesqueness of its position on the steep right bank of the Don, with its crowded terraces tumbling down the hill to the broad, shallow harbour, was also a great attraction. Another English writer, Rhoda Power, w ho \\ as there as a governess during the First World War, wrote that it reminded her of a Cubist picture: "It seemed to be all higgledy-piggledy, a jumble of vivid colours, domes and oddly shaped houses."'" Visitors noted
German
the cosmopolitan population characteristic of a flourishing southern port,
its
communities of Cossacks, Jews, Greeks, and, above all, Armenians, who had been settled here by Catherine the Great and had built their distinctive quarter of Nakhichevan, on the eastern outskirts of the city. The spirit of Rostov was spontaneous, independent, democratic, mercantile, competitive, and pleasure-loving. No wonder it had become the centre of southern resistance to the Boshevik coup and had earned itself the nickname of "White Guard City" during the Civil War. Of course, there could be no return to those halcyon pre-war days, but the memory of them was still fresh, and hopes had been raised by the liberal policies of the NEP. In his unpublished autobiographical poem. The VV^-y,* Solzhenitsyn uas later to evoke the atmosphere of these early childhood years. Old Rostov, he \v rote, seemed to be coming back to life. There were Greek and Italian ships in the harbour, and a brisk trade revived in grain, cattle, wool, and fish. Horse cabbies vied with motor cars on the roads, church bells continued to ring out each morning, the streets and parks had not yet been renamed for revolutionary leaders, and "all that seemed to have happened" large
*l'hc siasts'
title
of this
poem seems
Highivay (Shosse
High Road, famous to
to
eiitiiziastov),
Dorozhenka, meaning
now
in
literalU'
a
new
title
was
originally called Enthu-
Moscow
"The VVav," but
once more.
for convicts being transported to Siberia,
(convictless) era. Solzhenitsvn then
an English translation. Judging bv
prefer the original
It
an ironic reference to the Soviet renaming of the old Vladimir
as the starting-point in
symbolize the inauguration of
conveyed
have undergone some changes.
\\
a
ith derisive
changed the
title to
overtones that cannot be compactly
note in Vestnik, no. 117,
it
appears that he
may
C]
w
H
1 1.
DHoon
as that the pre-revolutionary sign of
new one
[45]
"Duma"* had been exchanged
tor a
sa\ ing "Soxiets."''
Solzhcnitsxn has sometimes gi\en the impression that he did not care for Rostov. In a
number of
interviews he has plaved
down
his association
partly, perhaps, because of his later estrangement
from it and and familv friends who still live there. It is true that he does not much care for the people, whom he has said he finds too boisterous and volatile for his o\\ n conservative tastes. Nor does he care for their colourful southern dialect, w hich holds no charms for him as a writer. But of the city itself he was exceedinglv fond, as he later showed in his descriptions of it in The Way and above all in the scene in August 1914, in which Xenia Tomchak's heart is said "alwavs to beat faster" whenever she returned to Rostov. "Sadovava Street was fresh and clean in the deep shade of the trees as it climbed the hill tow ards Dolomanovskw had long arms w ith runners instead of hoop-shaped pick-ups, The trams there were special cars for summertime with airy, open sides. T\ pical, too, w ere the special mobile lattice-work bridges, arc-shaped w ith handrails, which were placed across flooded streets in the southern rainstorms and were kept on the pavements when the weather was drv. From Xikolskv Street onwards the Bolshaxa Sadovava straightened out and ran like a mile-long with the partly,
cit\
,
one suspects,
to divert attention
from
relatives
.
.
.
.
arrow to the city limits
at
later said,
"To
Taissia's motives for
w as by
.
.
.
the suburb of Nakhichevan."'"^ In writing these
pages, Solzhenitsyn had had the sights and sounds of his
mind, and he
.
.
verv day
this
moving
I
love
its
ow n childhood
in
stones."''
Rostov must have been mixed. Since it North Caucasus, it was simply an easier was also easier for her, as a "social alien" to
far the largest city in the
place in
which
to find a job.
under the new system,
It
to melt into the multitude
and not stand out too
much, which was impossible in the small provincial town of Kislovodsk. Thirdly, it was still not too far from Kislovodsk, w hich meant that she was able to stay in touch with her familv and her son until he w as able to rejoin her. The alternative of Moscow which was the onlv other citv in w hich she had friends, was too remote and forbidding, and in the still-chaotic condi,
tions of 1921, threatened a
permanent,
if
involuntary, separation. Fortu-
nately, the happiest years of her childhood
had been spent
at a
boarding
school in Rostov, and the family of the headmistress of the school that she
had attended w
The
as in
many w avs
dearer to her than her
family in question v\ere the Andreyevs,
described in some detail in August 1914 under the
ow n.
whom
name
Solzhenitsyn has
of Kharitonov.
The
had been a school inspector, but the real power in the family w as his wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna, v\ho had owned and run an exclusive gymnasium for young ladies on the corner ot Staro-
mild-mannered
*The name
Duma w as
father, Nikolai,
of one of two assemblies forming the Russian parliament from 1905 to 1917.
The
elected under a limited franchise and had severely restricted powers until February
1917 (Old Stvle). After the February Revolution until the Bolshevik takeover in
October.
it
acted as the effective go\ernment of Russia
SOLZHENITSYN
[46]
pochtovava and Nikolayevsky streets behind the cathedral in the old quarter of Rostov. Taissia had come there in exactly the same circumstances as described for Xenia Tomchak in August I9M, brought by her wealthy father Zakhar, and virtually she be taken
in.
dumped on
the headmistress's doorstep with a plea that
In those days Taissia had been a
pious and naive, but
Mme
homespun country
girl,
Andreyeva's progressive school and household poised and sophisticated young lady, showing
had transformed her into a hardlv a trace of her former awkwardness. Solzhenitsyn still possesses one of those charming old composite photographs that schools used to distribute in the tranquil days before the First World War, showing Taissia's graduation class of 1911-12. Two medallions at the top enclose portraits of Mme Audrey eva and her husband, followed by thirteen rectangular photographs of the teachers, including a priest wearing a surplice and a heavv cross. Then come thirtv-six oval portraits of thirtysix well-groomed young ladies, wearing high-buttoned black school dresses with wide starched lace collars resting on their shoulders. A few of them are wearing cloaks, including Taissia, who is turned three-quarters to face the camera, a mischiexous half-smile on her round face, her hair hanging in unruly ringlets, hi another year, as a student in Moscow, her transformation was to be complete. A touch of superciliousness hovers about the pretty plump face that regards us from another photograph, a confident self-possession perfectly expressed by the ostrich feather in the showy hat and the expensive tailored coat.
Mme Andreveva on the graduation photograph depicts and severe-looking elderly lady wearing an intimidating pincenez, whose formidable personality is barely confined bv the constricting cirThe
portrait of
a grev-haired
cle
of girlish faces. Despite her liberal political views
—allowing among when anti-Semitism Rostov— she ruled her her,
other things, freely to admit Jews to her school at a time
was
at its
height and activelv encouraged in a citv like
establishment like an absolute monarch. Taissia had been admitted to her
home sia
as a
paying guest, and there, too, Andreveva was unbending. P or TaisTo the end of her days she
she "was not 'Mama' but 'the headmistress.'
would be the headmistress meeting her was alwavs slightly awe-inspiring and one could never argue with her or contradict anything she said.'""^ Taissia had done extremelv well in Mme Andreveva's school, coming out at the top of the class in her final year and winning the annual gold medal for the best pupil. From there she had gone straight to Moscow and had become a close friend of Mme Andreveva's daughter, Fvgenia Zhenia for short. Zhenia was four years older than Taissia and had gone to study in Moscow in the same year that Taissia arrived in Rostov laissia had taken Zhenia's room. And \\ hen she went to Moscow herself, she became enmeshed in the drama of Zhenia's marriage to an "unsuitable" husband, a young engineer by the name of Vladimir Fedorovsky The truth of the matter was that Zhenia had fallen head over heels in love with Fedorovskv, become pregnant by him, and married him in a cloud of disapproval from her imperious mother. .
.
.
—
—
.
— (;niLi)}i()()i)
who
I47I
deplored not only the indecent circumstances of the betrothal hut also
w ith the fortunes of an unknow n The whole thing is described with some humour in August 1914, where Fedorovsky appears as Filomatinskv. laissia's role as a go-between during her frecjuent visits to Mme Andreveva in Rostov is also portrayed the social disgrace of linking her ancient family upstart.
there, as
is
the ultimate reconciliation brought about
World War, the Revolution, and the By 1921, when laissia arrived
l)v
the upheavals of the
(>ivil VV ar.
in Rostov from Kislovodsk, the school had been confiscated and closed down by the new Soviet authorities, and the Andreyevs were under a cloud as "social aliens," like Taissia herself. Mme Andreyeva's two sons had fought for the White Volunteer Army during the
War and had never returned. But the situation was saved by the formerly despised son-in-law who was now a successful engineer working for the new regime. Through him the Andreyevs had managed to retain their Civil
,
large,
comfortable
when
flat
attached to the former school and were
living
still
young Solzhenitsyn arrived in 1924. He can still remember its welcoming rooms and broad balcony overlooking a narrow sidestreet. In 1926 they were deprived of this flat, but moved to equally spacious quarters
there
the
in a solid building adjoining the ornate edifice of
one of Rosto\
's
former
banks on Sredni Prospekt.''^ Faissia herself
managed,
some accommow as nothing like the the extreme, for it was decidedly
after great difficulty, to find
dation close by, in the region of Nikolsky Lane, but
Fedorovskys', and her
life
was hard
in
it
As the daughter of a wealthy landowner (although her inheritance had been confiscated and she was now as penniless as anyone else), she was automatically suspect. 1 he official policy was not to employ such people at all if it could be avoided, or else to assign them to the most menial, poorly paid, and insecure positions possible. difficult for
her to obtain any kind of work.
Taissia did everything she could to conceal her shameful origins.
On
occasion she asked her son to help her bur\' his father's three medals,
one
lest
it
be discovered that he had been an officer during the First World War. Photographs of his father in uniform also had to be concealed, and on the endless
probing questionnaires that had to be completed to describing her husband's
former status
at
every turn, Taissia took
as sluzhashchi, or office
worker, as
from the superior rabochi, or manual worker. The category of "officer" would have cut her off irrevocably not only from work but also from the distinct
all-important ration card.
—
She was enabled to get her first job as a shorthand typist with .\lelbuilding combine specializing in the construction of grain mills thanks to a recommendation from the chief engineer there, Alexander Arkhangorodsky (described under his correct surname in August I9M,), whose daughter, Lyuba, had been I aissia's best friend at the Audrey eva gymnasium. Arkhangorodsky, an assimilated Jew, had been highly successful even before the Revolution, and on the grounds of his former wealth and prestige might equally have fallen into the disgraced category of "social alien." But stroi, a large
SOLZHENITSYN
[48]
was more complicated than that. As a as member of a formerly despised minority Arkhangorodskv counted a Jew, that had identified itself particularly closely with the Revolution and was singled out for preferential treatment. Secondly, he had been known for his liberal and progressive views even before the Revolution. Thirdly and most importantly, he was a skilled engineer, indispensable to the reconstruction and continued smooth running of industry, a member of the professional group that was deliberately being wooed and pampered by the new Soviet authorities. Like Vladimir Fedorovsky, Arkhangorodsky was a member of virtually the only elite to w eather the Revolution with its former status more or less intact, an elite that was particularly numerous and strong in Rostov, with its industrial tradition. It was thanks to their patronage and friendship that Taissia was able to survive at all. Unfortunately, someone who knew Taissia's background informed on her, and she was soon dismissed. Worse still, her papers were officially marked to fix her lowly status, which meant that she was automatically barred from the large number of well-paid and reserved jobs that had been spawned by the early post-revolutionarv situation
the post-revolutionary bureaucracy, together with access to the privileged
food and clothing supplies that usually went with them, and was also looked
upon with suspicion by employers in the non-reserved sectors. Feeling vulnerable and exposed vis-a-vis the vast state apparatus, they were reluctant to hire and embarrassingly eager to fire her, often as the result of a denunciation. What usually happened was that she would be called into the director's office, told of the problem created by the revelation of her social origins, and invited to resign. This happened about half a dozen times in all, and each time Taissia had to trail from office to office in search of new work.*
An
immediate consequence of this
was automatically controlled room or fiat, which,
inability to obtain
an
officially
approved
post was that she
disqualified
cially
since 90 per cent of the housing sector
from applying
for an offi-
had been nationalized, excluded her from normal accommodation. Furthermore, there was a built-in catch, in that rents in the tiny private sector were incomparably higher, so that Taissia was squeezed between the inexorable pressures of an artificially enforced low income and an equally artificially enforced high expenditure.
With
great difficulty she eventually found a rickety, weather-boarded
narrow cul-de-sac in the centre of town. It consisted of a single scullery, measuring about twelve feet by nine, with loose boards and a leaky tin roof through w hich the wind whistled in winter and the water dripped when it rained or snowed. There was no drainage or plumbing. Water had to be fetched from a standpipe about 150 yards away, and all slops had to be carried out and emptied by hand. The shack was one of about half a dozen surrounding a tumbledown yard, which had rubble shack large
*It
is
in a
room and
not clear
how
often Taissia lost her job or for
eventually she seems to haxe obtained sky's help again.
more
how
long she remained without work, but
settled empl()\'ment,
perhaps with Arkhangorod-
e
Childhood heaped
in the corners
and
\\
a handful of stunted trees.
as criss-crossed b\-
Faissia
I49I
w ashing
and Sol/.henits\n
lines
strung betw een
li\ed there for
t\\ el\
from 1924 to 1936. Taissia was obliged to spend extrenieK long hours at her \arious jobs and often brought work home as well to supplement her meagre income. At some point she began to get more or less regular work as a conference stenographer, but since man\- of the conferences took place in the evenings, it meant spending even longer hours awav from home.'^ Her long hours meant that the housework often had to be done late at night. Water for the laundr\' had to be boiled on a tin\- Primus stove in their draughty, unheated scullery, which was freezing cold in winter, and Solzhenitsvn regularlv fell asleep to the sound of his mother scrubbing and splashing at their zinc tub. As soon as he was old enough, he, too, helped with the chores, fetching water, carrying out the slops, and doing the shopping after school. He still has vivid memories of standing in endless queues for bread and other commodities. Taissia was ill-equipped for this strenuous and precarious existence. She was basicallv a soft-hearted person, naive and impractical and unsuited to the tough, scheming world of the voung Soviet republic. She had been raised in luxurv, and was now disoriented and disheartened, in constant doubt about what to do next or what was best for herself and her son, and worn dow n by incessant labour. An internal-passport picture of this period tells the whole story. Gone is the plump, slightlv mocking face of the well-to-do voung lad}' with an ostrich feather in her hat. In its place we find the lined and carew orn face of an exhausted drudge, the forehead corrugated, the brows knitted, the lips tightlv compressed. Her hair (now streaked w ith grey) is badly cut in a
years,
frizzy utilitv style reminiscent of British factory
women
of the
war
years,
suffused with repressed pain and defeat. In
less and her entire expression is than ten vears she had aged twenty. An example of Taissia's characteristic gullibilitv and helplessness was her abortive attempt at this time to acquire a decent home. Although she had sold most of her possessions in Kislovodsk, she had managed to hang on to one precious heirloom her grand piano. In 1927 an order was issued for the demolition of their shack, and she resolved to sell the piano and apply the proceeds to the purchase of a four-roomed co-operative flat. She duly completed the sale and deposited the money with the co-operative, having been
—
would be ready in two years. Two years passed, then three, four, five, and still no flat was offered her. Initially the construction was postponed. Then, when the first lot of flats had been built, someone bribed the co-operative to give them Taissia's flat in her place. She was promised another, at a later date, but nothing came of it, and eventually she requested her money back. More time passed, and by the time the co-operative repaid informed that the
flats
had reduced the money's value to less than half, so that there was no longer any question of buying a flat with it. Her only stroke of good w as that the demolition order was never acted fortune if good fortune it be '^ living in her tumbledow n shack. continue upon and that she was able to
her, inflation
—
—
— SOLZHENITSYN
[50]
might have been \\ iser for Taissia to remarry she was precisely the sort of \\ oman w ho needed a strong companion in hfe. And it seems there was no shortage of suitors. But in this, too, her fastidious and vacillating character told against her. She could never make up her mind. Above all, she feared for the \\ ell-being of her son, in whom she worshipped the image and memor\- of her dead husband. Solzhenitsvn possessed his father's fair hair and blue eves (Taissia's hair and eyes were brown), and she kept In these circumstances
Isaaki's
memorv
name, Sanva
alive
bv
it
calling her son
—or Sanvechka—
vears Solzhenitsvn
came
bv
his father's
instead of the
unconventional nick-
more usual "Sasha."*
to feel that his mother's failure to
In later
remarry had been
and an error, not onlv for her own sake but for his as well: was older and able to grasp the full significance of this sacrifice, I concluded it was a mistake, since I believe no harm is done to children by a needless sacrifice
"When
their
I
having
One
a strict father."-"
orphanhood was to lead the son to idealize his dead him all she knew, especially about Isaaki's heroism during war, but her own know ledge was scant enough. Out of the fifteen months effect of this
father. Taissia told
the
known him, Isaaki had spent twelve on active service, and she had been cut off from Isaaki's familv bv his death and the Civil War. The deaths of Semvon, \ asilv, and Anastasia Solzhenitsvn in 1919 meant that onlv Evdokia and Konstantin were left of Isaaki's immediate family, not counting she had
stepmother and her two children, and that there was thus virno one on that side w ith whom she could communicate anv more. The onlv wav to make it up to the son was to take him to his father's grave, and Taissia and Solzhenitsvn made regular pilgrimages to Georgievsk until 1931. The great void of his father's earlv life had therefore to be filled bv the son's imagination, which appears to have been obsessed bv the subject in childhood and has remained haunted bv it ever since. Today as he labours at his vast epic on the Revolution, in \'ermont, it is his father's portraits that stand guard on his w riting desk. In one of them the vouthful Isaaki, w earing his high-buttoned school uniform, has his peaked cap tilted at a rakish angle, revealing tufts of unrulv hair sticking out to front and sides. The pose and expression are challenging but are belied b\' the soulful eves and irresolute mouth, framed bv a bushv beard. In the second and possibly later photograph the cap has been removed, the long hair is carefully parted on the right side, the beard has shrunk to a neath- trimmed goatee, and the high, broad his estranged
tually
forehead serves to emphasize the tht)ughtful look in those sensiti\e eyes. Here,
nurtured in the author's imagination for half latest series
a
century,
is
the hero of his
of novels, the prototype of his fictional reincarnation as Isaaki
Lazhenitsyn in August 1914.
*
I
he usual diminutives of Alexander are Sasha or Shura. Taissia seems to have preferred San-
vechka to Sanya his
in addressing her son. It w as she w ho, \\ hen registering his birth, decided that patronymic should be Isavevich rather than the more clumsv (but literallv correct) Isaaki-
vevich.
Childhood Another
[51]
effect of Solzhenitsyn's fatherlessness
was
to
encourage precoc-
As the onlv male in the household, Hving alone with a doting mother, he grew to early independence and maturity, a process that was hastened bv his ity.
increasing assumption of responsibility for household and other chores. Tais-
developed
sia's vacillations
exercised
all
the
more
in
him
a
strong and imperious will, which was
fully in the absence of paternal authority. Indeed,
impatience of authority, whether
in the
shape of parent, teachers, senior
guards, the Writers' Union, the Soviet government, or of
officers, prison
anyone but God Himself, was to become a leitmotiv of his career and determine his adult life. And with it went a rare practical energy, in which he differed as much as could possibly be from his own father and mother and which,
like his
will-power, harked back a generation, to his maternal grand-
father.
Grandfather Zakhar was grandfather I
didn't visit
was
a
somehow them
woman
all
in effect the onlv
took his place.
I
man
that often, but they weren't remote
and had
my
I
character.
got
all
a drastic
So
from
my
temper. In certain respects
had no
my
father, so
me I
at all.
a
man
Grandma of excep-
take after
him
energv from him, for example, because papa was
completely different sort of person. Papa was soft.
I
of rare goodness and kindness. But granddad was
tional energy,
very
in the family.
loved them dearly, Zakhar and P'vdokia.
energy comes from
mv
a soft, lyrical, philosophical
in a
man,
grandfather.^'
Solzhenitsyn's earlv independence and self-sufficiencv often tfxjk the form
Though happy enough to play adventure games and hide-and-seek with the other boys in the yard, he w as inclined to retire early from the fray and seek refuge in a book. Similarly, he spent his first two summer holidays from school away from Rostov with Zakhar and Evdokia in Gulkevichi, and whereas he has the fondest memories of scampering among the houses with the village children, still more fondly does he recall the strange peace of the countryside and the delights of communing with nature. Whatever the company and whatever the game, he invariably withdrew after a certain period in order to be alone, occupying himself w ith childhood hobbies and personal projects or pottering about the house. His solitariness was fostered by frequent long visits to other relatives as well. For his mother it was both a financial and a psychological relief to be able to send him to stay with other members of the family. After the two holidays with his grandparents, he went most of the time to Roman and Irina, who in 1927 left Novocherkassk and bought a house in Yeisk, a small fishing town about forty miles from Rostov on the shores of the Sea of Azov. In Yeisk, Solzhenitsyn used to wander round the harbour or go swimming on his own and was able to indulge his increasingly voracious appetite for reading. Irina had a first-class library, w hich she had miraculously preserved throughout all her peregrinations. Here Solzhenitsyn read Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and most of the Russian classics. Many of of solitariness and self-absorption.
SOLZHENITSYN
[52]
the books he read again and again, starting at an unusually early age.
claims to have read reread
War and Peace,
several times in the course of ensuing
it
been during
He
and to have seems to have
for example, at the age often,
this period that the figure of
summers.
It
Tolstoy became embedded in his
imagination as the archetypal Russian writer. Irina also presented him with
copy of \ ladimir Dahl's famous collection of Russian proverbs, though it much later that Dahl came to occupy as prominent a place in Solzhenitsyn's literary pantheon as Tolstoy himself. Other authors who made an impression on him at this time were Shakespeare, Schiller, and particularly Dickens. Another favourite was Jack London, an enormously popular author in Russia both before and after the Revolution, whom Solzhenitsyn first discovered in the supplement to one of the Rostov newspapers. Half a lifetime later, on his first visit to the United States, he was to pay homage to his childhood hero by seeking out London's home in California and making a
wasn't until
a brief pilgrimage.
Irina
encouraged him in his reading and did her best to foster his love From the very day of his birth, it seems, in her house in Kislo-
of literature.
him as being somehow in her special charge. Childhim all the love and affection that might otherwise own children, and he in turn came to love his "Auntie Ira" have gone to her loyalty that fully reciprocated her own. Uncle Roman, with a tenderness and on the other hand, though familiar to him from early childhood, struck him vodsk, she had regarded less herself,
she bestowed on
remote and unattractive figure." In every writer's biography it is possible to pick out one or tu o Individ-^ \\ uals ho had a decisive influence on the writer's imagination, particularly at an early age, either by virtue of their own adventures, which they then recounted to the child, or by the tales they told of others, whether real or invented. In Solzhenitsyn's case we can point to Aunt Irina as such an influ-
as
being
a
ence.* Profoundly conservative and patriotic, with her imagination forcibly turned to the past by the catacl)'sm of the Re\'olution, she regaled her nephew
during the long
summer
stories of his
v\'ith
The
tale
holidays with stories of olden times, and especially immediate forebears. tell v\ as redolent of a bygone era, like those faded from an Edwardian snapshot album in which we find
she had to
sepia photographs
overdressed people frozen in
stiff
poses, sitting bolt upright in outlandish
motor cars, or grouped in the foreground of milky landscapes at a season that seems always to have been high summer. It was a vanished age, never to return, but its features sank deep into the boy's imagination, to be re-created in his mature works half a century later. The family she told him of was his mother's family, the Shcherbaks. Like the Solzhenitsvns, they were of peasant stock and knew even less of their origins. Above all it was the story of Solzhenitsyn's grandfather, the *
Solzhenitsyn's
first
wife, Natalia Reshetovskava, disputes this and
is
of the opinion that Sol-
zhenitsyn inyented Irina's influence on his childhood after meeting her again in the 1950s and 1960s.
CH
1 1,
D H O () 1)
[53)
Zakhar Shcherbak, who seems to have been one of the most men in southern Russia. Zakhar had been born in 1S5S in Tavria, in the southern Ukraine. After a mere vear and a haH' of sehoohng, he had worked as a shepherd boy until about 1870, when his entire family migrated to the North (Caucasus in search of work. Thev settled just south of the Kuban, not far from the Sol/.henits\n farm, and worked as hired labourers. After ten years or so, Zakhar was given a dozen sheep, a cow and a handful of piglets by a grateful employer and urged to make a start on his own. He cjuickly showed imcommon energy and industr\ B\- dint of hard work and shrew d dealing, he built up a substantial holding and amassed a fair sum of capital. Me also met and married F.vdokia Ilvinichna, the daughter of a village blacksmith. She appears to have been a pious woman, w ho insisted on a strict observance of all the religious holidays, and she bore Zakhar nine children, of whom six died in a single w eek from an epidemic of scarlet fever. 1 his act of God only served to intensify her religious devotion. energetic
extraordinary
,
.
Zakhar's success as a farmer led to the rapid accumulation of real wealth, and sometime during the 188()s he moxed 50 miles north-w est to the district of Armavir in the Kuban, among Ukrainians like himself. About ten miles from Armavir, at a place called Kubanskaya Stantsia between the Vladikavkaz RaiK\ay line and the river Kuban, he bought a large piece of land, which he transformed into a sumptuous estate with a luxurious house and an elaborate park. A grand two-storey mansion was erected, with a wrought-iron balcony running around the entire first floor, and the w indow s w ere equipped with shutters and Venetian blinds against the heat. Piped w ater v\'as supplied through four separate systems from four separate sources, and electricity was provided by a diesel generator. After the house came the park, which Sol1
zhenitsyn later described
in August 1914, with its avenues of balsam and pyramid poplars, its pond for swimming in, its orchard, its vineyard, its Moorish garden, herb garden, and rose garden, "and a law n of emerald-green English rye-grass alongside the drive, which was cut with law n-mowers."-' In the central provinces of Russia, country estates like this were a familiar part of the scene, but they were mostly hereditary, going back, in many cases, for centuries, and were often dilapidated. Down here in the Kuban, by contrast, there were few hereditary estates, and those that existed had been there for less than a hundred years. The Cossacks, who owned most of the land, were by temperament restless and disinclined to dig deep roots. Their stanitsas, even when they grew to twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, remained overgrown villages, with unpaved streets and a bare mini-
mum
of public buildings.
When
the richer Cossacks built estates, they
had an informal, impermanent air about them. And in almost all cases their organization and appearance reflected the prevailing Russian taste for disorder and cheerful anarchism in their surroundings. In August 1914 Solzhenitsyn has drawn an affectionate portrait of his uncouth and unlettered, yet dynamic and remarkable, grandfather. By the turn of the present century, Shcherbak was farming fifty-five hundred acres traditionally
SOLZHENITSYN
[54]
and had twenty thousand sheep. The home farm alone, with its outbuildings and kitchen gardens, took up fifty acres. And on this land he liked to use the most modern "progressive" methods, modelling himself on the German colonists who were particularly numerous in the North Caucasus and were famous for their industry, efficiency, and unbelievably high productivity. As a result he was spectacularly successful. And yet he could not escape his origins. His life was an exotic mixture of ostentatious consumption and patriarchal custom. The interior of the big house was lavishly decorated to match the exterior, with imitation-walnut panelling, a \\ ealth of heavy Victorian furniture, and all the appurtenances of gracious living. There were ten indoor and ten outdoor servants, including
a butler, cooks, serving
maids, a chauffeur
(at
Zakhar purchased in a fit of enthusiasm for the latest technology, later for his Mercedes), and a coachman for his more conventional horse-drawn carriages. There were dozens of other employees a bailiff, an accountant, clerks, stewards, foremen, storekeepers, grooms, herdsmen, mechanics, gardeners, labourers, and, after the disturbances occasioned by the 1905 re\'olution, four armed Cossacks to guard the estate. Vet domestically his life remained little touched by his wealth. Scorning his modern bedroom, he had constructed a special room leading off his wife's, without a door to the outside because he was terrified of draughts and insisted on sleeping warm. To this end he also installed a tiled bunk beside a traditional upright stove in his room and slept there in winter in the first
for the "Russo-Baltic carriage" that
—
fashion of generations of Russian peasants before him.
and more Irina must have told her nephew, widening his eyes wealth and luxury. She herself had married into the family as a rich woman in her ow n right. Her father, an ex-soldier, was also a selfmade man. Childless for most of his life, he had fallen madly in love with a younger w oman when already old and had taken the unorthodox and scandalous step of bribing the bishop of Stavropol with forty thousand rubles for permission to divorce and remarry. Irina was the only child of this second union, and at the age of seventeen, when her father was already dying, had been married off to Roman Shcherbak straight from boarding-school. It was not a love match. Her ow n opinion had never been asked. But she had been too obedient a child, and the patriarchal traditions of the Kuban were too All this
with her
tales of
strong, for her to think of resisting.
Roman Shcherbak, Zakhar's only son, was by far the eldest of the three children who survived the scarlet-fever epidemic. He affected the style of an English country gentleman, complete
w
ith
tweeds and patent-leather boots,
and sometime after his marriage acquired that ultimate in English status symbols, a white Rolls-Royce, said to be one of only nine Rolls-Royces in the whole of Russia. He cultivated an P.nglish sang-froid, maintaining a cold reserve in
company and
striving for a pedantic meticulousness in questions
of honour and financial probity. Like Solzhenitsvn's father, Isaaki, he was
something of for a rich
a
lolstoyan
in
domestic
politics and,
man, an admirer of Maxim Gorky and
somewhat incongruously
his
woolly brand of natural
(^Ihildhood socialism, preferring
it
[55J
to the "Knglish" party of the (Constitutional
Demo-
crats.
was finer-spun than her husband and in-laws, with interests in and the arts that they were unable to share, and had sought solace in helping to plan the furnishings of the big house and introducing some style and taste into her immediate surroundings. She had an aristocratic hobbv: Irina
literature
handbag she carried a small Browning automatic, and an English-made lady's shotgun hung on the wall of her room. But more impor-
shooting. In her
tant to her than these pursuits
was her devotion
to religion. C>hristianitv,
particularly the mysteries of the Gospels, appealed to her imagination,
the stately rituals of the
Orthodox
liturgy, rich in sight
affected her appreciation of beauty. In this deyotion she
common ground
and and
and sound, strongly was fortunate to find
with her pious mother-in-law, Evdokia, so that the multiple
and acts of worship indulged in by the elder Shcherbaks did not cause her any of the hardship that they caused the worldly Roman. She found it comforting to have an icon in virtually every room, and reassuring to go down on her knees before her bed each night. Moreover, there was another dimension to her faith that took her, strictly speaking, beyond the bounds of Christianity. According to Solzhenitsyn, she was a firm believer in the transmigration of souls and felt that certain concepts of Eastern religion were a beautiful complement to Christian beliefs. She did not find them in any way contradictory; they were merely alternative manifestations of beautv.""^ Solzhenitsyn appears to have come deeply under the spell of his intrepid and romantic aunt. By the time she had moved to Yeisk, the anti-religious fanaticism of the immediate post-revolutionary years had begun to abate, and she was once again an avid communicant at the local church. Solzhenitsyn, at a loose end for much of his time in this sleepy little town, generally accompanied her during the holidays and was much thrown into his aunt's company. She taught him the true beauty and meaning of the rituals of the Russian Orthodox church, emphasizing its ancient traditions and continuity. She showed him its importance for Russian history, demonstrating how the history of the church was inextricably intertwined with the history of the nation; and she instilled into the boy a patriotic love of the past and a firm faith in the greatness and sacred destiny of the Russian people. Irina thus supplied him with a sense of tradition, of family, and of roots that was otherwise severely attenuated. Freudians would say that one of the most serious effects of fatherlessness is the production of a sense of disorientation and an early identity crisis, particularly in the case of an only child and a son. The search for a masculine model is frustrated, and the boy is obliged to cast about for a substitute. It v\as no wonder, perhaps, that Solzhenitsyn was so attracted by the example of his virile grandfather, and his imagination fired by the stories of his colourful aunt. Consciousness of a glorious family past was an essential source of pride to him, one that could be freely indulged in and enjoyed in the backwater of Yeisk, whereas in Rostov it had to be treated as a shameful secret and a stigma to be concealed. fasts
— SOLZHENITSYN
[56] Irina's
simultaneous and eloquent praise of the Russian past must also have
forged a link between these things in the bov's mind: his family's former
w ith Russia's greatness. Patriotic pride fused with famih' \\ ounded sense of self. Irina \\ as not alone in staunching the wound: there were also the Fedorovskvs. Zhenia and X'ladimir Fedorovsky were 1 aissia's oldest and closest friends in Rostov. It \\ as w ith them that she habitually spent most of her free time and to \\ hom she turned for assistance and advice, and it was to them that she appealed to keep an eve on her son \\ hen she \\ as unavoidably absent from home. Since she \\ as aw ay at w ork most of the day and often collecting or delivering additional w ork in the evenings, Solzhenitsyn would generally go there after school and wait for his mother to arrive."' Apart from the loss of the school and the disappearance of Zhenia's two brothers during the Civil War, the Andreyevs and Fedorovskvs had come through the Revolution quite well. Their new flat, on Sredni Prospekt, w ith its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms and w ide balcon\- overlooking a secluded courtyard, w as as big and solid and comfortable as the one thev had been evicted from. For Solzhenitsyn it w as a home from home. The Fedorovsky family, especially in the early years, was his ow n family too, and the entire bustling establishment offered a striking and welcome contrast to the forbidsuccess had coincided
pride in repairing his
ding and lonely hovel off Nikolskv Lane. Solzhenitsyn's playmates were Zhenia's tw o children, Mikhail and Irina
Misha and
Lialia, to their friends.
Misha was about
zhenitsyn and Lialia four years older, but
in
a
year older than Sol-
childhood the three of them
were inseparable, playing endless games together. A particular interest w hen the boys were about ten and eleven was the composition of their own illustrated new spapers and journals, w hich became a positive craze and drew in
some of
Lialia's friends as
w ell.
Taissia's old headmistress,
Mme
Andreyeva, was
still
alive
when
Sol-
zhenitsyn started going there, and he remembers her, in her seventies, sitting
and aloof in one corner of the draw ing room, playing games of patience. But the person w ho made the deepest impression on him was her once-despised stern
son-in-law and Misha's father, \ ladimir Fedorovsky. Fedorovsky was the
epitome of w hat w
as in early Soviet times called a spets, a technical specialist
whose field was some aspect of technology or engineering. His own speciality was mining engineering, and his particular subject was the relatively new field of underground combustion, a technique whereby coal was to be ignited directly underground, w ithout excavation, and the resulting gas piped off automatically. Such a technique naturally held potent attractions for Soviet technocrats still dazzled by the vision of speedy industrialization,
or expert
and Fedorovsky benefited enormously from the industrial mystique of those years. He also had a teaching post in the Facult\- of Steam Engineering at the University of Rostov, as a result of
which
his circle included not only
practising engineers and mining consultants but also teachers, theoreticians,
students, and
young graduates.
— (Childhood
[57)
and hard-working man. A phositting at his draw ing hoard, thin and dapper, his hair parted almost in the middle, his sinewy hands resting in front of him, with a thoughtful, slightly melancholy expression on his face. I le had a habitual stoop, carrying one shoulder higher than the other as he walked, and used a pince-nez for reading. On normal exenings he would disappear after dinner through the frosted-glass door of his study and continue working until late into the night, but on Saturdays and holidays the
Fedorovsky was
tograph
tremendousK-
a
in Sol/.hcnitsyn's
l)us\-
possession shows
Pedoroyskys would throw
him
w here he would be the life and would be card games, charades, someone would play the piano for dancing, and there was lots to eat and drink. On other occasions there v\ere late dinner parties at w hich Fedoroysky and his friends would discuss politics and international affairs, art and litera family party,
soul as a host. Plenty of visitors came, there
ature, as well as engineering
to stay
and business matters. The children were allowed
up on these occasions, and Solzhenitsyn has
tried to re-create
thing of their atmosphere in the closing chapters of August 1914.
some-
He would
much conversation as he could, but the moment ineyitabh' came when he and the Fedoroysky children w ould be banished to bed and would
drink in as
have to
listen to the
sounds of continuing merriment through the closed door
of their room.
Solzhenitsyn later recalled these happ\ times graphical
in
chapter
Now
it
That
friendly, liberal
Where Where
And
seems
of his autobio-
a fairy tale
home
friend and stranger all
ate
of theirs.
w ere
at ease,
took part in nois\ table talk
and drank whatever they pleased.
Their house was alw ays open to him, and he spent "half like a
1
poem, The Way:
"second son," acquiring
his childhood" there,
brother and a sister in the process.
a
In later years Solzhenitsyn himself opted for physics and mathematics as a
the
and
means of making
a living,
company of scientists and his books, articles,
and he w
engineers.
as to
spend
Some
a large part
of his
life
in
of them became close friends,
and interviews are studded with expressions of w armth immediate circle there were three engineers:
for their calling. In his mother's
Vladimir Fedorovsky, Alexander Arkhangorodskv, and Boris Ostrovskv (whose son, Misha, was also a playmate of Solzhenitsyn's). But it was above all the Fedorovskvs who kindled this glow in him, and it was childhood memories of those convivial conversations around the dinner table that stood behind the moving tribute he paid in volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago: Engineer!
It
so
happens that
I
was brought up
in
an engineering milieu, and
can remember the engineers of the tw enties perfectK intellect, that
—
that candidly
I
luminous
unrestrained and inoffensive humour, that freedom and breadth of
thought, the ease with which the\'
moved from one
field
of engineering to another,
SOLZHENITSVN
[58]
or in general from technical subjects to current affairs and well educated, with such good taste. Their Russian
was
art.
And
they
\\
ere so
excellent, rhythmical
and correct, and devoid of popular slang. Some played an instrument, others painted, and one and all had the stamp of spiritual nobility on their faces.-''
A notable feature of these conversations w as the political freedom with which everybody spoke. At that point in the t\\ enties, after the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the ideological rigours of War Communism had been considerably relaxed and there was a definite lightening of the atmosphere. To many it began to seem as if the harsh years of the Civil War and its aftermath had been nothing but a bad dream. Soviet society was reverting to more and more of the practices of the past, and the rupture of the Revolution began to seem less drastic than it had formerly appeared. Time was to show that this relaxation was an illusion, that it was basically a question of consolidating before making the next leap forward. But in the twenties this w as not at all clear, and the mood among people like the Fedorovskys w as one of private optimism and confidence. Solzhenitsyn recalls that members of his o\\ n family, too, used to express themselves \\ ith complete freedom in his presence. He was never sent out of the
room when
the conversation turned to "difficult" subjects, nor
kept from the truth about the difficulties of the immediate past.
On
\\
as
he
the con-
mother and Irina frequently dwelt on the horrors of the Civil War and the way the family had suffered. He knew all about the family friends who had been arrested or killed, of his uncle Roman's temporary detention and death sentence and Irina's bold intervention, of the confiscation of his trary, his
grandfather's estate, the searches and reprisals in Kislovodsk, Irina's enforced
flight
and subsequent peregrinations
Roman and
in search of a refuge.
"Everyone, of course, was anti-Bolshevik
in the circle in which I grew up," had important psychological consequences: "The political, religious, and social upbringing I received at home differed tremendously from the surrounding Soviet world. And for that reason I was slow-
remarked, and
he
later
in
coming
to terms
w
this
ith that Soviet
world.
"-'^
Discussing the same subject on another occasion Solzhenitsyn com-
mented:
The
fact that the\-
used to say everything
at
home and never
shielded
me from
my destiny. Generally speaking ... if you want to know the of mv life, you have to understand that received such a charge of
anything decided pivotal point
I
social tension in
ished
...
it.
myself.
I
I
childhood that
it
pushed everything
even constructed out of
else to
one side and dimin-
this a totallv false picture
used to maintain, for example, that
a
man's personal
life
of
life
for
was on the
whole secondary and of little importance to him. Whether it was this way or that, good or bad, was not important. The main thing was how he created his public life. I had to live through dozens of years before I discovered that this was false \nd for this I have been frequentlv and cruellv punished in life. But on the that's the w av I am and w as, because inside me I bore this social tension
—
I
Childhood
[59]
one hand thev used to tell me everything at home, and on the other the\ used to work on our minds at school. Those were militant times, not like toda\ And we used to listen w ith such wide eyes to the exploits of the Reds, u ave .
flags,
beat drums, blow trumpets.
And me that
so this collision betw een it
Even now
somehow defined it is
that
same
t\\
.
.
"We'll c(jmplete the Revolution."
.
.
.
.
.
o w orlds gave birth to such social tension w ithin
the path
.social
.
.
I
was
to follow for the rest of
tension that dri\es
me
on.-**
my
lite.
.
.
.
3
FAREWELL TO
THE OLD WORLD THE a
COLLISION BETWEEN the two worlds of familv and society came to
head
w
of childhood and his
ties
Writing of
hen he was between the ages of eleven and He was at that stage when the bonds to the past were in anv case certain to be loosened.
for Solzhenitsyn
fourteen, coinciding
ith his
\\
puberty.
this period later in
The Gulag Archipelago, with reference to the
Fedorovskvs and their friends, he recalled that "from the beginning of the thirties I started to lose touch with this circle' V and in a whole variety of
ways he began years.
It
was, in
to
move awav from
fact, a
the scenes and influences of his early
time of rapid change, both for Solzhenitsyn and for
which he lived. ow n case, the situation w as complicated by
the society in In his
The
his particular
psycho-
compensated for by a deep love of family and tradition, internalized in the form of loyalt\' to the past and its values. \\ ith the onset of puberty, normal feelings of rebellion and disenchantment compelled him to seek alternative role models, but so great was his attachment to the past that the process of adaptation w as of necessity painful and intense. At the same time there was the hitherto unnological needs.
lack of a father
ambivalence of his relations w
ticed
upon
to play the roles of
had been
partially
ith his lonely
mother. Unconsciously called
both son and husband, he needed
now
to assert his
independence of her and break away. He was therefore ripe for new experiences, and it was only natural that he should begin to reach out from the family circle and involve himself more in societ\' at large. The forms and direction that this involvement assumed were, of course, influenced by the general development of Soviet society as a whole, which at this
time was experiencing
its
own
crisis.
60
The end
of the tw enties and the
Farewell to the Old World
[6r|
marked a watershed in Soviet historv, after w hieh same again. Indeed, this "third revolution," as it has sometimes been called, wrought a transformation in Russia almost as great as that \\ rought by the October Revolution itself. None of this w as apparent at the outset. The honevmoon of the New Economic Polic\- had created the illusion of a return to pre-revolutionarv ways society seemed to be growing both more prosperous and more relaxed. But beneath the surface political developments w ere moving in the opposite direction. By 1928 Stalin had emerged the clear victor in the power struggle beginning of the
thirties
things were never the
—
that
had broken out
in
the Partv after the death of Lenin.
Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev as
rivals
He
and intimidated
had eliminated
all
the rest, and
pow er. The numerically tiny Communist Party had meanwhile strengthened its grip on the country. At the time of Lenin's death, it had had less than half a million members. By 1928 this figure had more than doubled, and it continued to grow rapidly in the early thirties. These new members were young was readv
to assert his
and malleable, dependent on Stalin and the Partv Secretariat for favours and advancement. They were also poorly educated less than per cent had received any higher education and were dependent on specialists like Fedorovsky to run go\emment and industry. But the Partv held all political power firmly in its hands and created tw o special instruments to assist its rule. One was psychological and propagandistic: the cult of Lenin, inaugurated bv Stalin w ith the construction of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and the
—
—
installation in traits
it
Stalin ordered millions of por-
of Lenin to be printed, together with booklets of his savings,
which were distributed to foundations of a new faith prayer-books of the
more
embalmed bodv.
of Lenin's
1
new
a superstitious, semi-literate
to replace the old.
"church."
These w ere
The second
practical: the secret police. Secret-police forces
up by Lenin
as a
of
to
be the icons and
instrument was older and
had existed before, of
course, notably in tsarist Russia, but there had been nothing
equal the Soviet Cheka,* set
all
population to lav the
anvw here
"temporary" measure
to
in the
Endowed with the essential power of summary Cheka had been the chief instrument of Lenin's "Red Terror," itself an innovation in European history. At the end of the Civil War this fearsome body was renamed the GPU ("State Political Directorate"), and in 1923 it became the OGPL ("Unified State Political Directorate") and was brought under closer Party control, but it remained a virtual state within a state and proved itself indispensable to continuing Communist
early days of the Revolution.
execution without
trial,
the
rule. By the mid-twenties the OGPU had established an efficient nationwide network of organized terror, while the concentration or "labour" camps, first opened in 1919 to house the victims of that terror, were fast becoming
an integral part of the economy. In 1928
*An
came
Stalin's "third revolution."
With
it
he abolished the
New
abbreviation of Chrezvychainaya kommissiya (Extraordinary Commission for Combating
Counter-revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation).
SOLZHENITSYN
[62]
Economic Policy and
called for an almost total forcible collectivization of the
peasantry, with the aim of extorting sufficient funds to finance a vast expan-
At the same time the
kulaks, or rich peasants, were and all private trading, on however small a scale, abolished. The consequences of this draconian policy were not immediately apparent, and it was only in the early thirties that they were eventually worked out in terms of mass purges, famine, deportations, the mushrooming of the labour camps, and the mobilization of the entire population for Stalin's "great
sion of heavy industry. to
be "liquidated" as a
class,
leap forward."
The voung
Solzhenitsyn could have been no more than dimly aware of
these developments in his early years, except insofar as they were palely reflected in the life of the school
become
—only
later
did the true pattern of events
The school he attended was the former Pokrovsky Colgymnasium in Soborny Lane not far from the Bolshaya
clear to him.
lege, a high-class
Sadovava, the main street that ran through the centre of town. After the
War
Civil
it
had been renamed for Zinoviev, but
referred to as the "Malevich
Gymnasium,"
master, Vladimir Malevich, tion
and was able
to
directed the school before the Revolu-
remain for several years afteruards. In the general opinion
was the best school
it
who had
in Rostov.
Solzhenitsyn arrived there in 1926,
round
at the
age of seven,
still
wearing
neck the cross that he had worn since infancy, and became an
his
instant favourite with his to
was still and talented head-
for a long while
for the popular
have icons hanging
tseva taught
all
in
first
teacher, Elena Belgorodtseva
(who was known
her home, as did Solzhenitsyn's mother). Belgorod-
subjects to the junior classes. Solzhenitsyn adored her,* despite
her reputation for old-fashioned strictness, and soon went to the top of the class.
But higher up
in the school
he ran into some
difficulties. It
of great educational upheaval and experimentation,
when
was
a
period
the schools were
being repeatedly reorganized, and the students had to adjust as best they could. at the head of the school, was an outstanding were most of the other instructors who had survived the Revolution, but they were not considered politically "reliable" by the Soviet authorities, and by about 1930 the majority of them had been removed. A typical case was that of the mathematics teacher, Nikolai Chefranov, an inspiring pedagogue who was eased out for political reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with mathematics but who managed to obtain an alternative post at the technical college, where the rules were less strictly applied. He even managed to get reinstated at the Malevich school much later, but after a term w as obliged to leave once more. He vv as one of the Solzhenitsyn's favourite teachers and deeply influenced him. It was because of Chefranov, said Solzhenitsyn, that he later decided to take up mathematics. Malevich himself
Malevich, for instance,
teacher, as
*
According to
information
\\
a reliable
source that does not v\ish to be identified, Solzhenitsyn later collected
ith a \ie\\' to
w
riting a story
about her, but the storv has ne\er appeared.
Farewell to the Old World was forced out of the school
One
of the
first
[63]
1930."*
in
school reforms to be introduced after the end of the
(^ivil
War had been the abolition of examinations. This \\ as done partly tor ideo examinations v\ ere an expression of bourgeois elitism and logical reasons partly for practical ones: it w as easier for the hornv-handed sons of toil and Party favourites to get their certificates if there was no independent verification of results. Soon after Solzhenitsyn arrived in school, this practice \\ as replaced bv the "brigade svstem" of education. "Brigades" of seven to ten pupils were formed to studv together and pass the examinations collectively, each pupil in the brigade being responsible for a good performance in a particular subject. But this, too, led to chaos and "complete idling, just as in American schools today, "^ as Solzhenitsyn later remarked. Another problem was textbooks. The old books were regarded as ideologically harmful, but it
—
—
was
a
long time before suitable
new ones
could be produced.
was in the middle classes, we didn't have any standard textbooks at all. We were taught from random newspaper articles or specially printed brochures and pamphlets. And then, one day, a decision was taken to establish regular textbooks that would be used on a permanent basis and remain the same from
When
I
year to year.
Bv
the time of
strengthened and had
settled
my
last
three years at school, the system had been
dow n, and
the teaching
was very
good."^
Another feature of the schools after the Revolution w as the virtual aboof history as a subject and the increasing attention paid to propaganda and ideological training in its stead. The Bolsheviks had been pioneers in the imaginative and effective use of propaganda, and they quickly perceived the advantages of catching people young and of commencing their indoctrination at a tender age. It was particularl\- important for a revolutionary government that demanded a complete and apocalyptic rupture with the past, in the name of building a new societw In such circumstances their hopes w ere pinned on the youth, for the adult population was past "re-education" in an\- fundamental sense. And this w as an additional reason why the old teachers and textbooks had to be withdraw n and replaced by "revolutionary" ones. In the case of the schoolchildren of the twenties and early thirties, the new policies were on the whole successful. The myth of the Revolution lition
triumphant, of the
fierce,
ultimately successful struggle of the underprivi-
leged to throw off the yoke of their cruel oppressors, had tremendous appeal
young. It w as Robin Hood on a mass scale and happy ending. As Solzhenitsyn has noted, those were militant times. It was tremendous fun to parade through the streets, waving red fiags, beating drums, and singing revolutionary songs to whip up emotions and stir the and to distract questionmasses. Here was a new opium to replace the old ing minds from the drabness and misery of everyday life.
for the imaginations of the
with
a
—
*It seems that Malevich was eventually arrested in 1937 or 1938 and sent to the labour camps, and that Solzhenitsyn mav have sought him out and interviewed him when he u as collecting material for The Gulag Archipelago.
SOLZHENITSYN
[64]
Solzhenitsvn was as stirred as most of his schoolfellows bv this revolutionary rhetoric, and at the age of twelve, in 1930, he took a decisive step
awav from his earlv training and beliefs by joining the Young Pioneers. The Young Pioneers were the junior wing of the C.ommunist Partv's vouth movement, the Komsomol, founded in 1918. In a sense thev were a sort of Soviet equivalent of the Bov Scouts, except that they had no independence and were financed and controlled by the Party. They were also ubiquitous an
—
official, integral
tion.
part of every school, and a potent instrument of indoctrina-
Joining them was not complicated.
On
the contrary,
genius of the builders of the Soviet system to take over so
it
was part of the
manv
of the para-
phernalia and simulacra of normal "bourgeois" society, and onlv behind the scenes to link
them with an imperceptible but unbreakable web of hidden by the Party. This
controls, so that every lever could ultimately be pulled
was gradually accomplished with the trade unions, professional associations, and eventually even with sports clubs, as well as with the vouth organizations, and always with great success. From the point of view of the children, you joinetl the Y Oung Pioneers in order to be with your friends, go to camp, learn to tie knots, sing rousing songs, parade on public holidays and to have the right to wear the Pioneer's red tie and red
cultural groups, social clubs,
badge, with
its five
logs (representing the five continents) ablaze in the fire of
world re\'olution. As another writer has pointed out more recently, there was nothing to it: "When you were old enough you became a \'oung Pioneer, then a member of the Komsomol, and then a member of the Party. It was as simple as that. That was what happened to everybody, just as you
moved
from class to class."' But the songs you sang, the occasions you marched on, and the speeches you listened to were carefully selected and
regularly
prepared
—very much
as in the
Boy
Scouts, except that the organization pre-
paring and controlling these events controlled everything else as well.
Solzhenitsvn had
come
to the idea of joining the Y
oung Pioneers
rather
and only under a certain amount of pressure. At the age often he had had the cross ripped from his neck by jeering Pioneers, and for over a year he was held up to ridicule at school meetings and told that he ought to join."^ He was used to regarding himself as "different" from the other children and to standing somew hat apart, but eventually the need to conform proved greater than his urge for a difficult independence. But it was not a simple matter, for the cross-currents in the school were rather complex. It would appear that the principal activists in the Pioneer and Komsomol movements, at least in Rostov, were Jewish children, whose parents had been systematically discriminated against under the tsarist regime. They were naturally enthusiastic about the nev\' order, but the fact of their nationality reluctantly at
endowed emerged
first,
their hostility to Solzhenitsvn's cross with a certain ambiguity. in
another incident that Solzhenitsyn became involved
in
This
soon after
he had joined the Pioneers.
A
routine scuffie took place one day between
two boys
in his class,
Valeri Nikolsky and Dimitri Shtitelman, in the course of which they exchanged
I
Old World
Farewk.li. to thk
[65
J
and Nikolsky called Shtitclman a "Russkv sloh."* Solzhenitsvn, sitw hen Shtitelnian accused Nikoiskv of anti-Semitism, Soizhenitsyn refused to support him, on the grounds that "everybody has the right to sav what he likes." After this he, t(K), was accused of anti-Semitism and arraigned before a special meeting of the \'oung Pioneers. The incident must have rankled w ith Solzhenitss n, for vears later he introduced it into The First Circle in the form of a flashback in the mind of Adam Roitman, a major in the MVI),t w ho recalls a scene from his childhood. In this scene the Soizhenitsyn hgure is called Oleg Rozhdest\ enskv, a "pale thin boy who was top of his class, never talked about politics and had joined the Pioneers with obvious reluctance." Rozhdestvensky has been observed attending church with his mother and w earing a cross round his neck, but his principal crime is to declare in the class-room one dav that "evervbodv has the right to say what he thinks," and when a Jewish bov challenges him insults
ting nearby, witnessed the scene, hut
("Nikola called
body has the
me
a 'dirty Yid'
right to say
w
—
is
that
all
hat he likes."
right too.'") to replv that "every-
As
a result,
he
is
denounced
at a
Pioneers' meeting (one after another "the tw elve-vear-old Robespierres got
w hole school and denounced this accomplice of anti-Semand expelled from the Pioneers, w hich could possibly lead to his expulsion from the school. Roitman, one of the Jewish bo\s who made up "about half of the class in that southern tov\'n," is portrayed in the novel as Rozhup
in front of the
ites")
destvensky 's "social accuser," responsible for reading out the charges.** Six months before these painful events, there had occurred another dent that would have sunk into oblivion, had
inci-
on the one hand, resulted in a lifelong and highly visible ph\ sical scar and, on the other, later become the subject of ingenious and scurrilous inventions on the part of his enemies. The incident occurred on 9 September 1930, when Soizhenitsyn was eleven. He and another bov, Alexander Kagan, were wrestling in the classroom for possession of a sheath knife w hen Kagan snatched it from Soizhenitsyn and accidentally pricked a nerve in the latter's hand. Soizhenitsyn felt dizzy, and started out for the cloakroom in order to put his hand under the tap. After a step or two, he fainted and fell, striking his brow on the stone doorpost and inflicting a deep gash. His companions picked him up and carried him to the cloakroom, where they bathed his forehead in cold water. They then took him to the out-patients' department of the local hospital to have his wound stitched and dressed, but the cut on his forehead w as crudely cobbled, turned septic, and had to be reopened and restitched. Soizhenitsyn was obliged to spend over a month in bed before it w as completeK' healed.^ One result of this boyish prank w as the scar on his right temple that has remained prominent to the present day. Another w as a henceforth recurrent tendency to faint when experiencing physical pain a peculiarit\- that w as to prove highly embarrassing in the army: on at least one occasion he was to it
not,
—
*An
approximate translation
ot the original insult,
which
used by Ukrainians about Russians. t Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (the Ministr\' of the Interior).
v\as
based on
a
popular term of abuse
SOLZHENITSYN
[66]
while being vaccinated. Perhaps the most curious consequence of this
faint
which it was put by the Soviet authorities campaign to discredit Solzhenitsyn. In 1975, after the appearance in the West of The Gulag Archipelago, a series of publications appeared in which the acquisition of the scar was attributed to all episode, however,
was the use
nearly half a century later in
sorts of character deficiencies.
in a
fit
to
its
According to one version, Solzhenitsyn fainted
of rage after having been reprimanded by his class teacher Alexander
Bershadsky, and thus cut his forehead. According to another, the scar was caused by Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitism. Instead of having wrestled for the knife, Solzhenitsyn fallen against the
was
doorpost as
said to have called
a result
Kagan
a
\\'ith
Kagan
"Yid" and to have
of being punched.*
The latter version obviously owed something to the Shtitelman incident (and may even have been inspired by Solzhenitsyn's description of the incident in The First
ishment for
incorporated expulsion as the probable pun-
Circle). It also
this crime,
but according to Solzhenitsyn, the only
some two years
real threat of
when
he, Kagan, and Solzhenitsyn subsequently hid the class register behind a cupboard to conceal from the director of studies the number of black marks he had against his name. On this occasion it was Bershadsky who threatened Solzhenitsyn with expulsion, and
expulsion he ever experienced occurred
and
a third
boy skipped
later,
classes to play soccer,
only the entreaties of the rest of the class (especially the
girls)
persuaded him
to relent.'"
During the early
thirties a
loosening of Solzhenitsyn's
ties
number
of other events contributed to the
with his family and the world of his child-
it were, the larger changes that were takaround him. In 1930 Roman and Irina ran out of the possessions and money that had sustained them since the Civil War, and they were obliged to give up their comfortable house in Yeisk and move to a flat. At the same time Roman took his first jol) as a driver for a local enterprise. That summer, instead of going to Irina and Roman as usual during the holidays, Solzhenitsyn went with his mother to Georgievsk to visit Aunt Maria and her family. Grandfather Zakhar and Grandmother Evdokia were there, having recently moved back from Gulkevichi, and their situation was pitiful. Za-
hood, symbolically underlining, as ing place
all
—
khar, with no his
former
money, no work, and no prospects, was but
self,
though
still
a pale
shadow of
capable of violent rages against the present regime
whereas Evdokia was silent and resigned. and Solzhenitsyn made their last visit to his father's grave in the little churchyard there. Afterwards, Taissia took him for his first and only childhood trip to his father's birthplace, Sablia, forty miles to the east. Grandfather Semyon was no longer there, of course. Two aunts and an uncle had died (his step-aunt, Maria, at the end of the twenties
and
their confiscation of his property,
While
*
in
Georgievsk, 1
These versions were published
first
(after Solzhenitsyn's
wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya,
being Rezac,
at
aissia
by
his
expulsion from the Soviet Union) by his
former school friend
Kirill
Simonxan (who, despite
the same school, had not witnessed the incident), and by the Czech writer
who
wrote
a
scurrilous "biography" of Solzhenits\n in 1978.
Tomas
'
Farewell TO THE Old WOrld after a long illness).
[67]
Another aunt, Evdokia, had mo\ed a\\a\ and onK Uncle a, w ere lett in the \ illage. Kon,
Konstantin and Solzhenitsvn's step-uncle, IK stantin
had inherited
a part of the famil\- farm,
and Solzhenits\n
travelling across the wide, dusty plain to get there.
The
later recalled
simple farmhouse
was made of reddish-brow n adobe and consisted of a single spacious livingroom and one somew hat smaller bedroom, w ith various barns, stables, and outbuildings attached to it. His uncle's sheep, as he recalled, simpK wandered over the open steppe, although there were special pens for them in winter.
Mother and son's visit w as brief, as much a farew ell as greeting, leaving no strong impressions on the \oung Solzhenitsx n. W ithin a few months both Konstantin and Ilva were to be declared kulaks* and deported to Siberia under Stalin's forced collectivization policies. A few years later, in 1933 or 1934, the cemeter\ in (ieorgiexsk where his father la\- buried was flattened to make wav for a sports stadium. It was to be nearlv thirtv years, atter his own deportation to Siberia and spell in the labour camps, before Solzhenits\'n w as able to return to these parts, and bv then the already tenuous links with his father's familv had been stretched almost to vanishing-point.' That same winter of 1930, not long after their trip to Georgievsk and Sablia, Taissia and Solzhenitsvn had a visit from Grandfather Zakhar. Such visits were a rare occurrence, for their hovel was too cramped to accommodate guests, and anyone who stayed was obliged to sleep on the floor. Zakhar, though now seventv-two, was not deterred bv this. Despite the tribulations he had endured since the confiscation of his estate, w hich included recurrent harassment and repeated questioning bv the Soviet authorities, he remained an imposing figure of a man, and had clung defianth' to the old customs and manner of dress. With his shaven head, big purple nose, and luxuriant moustaches, and clad in riding boots and an old-fashioned hipan anachronism in the nowlength w aisted coat, he looked w hat he w as drab and down-at-heel citv of Rostov. On this occasion, after stamping into Taissia's tiny shack, he sank down in one corner and began to leaf through the pages of the bible he was carr\'ing, loudlv bewailing his useless existence and cursing the new regime that had deprived him not only of his possessions
—
—
but also of
all
clung to the
purpose in life. Like many of the older generation, he still twelve vears after the Revolution, that the Bolsheviks
belief,
would one dav be defeated or disappear and that life would return to normal. Above all he was deepiv concerned about the fate of his estate and anxious that it should be properlv cared for, so that he could hand it on, he said, to the voung Solzhenitsvn, his onl\- grandchild, to carry on his work. Roman, Zakhar's son and natural heir, had no children of his own, and Zakhar regarded
Roman
as unfit to
run
a large estate.
As the old man continued *The name
applied
pendent peasants "fist."
first to rich,
who showed
to
maunder on
in this fashion, talking halt to
then to moderatelv well-off, and eventually to almost
hostilit\
to collectivization. Kulak
is
also the Russian
all
inde-
word
tor
SOLZHENITSVN
[68]
himself and half to his daughter and grandson, Solzhenitsvn \\ ent over to commiserate with him and comfort him. He had been taught at school about the evils of property, and he assured his grandfather that there was no cause for distress. "Don't worry about it, granddad. I don't want vour estate anv-
w av.
would have refused
I
it
on
principle."'-
and Solzhenitsyn \\ ere still sleeping, Zakhar crept away to go to church. Soon afterwards mother and son were aw akened bv the thunderous kicking of boots against the door. Two OGPU agents in sugar-loaf hats and sheepskin coats burst into the room and demanded to see Zakhar. He was w anted for questioning, thev said, in connection with the hoarding of gold. They were there as a result of Stalin's celebrated campaign to extort gold from private businessmen and traders from those w ho had been in business before the Revolution and from those who had been active onlv during the New Economic Policv. Apparentlv, the OGPU agents had follow ed Zakhar from Georgievsk, w here he had been twice detained and questioned on the subject of gold, and were astonished not to find him at home. 1 hev turned on Taissia, abusing her as a "class enemy" and demanding that she hand over any money, gold, or other valuables that she had in her possession. She said she had none, whereupon they threatened her v\ith imprisonment and asked her to sign a statement sw earing that she had no gold in the house, on pain of immediate arrest if their search proved Earlv next morning,
\\
hile Taissia
—
she had
The
lied.
I
asked w hether the statement included vxedding rings.
aissia
agents nodded.
When
she handed them her
own
having her dead husband's ring too. Taissia fetched
on and then signed the
ring, they insisted it
statement.
At at
that
moment Zakhar
returned from church.
The
police agents jeered
him, and said that they had come for his gold. Ignoring them, Zakhar
fell
and commenced to pray. The agents cursed him, hauled him to his feet, and conducted a thorough bod\ search, but found nothing. After a further stream of curses they stamped out, threatto his knees before the icon in the corner
ening to catch him on some future occasion.
Zakhar returned his wife,
to Georgievsk.
1
wo months
later, in
Evdokia, died. Unable to attend the funeral,
memorial mass
for her
mother
in
February 1931,
Taissia arranged a
Rostov Cathedral. This called for considnow regularly spied on and denounced
erable courage, for church-goers were
Often enough, they lost their jobs as well. For Taissia, however, the death of her mother w as an exceptional event, and she duly held the service and attended w ith her son. Fortunately, she escaped retri-
to the authorities.
was reported to the headmaster by one of his schooland w as reprimanded for conduct unbecoming to a Young Pioneer. The following year, in 1932, Zakhar died too. 1 he circumstances of his death were somewhat mysterious, and 1 aissia and Solzhenitsyn remained unaw are of it for some time afterw ards. It seems that, grief-stricken after the death of his wife, Zakhar had w andered back to the district w here his estate was, in the vicinity of Armavir. He continued to be pursued by the OGPU, who were convinced he had a secret hoard of s^old, and finally, halt-madbution, but Solzhenits\n fellow
s
— to thk Old World
Farf.vvf.ll
I69I
dencd b\' their taunts and hulK ing, he is said to ha\e hung a rough wooden cross round his neck, like a beggar, and gone to the OGPU headquarters in Armavir. "You have stolen all m\- monev and possessions," he said, "so now you can take me into vour jail and keep me." W hether the\ put him into the cells or not, whether he collapsed or died in some other way, nobody seemed to know. The news took a long time to filter through to Taissia, and all she w as able to do upon hearing it w as conduct another memorial ser\ ice at Rostov Cathedral.''
w
Solzhenits\n's connections in other
wavs
One
too.
evening
ith
childhood were being
in
March
irre\'ocabl\'
snapped
1932, with the thaw ing slush
still
on the ground, he ran round on one of his usual visits to the Fedorovskys. He w as brought up short at the gate bv an unusual sight. I'hin, tight-lipped, stooping Madimir Fedoro\sk\', the nearest thing he had had to a father, was being escorted through the yard by two strangers to a w aiting saloon car. In his hand he held a small w hite parcel tied up with string. He got into the car and was driven awav. Solzhenits\ n rushed into the fiat and was met with a scene of utter devastation. Drawers and cupboards had been violently tied
onto the
floor,
emp-
rugs and carpets had been torn up and tossed aside, books
and ornaments had been scattered ever\w here. The w hole fiat had been turned '^ upside down in a search b\' OGPU agents that had lasted twenty-four hours. This was Solzhenitsvn's first direct encounter with the brutalities of an
He was
aware, in a generalized w av, of some of the activities and had experienced their summary treatment of his mother and grandfather. But never, till now, had he seen the claws so nakedly unsheathed. 1 he memorv of w hat he w itnessed on that grey March evening actual arrest.
OGPU
of the
surelv informs the vivid description of opening pages of The Gulag Archipelago.
[.\rrest]
a
is
The
door.
sharp ringing
h
of the secret police, in.
.
.
in the
insolent entrance of is
the
appears in the
a typical arrest that
middle of the night or
a
rude knocking
at the
unw iped jackboots w orn by the unsleeping agents cowed and frightened w itness w ho follow s them
.
The
up by trembling hands of change of underwear, and something to eat
traditional arrest also includes the gathering
soap and towel for the victim,
nobodv know
The
w hat
s
is
a
needed or w hat is allow ed, or w hat it is best to w ear. means ... an alien, brutal crushing force raging .
.
.
traditional arrest also
for hours and hours. It means a smashing, a ripping and a pulling down from the w alls, a hurling onto the floor of the contents of desks and drawers, an emptying out, a scattering and a ripping and a piling of mountains of possessions on the floor and their crunch beneath jack-
unchecked open,
boots.
.
And upside
from
vour home
.
—
.
for those left
down and
ing back at
The
in
a tearing
behind
gutted.
after the arrest,
And
vou through the
grilles:
scene depicted in that
a different source.
To
it is
the long
tail
attempts to deliver food parcels.
last
"No one
of a
And
life
turned
voices bark-
here by that name!""
paragraph was familiar to Solzhenitsyn
get to his
home from
school, he
w as obliged
to
SOLZHENITSYN
[7o]
walk
down Nikolsky
Lane, which ran along one side of the enormous build-
ing that had been taken over as the
OGPU
prison in the centre of Rostov.
The back entrance to the prison was situated in the lane and was permanentlv marked by a long and dismal line of silent women waiting to make inquiries or to hand in food parcels.''^ One of the four massive wings that made up the prison faced the main boulevard, the Bolshaya Sadovaya (later Engels Street the OGPU prison was at No. 33) next to the university, its ironclad gates patrolled bv sentries in kepis, who chased awav anv idlers. In a later poem Solzhenitsvn described how its basements used to run out under the pavement, lit by opaque pavement lights set into the asphalt. These basements contained dungeons, so that passers-by were actuallv walking over the heads of the prisoners incarcerated there. He also described how one day a man appeared in one of the
—
windows of
the top floor of the prison block, clambered out and hurtled onto the roadway below, where he smashed to pieces. His body w as hastily removed by the sentries and the blood washed away with hose-pipes, but everyone knew what had happened.''^ There were also the columns of prisoners marched through the streets from time to time under armed guard, accompanied by the chilling shouts of the escort commander: "One step out of line and I'll give the order to shoot or sabre vou down!" As a bov, Solzhenitsvn saw and knew these things too, and vet he could not grasp their meaning. He was not old enough; he did not have the necessarv experience to interpret what he saw around him, and he went w ith the crowd. Onh' much later, after his odvssey through Soviet prisons and camps, did he appreciate the true significance of this prison and these columns. Only then could he write, in The Gulag Archipelago, his brilliant evocation of that secret "fourth dimension" of prison, lurking behind the usual three, of which not only children but also so many adults w ere '^ blissfully unaware until they discovered it for themselves. It turned out that Vladimir Fedorovskv was a late victim of the campaign against the "wrecker-engineers," who had been condemned at the Shakhty trial in 1928 and in the trial of the "Industrial Party" two years later.* These trials, coinciding with the end of the New Economic Policy, had signalled the ending of the ten-vear alliance between the Communist Party and the non-Communist specialists, and the inauguration of an era of rigid Partv discipline. Throughout the twenties the Party had needed the specialists in order to survive, although the specialists were free-thinking and usually blank
onto the
sill,
*Shakhtv was
leapt,
a city in the
Caucasus not too
to have uncovered a vast sabotage
far
from Rostov, where the secret poHce claimed No evidence was pro-
network run by veteran engineers.
duced, other than confessions extracted under torture, but eleven people were sentenced to death, of whom five were executed. It was the first Stalinist show trial. The "Industrial Party" trial
was centred on the
city of
Kuibyshev;
it
alleged the existence of a similar
network of
saboteurs organized into a party led by Professor Ramzin. Again the only evidence was that of forced confessions, and again death sentences v\ere passed dov\n, although this time none were carried out (on the other hand, forty-eight officials trial
began).
The
"Industrial Partv"
was
were said tt) have been executed before the working for Western capitalist interests.
also accused of
Fare\vp:i.i.
hard to control.
Now,
to
ith the rising
\\
Old WO kid
thf.
of
a
[71]
new generation of C>ommunist-
educated engineers more amenable to taking orders, the "bourgeois specialists" had become expendable and could be dealt with. The pretext was the
Manv
introduction of Stalin's First I'ive-Ycar Flan.
were impossibly high. The "bourgeois advised the Party that the plan ble.
w as
But instead of being listened
of the targets in this plan
specialists," as responsible experts,
too ambitious and the targets unattaina-
w ere accused of sabotage and put
to, the\
show trials, which forced confessions and rigged evidence were employed to secure conviction. Professor L. K. Kamzin, for instance, a former Bolshevik and on
trial for
treason.
These were the
first
of Stalin's great series of
in
star witness at the "Industrial Party" trial,
opposition party
among
the conclusion of the
claimed to have established an
the engineers with over two thousand members.
trial,
terms of imprisonment, leaving behind
to long
.\t
he and seven alleged accomplices were sentenced a fertile soil for the
tion of investigations to find the remaining 1,992.
continua-
Ihese continued for some
years in an atmosphere of increasing mistrust, even after
Ramzin himself had
been released and rehabilitated follow ing a suspiciously short time in jail. Vladimir Fedorovsky's crime, it transpired, w as to have among his pos-
w hich both he and Ramzin up by the tw ent\-four-hour search. It was not sufficient for him to be put on trial, and he was released after a year's detention and interrogation, but he was completel\' broken in health and spirits and never got his old job back again. He lived on more or sessions a photograph of an engineers' congress in
appeared.
less
I
his
was the
sole evidence turned
aimlessly for another ten years and died in 1943 in Tashkent.
Meanw hile,
fresh disasters struck the F>dorovskys after Vladimir's arrest.
Literally within days his mother-in-law
Taissia's old headmistress,
,
Mme
Andreyeva, was struck by paralysis and died after a short illness. Soon afterwards Solzhenitsyn's childhood friend Misha was involved in a skating accident, in which he fell and banged his head. He contracted meningitis and within
a short
time was also dead.
A
Solzhenitsvn and Taissia continued to
pall
of grief settled over the household.
call,
but Solzhenitsyn fancied he could
read a silent reproach in Zhenia's eyes for his survival, while her cious son
was dead. And
that his childhood a
in truth there
playmate had gone.
was
The
place
own
pre-
do there now of happy refuge had become
little
for
him
to
house of mourning.
was four years older than Solzhenitsyn them w as most marked. The longlegged blonde with the tousled hair, who had shared all his games and secrets, was now a young w oman. There had been a brief period w hen he w as infatuated with her, hanging round the desk where she painted w atercolours,
As
and
at
for Lialia, Misha's sister, she
an age
when
the difference betw een
little vase of lilies of the valley and three ornamental elephants. He had been intoxicated by her scent, the rustle of her dresses and her femininity. But with increasing maturity Lialia had tired of their games and Solzhenitsyn's dogged chivalry. At school she had heeded the siren voices of Party propaganda and rejected her upbringing and early ties. Soon her pas-
with her
SOLZHENITSYN
[72] sionate idealism
and she married
would transform her into an equally passionate Communist, a man who was to become one of the leading Party officials
of the city of Rostov.
'"^
Bv about 1934 Solzhenitsyn had more or less broken out of his childhood environment and entered upon a new phase of existence, in which he would take a greater and alwavs eager part in the larger life of his school and his circle of adolescent friends. Paradoxically, his active engagement with social questions and with official Soviet ideology came just at the time when the last drops of idealism were being squeezed out of the Party and when Stalin \\ as feeling his way towards establishing the most complete police state the world had yet known. But this development was masked not only from the outside world but also from the bulk of the population of the Soviet Union itself, let alone from its young people. For the moment their idealism remained intact, and it was to be a full twenty years before the truth became clear to more than a few, bv which time Solzhenitsvn would have discovered it for himself bv the hardest possible path. Meanwhile, he shared the optimism and hopes of those around him.
-
4
WRITER AND COMMUNIST ONE
OF THE abiding images that has come down to us of Solzhenitsvn's youth is that of deprivation and poverty. Lev Kopelev, his close friend in later life, once pointed out that the origin of Ivan Denisoxich's celebrated thrift in Solzhenitsvn's first published story was to be sought not simply in the author's labour-camp experiences but also in his straitened and
hungrv childhood, w hich had left an indelible mark on his character. Thrift, economy, modesty of material demands, and indifference to comfort came naturalh' to him and have remained a permanent feature of his way of life even in his present affluence. Soizhenitsvn once had occasion to confirm this when asked by a French interviewer, "What sensations are rekindled in \our mind when you think of your childhood?" He replied: '
Hardships. I'm afraid the w ord
\\
on't
mean much
of the war and the Nazis, especially as
Things were no better when
I
to
you
for
doesn't apply to
it
became an
your experience
all
my
childhood alone.
adult.
Up
From
the end of 1918, the year
to the age of forty
I
knew
I was know what a house was. We lived in huts which v\ere constantly assailed by the cold. Never enough fuel to keep us warm. No water in the room w here we lived we had to go out and fetch it some distance away. A pair of shoes or a suit of clothes had to last for several years. As for the food,
nothing but
a
kind of dignified destitution.
born, until 1941,
I
didn't
—
After the starvation of the 1930s, ordinary shortages were a
don't mention
it.
minor
some mysterious way,
evil.
In
all
these things struck
me
as
more or
less
normal.
This perception of "normality" was quite natural. All children accept it and regard their childhood as normal, at least until
the world as the\' find
73
— .
SOLZHEMTSVN
[74]
experience teaches them otherwise.
And
in
one sense
this
poverty and hun-
ger i^as normal in the Soviet thirties, for Stahn's First Five- Year Plan, its
forced collectivization of the peasantry and
w ith
forced industrialization,
its
ensured that the bulk of the population would go hungry throughout most of their
lives.
was the
Collectivization a principal
result of a tangle of motives
w inding up
cause had been the
on
but
Stalin's part,
New Economic
of the
Policy in
1928 and the replacement of a free market for foodstuffs by requisitions and coercion.
The
by
peasants, deprived of anv economic incentives, responded
cutting production, and
it
w as
tins that
persuaded Stalin to push through his
"revolution from above" and take over the land.
Not unexpectedly,
force
was
necessarv nearly everywhere, for the peasants fought tooth and nail to defend their holdings.
had been bought by and forced turn placed the mark of "counter-revolution" on
Their very support
promises of land; now
,
tw ehe years
for the Revolution
later,
—
they were being asked
up again. Stalin in the kulaks and stretched the meaning of the word to include not only rich peasants but any peasant who w as moderately successful or well-to-do, while other innocent victims were accused of being "kulak-minded" (podkulachtiiki) In the end it made little difference, for all w ho opposed the collectivization in anv w av w ere herded off to Siberia, either to swell the growing numbers in the labour camps or simply to be let loose in the Arctic tundra to fend tor to give
it
themselves or die.
The terrible
full
consequences are incalculable, but the immediate result w
famine
—"the only case
in history of a
Robert Conquest has pointed out ror.^
Estimates of the
figure of three
and
number
in his
purely
book on
this period.
of Soviet citizens
a half million
as a
man-made famine,"
who
as
The Great Ter-
died vary from the
submitted to Stalin bv the
OGPU
at
the
computed b\' a League of Nations report in 1946. An almost equal number were deported to Siberia. It w as an event unique in the annals of Europe, the greatest catastrophe of modern times apart from the Nazi Holocaust, to w hich it fully bears comparison. At the same time, it w as Stalin's first major exercise in large-scale deception, time to an estimate of five to
six million
both at home and abroad. The few contemporary reports that leaked out were quickly denounced and mainly disbelieved. At home a frightened population was kept in ignorance, while those in the cities knew only that there was a serious, inexplicable famine, without drought and without war, and that the w ise course was not to inquire into it too closely. The inhabitants of Rostov could not fail to be aw are of w hat w as happening. As the commercial centre for a rich agricultural region, and as a leading producer of tractors and agricultural machinerx for that region, Rostov had numerous links with the countryside, and new s was bound to filter through. The Cossacks of the Kuban, where Zakhar's estate had been, rebelled so violently that they had to be put dow n through the personal intervention of Lazar Kaganovich, head of the Party's Central Control Commission. A correspondent of the London Times, Iverach .McDonald, the
North Caucasus
at this time, later
described
how
who
tra\elled
through
w ere
untilled;
"the fields
I
Writer AND Communist
men had been
[75]
taken aw a\ after resisting the collectivization drive; children
came w himpering
to the train for bread.
""^
was instantly ready with plausible explanations for They were the work of "over-zealous" officials, or the result of "wrecking" on the part of the kulaks and other "class enemies," or the machinations of foreign powers and the supporters of counter-revolution of anvthing, in fact, other than the policies that had caused them. Methods might sometimes be wrong, but policies nexer. The press was under total Party control and thoroughly censored, and all links w ith foreign sources of information were deliberately broken off, for this was the vear in w hich the Iron Curtain v\'as first lowered. Not even the adult population w as aw are of the enormity of what was happening to them. To Taissia and Solzhenitsyn's endemic difficulties of tr\ ing to li\ e on one small salary was now added a general situation of w idespread shortages and hunger. Long queues for bread and other necessities of life became more prevalent than they had ever been before. Private hardship w as paralleled b\public hardship, private suffering by general suffering. Another resident of Rostov at this time recalls the enormous difficulty one had in buying any sort of clothing. To get a pair of shoes, for instance, could mean queuing for up to si.x months. The normal method was to go to the shop w here the arrival of a consignment of shoes was announced and to queue for a number, which lasted for one day. If the queue lasted longer, you were obliged to return every day and get a new number, and if you missed a day, you w ere struck off the list. \\ hen the consignment arrived (usually w ithout w arning), \'ou queued again in numerical order until you w ere able, if luck\', to bu\' your Stalin, for his part,
the abuses.
—
shoes.
person remembers another typical Rosto\" incident. A barrel two wheels was being pulled through the streets one day, and word got about that it was for sale. People rushed to fetch cans and pails and
The same
of paraffin on
fell in
behind
it,
or turned in their tracks and followed
it
just to
keep their
no time the man w ith the barrel found himself at the head of a vast procession that grew longer and longer as it twisted and turned from street to street. Nobody knew whether the paraffin was really for sale or not, and the delivery man either could not or would not say. And so the crowd followed him, a latter-day Piper of Hamelin, in silent hope. It places in the queue. In next to
was no longer icons and sacred relics that attracted processions in the streets, but barrels of paraffin on w heels.' Solzhenitsyn's penury merged with the public penury, and had both practical and psychological consequences. Practically, the biggest problem was clothing. Apart from having to queue all the time, he could scarcely afford what w as available, and his clothes, though neat, were often shabby and threadbare. Unforeseen accidents could occur to make the situation worse. On one occasion he sat on some ink on a chair and came aw ay w ith a spot on the seat of his trousers. The ink resolutely resisted all attempts to wash it out, and he w as obliged to continue wearing the trousers for two more years before he could afford another pair.
SOLZHENITSYN
[76]
Psychologically, the effects were
more impalpable. As the top educa-
Malevich school had a number of children from families suddenly impoverished and now suffering discrimination, like the Solzhenitsyns, the "exes," as they were picturesquely called, meaning tional establishment in Rostov, the
the ex-professional people and ex-bourgeoisie. But thev were the exception, rather than the rule. The majority came from families that had sur\ived scx:iall\' and economically, like the Fedorovskys, or from those of the new Party functionaries and proletarian elite. These latter were the new Soviet aristocracy, already beginning to be well dressed and well fed. Shortages meant nothing to them, for they had their own, reserved commissaries w here thev could entry being carefully restricted to those obtain virtually anything they liked with the right Party cards. Those who suffered w orst under this system were the genuine v\orkers and minor office employees, because members of the former bourgeoisie and intelligentsia could at least sell their possessions the new aristocrats were the eager buyers. And until they ran out, there w as at least a cushion against the general austerity. But apart from her grand piano, Taissia soon had nothing left. Solzhenitsvn was therefore excluded from popular pastimes like skating, because he could never afford the blades or the special boots to go with them. Another sport he longed to try was tennis, and he recalls how he used to press his nose to the w ire in his youth, watching those unattainable white-clad figures leaping about the court, and yearn to be able to join them. Neither the special clothes nor the racquets were remotely within his means, let alone the opportunity to join the club.*^ These social tensions, combined with a sensitivity about his fatherlessness and a simmering sense of shame over his class origins, seem to have fuelled a driving ambition and a rage to excel that showed themselves in Solzhenitsxn from an exceptionally early age. As a \'oung child he had decided that he w anted to become one of three things: a general, a priest, or a w riter. At school he was always an outstanding pupil, equally good at arts and at science subjects; like his mother before him, he was invariably top of his class. And his mother, indeed, played no small role in his education, constantly encouraging him with her love and devotion, admiring his progress,
—
—
and helping him w quence, he shone
ith his school
at just
work
in
every
way
she could.
As
a
conse-
about everything he touched. Natalia Reshetovskaya
was once told by a former classmate of Solzhenitsyn's that the one thing he seemed to be poor at w as draw ing, but by stubbornh applying himself to the problem over many months, he overcame his deficiency and began to obtain excellent marks in that subject as well. Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn's scholastic excellence did not turn him into a prig or cut him off from the other pupils. He was one of a number of outstandingly clever children attracted to the school by its reputation (it w as well known as the favourite school of the "exes"), and he became close friends w ith three of the most talented pupils in his class: Nikolai \ itkevich, Kirill Simony an, and Lydia Ezherets. He and the two other boys soon referred to themselves jokingly as "The Three Musketeers" and were inseparable throughout most of their school years and at university.
Writer and (Communist
[77]
Simonyan, an Armenian from Nakhichevan, arrived in Solzhehad been a \veahh\ businessman who had extensi\e Hnks abroad, especiailv in Persia, and who spoke man\' languages. Apparently, he had been able to continue with his business activities until the end of the New Economic Policy, in 1928, but had then fled to Persia to escape persecution, crossing the border on foot and leaving Kirill, nine, his sister, Nadezhda, five, and their mother to look after themselves. His mother was summoned by the CIPU for questioning, but nothing worse followed and she \\ as allowed to return to her familw Mrs Simonvan \\ as throw n back aissia, for she sufon her own resources and was even more helpless than fered from emphxsema and her health was too fragile to permit her to w ork. rhe Armenian community, however, was very close-knit. Friends and relations rallied round, and the family w as ultimately able to manage reasonably Kirill
nits\n's school in 1930. His father
I
well for those times.
Many
things
drew the two boys
together: the secret
pasts, their present fatherlessness, their
lived in a single
poverty
room on Dmitrievskava
overhanging iron balconies and an iron
shame of their
(Kirill, his sister,
fathers'
and mother
Street; their courtyard, with
staircase,,
its
looked even grimmer and
more run-down than the Solzhenitsyns' cul-de-sac). And they had a common interest in the arts. Kirill was a sensitive, dreamy boy with a passion for music. Indeed, his w hole family was gifted musically. His sister, Nadezhda, went on to become a well-known composer (she wrote the score for that exquisite Soviet period film The Lady with the Little Dog, based on the Chekhov story), and Kirill himself, despite a hearing defect, was a pianist of some accomplishment. In the summers, he insisted on taking Solzhenitsyn to free concerts in the park, and explained the principles of music to him. Kirill was also interested in the occult and, w hen his mother was out, used to organize seances, which seemed to Solzhenitsyn to establish genuine contact with the other world. He recounted his dreams to Solzhenitsyn, discussed their meana m\'stical bent that intrigued and fascinated Solzhenits\'n, much mysticism had fascinated him earlier. But w ith such interests and with his dark-skinned, soulful good looks, he struck the other boys as effeminate. His mane of black hair, heavy black brows, dark eyes, prominent ing,
and had
as Irina's
Armenian nose, and wide mobile mouth made him almost his
own
good, and he had
a
way
too
handsome
tor
of carrying a handkerchief in his hand or of
grimacing theatrically that inevitably led to
much
teasing.
He w as dubbed
ice.
"Kirochka" and sometimes imitated, but apparently without malIn early adolescence, when he suddenly grew much taller than the oth-
ers,
he earned the nickname of "Ostrich,"
"Kirilla" or
a
w ith him
into
the "Walrus," given to
him
name
that stuck
manhood.*^ Solzhenitsyn also had
a
nickname
at school:
because of his love of the cold. A preference for winter and cold weather was to become an enduring trait. The autobiographical Gleb Nerzhin in The First
midwinter before sawing some firewood: "Picking up handfuls [of snow], he rubbed it vigorously over his chest, back, and ."^ sides. All through winter he rubbed himself down to the waist with snow Circle strips to the waist in
SOLZHENITSYN
[78]
And
Solzhenitsyn's later choice of
Vermont
United
as a place to settle in the
was dictated by its climate and by his preference for cold w inters and cool summers. "Walrus" is a common Russian nickname for such lovers of States
cold weather.
As Musketeers,
was "Aramis" and Solzhenitsyn "Athos." was Nikolai V'itkevich Koka to his friends. Like Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai was an orphan. His father, a civil servant in tsarist times, had died during the Civil War, and Nikolai w as an only son. Nikolai's mother, Antonina V'itkevich, was a tough, resilient woman, determined to make her way in the world. She had joined the Party, remaining a staunch member of it till the end of her days, and this had enabled her, as a shorthand typist, to work for "sensitive" Party and government institutions, where the pay was better and some privileges were available. She had also tried re-marrying. In 1930 her second husband, a Daghestanian Moslem, had taken her and Nikolai to Daghestan with him, where they had lived in semi-oriental fashion and Nikolai had attended a Moslem school. But in 1934 the stepfather had died, and Nikolai and his mother had returned to
The
Kirill
evidently
—
third musketeer, "Porthos,"
Rostov. Nikolai
\\
as Solzhenitsyn's oldest
at school as early as 1928,
and
w hen both w ere
closest friend.
nine, but
it
w
as
The two had met only after Nikolai
returned from Daghestan that their friendship really blossomed. If
Kirill's
character was lyrical and unstable, Nikolai's seems to have been the opposite:
dour,
down
to earth, determined, independent.
Photographs of him reveal
stocky, broad-shouldered youth with a short neck and bullet-like head.
mouth
is
set in
abstracted as
an obstinate
w ell,
as if his
line,
a
The
the eyes look stubborn and somehov\
thoughts w ere turned
in
on himself.
He was far own
extroverted than Solzhenitsyn or Kirill, but seems to have held his
less
in their
common
The
pursuits.
other close school friend
who
deserves mention at this stage
is
Lydia
Ezherets (known to her friends as Lida). Lydia came from a highly cultivated
Jew
ish
family that was very prominent in Rostov during the inter-war years.
Dr Alexander Ezherets, was head of the main Rostov polyclinic and director of the Regional Health Board for the Black Sea coast, an exceedingly popular and influential man. Lydia seems to have resembled him in that she, too, was popular and was esteemed for her outstandingly generous Her
father,
and unselfish character. Solzhenitsyn remembers her as a kind, gentle, loveable girl who was never known to lose her temper or quarrel with anyone. Others, w ho met her in later life, invariably recall her intelligence, sensitivity, and willingness to help. The principal bond that drew these friends together was their common love of literature. Neither Kirill, in later life, nor Natalia Reshetovskaya (in is an entirely reliable witness in these matters, but Kiwords, as quoted by Reshetovskaya, on the subject of their enthusiasm and their relations w ith their literature teacher, Anastasia Griinau, have the ring of truth to them.
her edited memoirs) rill's
Writer and Communist
We wrote essays on
[79]
Shakespeare, Bvron, and l^ushkin, consulting
of-school sources and each trying to outdo the other. Gradually
it
a
mass of outbecame clear
first
v\e
were Lida Ezherets, Sanya Solzhenitsyn, and myself. wrote very had, very imitative poetrv, until Anastasia Serge\evna
suggested
we
try
that the best at this
At
\\
At the same time we started pr(iducwe wrote poems, epigrams on one another and
riting a novel together.
ing a satirical magazine in which
even on the teachers, which thev then marked
as "witty," "not wittv," "wittv
but tactless," and so on. In the ninth
We
organized
We
Rostand.
and tenth
classes,
v\
e
added
to this
an infatuation w
ith
the theatre.
drama club and rehearsed plavs bv Ostrovskv, (Jiekhov, and had ready-made characters in our class for all possible roles.'" a
This picture of the friends'
u as
later
con-
the Calf.
The
joint
literary activities at school
firmed by Solzhenitsyn in a supplement to The Oak and
dubbed "the novel of the three madmen" and w as written rather manner of the old parlour game of truth and consequences: each person
novel was in the
would take
it
in
turn to write a chapter, starting from whatever had gone
before but without indicating
zhenitsyn retained
when
how
the plot should develop further." Sol-
a great affection for .Xnastasia
already famous,
made
a point
Griinau and
of visiting her in
in later life,
Moscow.
It
appears
that he never forgot her lessons in his favourite subject and the love for
erature that she helped
instil in
lit-
him.''
was as passionate about literature as Solzhenitsyn, and while still two of them wrote reams of verse that thev dispatched to various vv Titers for comment. Usual! v their letters went unanswered, but on one occasion Leonid Timofeyev wrote back with a detailed and verv negative criticism of their efforts. .A.fter that thev approached a local poet called Cato for instruction and \\ ere encouraged to submit their w (jrk to a Rostov literarv magazine, The Hammer, but nothing came of that either. Solzhenitsvn later felt that Kirill had had it in him to develop into a capable and perhaps outstanding writer (Anastasia Griinau actually thought him the more talented of the two), but Kirill gradually lost heart, and after taking a medical degree he abandoned writing altogether (except for medical books). Lvdia, too, had literary ambitions, and it was usually to her flat (her father being comparatively wealthy and their flat sumptuous by Soviet standards) that the friends went to read and discuss their works. Of the entire group, she was the onlv one to take a degree in literature and end up teaching it, becoming a specialist in German literature and writing a certain amount of academic criticism. Nikolai Vitkevich was more interested in politics and philosophy than in literature proper and took little part in these exercises. Soizhenitsyn's love of amateur theatricals led to his toying at one stage with the idea of becoming a professional actor. Rostov w as particularly w ell Kirill
at school the
'"^
off for theatres at this time.
moved
into a
by the celebrated
Mausoleum
in
The
city's
Bolshoi Theatre
company had
just
sumptuous new glass-and-concrete theatre complex designed architect A.
V. Shchuko, the man responsible
Red Square. The huge
central block, flanked
for the
by two
Lenin
satellite
SOLZHENITSYN
[8o]
wings, had so enraged Rostov's citizens w ith
its
modernity and expense that
dubbed "the tractor," in honour of Rostov's best-known manufacture, but it was a vital centre of theatrical life, particularly after the arrival there of the Moscow director Yuri Zavadsky. Zavadsky, a famous actor-manager who had worked with Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko, w as formerly the director of the Red Army Theatre in Moscow, but in 1936, as a result of a routine artistic purge, he was accused of "an it
had been
ironically
excessive preoccupation with aestheticism," of pursuing "falsely understood
and innovation" (though some
ideas of novelty
said that
Nemirovich-Dan-
chenko's jealousy was at the root of the matter), and banished to Rostov.
Perhaps
fascinated
by Zavadsky's reputation,
attending his youth studio, which was
jammed with
Solzhenitsyn
began
enthusiastic applicants
in. He passed most of the two-part entrance examination without and was praised by Zavadsky for his comic talent, but Zavadsky tested his voice by the simple expedient of getting him to call out to Kirill some distance away and pronounced his vocal cords too weak. He retained a lifelong fascination with the theatre that was subsequently to issue in four stage plays, two film scripts, and a decidedly dramatic approach to prose fiction. He also conceived a passion for recitation, which in later life took the form of reading from his works. At the height of his fame in Moscow, he liked nothing better than to read to a private gathering of admirers and friends, always with gusto and verve, if not always with the requisite dramatic effect. Later, after his deportation to the West, in 1974, one of his first acts was to
eager to get difficulty
issue a
poem
gramophone recording of himself reading the
text of his long narrative
Prussian Nights.
Even had
his voice not failed,
zhenitsyn would have taken the
it is
doubtful, in retrospect, whether Sol-
final step
of entering the theatre, for his
overriding passion was literature, and of his three possible choices for a vocation, that of
becoming
first stirrings
very statement of written childish
them
dismiss juvenilia
a writer
quickly became uppermost in his mind.
of this ambition had occurred as early as the age of nine. it
invites a sceptical response.
poems and
later,
even
stories
if
when
How many
The The
people have
they were nine, only to forget and
they returned to writing? But Solzhenitsyn's
have survived intact and confirm beyond doubt that he did begin to
write systematically and at unusual length from the age of nine and that he
continued writing single-mindedly, without youth, and early
manhood
into
\\
hat
a break,
we now know
through adolescence,
as his literary maturity.
Throughout these early years the qualities that stand out in his writing, apart from a natural but not unduly precocious talent, are application, energy, and stamina
—not unimportant
attributes of a writer possessed of such vaulting
ambition.'"*
1 he
first series
of juvenilia dates from the winter of 1928-29.
The
first
rounded handwriting on the backs of invoices and other blanks from Melstroi, where his mother had worked. This is followed by "The Blue Arrow" (alternatively titled story in
it,
begun
in 1928,
is
"Pirates," written in large,
Writer and (Communist
[8i]
"V.V.," for the initials of the main hero) on tinv sheets of office paper antl by the astonishingly long "Science Fiction Story," both written in 1929. The science fiction \\ as eyidently intended for some journal that Sol/.henitsyn was planning at the time, either on his own or jointly with Misha and Lialia Fedoroyskaya. The first journal to haye suryiyed intact, howeyer, is the ambitiously named Twentieth Century, \v ith its no less ambitious subtitle: "On the Meaning of the Twentieth Century." The journal was neatly printed in handwritten capital letters, contained illustrations, yersc, jokes, and stories, all by Solzhenitsyn, and featured a long serial, "Fhe Last Pirate," whose subject matter hardly fitted the journal's grandiose aspirations but which ran in no fewer than twenty separate numbers. There seems then to haye been a slight pause until January 1932, when the thirteen-year-old tyro launched a new journal. The Literary Gazette. This one was in school exercise books (paper no longer being in such short supply), ran for two years, and deyoted much of its space to a long play. The Banquet, a comedy in two acts. It also contained another science-fiction adyenture entitled "Rays." Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn \yas trying nevy genres outside his journals. In 1934 he vyrote Mikhail Snegov, described as "a noyel"
on the exercise book coyer and "a tale" (povest) inside. Not surprisingly, its eponymous hero was an actor. Simultaneously, he wrote a great deal of verse, collected in one volume as Verse 1932-36 and later as Juvenile Verse, a miscellany of jokes, epigrams, and "especially intimate poems," some of them the fruit, no doubt, of those class activities referred to by Kirill Simonyan. Solzhenitsyn also collected a number of his early stories together under the com-
mon
title
of The Fateful Tragedy.
and omens stories,
the
(of
whom
An
Solzhenitsyn
interesting detail, for lo\ers of coincidence is
one),
"The Money Box," was named
surname but
also the affectionate
is
that the heroine of
one of the
Alia Svetlova, prefiguring not only
nickname of Solzhenitsyn's second and
present wife, Natalia Svetlova.
known w ithin the family and led on one occasion to his being drawn to the attention of Maxim Gorky. It happened as follows. His uncle Roman worshipped Gorky as an even greater writer than Tolstoy. There was a certain irony in this, for Roman himself was a Solzhenitsvn's efforts were well
typical
Gorky
—
anti-hero
a rich
merchant's son attracted by progressi\e ideas,
odds with contemporary society. Gorky repeatedly reviled and lampooned such characters in his endless novels devoted to merchant families, and was repaid by their applause but with patriarchal ways that were hopelessly
at
and adoration. At the end of the twenties, Gorky developed a theory that anyone at all could become a w titer, if only he w as given the right amount of encouragement and opportunity. As a result, people started sending him things to read from all over Russia. At about this time, in 1932 or 1933, Solzhenitsyn sent Roman and Irina a long letter about a trip he had made to the Black Sea coast with the Young Pioneers, describing the sights he had seen and his impressions. His uncle and aunt were so impressed that they sent a copy to Maxim Gorky. Some time later a reply duly arrived signed by
SOLZHEMTSYN
[82]
one of Gorky's
secretaries voicing approval
author definitely had
Of a somewhat
it
in
him
to
become
different character
and encouragement: a writer.
yes, the
young
'^
from the early
stories
and verse, and
of more interest for his biography, are what Solzhenitsyn called his Cycling Notes,
composed
in the
autumn of 1937
to describe a
month's tour of the
July and August in the companv of six friends. Solzhenitsyn had acquired his bicycle in somewhat unorthodox fashion.
Caucasus
in
In 1936, during his last year at school, he had been nominated
master for some sort of civic prize for outstanding pupils.
was usually
by the head-
The award
of the
once the nominations were in, but for some reason Solzhenitsyn's name was missing from the published list, and his school went without a prize-winner. His nomination had been blocked on account prize
a formality
The headmaster was incensed and kicked up a tredemanding that the injustice be righted. The officials conwas too late to alter the prize-winners, but consented to award
of his social background.
mendous
fuss,
cerned said
it
Solzhenitsyn a bicycle as an extraordinary consolation prize.
The headmaster
was supplied with a sum of money for Solzhenitsyn and a letter to be presented to the main city sports shop. In return for the letter and the money, a bicycle would be provided. For Solzhenitsyn this was better than a normal prize. Bicycles were a rare luxury in those days, and he would never have been able to afford one on his own. WTien he arrived at the sports shop v\'ith the letter, he was informed that there was a terrible shortage but that they would tip him off before the next consignment arrived so that he could come to the shop the night before and be first in the queue. When the tip-off came, Solzhenitsyn informed Kirill and Nikolai, and all three of them went to the shop at closing time the night before. During the evening and night they were joined by dozens of others, until a crowd of about 150 people was waiting outside the shop. Some policemen tried to disperse it, but without success. The following morning the three musketeers w
i
I
swaniplike sogg\ tlough,
I
made haH
of potato flour was our crutch and the main e\ent of the dav. Life had heguni
The day had begun problems: it
w
ith a
Wait
Had
—
was when
thread?
Or
greedily break
for the tea or pile in straight
lunch?
it
Each of us had nn riad dav before? Should he cut
really began! his ration the
into lumps? Or nip off pieces bit in bit? away? Leave some for supper or onlv for
it
And how much?-
At the 9 a.m.
make complaints
each of the cells was visited bv the dut\was the moment when the prisoners had a
roll-call,
ant. IVaditionaliy, this
were
this
he correctly apportioned
lieuten-
right to
or requests. Solzhenits\n quickh found out that complaints
—they were
hand and never went further like were almost equallv useless. Ihe medical treatment available in the Lub\ anka w as primitive, brutal, and hard to obtain. As often as not, it left you worse than before, for its purpose w as not to mitigate the effects of sleeplessness, o\era
waste of time
rejected out of
than the lieutenant. Requests for medical treatment and the
exhaustion, starvation, or beatings, but simplv to reassure the prison authorities
that the prisoner
was
for a
man
unheated punishment "All right,
was
still
not in danger of dving.
A common experience
recovering consciousness after a beating or incarceration in an the prison doctor bending over him, sa\ing,
cell to tind
you can continue."
And
it
was these same doctors w ho signed the
death certificates with false diagnoses of the causes of death.
Another formal
right
was
that of twice a
month writing
petitions are a peculiar feature of the Soviet penal system
petitions.
and appear
These to
be
a
custom of allowing prisoners to appeal to the higher powers for merc\-, w hen it w as both a safetv valve and a tacit admission of the injustice of much penal practice. In the Soviet period this right became as vestigial as the emu's wings and serves no useful purpose, vet it persisted throughout Stalin's time and continues to the present dav. \\ hen vou made a petition vou w ere taken out of vour cell and locked in a box, w here \ou were given a tinv piece of poor-qualitv paper measuring four inches bv three, a wooden pen w ith a broken nib, and an ink-w ell containing w atered-dow n ink. 1 he pen w ould barely write, the paper w as as porous as blotting paper, and there was little chance of producing anvthing legible (nor w as there room to write a proper message). Nevertheless, most prisoners, including Solzhenitsyn, went through with this farcical procedure, especiallv in the early vestige of the old tsarist
stages of their investigation,
when
thev belie\ed
in
pardons and did not accept
or realize that their fate had been determined in advance, or suspect that these petitions invariably ended
up on the desk of their
investigator.
For the
latter thev were useful evidence of the prisoner's state of mind, his hopes and
and made a valuable addition to his dossier. The day's activities began after the nine o'clock inspection. Sometimes the prisoners were called for interrogation at this time, particularly if their case v\as going smoothlv. If it wasn't, thev would be kept up all night or transferred to Lefortovo for harsher treatment, which is what happened to Leonid Z when he became stubborn and refused to sign the investigator's perhaps his
fears,
SOLZHENITSYN
[i62]
versions of his depositions. Otheru^'ise, the prisoners could play chess, indulge
and the telling of anecdotes that Solzhenitsyn so from the Lubyanka library, which turned out to be a
in the endless conversations
loved, or read books
great surprise.
The Lubyanka
library
was unique.
of confiscated private libraries.
In
The
all
probability
bibliophiles
it
had been assembled out
who had
collected these books
had already rendered up their souls to God. But the main thing was that while the security service had been busy censoring and emasculating all the nation's libraries for decades,
it
had forgotten
to dig in
its
own bosom, and
here, in the
one could read Zamvatin, Pilnvak, Panteleimon Romanov, and any all of the complete works of xVlerezhkovskv.'*
beast's lair,
volume
The
at
prisoners were allowed to order one book every ten days.
They
frequently failed to get the book of their choice, for the librarian doled out the books like so
many hunks
of bread, concerned only to see that they
got one book apiece, regardless of
its title
all
or contents. Nevertheless, they
received plenty to interest them, and by swapping around had enough, in a cell
of
five, to
keep themselves more or
until the next order
became
less
continuously in reading matter
possible.
Immediately before lunch the prisoners were
let
out for their twenty
minutes of exercise. Those on the fourth and fifth floors, where Solzhenitsyn was, were taken up onto the roof of the Lubyanka and allowed to walk in a concrete yard surrounded by high concrete walls. They 'uere accompanied by an unarmed warder, and an armed guard manned the watch-tower that
The prisoners were ordered to line up in pairs, keep hands behind their backs, and stay silent, but they usually contrived to talk among themselves in whispers. It was here that Solzhenitsyn learned about Estonian democracy from Susi, and here that he spent some of his happiest moments in the Lubyanka, out in the fresh air and away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the cell, with its constant reminders of his helplessness and humiliation. Here, too, he could see the sun for the first time since his arrival in Moscow and hear the distant honking of the traffic overlooked the yard. their
below on Dzerzhinsky Square, a reminder that somewhere out there life proceeded normally. At one o'clock they were served lunch a ladle of soup and a ladle of thin, fatless gruel, each dumped onto a flat aluminium plate. If they had saved some of their bread ration, it could now be eaten with the soup. If not, the soup and the gruel were gone in a trice, so that in the early days they were hardly aware that they had eaten anything. But "then, if you managed to get it under control, your stomach shrank and adapted itself to this meagreness, and the miserable Lubyanka slops became just right.'"* There followed a two-hour rest period during which, if they were not called out for
far
still
—
*I.e., censored authors. It
(once
condemned
was also in the Lubvanka that Solzhenitsyn Union for decadent formalism).
in the Soviet
first
read
Dos Passos
— Two A REAN Organization
|i'')3]
were allowed to lie on their bunks and read. was still forbidden to sleep, but thev usually contrived to doze with a book propped in front o( them. "Supper" was at 4 p.m. and then there were six hours to lights out, which another ladle of gruel was the favourite period for discussions, arguments, stories, debates. In mid-March a sixth prisoner was added to the hve in (IcW 67, and since it was now too small for them, all six were transferred to a larger cell in another wing: Cell No. 53. Here the ceiling was enormously high sixteen and a half feet and an almost full-length window was set in one wall, although four-fifths of it w ere blocked on the outside by a riveted steel sheet known colloquially as a muzzle. Muzzles were (and still are) a standard fitting in Soviet jails, blocking off all but a tiny patch of w indow and sky and serving to make electric light necessary day and night. interrogation, the prisoners Strictly speaking,
it
—
—
—
The new arrival in the cell, Yuri Y, turned out to be a Soviet officer who had spent two years in captivity in a German death camp and had survived by becoming the camp artist. He told Solzhenitsyn that while there he had learnt the reason for the particularly inhuman treatment of Russian prisas opposed to the Poles, Yugoslavs, Norwegians, and English-
oners of war
men
—
saw
that he
had refused
—
German camps. It was because the Soviet Union Hague Convention on war prisoners and thereany obligations in its treatment of enemy prisoners nor
in the
to recognize the
fore neither accepted
own. In Stalin's eyes a prisoner of war was a were expected to fight on or die, but never to surrender. Nor did the USSR recognize the International Red Cross. Therefore, while the prisoners of other nationalities were more or less decently fed and allowed to receive food parcels, the Russians starved and were allowed to die like dogs. Yuri Y had been transformed bv his experiences from a Soviet patriot (his father had been a high-ranking officer in the revolutionary imposed any traitor:
to protect
Red Army
forces) into
its
soldiers
an ardent anti-Communist and had allow ed himself to be recruited
into the Vlasov
army, thinking,
like
many
of
to be allowed to fight for the liberation of his
its members, that he was going homeland from the Communist
Germans had deceived and cheated the Russians who joined Touards the end of the war, Yuri was contacted by a Soviet agent who promised him a free pardon if he would go over to the Soviet side and give them information about a spy school that he had helped to organize. yoke. But the their side.
After
much
Yuri accepted, crossed the lines, and told Soviet he knew, only to be cheated once again and flung into
vacillating,
counter-intelligence
all
the Lubyanka.
Yuri was almost the same age as Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn was attracted by his frank and open personality. Their education and mil-
much
itary experiences
had
in
many ways been
similar,
and they spoke the same
language. But Solzhenitsyn's patriotism and his burning conviction that the
war
against the
Germans was
utterly right could not be reconciled with Yuri's
apparent treachery. Here was leaflets
had so disgusted him
a living at
example of those \
lasovites
whose
the front, and although Solzhenitsyn was
SOLZHENITSYN
[164]
beginning dimly to understand something of their motives and although he
found Yuri personally In
all,
I
cell.
said that our Revolution
1929 distortion was horrible. I
I argued with him throughout those was magnificent and just, that onlv its looked at me pitvinglv and compressed his lips.
Yuri spent three weeks in our
three weeks.
...
he was nonetheless alienated by his views.
attractive,
said that there
He
had been
a
long period in our country
when
all
our major
were conducted exclusively bv utterly dedicated men of high principle. He said thev were all cut from the same cloth as Stalin from the very beginning. (We agreed that Stalin was a bandit.) I praised Gorkv to the skies: what a genius, what a wonderfully correct point of view, what an artist! Yuri parried: a pathetic, boring creature who had invented himself and all his characters his books were complete fairv tales. Lev Tolstoy was the tsar of our literature.' affairs
—
Yuri soon departed and was replaced by another newcomer, whose story
up
eclipsed anything Solzhenitsyn had heard thin
voung man with
suit
and blue cap, quietly announced,
to
now. The new prisoner,
answer
in
to questions, that
been arrested for writing a proclamation to the Russian people.
why
he had written
it,
a
innocent-looking face, dressed in a cheap blue
a pale,
he had
When
asked
he confided shyly that he was none other than the
Emperor Mikhail Romanov. Solzhenitsyn was
electrified
—he
had never
expected to meet an emperor in the Lubyanka. Victor Alexeyevich Belov, which was his real name, was a former chauf-
who had worked at the Kremlin for a while and had been a driver to Khrushchev* as well as to Marshal Blyukher and other bigwigs. Solzhenit-
feur
syn listened raptly to his
tales of life at the top, his descriptions
the Kremlin leaders led a closed, secret lavishly at private banquets, reserv
ed shops
filled
moving
life
in a
of the
way
of their own, eating and drinking
magic
circle of
government dachas,
uith every kind of delicacy and modern consumer goods,
limousines, being cradled in the lap of luxury and privilege. Only Khrushchev, said Victor, had any sort of egalitarian principles and treated his chauffeur as a friend. But the key event in Victor's life had occurred in 1943 when a venerable old man with a white beard had visited him and his mother at home, had crossed himself before their icon, and had said to Victor gravely, "Hail, Mikhail, God gives you his blessing!" The old man, it turned out, had visited Victor's mother once before, in 1916, when Victor was a year old, and had predicted a great and mysterious future for him, saying also that he would return. And here he was back again. V ictor's mother had official
almost fainted with the shock, while the old for his destiny. In 1953 there
become emperor of
all
would be
a
man
rule,
and Victor would
the Russians.
Solzhenitsyn and his cell-mates barely
when they heard
instructed Victor to prepare
change of
knew whether
to laugh or cry
Victor's breathless tale, but his patent simplicity, guileless-
*This was presumabh' between 1935 and 1938, when Khrushchev was secretary of the Moscow District Party Committee. .Marshal Blyukher, commander of the Soviet .\rmy of the Far East after the Revolution, was executed by Stalin in 1939.
Two Are an Organization
1
165]
and conviction commanded respect and forebade mockery. Victor had been instructed to start gathering his forces in 1948, but, fired bv the old man's words, he had been impatient to begin earher. He was then working ness,
in the People's
Commissariat
autumn of 1943 he wrote
for the Oil Industry in
Moscow, and in the he showed to four
his first proclamation, \\hich
fellow workers. A year later, when working as a mechanic in a car depot, he wrote another proclamation and showed it to ten fellow workers, and also to two girls. The workers apparently approved of it, and, like the first four,
they kept his secret. But the two girls informed on him, and soon afterw ards he was picked up by the police and brought to the Lubxanka. Victor's story got a mixed reception from the members of ilcW 53 (a number that gave \ ictor a distinct //vVyo;; it was the year of his predicted
—
accession to the throne). Kramarenko, the
cell
stool-pigeon, at once found a
denounce the w orkers who had failed to inform on \'ictor. Fastenko, though far from a monarchist, seized on the workers' approval as evidence of mutinous feelings among the proletariat. Leonid Z, the engineer, found the w hole thing preposterous and took great delight in teasing Victor, just as the investigators began to do w hen new s of Victor's claim spread through the Lubyanka. Solzhenitsvn also found the story far-fetched, but he was much impressed by \ ictor's stories of high life in the Kremlin and the wretched conditions of his fellow workers. He wasn't sure how much to believe, but here was material on Soviet life such as he had never dreamed of acquiring, or had had any chance to acquire, up till now His sense that his real education was only now beginning w as strengthened. And he also began to get a feel for that Arabian Nights quality of prison life, and the endless stories that the prisoners told about themselves and others, like so many Scheherazades, to w hile awa\' the time. Not even the most fantastic tales could be neglected or dismissed out of hand, and in many cases, as in that of the "Emperor Mikhail," the fantastic stories were the ones that told him most. What fascinating adventures they heard, what wonderful conversations they conducted on their causes and meaning: pretext to visit his investigator and
.
the weightless Lubyanka evenings!. What light, free thoughts! It was though we had been lifted up to the heights of Sinai, and there the truth manifested itself to us from out of the fire. Was it not of this that Pushkin dreamed? "I want to live so as to think and suffer." And there we suffered, and we thought,
Oh,
.
.
.
as
and there was nothing
else in
our
lives.
'^
Solzhenitsyn had been released from solitary confinement and allowed into a
communal
cell as a
mark of favour
the investigator's initial assault, but
it
for his co-operative attitude
during
transpired that Captain Ezepov was
far from finished with him. The charge against him under Article 58, paragraph 10 (anti-Soviet agitation), was, it seems, taken as proved, but there remained the question of paragraph 1 1 (forming an anti-Soviet organization), and Ezepov now turned to the various letters that had passed between Sol-
SOLZHENITSYN
[i66]
zhenitsvn and Nikolai, and between the two of them and XataHa, Lvdia and '
Kirill.
Phrases that had seemed quite innocent the jocular tone they had adopted
nance
war
when
now
when dashed
off at the front in
acquired an entirely different reso-
issuing from Ezepov's mouth: "conference of the big two," "the
after the
war," the need for
a
"new organization,"
a "party of five plus
two." Ezepov had also gone through the papers found in Solzhenitsyn's suitcase, read copies of the war stories that he had sent to Lydia (that had failed to appeal to
Znamya because of their unorthodow), and come
across the postage-
stamp-size portraits that Solzhenitsyn had cut from the Prussian miller's book
about the First World War. Putting aside the Hindenburgs and Ludendorffs, Ezepov had retained only two: "Tell me, Solzhenitsyn, why were you car-
and Trotsky in your suitcase?" ow n guilt was not enough, it seemed, to satisfy the suspicions aroused in Ezepov by the picture Ezepov had conjured up of a hardened counter-revolutionary with secret dreams of sabotage. His friends must have been deeply involved as w ell. If this w as what they wrote about in their letters, w hat did they talk about when they met? And what happened at the meetings referred to in the letters? He insisted that in giving his answers, Solzhenitsyn should go back as far as 1940, to the time when the friends were still at the university in Rostov. • Solzhenitsyn's first thought had been to say that he had forgotten everything, but this threw the investigator into a rage and brought forth dark threats of shooting or physical ill-treatment. Besides, Ezepov had the letters in front of him, so that the pretext of forgetfulness didn't seem very convincing. Solzhenitsyn pretended that he and his friends had discussed nothing but the weather and sport and similar trivialities, but again the letters contradicted him: they were too serious, too circumstantial, and too specific to allow him to wriggle off the hook in that way. He would have to think ot something else. But w hat? His dilemma in approaching this problem was threefold. In the first place, he had no idea whether the others had been arrested, and if they had, he had no idea what they might be saying. In Nikolai's case he was fairly sure that arrest must have taken place, but the fates of Kirill, Lydia, and Natalia were completely unknown. Ezepov deliberately kept him in suspense, implying that the others were bound to be arrested and that confrontations would be arranged, at w hich his evidence would be compared with theirs for its veracity. Secondly, of the three others, Kirill was most at risk: his father had fled the country illegally, and he had generally been the most rying portraits of Nicholas
II
Solzhenitsyn's confession of his
in his student criticisms of Soviet society, although in his letters he had been more reticent than either Solzhenitsyn or Nikolai. Thirdly, and
outspoken
most importantly, Solzhenitsyn was worried about
his front-line diaries
and
crammed with him by men in his
notebooks. These, too, were in Ezepov's possession and were stories
unit or
and descriptions of life at the by others he had happened
front,
to
many
meet
told to
in the course of his military
Two Are an Organization The
service.*
describing
it
were
stories
about military
totally frank
with unvarnished directness and
and response that were
far
["^7] at the
front,
illustrating complexities of
motive
life
removed from the stereotypes of
Stalinist
propa-
ganda. With his zeal for completeness and accuracy, Solzhenitsvn had not
only noted them told
him these
down
in
voluminous
stories, the dates
incidents had occurred.
He
detail
when they
had
named the people who him and the dates when the
but had
told
also noted
down
stories of collectivization
and famine in the villages, of shortages and miserable living conditions in the towns, each time with the name of his informant. These diaries lav like a time bomb ticking aw ay among the documents and papers h ing on Ezepov's desk, and he could hear
it
mind
ticking in his
They were a permanent reminder among his innocent army comrades
as
he duelled with
gator.
of the havoc that could
ated
if
their stories
his investi-
be cre-
still
w ere discovered and
read.
From Ezepov's
lines of questioning,
Solzhenitsvn deduced that the
investigator had not yet read the diaries. This was parth- because thev w eren't
necessary to the main case against little
him
—they looked
to the charge of starting an organization,
of Ezepov's questions
—and partly the
part: the diaries consisted of four
pencil in the tiny,
order to cram a
which was now the main object on Ezepov's
result of sheer laziness
notebooks of small format, written in faded
cramped handwriting
maximum
they w ould add
as if
had developed
that Solzhenitsvn
of information onto every page.
them demanded the
pled and moisture stained, and to read
in
They were crumsort of effort
and
concentration that Ezepov was loth to apply, particularly in such an easy case. Congenitally idle, it
he was quite content to do
botched job so long
a
as
served the immediate purpose, and he was corrupted by his knowledge of
the protection that the security service enjoved.
He
it
was
whom
Solzheni-
tsyn later described in The Gulag Archipelago as ringing his wife to apologize that he
would not be returning home
for the night, since he
had an important would
interrogation to carry out, and then ringing his mistress to say he
come
in
an hour or so
—
all
this in the
presence of the despised prisoner.
Solzhenitsvn could not be sure that Ezepov wouldn't take
it
into his
head to investigate the diaries, and he still did not know what the others might be saying. For that was the whole point of the investigation to keep him in suspense, to remind him of his solitariness, to deceive him, and to
—
unwary admissions. Finding pure negation no use, he resolved must be to draw all suspicion and attention aw ay from his war diaries and to interpret the letters and conversations that interested the investigator in such a way as to make them seem innocent and harmless, the inconsequential babbling of callow students. It seemed a good idea at the time. that you ought to come as close "The idea flashes through your mind of course rounding off the as you can to the truth of what was actually said sharp edges and skipping the dangerous parts. After all, people say that when trap
him
into
that his task
.
.
.
—
*One that
of these was the storv that Leonid \'lasov had told him in the became the nucleus of "Incident at Krechetovka Station."
train to
Rostov
in
1944 and
SOLZHENITSYN
[i68]
you
you should always stay
lie
as close to the truth as possible." Later,
tem-
pered bv long years in prison and camps and hardened by his encounters
KGB,
with the
"You wanted
Solzhenitsvn realized that this had not been such
to
outsmart your investigator! You have
mind. You are an
intellectual.
And you
a
good
a quick,
idea:
ingenious
outsmarted yourself!"^ Solzhenitsyn
likened his psychological reactions to those of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment:
Out
of
mv
"I
—
—
and who was there to teach us otherwise? I repeated bv Dostovevskv. Porfirv Petrovich savs to Raskolnikov,
inexperience
the mistake described
don't need to bother mvself
\\
an explanation for
ith finding
all this.
You're an
whole thing to me neativ yourself, so that it all adds up." And he was quite right. I was amazed when I read it afterwards in jail. All thev need to say to you if you're an intellectual is, "All right, explain to me yourself where vou got your views from." And vou start to think, "How can I explain it all so that he believes me and leaves me alone?" And off vou go w ith your explanations."^ intellectual
Keeping
and
vou'll explain the
he could to their actual conversations, Solzhenitsyn attempted to portray everything in the letters as if he and his friends had been completely loyal. For instance, on one occasion they had complained as close as
about the introduction of tuition fees for higher education.* Yes, said Solzhenitsyn,
it
was true they had been discontented, but only because this away from egalitarianism and Communist ideals. Were
represented a step
they also dissatisfied with the reduction in piece-work rates? Yes, they were,
because they
measure was unfair
felt this
Well, yes, but they had criticized
more
successful than hitherto.
On
it
to the workers. Collectivization?
only because they wanted
it
to
be even
other occasions he attributed their discon-
and insufficient understanding of the was of little avail, because the investigator was
tent to youthful inexperience, egotism,
intentions of the Party.
But
it
interested only in evidence that confirmed the group's guilt, not in testimony that contradicted
guage:
".
.
.
it,
and he wrote everything dow n
tried to create
an
illegal
organization.
he conducted systematic anti-Soviet agitation effecting a forcible
change
.
in his
.
.
.
.
.
own
special lan-
F'rom 1940 onwards
worked out plans for and state, and mali-
in the policy of the Party
ciously slandered Stalin."'^ It
was
a typical "beginner's" mistake, as Solzhenitsyn ruefully
in later years, yet rill,
admitted
he succeeded in his immediate aims. Neither Natalia, Ki-
nor Lvdia was arrested or even called
in for questioning,
and no case
month of his investigation "all my notebooks were cast into the hellish maw of the Lubvanka furnace, where they burst into flames the red pyre of one more novel that had perished in Russia and flew out of the highest chimney in black butterwas
started against them.
As
—
*
This was
a quite
common theme who
former student called Anechka of fees and v\Tites that
many
for the diaries, in the fourth
—
in those days.
Panin, in his memoirs,
v\as jailed for allegedly
tells
the story of a
complaining about the introduction
innocent people w ent to the camps on similar charges.
Two Are of soot."" In this \\a\
flies
,
he
an Organization
[I'jyJ
later said, 'i lost ni\ novel
about the war."'-
Soon afterwards he was requested to sign a document conhrmintj that the notebooks had been burnt as being of no relevance to the case against him. For once he did so gladlv.
The
war were both drawing to a close. Shortlv was removed from the exposed corner of the window in their high-ceilinged cell. That evening it v\'as uncannilv quiet in the Lubyanka. 1 he investigators all seemed to be out and no one was taken for interrogation. The only sign of normalitv was the sound of a prisoner being taken from his cell and into a nearby box, where for some reason he was noisily beaten up bv the warders. On 2 Mav the prisoners heard a thirty-gun salute being fired. That signalled the capture of Berlin, if only they had known it. On 9 May there was another thirt\ -gun salute followed later by a fortv-gun salute. That meant the capture of Prague and the end of the war in Europe. Again the investigators were all awa\, joining in the wild celebrations that engulfed the Moscow streets that da v. A Western before
investigation and the
Mav
1
1945, the black-out shade
eyewitness has described the scene as follows.
Mav
Moscow. The spontaneous jox of the two or w ho thronged the Red Square that evening and the Moscow River embankments, and Gorki Street, all the wav up to the Beiorussian was of a quality and a depth I had never vet seen in Moscow before. Station They danced and sang in the streets; everv soldier and officer was hugged and kissed; outside the US Embassv the crowds shouted "Hurrav for Rooseveltl" (even though he had died a month before); thev were so happv thev did not even have to get drunk, and under the tolerant gaze of the militia, voung men even urinated against the walls of the Moskva Hotel, flooding the wide pavement. Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow before. For once, Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The fireworks displav that evening was the most spectacular I have ever seen.'' 9 was an unforgettable dav in
—
three million people
—
Solzhenitsyn saw the fireworks through the bars fought his
way
three battle-filled years before his arrest,
Orel
when
his cell.
who had been on
Stalin decreed the first victory salute,
the thought of final victory. soldiers
(jf
He who
had
across the Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland, and East Prussia for
filled
active service in
w
ith
emotion
at
The Uubvanka, however, though packed with
and ex-prisoners of w
silent as the grave. All
was
ar
w ho had been
arrested at the front,
was
as
they could see were snatches of the firew orks and the
beams in the sky, just visible above the muzzle that covered their window The only other sign that something unusual had occurred was the simultaneous delivery of lunch and supper: two ladles of gruel instead of one, searchlight .
and
a ladle of soup,
idays. In
all
something that generally occurred only on national hol-
other respects the day w as absolutely normal; the security police
and the Lubyanka continued to function faultlesslw The prisoners were allowed their
turn to urinate
A
week
or
two
at
—
as usual
later,
—precisely 6 p.m.
Solzhenitsyn was
summoned
to see Lieutenant-
SOLZHENITSYN
[lyo]
Colonel Kotov, the prosecutor in charge of supervising his case. According
was supposed to review the investigation as it it was being conducted correctly. He was also required to ask the prisoner what complaints he had about the investigation and whether his legal rights had in any way been infringed. But the prosecutors held their appointments onlv on the approval of the security police, whose performance they were supposed to be assessing, and therefore the interview was a pure formalitv. to the law, the prosecutor
proceeded and to check that
Kotov,
calm, well-fed, impersonal blond man, neither malevolent nor benevo-
a
lent but entirely neutral, sat for the first time.
watched. asked
if
I
.
.
He
behind
his
desk and yawningly examined
my dossier
spent fifteen minutes acquainting himself with
it
while
I
Finally he raised his indifferent eyes to look at the wall and lazily
.
had anvthing
I
wanted
to
add
to
mv
testimony.'"*
Solzhenitsyn sensed the hopelessness of trying to influence this
man
in
any way. Nonetheless, he raised the question of his charge under paragraph 11 of Article 58, in addition to paragraph 10, that is, of setting up an antiSoviet group or organization. After all, only two of them were involved, and this hardly constituted an organization. Kotov listened to him in silence, leafed through the dossier again, weighing up the consequences of causing a hitch in the procedure at this late stage of the case, then sighed, spread his hands, and said, "What is there to say? One person is a person, but two persons are
.
Not long
.
.
people."'^
after this,
for a final session
Solzhenitsyn was
summoned
to the
same room again
with his investigator. According to Article 206 of the crim-
inal-procedure code, the prisoner was required to read through his earlier depositions, and any other testimony in the case, and sign to the effect that
he had read and agreed them. Captain Ezepov pushed the thick the desk to Solzhenitsyn and invited
on the printed
him
to
open
it.
Almost
at
file
across
once Solzheni-
According to the had never known about, including the right to complain about the conduct of the interrogation and to have his complaints recorded and included with the documents in his case. His gorge rose and his indignation boiled when he saw copies of his letters accompanied by wildly slanted interpretations of their meaning, together with the depositions in Ezepov's handwriting, with their distorting language and tendentious implications. Finally, there was the tsyn's eyes
fell
text inside the front cover.
criminal-procedure code, he had had
all
sorts of rights that he
preposterous accusation of forming an organization.
Solzhenitsyn said hesitantly that he would refuse to sign because the investigation
had been conducted improperly. Ezepov was unmoved and over again. He uttered some where collaborators were held But that didn't seem to be the right
suggested that in that case thev should begin
all
threat about sending Solzhenitsyn to the place
and made
as if to reach for the
solution either.
file.
TwoAreanOrganization Begin
all
over again?
Ahead of me was about that place
annoy him,
It
seemed
to
me
easier to die than to begin
the promise of at least
\\
some
sort of
here they kept the collaborators?
for that
would
[171]
affect the tone in
life.
.
.
.
Anyway,
all
And I
over again. then,
what
had better not
which he phrased the
final indict-
ment.
And
so
I
signed.
I
signed
didn't then understand.
.\11
it
complete with paragraph
thev said was that
it
1
1,
whose
wouldn't add to
significance
mv
I
sentence.'*^
With the investigation completed, Solzhenitsxn was at last removed from Lubyanka and transferred to another Moscow prison, Butvrki, to aw ait the pleasure of the "organs." It was a wrench to leave his friends in Cell 53. As he had discovered from his first arrival in a communal cell, no one could be closer or dearer to you than a cell-mate, a comrade in the extremes of
the
adversity like yourself. x\t the back of his mind, behind
all
the misery, the
scorching humiliation, the indignation, and the resentment that occupied most
of his waking thoughts, there had also been kindled a tiny glow of pride that at least
he had been here in the Soviet Union's most celebrated and most
own eves and walked with his and bo.xes and corridors and investigation rooms of the world-famous Lubyanka, which had swallowed and consigned to oblivion so many outstanding Soviet citizens. It was true that he was as vet only dimly aware of the significance of what he had seen, but the memories w ould stay with him forever. When he arrived in Butvrki, at the end of June 1945, Solzhenitsvn regarded himself as a veteran, yet his education was only just beginning. His cell was three times as large as the one he had left in the Lubyanka, w ith important political prison, had seen with his
own
feet the cells
more than three times
as
many
inmates in
it.
The
vast majority turned out
w ar, Russian peasants and w orkers w ho had been carried off to Germany to work as labourers there, or members of the \ lasov forces. The stories that Yuri Y had told him about life in the German camps or about fighting alongside the Germans were now repeated in a hundred variations. Solzhenitsvn was stunned. He recalled the tattered X'lasov leaflets to be returned prisoners of
he had read
at Orel and in Belorussia, the collaborator he had seen being horsewhippped through the streets near Bobruisk, the last-ditch stand of the Vlasovites in East Prussia, and the distaste and disdain he had felt for these contemptible traitors. He also remembered the returning columns of prisoners of war, obediently lined up and submissive to their Smersh guards, and the six w ith the letters SU on their backs w ho had marched with him for two days and a night to Brodnitz immediately after his arrest. Was it because he himself had been taken for a Vlasovite by the jeering cart-drivers that he now felt such an urge to identify w ith them and to understand them? Once again he heard how the Soviet prisoners of w ar had been renounced bv their rulers and how some of them had allowed themselves to be recruited into a so-called Russian army fighting on the side of the Germans, while others had stuck it out as prisoners of war only to find themselves equally rejected upon
— SOLZHENITSYN
[172]
home. The truth was that StaHn made almost no distinction between them. Anyone who had had real experience of Western Europe, \\ hether inside a camp or out of it, was regarded as a potential danger and a security risk, for Stalin feared the comparisons that would be made with home. He also feared that free-thinking officers and men who had mixed with the British, American, and French forces might bring home the Decembrist virus that the victorious Russians had returned with from Paris a hundred years beforehand, after the Napoleonic Wars. If a poor, benighted soldier had spent his entire time in a death camp and by a miracle survived, that, too, was nourishment for Stalin's paranoia: if you survived the death camps, there must be something fishy about you; you must have collaborated. All this and more, Solzhenitsvn heard from the men around him in Butyrki, and he now came to realize the justice of Yuri Y's strictures, so much so that when an elderly Russian worker whom he otherwise admired began to curse the "traitors" in their cell, it was he, together with two other young lads, who defended them from the old man's ire. Another world that opened up to Solzhenitsyn's fascinated gaze in Butyrki was that of the Russian emigres, thousands of whom had been overrun by Soviet troops in Western Europe or had been unjustifiably handed over to Stalin by the Allies on the pretext that they were traitors. Now they were in their return
Soviet
It
awaiting sentence.
jails
was
dream, the resurrection of buried history. The weighty tomes
just like a
on the Civil War had long since been completed and their covers shut tight. The causes for which people fought in it had been decided. The chronology of its events had been set down in textbooks. The leaders of the White movement were,
it
appeared, no longer our contemporaries on earth, but mere ghosts of
past that had melted away.
The
a
Russian emigres had been more cruelly dispersed
And, in our Soviet imagination, if they were still dragsomewhere, it was as pianists in stinking little restaurants, as lackeys, laundresses, beggars, morphine and cocaine addicts, and as virtual
than the tribes of ging out their
Israel.
lives
corpses.''
Yet now Solzhenitsyn went to a medical examination with Captain Borshch and Colonel Mariushkin, both veterans of that same tsarist army in which his father had fought in the First World War. Later these men had fought on the side of the Whites and left with the retreating Volunteer Army; since then they had lived out their lives peacefully in Western Europe, only to be cruelly and unjustly returned. Among the other prisoners in his cell was a Colonel Yasevich, also a veteran of the Civil War, and a young emigre, Igor Tronko, who was Solzhenitsyn's peer but had left Russia with his parents while
still
a
baby.
From
these
men
Solzhenitsyn obtained a picture of the
Russian emigration totally different from that prevailing in the Soviet Union a picture
of decent, sober, self-disciplined, and for the most part impover-
ished people, clinging with dignity to their language, culture, and customs
and imbued with
a
spontaneous love of the motherland that was
all
the
more
— Two Are
AN Organization
['73]
touching in the face of the hatred with w hich the motherland regarded them. Nor were they all dyed-in-the wool reactionaries, especially not the young people
like Igor,
who had
reacted against the conservative view
s
of their
parents and were eager to give the Soviet government the benefit of everv
doubt.
Through
the
window
s
of Butyrki Prison they could
still
hear the sound
of the post-war celebrations. Brass bands seemed to be parading the streets
almost every other day, and on 22 June 1945, the fourth anniversarv of the beginning of the war, there was an enormous victorv parade in Red Square.
The
prisoners heard about
feelings.
They
it
on the grape-vine, and heard
w
it
shared the pride and relief of their countrvmen
at
ith
mixed
the victorv
over the Germans, but they were prevented from show ing
it and were excluded from the celebrations. Yet they desperatelv wanted to join in, to belong and to be released from their misery, almost at anv price. Some of this longing took the form of a craving to knov\ their sentences. If only it were all over and they at least had the certainty of know ing what lay in store for them. They dreamed of being sent to the wide-open spaces of southern Siberia, where the climate was mild and thev could lose themselves in nature. "In the end, that spring, even the most stubborn of us wanted forgiveness and were ready to yield a great deal in return for just a little more life." Or, more poignantly, they dreamed of an amnesty.
sounded a summons to mercv. It \\ as the spring that marked enormous war! We saw that millions of us prisoners w ere flowing in and knew that millions more would greet us in the camps. It just couldn't be that so many people were to be held in prison after the greatest victory in the world. Thev were onlv holding us now to teach us a lesson, so we wouldn't forget. Of course, there was bound to be a great amnesty, and we
The
spring
itself
the ending of such an
would soon be
The
prison was
predicted.
One
released.'^
rife
day,
with rumours of amnesty. Even the date was repeatedly
upon entering
the lavender vestibule of the Butyrki baths,
Solzhenitsyn and his cell-mates read, high on the wall and written in soap, a
announcing what they had all been waiting for: "Hurray! Amnesty on July 17!" In fact the anonymous scribe was ten days off the amnesty came early, on 7 July 1945. But not as expected. It was to apply only to criminal prisoners, to deserters, and to just a small number of political prisoners to that tiny percentage of those charged under Article 58 w ho had been sentenced to less than three vears. But nobody had seen the text yet, graffito
—
—
and so the prison remained thick with rumours. Three weeks later, on 27 July 1945, Solzhenitsyn and a prisoner named Valentin, from Kiev, were called out of their cell after breakfast. Their cellmates noisily ribbed them and assured them they were being amnestied. They were even asked to take out messages and to send in food parcels. Of course it was all nonsense. "Perhaps you honestly didn't believe it, perhaps you wouldn't allow vourself to believe it, you tried to brush it aside w ith
SOLZHENITSYN
[174]
jokes, but flaming pincers hotter
your
heart:
What
Thev were led
than anything else on earth suddenly seized
were true?"
if it
taken with about twenty other
through Butyrki's interior courtyard with
men
its
to the bath-house, then
emerald garden.
The
green
my
eyes
seen the green of the leaves with such intensity as they did that spring!
And
of the trees seemed unbearably bright to Solzhenitsyn. "Never had
my
never in
life
had
seen anything closer to God's paradise than that
I
little
Butyrki garden, which took no more than thirty seconds to cross on the asphalt path."'*^
The
departures, and
left
known
col-
for prisoners' arrivals
and
prisoners were locked into a spacious box
loquiallv as "the station," since
it
was used mainly
By now they were on
without explanation.
tenterhooks,
but did not dare voice their hopes aloud. It turned out that none of them had done anvthing very serious and that they were all cases for the so-called Special Board of the NKVD. After three hours of suspense the door was suddenlv opened and the first prisoner summoned, a thirty-five-year-old bookkeeper. Within minutes he was back again, and the next one was called. What was the verdict? The bookkeeper looked crushed: five years. Then the next prisoner returned, a hysterical giggle on his lips: fifteen years. Eventually it was Solzhenitsyn's turn. He was led into an equally large box next door. It was the famous "frisking box," where all new prisoners were searched on arrival. It had a number of emptv rough-hewn tables in it and space for up to twentv prisoners to be searched at a time, but now the major sitting at a small only person there was a neat, black-haired table on the far side with a table lamp on it. There was no one else and no "board," just this one solitary officer. The major gestured to Solzhenitsyn to sit down, asked his name, then leafed through a pile of typed documents on one side of the table and pulled out a sheet about half the size of a normal
NKVD
piece of typing paper. In a bored voice he read out the bureaucratic formula
of Solzhenitsvn's sentence, then turned the paper over and write a statement on the back confirming that
it
at once began to had been read to the defen-
dant. Solzhenitsyn understood that he had been sentenced to eight years, but it
was
it
in.
flat and boring and all over so quickly that he could barely take had he been sentenced? When? By whom? Was there to be no hearing, no trial, no "due process"? It was a crucial turning-point in his life, vet no one seemed to be interested. He writes that he wanted to linger over it, to savour the gravity of the moment, and when the major pushed the sheet face down to him to sign, he said, "No, I have to read it for myself." "Do you reallv think I would deceive you?" retorted the major lazily, but noneall
so
How
theless invited
nal,
him
to
go ahead and read
it.
The
small piece of paper in Solzhenitsyn's hand
but
carbon copy.
a
that did not affect
waste words.
and place of
On
him the
birth)."
—
left
On
w asn't even the
origi-
July 1945, the very day of the amnesty the date of his official "trial." The document did not
It
was dated it
said,
7
"Heard:
the right
it
The
charges against
said, "Resolved:
—(name, date —(name)
To award
for
Two Are
an Organization
['75]
anti-Soviet agitation and attempting to found an anti-Soviet organization 8
camps." And at the bottom it said, "Copy Ihe blanks had been filled in with Solzhenitsyn's personal details, and that was all. It looked like an invoice or a chit for obtaining office supplies. Solzhenitsyn says that he looked at it and tried to summon up an air of solemnity. For form's sake he said, "But this is terrible. Eight years! What for?" But his words sounded unconvincing both he and the major could hear their falsity. Ihe major was now in a hurry. "Sign there," (eight) years in corrective labour verified. Secretary."
—
he said, pointing to the paper. Solzhenitsyn signed but case, allow
me
to write
The major ntxlded: "When hurried him out.-"
the time comes,
still
said, "In that
The sentence is unjust." you can." And the waiting warder
an appeal here and now.
lO
FIRST STEPS IN
THE ARCHIPELAGO THE his
TIME w OLLD never come for Solzhenitsvn to lodge an appeal against sentence bv the Special Board.
Xo
appeal was possible,
because the board figured neither in the Soviet criminal code nor
if
only
in the
con-
was as if, from the point of view of criminal procedure, it didn't all, and since it was not part of the \isible judicial s\stem and had no organs above or below it, there w as simplv no mechanism for appeal-
stitution. It
exist at judicial
ing against
its
In part
1
sentences.
of The Gulag Archipelago, for which Solzhenitsvn drew exten-
months in prison, he traces the concept of w av back to Catherine the Great and points out that there w as a regular tradition in Russia of condemning individuals to exile or imprisonment on the w him of the tsar or powerful officials. Like many tsarist injustices, these instances of extra-judicial repression were random and capricious, affecting numerous individuals in an arbitrarv w a\', but they siveh'
such
on
his
memories of
a special
board
his first
the
all
had not been erected into a svstem affecting millions. This occurred only with the "troikas'' of the GPU, established after the Rexolution expressly to bvpass the courts and carrv on the w ork of the revolutionary tribunals.
And
these in turn gave wa\" to the Special Board, which Stalin set up in 1934, immediatelv after the Kirov murder.* Ironicalh', its establishment coincided w ith the abolition of the old OGPU and the latter's replacement by the NKV'D, a move intended to signifv a liberalization of political conditions and the reform of the secret police. The OGPU had become so svnonymous w ith
December 1934 was murdered on w as responsible because he feared storv has never been told in the Soviet Union and Stalin's
* Sergei Kirov, first secretary of the Partv in Leningrad, \\
hile
w orking
in his office. It
Kirov's popularity, but the
is
generally believed that Stalin
full
involvement never admitted.
176
1
First Steps in the Archipelago
['7?]
and the unprecedented brutality of collectivization that it was to replace it w ith something else. A thorough reorganization of the Soviet judicial structure was also carried through, u ith the avowed and of providing, it aim of unifving the system of justice under the police terror
deemed prudent
NKVD
was
alleged, greater guarantees for the rights of the individual. In the midst
of this reforming zeal the setting
overlooked and seemed to
There were no fanfares
at
come
the time, and
for Soviet political practice,
vations that
up of the
made nonsense
it
of
Special Board
practically
little \\
as said
about
it.
But typically
turned out to be one of those Stalinist innoall
the pretty paper guarantees in the Soviet
criminal code and completelv contradicted
its
ostensible intentions.
the verv beginning the board's powers had been
From
w as
as a kind of administrative afterthought.
ill
The
defined.
main proviso was that the Special Board could try "socially dangerous persons" without recourse to the courts, w hich meant that, after the investigation had been completed, cases were invariably heard in absentia, the accused having no right either to appear in person or to be represented by a law yer. In other w ords, it was a purelv administrative procedure. Exactly who these socially dangerous persons were was left up to the secret police to decide, and this was the source of the abuses. In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenits\'n lists the main categories of "crime" dealt with by the Special Board (they were known colloquially as "alphabet articles," to distinguish them from the numbered articles of the criminal code): ASA, AntiSoviet Agitation; CRA, Counter-revolutionary Activities; SE, Suspicion of Espionage; CLSE, Contacts Leading to Suspicion of Espionage; and so on, right down to SDE (Socially Dangerous Element) and even MF (Member of Family of an accused person). The punishments handed out by the board consisted mainly of terms in the labour camps and internal exile, and these ranged from periods of five to ten, twenty, and even tw enty-five years, with execution a possibility during the latter part of the w ar. As the wave of purges mounted throughout the thirties, the Special Board had increased in importance and expanded its work, until, under the pressure of numbers, it turned
—
into a simple rubber-stamping machine.
ations
and
its
The
sheer arbitrariness of
true character were revealed in 1965,
been abolished,
when
a
some time
its
after
operit
had
Soviet legal journal admitted that the Special Board
had usually dealt with the cases for which there w as insufficient evidence to secure a conviction even in a Soviet court.' Two other peculiarities of the Special Board should be mentioned. Whereas men and women who had been sentenced by the courts w ere generally (although not invariably) released at the conclusion of their sentences,
w ere usually re-sentenced by administrative decree to period of imprisonment, or else to internal exile under police sur-
Special Board victims a further
veillance.
Secondly, the Special Board operated
of internal affairs and to Stalin
was no
in
complete secrecy.
Its
was responsible only to the minister (w hich was an additional reason w hy there
membership w as never divulged, and
it
appeal).
When
he returned to the "station" after being told his punishment, Sol-
SOLZHENITSYN
[ijS]
a sense of suppressed hysteria was beginning to spread w ho already knew their fate. Not only could they not muster the solemnity that seemed appropriate to the moment but they were like chastised schoolboys returning one by one from the headmaster's study, only to break into giggles when the worst w as oyer and they were all together
zhenitsyn found that
among
prisoners
again. Prisoners departed
how the
and returned, departed and returned, and somewas trans-
entire absurdity of this mechanical bureaucratic routine
Only
lated into tension-releasing laughter.
the bookkeeper remained subdued,
The
next lightest sentence was Solmost of the others got ten years. Here and there some of the prisoners still talked of amnesty and said that Stalin was just trying to scare them. But the yoices were less confident than before, and in their heart of hearts most of the prisoners knew that their reckoning had come. The laughter w as simply a way of purging the emotions and preparing themselves yet he had the lightest sentence of
all.
zhenitsyn's, while
for the ordeals ahead.
Before the next step, they w ere it
was only
a
all
made
to take another bath, although
matter of hours since they had had one. Solzhenitsyn's compan-
ion \ alentin, cheerful and
neyer mind, we're
still
making the best of
young and
it,
tried to
we'll survive.
be reassuring: "Well,
The main
thing
is
not to
camp, we'll keep mum with everybody, so they don't slap another sentence on us. We'll work honestly and keep our mouths shut."- When they had all dried themselves and dressed, they were led to the Butyrki church. But their purpose was not to pray. The church had been converted to more practical uses. Its great height had been divided into three storeys, and each storey contained several cells. Solzhenitsyn w as pushed into the south-east cell, an enormous square room holding two hundred prisoners. There were bunks for less than half this number, and the rest slept on the tiled floor, either directly beneath the bunks or in the aisles, in a great, seething mass of arms, legs, kitbags, cases, sacks, and other receptacles. There were no books or chess sets in this cell, the muzzles on the w indows were makeshift, cobbled together out of unplaned boards, and the dented aluminum bowls and splintered wooden spoons w ere handed out before each meal and collected up again afterwards. All this was because the church cells were only temporary prisoners came here in transit, after being sentenced and before space could be found for them at their next port
make any more
mistakes.
When we
get to the
—
of
call.
The church
cells
had their
own
special atmosphere:
it
trembled from the
first
draughts of future transit prisons, from the distant breeze of the Arctic camps. In the church cells
you celebrated the
sentence had been pronounced and
how
And
rite
as
of adjustment
no
—
to the fact that
your
and to the fact that no matter be, your brain had to digest and
joke,
new era of vour life w as going to This was very hard to do. here there were no permanent cell-mates, such
cruel this
accept
it v\
it.
as vou had had in the and \\ho became like a family to you. Day and night, people and taken aw av singly and by tens, and as a result the prisoners
investigation cells
were brought
in
First Steps in the Archipelago
['79]
were kept constantly on the move along the floor and the bunks, and to lie next to any one neighbour for more than two nights.^
it
u as
rare
Solzhenitsyn was made extremely uncomfortable bv this constant movement and missed the camaraderie of his first five months of imprisonment. His only friends were two voung Moscow intellectuals. He had met one of
them, Boris Gammerov, \\
him on
ith
many
Butyrki before, and had had
in
and
politics
literature.
Gammerov's
discussions
father had been killed in the
Gammero\- himself had joined an anti-tank unit during World War while he \\ as still very young, had been \\ ounded in the lung and had been inyalided out of the army with TB. After that he had enrolled in the biology department of Moscow University, begun to write poetry, and joined a students' discussion circle, which is what got him into trouble and led to his arrest. The other man, Georgi Ingal, was from the same discussion group. Ingal was evidentl)' a gifted w riter, a pupil of the influential historical novelist and critic Yuri Tynyanov, and already a candidate member of the Writers' Union despite his comparative youth. He had almost finished a novel about Debussy. But Tynyanov, a former member of great purge of 1937.*
the Second
the controversial "Formalist" school of criticism, t had undergone considerable persecution in his time and at his funeral in 1943, Ingal had
grave-side speech in
w hich he
referred to
Tynyanov's tribulations
biguous terms. This had contributed to his ultimate dow
nfall, in
made a unam-
in
the spring
of 1945, and to his sentence of eight years.
At earlier meetings Gammerov had surprised Solzhenitsyn by vehemently expressing his belief in God and taking Solzhenitsyn to task for some disdainful remarks on the subject of religious belief. Solzhenitsyn had been startled that one so young, born in 1923, could be a Christian when he himborn and baptized a Christian when Christianity was
still
universal in
Russia, had long since lost his faith and declared his atheism.
Now Gam-
self,
merov and
Ingal assailed Solzhenitsyn together.
This conflict w
very hard for me.
as
view of the world that
any new opinion
until
is it
I
was extremely attached
incapable of admitting anv
new
at the
time to that
fact or of appraising
can find some readv-made label for
it,
whether
it is
the
"vacillating hypocrisy of the petty bourgeoisie" or the "militant nihilism of the declassified intelligentsia.""*
*The great purge is the name usually given to Stalin's mass murders and the mass terror inflicted on the Soviet population in the vears 1937-39. Its origins go back to 1934 (and even to the collectivization of 1929-30), but
1937. Robert Conquest's
it is
generally agreed to have reached
book The Great Terror
is
devoted to
its
height during and after
this subject, as
is,
in large part,
Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
tThe
Formalists were prominent in Russia from just before the First World
they were so
named because
concentrated on
its
work.
War
until the 1930s;
denied the importance of social content in literature and
formal and aesthetic qualities.
victimized after about 1930, their
the\'
when many
Thev were
lost their jobs
heavily criticized and extensively
and were prevented from publishing
a
SOLZHENITSYN
[i8o]
Thev
didn't attack
Marx
as such,
Lev Tolstoy. Tolstoy, they
idol,
of church and
but they did attack Solzhenitsyn's Hterary totally
wrong
in his rejection
he had been foolish to preach that every individual should
state,
combine mental and physical work stood history
had been
said,
when
claiming that
it
in equal
measure, and he had misunder-
could not be influenced and directed by
how could one account for Stalin? on Tolstoy was hard for Solzhenitsyn to accept, but bolstered by the ghastly example of Stalin, it was equally difficult to resist, and Solzhenitsyn was forced to reconsider his former ideas. There were other surprises too. They praised Pasternak to the skies, reciting his verse by heart. Solzhenitsyn had read only one volume of Pasternak's verse. My Sister, Life, and had disliked it, finding it "precious, arcane, and far removed from simple human concerns.'"' But when the two voung men recited Lieutenant Schmidt's strong individuals. If that were the case,
The
last
attack
at his trial (from Pasternak's long poem "Lieutenant new side of him and conceded his admiration.* What struck him most of all about these young men was
speech
he saw
Schmidt"),
a
their fierce
disdain for Stalin's regime and their cool, even proud, acceptance of their
seemed that emotionally they had completely cut themselves off and somehow found their presence here inevitable. For Solzhenitsyn such detachment was impossible. Try as he might, he felt bound
sentences.
from
It
Stalin's Russia
even responsible for it in certain ways. The best years of his youth had been dedicated to it. Society itself had recently thrust him away, had rejected and crushed him, and he was learning new aspects of its character every day, but still it wasn't enough. The umbilical cord still bound him not only to Mother Russia, which he had always adored, but also to Soviet Russia and the paternal Party, whose ultimate magnanimity and justto this society,
ness he
still
did not doubt.
was one source of enormous relief to him that on the conclusion of his investigation and his move to Butyrki he had been given the right to receive parcels. In the harsh conditions of Soviet jails, this right was invaluable regular supply of basic foodstuffs and a few items of warm clothing could make all the difference between near-death from starvation or hypothermia and an existence that was just tolerable. More important, it gave him an It
—
opportunity to inform his family of the bare facts of his survival and whereabouts.
Solzhenitsyn could only guess
at the
appearance must have caused. Natalia's
had not come
until
March
1945, a
consternation that his sudden dis-
first
inkling that something
whole month
after
her postcards was returned marked, "Addressee has that
mean? Natalia immediately wrote again and
was wrong
his arrest, when one of left unit." What could
sent separate letters to Pash-
kin and Sergeant Solomin. Lydia Ezherets also wrote to Pashkin and to tain
*My
Melnikov. Their Sister, Life,
first
Pasternak's third book
ot"
poetry, had appeared in 1922 and immediately con-
solidated his reputation as one of post-revolutionary Russia's best
Schmidt" was published
Cap-
thought was that Solzhenitsyn must have been
in 1927 in Pasternak's
book The Year 1905.
young
poets. "Lieutenant
First Stf.ps in thk Archipfi.ago killed in action,
but
Kirill,
now
a
[iHi]
captain in the medical corps and recently
posted to East Prussia himself, had disabused them ot that idea: "Our army is
not so delicately trained as to conceal from families the truth ab(nit the
fallen.
anything had happened to Sanva, the situation would have been
If
—
—
'wounded r^r killed on such and such a date.' "^ A month passed, during which Natalia did not know whether to hope or to mourn. Neither she, nor her mother and aunts, nor L\dia and the two Veronicas in Moscow could explain this total silence. In the second week of April, Solomin had replied to her letter w ith a guarded note not to Natalia written on the
letter:
but to Natalia's mother: Circumstances are
now
such that
w hv he
I
must write
to vou.
You
are interested, of
vou and w hat has happened to him. He has been recalled from our unit. Where and for what reason I cannot tell you now. All I know is that he is alive and well, but nothing more, and also that nothing bad will happen to him. Please do not worry and help course, in Sanya's fate, .
.
hasn't
\\
rittcn to
.
.
.
.
Natasha.'
This reassured them that Solzhenitsyn was not dead, but why had Solomin written to Natalia's mother, whom he had met onlv cmce, rather than to Natalia herself, whom he had escorted to the front in 1944 and w hom he knew much better? And why should Natalia's mother have to "help her? All this only deepened the mvsterv. Soon afterwards Antonina \'itkevich began to complain that she, too, was not receiving any letters from Nikolai, and Nikolai's letters to Natalia also ceased. "Why both of them?" asked Nikolai's grandmother one da\-, on "
learning of the
new s.
After another Ilya Solomin.
month of
His departure was sudden that's
why you
don't
.
.
a little
.
we
letters
make anv
more
explicit.
didn't have a chance to talk to one another,
shouldn't be surprised
Don't expect any
And
waiting, Natalia received a second letter from
This time he was
if
tell you anything. no position to write to you.
he wasn't able to
from him, because
inquiries either, at best
he's in it's
hopeless.
.
.
.
.
.
.*
Solomin was still unable to say anything directly for fear that the censors might be reading his letters, and since he had no idea of the reason for Solzhenitsyn's arrest, he, too, might be in danger. It took considerable courage to write to Natalia at
all.
Solzhenitsyn's superior officers didn't reply to her
letters.
Permission to receive parcels was granted to Solzhenitsyn in late June. being asked to give the name and address of the person to whom noti-
Upon
fication
most
should be sent, he decided that Natalia's aunt \'eronica would be the Moscow. Veronica received a printed card
practical, since she lived in
informing her, out of the blue, that "permission has been granted to you to deliver parcels to the Prisoner Solzhenitsyn, A.I." This
was the
first
news
SOLZHENITSYN
[i82]
months of the fact of Solzhenitsyn's arrest, and was Butyrki Prison. Veronica at once dispatched a telegram to Natalia in Rostov: "Sanya alive well details later." Two days later, on 27 June, she sent another telegram, asking Natalia to come to Moscow or to book a long-distance telephone call. Natalia booked the call and endured agonies during the several hours she was obliged to wait for a line. Finally, she heard Veronica's voice on the other end of the telephone: "I took him a parcel today." At last she knew for sure. After the first telegram she had hoped that perhaps he had been sent on some sort of secret assignment. But now she knew without a doubt: her husband had been arrested and was the family had received in six
the address on the card
in
jail
in
Moscow.*^
was not possible for Natalia to pack her bags and leave for iVIoscow instant. She still had her job in the Rostov University laboratory, and on the she was studving to take the entrance examinations for admission to a postgraduate degree course in chemistry. But the summer term was drav^ing to an end, and a stroke of luck came her way. Her post-graduate supervisor. Professor Trifonov, was moving to the University of Kazan to become chairman of the department there, and he offered her three choices: to go to Kazan with him, to move to the Polytechnical Institute in her home town of Novocherkassk, where she would have a suitable supervisor, or to take on the more It
difficult task
unknown
of gaining entrance to
Moscow
Universitv. For reasons then
and immebegan preparations to go to Moscow and be interviewed for admission. The head of the Department of Physical Chemistry in Moscow, Professor Frost, had taught one of Natalia's Rostov professors when he had studied there, and her chances seemed reasonably good. To be near her husband and, if possible, to visit him in jail was the immediate goal that beckoned her, but there were subsidiary reasons why the move to Moscow was attractive. Solzhenitsyn and Natalia were quite well known in university and Partv circles in Rostov. He had been an outstanding student and Komsomol member, and she had worked in two differto Professor Trifonov, Natalia took the third possibility
diately
ent universitv departments,
acquiring
many
friends
among
the faculty
members. During the war she had eagerly responded to friendly inquiries about his progress, had boasted of his battle experiences and medals, and had even read extracts from his letters to some of her friends and colleagues. Everyone knew of his disappearance, and throughout the spring and early summer she had been bombarded with sympathetic requests for news of him. But now the situation looked entirely different. The war was almost won, onlv Japan still held out against the allies, and it was clear that, contrary to the universal hopes and the half-made promises, an era of ideological rigour was on the way again. Prisoners of war were failing to return to Rostov from captivity, many front-line soldiers were also missing, not all of them and the press gave great prominence to official reprisals being inflicted collaborated with the German occupiers and to the need for vigilance in the reclaimed territories. Rostov itself had been occupied by in action,
on those
who had
First Steps in the Archipelago
[1H3]
Germans for a while, and Rostov's citizens knew w hat turmoil that had So Natalia realized that to be know n as the w ife of a political prisoner would almost certainK' put an end to her career in Rostow Not only the
created.
would she not be able to continue w ith her post-graduate studies but she would also be condemned t(j the life of a third-class citizen (fortunately, she was oblivious of the fact that she also ran the risk of arrest under the "MP" member of the family of a convicted man). There w as no reason to article jeopardize her entire career unnecessarilv. She informed her colleagues that
—
Solzhenitsyn had been reported missing in action, and after pa\ing three times the normal price for an air ticket, she flew to
Moscow
at the
end of
June. In three weeks Natalia visited Professor Frost in the chemistrv depart-
ment, was refused admission and was recommended to
tr\' Professor Kobozev, works, went to the Ministry of Higher Education to investigate the procedures for a transfer, applied to the assistant dean of
Kobozev, read
visited
his
the Chemistry Faculty, and finally, on 18 July, got Kobozev's permission to transfer
and be supervised bv him. She had won her
be coming to Moscow.
Meanw hile
from Aunt Veronica, w
ith
whom
of a parcel to Butyrki, and self.
she would
she was staying, about Veronica's delivery
made arrangements
This meant making inquiries
first battle;
she extracted w hat meagre news she could
at the
one her-
to deliver a second
information department of the
NKVD
on Kuznetsky Most, then going in person to the prison on Novoslobodskava Street and queuing up with the other w ives and mothers. She had become like those women whom the young Solzhenitsxn had passed and bareh* noticed fifteen years
ago outside the
OGPU
prison in Rostov.
Natalia also found time to go and see Lydia and compare notes about
Nikolai and Solzhenits\n and their correspondence. Lvdia had achieved her
ambition of marrying her childhood sweetheart, taken place in 1944, just before he again.
The two
left for
the front
Kirill
—and
—the wedding had Kirill
been the cause of Solzhenitsyn's and Nikolai's
Lydia
arrest.
also
her to the grim fortress of Butyrki, helped her prepare the parcels,
and
was now back
of them shared Natalia's grief and discussed what might have
tried to assuage her anxieties.
Then
it
was time
first
went w
ith
couple of
for Natalia to
dash back to Rosto\- to take her post-graduate examinations before the autumn
term began.
On
these depended success or failure in her plan to
Moscow. Before she
left,
Dear Mamochkal Nothing new. Maybe Yesterday
I
that's
w hat
I'll
sent off the second parcel. In addition to
return to Rostov
some
food,
I
to
my work
w
ith.
sent under-
wear, a towel, socks, and some handkerchiefs. Don't forget to register
canteen and hand in
move
she jotted a quick note to her mother.
me
at
the
card to the university."^
She paid a last visit to the information department on Kuznetsky Most, where they told her that Solzhenitsyn had been sentenced to eight years. Would she be able to write letters? Yes. Unlike vast numbers of political
SOLZHENITSYN
[184]
had the right
prisoners, he
each vear, but onlv
when
it
to write and receive a hmited number of letters had been resolved what labour camp to send him
to.
A
decision on this
as Natalia travelled
was now imminent, and
in the first
days of August,
south to take her examinations, Solzhenitsyn was trans-
ferred to the Krasnaya Presnva transit prison in another part of
Moscow.
Krasnaya Presnva is another jail that has been much described in the annals of the Gulag.* A vast overcrowded warren of a building whose cells seem to have been permanentlv bursting at the seams, Krasnava Presnva was at the verv hub of of the labour-camp system, a hive that not only served as the launching point for almost ers but
being
was
all
new
also the central terminus
moved
recruits to the Gulag's
through which they
army of labourall
passed
when
from one part of the archipelago to another. Just as the Soviet
empire's railway lines
lead to
all
of the Gulag Archipelago
all
Moscow,
so
do the communication channels few ex-
lead to Krasnaya Presnya; and there are
labour-camp prisoners w ho have not been there
Krasnava Presnya differed from Butvrki
in
at
one time or another.
fundamental ways and con-
tributed greatlv to Solzhenitsyn's education. In Butvrki
all
the inmates had
been political prisoners charged with disloyalty to the Soviet regime. They were neither thieves, nor embezzlers, nor thugs, nor murderers, but had been jailed for their thoughts, their words, or on the simple presumption of unreliabilitv. Thev were comparatively fresh from the outside world and had
come and
trailing habits of courtesv, consideration,
a sense of responsibilitv.
Upon
decency, respect for others,
finding themselves together in
communal
cells, the politicals had quickly struck up friendships and a sense of solidarwarders, ity. Similarlv, the "enemy" had been easy to spot and identify stool-pigeons stood officials. Within the cells, onlv the investigators, police But were easily recognized. other side, and they, too, out as belonging to the of priswere all kinds was entirelv different. Here there Krasnava Presnva oners, from timid, newlv convicted, political "rabbits," still wet behind the ears, to hardened criminals with fifteen or twenty years of jail behind them,
—
for
whom Gulag
politicals
mav
was
their life
have been
and
their element.
When
a majority, especially in the
first
taken together, the years after the war,
but thev were demoralized, shocked, naive, and inexperienced in the ways of the criminal world, and above
all
they were new arrivals and in transit,
whereas the criminals were permanent, occupied
all
the positions of petty
was to stumble transit prison steps in the your very first them very quickly. "From across of the warders or of officers not in the hands notice that here you are you with stars on their shoulders, who at least minimally observe some kind of "'' written law. Here vou are in the hands of the prison 'trusties.' The trusties made no secret of their corruption and their greed for the
power
*
in the prison,
Gulag stands
and
virtuallv ran the place. Solzhenitsyn
for Glavnoye upravkniye lagerei
appears to have been the
first
to use
it
as
{Mzm
Administration of the Camps). Solzhenitsyn
an independent noun.
— First Steps in the Archipelago prisoners'
and
meagre possessions, which was
his fellou- politicals,
dispiriting
[185]
enough
to Solzhenitsyn
but other unpleasant surprises were to follow. Hav-
which thev had been transported from Butvrki, they were ordered to squat on the ground in the prison \ ard, beneath the cell windows. The windows were barred with muzzles, which prevented them from seeing in, but from inside thev heard hoarse, friendlv voices shouting to them: "Hey, fellows! 1 here's a rule here that w hen thev ing been unloaded from the prison van in
away everything
search you, they take
got any, toss
it
in
loose, like tea
through the window and
These friendly voices
and tobacco. So
we'll give
it
back to vou
if
vou've
later."'^
ere in such stark contrast to the curses and shouting
\v
new arrivals enthusiasticallv gave up their tobacco pouches and packets of sugar, only to discover, much later, that thev had been fooled. Their neu "friends" denied all knowledge of tobacco or sugar, and of the invitations to leave it with them.
of the armed guards that the
A
sign of the special status that awaited politicals
prisons and
camps was the
was derogatory because
it
from now on
in the
insulting designation of "Mister Fascist." "Mister"
harked back to a pre-revolutionary form of address,
"Comrade" was applied not onlv to anvone who accepted or, more importanth', was accepted by the Soviet system. It meant you were a "Soviet man," one of us, one of ours, whereas "mister" indicated that vou were sociallv alien either a throwback to the pre-revolutionarv bourgeoisie, or a class enemv (or both). "Comrade" w as not allowed to be used as a form of address to political prisoners (nor to any other prisoners, for that matter), nor were the politicals allowed to use this hallowed word in addressing others. Thev were invariably known mockingly as "mister" or more formally as "citizen." The very utterance of either word bv a securitv officer was equivalent to saving, "You are under arrest." From the very moment that Solzhenitsyn's epaulettes had been torn off, he had been no longer "comrade" but "mister" or "citizen." Similarly, prisoners were obliged to address members of the NK\'D and the pre-dating the revolutionarv "comrade."
Partv
members but
—
to
—
prison administration as "citizen" but never as "comrade." "Fascist"
was
a reference to the large
and returned prisoners of war
numbers of
who were now
filling
alleged collaborators
the
jails.
No
one could
be presumed to be more sociallv alien or hostile to the Soviet system than
a
—
was judged particularlv appropriate and humiliating to call all political prisoners bv this name. The criminal prisoners were actually encouraged to employ this terminologv and were repeatedly assured by the prison authorities that thev were the superior and more favoured class. They were still "comrades" in all but name and were therefore to be given positions of privilege and trust. This not only coincided w ith Soviet theories of criminalitv, according to which political nonconformity was a graver crime Fascist,
and therefore
it
—
than social deviancv, but convenientlv enabled the authorities to additional
punishment on the
politicals
by placing them
inflict
an
at the criminals'
mercy. Solzhenitsvn was onlv dimlv aware of these ramifications
when he
arrived
SOLZHENITSYN
[i86]
were immediately apparent not only in upon his assignment to a cell. He and Valentin were thrust into a cell that was smaller than the Butyrki church cells, yet had over a hundred prisoners in it. All the two-tiered bunks were full, but most of the asphalt floor beneath the bunks was free, and so were the aisles between the bunks. The normal procedure in cells of this kind was for the newcomers to start on the floor next to the stinking latrine tank, then work their way round the cell beneath the bunks before graduating to the lower tier and working their wav round again, until finally, if they were lucky, they got to the privileged top tier and reached the windows. The speed and manner in which thev moved depended on the numbers that were taken out and put in each dav, for the prisoners in a transit prison were constantly on the move. Solzhenitsvn and Valentin, in
Krasnaya Presnya, but
its
effects
the episode of the tobacco and the reception procedures but also
among their fellow prisioners at last, crawled under two bunks where the floor was free. The bunks were very low, and they had to inch in on their bellies. Luckily, their personal belongings had been handed to the prison store for safe-keeping until their destination was decided, and they had with them only knapsacks containing lard, sugar, and bread that they had received in parcels from their families. These, however, were more than enough to cause their undoing. thankful for having arrived
We
were going
to
lie
there quietly and talk quietly.
darkness, with a wordless rustling,
from
sides
all
and on
all
some
Not
chance! In the semi-
a
"juveniles" started to creep
Thev were
fours, like big rats.
still
up on us
bovs, some no more
than twelve years old, but the criminal code accepted them too.
They had
alreadv
been "processed" under the thieves' law and were continuing their apprenticeship with the thieves here.
from all
and
sides,
all
They had been unleashed on
six pairs of
us.
Thev
leapt
on us
hands wrenched from under us and stripped us of
And all this took place in total silence, to the sound of sinister And we were trapped we couldn't get up, we couldn't move. It took
our wealth.
sniffing.
—
no more than
a
minute
lay there feeling stupid.
to seize our bundles. Thev were gone. We We had given up our food without a fight. And we could
for
them
.
.
.
go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, backsides first, we got up from under the bunks. '^
The young
criminals had been sent bv their gang-leader, a hardened
professional crook
cronies
on
who
occupied the top bunk next to the window, with his
either side of him. Solzhenitsyn's stolen victuals
bunk before him. Resenting
his humiliation, Solzhenitsyn
the thief sat looking triumphantly
down
at
now
lay
went over
to
on the where
him. His instinct, as he
later
described the scene in The Gulag Archipelago was to leap up and grab his food ,
back, or
punch the
urchins and punish
thief
on the nose, or
at least
grab one of those grinning
him
for the brazen robbery.
But he did not dare. The
gang-leader was both bigger and stronger than he and had plenty of friends
From
and deformed face it was obvious he would was unclear who made up the grey mass of prisoners lying motionless on the lower bunks. To save face and preserve
to help him.
show no mercy
his scarred
in a fight.
And
it
First Steps in the Archipelago
[187]
some sense of honour, Solzhenitsvn protested indignantlv that if the thieves were going to take their food, thev might at least give him and \ alentin a place on the bunks in exchange. It w as a lame response and an ignoble one, as Solzhenitsvn later realized ("for
time
remembered
I
acknow ledging
The
their
it"),'"^
for
it
many
years thereafter
I
blushed everv
pla\ed directK' into the thieves' hands,
power over him and acquiescing
in their lawless rule.
gang-leader readily agreed to Solzhenitsyn's request and ordered two
other prisoners to vacate the low er bunks bv the w indow and
move onto
the
floor.
Solzhenitsvn and \ alentin thus accelerated their progress round the
cell at
the expense of
t\\
o other politicals, and were bitterlv reproached for
it
later that night.
Krasnava Presn\a marked
a
new
stage in Solzhenitsvn's education. In
East Prussia he had thought there could be nothing worse than huddling four abreast in a freezing-cold concrete cellar, or marching for tw o davs through icy winds and rain. In the Lubvanka he had discovered solitarv confinement and the mental agonies of interrogation. In Butvrki he had had his hopes raised and dashed by false rumours of an amnestv, had heard himself finallv condemned to eight years in the camps, and had slept on the floor in a cell with two hundred people in it. At each stage he had been stunned bv the ferocity of the blows and the unexpected direction from w hich thev had come, and at each stage his numbed brain had told him that the w orst w as now over and that things w ere bound to get better. And at each stage he had been deceived. \\ as there a logic to it, or was there none? Perhaps it was Solzhenits\n's optimism that made the blows seem progressivelv w orse: his irrepressible hopes invariablv rose after each new trial, onlv to be cut down again b\- the follow ing one, and then to bob back again, until the next blowcame and telled them once more. And vet even here, in retrospect, he came to look upon the bright side of his vicissitudes. "Even for the greenhorn," he later wrote, "w horn the transit prison cracks open and shells, like a nut, it is
verv, very necessary.
camps. Such
It
gives
him some gradual preparation
for the labour
one leap would be more than the heart could bear. His consciousness would be incapable of orienting itself in that murk. It has to be done graduallv."'' Krasnava Presnva, however, was qualitativelv different from anvthing he had experienced before. In leaving Butvrki, he had cast off from the mainland and was alreadv on one of the subsidiarv islands of the archipelago. Here the distant draughts from the labour camps, w hich had barely ruffled the air of the Butvrki church cells, began to blow in a stiff breeze, one that a transition in
struck a distinct chill into the heart despite the It
was from Krasnava Presnva
his first letter to Natalia, a
Archipelago. It
summer
that Solzhenitsvn
procedure he w as
heat.
was
allow ed to
later to describe in
w rite
The Gulag
was
w ords home of a man who had been thoroughly ploughed by At home thev still remembered him as he had been before, but he would never be the same again and suddenlv this w ould flash out from one
the
first
unfamiliar
the investigation.
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[i88]
of the crooked lines. Crooked because, although letters were allowed from the
and there was a post-box in the yard, it was impossible to lav hands on paper or pencil, and vou had no means of sharpening it anyway. However, you could alwavs smooth out a tobacco wrapper or a sugar packet, and someone in the cell was bound to have a pencil, and so the lines would go down in an indecipherable scrawl, determining the family's future in harmony or discord.'^ transit prison
Solzhenitsvn had already exchanged brief ing the delivery of her
first
parcel.
Above
all
letters
with Veronica follow-
he was desperate for news of
Where were Kirill and Lydia, what did she know of Nikolai? "Reply to me, if only briefly, telling me the essential points. For ten days I've been impatiently w aiting for new s ... I pray from the bottom of my heart that Nikolai and Kirill avoided my fate." He had also received Natalia's first letter written to Krasnaya Presnya after being informed of the address from Moscow by Lydia. "What indescribable joy I derived from the sheets of paper written in your own hand," he wrote to Natalia; "in this way To this day I don't know I learned that you are alive, healthy and free. whether or not 'sir' has shared my fate."'' "Sir" was a transparent reference to Nikolai. Throughout his investigation Solzhenitsvn had half expected to be confronted with Nikolai, or at least with Nikolai's evidence, and perhaps with the others too, but it seemed that no confrontations had been necesthe case was not serious enough and Ezepov not thorough enough for sary that. As a result Solzhenitsvn still did not know what had happened to his friends. He was overjoyed to learn that his wife was well and unharmed; and from the absence of any hints to the contrary in her letter, he deduced that the same was true of Kirill and Lydia. Judging from the letters to Natalia that she later quoted in her book, he now regretted the last, irritable letters he had written her from East Prussia, and felt exaggeratedly repentant and ashamed. How could he have behaved that way towards her? She was his "beautiful wife," who from the depths of his present degradation seemed infinitely alluring and desirable. He mentioned to her the rumours of an amnesty, still persistent enough to be believed, and wrote with characteristic optimism that he was confident he wouldn't have to serve his full eight years. But if by chance he was proved wrong, he would feel bound to grant her "complete personal freedom" throughout the time he was away. In theory, at least, he shared the sentiments he later put into the mouth of the autobiographical Gleb Nerzhin in The First Circle: "My don't curse that you waited darling, for four years of war you waited for me in vain: now it will be ten more years. All my life I will remember our brief happiness like a shaft of sunlight. But vou should feel free from now on. There is no need for your life to be ruined as well. Marry again. "'^ The future looked dark and uncertain from his Krasnaya Presnya cell, but still he experienced an irrepressible urge to discuss it, just as he had liked to do in his letters from the front. Only now the picture had changed. Instead of a life in the thick of politics and literature in Moscow or Leningrad, he dreamed of getting away from it all. Those conversations in the Butyrki church the others:
.
.
.
—
—
.
.
.
First Steps in the Archipelago cell
about the joys of
a quiet
country
life
somew here
[189]
in Siberia reflected a
whole new approach to life. After his return, he w rote Natalia, thev would go to live in some "remote, but thriving, well-provisioned, and picturesque village," perhaps in Siberia, perhaps down in the Kuban where his grandfather had lived, or on the river I>)n or the Volga. The\' would both take up teaching again, and in the summer holidav s make tourist visits to Moscow, to Leningrad, to Rostov. Above all, it seemed, he now craved a peaceful life, close to nature, far from places where "accidents" might happen, like the one that had got him into his present mess. Si.\ months of prison had knocked the stuffing out of him. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into a quiet corner where he could lick his wounds and be left alone. ''^
II
TO THE NEW JERUSALEM THERE WAS UTTLE chancc of Solzhcnitsyn's realizing within the confines of Krasnaya Presnya.
life
his
dream of
a quiet
Not only was he being
Gulag but the occupants of the cell were down, subtracted from, added to, stirred and new combinations. There was the same assortment of interesting
subjected to the
first
rigours of the
constantly being turned upside
mixed
in
individuals as before, with fascinating lives and unbelievable stories to
know them he had bumped into
tell,
but there was no time to get to
properly or hear them out. In the
Butyrki church
a
cell
co-defendant of the "Emperor
Mikhail"; into a participant in the Austrian Schutzbund rebellion of 1934, most
of
whose members, he learned, had,
been sent to the labour camps Lieutenant Vladimirescu, spy.
It
was not
as
it
who
had been
after taking refuge in the Soviet
Union,
purge of 1937; and into a certain calmly announced that he was a Rumanian
in the great
in the investigation cells,
had time to get to know the other prisoners. In the
however, where you
you had
transit cells
to
snatch what information you could, before vou or vour companion were
moved
on.
On
the other hand,
openness with which everyone put
it
in The
Gulag Archipelago,
you gained from the desperate candour and As Solzhenitsyn "You were refreshed and aired by the incesin the transit prison spoke.
by the comings and goings of dozens and hundreds and you became more lucid, vou began to understand better what was happening to you, to your people and even to the world. One eccentric in the cell could open up worlds to you that you would never be able to read about in any sant traffic back
and
forth,
of people, bv the frankness of their stories and conversations
.
.
.
book."' In Krasnaya Presnya there
were dozens of such 190
eccentrics, but the pris-
-
ToTHE New who made
oner
who
neighbouring bunk. 1
spent only two nights there and by chance slept his prisoner
son of Gulag," as veterans were called,
He owed
parts of the archipelago. officially
was
a
labour-camp veteran, a "true served years and years in all
who had
had been
his status to the fact that he
designated a construction specialist and had a chit in his dossier
indicating that he status
[>9i1
the deepest impression on Solzhenitsyn was a "special-
assignment prisoner" in a
Jerusalem
was
a great
w as
to be used on no other form of work. 1 o obtain this achievement in the labour camps and meant that he was
exonerated from "general duties,"
a
term that Solzhenitsvn
still
did not
understand. But the price of that achievement was written on his face, whose
dominant expression was one of cruelty and determination. "I did not then realize," Solzhenitsvn later wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "that this precise expression was a national characteristic of the denizens of the Gulag islands. Persons with soft, accommodating expressions quickly died out on the islands." The veteran, like a re\ered professor, was quickly surrounded bv a group of novices demanding to know what awaited them in the camps. And, like a professor, he read them a lecture.
From your first step in the camp, everyone will trv to deceive and rob vou. Trust The law there is the law of the jungle. There never w as no one but yourself. \nd above all, avoid "general duties" and never will be any justice in Gulag like the plague. Avoid them from the verv outset. If you land up on general duties on vour first day, vou're lost, lost forever! .
There
it
.
.
was again, "general duties." What did
it
mean? The professor
patiently explained that general duties referred to the basic labouring in each
camp, at w hich 80 to 90 percent of the prisoners slogged aw ay. The work was so gruelling, the norms set so high, and the food so meagre that the vast majority of prisoners on general duties sooner or later subsided into scavenging and died of exhaustion and malnutrition. That was the reason the professional thieves did their utmost not to leave Krasnava Presnva or, if they did, to get for themselves the trusties' jobs assisting the administration.
above
all
knew what awaited them
in the
camps. But could
general duties be squared with Valentin's
vow
to
this
They
concept of
"work honestly"
in the
camps? Solzhenitsyn was to try a form of general duties rather sooner than he had anticipated: the heat and stench in his Krasnava Presnva cell were unbearable. Its two w indows faced south, and the sheet-metal muzzles, preventing the entry of all except a trickle of fresh air, heated up in the August sun and roasted the people inside. Stripped to their underw ear, braving the unbiquitous bedbugs, the hundred-odd prisoners sweltered and writhed in helpless immobility, praying to be called out and sent on to their next assignment. For this reason, when the call came for volunteers to go down to the Moscow River and unload timber, Solzhenitsvn was among them, grateful for the chance to spend the day in the fresh air. The w ork consisted of shift-
SOLZHENITSYN
[192]
ing balks of timber from one spot to another on one of the wharves, and
Solzhenitsvn was appalled to discover that none of them had the strength
left
do the work verv quicklv. Nevertheless, thev earned an extra three and a half ounces of bread per day and barely noticed the watch-towers with armed guards and the high fence that surrounded the wharf. Evidently a proper camp was in formation here, and the Krasnava Presnva prisoners were just a temporary expedient. It was while they u ere being marched back from the wharf that Veronica Turkina caught a glimpse of Solzhenitsvn in one of the columns, the first sight that anv of the familv had had of him since his arrest. She wrote at once to Natalia, disguising her message by feminizing Solzhenitsyn's name and striking an exaggeratedlv cheerful note to dispel Natalia's gloom. "Saw Shurochka* just once. She was returning \\ ith friends from her job of unloading timber on the Moscow River. She looks marvellous. She is suntanned, energetic, cheerful, smiling from ear to ear, teeth sparkling! I'm verv glad she's in good spirits.'" Solzhenitsyn was later to use this incident in The First Circle, attributing the chance encounter to Gleb Nerzhin's wife, Nadia, instead of her aunt, and describing his own appearance as "sallow and emaciated," to
of the other skinny prisoners in the column.^ Meanwhile, Natalia had received Solzhenitsyn's
like that
crammed pages
Presnva, four tightlv
letter
from Krasnaya
written in hard pencil in the minuscule
handwriting that Solzhenitsvn had perfected for his notes
at
the front, and
She had completed her summer chemistry examinations in Rostov and was preparing to go to Moscow in the hope of seeing him. But getting there was no easy matter, for first she had to show good
folded into a tiny triangle.
reason
why
she needed to travel, so that she could get a permit to leave her
place of residence, and then she had to obtain a ticket,
which meant joining
endless queues or offering a bribe.
While she was making these preparations she received another letter from Veronica, dated 24 August. Her aunt wrote that the last time she had tried to deliver a parcel to Solzhenitsvn she had been informed by the Krasnaya Presnya office that he v\'as no longer there. They refused at first to inform her of where he had been moved, and it was only several days later that thev It's
had consented to reveal
the absolute truth that
ling, hov\
many
his destination.
you were born under
Everv Sundav vou
will
be going
spot set in wonderful countrvside. land."
There vou
a
lucky
star!
Natasha,
will
It
used to be called the "Russian Switzer-
—
—
place for the fledgeling convicts to take their
der.
dar-
be able to see him.'
Novy lerusalim "New Jerusalem," a pregnant name for a labour camp and set in the "Russian Switzerland." What more *The
my
me yesterday. You can rest easy. from Moscow to Novy lerusalim. It's a holiday
envious eyes were fixed on
usual diminutive of Alexandra
—
in this case a
first
faltering steps
corrective
promising
on an
island
device for not referring directly to Alexan-
'1
THE Nf.w Jerusalfm
()
I
'93
I
of the archipelago? Solzhenitsyn and sixty other politicals were transported there on 14
August 1945,
floor so as to
found the
in the
back of two open
be invisible to inquisitive onlookers.
streets
and houses decked with War had
over Japan. Ihe Second World
Within
"The
a short
time they arrived
flags
—
at last
it
lorries,
To
squatting on the
their surprise, they
was the day of final victory
come
to an end.
at their destination in
New Jerusalem.
Ihe Fascists have arrived!" was the cr\ that greeted them as they climbed down from the backs of the lorries and stretched their stiff limbs. 1 he district of Zvenigorod, where the camp was situated, was only thirty miles west ot Moscow, and the ride had taken no more than an hour, but thanks to the long-windedness of the Krasnaya Presnya disFascists have arrived!
charge procedures, the endless formalities and the inefficiency of the transit was nearly sunset by the time they arrived, rhev were once surrounded by inquisitive prisoners and asked the usual questions about where they were from, whether they were "Fascists" (political pris-
port arrangements,
at
oners) or criminals, and so on, before being
left
alone to go through the
seemingly interminable admission procedures.
At
first
glance the
camp
struck
them
as attractive
and even cosy.
The
freshness and greenness of the surrounding landscape dazzled their eyes,
accustomed for so many months to the drabness of a city prison. Ihrough the loosely interwoven strands of barbed wire, they could see the gentle hills of Zvenigorod, dotted with unkempt cottages and tumbledown hamlets; the spraw ling informality of the Russian countryside seemed to extend right through the wire to the ramshackle barns and sheds that housed the camp canteen, bath-house, stores, latrines, and other services. Fven the white, two-
storey brickworks, with its tall chimney, which was the centre-piece of the camp, the stone barracks for the men, and the wooden barrack, with an attic perched on the top, for the women, were momentarily perceived by them as endearingly familiar and normal. They were led to the living compound, an area about two hundred yards square and fenced off from the work compound by barbed wire, with a guardhouse between the two. It was late. They still had to queue up to hand in their belongings to the stores. Solzhenitsyn waited obediently, handed in his suitcase, and remained w ith only what he stood up in. Then they were
taken to the stone barracks to see their
new
quarters,
w here
the impression
of cosiness was quickly dissipated.
The cavernous barrack rooms were totally devoid of furniture, row upon row of some curious sleeping structures known in camp as "wagonettes." Fach wagonette consisted of two vertical steel posts ing about six feet apart on shaky legs, with two crossbars sticking for
either side like a double
T, one
at
knee height and the other
at
except jargon stand-
out to
about the
w hole thing form four narrow bunks, two above and
height of a man's shoulders. Across these bars and holding the
together were bare boards fixed to two below. There was no bedding of any kind, not even a straw mattress (let alone a pillow). Each prisoner was obliged to lie directly on the bare boards
SOLZHENITSYN
[194] in
—
He dared not remove his boots or morning they w ould be gone; and in any case
whatever clothes he was wearing.
—
anvthing else there
for the next
was nowhere
out, the barrack
to put them. In the mornings,
room was
left as
when the prisoners filed Not a rag, not even a
clean as a whistle.
fluff, was left to show that any humans had been there. But the feature of the wagonettes that was to upset Solzhenitsvn the most, and make his life on them a misery, was their chronic instability. Every time a prisoner climbed onto one of the four bunks, or climbed down again, or turned over, the whole structure wobbled and trembled, so that the other three occupants would be shaken out of their sleep. Solzhenitsvn detested them, for they left him with no control over the most precious hours in a prisoner's dav and deprived him of his last vestige of privacy.^ Not surprisinglv, he slept badly that first night. The boards were excruciatinglv narrow and uncomfortable, he could not get used to the itchy feeling of sleeping in his clothes and boots, and he was painfullv conscious of the other three bodies tossing and turning on their joint wagonette. His mind was also full of apprehension. He recalled the insistent words of the specialassignment veteran: whatever you do, keep off general duties! Yet how was it to be done? Barely an hour had gone by before one member of their transport entered and announced that he had been put in charge of maintenance work in the compound. Another had been given permission to open a barber's shop for the free workers at the brickworks. A third had run into an old friend who had fixed him up in the planning section. All good jobs, but there was a limited number of them available. What should he do? To whom should he turn? Did it require bribes, or was there some other wav? What was for
piece of
the best?
The
next morning he was
ringing of
a bell
woken
at a
quarter past four bv the loud
and the shouts of the guards.
up. Stiff and shivering,
still
drunk with
Time
sleep, not
for the first shift to get
wishing to wash and not
needing to dress, Solzhenitsvn stumbled blindlv to the canteen. "Evervone
was pushing and shoving and knew exactlv what he wanted. Some were racing to get their bread, others to collect their gruel. And you staggered about like a lunatic, unable to make out under the dim lights and in the steam from the gruel where to go for the one or the other."'' At length he obtained his pound and a quarter of soggy bread and dipped his spoon into his bowl, onlv to discover
a meatless, saltless, fatless, evil-smelling nettle
soup that made
stomach heave and his head swim. Lifting his eves to the wall opposite, saw through the gloom a big red slogan so beloved of Soviet administrahe his
tion:
"Whoever does not work does not
eat!"
After breakfast the newcomers were lined up, counted, and marched to
work compound, escorted by armed guards and trained Alsatians baying at the leash. It was 6 a.m. and just beginning to get light. To keep them busv, thev w ere ordered to move a pile of rubbish from one spot to another by wheel- and hand-barrow The work was obviously meaningthe
and straining
.
less,
and Solzhenitsyn took every opportunity to stop and chat with Boris
TO Gammerov and Georgi
T H F.
Ingal.
N EW
J E
RUSALKM
1
To take their minds off their
•
9
5
I
work, the\ talked
—
about their favourite subject hterature. Ingal described I \nyano\'s funeral to Solzhenitsvn and informed him that he regarded himself as Tynyanov's pupil in the v\Titing of historical novels. This led to an interesting clash of
opinion, which Solzhenitsvn later described in Ihe Gulag Archipelago.
—
We
argued about historical novels ought people to write them? After all, a with things the author never saw. Burdened bv remoteness
historical novel deals
and the ripeness of his own era, the author can trv to convince himself as much as he likes that he has thoroughly comprehended, but nonetheless he is never able to enter into
it
properly, which means, surely, that a historical novel
is
an inven-
tion?*
That question mark presumably indicates the gap through which Solzhenitsvn squeezed when he came to start on his own series of historical novels. He would later argue that he lived close enough in time, and knew enough eyewitnesses, to make August 1914 and its successors different in kind from the usual run of historical novels, and in this there is some truth. On the other hand, the break between tsarist and Soviet Russia was so radical and so complete that he could never recapture that pre-revolutionarv w orld with the same authoritv as he has the Soviet one, a circumstance that later led to
some
fierce
polemics concerning the authenticitv of August 1914.
One bv one
the
new
arrivals
v\
ere called in to be given their
permanent
assignments. Ingal had already met someone with influence and been given
Gammerov,
true to his disdain for the authorities and any way, proudlv accepted general duties. Soon it was Solzhenitsvn's turn. He had already thought about how to make an impression and keep off the dreaded general duties, and had carefully put on his full officer's uniform (minus the epaulettes): tunic buttoned up to the neck; broad officer's belt; riding breeches; and patent-leather riding boots. When he entered the director's office, according to Solzhenitsvn's account of the meeting, his clothes had the desired effect.
bookkeeper.
a job as a
refusal to treat
with them
in
"Officer?" guessed the director.
"Yes,
sir!"
"Anv
experience with men?"
"Yes."
"What unit did you command?" "An artillerv battalion." (I lied on impulse,
a batterv seemed too small me, half-trusting and half-doubting. "But can vou manage here? h's hard here." "I think I'll manage," I said. He frowned and thought for a moment "All right. You can be shift foreman in the clav-pit.'"'
He
.
looked
.
.
.
Solzhenitsyn was triumphant. outset.
to me.)
at
Another former
officer,
He
.
.
had avoided general duties
named Akimov, was
at
the very
also appointed shift
SOLZHENITSYN
[196]
foreman, and the two of them strolled off together.
They
agreed that the
had seemed undulv hesitant in giving them the job and could not fathom why. After all, there were only twenty men in each shift and both had commanded larger numbers than that in the army. Work in the camp was carried out round the clock, in three shifts. The morning shift began at six and ended at two, the afternoon shift ran from two to ten, and the night shift from ten to six. Solzhenitsyn was assigned the morning shift, and during the first day or so seemed to be getting into the swing of it. But after a day or two he was confronted, shortly before his shift was due to end, with a new brigade of workers, a punishment brigade, consisting entirely of professional crooks who had just been released from the camp lock-up after threatening to cut the camp commandant's throat. They had been brought to the clay-pit because it was the heaviest and most difficult work, but instead of picking up their shovels and bending their backs, they simplv sprawled on the ground and commenced sunbathing. Solzhenitsyn went over to them and curtly ordered them to start work. He was met with laughter and a volley of obscenities. He would have liked to stand his ground, but his experiences in Krasnaya Presnya had already taught him that it was dangerous to meddle with criminals. Enraged and confused, he beat a prudent retreat. Soon afterwards his shift came to an end, and he was replaced by Akimov; and later that day he learned of the sequel to his encounter. Akimov had started by approaching the thieves in exactly the same way as Solzhenitsyn. He had more to lose, however, with a whole shift ahead of him, and had therefore pressed the thieves much harder. When they still refused, he had reported them to the supervisor, an engineer by the name of Olga Matronina, but she had simply ordered Akimov to force the thieves to work. Akimov had returned to the clay-pit and tried again, and on this occasion the crooks had chased him into a distant corner, knocked him down, and smashed his kidnevs with a crowbar. Akimov was carried off to hospital director
and never seen again. Fortunatelv, there were no more confrontations between Solzhenitsyn and the thieves, but his life was little the better for that, for he immediately came into conflict with the brigade leader on his shift, a prisoner who was neither a political nor a professional criminal, but a man convicted of a civil a Muscovite named Barinov, a veteran of the clay-pit who work through and through and whose main aim in life was to shield his men from the worst rigours of the camp and fulfil the norms as efficiently and painlessly as possible. Later in his camp career Solzhenitsyn came to
offence.
knew
He was
the
admire such far-sighted brigade leaders and later still immortalized one of them in the person of Tiurin in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But in New Jerusalem he still identified with authority and insisted on his right to give Barinov orders, just as he would have done in the army. Barinov did not try to resist Solzhenitsyn or to beat him up; he simply made a complete and utter fool of him.
The work
in the clay-pit consisted of digging the
from the ground with shovels,
filling
wagons with
it,
and
raw clay wagons
rolling the
TO to the wet-pressing plant,
THE
N EW
where the
clay
J E
RU
u as
S
ALEM
['971
pressed into bricks.
The w agons
had to be pushed on tracks that ran along the floor of shallow ravines w here the clay had already been dug out, then hauled out of the pit w ith the help of a mechanized winch and pushed again over flat ground to the plant. These wagons proved to be Barinov's weapon. Whenever something went wrong with one of them, Barinov w ould ostentatiouslv
call
Solzhenits\n over and
him for instructions on how to put it right. Or he would ask for guidance on where to lav the tracks next, or on how to repair the w inch if it broke down, all the time aware that he knew the answers perfectly well and Solask
zhenitsyn didn't. Alternatively, to
if
Solzhenitsyn gave orders for certain things
be done, Barinov would invariablv discover reasons
whv
the\' couldn't
and would demonstrate them to Solzhenitsyn in front of the other men. In the end Solzhenitsyn was forced to abandon the unequal struggle. His spirit was numbed; he felt utterlv bewildered and helpless. Krasnava Presnya, Butyrki even the Lubyanka had been nothing like this. It was still true, it seemed, that every new step he took was worse than the one before. How
—
long would
—
it
go on?
He was
soon grateful to
let
Barinov have his
way
in
everything, and every morning as he entered the clav-pit, dreading the dav
ahead, he would pray only to be
left
alone and not to be bothered bv Barinov.
Unfortunately for Solzhenitsyn, another pair of eves was watching him
—
Olga Matronina. Matronina, although technicallv a political member, had been shot during the thirties, and she had got eight years as a member of the familv), was an even more fiercely loyal Communist than Solzhenitsyn, and absolutelv dedicated to the system. Her consuming goal in life was to maximize brick production just as in anv normal enterprise, regardless of the fact that the work-force consisted of half-starved convicts working in abominable conditions with out-of-date equipment (or, in some cases, with none at all). As she had recentlv written in a petition to Kalinin, the president of the Soviet Union, "mv long sentence has not broken my will in the struggle on behalf of Soviet power and Soviet as well
that of
prisoner (her husband, a Partv
"
industrv.
Matronina was chief of the wet-pressing plant, to which the clav-pit was announced that the number of wagon-loads per shift was to be doubled just like that. Solzhenitsvn regarded himself as essentially on her side but on this occasion made no attempt to comply. He simplv did not see how his starving and exhausted men could possibly double attached, and one day she
—
a
production
norm
that
was alreadv bevond
their strength,
and he did not
understand that the task of a foreman was precisely to make them double
That
it
on the side of the camp authorities, and of his better rations, which he now received from a different hatch in the canteen. And that was the promise that his Soviet officer's uniform had seemed to make to the director and Matronina when he had pleaded for the job. Confronted bv his failure, Matronina was implacable and roasted him in front of Barinov and the men to Barinov's vast satisfaction. A dav or two later, Solzhenitsyn seized the opportunity to go to Matronina at all costs.
v\as the price of his privileged position
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[198]
and humbly beg to be taken on as a ledger clerk in the plant, but she roasted him again. If she needed a ledger-clerk, she said, she had plenty of girls available for the job. What were needed were "production commanders," and she sent him back to the clay-pit. The following day Solzhenitsyn was informed that the post of foreman had been abolished. Barinov was to be placed in charge of the morning shift, and Solzhenitsyn was to be put on general duties, under Barinov, digging clay. "Give him a crow bar and don't take your eyes off him. See he loads six wagons a shift. Make him sweat! '^ was Matronina's parting shot to Barinov. Solzhenitsyn's rise and fall had been uncommonly swift, in the best tradition of the labour camps. Either you adapted quickly and were saved, or you failed to adapt and were subjected to all the rigours that the labour-
camp regime had
to offer, which could quickly end in your demise if vou were unlucky. But besides the physical privations, there was the mental
anguish.
One
of the things that stands out in Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of
New Jerusalem
in
The Gulag Archipelago
is
the vivid recollection of his white-
hot indignation and outrage over the sheer bovine stupidity of the
arrangements. For instance,
members
camp
of the three shifts at the brickworks
were mixed together in the barrack rooms. This meant that there was continual noise and movement. No sooner had the morning shift had supper and returned to their rooms for the night than the members of the night shift began to get up from their bunks and prepare to go outside. Soon after they left, the afternoon shift would return and crowd into the rooms, boisterous and talkative now that work was over. Finally, well after midnight, it would fall quiet at last, but at four-fifteen it was time to get up again, and it was the morning shift's turn to disturb the others. Worse still, at each changeover the wagonettes would be set creaking and shaking, and the bright electric light was kept on all the time. The day was also organized in such a way that the prisoners were kept constantly at the beck and call of their overseers, yet at the same time forced to stand around unoccupied for long periods at a stretch. In addition to performing the cumbersome rituals of washing and eating, thev had to queue twice a day at the stores, once to hand in their belongings in the morning and once to get them out again in the early evening. There was also the daily roll-call.
Everyone in the compound had to form up in ranks while an illiterate guard with plywood board in his hand went round, continually licking his pencil, corrugating his forehead with mental strain and whispering to himself. He counted the ranks several times over, then went round every building to check, leaving the prisoners standing there. Sometimes he made a mistake in his sums or got mixed up over how many were in the lock-up. And this senseless waste of time went on, if you were lucky, for an hour and sometimes for an hour and a half." a
What
is
interesting here
burned so deeply
is
the sense of outrage and frustration that
in Solzhenitsyn
still
twenty years afterwards, when he was
— TO
THE
writing The Gulag Archipelago.
It
NE
V\'
w as
J ER
USALEM
['99]
partly the irritation of an intellectual
confronted by the mindless procedures of any cumbersome control
s\
stem
—
anvone who has done military service will recognize his frustration but the level of intolerance of it was highly personal to him. As he v\ rites in The is not very highly developed in the Russian labour-camp prisoners; but to anvone who possessed it (Solzhenitsyn was one of the very, verv few) these endless delays were agonizing. Ingal and Gammerov got round them bv standing on parade with closed eyes and composing verse or prose, or letters home, in their
Gulag Archipelago, a sense of time people
—and was
heads.
And
totally alien to
in general
they coped better with the pressures of
although they were younger and had
less front-line
camp
life,
experience than Solzhe-
whose phxsical work was easv, insisted on underlining freedom and independence bv refusing to sleep during the first half of each night and sitting up on his bunk w riting. Boris Gammerov, whose independence had been expressed in his willing acceptance of general duties, was too exhausted to emulate him but still led an active mental life, debating with the other two and composing verse. But Solzhenitsyn was too confused and depressed to keep up w ith them. He did write to Natalia asking her to send him paper, pencils, pens, ink, and some English textbooks, since he had resolved to revise and improve his English as an antidote to camp depression, but he found the obscenities of the morning parade and the din of the barrack room too intrusive to contemplate any creative w ork, and the effort of composition w as totally beyond him. His will-power had been sapped by his ambivalence about the camp authorities, his instinctive urge still to "belong" and be accepted as "one of them." He was bewildered and disoriented. When he wrote to Natalia, he complained of "spiritual fatigue" and a head clogged with a "viscous jumble of dullness." He had no clear idea of what was for the best or w hat he should trv to do next. His vacillation became even more marked after he was summoned one day for an interview with a voung NK\'D lieutenant. In fact, the lieutenant nitsyn. Georgi Ingal, his creative
did not interview
him but simply
invited Solzhenitsyn to write his autobiog-
raphy.
After the investigation depositions, in which after the humiliation of the prison vans
and
I
had only spat
all
transit cells, after the
over myself,
armed guards
and prison warders, after the thieves and trusties had refused to see in me a former captain of our glorious Red Armv, here I sat behind a desk, not being pressed by anvone at all, beneath the benign gaze of this friendly lieutenant, and wrote at just the right length and in thick ink on excellent smooth paper, such as
you did not get in the camps, that I had been a captain, that I had commanded a batterv, and that I had been awarded such and such medals. And thanks to the very fact of writing, it seemed to me that I was getting back my own personality,
mv
mv epistemological subjective "I"! mv autobiographv, was completely
"I." (Yes,
man,
is
to rise
.
.
.)
And
the lieutenant, read-
"So you're a Soviet was right, why not? How agreeable it was from the dust and ashes and become a Soviet man again it was one half
ing through
that right?" Yes, of course
of freedom!''
satisfied.
it
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[2oo]
That dream of freedom and he was still hoping
burned bright in Solzhenitsyn's imaginaan amnesty. The 7 July amnesty had been only slowly put into operation, and it was not until his arrival in New Jerusalem that he discovered its terms and saw how it was working. Releases tion,
from the
New Jerusalem
still
for
had begun only with the
new work-force was needed
arrival of the "Fascists," for
to take the place of the old. Solzhenitsyn
it was onlv professional thieves and civil offenders who from the July amnesty he himself witnessed dozens of them being released from New Jerusalem and returning to Moscow. Nevertheless, it did not seem possible that the amnesty would or could stop there. Rumour said that now that the war was well and truly finished with the victory over Japan, Stalin would "take account of the victory" and declare a second amnesty expresslv for political prisoners. It was even said that the amnesty had been prepared and lay on Stalin's desk ready for his signature but that he was away on holiday (Solzhenitsyn later incorporated this rumour into his play The Tenderfoot and the Tart). "The basic hope," wrote Solzhenitsyn to Natalia, "is for an amnesty for those convicted under Article 58. I still think that this
then discovered that
were
—
to benefit
will
happen. "''
the
camp
One
result of this farcically partial
amnesty was the appearance
of giant slogans: "For this broad amnesty
all
over
us thank our dear
let
Party and government by doubling productivity." Another was a shortage of
manpower with which
to achieve this doubling. Solzhenitsyn
was switched
for a time from the clay-pit to Matronina's pressing plant. There he was able to observe
Matronina queening
who worked
it
over the several dozen
eight-hour shifts (without a break)
at
women
conveyor
prisoners
belts carrying
the newly pressed clay bricks. Solzhenitsyn's job was to manhandle
loaded
v\'ith
1
wagons
20 wet bricks stacked on shelves from one end of the conveyor
where thev were loaded by two girls, along rails to the drying chamThe wagons were top-heavy and the wooden kiln floors were rotting and full of holes. Solzhenitsyn frequently stumbled and fell while trying to line up the wagons and drop the shelves onto racks in the chambers. "There was probably supposed to be some kind of ventilation in the chambers, but it was no longer working, and while I struggled with my mistakes in positioning the shelves (I used to get them crooked, they got stuck, wouldn't settle on the racks, and wet bricks would rain down on my head), I gulped in carbon fumes which burned my windpipe."'"* He was almost relieved when ordered back to the clav-pit again, where he teamed up with Boris Gammerov. They had been transferred because the amnesty was reducing the ranks of the digging brigades once more. The shift norm for each worker was six wagons of clay (eight cubic yards) filled and pushed by hand to the winch sixteen cubic yards for two people. But the most they could manage was six and a half yards between them: less than half the norm. And that was in dry weather. Boris still had shrapnel in his lung, and his TB was getting worse. Solzhenitsyn's arms felt as if they were dropping off. "The work-loads of an unskilled labourer are beyond my belt,
bers.
—
NEU
rO THE
J
F.
RUSA
I.
E
M
[
2
O
I
]
Strength," he wrote to NataHa. "I curse m\' physical underdevelopment."''
A few dav'S later it began to rain, .\utumn was setting in, and the rain went on and on, neither turning into a dow npour nor completely stopping. "In New Jerusalem for some reason they did not even issue us w ith padded jackets, and there in the red clay-pit, beneath that monotonous drizzle, we wallowed and caked our army greatcoats, which b\ the end of the third day had already absorbed a pail of w ater each. Nor did the camp issue any footwe were rotting our last front-line boots in the wet clav."'^ Solzhenitsyn resolved to get rid of his tunic and cavalr\' trousers for a while and wear, and
packed them away
in his suitcase in the store,
applying to the quartermaster
—
some patched and faded camp rags in their place oblivious, for the moment, of the symbolic importance of this change. But it still didn't help. He and Gammerov tried to keep up their spirits by talking about Chekhov and Vladimir Solovyov* (whom Solzhenitsvn had not then read) and by telling jokes, but the norm became even more unattainable in the squelching mud. They were put on punishment rations: three ladles of nettle broth and one of thin gruel a day, and less than a pound of bread. And still the rain for
fell.
The
had become drenched, and we were well and trulv stuck
clay-pit
much
in
it.
No
you picked up on vour shovel and no matter how much vou banged it on the side of the w agon, the clav w ould not drop off. Each time we had to reach over and push the clay off the shovel into the car. And then we realized that we had merely been doing extra work. We put aside our shovels and began simplv to scoop up the squelching clav from beneath our feet and toss matter how
it
clay
into the wagon.'
Just before tw o o'clock and the end of the
shift,
Matronina appeared on
the edge of the clav-pit and could be seen gesturing to the brigade leader as
she walked around and pointed out certain spots: she was giving orders for
norms had been fulfilled. The "Our hands had grow n numb from the cold claw and
the prisoners to be kept in the pit until their
afternoon dragged on.
by
this
futile
time
we
couldn't even throw anything into the wagon.
occupation, climbed up to the grass, sat
down
We
left this
there, bent our heads,
our coats up over the backs of our necks. From the two reddish stones in a field. "'^ Soon everyone had left the pit, and the w agons stood abandoned, some of them turned on their sides. Gammerov and Solzhenitsvn picked up their shovels and dragged their way over to the foot of Matronina's pressing plant, where they huddled in the dust beneath a brick vault. Not far aw ay some other prisoners were digging into a heap of coal, picking out some greyish black lumps and eating
and pulled the side
*A
we
looked
collars of like
religious philosopher
the union of
all
and poet of the
Christian churches and
latter halt
belief in the importance of mystical revelation. intellectuals
opposed to the Soviet
of the nineteenth centurv
who combined
political
He
system.
liberal political
has recently
views
who propounded \\
ith a
profound
become popular with Russian
SOLZHENITSYN
[202]
them. Solzhenitsyn asked what they were. He was told it was "sea-clay." It had no nutritional value, but it didn't do any harm either. It simply made
men
a good meal. were kept at the clay-pit, but no one fulfilled Right up Matronina cursed and ordered that they be kept out all night. But his norm. work lights in the compound and it was too big a risk. Someno were there one might escape. The men were rounded up and herded back to the living compound by armed guards and baying dogs. They gulped down their two one for lunch and one for supper to the dim light ladles of nettle soup from two paraffin lamps flickering in the canteen, then lay down as they were, soaking wet and muddy, on their polished wooden boards. For three nights now thev had slept in sopping-wet clothing. There were no facilities for drying anything, and it was cold from the draughts. Solzhenitsyn felt at a lower ebb than he could ever remember: exhausted, rain-sodden, cold, drained of all hope. And tomorrow would be the same, and every day after that: Six wagons of red clay, three scoops of black gruel. "We had felt that we were growing weaker in prison, but here it went much quicker. There was already a sort of ringing in our heads. We were on the brink of that pleasant lassitude when it would be easier to yield than to fight
the
feel full, as if
they had eaten
to nightfall they
—
—
back."'^
He realized,
understood that the archipelago was more brutal than he had ever more merciless even than the special-assignment prisoner had pre-
He had made his bid to escape general duties and had failed. He still had nearly eight years to serve, yet he alreadv felt he had one foot in the grave, and the future seemed an utter blank to him. He had completed exactly three weeks of his sentence. dicted.
12
LIFE
AxMONG
THE TRUSTIES REPRIEVE FROM THE clay-pits ofNcw Jerusalem came suddenly and unexcollect their
was
to
on 9 September 1945, when all the prisoners were told to belongings from the store and to stand by for transfer: the camp
pectedlv,
k^
be emptied to make
wav
for a contingent of
German
prisoners of war.
To his great relief, Solzhenitsyn was not sent on one of the distant convoys to the Urals, Central Asia, or Siberia that he had heard so much about, but was transferred back to Moscow to Kaluga Gate, on the south side of the
—
city.
As
usual, the parading
and
roll-calls at either
end seemed interminable,
was night before the Kaluga Gate contingent arrived at their destination. Shocked and frightened by his experiences on general duties at New Jerusalem, and with the words of the Krasnava Presnya veteran still ringing in his ears, Solzhenitsyn was determined to avoid a repetition of his recent ordeal at all costs. The commander of Kaluga Gate, Lieutenant Xevezhin, was on hand at the guardhouse to inspect and question new arrivals. When he came to Solzhenitsyn, who had specially dressed up in his cavalry and again
it
breeches and officer's topcoat for the occasion, Solzhenitsyn announced boldly
was a "norm setter." It was a word he had first come across in the camp, and he had no idea what it meant, but he hoped it had something to do with mathematics. Nevezhin asked Solzhenitsyn a few questions; he appears to have been impressed by his willingness to please, because the following day Solzhenitsvn's name was missing from the list of those sent out to do general duties, and two days later he found himself appointed to the unimathat he
ginably exalted post of production superintendent, a ated for him, that placed him in charge of
203
all
new
job specially cre-
the brigade leaders, the
work
SOLZHENITSYN
[204]
and most of the trusties in the camp. This was higher than he had dared dream, and it carried with it the privilege of sleeping in one of two special rooms set aside for the production trusties. This room, on the third floor, was for six people onlv. It had single bunks instead of shuddering wagonettes, bedside tables shared between two allocator,
people, and a hotplate on
room was
ing the day the
day
at the stores,
and
life
which
in from outside. Durwas no necessity to queue twice a was more comfortable than anything he had known
to
cook food brought
locked, so there
since his arrest.
The company tor,
room was
in the
also rather special:
two
generals, a doc-
—and only one peasant, though even he had once been
an engineer
man
chair-
of a village Soviet. Solzhenitsyn looked and listened and learned
—
his
education was continuing.
Of the
t\\
much
o generals,
Alexander Beliavev,
\\
the grander was the air-force major-general
ho w orked
as assistant to the
was senior in camp, he
norm
setter.
tion superintendent, Solzhenitsyn
to Beliayev in the
archy, but, like everybody else
still
called
him "general"
deferred to Beliayev and
(an almost unique instance of a man's informally retain-
ing his former rank in the labour camps) and treated
ated respect that
seemed
to
on
insisted
it.
for the first time in the construction office for a light, thinking that the latter
But not
at all.
him with the exagger-
be universally accorded him
was because Beliayev himself
sive lighter
As produccamp hier-
\\
at
Kaluga Gate. This
Solzhenitsyn encountered him
when he approached
the general
ould offer him his cigarette to light from.
Beliayev removed his cigarette from his mouth, took an expen-
from
his pocket,
and placed
it
ostentatiously on the desk for Sol-
zhenitsyn to use. Subsequently, Solzhenitsyn noticed that this was typical of Beliavev's whole attitude:
"He
stood out from the grey-black, lice-ridden
and handsome figure but also by his Even when lined up with all the others and \\ ithout moving a muscle, he was able to demonstrate that he had no connection \\ hatever with the teeming camp rabble around him and that until his dying day he would never understand how he had come to find prisoners' ranks not only
bv
his height
particular air of not being present.
himself
among them."'
Beliayev never entered the
camp
canteen, boasting that he didn't
know
where the door was. Every day at 1 p.m., when the prisoners returned to their living quarters from the work compound, Beliayev's wife would punctually present herself at the camp guardhouse and hand over a freshly cooked
vacuum container. This he ate in room every day, together with a portion of his bread ration, which was brought to him by the peasant, Prokhorov. Even then he could not resist hot meal for him, stored in an expensive
their
cutting a thin slice off
mouth touched nothing
all
six sides
of his piece of bread to ensure that his
had been handled by the other prisoners. The other general, Pavel Zinoviev, had been a general in the MVD, which meant he had once been responsible for administering the prisons and camps. Indeed he still wore the same bluish grey uniform of his captors, with that
Life
among the Irusties
1205]
and detested by, the other prisoners, and it clear that in the past he had personally w prisoners orking on construction supervised projects. He, too, shunned the camp canteen and had all his food brought to him bv his wife and daughter, who lived not far from the camp, but they \\ ere poorer than Beliavev's wife, and therefore, in addition to the bread, he made Prokhorov bring him his soup and gruel from the canteen, which he reheated over the hotplate. Zinoviev was milder mannered than the blustering Beliayev, but he had sharp tongue and felt his present humiliation much more keenlv than the a air-force general did. Both had been jailed for corruption and embezzlement, but whereas Beliayev had not had his personal propertv confiscated, Zinoviev had lost half of his, and this, too, filled him with resentment. Solzhenitsyn observed the two of them with fascination and not without a certain sympathv, though their arrogance and obvious contempt for everv'one around them precluded real friendship. He was also happv to tolerate their mild its
azure piping so familiar
to,
remarks that he dropped made
despotism after the bruising rigours of
New Jerusalem.
The doctor in the room, Dr Pravdin, a neuropathologist in his former and now chief of the camp medical section, had been imprisoned, like Solzhenitsyn, under Article 58, for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and like Solzhenitsyn had been sentenced to eight years. He was a big, distinguished-looking man of about seventy, with a mop of silvery hair that he had been able to preserve from shaving by a special dispensation. Yet he seemed to Solzhenitsyn to be as timid as a rabbit and to have "the naivety of He believed that we had all been imprisoned only a backward child. temporarily, as a kind of joke, and that a magnificent and generous amnesty was being prepared so that we would value freedom all the more and be eternally grateful to the Organs for this lesson."- Not surprisingly, Pravdin was diligent in his efforts to please the camp administration and consequently not in the least concerned for the medical standards by which he had lived all his life. The medical section's task, as he saw it, was simply to rubberstamp the administration's neglect of the prisoners. The two remaining inhabitants of the room were most unpopular \\ ith the generals, who did everything in their power to get rid of them. One of them, Orachevsky, had been an engineering instructor and had been jailed for five years for "smiling" while reading Pravda and for passing a negative comment when asked to fill in a political report on someone. Orachevsky was taciturn and seldom joined the endless conversations in the room, \\hich were invariably led by the generals, but what fascinated Solzhenitsyn about him was his passionate devotion to his work. The other odd man out was the peasant Prokhorov, who was unacceptable to the generals because of his coarseness and rude simplicity, although formally speaking he was the leader of the production trusties' brigade and had to deal with the camp authorities on their behalf. He was a peasant of vast experience and had been jailed for doling out too many ration coupons to his starving villagers when re-elected chairman of the village Soviet (havlife
.
.
.
SOLZHENITSYN
[2o6]
German occupation and retreat. many independent-minded peasant figures that Sol-
ing held this position before the war) after the
He was
also the
of
first
zhenitsyn came to admire in the camps, and Solzhenitsyn opposed the generals'
request for his removal.
What
I
immediately liked about him was
this: in
bringing Zinoviev his mess tins
and Beliayev his bread, Prokhorov was never servile and never produced a false He needed a great deal of food to nourish his big smile or an empty word. worker's body. For the sake of the general's gruel and broth, he patiently endured .
his humiliating position.
to
them
either.
time had not
He
come at
.
He knew
they despised him here, but did not suck up
could see through the
to voice his opinion.
on bedrock, that much hurry to smile
.
in
our people
I
lot
felt
rests
of us as
if
we were
naked, but the
about Prokhorov that he was founded
on shoulders
like his.
He was
anyone, his gaze was sullen, but he wouldn't stab you
in
no
in the
back either.^
Solzhenitsyn's reign as production superintendent at Kaluga Gate was brief. Less than a week after his appointment, Lieutenant Nevezhin was removed from the post of commandant, for stealing building materials. In itself, such stealing was neither unusual nor exceptionable among the officers and administrative staff it went on constantly. And the prisoners were bribed and blackmailed into helping too. But Nevezhin was insatiable, so that in the end his superior could ignore it no longer. He was replaced by a Lieutenant Mironov, who quickly found Solzhenitsyn too naive to supervise the other prisoners. Instead of increasing their quotas and extracting maximum labour for minimum reward, he had been too much on their side, insisting on the observation of the safety regulations and the supply of proper tools and materials, and had only hindered those who were determined to "get things done" at any price. From production superintendent he was kicked all the way down to general duties, but even now he retained a modicum of luck. As a mark of indulgence he was put into the painting brigade, which was one of the easier brigades, and he was allowed to retain his place in the trusties' room, since his replacement as superintendent already had a bunk in the other room set aside for trusties. It was about now that he had his first, long-a\\'aited meeting with Natalia. It had taken her some weeks to settle her affairs in Rostov, obtain the necessary permission to change her place of residence, get a permit to travel, and buv a train ticket, and she was quite surprised, on arrival in Moscow, to be met bv Veronica with news of her husband's move to Kaluga Gate she had imagined him to be still in New Jerusalem. The following day she made her way to the camp, whose situation Solzhenitsyn later described in The First
ignominiously
—
—
Circle.
Kaluga Street was occasionally
v\
ith
a
broad, busy thoroughfare with a steady flow of limousines,
diplomatic number-plates. Buses and trolleybuses stopped by
the end of the railings enclosing
Neskuchnv
Park,
where the camp guardhouse
Life
among the Trusties
stood, looking like the entrance to a normal building
swarmed some people
ished structure
workers looked
like that
site.
[207]
High up on
in dirty, tattered clothing,
but
the unfin-
all
building
and none of the passers-bv guessed that these were
convicts."*
Unfortunately, neither Solzhenitsyn nor Natalia has described their
meeting
in
any
detail.
quickly, recording
how
memoirs Natalia passes over
In her edited
ver\'
it
she entered the guardhouse and waited alone in an
empty low-ceilinged room, with wooden benches around the walls, for Solzhenitsyn to be summoned. "I heard the sound of steps. There in the doorway stood my husband smiling at me! He held his cap in his hands, revealing his shaven head." They were not alone a guard was present throughout the meeting
—
—but
it
must
ha\'e
been
a highh*
emotional occasion for both of them.
Natalia indicates that Solzhenitsyn was
contrite about his last letters
still
from East Prussia and again asked her forgiveness for the harshness of some of his expressions. "The former Sanya had not know n how to stop to consider the pain he might be causing others," she writes in her memoirs, "but there was something about the new Sanva that alreadv made him more sensitive to the beat
of another's heart.
He w anted
to cross out the lines in his
old letters that had offended me."'' Solzhenitsyn has confirmed that this
how
he
and
felt,
in
was
The First Circle he shows Gleb Nerzhin similarly chas-
tened and softened by his experiences:
"He had become
gentler, he kissed
his wife's
hand, he watched for the glint in her eves; while with her he was
no longer
in
jail.
The
ruthlessness of
camp
had altered him."'' at Kaluga Gate separation between husband and wife, life
In the novel, Solzhenitsyn conflates their
and and
raises the
theme of a possible
legal
.
.
.
many meetings
seems that he did on several occasions repeat the assurances first given in his letter to Natalia from Krasnaya Presnya that she should feel free to divorce him and seek her happiness elsewhere. But she interpreted this at first as a desire, on his part, to get rid of her, and so, on the heels of the East Prussian misunderstanding, came a new misunderstanding to muddy their relationship and lead to endless self-doubt and questioning. It was all exaggerated, of course, by their artificial separation, but Natalia soon made it it
—
clear that she
still
loved her husband and had not the slightest intention of
taking advantage of his offer, while he at
made no
secret of his
immense
relief
her decision. His arrest and imprisonment, and the grief and despair inflicted
on both of them, had brought them closer together than at any other time since their wedding. Natalia swore to remain faithful and to wait for him all the eight years of his sentence, and he, filled with confusion, guilt, and foreboding, fervently prayed that he, too, would be able to keep faith and that it would be less than eight years until the day of their reunion.
To
the truth, despite his retrospective disdain for Dr Pravdin, he hoping for an amnesty. At first the prisoners thought it would come the time of the November holidays, on the anniversary of the Revolution, an act of clemency by Stalin to mark the complete end of the w ar and the
was at
as
also
tell
SOLZHENITSYN
[2o8]
victory over Japan. But November 1945 came and went, and nothing happened. In December, Matyushin, the camp artist, was released as a result of the July amnesty. Matyushin had originally been sentenced to only three years,
had served four and
a half years,
and had secured
his release only as
the result of a long-drawn-out campaign of petitioning. Nevertheless, like
an omen. His charge had been
a political
one
—and the July amnesty was being put
—Article
58,
it
seemed
paragraph
into effect so slowly and haphazhoped against hope that it might somehow be extended to all politicals. One day during this period Solzhenitsyn climbed to the top of the block of flats they were building, to the eighth floor, and
IB
ardly that the prisoners
looked out over
Over
to
Moscow
still
.
one side were the Sparrow Hills, still open and clear. The future Lenin still in the planning stage and hadn't yet been built. Kanatchikova
Prospekt w as
[the lunatic asvlum] could be seen in
Dacha
pristine original state.
its
On
the
other side could be seen the cupolas of the Novodevichi Nunnery, the hulk of the Frunze streets, the
—
Academy, and Kremlin, where
been prepared for
To
us, the
our
Remembering some
refuge in
all
away,
in a violet
haze beyond the bustling
thev had to do was sign the amnesty that had
us.
doomed,
lav virtually at
far, far
this
feet,
world appeared tempting
in its riches
and glory
as
it
vet forever unattainable.'
his earlier
dream of
getting
away from
it all
and seeking
distant corner of the country, Solzhenitsyn turned his thoughts
amnesty and petitioned the Supreme Soviet to imprisonment to exile for life to any part of the
to exile as an alternative to
commute country
his eight years'
chose (he didn't then realize that his sentence included exile any-
it
way). But no reply came, and by
am
again. "I
March 1946 he was dreaming of an amnesty
100 per cent sure," he wrote to Natalia, "and
am
still
convinced
amnesty was prepared in the autumn of 1945, and that it was approved in principle by our government. But then for some reason it was postponed." As late as May 1946 he and his comrades were still hoping that an amnesty
that the
would be proclaimed to mark the first anniversary of victory over the Germans, as emerged in another letter to Natalia. "Today we were full of expectation. Although there were conflicting rumours about the ninth, still there is a possibility during the week or two following the ninth. Such weariness has descended upon us all as if the newspapers had actually promised it for today.
"^
Not
long after Solzhenitsyn's demotion to the painting brigade. General
moved to Butyrki and Solzhenitsyn was able to slip into his job norm setter. Once more he was a legitimate occupant of the trusties'
Beliayev was as assistant
room and needed no longer opportunity to revert to his boots,
all
go
in fear of expulsion.
He
clothing and
He was
pleased to be
made
more anxious than ever
to
also took this
and patent-leather
of which he had earlier put aside for ragged overalls
the painter's brigade. officer's
to
officer's tunic, cavalry breeches,
when
a trusty again,
make
a
joining
proud of
his
good impression on
AMONG THK TrUSTIFS
LlFK
And onee
the authorities.
[209]
again he succeeded better than he had imagined.
Proof of his success came with a
bv one of the camp guards, year student the
MV'D
Moscow
at
visit to the trusties' room one evening young man named Senin. Senin was a fourth-
a
University
in his spare time.
pation, for he invariably arrived
the guardhouse.
And
unusual in Senin's the trusties' literature.
room
On
\\
He was
ho earned extra money by working
for
apparently ashamed of his secret occu-
and
left in civilian
clothes and changed in
"Senin" was not his proper name. There was nothing
visits.
He
fancied himself an intellectual and liked to
to discuss the latest films he
however,
this occasion,
had seen or
to talk
visit
about
after chatting inconsequentially for a
A few minutes Senin followed him out and instructed him to go to the securitv offi-
while, he secretly signalled Solzhenitsyn to leave the room. later,
cer's
room. This seemed
like
new
bad news. Being summoned
to see the securitv officer
was being prepared against you, or that you were called to give evidence being in someone else's case. Either wav it was an unpleasant business. But his immediate fears were quickly put to rest. The security officer had a small, cosilv furnished room "that didn't seem to be a part of Gulag at all." It contained a desk, a sofa, and a radio playing some familiar classical music. As Solzhenitsyn later described it in The Gulag Archipelago: "I instantly softened: somewhere life still went on! My God, we had already got used to the idea of taking our own life for normal, vet somewhere ."^ Instead of barking at him, the security it still went on, out there. officer was courteousness itself. How was Solzhenitsvn feeling.' What did he think of camp life? Was he comfortable in the trusties' room? Solzhenitsvn answered briefly and non-committally, until they came to the crucial quesusually meant
a
case
.
.
tion.
"Well, after everything that has happened to you, after evervthing vou
have experienced, have you remained Solzhenitsyn
mean "Russian"
knew what
lay
a Soviet
man?"
behind those words. "Soviet" didn't
just
or a citizen of the Soviet Union. "Soviet" in this context
meant you supported the Soviet system. He hesitated and replied that the Special Board had itself pronounced him "anti-Soviet" with its sentence. But the security officer waved that aside. Everybody knew the Special Board was a rubber stamp. Its verdict didn't count in what they were discussing now. The main thing was: How did Solzhenitsyn feel? Had he changed or become embittered? After all, he had been Soviet in his youth, the officer knew from
why he had been asked to had led to nothing at the time, but had found its way into his dossier, had accompanied him to Kaluga Gate, and was being taken up again by the ever-vigilant "organs.") He had been a Soviet officer, and was still proud to wear his uniform around the camp. He was also desperately keen for an amnesty, and had petitioned the authorities for exile, so he still believed in the justice and mercy of the system, still had his
autobiography. (Solzhenitsyn
write his autobiography in
faith in the authorities
now
understood
New Jerusalem.
—did he not?
It
SOLZHENITSYN
[2io]
Sensing
a threat
behind
this
smooth
recitation of his former virtue, Sol-
zhenitsvn hastened to assure the officer that he was not embittered and was
and of course he was still Soviet. This was evidently what the waiting to hear. They could talk as two Soviet people. They been officer had ideology and had common goals. "We must act in unity. same the shared You help us and we w ill help vou." still
a socialist;
Solzhenitsyn
The
felt
trapped by this and wondered where
no time
officer lost
in explaining. Solzhenitsyn
w as the
it
was
ideal
leading.
person to
as going on in the camp. He could choose and report their contents to him. Solzhenitsyn demurred and claimed to suffer from a bad memory, but the officer became threatening. Did Solzhenitsyn \\ ant to go back to general duties or be sent to Siberia? For two hours and more, according to Solzhenitsyn's account of the matter, the\' circled back and forth around this central point, the security officer striving to convince him that it was in his own interests, while Solzhenitsyn stonewalled and tried to find a way of retreating from his commitment to behave like a "Soviet man." It was well past the time for lights out in the rooms when the officer switched his attack. He had heard from Senin, he said, that Solzhenitsyn w as hostile to the professional crooks and thieves. Was that so? Solzhenitsyn confirmed that it was. He had hated them from the day he first set eyes on them and had already had several serious clashes with them. Well then, said the officer, surely Solzhenitsyn was not in favour of criminals' escaping from the camp? What if a bunch of them got out and robbed or raped his wife on the street while she was making her way home from her institute? She w as
help
him keep
in
touch
\\
ith
what
\\
to overhear certain conversations
young and pretty, wasn't she, and the camps? Surely she, and others things? Solzhenitsyn writes that he
all
alone with her husband locked up in
like her, still
should be protected from such
wondered what the
security officer
was leading up to, but felt a sense of relief at having found some common ground at last. Yes, they should be protected from thugs, and he could agree to that
with
a clear conscience. In that case, said the security officer, surely
him any plans he heard
Solzhenitsv n wouldn't refuse to report to thieves to escape? Solzhenitsyn hesitated. rity officer
criminals.
was repugnant
As
he agreed to the if
And
the threat
for the
any secu-
applied only to the hated
it
was most unlikely he would of Siberia would be lifted. Relucso
it
officer's suggestion.
by magic the security
zhenitsyn to sign: "Pledge. securit\' officer an\'
idea of reporting to
at least
He hardly ever mixed with them,
have anything to report. tantly,
him but
to
The
I
officer
produced
a sheet
of paper for Sol-
the undersigned pledge to report to the
escapes planned
b\- prisoners.
..." Solzhenitsyn
camp
resisted.
He
had not said all prisoners, only the crooks. And he preferred not to sign name. But the securitx' officer was adamant. What difference did it make if Solzhenitsyn \\ as truly "one of us"? They both knew that it really meant only the criminals. In the end, he had to sign the pledge, as well as another his
pledge never to disclose the contents of this
first
pledge.
And
as a final
humil-
among the Trusties
Life
iation, the security officer insisted that
for
all
informers had to have a
essential part of the system. failed it
him, and
was
left to
Solzhenits\n choose
pseudonym
a
pseudonvm, it was an
for their denunciations;
For once, Solzhenitsvn's
literary inventiveness
the security officer to suggest "V'etrov." \'etrov
became, and Solzhenitsyn duly signed the form with his new name. This episode marked the nadir of Solzhenitsyn's camp career and indeed
the nadir of his to
it
[211]
endure
life.
He was
to
know
worse physical deprivations, he was and he was to come within an occasions, but never was he to sink morally far
far greater psychological pressures,
ace of death on at least
two
later
or spiritually lower than in this confrontation with the security officer at
Kaluga Gate. Yet, as he has shown tation
w as almost
in The
Gulag Archipelago, such
a
confron-
inevitable in the light of his early behaviour in the camps.
New Jerusalem and at Kaluga Gate (and Krasnaya Presnya) had been to "get on," to rise to the top, to become a part of the camps' ruling elite and occupy a position of trust, just as he had strained every nerve to become an officer. And he had been prepared to do almost anything to keep away from the dreaded general duties, which the benighted mass of the prisoners ended up performing, thus hastening the day when they went to the wall. To this end he had flaunted his uniform, his ability to command, and his loyalty to the system, showing himself pathetically eager to please; and at the same time, nursing his bruised ego and sense of personal outrage over his ill-fortune, he had pleaded and petitioned for mercy. On the other hand, we can salute his courage in confessing this ignominy nearly thirty years later. As he said after publishing volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago, he had revealed in it worse things about himself than his enemies could have ever dreamt he would do. Indeed, we owe most of what we know of his inglorious first years in the camps to his ow n revelations scattered through the various parts of The Gulag Archipelago and a few other works. It is possible that he has even darkened the image in places, for The The
entire thrust of his ambition in
also at
Gulag Archipelago
is,
among
other things, a
summons
to the
Russian people
and Solzhenitsyn attempted to lead the w av bv conspicuously displaying some of his own. In his rage to atone, he may have exaggerated at times. On balance, however, the picture does not seem overdraw n. The self-portrait that Solzhenitsyn sketches is essentially confirmed by w hat Natalia Reshetovskaya has told us of him at this period, and by w hat we know of his later psychology and development. to repent their sins,
In the short term,
He
it
would appear, Solzhenitsvn's pledge made
continued to work as assistant norm
little
and Senin periodically pumped him for information. Since Solzhenitsyn never seemed to have anything to report, Senin urged him to give information on his workmates or anything else that he knew, but Solzhenitsyn fell back on the narrow terms of his commitment and said that it applied only to thieves and
difference to him.
setter,
escapes, and nothing more. xVIeanw hile, he
was becoming more
closely acquainted
w ith other
aspects
— SOLZHENITSYN
[212] of
camp
life
and the complexity of the hierarchy that governed
it.
In effect,
camp guards and adminpersonnel supervising the construction work
there were three hierarchies, one consisting of the istration,
another of the free
none of whom was
—and
a prisoner
a third
of the trusties and other prisoners
with positions of responsibility in the day-to-day running of the camp. These hierarchies did not mix at the upper and lower ends of the three scales, but in the middle, the free personnel and the prisoners worked very closely together and were virtually indistinguishable, with the crucial difference, of course, that the free workers went home at the end of the working day. At the top of the heap was the camp commandant, first Lieutenant Nevezhin and later Lieutenant Mironov, answerable to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Beneath him came the armed guards, who looked after the physical security of the camp, and the w arders, responsible for the day-today supervision of the prisoners, both of whom also worked for the MVD. Somewhat to one side and in many ways more powerful than the comman-
dant was the security officer,
who was
responsible for security matters, for
the behaviour of the political prisoners, and for ensuring ideological confor-
mity. a
He worked
for the secret police
law unto himself. Parallel with
(now known
this hierarchy
as the
NKGB)*
and subordinate
to
it
and was
was the
construction hierarchy, consisting of the chief engineer, responsible for overseeing the entire building project and guaranteeing that the architect's plans
were carried out, the \\ orks manager in charge of all the construction workand specialist foremen for all the main building trades: bricklaying, joinery, plumbing, electrical work, and plastering. There was also a group of individual free workers who worked as tractor drivers, excavator drivers, dispatch clerks, firemen, and so on. The prisoners' hierarchy was headed by the so-called compound trusties, those who worked most closely with the construction personnel and held the most confidential positions: chief bookkeeper, stock-room clerk, work allocator. Their job was to assist the works manager in making the project pay its way. Since they controlled the quotas and the deployment of the prisoners' labour, they played a key role in determining how and by whom the ers,
camp
v\
as run.
against the
Of
course, the
commandant and
cer, or against the
compound
his
trusties could not
MVD personnel,
move openly
against the security offi-
works manager and chief engineer, but they could
influ-
ence them heavily in their decisions and sometimes, by virtue of their control over output, could effectively dictate some of those decisions insofar as they affected the other prisoners. For instance. Lieutenant
Mironov had dismissed
Solzhenitsyn from his job as production superintendent without their intervention, but
it
was the compound
trusties
who,
a short
time afterwards,
ousted Solzhenitsyn's successor, Vasily Pavlov, and installed
own
preferred nominee, Alexander K.
Solzhenitsyn from his job as assistant
in the post their
Shortly after that they removed
norm
setter
and got him put back onto
*Sarod)iy komniissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (People's C^ommissariat for State Security). security apparatus had been separated from the
NKV'D once more
and renamed
in 1941.
The
— Life
among the
I'rusties
[213I
w as expelled from the production trusroom and consigned to the \\ agonettes in the big barrack room. 1 here was one other privilege, particularK' xaluable in a camp where men and women mixed, that the compound trusties exercised to the full, and that v\ as control over the women. The life of a woman could quicklv be made insupportable in the camps: she was more vulnerable than a man to the hard general duties, with the result that he ties'
phvsical labour of general duties and to such humiliations as the intimate
bodv searches, the shaving of pubic lies, all
of
hair, the
bathing
w hich oppressed her psvchologically and
deprivation. Furthermore,
women
\\
in front
of male order-
intensified her phvsical
ere in short supplv, so that the pressure
show them favours and ultimatelv to climb into bed w ith them was intense and unavoidable. There was at Kaluga Gate one girl in particular who made an impression on Solzhenitsvn. She was a former lieufrom
trusties to
tenant and a sniper in the armv, and according to Solzhenitsvn she w as "like a princess in a fairytale:
The
crimson
lips,
chief bookkeeper, a fat Jew
hardlv bear to look
at,
the bearing of a swan, jet-black locks."
named
Isaak Bershader,
whom
she could
resolved to have her for his mistress. For weeks he
made sure she was kept on the heaviest forms of general persuaded the warders to victimize her on pettv charges, and threatened her with a transport to Siberia, all the while making no secret of his laid siege to her,
duties,
end she capitulated: "One evening," writes Solzhenitsvn, from the snow and the sky, I mvself saw how she flitted like a shadow from the women's barracks and with lowered head knocked on the greedy Bershader's store-room door. After that she was well taken care of in the camp compound."'^ 1 he production trusties were a rung lower on the prisoners' ladder, although the most senior of them, the production superintendent, had a great deal of power if he chose to wield it. Alexander K, the energetic thirt\-fivevear-old engineer who succeeded V asilv Pavlov in the job, was verv fond of tyrannizing those under his control. "He was one of those prisoners whose actions put more fear into the inmates than the Archipelago's inveterate bosses: once he had got vou bv the throat, he would never let go or relax his grip. He got the rations reduced visits banned and transports increased objective. In the
"in a twilight pale
.
.
.
anvthing to squeeze more out of the prisoners.
And
both the camp
dant and the construction chiefs were equally pleased with him.""
norm setter and most importantlv, the brigade
duction trusties included the office staff, and,
As
at
New Jerusalem,
oners' point of view, these
the ones
who
commanThe pro-
his assistant, various
minor
leaders.
Solzhenitsvn noticed that from the ordinary pris-
were the key
figures.
The
brigade leaders were
haggled over the quotas with their various superiors.
If
they
were good, thev attempted at all costs to shield their men from the worst rigours of the camp, to protect them from the arbitrary punishments of the commandant and his warders, the exorbitant demands of the production trusties, and the even worse corruption and tyrannv of the compound trusties. Their role was a heroic one, and the well-being of the majority of the pris-
SOLZHEXITSYN
[214]
oners absolutely depended on them. Fortunately, they had considerable
room
manoeuyre, because in a sense the rest of the camp depended on them. Solzhenitsyn had experienced this at New Jerusalem with Barinoy. It was Barinoy \\ ho decided how man)' wagons the prisoners should load and who saw that they obtained what little pay they vyere due,* and there had been for
little
that Solzhenitsyn could do, as foreman, to shift him.
After his relegation from
norm
setting to general duties, Solzhenitsyn
was able to obserye the relations between the prisoners and the foremen from below. Fyodor Murayyoy, the joinery foreman, was a drunkard and a fool. He would sign almost any vyork youcher the brigade leader put in front of him and w as incapable of distinuishing good work from bad, which of course was yery much to the prisoners' adyantage it was often impossible to fulfil the quotas if the work w as done properly (and if the quotas were not fulfilled, their already skimpy rations would be cut still further). The brigade leader, as the one responsible for the quotas and therefore for how much the prisoners receiyed to eat, was thus the only trusty who was able to carry out his work without detriment to the ordinary labourers. the storekeeper, clerks, nurses, Lastly, there were the "seryice trusties" cooks, breadcutters, canteen staff, bath attendants, cleaners, and the doctor, dentist, and barber. All these were prisoners too, but since their work was priyileged and much easier than that in the construction brigades, it was apportioned by either the compound trusties or the production superintendent, who naturally reseryed it for their fayourites and for those prisoners prepared to pay for it in some way or another. Many of them were women, and the form of payment \yas explicit, as with the woman lieutenant subjugated by Bershader. In other instances it meant willingness to pay bribes, usually in the form of tea, tobacco, or clothing, or to conniye at and take an actiye part in the widespread stealing that w as endemic to the camps. Solzhenitsyn was too naiVe and inexperienced to make much headway in the complex web of pow er bargaining and corruption that preyailed in the camp. While not deyoid of ruthlessness when his innermost goals were at stake, he did not possess that naked driye for power at all costs that was the recipe for success in the camps, and so he was a failure as a production superyisor, a failure as an assistant norm setter, and eyen, from the authorities' point of yiew a failure as an informer as well. If he was to survive in the camps, it would have to be by cunning, and it was here at Kaluga Gate that he began to develop a talent for craftiness that w as to become second nature in the years ahead. In a sense, his deal with the security officer had marked
—
—
,
the self
first
step along this road.
By
agreeing to inform, he had ingratiated him-
with the authorities, but seems never to have intended to act on the
agreement.
He was
*The remuneration
also
determined to stay on the side of power
if
he could,
of labour-camp prisoners varied according to place and time. Generally
u as impossible, in the forties, to earn more than about twenty-five rubles a month, but that depended on 100 per cent fulfilment of the "norm," or quota, w hich was generally set too high. Most prisoners earned at best a handful of rubles, at w orst nothing at all. speaking,
it
LiFK
AMONG THE TrUSTIES
and indeed, throughout his stay
at
[2
I
5]
Kaluga Gate, was able to remain on the from the produc-
fringes of the trusty aristocracy even after being expelled
tion trusties'
One
room.
aspect of this drive for social acceptability was his participation in
the amateur theatricals staged in the camp's cultural and educational section
(CES). 7 hese cultural and educational sections were post-revolutionarv times, just a threat,
u hen
"corrective labour"
and they had been intended to
a
was
throwback still
to earlv
an ideal and not
assist in the "correction"
of
criminals through propaganda and ideologicallv approved cultural activities.
During the thirties the early idealism had been stripped awav, but the sechad remained and continued to exist as a sort of shadow of their former selves. This was the place, for instance, v\here you obtained pen and paper with which to write letters home or petitions to the government for clemency. The CES was also responsible for censoring and distributing incoming letters to the prisoners and for emptving the brown boxes into which the petitions were posted. The CES housed the library, if one existed, or the few books that were allowed in the camp, as well as whatever newspapers were allowed. It was the place where artists could go to get materials and paint their pictures artists were much prized in the camps and occupied a highly pri\ ileged position, since they could provide the officers and guards with pictures to take home. At Kaluga Gate thev also stencilled rugs,* w hich the guards paid for in commodities and sold outside. And the CES organized periodic concerts and theatrical performances, most of which were staged in tions
—
the
camp canteen
after supper.
Solzhenitsyn gravitated to this section soon after his arrival
at Kaluga Gate it was the one place where he could go in the evenings to get awav from the endless, boring conversations of Beliavev and Zinoviev and talk about something more elevated and interesting. It was also the one place where the men prisoners were allowed to mix w ith the w omen prisoners on equal terms, where thev could rehearse together and put on concerts and
—
plays.
There w ere speciallv printed collections of plavs labelled "for performance only in Gulag" plays that were ideologically innocuous but so ill-
—
written and ridiculous that thev
\v
ould have been laughed off the stage else-
where. Solzhenitsyn managed, after great difficultv
in finding a
stage a performance of Chekhov's The Proposal, and he gave a
dramatic readings, just as he had done as the
w hole thing w as reminiscent of
his
a
copy, to
number
of
schoolbov and student (indeed,
Komsomol
activities in Rostov).
On
one occasion he accidentallv aroused the ire of the officer in charge by reading a monologue of Chatskv's from Gribovedov's celebrated play. Woe from Wit. It had been a favourite of Solzhenitsvn's for a long time, and he writes that in his enthusiasm he overlooked its topical satirical content. Here in the *This ma\' ha\e been the inspiration Ivan Denisovich learns
w
for the scene in
ith distaste that his
craft pursuits for stencilling
and
selling
A Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisoiich in
u hich
fellow villagers have abandoned agricultural and
cheap rugs.
SOLZHENITSYN
[2i6]
it took on quite a different resonance. "Who are the judges?" it began, and included the line "Their hostility to a free life was implacable." When Solzhenitsyn reached the couplet "Where, oh where are the fatherland's fathers? Is it not these men loaded with plunder?" the section chief exploded and
camp
ordered him off the stage.'' Solzhenitsyn was soothed and diverted by his theatrical
activities. Not camp compound couple of hours in the evenings but they also offered him an refuge from the repellent world of everydav camp life. Having
only did they give him the opportunity to freely for a
imaginative
move around
the
been convicted partly on the grounds of what he had written, he dared not have many books in his room or show an overt interest in literature. If he took a book to read while waiting for the endless
took care to see that
it
was
a
roll-calls to
textbook on physics.
The
be finished, he
cultural
and educa-
was therefore an oasis, and the books and plays that he was able to handle there gave him the strength to carry on at his general duties. At some point during these activities, he heard of the existence of whole theatrical troupes of prisoners in Gulag, whose members were freed from general duties in order to rehearse and perform their plays full-time, and he clutched at this straw as yet another possible means of ensuring his survival. Gulag actors were trusties of a sort, but at least their privileges did not depend on deceiving or persecuting others. As it happened, there was a long tradition tional section
of theatre companies in Gulag. In the thirties already, senior
MVD officers
had indulged themselves by forming such groups and had vied with one another to collect the best actors and actresses from various prisons and camps and outshine one another, much as nineteenth-century Russian landowners had done with their serf theatres. Now, in the post-war period, every Gulag region had its own "professional" theatre troupe, and the Moscow region had several, one of which unexpectedlv came to Kaluga Gate.* Solzhenitsyn was fascinated. "What a strange sensation! To watch a performance of professional convict actors singing, white dresses, black frock coats.
elderly Latvian couple
formed
during the
camp ."'^
.
.
canteen! Laughter, smiles,
He
quickly got to
know an
played leading parts in the troupe, Oswald and
Oswald had been
Isolde Glazunov. in Riga
who
in a
a pupil of
German
Vakhtangov and had
later per-
occupation, together with his wife, a
dancer. For this they had been charged with treason and sentenced to ten years. Isolde also
danced
at
Kaluga Gate, despite her advanced years, but
Solzhenitsyn heard that soon afterwards she was separated from her husband
and sent away on a camp transport, while he was forced to stay behind. Such were the immutable, cruel laws of the Gulag: not even membership in a theatre group was a guarantee against sudden transfers, punishment cells, reduced rations, or any of the thousand shocks to which the prisoner was arbitrarily subjected.
Solzhenitsyn also became friendly with Glazunov's "spiritual daughter," *
Varlam Shalamov,
actor in one of the
in his
camp
Kolyma Tales (New York and London, 1980), has
theatres ("Esperanto").
a story
about an
— among the Trusties
Life
[217]
Nina, the leading actress in the troupe, \v ho turned out, Hke Solzhenitsyn, have attended the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and His-
to
tory and to have studied under the to
what degree Solzhenitsyn w
had
a lover in
same
art historv professor. It
as attracted to
is
not clear
her physically but she already
the troupe, a former dancer from the Bolshoi ballet. Solzhe-
nitsyn was desperatelv keen to join the troupe as well, but his hopes were in vain. all my efforts, I did not succeed in becoming a member of the ensemble. Soon afterwards they left Kaluga Gate and I lost sight of them. ... I remained there in the modest little amateur group u ith Anechka Breslavskava, Shurochka Ostretsova, and Lvova. I now look back upon mv participation in it as a mark of
Despite
mv if
immaturity and
spiritual
camp
the
The
a humiliation.
he found no other distractions in
Moscow
tipsy and give the orders: "I
want
of a
worthless Lieutenant Mironov,
Sunday evening, could
a concert in ten minutes!"
arrive at
And
and
in a trice
brilliantlv
.
stage before an
lit
the
from bed or dragged awa\- from the camp hotplate we would be singing and prancing about and performing on
actors could be roused
emptv
hall,
\\
ith
.
.
a
onlv the arrogant, doltish lieuten-
ant and a trio of guards for an audience.'"*
was sweetened for Solzhenitsvn by the chance it gave Breslavskaya, w ith w horn, it appears, he fell in love at Kaluga Gate. He later informed Natalia that this was the onlv time he w as unfaithful to her throughout the fourteen years of his army service, imprisonment, and exile.''' Anya is portrayed as Lvuba Negnevitskaya in The Tenderfoot and the Tart, which, in its first variant (as The Republic of Labour), was Perhaps the
him
pill
Anya
to be near
dedicated to her.*
As spring gave way to summer, life at Kaluga Gate became somewhat There was no longer the biting cold of the Russian winter to
pleasanter.
contend with, and the prisoners no longer needed to tear
down
partitions
and joists with which to stoke up their fires. Solzhenitsyn laboured ten hours a day at laying parquet floors and found himself reasonably able to cope with his moderate form of general duties, but the rations were meagre, and not even Natalia's twice-weekly parcels could stave off his growing hunger and lassitude. Meanwhile, the threat of a sudden transport to a harsher climate and harder work still hung over him. Suddenly, on the morning of 18 July 1946, he was summoned from the ranks at morning roll-call and told not to go to work with the others. All the guard could tell him in answer to his questions was that he should report to and plunder
*The 0/f«'
rafters
question of what to /
sbalashoz'ka
shalashovka (derived
prisoner
who
call this
based on
is
from
plav in English
camp
shalash,
slang. Olen
meaning
a
is
problematical. Solzhenitsyn's Russian
(literallv
"deer")
means
a
camp
title
novice, and
rough hunter's cabin or bivouac) means
a
woman
agrees to sleep with a trusty or with trusties in exchange for food and privileges
not quite a whore, more a tart or a tramp. Innocent seems to
me
to catch
none of
The
published English
this raciness. Alternative titles
title
The Love-girl and
the
proposed, besides mine,
include The Paragon and the Paramour, The Greenhorn and the Camp-zi'hore, The Greenhorn and the Shackereen,
and e\en The Reindeer and
the Little Tent.
— SOLZHENITSYN
[2i8]
the guardhouse "with his belongings" and that he was being
Kaluga Gate on special instructions from the Ministry of the
moved from As his
Interior.
brigade disappeared into the
work compound, Solzhenitsyn was surrounded
by the compound
who
Some
predicted a
opposite soared.
—
that he
Was
it
trusties,
new
animatedly discussed
case against
him and
a
would be amnestied and
new
this
unusual event.
sentence. Others said the
set free.
Solzhenitsyn's hopes
possible that his petitions had been answered at
last,
that his
optimism had not been unfounded? Or was he destined to have his sentence doubled and to spend the rest of his life in the camps, as had happened to several prisoners he knew?'^ He had almost forgotten that six months earlier all the prisoners at Kaluga Gate had been required to fill out Gulag registration forms under a new ordinance. Among other things, the form had asked for the prisoner's profession. Solzhenitsyn had realized that in the camps the answer to this question could be decisive. Many of the cons had gone for the main Gulag specialities, putting themselves down as "bakers," "barbers," "cooks," and "tailors," regardless of their occupations in real
life
outside. Solzhenitsyn followed the
same principle but built instead on his training in mathematics and physics. He had recently acquired a book on the exploding of the first American atom bomb a translation of an American government report on the subject which he had been able to keep and read for a few davs, and he knew that atomic energv was a top priority in Soviet science. He had therefore listed his occupation as "atomic physicist" in the hope that it would catch some official's eve. He had heard rumours that in some part of the Gulag there existed special camps where prisoners who had been engineers, technologists, and scientists were put to work in their own specialities and led a privileged life, with easier conditions, better living quarters, and decent rations. Like the other prisoners at Kaluga Gate, he had never met a former resident
—
of one of these fabled institutions, but the legend persisted and he had thought
would be no harm in trving. Perhaps it had worked and his luck had still did not know the details or where he w ould be going, but w hen he reported to the guardhouse, he discovered that he w as being summoned on "special assignment" bv the Ministry of the Interior. He had become a "special-assignment prisoner" after all, just like the Gulag veteran who had made such an impression on him and warned him off general duties in Krasnava Presnya. The future, though still obscure, suddenly seemed full of there held.
He
promise.
Much later, Solzhenitsvn was to look back on his nine months at Kaluga Gate with repugnance and to describe it as a low point in his life and a period of spiritual failure. This it certainlv was, but it had also added significantly to his education. In Krasnaya Presnya and New Jerusalem he had glimpsed the murderous machine that kept the convevor belts of the Gulag in motion. Here he had learned about the labour relations that made the machine necessary. And he had discovered that the land of Gulag lav not only in the distant outposts of the empire, in the far north, bevond the Arctic Circle, in
— Life
among the Trusties
I^k;]
the tundra and taiga of the Siberian Kast, in the sandy deserts and mines of Mosthe Central Asian South, but also at the very centre of the empire, in
cow, beside Neskuchnv Park and overlooking one of Moscow's famous boulevards. In short it was evervwhere, like an invisible fourth dimension "invisible," that is, to the other inhabitants of the Soviet Union.
13
SPECIAL-ASSIGNMENT
PRISONER SOLZHENiTSYN
LEFT KALUGA Gate in the early afternoon of 18 July 1946 and was taken straight to Butyrki, the prison where he had spent a
month
summer. Passing the church
cells, with their memories and anxious conversations about the future, Solzhenitsvn \\ as led into the reception \\ ing. If the prison had seemed crowded a year ago, now it was bursting at the seams. It took eleven hours for him to complete the immutable admission procedures of search, bath, fumigation, and the endless repetition of name, date of birth, place of birth, charge, and sentence. After each short burst of activity, he was obliged to wait for hours in solitarv boxes. But he no longer felt himself to be the wavering and impatient greenhorn of the preceding vear, and it was almost with nonchalance that, at three o'clock in the morning, he finallv entered Cell 75 and called out in a low but cheerful voice, "Who's last?" A hoarse voice replied that his place \\ as beneath the lowest tier of bunks next to the latrine tank. Apart from this solitarv replv, there wasn't a sound in the cell.
of
the preceding
Gammerov and
Ingal
Lit bv two bright w as spraw led fast
suspended beneath two domes, the entire
cell
asleep, tossing in the stuffy atmosphere: the hot July air
was
electric bulbs
not able to circulate through the windows, which were blocked by "muzzles." Tireless
flies
buzzed and
Some had covered
flitted
from sleeper
—
light. There was an acrid stink from the latrine tank up by the heat. About eighty men had been stuffed five, and there was still room for more.'
The and
making them twitch. them from the blinding
to sleeper,
their eves with hankerchiefs to shield its
putrefaction
into a cell
meant
was speeded for
twenty-
next morning, the extra boards between the bunks were dismantled
a chest
pushed from the
latrine tank to a position
beneath the window.
Special-assignment Prisoner
As
new comer, Solzhenitsyn had
[221]
and answer was one of many "special-assignment prisoners" in Cell 75. It turned out that the inmates consisted of two main categories: in the first were ex-prisoners of war and men repatriated from the occupied countries of Eastern Europe, all of whom had recently been investigated and sentenced for "treason" and were now waiting to learn their destinations, just as Solzhenitsyn had had to do a year earlier; the second comprised physicists, chemists, mathematia large group of scientists like himself draughtsmen who had been gathered from all over the cians, engineers, in readiness for transfer to special prison institutes w here they Soviet Union able work their own would be to at subjects. Solzhenitsyn was relieved to have this confirmation that he was indeed destined for a prison institute. Not man\ minutes had passed before he was approached by a tall, middleaged man with a hooked nose and a grave expression on his face, who obviously a
questions, after
w hich he
to give an account of himself
learned that he
—
possessed considerable authority in the
—
cell.
He
introduced himself as Pro-
No. morning under the left window after the bread ration has been served. Would you be prepared to give us a lecture on some scientific topic? And if so, on what subject?"Solzhenitsyn was both charmed and perplexed. Only the preceding morning he had been standing in the open with the carpentry brigade at Kaluga Gate, his stomach empty, his limbs heavy and aching from stooping over parquet floors, his mind dull and numbed by the monotony of the work, and now he was being asked to deliver a scientific lecture. Among these men he was something of an impostor, having had only an undergraduate training in physics and mathematics. Nevertheless, he quick-wittedly recalled the book on the American atom bomb he had read at Kaluga Gate. The chances were that the others had all been in prison too long to have learned much about it, so he offered a lecture on that. It was accepted. He was to become an expert in atomic physics somewhat sooner than he had expected when fessor rimofeyev-Ressovsky, president of the "Scientific Society of Cell 75.
Our
filling
society meets every
out the questionnaire.
much about the and indefatigably filled in the gaps in Solzhenitsyn's knowledge, but the lecture w as judged a success. Solzhenitsyn w as formally admitted to the society and got to know its dozen or so members. Nikolai Timofeyev-Ressovsky, their leader, was a distinguished geneticist. As early as 1922, as a graduate student, he had been singled out to collaborate with the eminent German biologist Vogt, who had founded Moscow's Institute for the Study of the Brain, and he later accompanied Vogt to Berlin to work with him there. In 1937 he had been ordered It
turned out that Timofeyev-Ressovsky knew almost as
subject as Solzhenitsyn did, understood
to return to the Soviet
it
better,
Union, but refused, although he retained
his passport
he had been
and continued one of the founders of the Soviet school of radiation genetics, which was w hy he knew so much about atomic research, and was also a biophysicist, radiobiologist, and zoologist of note. When Soviet troops entered Berlin, he had to regard himself as a Soviet biologist. In fact,
— SOLZHENITSYN
[222]
immediately placed his institute under Soviet protection, but he and another Soviet biologist, Sergei Tsarapkin, had been arrested, sent back to the Soviet
Union, and sentenced to ten years for treason. Among the other members of were a Jewish physicist, Victor Kagan,* a composer and pianist, Vladimir Klempner, an Orthodox priest who had been captured in Europe, Evgeni Divnich, and two engineers, F. F. Karpov and Nikolai Semyonov.
the society
Semyonov had been one of the creators of the famous Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station and Dam, one of the show-pieces of early Soviet technology, and it was he who had called to Solzhenitsyn from beneath the bunks the night Solzhenitsvn arrived. One or two of these men, like TimofeyevRessovskv and Semyonov, were to become lifelong friends, while others quicklv disappeared from view. All, however, made a lasting impression on Solzhenitsvn in that summer of 1946. "What a cell it was!" he later wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. "Was it not the most brilliant in my entire prison career?"^ The cell was also memorable for the opportunity it gave him to rest and to recover his strength after the rigours of
even
if it
meant sleeping on the
New Jerusalem
and Kaluga Gate,
floor.
In the Butvrki cells the arches supporting the bunks are very low:
it
had never
occurred even to the prison authorities that prisoners would be sleeping under
them. Therefore, the
first
thing vou did was throw your greatcoat to your neigh-
it out for vou. Then you lay face-down in the passageway and inched your way underneath. People were constantly walking up and down the passageways, the floors beneath the bunks were swept at best twice a month, you could wash your hands only during the evening latrine call, and even then without soap no one could sav vou experienced vour body as some sort of divine vessel. But I was happv! There, on the asphalt floor, in my dog's hole, where dust and crumbs were scattered from the bunks into our eves, I was absolutely happv, uithout qualification. Epicurus was right: even the absence of variety can be experienced as a satisfaction when it has been preceded by a
bour, so that he could spread
—
which had looked endless, after the and my aching back, what bliss it was to lie there for whole days, to lie there sleeping and yet still get a pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day of cattle feed or dolphin-meat. They kept me in that cell for two months, and I slept enough for the year just passed and the year to come. During that time I progressed along the floor as far as the \\ indow then went back to the latrine tank and made my w ay back again on the bunks this time as far as the arch.'*
variety of dissatisfactions. After the camps,
ten-hour working day,
\\
ith the cold, the rain,
.
.
.
,
—
He
found himself in a home away from home, surrounded by educated spoke a similar language to himself and saw their prison experiences through similar eyes. It was comforting to exchange reminiscences with veterans of many years' imprisonment and to test his impressions and devel-
men who
* Victor
Kagan
later
published his
own
reminiscences of
number was
(1981).
According to Kagan, the
lecture
on the sound-ranging techniques he had employed
cell
life in this cell in Kontiiieiit,
71 (not 75),
and he
recalls
at the tront.
no. 29
hearing Solzhenitsyn
Special-assignment Prisoner
[223]
oping views against theirs. The scientific society, which met regularly every morning, gave him the sense of belonging to a friendly and exclusive small
where there were games of chess, books (though there were always long lists for the few interesting books that came their way), and, in the evenings, occasional concerts and yet more lectures and discussions. Timofevev-Ressovsky, ever the soul of the company, would give them reminiscences of his travels in America, Italy, and Scandinavia. Emigres spoke of their experiences in France, the Balkans, and other parts of Western Europe, while still others lectured on Gogol, Le Corbusier, and the habits of bees. But not all was sweetness and harmony. Evgeny Divnich, the Orthodox priest, was passionate and convincing in his detailed denunciations of Marxism. Nobody in Western Europe, he said, believed in it anv more. It was dead and buried as a political philosophy. Solzhenitsyn couldn't accept this and sprang to Marx's defence. "After all, I was a Marxist, wasn't I?"^ It was a repeat performance of his arguments a year earlier with Yuri Y and Gammerov and Ingal, and if the flame of his conviction no longer burned quite so steadily, he nevertheless suppressed his doubts and stoutly defended the true club,
waiting
faith.*
An
reminded him queasily of the ignoble He was already to the strange twists and turns of the prisoner's vovaging about the archipelago, of the curious coincidences and criss-crossing of destinies, of the bush telegraph that brought you information about the fates of former cell-mates and the further careers of comrades whose lives vou had briefly shared in a camp or transit prison. In this way he had learned of the one had been fate of one or two cell-mates from his previous stay in Butyrki sent to Karaganda, another shot. But even so he was not prepared to bump into the elderly German civilian w hom he had obliged (on the second night after his arrest) to carry his suitcase on the long march to Brodnitz. Solzhenitsyn blushed at the recollection of it, but the German seemed to have forgiven him and was truly pleased by their meeting. He had been sentenced to ten years' hard labour, and it was clear to Solzhenitsyn that he wouldn't live
way
unexpected meeting
which he had becoming accustomed in
in the cell
started out
on
his convict's career.
—
Germany again. The days flew swiftly
to see
by. Solzhenitsyn soon found that sleep was becoming less necessary, and he joined more and more in the evening discussions and entertainments. He did some of his recitations, including poems bv his favourite, Esenin (Victor Kagan remembers his reading "Letter to a Woman" and "To a Fallen Maple Leaf"). A cell-mate of about the same age, Konstantin Kioula, was writing and reciting his own verses, and for the first *
Kagan suggests that Divnich was not as sincere as he seemed to Solzhenitsyn and that he loved provoke argument for its own sake. Divnich had also, it seems, had links w ith the Frankfurtbased NTS, or Narodtio-trudovoi soyiiz (Popular Labour Alliance), the best-organized and most
to
militant of the anti-Soviet political groups in the emigration; man\' years later, after twenty
years in the camps, he was persuaded to w his
former associates.
rite a
book about the
NTS
in
w hich he denounced
SOLZHENITSYN
[224]
time since his arrest Solzhenitsyn
felt
the urge to write again.
Not
stories
—
now, but poetry poems about life in prison, rather like Kioula's, with their narrow range of subjects that meant so much to the inhabitants of the archipelago:
"The
First Parcel,"
"To
My
Wife," "To
My
Son."
more about the special prison institutes for scientific research that thev were all bound for. Such institutes had originated in the thirties and were the logical culmination of a number of different developments in Soviet society. On the one hand there had been In Cell 75 Solzhenitsyn learned something
the great series of purges of the technical intelligentsia, beginning with the trials
of the "wrecker-engineers," and the Industrial Party, and on the other
growth of Gulag and the system of forced labour resulting from the collectivization and the purges. Initially the tendency was for all the victims to be thrown at random into the labour camps and to be used as fodder for the hard-labour brigades, regardless of whether they were engineers or peasants. But this was terribly wasteful. Moreover, it became apparent that the rooting out of the "bourgeois specialists" was not simply wasteful but was also delivering a death-blow to the nation's plans for industrialization, particularly at the ambitious tempo that Stalin had set for it. The Soviet government was hard put to it to manage without them. But it was ideologically unacceptable, and in terms of crude power politics inexpedient, to release the specialists or admit that an error had been made. And so the special prison institutes came into being, equipped with laboratories, research apparatus, workshops, and in some cases whole factories, which were then filled with prisoners capable of running them and producing results in their the rapid arrests
field
made during
of specialization.
Such prison institutes and factories were directly analogous with the labour camps thrown up to tackle the great construction projects in Siberia and Central Asia. Of course, the process of selection for them was rough and ready. Academics continued to perish digging post holes in the frozen soil of the far north, just as bricklayers continued to die in the salt mines of Siberia
and
fitters
and turners continued to collapse
in the quarries of the Urals,
but
camps as a normal source which had begun in 1929,
the very fact of a conscious orientation towards the
of labour for every conceivable kind of project,
indicated a fundamental shift in the government's attitude towards them, and
was extended
The
to the institutes as well.
and best-known example of a prison institute was that set Leonid Ramzin, the chief defendant in the Industrial Party trial of 1930 (whose appearance on a group photograph had led to the downfall of Solzhenitsyn's adopted "uncle," Vladimir Fedorovsky, in Rostov). Ramzin's case was unusual in that he had enthusiastically collaborated with at his trial and been their star witness, so that he may have been the promised a special reward before his conviction. In any event, he became
up
earliest
for Professor
NKVD
head of an institute for the study of thermal sively
by
electricity staffed almost exclu-
prisoners, and there he invented something
known
as the "single-
pass boiler," an outstanding contribution to the thermal-energy industry that
Special-assignment Prisoner
[225]
was internationally recognized as a scientific breakthrough. Ramzin was awarded a state prize for his efforts and granted a free pardon, an example that \\ as to have a powerful influence on the attitudes of future prisoners committed to these special institutes. appears that a
It
thirties
owed
number
their genesis to
of other Soviet technical developments in the
work bv imprisoned
scientists,
including a series
of railway locomotives and innovations in the fields of artillerv and tank con-
But the best-known and best-documented field in which prisoner was the Soviet aircraft industrv. In the great purge of 1937-38, large numbers of leading aero-engineers and aeroplane designers were arrested and jailed, including the outstanding designer Andrei Tupolev, who was hvstericallv accused of selling aircraft designs to the Germans. Once the arrests had been carried out, the Soviet air industrv virtuallv collapsed, to which the authorities responded by putting all the factories and workshops behind barbed wire and turning them into a prison industrv. Tupolev, who had been sent to a prison institute in Bolshevo, just outside Moscow, was summoned by the and asked to list all the arrested aero-engineers he knew and to head a new research and development institute in aircraft design (later known as TSAGI).* He agreed, and was joined by a number of other outstanding designers, including V. M. Petlyakov and M. Mvasishchov between them thev were responsible for almost the entire Soviet programme of military-aircraft development in the period leading up to the Second World War. Both the Tupolev-5 bomber and the Petlvakov-2 fighter were designed and developed in Bolshevo, and a number of other aircraft were taken through the earlv planning stage. Later the institute was evacuated to Omsk, and in the summer of 1941 Tupolev and about two dozen of his leading engineers and designers were pardoned and released. The following year several more were released, and by the end of the war that particular prison institute was shut down.^ This was not the end of the prison institutes, however. A new one was set up after the war at a place called Bolshino for the development of rocket technology, and it was there that Sergei Korolyov, the "father" of Soviet space travel, invented his liquid-fuel jet engine. He, too, was rewarded \\ith a pardon and a release. In 1946 Bolshino was split into two, one halt going to Rybinsk, on the upper reaches of the Volga, about 160 miles north-east of Moscow, and the other to Taganrog, in the south. Somewhere along the line the prison institutes acquired the nickname of sharashka,i and in September 1946 Solzhenitsyn was dispatched to the Rybinsk sharashka, where jet engines struction.
research plaved a crucial role
NKVD
—
W
*An
abbreviation for TsentraPny aviastroitePny gosiidarstvenny
institut
(Central State Institute for
Aero-construction).
tNo
one seems
known
to
know
as a sharaga (of
ness). Professor
the origin of this term. Before the
which
sharashka
is
war such
—implying
the diminutive form
Georgi Ozerov, an engineer,
later
wrote
a short
a prison institute
book about his experiences w hich circulated
the Tupolev institute called Ttipolevskaya sharaga (The Tupolev Sharaga),
samizdat
in the late sixties
and was published
(in
was
familiarity, not smallin in
Russian) in Frankfurt in 1973 (Possev-\'erlag).
SOLZHENITSYN
[226]
were still being made. His work, however, had nothing to do with engines and seems to have been purely mathematical. He remained there for five months before being moved to another sharashka, in Zagorsk. Once more he was kept awav from production work, but this time was given to understand that he was here only in transit: his final destination v\ as to be yet another sharashka, which was to be opened shortly.
Such a move suited Solzhenitsyn perfectly. Life in the prison institutes was easv compared to that in the labour camps. The hours were long and the prisoners were still surrounded by armed guards, but the work was not arduous and the rations were much better. At Zagorsk, Solzhenitsyn was given the post of librarian. One of the people he met there was the naval lieutenant Victor Trushliakov, the fabulous confidence trickster described in volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago, who had managed to get transferred to the sharashka from a harsher prison by convincing the camp authorities that he was a firstclass inventor. Among his manv inspirations was a device for deflecting radar beams, and Solzhenitsvn was ordered to do all the mathematical calculations and formulae necessarv for a realization of this project. Solzhenitsyn could make neither head nor tail of Trushliakov's fantasies, but no sooner had this project collapsed than Trushliakov invented another one, having to do with the possibility of interplanetary travel. Nothing came of that either, but one of Solzhenitsvn's engineer friends was convinced that Trushliakov was a new Newton, while another friend, Dimitri Panin, was much impressed when and claimed to know the remote control. secret of a device for manoeuvring tanks by Trushliakov's inventions were the fruit of that desperate urge of all the convicts to find a safe niche for themselves and somehow escape the dreadful Trushliakov turned up
general duties.
at
another
Moscow
Not onlv had news
institute
of the "paradise islands" of the sharashkas
percolated through to the other camps but so had the information that a rare genius like Ramzin or Korolyov might buy his freedom \\ ith his brains, which acted as a powerful stimulus to evervone else. these aspirations, of course, for in this
who
wav
The
authorities encouraged
the scientists and engineers revealed
they were and could be directed to more profitable work.
An
attempt
was made to squeeze useful knowledge out of some German prisoners of war as well. In the aftermath of victory in the Second World War and its occupation of East Germany, the Soviet Union had shipped whole factories back to copv German products and belatedlv learn the technology for itself. Soviet technicians learned for the first time how to make mcxlern watches and clocks, sensitive cameras, up-to-date radios and record players, and a host of similar items. About six thousand Germans and their families were arrested and transported to the Soviet Union to work on rocket and space technology.
German expertise, the Soviet German brains by getting their
Later, having discovered the usefulness of authorities thought they could find more
prisoners of
\\
ar to
fill
out lengthy questionnaires on their special
skills
and
These questionnaires were gathered up and sent to on jobs thev had Zagorsk for evaluation, and Solzhenitsvn became the translator for a group held.
Special-assignmknt Prisonkr
[227]
of engineers charged with assessing their worth. But the exercise misfired.
Germans knew enough
If
be useful to their captors, thev either kept quiet about it or shrouded their knowledge in a fog of misleading jargon. And if they seemed to make sense and to be trying to convey something, it usually meant they knew nothing. the
The most
to
Zagorsk was four-volume Russian dictionary of Vladimir Dahl. Dahl
significant event of Solzhenitsyn's brief stay at
his discovery of the
was the nineteenth-centur)- lexicographer who compiled the first (and in many ways still the best) comprehensive dictionary of the Russian language. Although of Danish origin, he was dedicated to the idea of freeing literary Russian from Latin, French, and German influences, and to that end he became a great collector and student of Russian folklore and Russian folk expressions and a champion of the spoken word as a model for literary works. His is still the standard collection of Russian proverbs (a copy of \\ hich Irina had given to Solzhenitsyn in childhcxxi),
became the foundation found
it
on the
and
all
his discovery.
in
one of
He
used to be "a
his letters to Natalia,
What
his dictionary, like
pleased
Dr Johnson's
in English,
Russian dictionaries to follow. Solzhenits\n
library shelf soon after his arrival in
by
him.^
for
flat,
Zagorsk and
\\
as delighted
two-dimensional creature," he w rote
but then "stereometry opened up" before
him most was Dahl's
habit of grouping words according
to root, rather than in conventional alphabetical order,
and the
\\
ide range of
Dahl's vocabulary, as evidenced by the vast store of examples that Dahl had
amassed with which to illustrate his meaning. Alany of these were proverbs that Dahl had collected for his other work, but all his examples seemed to be filled with a lapidary folk wisdom that bordered on the proverbial, and Solzhenitsyn was amazed by their conciseness and precision.
He
resolved to
two of Dahl every day and
the
uncommon
read a page or
to
memorize
all
words and expressions he found there, an exercise he later dubbed his daih "literary gymnastics."*^ His purpose, he said, was not to "collect" these words but rather to immerse himself in the Russian language, to absorb its spirit and refresh himself. Later he started copying them into a series of improvised notebooks that he labelled "Selections from Dahl," which he quickly filled with his spidery handwriting. He has them still, divided into alphabetical sections, each corresponding more or less to a volume of the dictionary. They were later to form the foundation of that uniquely broad, idiosyncratically earthy lexicon that instantly identifies and sets apart Solzhenitsyn's mature literary style from that of all other Russian writers past or present. In early July 1947 Solzhenitsyn was taken from Zagorsk to Butyrki under armed escort to await vet another move in the chess game that the authorities appeared to be playing with him. As
in his previous
journeys since arriving
he and and en route he tried to slip an uncensored postcard to a fellow passenger to post for him, only to discover at the last minute that the man w as a labour-camp guard homeward bound on leave. His fourth stay in Butyrki w as only fleeting. On 9 July he w as shipped in the sharashkas,
gers,
his guards tra\elled in the guise of private passen-
SOLZHEXITSYN
[228]
out again to Marfino, on the northern outskirts of Moscow
next to Ostankino Park (which housed the botanical gardens), to "Special Prison No. 16." This
was the Circle
sharashka that
became the
,
setting for virtualh- the
\\
hole of The First
(Marfino becomes Mavrino in the novel), and in chapter 6 Solzhenitsvn
describes the arrival of
and the w
A
a\-
in
\\
dozen and
Gleb Nerzhin (based on
his
own
experiences) there
hich the prison institute w as established.
a half prisoners
were summoned from the camps and brought to Moscow seminarv, which was duly encircled
the ancient building of this former
The
prisoners looked back to those days as to an age of pashad been possible then to turn on the BBC at full yolume in the prisoners' quarters (they hadn't yet learned how to jam it); to \\ ander about the compound in the evenings as they pleased and to lie in the long, dewy grass, which, contrary to regulations, had not been cut (the grass was supposed to be
with barbed wire.
toral simplicity. It
kept short to prevent the prisoners' crawling up to the barbed wire); and to gaze at the eternal stars
of
.\1\
D
—
or, if
he was on night duty,
them under the barbed w ire
The
at
the mortal, sweating figure
sergeant-major Zhvakun, as he raided the balks of timber and rolled to take
theological seminary in
home
w hich
for firewood.''
the main
body of the
institute
w as
housed was a neo-classical brick building that terminated in a low, hexagonal tower enclosing a vaulted church (quaintly called "Assuage Mv Sorrows"). It was here in the church that the library w as situated and here that Solzhenitsvn worked for the first six months of his stay in the sharashka once again he had been appointed librarian. Beside the church stood a grove of onehundred-vear-old lime trees and a small, vaulted house in which a bishop had formerly' lived, together with a huddle of temporary buildings erected
—
for the administrative staff.
w as even more comfortable than in Solzhenitsyn's previous during the first few months. To begin with, the shathe other half rashka occupied about half the main block of the seminary was still in the process of conversion by ordinary prisoners (another camp was set up next door to house them).'" The sharashka inmates slept in two Life here
sharashkas, especially
—
rooms on the second floor, on double bunks equipped with mattresses, sheets, blankets, and pillows, and each prisoner was allowed a small bedside table for his belongings. At night the blinding light of the prison and labour-camp cells was replaced bv a blue-tinted bulb. Also on the second floor were a medical room and the prison commandant's office, w hile the floor below housed the laboratories, and the ground floor the canteen and various It
w orkshops.
took about six months to get the institute organized, assemble the
equipment, prepare the laboratories for research, and fit out the workshops. .Most of the equipment came from the German company of Lorentz,* w hose furniture and apparatus had been shipped back to the Soviet Union in three train-loads. The work w as carried out bv the engineers, while necessar\'
* KopeIe\ (see below
)
w
rites that the
equipment came from the firm of some from each.
nitsvn and Panin sav Lorentz. Perhaps there was
Philips, but both Solzhe-
— Special-assignmf.nt Frisonkr
I229J
Solzhenitsvn slouly sorted through the mass
ot technical l)ooks and journals had been collected (in Russian anti h.nglish as well as ( Jernian), classified and catalogued them, and continued to do a certain amount of translation. The initial project for \v hich the institute was being prepared was to develop
that
a walkie-talkie radio tor the police.
mcxst interesting thing to happen to Solzhenits\ n durmonths was his meeting, and subsecjuent friendship, with two men who were each in their different ways to inlUience his thinking and Dimitri Fanin and Lev Kopeleave an indelible imprint on his imagination lev. Panin arrived in Marfino first, in October 1947, and in his memoir on
Undoubtedly, the
ing those early
—
described his
this period has
The morning
after
my
meeting with Solzhenitsvn.
first
arrival, as
stairs.
I
I
was drying m\'
man
towel, an impressive figure of a
in
an
face
on
a
govcrnmcnl-issuc
officer's greatcoat
came dow n
the
took an immediate liking to his candid face, the bold blue eves, the It was Alexander Solzhenitsvn. was starved for fresh air, so within There was nobodv about except for several
splendid light-brown hair and aquiline nose. After
my
moments
transport and a I
month
followed him outside.
prisoners conversing beneath
Since ance,
who
was
I
v\
I
in Butyrki,
still
wearing
as quicklv
I
some ancient lime
my camp
trees in the grass-grov\'n yard.
me
rags that gave
surrounded by the old residents
such
a
—except
cut-throat appearfor Solzhenitsvn,
bv himself some vvav off. But when the others had satisfied their curiosity about me, he came over and suggested we take a stroll together. 1 shall never forget the first thing he said to me: "As I was coming dow n the stairs, w hat strolled
should
I
see in the darkness of the hallway but the face of an icon of
Panin was indeed
a strikinglv
handsome man.
Our
Saviour.""
In The First Circle Sol-
zhenitsvn based the character of Dimitri Sologdin on Panin, and in his description of his physical appearance likened
him
to .\le.\ander
Nevsky,
dwelling lovingly on his high, straight forehead, regular features, piercing blue eves, blond moustache and beard, superb physique, and erect bearing the very figure of a medieval knight.
chivalrous
Ihere was something romantic and
—archaic even — about Panin's whole bearing and character,
yet his brain, especially in matters of science,
Panin was in the
six
and
was diamond sharp.
years older than Solzhenitsvn and had witnessed scenes
Revolution and Civil
War
that
had
filled
him with
revulsion for the
Bolshevik regime from childhood on. Later he had become a
civil
engineer
and had been repelled bv the systematic persecution of the engineers in the early thirties, which had nourished in him an ever-fiercer hatred ol the Soviet regime. At one time, it appears, he had contemplated joining a Cossack uprising in the Kuban, but nothing came of this plan. Throughout the thirties he had worked in a variety of engineering jobs, and in July 1940 had been sentenced to five years in the labour camps after being denounced by a fellow engineer. In 1943 he had been given ten more years for "defeatist propaganda," and by the time Solzhenitsyn met him, had spent seven years in a variety of labour camps in the Arctic North. During that time he had endured unbelievable
SOLZHENITSYN
[230] privations and yet had
and, above
all,
come through them with sound
health, a clear
an impressive grasp of moral values and
a fanatical
mind,
devotion
to justice.
Lev Kopelev arrived in the sharashka about a month later than Panin. was older than Solzhenitsyn by five years (he became the inspiration for "Lev Rubin" in The First Circle) and was superficiallv Panin's opposite: a deeplv committed Marxist, long-time Party member, and loval supporter of the regime. He had been arrested on the same front as Solzhenitsyn and convicted on similar charges, yet he believed even more passionately than Solzhenitsyn that the whole thing was a gross error and that any day he would be pardoned. He defended the Soviet regime with even more conviction than Solzhenitsyn was now able to do, and clung to the belief that his arrest and the whole phenomenon of the camps and the purges before and after the war were temporary deviations from the norm, the result of Stalin's inadvertent misunderstandings, and would sooner or later be corrected by He,
—
too,
an all-wise Party.
Both Panin and Kopelev were men of principle, passionately committed to their separate views of the world, and they had every reason to detest one another. Yet they were the best of friends, having already met and liked one another in Butyrki before arriving at the sharashka. In his book on his experiences, Panin writes that he had been won over when Kopelev, a relative novice in the camps, who was still being sent parcels by his family, broke a loaf of white bread in two and handed Panin half. After seven years on starvation rations, Panin had forgotten not only how white bread tasted but how it looked. "If Lev had given me only a tiny bit of it, I would have been rapturously happy. But here was half a loaf! His grand gesture affected me. ... A generous nature and a nobility of spirit distinguished Lev from ordinary men."'^ Kopelev, too, was a handsome man. "I
Of their
first
looked up and saw, in the centre of the gangway,
prime of
life,
with dark eyes and
In the sharashka, Kopelev
grew
a a
hair.
He
beard,
meeting, Panin says, a striking
had the build of
let
his hair
a
man
in the
guardsman."'^
grow long
to conceal an
and looked every inch an Old Testament prophet. It was Panin who had gone to the sharashka commandant to persuade him to summon Kopelev from Butyrki, although Kopelev was a philologist and literary historian and had no technical qualifications at all. Solzhenitsyn had supported Panin's recommendation on faith, disregarding the fact that his own job as librarian might be at risk if Kopelev came, since Kopelev was incipient bald patch,
German and
in several other languages as well. Kopelev's work in where he had reached the rank of major, had been to organize anti-Nazi propaganda behind the German lines and undermine morale, and he had been arrested for opposing the hard policy taken by the Soviet army in the occupied German territories and for resisting the looting and terror carried out under the slogan "Blood for blood, death for death." He had been denounced for being "soft on the Germans" and had narrowly escaped
fluent in
the Soviet army,
Special-assignment Prisoner a
charge of treason. Solzhenitsyn, in The First
Circle,
[231]
sums up the complexity
of Kopelev's feelings and his essential generosity of spirit
when
describing a
by some (lerman prisoners of war at the sharashka to celebrate Christmas, to which Rubin (Kopelev) alone is invited from among the Russians. "For them, this enemy major who had spent the whole war spreading discord and destruction among them was the only man they felt close to and could understand." As for Rubin, he had been "reluctant to come to this celebration, but the others had been so insistent, and he was so sorry for them in their loneliness, that he could not bring himself to cast a shadow on their festivities by staying avxay.'""* What Kopeley later remembered from his first meeting v\ ith Solzhenitsyn were the latter's piercing blue eyes and firm handshake. The two of them established that they had served (and been arrested) on the same Prussian front. They must have fought their way through some of the same towns and villages, and Solzhenitsyn might even have heard Kopelev's voice over the military radio. Finally, they had both been arrested by the same section of Smersh. Kopelev was genuinely delighted by this series of coincidences but noticed a slight frown on Solzhenitsyn's face as they compared their experiences. Solzhenitsyn later told him that the coincidences were so great as to make him suspicious, and he had momentarily wondered whether Kopelev was an informer. But the suspicion quickly faded. Solzhenitsyn was gratified to learn that Kopelev had shared his distaste for Soviet looting and violence in the occupied territories, and was later to incorporate a number of stories that Kopelev told him into his narrative poem Prussian Nights. The two men proved to be close in other ways. Kopelev was the first prisoner in the four months that Solzhenitsyn had been librarian to ask for the newspaper files (the library had a complete run of Pravda and Izvestia). Solzhenitsyn was delighted. "It just had to be," he told Kopelev (according to Kopelev's memoirs). "We were on the same fronts and swept up by the same counter-intelligence. And we've both got the same appetite for new ssmall party held
papers.
It's a
They
sort of kinship.""
Kopelev had been a young and History when correspondence course there. Kopelev was a Ger-
also shared a passion for literature.
lecturer at the
Moscow
Institute of Philosophy, Literature,
Solzhenitsyn had taken his
manist and a polyglot. Solzhenitsyn was chiefly interested ture,
in
Russian
litera-
but Kopelev's passion for philology coincided with Solzhenitsyn's
enthusiasm for Dahl and the history of the Russian language. Learning of Solzhenitsyn's linguistic exercises, Kopelev energetically assisted
obtaining a complete set of Dahl for the Marfino library. Later, zhenitsyn
left
him
when
in
Sol-
w ith him, Kopelev w hen they were reunited in the fifties, he handed Solzhenitsyn to make his set complete once more. the sharashka for Central Asia, taking volume 2
kept the other three; and
them over
to
Last but not least, they were close
politicall\'.
zhenitsyn's Leninist views and valued in larly in the hostile
environment of the
him
Kopelev approved of Sol-
a political supporter, particu-
sharashka, v\'here a clear majority
was
SOLZHENITSYN
[232]
against Party orthodoxy- Both
still identified with the establishment, both had been active members of the Komsomol, both had fought enthusiastically in the Red Army until the dav of their arrest, and both felt that there had
been some awful miscarriage of
justice in their cases; if
it
could only be brought
competent authorities, all would be put right and they would be restored to freedom. Kopelev supported his belief with a veritable bombardment of petitions (to the Central Committee, to the Supreme Court, and even to Stalin personally), which he kept up throughout his time at the sharashka. Solzhenitsyn, having had more experience, was beginning to cool in this respect. But he, too, on ai rival in the sharashka, had continued to hope for an amnesty and had still dreamed of a commutation to exile, although these hopes fairly soon faded. By the end of 1947 he was ready to acknowledge them as a pipe-dream. "Whenever they start talking about an amnesty," he wrote to Natalia, "I smile crookedly and walk away."'^ If Kopelev appealed to the loyalist and politically orthodox side of Solzhenitsyn's temperament, Panin's influence was on the side of scepticism and hostilitv. Kopelev appealed to his desire to believe, Panin to his urge to dissent. Panin was in some ways the engineer par excellence, a cool, rational, analytical thinker whose views had been tested and tempered in the fire of the labour camps. He seemed to have been everywhere in Gulag: in the far east, the far north, the Urals, European Russia. He had travelled in an infinity of prison vans and convict trains, languished in transit jails, been in punishment cells and solitary confinement, done general duties and been a trusty, fought hand to hand with the professional thieves and more than once been close to death. He was a veteran with a wealth of experience and an authority that Solzhenitsyn immediately recognized. His views were harsh and uncompromising, contradicting manv of Solzhenitsyn's favourite notions, but Solzhenitsyn instinctivelv acknowledged their rationality and their grounding in the reality of Gulag. On the subject of amnesties, for instance, Panin was unremittingly pessimistic. "Don't fool yourselves with day-dreams, gentlemen.* They won't let us go. If we were in the camps, maybe they'd let us out into the 'big compound' of exile. But from the sharashka never. They've let us into their secrets here. For all our luxuries our mattresses, sheets, and pudNo, gentlemen, there's no dings we shall have to pay a high price. to the notice of the
.
.
—
.
—
— .
point in counting the days, we're in for
.
.
life."'^
Panin had enormous intellectual and physical passion and was an indimarrow of his bones. He was what the Russians call a chudak.
vidualist to the
An
"eccentric"
is
perhaps the nearest one can get
in English,
but the English
word "gentlemen" was his way of setting himself apart from all forms of Soviet usage. In normal intercourse with one another and members of the administra* Panin's persistent use of the
tion, prisoners (in all the
camps) were forbidden
to say
"comrade" and were obliged
term "citizen." Peretz Hertzenberg, another former inmate, says that prisoners
were invariably of the
polite to
one another and always used the second-person
more common "thou" form.
to use the
at xhe sharashka
plural Vy (you) instead
Special-assignment Prisoner
I233I
much crankiness and inconsequentiahtv, whereas chudak impHes more of the sainted innocent and the inspired inventor. This stood out in, among other things, his invention of, and devotion to, a "hmguage (jf maximum clarity." As it appears in Solzhenitsyn's novel on the sharashka suggests rather too
Sologdin's (Panin's) "language of fictional invention (as
was being
does
much
maximum
entirely faithful to reality. In his
pages to this concept, defining
it
clarity" looks like an inspired
else that Solzhenitsvn describes), vet
memoirs Panin devotes
as a device for refining the
he
several
Russian lan-
words and expressions, and improving its accuracy and precision. At one point, where he talks of founding it on a vocabulary of "a few hundred basic words," he seems to toy with a concept similar to Basic English, but elsewhere comes perilously close to Hitlerian nonsense about the harm done to the purity of a language by foreign borrow-
guage, purging
it
of
all
foreign
ings, advocating a greater Slavonicization of literary Russian that recalls the
German
"Aryanization" of the
was
some ways
thirties.
concept, and Panin thought it might even be applied to scientific language, despite the vast amount of international terminology already present in scientific Russian (as in all scientific languages). His theories evoked an answering chord in Solzhenitsyn, whose study of Dahl had led him to a preoccupation with Slavonic roots and folk language, and in Kopelev, whose philological interest was aroused. But the It
other two
in
a typical engineer's
men were more
professional in their linguistic pursuits and too
well acquainted with the nature of the Russian language, with
its
vast
num-
ber of foreign words and borrowings, to imagine that such a purification
could work. In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn (not unsympathetically) parodies
Panin and his theories.*
few months while the sharashka was being organized was extremely relaxed. Solzhenitsyn, Kopelev, and Panin lived in the larger of the two main cells, laughingly dubbed the "house of commons" (the smaller, engineers' cell was the "house of lords"). Reveille was at 7 a.m. and lights out at 10 p.m., and the working day lasted for no more than eight hours. When off duty, the prisoners could stroll in the compound, and the evenings were largely their own. The food, too, was excellent in comparison with what they had been getting: fourteen and a half ounces of white bread a day, an ounce of butter, wheat-meal porridge for breakfast, a meat course for lunch, and a dessert after lunch. But still the prisoners were often hungry and dreamed daily of the possibility of receiving parcels, which for Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev was temporarily excluded: the sharashka' s location was a state secret and couldn't be revealed to the prisoners' families, so that it took some months to set up the mechanism whereby parcels could be sent via a neutral address. Kopelev describes the modest "feast" they organized to celebrate the New Year of 1948. A luckier cell-mate had given them a quarter of a tin of concentrated
During those
first
the prisoners' schedule
* In the revised, ninety-six-chapter version of The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn has strengthened the
element of parody and shows
less
sympathy
to Panin's views.
SOLZHENITSYN
[234]
cocoa from his parcel.
From
breakfast they had saved
supper some bread, and thev obtained kitchen. This
a
some sugar and from
couple of pots of hot water from the
was consumed on Panin's upper bunk
(similar
groups of
pris-
oners were celebrating elsewhere in the room). Panin proposed a character-
"Gentlemen ... word "orator"]. People but what kind of happiness
am
not golden-tongued [he did not want to use
istic toast:
I
the
usually wish one another a 'happy
toast the possible.
to
I
is
possible for us?
.
.
New
Year,'
.1 raise this sober goblet to
drink to our not going hungry in the
new
year.
.
.
.
And
our friendship, gentlemen.'"^
Such evening gatherings of the three friends (a new and adult version of "the three musketeers") became very much the rule that winter, but on other occasions a larger group of prisoners would meet in the library to hold discussions, relate their experiences, stage impromptu concerts, or conduct poetry readings. The prime mover, according to Panin, was usually the boisterous Kopelev, who adored such gatherings. As Solzhenitsyn later noted of Rubin in
The First
them.
Circle,
He found
he "couldn't exist without friends, he suffocated without
solitude so intolerable that he couldn't even wait for his ideas
mature in his head, but hastened to share them with someone while they were still only half formed.'"*^ Kopelev had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian literature and could recite the work of dozens of poets from memory, which made him very popular and much in demand.* Solzhenitsyn also shone in these recitals. On one occasion they both read from JVlayakovsky's early works (though neither cared much for the poet any more), and Solzhenitsyn read from Esenin. Kopelev also sang some popular songs by Soviet composto
ers.
Solzhenitsyn seems to have enjoyed these performances during his
months
at
the sharashka and even revived
some of
his set pieces
student days and the concerts at Kaluga Gate. In general he
felt
from
first
his
comfortable
in this all-male society, enjoyed the manly comradeship, the boisterous jokes, and the feeling of oneness that derived from a sense of shared privations and shared pleasures. In a sense it reminded him of the camaraderie of the and in The First Circle he was to liken their cell to an ark or a ship trenches and, by implication, its occupants to sailors afloat on the high seas. But this
—
created problems as well, for he just as strongly interests flict
and of
his puritanical urge to
always present
self-discipline that
in
felt
the tug of his other
work. Panin captures exactly the con-
him between spontaneous gregariousness and the
ascetic
he had cultivated since childhood.
man
Solzhenitsyn
is
seems to get
tired.
a
of exceptional vitality,
He
often put
who
up with our
is
so constituted that he never
society simply out of courtesy,
was wasting on our idle pastimes. On the other hand, good form or allowed himself some time for a little amusement,
regretting the hours he
when he was *
Kopelev
v\'as
in
evidently the originator of the satirical reworking of The Lay of the Host of Igor into "The and the Fox" (see chapters 50 and 49 ot The
Soviet judicial jargon, and of the fable First Circle).
"Buddha's Smile"
Oow
(see chapter 54)
\\
as the vsork of
Solzhenitsyn and Semyonov.
— Special-assignment Prisoner we
i-35J
\\ itticisms, and varns. On such occadeepened and his nose whitened, as if carved was not often one saw this side of him his sense of humour.
got enormous pleasure from his jokes,
sions the flush of Sanya's cheeks
from alabaster. It He had the ability
—
things that usually escaped the rest
audience
artistry that the
mannerisms, gestures, and intonations of us and to reproduce them w ith such
to catch the subtlest
literally
—
rocked w
ith laughter.
himself in this fashion only very occasionally if it
was not
at
among
Unfortunately, he indulged his close friends
—and only
the expense of his work.-"
Kopelev also noticed Solzhenitsvn's need for solitude. They all required from time to time, he writes, especially when walking on occasion in the yard, and then the other two would try to guard the one who had asked to be left alone and preserve his privacy. When it was Solzhenitsvn's turn, he "used to pace up and down our path, tall and thin, in his long greatcoat, w ith the earflaps of his army cap lowered, w hile Panin and I patrolled the exit from the main square in the yard"^' to see that no one interrupted him. On such occasions, another prisoner reports, his face would be set in a mask of it
unapproachability."
The "work"
was engaged upon, apart from his daily with Dahl, was writing, to which he had returned \\ ith
that Solzhenitsvn
linguistic exercises
an eager sense of relief as soon as he had settled
at the sharashka.
His
first
thought had been to continue the big novel about the Revolution that he had
commenced
and he had decided to go back to the beginning and wrote and completed some chapters under the provisional title of Love the Revolution but was dissatisfied with what he produced. His youthful self-confidence had vanished, to be replaced b\- scepticism and selfdoubt. The October Revolution, \\ hich w as to be the focal point of the novel, no longer shone in his mind w ith unclouded glory, and his title now seemed to contain a note of irony that had not been intended \\ hen he first thought start afresh.
of
as a student,
He
it.
Eventually, he was to abandon the project completely, but not his interest in the Revolution. Feeling
inadequate to handle
Kopelev was steeped
for information.
it,
he turned to Kopelev
wanted to know Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn approached him one day and said:
ideal source for the sort of things Solzhenitsyn
to
What
need
I
is
and was an According
in revolutionary history .
the general sequence of events and the characters of the people
want you to do it without embroidery and without omissions, and impartially as you can. I know you're biased. You're a Marxist-Leninist and must keep to the Party line. But I understand that and can Don't exaggerate, don't try to make propamake the necessary allow ances. ganda, and don't hush anything up. Give different versions and different points of view And don't prevent me from making up my own mind and deciding for involved. But
and
I
as objectively
.
.
.
.
myself. Don't pressure me.-'
Most of Kopelev's information was imparted walks in the yard or
sotto voce
in
over cups of strong tea in
w hispers during a
their
corner of the library
SOLZHENITSVX
[236] in the evenings.
On
these occasions Solzhenitsyn
interpretation of the events he
ment would express doubts about Lenin prove, he asked Kopelev, that
\\
was describing, and if
ould challenge Kopelev's for the purposes of argu-
as well as Stalin.
Lenin had remained
W as
it
possible to
would have no famine? Could
alive there
been no campaign against the kulaks, no collectivization, e\er\"thing be blamed on Stalin? And the\ argued o\er Stalin, too, for although Kopelev held Stalin responsible for individual mistakes, he still regarded him as a great leader and genius. Kopelev took up a position that he himself has since described as
Marxism
at all,
China Sea."
He
"Red imperialism," combming Soviet patriotism w ith Rusthis point of view Stalin's main justification wasn't
From
sian nationalism.
,
but rather his conquest of territorv "from the Elbe to the
had made Russia great again.
He told Kopelev that book of memoirs he had read about 1917, a soldiers' meeting had been described at w hich an elderlv veteran had interrupted an orator calling for w arm-w ater ports w ith the exclamation "Screw you and vour seas! \\ hat are we supposed to do, plough them?"-"^ Such peasant common sense appealed to him, and he felt that Stalin had no interest in, and no time for, the common people. Lenin, Bukharin, and perhaps Trotskv had shown some concern, but not Stalin. Stalin and his supporters were interested onlv in more territorv in w hich to trv out their theories. Another argument of Kopelev's that Solzhenitsvn resisted was that of historical determinism. What would have happened, he asked, if Kornilov had displaced Kerenskv, if Krasnov's Cossacks had dispersed the Congress of Soviets and shot Lenin and Trotskv?* Nothing w as predestined or inevitable. He had once believed in the theorv of historical determinism himself, he said, but could no longer bring himself to do so, because he couldn't believe the analvses of those w ho had been proved wrong so many times. Even the greatest of them, Marx and Lenin, had been totally wrong in their Solzhenitsvn had no patience with this argument.
in a
predictions.
When
it
came
to discussing these
same things w
ith Panin,
however,
Solzhenitsvn took a different tack. Panin regarded their heated debates on the truth or
falsit\'
of Marxism-Leninism w ith undisguised contempt.
w
firm Christian, he
as
As
a
convinced that the Bolsheviks were the instruments
of Satan, that the Revolution had been imported into Russia by foreigners
and tion.
aliens,
and that salvation could come onlv
Russia had to purif\ herself of
all
— hence
other things, purifving her language
maximum
claritv."
to Kopelev's side.
Faced with
For
all
as a result of divine interven-
foreign bodies, and that meant,
this sort of
his scepticism,
among
his search for the "language of
argument, Solzhenitsyn switched
he could not disow n the Revolution
completelv, and he would contradict Panin as fiercely as he had his other friend.
*ln September 1917 General Kornilov led an abortive rebellion against the war minister and de of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerenskv. Ataman Petr Krasnov, leader ot the Don Cossacks in the spring of 1918, had attempted, unsuccessfully, to enlist German support for a dri\e north against the new Bolshex ik government in Petrograd.
facto leader
Special-assignment Prisoner At one point he sought
a
way
I237]
out in the teaching of Kastern philoso-
phers. Kopelev notes that one of Solzhenitsyn's favourite books, and one that
he kept most thoroughly hidden from the other prisoners, writings by sages of the ancient
F^ast.
I
le
was
v\'as a
collection of
particularly attracted
by the
teachings of Lao-tse, the Chinese 1 aoist philosopher, and bv such apo-
phthegms
The
as
"Weapons
are the instruments of unhappiness and not nobilitv.
noble person conquers unwillingly.
He
cannot enjoy killing people."
And: "The more prohibitions and restrictions you have, the poorer the people. The more laws and regulations you have, the more thieves and outlaws you will have too.""' Kopelev shared Solzhenitsyn's admiration for this predecessor of Christ (Lao-tse also offered a version of "return good for evil"), but Panin v\ as as implacably opposed to taking the Eastern thinkers seriously as he was to Marx and Engels. It was simply heresy, he said. True faith could not be the fruit of reason but was a gift from God, to be accepted by the heart and not the mind. Only the exact sciences were susceptible to the powers of reason. All else, including the subject matter of the social sciences and the humanities, could be understood only intuitively, and to try to study them led merely to schism and renunciation of the true church. Among the things the three friends debated was the question of nationalism. Solzhenitsvn pointed out to Kopelev that when the war had reached a critical point for Stalin, he had rallied the nation by appealing to its patriotism and invoking not Marx and Lenin but Russian heroes of the past: Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov.* Marxist internationalism was a sham. Nor was he impressed by Kopelev's assertions that internationalism w as not incompatible with the fulfilment of national aspirations, that "inter" meant "between," not "above" or "without." In this, Solzhenitsvn was closer to Panin, and shared Panin's suspicions about the role of Jews and foreigners in the
Communist
A
Party.
slightly farcical illustration of Solzhenitsyn's prej-
udices occurred, according to Kopelev,
had named leaders that they aries as a
were
to discuss the
like
Gershuni, Gorovits, and Gots, Solzhenitsyn exclaimed
Jews, whereas he had regarded the Socialist Revolutionparty of the peasants. Solzhenitsyn also believed, according to
Kopelev, that all
when Kopelev came
Revolutionary party in the history of the Revolution. After Kopelev
Socialist
all
all
the Trotskyites in the 1920s and 1930s had been Jews, and
Bukharin supporters Russians.
On
the subject of Jewishness and
its
irreconcilability with the Russian
were agreed. Kopelev, they were history and literature than they did, and spoke Russian equally well, yet also knew German and German literature very well, and if he were to live in Germany for ten to fifteen years, he would pass for a German. "But neither I nor Dimitri could do that," said Solzhenitsyn. "And it's not just us. Look at our caretaker, Spiridon. He can national identity, Solzhenitsyn and Panin
willing to admit,
*
knew more about Russian
Alexander Nevskv had defeated and turned back the Swedes
ander Suvorov was hail
a
in the thirteenth
century. Alex-
highly successful general under Catherine the Great. Field Marshal Mik-
Kutuzov was the hero of
Russia's defeat of Napoleon.
SOLZHENITSYN
[238]
All he knows about Pushkin are some dirty jokes. But even if he were to live his whole life in Germany, or even Poland, he would remain a Russian peasant wherever he went."-*^ Kopelev, said Panin, simply didn't want to own up to his true nature and admit that he was a Jew, a member of the chosen race, and not a Russian. Solzhenitsvn greatly admired both his new friends, looked up to them as older and more experienced than he, and was grateful for their company. "It is only natural," he wrote in one of his letters to Natalia, "that men so rich in intellect, education, and experience should make such a big impression on a young man who, on the whole, was a mere provincial and had seen very little up to then."^'' He treasured their debates as marking one more stage in his education. The camps were his true universities, not the physics faculty in Rostov. And he was beginning to realize that he had fallen into a magic circle that was the freest in the whole of the Soviet Union. Where else could he have discussed so franklv and openlv the true history of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, the role of 1 rotsky, the disasters of collectivization (Kopelev had participated in that, too, and was a mine of information), the meaning of the purges, the catastrophic start to the Second World
barely read and write.
War?
.
.
.
In Stalin's post-war Russia every conversation they held reeked of trea-
son and "ideological sabotage." Such opinions voiced outside the camps would
have earned them
minimum
at Marlow voices and lard their speech with expletives to preserve the illusion of a normal labour-camp argument. If Gulag was hell, thev were truly onlv in the first circle. Kopelev writes that he first heard this expression applied to the sharashka bv Panin and was never sure whether Panin himself had invented it or was simply passing it on.-^ But it was left to Solzhenitsyn to seize the phrase and fill it with meaning, and that
fino they
meaning had
its
scribed yet free his
two
a
were obliged
of twenty-five years apiece, and even
to speak in
—circum-
origin in the unusual character of the sharashka
—and
in these passionate debates
closest friends.
between Solzhenitsyn and
H IN
THE
FIRST CIRCLE
ONE
manv advantages of the sharashka was that prisoners could unhmited number ot letters, books, and parcels trom home and could send letters out. It was true that all letters and parcels passed through the hands of the securitv officer. Major Shevchenko (he was later replaced b\- Major Shikin), for censorship purposes, but this was a tremendous advance on the usual camp regulations. There was also the comforting fact that the sharashka was situated on the verv outskirts of Moscow By day the prisoners could look into the unkempt grounds of the botanical gardens. By night they could see the pink glow of Moscow's lights reflected in the sky and could hear the whistle of trains leaving the capital for Riga and Yaroslavl. To Muscovites especiall\-, it all seemed verv close and accessible. And yet meetings with relatives were heavilv restricted, and this created a mixture of frustration and longing in the Marfino inmates.' Solzhenitsyn felt these emotions keenlv, for Natalia now lived in Moscow and it was doubly painful to have her so near and yet so inaccessible. But their infrequent meetings w ere a great jov to him. The first had taken OF THE
receive an
.
,
place in Jul\" 1947, soon after his arrival.
Owing
to the secret nature of the
Taganka Prison in Moscow and took place in the officers' club there, for w ives and families were not supposed to know where their husbands were being held. The w hole process w as shrouded in an atmosphere of conspiracy and conducted according to a ritual that Sol-
sharashka,
meetings w ere arranged
at the
zhenitsyn has described in The First
Circle. First
the prisoners had to change
out of their prison clothes and don civilian suits specially issued for the occasion.
Then they were
read a
not to talk about their
work
list
of prohibitions, including
or the location of the prison.
239
strict instructions
At
a later date,
it
— SOLZHENITSYN
[240]
seems, a prohibition was placed on kissing and embracing one's wife, but at this first
meeting embraces were
still
permitted.
Mavrino that prisoners were driven to were not supposed to know the present whereabouts of these living dead, whether they were being brought in from some place a hundred miles away or from the Kremlin, from the airport or from the next world. They were only allowed to see well-fed, well-dressed men with white hands who were no longer talkative, v\ ho smiled sadly and assured them all was well and that thev had all thev wanted. These meetings were rather like those scenes depicted on ancient Greek steles, showing both the deceased and the living people who had erected the monument to him. The steles always had a thin line dividing the other world from this. The living looked fondlv at the dead, while the dead man looked towards Hades with eyes that were neither happy nor sad, but somehow blank the look of one who knew too much.^ It
was due
to the top-secret nature of
another place for their
visits.
Their
relatives
was in fact an open secret to the Moscow wives, and Natalia subsequently went to the Ostankino Park on a number of occasions in the hope of glimpsing Solzhenitsyn through the wire. She was accompanied on these excursions by Panin's wife, Evgenia, whom she had met in the waiting-room during her first visit, and once they narrowly escaped arrest by a suspicious policeman who demanded to see their passports. They
The
location of Marfino
fondly imagined that the
on the grass included
men
their
they could see playing volleyball and lounging
husbands, but
it
was impossible
to get close
enough
to make out their faces. Solzhenitsyn did play volleyball from time to time
and was reasonably good at it (though, according to Kopelev, he was a bossy ^ plaver and tended to intercept passes intended for others). was tender in the Taganka Solzhenitsvn's first meeting at Natalia's and happiest of were "the the extreme and opened a period of two years that .
our years of unhappy
separation,'"^ according to Reshetovskaya, although
.
.
it
was to be almost a year before they were allowed to meet again. On the other hand they were able to exchange letters constantly, and the fact that they were both in Moscow, although totally cut off from one another physically, somehow consoled and reassured them, endowing their lives with a semblance of normality and driving memories of the true face of Gulag into the background.
For Natalia, these were extremely difficult times. She had succeeded in moving to Moscow and was now doing post-graduate studies in chemistry under Professor Kobozev, while living with her aunt on Malaya Bronnaya
—
and overcrowding Moscow was from the front and evacuees with soldiers returning bursting at the seams from the impact of the was still reeling from the provinces, and returning sacrifice for the considerable Natalia had involved and accommodating war Turkins. Their "flat" consisted of a single, large room partitioned to form two smaller rooms, with a small passageway between. Aunt Veronica's mother Street.
—
It
was
a period of terrible shortages
In
the First (Circle
(241
I
one small room, and Natalia moved into the other with. who was now nineteen, while her aunt slept in the passageway. This was all that was left to them of the six room flat that \ eronica had inherited from her mother, for thev had been "compressed," as the saying went, into one room after the Revolution, and the other five rooms had been let to five other families, w ith whom the\ nowshared the kitchen and bathroom.' The Turkins had been pleased to welcome Natalia and offer her a home. Thev had shared her sense of shock and grief over Solzhenits\ n's arrest, although they hardly knew him, had lent a sympathetic ear to her sorrows, and had helped her find her feet in this strange, hectic, and forbidding capital citv. It had been from their place that she had set out for her first meetings with Solzhenitsyn at Kaluga Gate, and it w as there that she met his former sergeant Ilya Solomin, after his demobilization from the army, and heard from him the detailed storv of Solzhenitsvn's arrest. Solomin told her that he had burnt the books he found stored in the how itzer case, but had managed to hide all her letters to Solzhenitsyn and w as now returning them to her. He also gave her Solzhenitsvn's surviving notes on the Samsonov campaign and his front-line copy of Esenin's poetrv, which Natalia immediately sent on to Solzhenitsyn at Butvrki w ith a new inscription inside: "Thus w ill everything that is lost return to you."* Solomin, whose entire family had been slaughtered by the Germans at Minsk, now had nowhere to go and lingered at Malaya Bronnaya for a w hile. After much discussion and an exchange of letters w ith Natalia's family in Rostov, the Turkins arranged for him to move there and to occupy Natalia's old room, which he duly did. The arrangement was not a success, however. Solomin, with his barrack-room ways, old soldier's swagger (a prominent feature of Soviet soldiers returning from occupied Germany), and taste for vodka and late nights, unavoidably scandalized the old ladies and played too much havoc w ith their normally quiet life. The arrangement lasted less than a year, but in the meantime Solomin had succeeded in gaining admission to Rostov University to study engineering and was able to move into a univerand
sister slept in
Veronica's daughter, the younger Veronica,
sity hostel.
In 1946 Natalia had also moved from the Turkins' into a university hosShe had been reluctant to go at first. The Turkins were relatives and despite the overcrowding, she appreciated their affection and support. The hostel would be lonelier and more impersonal and w ould call for more selfreliance. Moreover, the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust that once again began to cloak the city as Stalin's paranoia reasserted itself meant that she dared not admit even to the existence of a husband who was a political prisoner she \v ould at once be expelled from the university. But the overcrowdtel.
—
*This
is
a literal translation of the Russian:
translation of Reshetovskava's
book dresses
Tak this
i
up
offers a paraphrase instead of a direct quotation.
double meaning.
vse uteryannoe k tebe vernetsya.
in pseudo-biblical
The
The
English
language, and Kopelev
point of the new inscription lay in
its
[242]
SOLZHENITSYN
ing and the cramped conditions at Malaya Bronnaya were growing intolerable,
and so she was obliged to make the move.*^ The hostel was located at Stromvnka and her life there, with five roommates, was much as Nadia Nerzhin's is described in The First Circle (Solzhenitsyn questioned Natalia on this subject when he was working on the novel). Life was austere, as it was in most European capitals during the earlv postwar years. Food and clothing were rationed, the room at Stromynka was sparsely and shabbilv furnished, and Natalia had only a modest graduatestudent grant out of which to meet her needs. Furthermore, the oppressive secret that she was obliged to carrv round w ith her could be shared onlv with Kirill, Lydia, and the two Veronicas, and this served to increase her sense of loneliness and isolation. Bv the summer of 1947, when she and Solzhenitsyn had their first reunion, she w as in the final stages of completing her doctoral dissertation for Professor Kobozev. The original deadline had been 1 September, bu^ she had succeeded in getting it postponed until November. This meant that her Moscow residence permit and her place in the hostel were guaranteed for another vear. After September, hov\ever, her grant came to an end, and her mother was obliged to send monev from Rostov to support her. She also had no right to a ration card and was forced to buy a temporarv card on the black market. Her position was most precarious. If her dissertation failed, she would be forced to look for a job and another room, or perhaps to return to Rostov. At length, at the end of November, she delivered her dissertation to Professor Kobozev, who declared himself satisfied. In December food rationing was abolished, and in Januarv Natalia was taken on as a post-graduate assistant in Kobozev's laboratorv. Her wages turned out to be less than the grant she had been getting, but she was able to manage, and she was above all relieved to be able to stay in Aloscow. Throughout the spring of 1948 she prepared copies of her dissertation for the formal defence, composed an article and a lecture on the theme of her dissertation, answered some queries
by the two chemists appointed to "challenge" the dissertation at her it, and mentallv prepared herself for the great day in June. On 23 June her formal defence took place, and her dissertation passed on a vote of twentv to two. Lydia and Kirill and some university friends from Rostov were there to hear her defence and join in the celebration banquet afterwards, and onlv Solzhenitsvn's enforced absence cast a shadow over her day of triumph. With her dissertation out of the way, Natalia decided to resume her musical studies and signed up for classes with a teacher called Undina Dubova at the Moscow University Club. She had never abandoned her love of piano playing and possessed her own Becker piano, a treasure that she had installed in the hostel at Stromvnka, where she frequentlv played duets with her best friend and room-mate, Alexandra Popova. She also played fairly regularly with Kirill, and after practising hard was selected to play in concerts with some of Dubova's other pupils. Dubova was herself a pupil of the renowned raised
formal defence of
In
the First Circle
[243I
and teacher Heinrich Neuhaus and on one occasion took Natalia to to play for him. He seemed quite pleased with her playing. Music also managed to bring her closer to her husband. Since his student da\s, Solzhenitsyn had not taken much interest in music, but at Marhno he became a passionate radio listener, tried to catch all the music programmes, wrote at length to Natalia about the pieces he had heard, and was enthusiastic about her return to piano lessons and her success at amateur concerts. Perhaps, he wrote, this w as the "real significance" of her stay in Moscow, and he urged her to "become a great and brilliant pianist" while she was there. Later, in characteristic fashion, he began to construct ambitious plans for her. When she went to giye a series of concerts in Leningrad, he hailed the news that she had deyeloped a professional stage presence and congratulated her on haying made her first yisit to Leningrad not as a tourist but as "a yictor among instrumentalists." He adyanced the slogan "Less chemistry and more music!" and began seriously to encourage her to take up music professionally.** During these years, \yrites Reshetovskaya, they felt extremely close to one another. pianist his
home
We
exchanged letters constantly, and somehow each keenly felt the life of the Sanya took all mv affairs to heart, gave me advice, encouraged me. And I felt that everything I was doing I was doing not only for myself but also for him. h was so pleasant to cheer Sanya \\ ith mv little triumphs: an examination passed with flying colours, a test lecture that went well, a complimentary remark bv a
other.
professor.
The
letters
warmed
us and sustained our feelings for one another, and
our meetings became celebrations
The
in themselves.^
next meeting that Reshetovskaya describes in any detail took place
on 20 June 1948, just three days before she was due to The two of them had come to anticipate their meetings with all the ardour of young lovers again, and Solzhenitsyn wrote to her that "in the evening after work, he had w alked in the yard for a long time, gazed at the moon, imagined the conversation that was about to take place between us, and thought about how I, too, was probably thinking about him 'more than the dissertation.' " He wrote that after washing his hair he had walked around "in a towel rolled up like a turban so that my hair w ould set properly by tomorrow,"'" and that he would take extra care over polishing his shoes and shaving. At their 1948 meeting Solzhenitsyn announced to Natalia an astounding coincidence: Nikolai Vitkevich had arrived in the sharashka* Solzhenitsyn a year after the first,
defend her dissertation.
already in
knew from Natalia, via Nikolai's mother, that Nikolai had been arrested two months after him, and sentenced by a military tribunal to
April 1945,
ten years' imprisonment, the standard tribunal term.
*Kopelev dates V'itkevich's arrival was two vears earlier, in 1948.
in the sharashka as 1950,
\nd
he must have know n
but Reshetovskaya confirms that
it
SOLZHENITSYN
[244] that Nikolai
had been sent
to Inta, in the northern Urals,
on the verv edge
of the Arctic Circle, to serve his sentence. But there had been no direct contact between them, and thev had hardlv expected to meet again while
both were prisoners. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn's
first
response on hearing (from
the Marfino security officer) that his co-defendant was on his
and that he had better "watch
way
to the
had been one of alarm. It was a more or less fixed rule that co-defendants weren't sent to the same camp, and he suspected a deliberate provocation and the preparation of a new case against him. But his fears were quicklv dissipated when he found himself face to face with Nikolai. Nikolai was given the top bunk adjoining Solzhenitsvn's, and Solzhenitsyn simultaneously moved from his lower bunk to the upper one to be beside him. After that the two friends spent many nights deep in conversation, running over the details of their arrests and investigations, comparing charges, describing their camp experiences and exchanging news of Natalia, Lydia, Kirill, and other friends. So intense were these conversations that they earned themselves the derisive nickname of "the Solzhenitsker brothers" and were the butt of many jokes by Solzhenitsyn's
sharashka
his step"
comrades." Their meetings outside Orel and the mock-portentous "conference of the big two" now seemed an age away, and although it appeared for a short while as if thev might still be "two trains travelling side by side," in reality their formerly parallel tracks had begun to diverge. Exposure to arrest and the rigours of the Gulag had evoked different responses in them and had developed character traits that had hitherto lain dormant or been overlooked in the flush of their
youthful friendship.
Perhaps the area in which
this difference
of politics and ideas. Solzhenitsvn was
still
now counted
for
most was that
passionatelv engaged in the ideas
had obsessed him in youth and that were ultimatelv responsible for his and imprisonment. He was still conducting a continual, agonizing dialogue with himself about the meaning of life, the nature of socialism, the importance of Marx, the role of Lenin, and the significance of the October Revolution (his heated debates with Panin, Kopelev, and some of the other prisoners were all part of this process). Nikolai, on the other hand, proved to be less fiery than of yore. Already as a student his opposition to the Soviet system had been tinged with quietism. He was against state interference in that
arrest
his personal life, detested the "big brother" mentalitv
much more
than did
But although in some ways he had gone further in his hostility to the regime, he had always been more passive than Solzhenitsyn and had had a clearer notion of what he was against than what he would have put in its place. It had been Solzhenitsyn who had led in elaborating all sorts of programmes for improvement and in drawing up "Resolution No. 1." Now Nikolai wanted to be left alone more than ever. The camps seemed to have knocked the stuffing out of him, and he simply Solzhenitsyn, and simplv wanted to be
left
alone.
wanted to turn his back on it all and retreat into personal life.''^ Another factor was partly political and partly personal. Of Solzheni-
In
the First
(^irci.k
I245J
two new friends, Nikolai much preferred Kopelev (as Solzhenitsyn had predicted to Kopelev beforehand). Kor all his vouthful rebelliousness, Nikolai had been a Party member and w as the son of a Partv member. He still disliked Stalin and regarded most ideology w ith scepticism, but he perceived that the best w a\ to get on w as to keep in w ith the establishment and tsyn's
accept
authority in return for a quiet
its
the outset (and the feeling
w
life.
But he had detested Panin from
w
as mutual). Panin,
ith his chivalr\-, his elevated
notions of honour, his religiosity, his open contempt for the authorities, and
make
his steadfast refusal to
whom
trouble-maker
a deal
w
them, w
ith
Nikolai most distrusted
t\pe of idealist and was an uncomfortable
as the
—and
reminder of the price of coming to terms. Nikolai's usual response when Panin entered the room, and particularl\- w hen an\ political discussion started,
was simply
we have
to leave
only one
it.
As Solzhenitsyn
We
life.
were born
motto was that to hell w ith
later said, "Nikolai's
to live, so let's live
and
everything else."'^ Solzhenitsyn, however, was moving in precisely the opposite direction.
Not only did he
relish these political discussions
own
ishment for his
and
them
find in
rich nour-
ideas but he found himself draw ing steadily aw av from
The
Kopelev's position and closer to that of Panin.
process
brilliantly
is
w here Nerzhin (Solzhenitsyn) is show n as being midway, in his political and philosophical views, between Rubin (Kopelev) and Sologdin (Panin) and arguing w ith both of them. The w hole novel is an extended debate on the ideas and concepts that preoccupied all three of them at the sharashka and is, on one level, a dramatization of Solzhenits\"n's spiridescribed in The First
tual
odvssev there.
Circle,
The
struggle he show
s
in the novel
betw een the tw o sides
met-
for possession of Nerzhin's soul resembles the struggle that took place,
aphorically speaking, betw een Panin and Kopelev for the allegiance of Sol-
zhenitsyn.
Explaining later the contrast betw een his ow n position
and that of Nikolai, and the course expressed
For
at the sharashka
development took, Solzhenitsyn
as follows:
it
mv
his
part,
true that
I
I
was never able
to get
aw av from
politics or
mv
convictions.
used to try to defend Marxism during the early years of
my
It is
impris-
onment. But it turned out that I w as incapable of it. There were such strong arguments and such experienced people against me that I simplv couldn't. They beat me every time. And so gradually I moved awav from Marxism, and at the sharashka I describe an intermediate position of scepticism, w hen I didn't quite believe in
it
anv more. At
believe in anything, still
at
the sharashka,
all
don't
I I
mv
ing Dostoyevskv, actualh- ...
was
macy of
it
was
I
a
most convenient
anything, leave
began gradually
began gradually to return to that
events,
know
to
me
abandon
alone.
.
position: .
began
to
move
I
don't
Then, w
this scepticism.
old, original childhood concepts.
in the first place idealist, as they call
.
hile
In fact,
Through
I
read-
ever so slowly tow ards a position it,
that
is,
of supporting the pri-
the spiritual over the material, and secondly patriotic and religious. In
other words,
I
began to return slowly and gradually to
all
mv
former
views.'"*
SOLZHENITSYN
[246]
But not quite
all.
When
Peretz Herzenberg, a fellow prisoner, said to
Solzhenitsyn one day that he recognized in him a believer, Solzhenitsvn declined to confirm
it.
The
question of religious belief, he said, was a verv
complex problem, and he implied
As
that he
was not ready
for Vitkevich, the truth of the matter
to solve
'^
it.
seems to be that he was
ordinary individual and that this ordinariness stood out
when
a rather
contrasted with
the sharp originality and intellectual distinction of Solzhenitsyn's other friends.
Kopelev,
who
got on well with Nikolai, nevertheless couldn't stand his habit
of referring to famous Russian writers as "Al" Pushkin, "Mickey" Lermontov,
"Nick" Nekrasov, and "Volodya" Mayakovsky.*
He
had developed
a
sentimental nostalgia for his early childhood in Daghestan, assumed an air of stoic resignation that (his
he regarded as
fitting for a
man
of
Moslem upbringing
dark skin and wide face enabled him to press the connection quite
far,
although he had not a drop of Daghestanian blood in him), and brought
a
on women, regarding all actresses and ballet dancers as "whores" by definition, and men who married them as "unmanly." He loved listening to oriental music and was predictably flattered when Kopelex' nicknamed him "Djalil."'^
Moslem narrowness
It is
to his views
perhaps indicative of Solzhenitsvn's cooling relations with his old
was found for him in The First Circle, although some aspects of the character of Ruska Doronin (notablv his love affair with Clara and his occupying the neighbouring bunk to Nerzhin's) were based on Nikolai. Perhaps a factor in their estrangement was the circumstance that Nikolai worked in the vacuum laboratorv and that their paths did not cross in their work. Nevertheless, their friendship survived the camps and was even revived for a brief period afterwards, but it no longer bore comparison with that intensity of feeling that had existed between them as youths and young men, before their arrest. Among the new friends w ith whom Solzhenitsvn now spent much time was the camp artist, Sergei Ivashov-Musatov (who appears as Kondrashovfriend that no prominent place
Ivanov
in
The First
Circle,
Solzhenitsyn having preserved even the double-
barrelled surname). Ivashov-Musatov vidual
who reminded Kopelev
eccentric in his theories and
of
Don
was
a tall, skinnv, exotic-looking indi-
Quixote, and seems to have been equally
sudden enthusiasms. On Solzhenitsyn he exerwas to last well into the period when they
cised a powerful fascination that
were both
free
men
again. Sentenced to twenty-five years for having attended
novel bv Daniil Andrevev,t Ivashov-Musatov had been brought straight to Marfino and ordered to paint pictures, at the rate of one a month, to decorate the offices and rooms of the prison institute. According a secret
reading of
a
*
These are the approximate Knglish equivalents (except Volodya) of V'itkex ich's nicknames. Andreyev was one of tuo sons of the u ell-know n Russian u riter of the earlv tw entieth centurv Leonid Andreye\' (1871-1919). In 1949 he was arrested and jailed for ha\ing written a t Daniil
novel that was judged "anti-Soviet," and the
manv
friends
who had
visited his
readings from the novel v\ere arrested too. Kopele\' mentions an engineer
Kemnits, w ho had also been
jailed as a result
of hearing Andreve\ read.
at
home
to hear
the sharashka, Victor
In
the First Circle
[247]
Ivashov-Musatov was trained as a mathematician but had an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and philosophy, and subscribed to a sort of toggv theism that was not limited to anv one recognized religion.'' Ivashov's subjects make it sound as if he somewhat resembled the preto Panin,
Raphaelites without their Christian strain: Parsifal, The Holy Grail, ^ Othello
and Desdemona portraits and landscapes dramaticalK' painted to express strong ,
emotions and views.
It
seems from Solzhenits\n's embarrassingly lengthy
descriptions of the paintings in The First Circle that he approved verv
of Ivasho.'s output at the time, though he
much
was suspicious of an excess of
emotion and questioned Ivashov's romanticism in his literary pictures: did not Ivashov's doctrine of "ennobling" reality come perilously close to the cosmetic injunctions of socialist realism?
On
the other hand, the\' could also
be traced back to the tradition of Russian religious art and the view s of the late Tolstoy, with which Solzhenitsyn felt much more comfortable and familiar.
What seems
have fascinated Solzhenitsyn most of
to
all
was Ivashov's
concept of his vocation.
was not an occupation or
For [Ivashov]
art
only possible
way
human
of
life.
a form of knowledge. Art was the For him, everything around him landscapes, objects,
characters, or shades of colour
—
—
all
had their ow n particular resonance,
which he could unerringly identify and place in the tonic scale. There was a stranger to, and that w as indifference. He \\ as well know n for his extreme likes and passionate dislikes, and his uncompromising .
.
.
only one emotion he w as
opinions.'**
Solzhenitsyn
may
well have been taken with one other aspect of Iva-
shov's technique, brought into play
w hen he was painting
not sufficient for him, Ivashov asserted, simply to look at a ing his portrait.
and
He
his gestures, in
And
that nature
needed to
him,
talk to
listen to
portraits. It
man when
was
paint-
him, observe his smile
order to perceive his inner nature and essential character.
and that character were what he
tried to capture
on canvas
or on paper.
The
engineer Nikolai
nitsyn had
first
met
in
Semyonov (Potapov
Butyrki and
in the novel),
who reminded him
w hom Solzhe-
so vividly of the
sagacious engineers he had seen round the Fedorovskys' table as a child,
Semyonov had been chief engineer during the Pow er Station, one of Stalin's prize projects, and had been captured by the Germans during the war. The Germans, discovering w ho he w as, had asked him to w ork for them in restoring the dam, but although Semyonov had confirmed his identity, he had refused to collaborate. He had also made no fewer than three attempts to escape from became another firm
friend.
building of the Dnieper Hydroelectric
the
Germans, but on
his repatriation after the
war he was accused of betray-
Germans and sentenced to ten years for sabotage. Panin Semyonov as an unthinking robot w ho was ready to do anything for
ing secrets to the
detested
* Ivashov's picture The
Holy Grail
later
hung
in Soizhenitsyn's
living-room in Ryazan.
a
SOLZHENITSYN
[248]
the Soviet regime and take orders without thinking about the consequences.
Solzhenitsvn in time would
who
of Soviet scientists
make
come
army work to
to similar conclusions about the vast
are content to take orders
from above and
to
the Soviet svstem strong, despite their private reservations about and
even hostility to the svstem, but at the sharashka his views had still not developed that far. Theoretically, he \\ as moving closer to Panin, but the force of habit
was hard
terms with
to break,
and
in practice
political loyalists. Besides,
he had no trouble remaining on good what was more important to him at
—
was not a man's political beliefs but his ethical stance view that even Panin endorsed in his friendship with Lev Kopelev. Somewhat different from Solzhenitsyn's other friends was the Marfino caretaker, Spiridon (who appears under his own name in The First Circle). Like Nerzhin in the novel, Solzhenitsvn used to enjoy sawing firewood in this stage of his life
the vard in the mornings before breakfast, usually with Panin. Panin had
summer, he
slept
by an open window
had been an admonition not in the fiercest
his shirt
and words to Kopelev in Butvrki the window), and he made a habit, even
need to "subjugate the
fixed ideas about the
to close
flesh." Invariably, winter
(his first
of Arctic frosts, of walking about the yard without a hat,
unbuttoned almost
to the waist,
and with
v\'ith
topcoat slung noncha-
a
moment the snow disappeared, he would dispense not only with the coat but also with his boots and walk barefoot, seeking out the roughest ground and deliberately walking on gravel, cinders, and other material with hard edges and corners. Panin was also the first to get up in the mornings. It had been his idea to saw firewood, and he persuaded Solzhenitsyn, and sometimes Kopelev, to join him (Nerzhin rubbing himself with hoar-frost in the novel before commencing work with lantly ov'er his shoulders. In spring, the
Sologdin
is
another autobiographical
detail: the
"walrus"
still
had
a taste for
the cold). Since the preparation of firewood was, strictly speaking, Spiridon's
and since Spiridon provided the tools, the three men got to see of him, but it was only Solzhenitsyn who cultivated him and made
responsibility
quite a lot a point
of visiting
him
at
other times as
Panin laughingly called for all
it
Solzhenitsyn was imitating
Tolstoy, in his search for
well.'*^
and he was
right,
his favourite nineteenth-century writers,
above
his "going to the people,"*
wisdom
at
the the feet of the
common
people.
But unlike Tolstoy, he had another compelling reason: his study of Dahl's dictionary had convinced him that the path to a revitalized and healthy literary language lay through a return to peasant idioms and the popular roots of everyday speech. Spiridon was a living and accessible repository of that speech and could teach him far more than books could about the state of the living language.
The
fruits
of this study are also to be seen in The First
where some of the best pages (and some of Solzhenitsyn's most writing) are devoted to an account of Spiridon's
patterns
(a
Spiridon's
own
device Solzhenitsyn was to employ on a larger scale in
* Solzhenitsyn evidently took the joke in
The First
life in
Circle.
good
part, for
he made
it
Circle,
interesting
speech
A Day
one of the chapter
titles
in
of
the First (Circle
In the Life of
Ivan
Detiisovich).
But Solzhenitsyn was
paternalistic fallacies of nineteenth-century its
a
worst excesses. Bv underlining,
in
and the
[249] sutticicntlv
aware of the
populism to distance himself from
The First
the similarities betw een
Circle,
common man
contemporary Soviet manages to deromanticize the traditional concept of "the people" the same time refurbishing it for the future use in a more fruitful
\erzhin-t\pe
intellectual
in
Russia, he
(while at
and contemporar\' way). Onl\- much later, in his polemical writings, did he return to a cruder concept of "the people" and betray some of the insights that had enriched The First Circle.
Meanw hile
Solzhenitsyn w as reading more than
his university days.
The Marfino
at
an\ other time since
library contained mainly technical books
but had an eclectic and eccentric collection of general books that Solzhenitsyn seems to have read in
Mommsen's
its
entirety at one time or another, including
History of Rome, Klyuchevsky's History of Russia, and
works bv Darwin, Turgenev, Timir\azev, and Peter Struve. In April 1948 a plan was made to organize these books into a leisure library and add to them s\stematically. Kopelev w as put in charge of it at Solzhenitsyn's suggestion (Solzhenitsyn had declined the task on the grounds of lack of time) and by steadily acquiring new works, mainly in the field of literature, and taking books out on loan from the Lenin Library, was able to see that they had access to a liberal supply of good fiction and poetr\-. It was now that Solzhenitsyn rediscovered Dostoyevsky, finding him far more satisfying than before. According to Reshetoyskaya, he also read Alexei Tolstoy, Tiutchev, Fet, Maikov, Polonskv, and Blok, and urged her to do likewise. "After all, you don't know them," he wrote, adding characteristically in parenthesis, "and neither do I, to my great shame. "-^ He was apparently much impressed by that great French favourite of Russian readers Anatole France and was almost as enthusiastic about the Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov. Most of the writers mentioned by Reshetoyskaya were poets, and it may have been no coincidence that about this time Solzhenitsyn was himself turning from prose to poetry. On his arrival in the sharashka, he had still been immersed in Tolstoy. "Am slowly savouring the third volume of War and Peace, and with it your little chocolates,"-' he had written to Reshetovskava; and Kopelev reports that soon after his own arrival in the sharashka, he had seen Solzhenitsyn poring over a volume of Tolstoy's novel that he seemed to carry everywhere with him. The margins w ere crammed w ith annotations, some of which struck Kopelev as positively blasphemous, such as "no good," "clumsy," "gallicism," and "too wordy," but when Kopelev mentioned this to Solzhenitsyn he dismissed it: "Don't try to frighten me w ith your authorities. That's my opinion. I wrote it for myself. Tolstoy's language is out of date now."-^ His study of Tolstoy seems to have coincided w ith his efforts to write Love the Revolution and, when that failed, with a new prose work about his life in the army. This later piece, which never acquired a title, began w ith a description of life in the horse-draw n transport unit, where he
—
had
first
served. But
when
it
came
—
to describing life at the tront. he keenly
— SOLZHENITSYN
[250] felt
the loss of his diaries and ran into a dead end.^^
The
switch of interest from the distant past of the Revolution to the
his own life did, however, have a liberating effect on and unlocked the way for him to start w riting his first long and successfully completed work, a narrative poem that finally acquired the title The Way. His first idea was to transpose his armv chapters into verse. Since arriving at the sharashka, he had written a great deal of incidental verse poems to and about his wife, a poem to Kopelev on his birthday, poems about life in the camp.^'* He was encouraged by Kopelev, who admired his talent and himself wrote verse at this time. To the list of poets thev read and discussed in the sharashka, Kopelev adds Pushkin, Gumilvov, Pasternak, and Simonov (Kopelev points out that Solzhenitsyn was much less interested in translations: when read some Bagritsky translations by Kopelev, he responded, "What I need are Russian poems about Russia").''' Putting his prose into verse didn't seem to work, however, and Solzhenitsyn decided to go all the way back to childhood for the start of his poem and to work forwards. The armv chapters could come in as a prose epilogue to the main part of the poem, or simply remain as part 2 (this idea was also abandoned in the course
more recent events of his imagination
of time). Part of the reason for Solzhenitsyn's decision to return to his childhood for this
examine
poem must have been a desire to make sense of his life and to reit in the light of his new feelings about Marxism, the Revolution,
Soviet society in the twenties and thirties, and events, such as the purges,
had only vaguely thought about before. In turning to verse as the for what was planned from the start as a longish work, he seems to have been guided as much by practical considerations as by stvlistic questions. Verse was more easily memorized. In the conditions of the sharashka, it was possible for him and Kopelev to write their \\ orks down on scraps of paper and keep them for a while, but anvthing with unorthodox thoughts in it had to be carefully hidden, and when discipline was later tightened and regular searches were introduced, they often had to be burnt. Their verse could then be committed to memory and reconstituted when conditions were safer. Stylistically, the chief influences on Solzhenitsvn seem to have been the nineteenth-century poet Nikolai Xekrasov,* Alexander Tvardovskv, whose Vastly Tyorkin Solzhenitsvn had admired at the front, t and his beloved Esenin. All three poets were verbally inventive, racv and vigorous in their styles, and steeped in Russian folk-wavs, and the first tw o had a strong satirical vein that matched Solzhenitsyn's present intentions. The provisional title of his poem. Volunteers' Highivay, expressed this satirical intent; it was an ironic reference to a recent government decree bestow ing this name on the old Vladimir High that he
medium
*Nekrasov was long narrative
a
famous editor and poet of the 1860s and 1870s. His best-known work
poem Who
set out to explore various regions of Russia
tSee
p. 125
and note.
is
Lives Happily in Russia? detaihng the adventures of seven peasants
on
foot to find an
answer
to this question.
the
who
— I
N T H F. F R S T
Road running out of Moscow
(
I
; I
RCLE
—the road along
\\
I
2 5
I
]
hich convicts sentenced to
hard labour in Siberia in tsarist times had been led from the capital in chains. The official change of name was meant to svmbolize the supposed abolition
bv the Soviet state of hard labour and the enlistment of "\l/,hcnits\n had
still
his return to the (Ihristian faith, he
hccn writing "god" with
began writing
it
with
a
small
if.
After his operation and
a capital letter again.
A Son down
the crime for
It is
\\
hich
we
of Ciui.AG
L303J
now being punished."'" would not have remembered these words what followed. lie knew nothing of Kornfeld, are
possible that Solzhenitsyn
so vividb had
it
not been for
except that for two months the doctor had not
camp compound, which had and was afraid
left
the hospital or entered the
raised the suspicion that he
was
a
stool-pigeon
go there. Solzhenits\ n dismissed the idea as unlikely, but the following morning he was awakened b\' the sound of hurrxing feet and a tramping in the corridor. Kornfeld's body \^ as being hurried to the operating during the night his skull had been cracked bv a plasterer's hamtheatre to
—
operation w as unsuccessful, and the dead man was placed in the morgue adjoining the room where Solzhenitsyn slept alone. It w as then that Kornfeld's ominous last words returned to him w ith new meaning. In The Gulag Archipelago, w here he describes this episode at greater length, Solzhenitsyn quotes the poem that he w rote in the hospital and that marks his return to (Christianity. Recalling how it had been the faith of his childhood, he describes his youthful conversion to Marxism under the inHuence of "bookish sophistries" and the sense of power and certainty this gave him:
mer.
The
Without
Had But then had come
a
rumble,
faith's edifice
quieth crumbled
his
\\
ithin
mv
breast.
journey "between being and nothingness" and his
return to understanding. I
look back with grateful trembling
At the
life I
have had to
lead.
Neither desire nor reason
Has illumined
its t\\ ists and turns. But the glow of a Higher Meaning Only later to be explained.
And now w ith I
the
cup returned
scoop up the w ater of
Almighty God!
I
to
me
life.
believe in Thee!
Thou remained when
I
Thee denied
'''' . .
.
That these were
his true feelings at the time is confirmed bv a letter he wrote immediately after his release from the hospital. He had been apprehensive before the operation, he w rote, but the faith "in God's will and in God's mercy" that he had recenth' acquired had greatly eased his path.-" The closing pages of part 4, chapter 1, of The Gulag Archipelago ("The to Natalia
Ascent"), where Solzhenitsyn mentions his hospital, are
among
the most
moving he has
poem and
recounts his stay in
written. In
them he describes
not only his reconversion but also his credo, the set of beliefs to w hich his prison career and his sufferings had brought lapses
endemic
to
human
him and
weakness, he had tried to remain
to
which, w
ith the
faithful e\er since.
SOLZHENITSYN
[304]
of good in myself. good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties it runs through the heart of each and every one of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationarv. It shifts and moves with the passing of the years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good. And even the most It \\
on rotting prison straw that
as
Gradually
it
became
clear to
me
I
felt
the
first stirrings
that the line separating
—
virtuous heart harbours an un-uprooted corner of
This
v\
as the reason, writes Solzhenitsyn,
rioritv of religion
man
—
religions
all
—over
ideology.
evil.-'
why
he came to see the supe-
"They
struggle with the evil
men)," whereas revolutions "destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them" and then "take to themselves as their heritage the inside
(all
only magnified still more."" Solzhenitsvn concludes his meditation by expressing gratitude for the years of incarceration in prisons and camps, which had enabled him to fulfil
evil itself,
"Know thyself." And then adds
the biblical injunction
having been in
my
life!"
"And from beyond
of his mature writing, for
you
to talk
—
Xot long
you're
after
into the recovery
"Bless you, prison," he writes, "for the ironic parenthesis, characteristic
still
alive!
the grave they answer:
it's all
right
"-^*
Kornfeld died, the gentle giant, Pavel Boroniuk, burst to bid Solzhenitsyn farewell before departing with
room
his transport. If the
evidence of Cancer Ward and The Tanks Knoiv the Truth is may have been threatened with transportation
to be believed, Solzhenitsyn
himself, and there
is
a suggestion in Cancer
ried out Solzhenitsyn's operation
was
Ward
that the surgeon
also transported
who
car-
without warning. In
the novel, the doctor shouts back to the semi-autobiographical Kostoglotov that a section of his tumour has been sent to Omsk for a histological analysis
and that he should inquire there if he wants further information. Omsk is certainly the place to w hich doctors from Ekibastuz would have sent their samples, and it is possible that this incident is autobiographical. The removed
lump was apparently
a
Solzhenitsyn as writing
malignant lymph node, but Reshetoyskaya records
home
to say that, according to the doctors, his tu-
not metastasized or spread to the surrounding tissues. "F'or that reason, the doctors assured me, there are no grounds for further concern."-^
mour had
At the end of February, Solzhenitsyn was released from hospital and returned to the compound. Boroniuk was gone, of course. Panin was in the punishment block and soon to follow him, as were Pavel Gai, Vladimir Gershuni, and the camp jester, Kishkin. The prisoners were sullen, subdued, and
full
of suspicion, while the
ruthlessly
rounded up
all
camp
authorities e.xulted in their victory
and
the real and suspected trouble-makers.
Solzhenitsyn did not resume his old job of brigade leader, nor did he return to bricklaying. For a while he dreamed of taking up carpentry again.
would be good to master this trade too," he wrote in his letter home on I March 1952 the first for a year, because his letter of the preceding Novem-
"It
—
*.\m()ng other things an acknowledgement that Solzhenitsyn's sentence had been experiences easy, in comparison with those of millions of his fellow victims.
light,
and
his
A Son of ber had not arrixcd.
He
(iUi.ag
IV5l
maintained his romantic prejudice
in
taxour ot man-
and complaining about his reading thouincompetence. "A thirtv-year-old blockhead grows up sands of books, vet he can't sharpen an axe or set a handle on a hammer."'" But he was not allowed to be a carpenter. He was sent to work in the foundr\' as a smelter's mate (this w as also a form of punishment, it seems), an experience he w as later to draw on in w riting The Toiderfoot cnul the I art. According to the description given there, the foundrv w as a high-ceilinged iron building dominated b\' a domed, rust-red furnace that stretched from ual labour, calling himself a "sissy intellectual"
.
.
.
w ith its chimnex" disappearing through the roof. Beside it drying-chamber built of rough brick, and there were piles of burnt earth strew n about the floor, interspersed w ith moulds for casting iron and a varietv of shovels, crow bars, and buckets used either in fuelling the furnace or in extracting the molten iron. The work here was probabK- the hardest that Solzhenitsxn had ever done. The foundry w as sweltering hot, there w as smoke evervwhere, and he had to sweat at a varietv of unskilled jobs, from chiselling slag off the furnace to stoking it and lugging the moulds about. But the foundr\' w as also a kev element in the camp's economx', making spare parts for various kinds of machinerv; and it w as run b\' a free w orker, \ asili Frolov, w ho had a genius for fiddling the books, making articles for sale on the side, and securing excelfloor to ceiling,
was
a large
lent conditions for his workers. Solzhenitsxn based the character of \ asili
Brylov, the foundry manager in The Tenderfoot and the Tart, on Frolov,* and
w ords
Brvlov's
in act
1
mav
be taken as indicative of the situation
in
which
Solzhenitsvn now found himself.
now,
vou fabulous quotas. I've worked new foundries, and I've alwavs got on well with the prisoners. Tell me one thing vou haven't got. Your bread ration's the best in the camp. Vou get double porridge and double soup. We make irons to sell on the side, and as for vour togs, I'll sell 'em for vou anv time vou want. .A.nd anv time vou want to mail a letter, just give it to me. Anv time. Right now if \ou want. You've got vour w ork and there's enough for me to \\ ct mv whisLook, bovs,
it's
not a bad
fifteen vears in the
life
camps,
is it? I fix
I've built eleven
tle.-^
camps were made economically self-sufficient camps already were). Each camp became responsible for paving its wav, and a svstem of pavments to prisoners was introduced, depending on their productivity. Some 45 per cent of the value ot what the camp produced was counted as earned income, w bile S5 per cent w ent to the state. But there was a catch. Seventv per cent of the earned income w as deducted to pay for the maintenance of the armed guards, dogs, fences, camp In earlv 1952 the special
(as
the ordinarv
*In the
text of The Reptihlk of Labour
pubHshed to Frolov.
in the Paris edition
(which was the original name of The Tenderfoot and
of his Collected Works, Solzhenitsvn has changed the
the Tart)
name back
SOLZHENITSYN
[306] jail, 1
3
security officers, warders, food and clothing, and so on, leaving about
per cent of the total to be credited to the personal accounts of the pris-
oners.
the
Anything
sum was
that they earned in this
way
\\
as then divided in two.
kept back, to be handed to the prisoner
from the camp, and the other half \\
as
at
Half
the time of his release
converted once a month into vouchers,
with which the prisoners could bu\' sweets, condensed milk, and similar luxuries in the camp shop, or even purchase additional meals in a specially instituted
"commercial" canteen.
of liberalization. The sums involved were quite small, but huge incentive to prisoners; productivity (and consequently the work tempos) rose enormously. The harsh regime was eased in other minor ways. Films were shown more frequently than before, and the secuIt
w as
a sort
they acted as
rity officers
a
somewhat
— not
relaxed their grip
pigeons could no longer survive
among
voluntarily, but because stool-
the prisoners (this was one of the few
made by the prisoners' brief rebellion). Apart from receiving good rations for his w ork in the foundry, Solzhenitsvn continued to receive monthly parcels from Natalia's aunt Nina in Rostov (paid for by Natalia). These were a "source of life" to him, as he put it in one of his letters home ("Thanks to your parcels I am alive, well, and cheerful," he had w ritten to Nina), and had helped sustain him through the preceding icy w inter and his year as a bricklayer. They contained sugar, bacon, biscuits, oatmeal, dried fruit, tobacco and occasionally luxuries like butter and sausages (and even fresh eggs, on one occasion). Nina w as also able to send him felt boots, socks, mittens, a knapsack, a kitbag, and even a pair of goggles to keep the dust out of his eyes, as w ell as domestic essentials like toothpaste, needles and thread, a sponge, a v\ooden spoon, plastic dishes, and little plastic boxes to keep things in. Just as important, in a different way, were the paper, ink, notebooks, and pencils she sent him, not to mention books by Alexei Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Koltsov, and Blok. He read a great deal of poetry in t^kibastuz, probably to help him in composing his long epic poems at the time, and he also managed to read works by Herzen, Goncharov, Chekhov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Wilkie Collins. His gratitude to Aunt Nina for her devotion and generosity was unbounded. By now she was over seventy and too old to carry the parcels to gains
—
the post office herself, enlisting the services of a
young
relative for this pur-
pose, but she never failed to meet Solzhenitsyn's requests and desires.
tobacco you sent w as out of this world, just as
wrote to her on one occasion.
my own was
to
mother."
He owed
And on
her, he
remember her kindness
"The
you yourself smoked," he
me
like
"a debt too great to be repaid,"
and
another:
felt,
if
"You
are caring for
for the rest of his life.-
more important to him now in that, tor was unable to fathom, Natalia's letters were grow ing rarer and more distant in tone. Throughout 1950 she had written regularly at the rate of one letter a month, retailing new s about her work at the Agricultural Institute, her concerts, various lectures she was tjiving, and her life in Ryazan. Nina's solicitude was
reasons he
all
the
A Son ok
(iui.AG
[3*^7]
At that time she was living in a hostel, but in February 1951 she had managed to get two rooms out of three in a communal flat in a building specially erected for teachers of the Agricultural Institute. The house was a long, low,
wooden building situated on a patch of empty ground in Kasimo\ sky Lane, on the very outskirts of Ryazan, about a twenty-minute bus ride from the communal kitchens and toilets, no bathcentre. Its facilities were modest rooms, wood-burning stoves for heating, but at least the rooms were big enough to take a grand piano, and Natalia was able to move her piano down from Moscow. Simultaneoush her mother, Maria, had moved up from Rostov to cook and clean for her. It was at about this time that Natalia had w ritten suggesting that she use her summer leave to travel out to Ekibastuz to visit her husband. It was almost a year since she had seen him last, and she was feeling desperately lonely. She no longer had her Stromvnka girl friends for company, and L\dia and Kirill were far away. Solzhenitsyn, however, had squashed the idea. "My dear little girl," he had w ritten in answer to her inquiry, "coming to me here is completely useless, because a meeting is absolutely impossible. We can see one another only three summers from now."-*^
—
,
.
Perhaps because of her disappointment o\er
this rebuff,
.
.
perhaps because
of increasing loneliness, perhaps because her husband now seemed so remote
and inaccessible (able to write only twice a year), Natalia found her feelings slowly changing. She started going out more on her own and became an active member of the newly formed R\azan chapter of the Mendeleyev Society. Ihe chapter's executive secretar\ w as a senior lecturer in chemistry at the recenth' opened Pavlov Medical Institute, \ sevolod S.,* who had moved to Ryazan from Krasnodar on the death of his wife. \ sevolod, like Natalia, seemed alone in the world, and the\' proved to have many things in common. His training was almost identical with Natalia's, he had studied (in \ oronezh) under Natalia's former professor from Rostov, and he had even applied to the Agricultural Institute at the same time as Natalia for the vacant lecturer's post that Natalia had subsequently been awarded.-^ Natalia seems to have responded cautiously to his friendship at first, but found the fact that he was ten years older than she reassuring and comforting. Apart from escorting her to and from society meetings, he discussed her chemistry lectures w ith her (he was giving identical courses at the Pavlov Institute), offered her advice, and helped her w ith her work. Natalia's mother, Maria, appears to have liked him very much. She encouraged him to drop in for a meal or a drink even w hen Natalia wasn't there and did ever\thing in her power to encourage the relationship. Despite her earlier affection for Solzhenitsyn, she regarded Natalia's continuing sacrifice of her happiness as
had offered Natalia her freedom and had expressed doubts as to whether he would ever be released. In the summer of 1951, Vsevolod had followed Natalia and her mother pointless, particularly since Solzhenitsyn himself
* \'se\ olod's
Lnion.
surname
is
omitted out of regard for members of his family
still
living in the Soviet
SOLZHENITSYN
[308]
Rostov and had asked her to marry him. She had temporized and gone to her aunt and cousins in Kislovodsk, leaving him with her mother. A letter he wrote to her in Kislovodsk appears to have stronglv affected her, for
to
visit
her
own
letter to
urallv short. "It
Solzhenitsyn from Kislovodsk came out strained and unnat-
seemed
he wrote to her
letter,"
as
though you had
at a later date.
"A
to force vourself to begin
vour
kind of reticence fettered vour
On her return to Rvazan, Vsevolod had met her at the station in a taxi, and from that time on there seems to have been a tacit understanding betw een them, although thev still did not live as man and \\ ife. tongue, and after a few lines you broke off."^"
A
determining factor
in Natalia's decision
was the
arrival in R\'azan of
V'sevolod's elder son, Sergei, then thirteen vears old. Vsevolod had not at
—
told Natalia of the existence of two children bv his former wife thev were staving with relatives in the south and he feared the news might alienate her. But he had told Maria, and she had broken the news to Natalia, and when Natalia saw Sergei, she was captivated bv his liveliness and intelligence. The child appealed to her hitherto suppressed and dormant maternal instincts and, after a period of adjustment, he was able to accept her as a friend and mother. Oddly enough, \'se\'olod, too, aroused the maternal instinct in her. Unprepossessing to look at, prematurelv old for his vears, he was even going deaf at the time thev met and learning to use a hearing aid. But first
all this,
plus his helplessness in dealing with the thirteen-vear-old Sergei,
made him more appealing. was a sudden tightening of securitv once more. The w hole country was again under siege from Stalin's security apparatus and in the winter of 1951—52, just when the situation was growing tense in Ekibastuz (and in man\' other camps), Natalia was summoned bv
only increased his evident need for mothering and
Another contributorv
factor
the chief of the Agricultural Institute's "special section" (responsible for secu-
and asked to fill out another long questionnaire like the one she had been faced with in 1948. Once more she was obliged to say that she was in the process of dissolving her marriage, and to w rite the necessarv information about Solzhenitsvn in the column marked "former husband." On this occasion, however, she resolved to complete the divorce proceedings. Since a divorce had to be announced in the newspaper, and since she did not dare jeopardize her position in Rvazan (where no one knew she was married), she travelled to Moscow gave the Turkins' flat as her home address, filled in the necessary papers, and placed an announcement in the Moscow Pravda, which was much less read than its rival the Moscow Evening News (even so someone at the sharashka spotted it).* At the same time she handed Solzhenitsyn's notebooks, manuscripts, and other papers (including his annotated copy of War and Peace) to the younger \ eronica Turkina for rity)
,
safe-keeping.
She was somewhat strengthened *The
legal formalities
February 1953.
dragged on for
a
in
her resolve bv the unhappy coinci-
while, and the divorce v\as not
made
absolute until
A Son of (iulag
f3vl
one of Solzhenitsvn's six-monthlv letters (the one due in and the approval of her friends. The loss meant that a w hole year was to go by from one letter to the next, v\ hich stretched the thin thread of their relationship to breaking point. In the meantime Lvdia Kzherets, Solzhenitsvn's as well as Natalia's friend, apjiroxed of the new marriage, and Veronica lurkina came down to Rvazan to be introduced and also gave her endorsement. In the spring of 1952, Vsevolod and Sergei moved in with Natalia and Maria on Kasimovskv Lane. le and Natalia did not go through any form of marriage ceremony but simpK announced to the world that henceforth thev would be man and \\ ife. I'his w as the position \v hen Solzhenitsvn left the hospital after his cancer operation and went to work in the foundrv. His parcels continued to dencc
ot the loss of
November
195
1)
I
(still paid for by Natalia), but her letters had now ceased, indicating something was wrong, hi March 1952 he had the chance to w rite again, and sent news of his operation, assuring everyone that he had recovered; and he must have written to Aunt Nina too, for he asked her to "clear up the
arrive
that
uncertainty" for him. She dared not do
it,
regarding
it
as Natalia's
dutv to
him the news. But Natalia was too frightened: she was unw illing to upset him so soon after his cancer operation. The whole business was to drag on until September 1952, when Aunt Nina hnallv wrote, "Natalia write and give
has asked
me
to tell
vou
that
vou mav arrange vour
life
independentiv of
her.""
Solzhenitsvn was puzzled and irritated bv this vague and roundabout means of communication uas his marriage ended or not? He wrote to Natalia again, asking her to amplify this "meaningless, enigmatic phrase" and spell out the true situation. It appears that he still hadn't given up hope of u inning her back. "No matter what you've done during the past two years," he wrote, "vou will not be guiltv in mv eves. I shall not criticize or reproach vou either in mv thoughts or my words. Neither bv mv former behaviour nor mv luckless life, which has ruined and withered vour youth, have I justified that rare, that great love that you once felt for me and that I don't believe is exhausted now. The only guiltv one is me. I have brought vou so little joy, I shall be forever in your debt."''- But it was too late. Reluctantly, Natalia wrote and informed him about her marriage, and that brought their correspondence to a close. Although we have abundant exidence in The First Circle of Solzhenitsvn's feelings about his initial separation from Natalia and their first, "fictitious" divorce, we can only guess at his feelings on learning the truth of this genuine divorce, and Natalia's love for another man. What slender evidence we have suggests that he was incensed and mortallv jealous. Despite his lofty declarations of Natalia's right to leave him and seek her happiness elsew here, he seems not to have believed that she would do so; and when, at the time of their fictitious divorce in 1949, she had assured him of her continuing love and lovaltv, he had confessed, with his usual candour, that that was w hat he had wanted all along. But now the separation was irrevocable, and it seems
—
—
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[310]
that Solzhenitsvn's attitude to his rival
He
terness.
later called
him
was one of deep resentment and
bit-
"a scoundrel tor tempting into marriage a wife
whose husband was still among the living."'^ He was now into the last year of his sentence and beginning to look forw ard to his release. He knew that it was not guaranteed. There had been innumerable instances of prisoners' being charged and sentenced in the final months of their prison term, or simply not being released at all. Even if he was allowed to go, he had been told he could never return to central Russia but was destined for "perpetual" exile. Nevertheless, he had survived the purge of camp trouble-makers that had carried off Panin, Boroniuk, and the
unquenchable optimism he looked forward to making la\' ahead. To Aunt Nina he wrote a request for textbooks on arithmetic, geometrv, and other mathematical subjects. He would trv to become a schoolteacher again. With his prison record, it could and with
others,
the best of
only be
\\
at a
his
hatever opportunities
humble
level in
some
out-of-the-v\'a\' village or small settlement,
hat she sent
him should not be
the standard text-
but he
still
insisted that
books.
On
geometrv, for instance, he specified an older book, "where the
\v
problems for construction." As Reshetovskava points out memoirs, "He w as sure that a person with a mathematics degree, vv ho had worked at mathematics in a sharashka as well, would certainly not have forgotten it and could easilv teach it in a village school. But \\ hat Solzhenitsyn wanted \\ as something for himself, some sort of inner satisfaction, so that even in a village school he w ould be almost a reformer in the method of teaching mathematics. He would conduct his courses on the highest-possible
text offers lots of in her
level.
"'^
In April 1952, when he was studying these books in his spare time, he was surprised bv a summons to see the securitv officer. For a moment he feared that he was not to be released after all, but it turned out that his old school friend Kirill Simonvan was being investigated by the MGB in Moscow. Kirill was now a leading surgeon in a Moscow hospital and w as making a brilliant career for himself (among other things, as the author of some medical monographs). He had separated from Lvdia Ezherets after a short and unsatisfactorv marriage, but in all other respects seemed to be flourishing. Solzhenitsvn w as asked, for reasons he could not fathom, to testify to Simonyan's "anti-Soviet attitudes" and to confirm the testimony he had given during his investigation in 1945. But he refused. Although not ashamed of the answers he had given Captain Ezepov as a green young prisoner seven years before, he was not proud of them either. As a camp veteran, he now knew how unnecessarv it had been to try to answer at all. He did not confirm his former testimony, but on the contrarv renounced it as extracted under duress. Kirill, he said, was a model Soviet citizen. The exact nature of the events surrounding Kirill's arrest and interrogation is still not clear, but from a later, rather garbled account of the matter by Kirill, and from the guarded comments of one or tw o people who knew him in later life,'' it is possible to reconstruct an approximate picture ot w hat
A Son OK must have taken
place.
of homosexual charge (it
It
appears that
(iui.AG kirill
had been detained on some
— homosexuality was (and
uas homosexuality, apparentlv, that had
marriage to Lydia).
I
3
I
is)
a
crime
led to the
i
)
sort
Union
in the Soviet
break-up of
i
Kirill's
laving arrested Kirill, the security organs looked
at his
and presumably discovered his involvement with Solzhenitsvn. Kirill had not been implicated enough to be questioned at the time, but the "anti-So\'iet" character ot Solzhenitsyn's crime offered a convenient weapon w ith u hich to threaten Kirill now, and that was presumably why Solzhenitsvn \v as asked to "confirm" Kirill's anti-Soviet views. Solzhenitsvn's refusal must have been file
rather inconvenient for Kirill's investigator, but the latter chose to ignore
and showed
it
copy of Solzhenitsyn's 1945 testimony as if it were fresh. Kirill (like Solzhenitsyn himself and the rest of their group) was depicted there as a "harmless" malcontent, socially at odds with the tone of Soviet society and dissatisfied with many of its minor manifestations. Reading it in 1952, however, when the\ were all seven years older, and with the eves of a badly frightened man, Kirill w as horrified: it looked like an act of betrayal. Having achieved his purpose of scaring Kirill half to death, the investigator Kirill a
appears then to have offered him some sort of deal his hospital colleagues,
—perhaps
to
inform on
perhaps to perform some other kind of service.
perhaps he was simply kept
some
Or
Whatever it v\as, it had nothing to do with Solzhenits\'n at the time, but it cast a shadow over Kirill's life that was to stay with him until his death, and for which he was to hold Solzhenitsyn chiefly responsible. It also spelled (unbeknownst to in reserve for
later occasion.
Solzhenitsyn) the death of their friendship.
Solzhenitsyn spent the rest of 1952 labouring in the foundry, reading
up on mathematics, and working away steadily at his poetry. His long, autobiographical poem. The Way, had spawned two independent works: Prussian Nights, a verse narrative, and Feast of the Conquerors, a verse play, both of them about his experiences with the advancing Red Army in East Prussia. In the course of 1952 he started a second play, Decembrists icithout December,^
based on his experiences in the Smersh prison
at
Brodnitz, and wrote a
ber of shorter poems, most of which have never been published.
was
later
published, with the enigmatic
title
able light on Solzhenitsyn's developing views
The poem was
a meditation
on the
num-
One
that
of "Russia?" throws consider-
on Russian
history.
poet's search for the "real" Russia, a
Russia of "forthright men," "impassioned cranks," "welcoming doors," and as he put it, where you did not kick a man when he was down, where slavishness was not the norm, and where the wisdom of one's ancestors was not ignored. The poet's aim was not just to praise Russia's
"broad tables,"
and ignore her faults but also to recover a sense of the true nature of homeland. This nature, he felt, was one that could do "without the Slavs without the sacred sword!" Wars and conquest were and v\'arm waters virtues his
.
*This plav
v\as later
.
.
renamed The
Solzhenitsyn's Collected
\\ orks.
Captives
and appears under that
title in
the Paris edition of
SOLZHENITSYN
[312]
unnecessary to Russia, for they had brought only grief and disaster, especially to the
other nations that had suffered from Russia's might.
We
have become universally hated. Everywhere we shall be crucified, Thev will slaughter us on the \ istula, And in China build us funeral pvres.
The
Tartar's indelible birthmark and the foulness of Stalinist filth Have marked us all! Thrice cursed Will be Russia's name henceforth.
Yet there was a
tin\'
morsel of hope.
the true, unique Russia
was
still
However
delicate
and
fragile she
remained,
cherished in the hearts of her hundred mil-
and this Russia had still to make herself heard. theme had appeared in some passages in The Way, written a few months earlier, \\ here Solzhenitsyn had addressed Russia as "mv homeland, mv shame," as an accursed, pitiless, ridiculous, insensate native land, unworthy of the name of mother, yet one that he could not help loving immoderately. This time he had sought the blame not only in the Tartar yoke and Stalinist excesses but also in Russian history, and particularly in the unbridled criticism and ridicule that generations of Russian w riters had heaped on their homeland. "Thank you, fathers of the enlightenment! You wanted to ease our way! Yon sowed with great impatience nov\' admire what we have reaped!" Solzhenitsyn's own generation, he felt, had helped to make things worse, by living too much on the surface and not seeing through to the essence of things. Only arrest and imprisonment had opened his eyes lion people,
A
similar
—
to the truth.
'^
Exile for Solzhenitsyn
was only months away.
He
later
wrote
in
The
Gulag Archipelago that in his eight years in prison and the camps, he had never
good word about exile, yet "the dream of exile burns like mind, a flickering, iridescent mirage." It was a dream he himself had cherished from the earliest days of his imprisonment, even if he had thrust it away during the middle years of his sentence. Now, at last, it was to be realized. Although he tried to fight down the hopes that involuntarily rose within him, to preserve a cold indifference, and to remain faithful to the stoicism he had worked so hard to acquire during his three years in Ekibastuz, he could not entirely suppress a feeling of muted exaltation. And yet, mixed with these hopes were feelings of regret. "Only on the threshold of the guardhouse," he later wrote, "do you begin to feel that what you are leaving behind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse of 'freedom.' "^' Solzhenitsyn's sentence ended officially on 9 February 1953. Four days heard anyone say
a
a secret light in the prisoner's
—
A Son of CiLlag
I
i
•
^
1
together with a group of other released prisoners, he was led out of the main camp gates under armed guard and marched to the railway station. Superstition decreed that you should never lo(jk hack at vour last prison; otherw ise vou w ere doomed to return there. According to another tradition, you should throw your spoon at it, so that it didn't pursue vou (alternatively, you should not leave the spoon behind; otherwise you would be obliged to return for it). Solzhenitsyn decided to take his spcKm w ith him. He had moulded it personally in the Kkibastuz foundry and v\anted it as a keepsake. .At the railway station Solzhenitsyn's group mingled with hundreds of other prisoners brought there from other camps in the gigantic Karaganda complex. Together the\' v\ere loaded into a long prison train and set off once more for an unknow n destination. later,
i8
EXILED "IN PERPETUITY"
FIRST few davs of journey, FOR THE he had followed three years his
that
this
Solzhenitsvn retraced the route
earlier in
coming
to Ekibastuz, only
time in reverse: north to the old-fashioned prison of Pavlodar, north-east
Omsk, with
shades of Dostovevskv, and east to Novosibirsk. Again same surlv armed guards, the howling dogs, the crowded Stolvpins. It was hard to believe that all this presaged release. But in Omsk a good-natured warder, marvelling at their good fortune, informed five of them that they were being sent south. And in Novosibirsk they were put on
to
its
there were the
a train that did indeed crawl south
—through the dustv wilderness of
Kazakhstan, skirting Lake Balkhash, to Alma-Ata.
due west
to the regional administrative centre of
From
east
there thev travelled
Dzhambul, on the very
midway between Alma-Ata and Tashkent. Thev arrived in Dzhambul in the dead of night and w ere transferred bv lorry, still under armed escort, to the town jail. The next morning thev w ere moved to the local MVD headquarters, where a lieutenant informed them that thev had all been assigned to the district of Kok Terek, on the southern fringe of Kazakhstan's vast desert of Bet-Pak-Dala. A brown sheet of paper border of Kirghizia,
was shoved across the desk at Solzhenitsvn informing him that from this day hence he was to be exiled to the district of Kok I'erek "in perpetuitv" and that in the case of unauthorized departure he could be sentenced to tw enty
imprisonment with hard labour. This w as the first official confirmation had been sentenced to exile as well as imprisonment, but it came as no surprise. All prisoners released from Ekibastuz, w hether or not exile figured in their sentences, were obliged to go into exile. After signing the document, Solzhenitsvn w rote a satirical epigram that ended:
years'
that he
3
'4
— F.
I
sign
w
X
11.
F.
o
" D " N PF RPETU TY I
m\
ith a flourish,
I
heart
is
I
3
'
5
]
Hght.
Like the Alps, basalt or the firmament,
Like the stars (no, not those on \our shoulders so bright!)
Oh, enviable
fate,
I
But can everv word,
Can
the
am permanent! I
wonder, be truer
MGB be permanent too?'
Solzhenits\n and his companions
\\
ere confined to a small
davs, before being marched back to the station.
From
room
for
t\\
bv had come, in the direction of Alma-Ata. But halfwav there, in the small town of Chu, thev were unloaded and made to continue on foot. It w as stiflingly hot, and the members of the group, having cultivated the convict's habit of acquiring and retaining as man\' clothes as possible, were terriblv overdressed. Solzhenitsvn himself was wearing long underpants and his twill trousers, two paddetl jackets (one filched during stock-taking at the camp), and his old, threadbare arm\ greatcoat, w hich he had faithfully treasured since the dav of his arrest eight vears beforehand in East Prussia. In addition, thev all had kitbags and suitcases to carr\ 1 hev trudged for six miles along a dustv road until darkness fell, w hen thev were locked up for the night in the jailhouse of the hamlet of Novotroitsk. The follow ing da\ a lorrx' came to collect them and carried them bumpilv over the last fortv miles to Kok Terek. It was 3 March 1953, just eighteen da\s since Solzhenits\n had been marched out of Kkibastuz. Thev were still to all intents and purposes prisoners under armed guard, and in Kok Terek their destination was inevitabh- the .\I\ I) station, where thev were interrogated b\' an officer of the MGB and asked to fill out a questionnaire and to w rite dow n a curriculum vitae. 1 he\' were issued w ith spetrain
back the w
a\"
there the\' set off
the\"
.
cial identity
cards indicating their status as exiles (thev
have the usual internal passport) and informed that
allow ed to
wished
to travel
Kok lerek for anv reason, the\" could do so onlv w ith permit from the M\'D. Even then the\' had to indicate their desti-
bevond the a special
w ere not
if the\'
district of
nation, the dates of their journcN' there and back, and the place
would be
sta\ ing
w here
the\-
while awav. In the meantime, in Kok lerek, thev were
MVD tw ice a month. MVD
obliged to report to the
Opposite the station Solzhenitsvn had spotted the village school, a low thatched adobe building with an incongruous, neo-classical stone portico stuck on the front. \\ hen the questioning was over, he asked casually ,
where the
district
education office was to be found.
When
the
MCiB
officer
there would be no objection
answ ered his quer\- serioush', he deduced that to his applying for a job there, and permission to go to the education office was granted at once. \\ ithin a few minutes Solzhenitsx n found himself w alking normally dow n the street for the first time in eight \ears. He almost had to
pinch himself to make sure that he w I
W ith
dreaming.
s the meaning of this great free word. I am no sub-machine-guns threatening me from either
wonder w hether evervbod\- know
walking along by myself!
as not
-
SOLZHENITSYN
[316] flank or
from the
rear.
I
look behind me: no one there!
right-hand side past the school fence, v^here a big pig if
I
like,
I
can
v\
on the
alk
left,
where hens
is
It
I
Hke,
I
can take the
rooting in a puddle.
And
and scratching immedi-
are strutting
ately in front of the district education othce. I
walk the two hundred yards
for eternity,
is
already just a
relaxed. In the course of those
higher
to the office,
straighter,
little
my spine, \\ hich my manner already
and
two hundred yards,
I
seemed bent more
a little
haye graduated to the next-
ciyil estate.
Putting on his usual bold front, Solzhenitsyn \yalked into the education office and, just as casually as
that he would
like to
become
when
speaking to the
a teacher.
The two
MGB officer,
announced Kazakh school inspec-
stout
—
in these remote parts, everytors he found inside \\ ere surprised to see him one knew everyone, especially in a professional field like education. He explained that he w as an exile, and after disappearing into an inner sanctum for a while, they emerged to beckon him inside. There he was greeted coolly and circumspectly by the director, "a small, lithe, attractive Kazakh woman about her," who questioned him about his qualiw ith something feline fications and his past career. What clearly interested her most were the reasons for his imprisonment, but Solzhenitsyn brazenly replied that they were .
.
.
and that he was not at liberty to tell her.' She responded by telling him that she had no vacancies for teachers of mathematics and physics. Solzhenitsyn already knew this to be untrue. When the two inspectors had left the outer office, he had got into conversation w ith the typist, a plump, middle-aged Russian woman of about fifty who was herself a former prisoner, and she had told him that Kok Terek v\ as extremely short of mathematics teachers. As for teachers of physics, there wasn't one in the entire district. But there was nothing he could say or do. The three Kazakhs w ere obvioush' frightened by his exile status and in the end compromised by asking him to fill out vet another questionnaire (in duplicate) and write out another curriculum vitae. Ihev would let him know, they said,
a state secret
if a
vacancy occurred.
Solzhenitsyn returned to the MV'D station w ith its makeshift adobe lockofficers here had been affected by the easygoing southern Even the ways of the Kazakhs, and no move was made to lock the new arrivals up for the night; thev were allowed to sleep on some bundles of hay in the yard. This first night out of prison, under the stars, was never to be forgotten by Solzhenitsyn, w ho wrote lyrical descriptions of how it affected him in both Cancer Weird and The Gulag Archipelago. Here is how he expressed it in
MVD
up.
the latter l)ook.
A
night under the open sky!
We
had forgotten what
I
it
was
like.
There had
had no thought of sleep. walked and walked and walked about the prison yard, which was bathed in
always been locks and bars, always walls and soft,
warm
trough,
a
light.
A
cart left
where
it
ceilings.
I
had been unhitched,
a well, a
drinking
small hayrick, the black shadows of horses under an open shed
—
it
was
"in I^ERPl TUITY"
F'"XILED all
Ii'T]
so peaceful, so ancient, so tree troni the cruel imprint ot the
only the third of March, but there was not the slightest almost summer\
M\
1).
It
the night
chill in
was
air.
It
had been in the daxtime. Again anti again the bra\ ing of donkevs rose over the spraw ling \ illage lA Kok lerek, long-draw n-
was
still
,
as
it
out and passionate, telling the she-asses of their love, of the ungovernable strength
Some ot
flooding their bodies.
the braying
w as probably
the she-asses answ ering.
found it difficult to distinguish one voice from another, but that powerful bass bellowing was perhaps the noise of camels. I felt that if onlv had a voice, I, I
I
would
too,
able to
baying
start
at
the moon:
shall
I
As Solzhenitsvn w
shall
be
Olcg Kostoglotov, "On that times he had vowed look on the gloom v side, the opti-
rote in Cancer \Vi/nI of
never to do either."' Despite his desire to
him
The
I
mo\e around!^
night he believed and hoped again, no matter
mist in
be able to breathe here!
as
\\
how many
unquenchable.
following dav the exiles were allow ed to look for private lodgings.
Solzhenitsvn found
a
room
in a tin\'
mud
hut whose roof was so low that he
w indow and an earthen floor. bed he simply laid his padded jacket on the floor and slept on that. There were no amenities of anv kind he did not even have an oil lamp as but just to be alone in the dark \\ as sheer vet (electricitv was unthinkable) bliss after all those vears of cells and barrack huts glaringh- lit bv da\- and
couldn't stand
For
up
inside, with a single, fogged
a
—
—
night.
On
March 1953, Solzhenitsvn was roused l)v Mrs Chadova, w ho seemed terribly agitated. "Go to the
the verv next morning, 6
his elderly landlady,
square and listen to what the loudspeakers are saving," she asked w hv, she whispered, "I'm frightened to
tell
said.
When
\ou, I'm frightened to
he tell
vou."^ In the main square Solzhenitsvn found a crowd of about two hundred
people listening to
a radio
announcement
that Stalin
had died. The old men
had bared their heads and w ere openh' grief-stricken. Others looked mournful,
and onh
a
few of the vounger
men seemed
unconcerned.
Solzhenitsvn w as not merel\- unconcerned, he wanted to jump for joy.
His arch-enemv was dead.
The man w ho had come
to personif\ tor
him
all
the evils and penersions of the Soviet system, author of the monstrous labour
camps and monarch of the archipelago
(for criticizing
whom
Solzhenitsyn
had been flung into the abxss), had come to the end of his intamous lite. Women and girls wept openlv in the street, dabbing their eyes w ith their handkerchiefs. Concealing his real feelings and setting his face in a suitably solemn expression, Solzhenits\n left the square and returned to Chadova's hut. Fhe rest of the dav was spent w riting a commemorative poem in honour of this signal occasion,
"The
Fifth of
March."*
(Chadova's hut was not suitable for a long stay, and Solzhenitsyn found
another room with a young couple called Yakov and Katerina Melnichuk, on
Sadovava
Street.
Their clav hut w
asn't
much
bigger than Chadova's but w as
*()thciallv the equivalent of S 100, unofticiaiiy less than half of that
amount
in present values.
SOLZHENITSYN
[318]
somewhat
better
equipped and allowed him more room. Katerina Melnichuk
later described her
He came hands.
I
.
.
.
first
impression of him.
and put
his
wooden
suitcase
down by
We
shook
were in a dreadful state. Yakov, mv husband, picked up his suitcase and "Oho! It's heavy! What have vou got in there books?" "Yes, books," he
clothes said,
the front door.
could see that he was well-mannered and very good looking, but his
—
said.
He used to burn the bunk out of boxes in the kitchen. would have been asleep for ages, but he used to stay up till all hours reading bv the oil lamp or writing something. He was strange. Soon after he arrived, I boiled some potatoes in their jackets and turned them out onto a plate. He picked up a potato, rolled it about in his hands and suddenly bit into it. I was alarmed. "What are you doing, Sasha? Peel it first." But he only smiled at me. He was remembering old times, I expect.
We made
midnight
him
a
oil a lot.
.
Katerina recalled his getting up earh' for long
.
.
We
walks over the steppe
if it
w as
—
fine.
—
morning and going w as not, he used to pace the sharashka. She told him
at six in the
When
it
up and down the garden, just as he used to do in to rest more and not push himself so hard, but he simply smiled and said he couldn't help it, it was w hat he w as used to. Solzhenitsvn now had time to look at his situation and surroundings more carefully. Exile as an institution had been common in Russia for centuries bv the beginning of the twentieth century there were about a quarter of a million Russians in internal exile at any one time. After the Revolution the new Soviet leaders promised that exile, like all the other repugnant features of the tsarist regime, would be abolished; but, like all the other repugnant features, it was not only not abolished it was adapted and intensified a hundredfold. Ihe numbers sent into exile had taken an exponential leap with collectivization in the years after 1929. Throughout the thirties and forties, many millions were sent into exile, including, during or after the war, whole peoples, such as the Yolga Germans, the Crimean Tartars, and the Meskhetians. After 1948 it had also become the accepted practice to send almost all prisoners convicted under Article 58 ("anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda") into exile w hen they had served their sentences, regardless ot what those sentences had stipulated. Kazakhstan had long been familiar w ith the phenomenon of exile. In 1930 the Kazakhs had rebelled against the policy of collectivization, and Marshal Budenny and his famed Cossack cavalry had been sent to suppress the revolt, w hich they did w ith their usual brutal efficiency, hacking dow n the
—
—
precious trees (in a very dr\ land) of rebellious peasants and putting a torch to their
become
homesteads. Since then, Kazakhstan, with a
prime
repositor\' for exiles. In the
was an ethnic mixture of great
varietx',
its
Kok Terek
empty
spaces, had
district alone, there
including Kazakhs and Russians, large
contingents of Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Greeks from the Kuban, Che-
chens from the Caucasus, Koreans from the Far East, and representatives of
—
^
F",
just
about
Many Kok 1
X
1 1. F,
D "in P K R P
J
I
U IT Y
" L
of them had arrived in the years just before and after the
erek,
3
'
9J
other nation in the Soviet empire.
c\ cr\'
and
its
central \illage of Berhk,
rapid and mainl\' unplanned development. sort of settlement,
When
,
It
\\
ar.
had consec|uentl\ undergone
was
a
sprawling, featureless
with about four thousand inhabitants, most of them
exiles.
Sol/Jienitsvn arrived, the village had no church or m()sc]ue but pos-
sessed a cinema and a co-operative store.
1 here w as not a single asphalt road Dust was everywhere, and when it rained the roads became a quagmire and impassable. If a vehicle happened to be out in the steppe when it rained, or even on the outskirts of the village, it had to be abandoned or until the rain stopped and the roads dried out. For the driver stayed with it this reason, there were few vehicles in use, and the villagers preferred mules,
in the place.
—
—
donke\s, horses, or camels.
The main
occupation in the area was agriculture, mostly
cattle- and though the authorities were trying to encourage more arable agriculture, especially the grow ing of sugar beet. This was made difficult by the long, hot summers and frequent droughts, but a series of irrigation channels had been dug to bring w ater from the river (^hu, and in Kok 1 erek itself there w as an intricate netw ork of irrigation ditches feeding the individual farms and holdings. Most water went to the state collective farm, run bv Kazakhs, but private peasants w ere allowed to have water about once every three to four weeks, and then there was a tremendous hustle and bustle throughout the village. Competition for the water was fierce, leading to jostling and even fights, and since the water was often given at awkward times in the middle of the night or at dawn uproar was almost endemic. For the first month or so after his arrival, Solzhenitsyn remained without work. He continued to badger the people in the education office, but they were visibly frightened by his political past and after a w hile refused to receive him at all. They even produced a document signed by the regional education office stating that all the schools in the Kok Terek district were fully staffed w ith mathematics teachers and had no need of more. Since the MV D had paid him the money earned and saved at Ekibastuz, he was in no immediate need and decided to bide his time. B\' going to the tea-room once a day for two rubles' worth of hot broth and by subsisting on potatoes, bread, and dripping, he w as able to make his money go a long way. Thrift w as by now second nature to him. In the meantime he occupied himself w ith w riting out the verse he had composed and memorized in the camps. One day he was unexpectedly stopped in the street bv an .\1\ D officer and told to go w ith him. The officer led the way to the district consumer cooperative, a wholesale enterprise responsible for supplying all the shops in Kok Terek, and ordered him to start working there. He v\'as signed on immediately as a "planning officer," with no questions asked, at a princely salarx' of 450 rubles a month,* and set to work.
livestock-rearing,
—
* Officially the equivalent of $100, unofficially less than half of that
amount.
SOLZHENITSVN
[320]
had been enlisted, it transpired, to help cope w ith the annual crisis brought on by the Soviet custom of holding a grandiose, nation-wide "sale" of consumer goods every 1 April. The whole exercise was little better than a propaganda trick, for no more than a few copecks w ere ever dropped from each item. Nevertheless, everv single article for sale was affected, and this meant that everv wholesale distributor and ever\- retail shop in the country was obliged to make an inventory of its stock and set the new prices (w hich were centrally determined, of course). Since the task had to be accomplished
He
almost overnight,
it
in\ariabl\ created chaos every year.
Solzhenitsvn was quickh follow ed into the co-operative offices by tw o other unemployed exiles, V. I. \ asilenko, a former ship's captain who had
and Grigori Samsilovich, who was became friends. All three were put to work beside the fifteen permanent staff, w ho w ere already poring over enormous inv -ntories and furiously clicking their abacuses. It was a simple
same
arrived in the still
a stranger to
part\- as Solzhenitsxn,
him, although they
later
and intenseh- boring bookkeeping operation, not at all to Solzhenitsyn's taste, but there w as nothing to do but give in and get on with it. Even so, it w as not in Solzhenitsyn's temperament to obey orders blindly.
by the slow ness of working out all his sums on paper, he asked for machine. No one seemed to know w hat it w as at first, and no one in Kok Terek knew how to use one, but somebody remembered that there w as one in the district statistics office, and eventually this w as procured Irritated
a calculating
for Solzhenitsyn's use.
A
more
spectacular piece of effronter\' followed about a
the going began to get tougher.
week
The obese Kazakh chairman
later,
w hen
of the co-oper-
and announced that since they were and since the matter w as urgent, everyone would henceforth be required to work from seven in the morning until tw o the next morning, w ith an hour's break for lunch and another for supper, making a seventeen-hour day. Solzhenitsyn was appalled by this news, not least because he w as deep into his verse pla\- and knew that this would deprive him of the time needed to w ork on it. He already resented working at the co-op at all. Seventeen hours was out of the question. And he ative called the entire staff into his office
so badh' behind with the repricing exercise
marvelled at the sheeplike
employees
as
w ell
way
as the exiles,
in
which everybody, including the
free
accepted this despotic injunction without a
murmur. As a
political exile he could not \oice his objections aloud. He would have been accused of ideological sabotage. But nobody else spoke up, so he resolved on a course of action that he had learned from experience in the camps not to answer back, but simply to ignore the instructions and do
—
what he w anted. At
five o'clock
I
the morning. All ing to count.
rose from
mv
Thev
mv
desk and
left.
.\nd
I
did not return until nine
in
colleagues were already sitting there, counting or pretend-
looked
at
me
as
though
I
were crazy. [Grigori Samsilovich],
.
"in Pfrpktlitv"
l-.xii.KU
who
l.^^'l
sccrcth approxcd otnix hchaxiour but elaixd not imitate nic, infornuxl
privately that the boss hatl stood oxer ni\ cnipt\ desk screaming that he
dri\e
me
a
hundred kilometres
mc
would
into the desert.''
w rites that w hen he heard this, his heart w as in his month, w as quite \\ ithin the chairman's pow crs to get him expelled from Kok Terek. But miraculously the chairman elid nothing. Kazakh letharg\ smalltovyn dilatoriness, and the faint beginnings of a more liberal era following the uncertainty caused by the cleath of Stalin combined to favour him with an unexpected immunitw and he was left alone. 1 he chairman even looked away w hen he passed him in the corridor. S()l/hcnits\ n
for
it
,
Solzhenitsxn's stubbornness and self-conhdence were s(X)n to be rew arded
new way. The superintendent ot studies at the Berlik school, Zeinegata Svrvmbetoy, a \oung Kazakh and prominent member of the local Party organization, had been very impressed w ith Solzhenits\n w hen he first came to ask for a job. This "tall, skinny man w ith the pale face and deep-sunken eves" had struck him as rather comical at their first meeting, w ith his faded cavalry breeches, patched boots, and the mangy fur cap that he nervously kneaded in his lap. But Solzhenitsvn's seriousness and self-confidence had won Svrxmbetov over, while his academic qualifications in ph\"sics and mathematics were well nigh irresistible.'" The one objection to employing him had been the virtually insurmountable one of Solzhenitsvn's political past. One couldn't be too careful. But after he had been w orking for about a month in the co-operative, Solzhenitsvn received a call from Svr\mbetoy. The latter was on his wa\' to a trade-union meeting at the Dzhambul Regional Education Office and w anted a copy of Solzhenitsx n's diploma to take w ith him. He w as determined to employ him if he could and w as prepared to take whatever political risks were necessarv In Dzhambul, S\Tymbeto\- pointed out to the regional director of education that it was absurd to have such a highly qualified teacher in the village and not use him. The regional director agreed and personally signed an order appointing Solzhenits\n teacher of mathematics, ph\sics, and astronomy in the Kirov High School in Berlik, thus bxpassing the local officials w ho had in a
been blocking his entry." Solzhenitsvn was overjoyed. Prom the very day of his arrival in Kok Terek, the tide of desire to return to his old profession had been running high.
"To
and run
To feel myself a man again! To sweep into the class-room burning eves over childish faces!"'" The determined \oung
teach!
mv
superintendent had rescued him. Solzhenits\n began teaching immediately after the Ma\' holida\s; he later
described his emotions in The Gulag Archipelago.
Shall
I
describe the happiness
the chalk? This ship:
I
was
reallv the
stopped noticing
all
gave
me
to
day of
my
release, the restoration of
it
go into the class-room and pick up
the other things that
made up
the
life
my
citizen-
of an exile.
SOLZHENITSYN
[322] \\
school.
hen I
I
\\
as in Ekibastuz,
w ould look
at
it
as at
our column w as often marched past the
some
local
inaccessible paradise, at the children running
and the tinkle of the bell from seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a class-room carrying a register as the bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders." at the teachers in bright dresses,
about the vard,
me
the front steps cut
...
to the heart.
It
Characteristically, he noted that although nostalgia
was
and
his teacher's
bv his needed the contrast after years of humiliation, after years of knowing that mv talents were unwanted." His talents w ere certainly w anted in Kok Terek, where he was immediately asked to take the top two classes in physics and mathematics. He found them "tragically unprepared" for their leaving examinations, due in a month's time, and threw himself joyously into the herculean task of making up for lost time. "I prescribed additional evening classes, group discussions, field-work, astronomical observations, and they turned up in greater numbers and higher spirits than if the\' had been going to the cinema."'^ instinct explained this craving for the class-room,
hunger
ith
the time
came
w as
for the examinations, the superintendent
afflicted
an access of sudden doubt. Perhaps Solzhenitsvn was rusty and had
forgotten his mathematics and ph\sics in the camps? to check.
Syr\mbetov, the onh man
had been so o\erjoyed
to find
There had been no time
Kok Ferek w ith a university degree, another university man that he had rushed him in
manage w as desperate to
into the school as fast as he could
it.
of his school-leavers and
tr\'
if
also dictated
for esteem: "I
When w
it
I
le knew of the low standards and improve them. But what
he had blundered?
The
Soviet educational system calls for leaving examinations to be taken
—
and w
from the Minopened by the teacher in the presence of his pupils and then written up on the blackboard. This is to ensure that no one know s the questions in advance. \\ hen the packet of the superinquestions arrived in Kok Terek a da\' or two early, as usual in
two
istry
parts
oral
of Education in
ritten.
Ihe w
Moscow and
ritten questions are sent
are supposed to be
—
—
tendent called Solzhenitsxn and the other mathematics teachers into his
office,
and instructed Solzhenitsvn to answer the questions in the presence of the other teachers. To Svrvmbetov's delight, Solzhenits\n answered them all w ithf)ut difficulty. A similar incident occurred two days later, w hen the examination was illegalK'
broke open the
seal,
taking place. In the villages and hamlets around
Kok Terek,
the seventh-year
pupils were taking a similar leaving examination at a lower level. Suddenly the telephone rang in S\r\mbetov's office, and a teacher from one ot the
came on the line: "We can't solve the questions! 1 he answers coming out all wrong!" Soon another teacher rang in, and then a third. 1 he despairing superintendent summoned Solzhenits\n and asked him w hether he could answer the se\enth-class questions as well. Solzhenitsyn complied, village schools
are
and the chastened superintendent rang back each of the schools
in turn.'^
EX
I
LE
D " N PKRPKTUn Y
"
I
[
3 - 3
J
This farcical episode reflected the abvsmall\- low educational standards prevailing in Kazakhstan. Man\- of the village teachers had had onl\' seven
vears of schooling, and there were other features of the local svstem that
w as meawas an excellent idea, but in practice, owing to a lack of inspection and an\- means of verification, it simplv led to teachers' awarding high marks indiscriminatelx". 1 his academic inflation was reinforced by pressure from local officials to ensure that their children got good marks, regardless of performance, and bv a general unwillingness on the part of the teachers to upset their superiors. LastK', there were militated against excellence. For instance, a teacher's performance
sured
b\- his
examination
results. In
theorv
it
the peculiar effects of positive discrimination in fa\ our of Asia,
were doing
To
women.
In Central
women had
this
their
been traditionallv oppressed, and the Soviet authorities best to change things and offer incentives to Kazakh women.
end, they had introduced quotas for examination passes bv
women
and similar quotas for places in institutes of higher education; but since not enough Kazakh women were qualified to take them, the quotas were filled with unqualified candidates.
Manv
depressing educational standards
still
of these ended up as teachers, thus further.
Solzhenits\n \\ as irritated and affronted bv this sort of pettx' corruption, which flourished both inside and outside the school. One source of such corruption was the precarious situation of the exiles. Of the four thousand inhabitants ot Kok 1 erek, a majoritv were exiles, who were reminded at ever\' turn of their position as second-class citizens and their dependence on the goodwill of the authorities. These reminders usualh' took the form of requests for "loans," accompanied b\- threats of dismissal if the exiles proved uncooperative.
Within the school the unofficial loans w ere svstematized in the form of deduction made from teachers' salaries ever\' pav-dav, and the headmaster would regularlv demand fiftv rubles from each teacher towards a "present" for one of his daughters' birthdavs, or call individual a twenty-five ruble
teachers into his stud\' to "request" a loan of
up
to fi\e
hundred
rubles. Before
graduation, the parents of Kazakh pupils w ere obliged to contribute a half or
—
whole sheep to the school in w hich case a certificate w as guaranteed, even the pupil had failed and w hen the local Partx' bosses took correspondence courses to improve their qualifications and pav (w hich they frequenth did), it was the teachers at the school who answered the questions and completed a
—
if
the written tests for them.'''
Much of this simplv reflected the oriental social arrangements and tribal customs of traditional Kazakh societ\-, but it w as compounded b\" the corrupt centralized power of the Part\' hierarchx" and the weakness of the law Nor were matters helped bv the passive complicitv of the exiles themselves. As ex-prisoners, thev expected to be ill treated and to be obliged to knuckle .
under,
w hich made
Yet there w
Serb and
as
their oppressors' task that
nothing inevitable about
a colleague of Solzhenitsvn's,
had
it.
much
easier.
Georgi Mitrovich, an elderb
built a formidable reputation for
SOLZHENITSYN
[324]
all forms of corruption and backsliding, although he had served ten years for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity" and was an exile. A livestock expert by profession, he had once worked in the district agricultural department, but had been sacked for exposing the local Party leaders' practice of exchanging their cows for better ones from the collective farm herd or of having their private cows fed and fattened at the collective farm's expense. After that he had been transferred to the district health department, where a similar series of events occurred, and had then moved to Solzhenitsvn's school, where he continued in the same vein, exposing ille-
himself as a scourge of
galities at teachers'
meetings, writing complaints to the regional authorities,
and even dispatching telegrams to Khrushchev. He was dismissed for a while from teaching, then reinstated, then transferred to another school, and came w ithin a hair's breadth of being rearrested, but he persisted with his fight for justice.
Solzhenitsvn did not submit meeklv to the system either, refusing to award high marks for favours and rejecting, when it came, a request for a loan from the head of the
Kok Terek
education department. But although he
admired and became friendly with Mitrovich and shared his indignation, he did not support him in his campaigns. Mitrovich was somewhat protected by the fact that he was now old and in bad health, and as a faithful Leninist (something that struck an answering chord in Solzhenitsyn emotionally, if no longer intellectualK), he could attack the system "from the left," w hich earned him a certain degree of indulgence. Solzhenitsyn, however, had moved other direction and could not afford to give rein to his real opinions. Consequenth' he kept quiet, and to avoid voting against Mitrovich would in the
find a pretext to slip
away from meetings before
a
vote was taken.'
A
more compelling reason for Solzhenitsyn's pation w ith his w riting. From the moment of his
silence
was
arrival in
his preoccu-
Kok Terek, he
had devoted every minute of his spare time to it, despite the difficult conditions and the necessity for absolute secrecy. For the first three weeks he had had nothing else to distract him and had made splendid progress. Then had come the job at the consumer co-operative and then the teaching, so that ever\'
moment was now
precious to him.
dow n onto paper everything that he had composed and memorized in Ekibastuz. Above all, this meant The Way (now somewhat ambitiously called a "novel in verse"),* which he was at last able to w rite out in full and revise. W hen completed, the poem contained eleven His
first
task
had been
to get
sections or "chapters" of unequal length, preceded
an equally brief introduction.
on the ballad form 'I'yorkin,
the
poem
e\
It
was written
by
in a loose
oKed by Alexander l\ardo\sk\-
a brief
prologue and
iambic metre modelled for his
mock-epic
that Solzhenitsyn had so admired at the front. Fhe
\
'asily
Way
is
longer than Tyorkin, however, consisting of over ten thousand lines of verse *
It is
possible that Solzhenitsyn
he called his has,
poem
a
was influenced by the
no\el in \erse. In fact, The
Way
subtitle of Pushkin's Evgeiiy Oiiegi)i
w hen
has no plot in the sense that Evgeny Onegiii
and contains oniv one major character: the autobiographical hero.
,
EX
1 1.
D "in
F
Fkrpk
"
un
I
^
1
("twice as long as EitgciJe Onegiii,'' as Panin later w rote ot
it
3 - 5
1
in his memoirs),'**
had been a prodigious teat to memori/,e it, e\en w ith the help ot the rosarv and the slips ot paper. The poem has not been published, except tor cha[ner 9, which has appeared separateh' both in Russian and in translation under the title ot Av/.v-
and
it
And
sian Nights.
of the prologue, which was later rewritten b\ Sol/.he-
a part
w hen quotetl by
nits\n, slipped out in the late sixties
about his work.* The prologue
interesting for
is
of his role as a v\riter.
camp. Despite .
.
.
To
prisoned
is
not to
To
Ijc
tells
us about Sol/henitsyn's \iew
describing his hard
compulsion
feels the
in the
an essay
to
lite in
w
the
rite.
dav.
write now, without dcla\
Not
in
millstones of
heated wrath, but with cool and clear understanding.
mv
thoughts can hardly turn.
rare the flicker of light in m\' aching soul.
mv 1
is
the circle around us tautly draw n,
verses
icill
burst their l)onds and freely roam.
can guard, perhaps, bevond "their" reach.
In rhvthmic
is
it
man
The Too
And
hat
however, he
write!
But
\\
b\' l)rietl\'
his weariness,
Yes, tight
He
begins
It
a friend in
harmonv,
this
hard-won
also explicit about his mission.
himself but on behalf of the millions
camps or been crippled
gitt ot
speech.
He is writing not just on behalt of who had died in Stalin's prisons and
for life b\' their sufferings.
I do not w rite m\ verses for idle pleasure. Nor from a sense of energ\' to burn. Nor out of mischief, to evade their searches.
Do I
carrv
I
The
have paid
Oh,
them
past
mv
captors in
free flow of m\' verse
if this
a cruel price for
w ere but
the
mv
brain.
dearlv bought,
is
my
sum
poet's rights
.
of the price paid for
But those others paid the price w
my
verse!
ith their lives.
Immured in the silence of Solovki, drow ned in Or shot w ithout trial in \ orkuta's polar night.
the thunder ot
w aves.
Love and warmth and their executed cries Have combined in my breast to carve
The
receptive metre of this sorrowful tale.
These few poor thousand incapacious lines. Oh, hopeless labour! Can vou really pay the price? Do vou think to redeem the pledge with a single life? *Solztienitsvn later published
heading
"On
some
the Soviet Border."
extracts in the \'est)nk
Thev show
the hero
RKhD,
(i.e.,
no.
117 (1976), under the
Solzhenits\ n) on his
way from
Brodnitz to Moscov\' under armed escort and describe his meditations on the course ot Russian history (see p. 312).
SOLZHENITSYN
[326] For In
\\
mv
hat an age has
women's happy
country been so poor
laughter, so very rich
In poets' lamentations!
—
Verse, verse
for
A drop of scented Here, the next
t\\
in outline,
is
ent\' \ears,
the
all
that
we
ha\ e lost,
resin in the razed forest!
programme
that
\\
as to
'''
occupy Solzhenitsyn
for
not just in verse but in prose as well, and that w as to
mature works, ranging from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the three \olumes of The Gulag Archipelago. About the rest of The Way, Solzhenitsvn has been extremelv reticent. Four years after completing it, he told Dimitri Panin that he w as rather dissatisfied with the poem, finding it long-w inded and repetitive, and he spoke of rewriting it. In the earh' sixties, after the success oi Ivan Denisovich, he did indeed rew ork some of the chapters and tone them dow n before offering them to Aoiy Mir under a different title (A Cheerless Story). Sovy Mirs editor, Tvardovskv, rejected them and is quoted (in The Oak and the Calf) as saving,
give birth to almost
all
his
can understand that vou had to w rite something in the camps; otherw ise vour brain would have gone rustv."-" He also told Solzhenitsyn that the poem was "the sort of thing that should be printed in 8-point tvpe in volume
"I
20 of vour collected works."-' In 1963, w hen Solzhenitsvn read the
Anna Akhmatova,
she, too, advised
him not
to publish
it,
poem
to
but to stick to
w hich he w as "unassailable."-from The Way Solzhenitsvn worked on a verse pla\". Feast of the Conquerors, also composed at Ekibastuz and committed to memory there. For manv vears Solzhenitsvn w as even more reticent about the play than about the poem, parth' because of its more controversial subject matter, but mainh because in 1965 the plav, together with some of his other early works, was confiscated bv the KGB and circulated among lovalist members of the \\'riters' Union in an attempt to discredit him. The aura of dread created around the pla\ bv subsequent bad publicity (Solzhenitsyn w as obliged to renounce it w hen tr\ ing to get Cancer Ward published) led manv observers to conclude that the pla\ must contain unspeakable opinions about the Soviet political system, and it w as not until manv vears after he had arrived in the West that Solzhenitsyn released it for publication in volume 9 of his collected works.* prose, in
.Apart
—
In point of fact. Feast of the Conquerors
controversy
made
it
appear.
It is a
is
not as sensational as the later
relativeh short pla\- of about twenty-five
hundred lines, w ritten in iambic rhyming couplets that appear to be modelled on Gribovedov's nineteenth-centur\" comedv Woe from Wit {Feast of the Conquerors is also described as "a comedv"). There are no acts, only a succession of scenes, which all take place at an impromptu celebration banquet organized bv the staff of an artillery battalion at a captured countr\ mansion in Elast Prussia.
Solzhenitsvn's unit had actually held such a banquet in January
1945, and man\- of the characters are based on fellow * Published in 19H1.
An
members of
English translation appeared in 1983 under the
his battal-
title \'lcto>y Celebrations.
F.
X L F. D "IN I
ion. Arsen\" Pashkin, the political in his novel
about the war, figures
PF
R P F T L IT V
"
[32"]
commissar he had once \\ anted to describe Arsenv \'anin; Lieutenant Ovsvannikov
as
becomes Lieutenant ^'achmennikov; Solzhenitsvn himself is transformed into first appearance of this surname in his literarv works); (Japtain I3obrokhotov-.\laikov appears under his real name (he was killed at the front shortlv after the actual banquet took place); and one mav readily imagine that Berbenchuk, the battalion commander, his wife, Glafira, and Captain Likharyov are also based on real-life prototypes. One furCaptain Sergei Nerzhin (the
ther detail reproduced from the actual banquet
upturned mirror
banqueting table
as the
— an
is
the use of an enormous
prop
effective
in
any
theatrical
production. Into this
company of
real-life
prototypes Solzhenits\ n introduced two
— Lieutenant —and the other based on person who the banquet —Galina, an Rus-
contending figures to propel the action along, one
Gridnev, an officer
in
fictional
Smersh
a real
how ever, present at original emigree sian girl who has come all the way from \'ienna, where she lives, to be near her fiance, w ho is fighting w ith the V'lasov forces in East Prussia. Such plot as there is deals w ith the discovery of Galina in a Prussian village bv the
was
not,
assumption that she has been a prisoner of the Germans, their good-natured offer to take her along w ith them, and Gridnev's opposition on the assumption that she is a German spy. The only person w ho learns the truth about her is Nerzhin, w ho was a childhood friend before she departed to the \\ est. When she informs him of her real reason for being in Prussia, he praises her for her fidelit\- and lovaltv to her fiance and vows to help her find him ("I have faith in our Russian future w hile such w omen as you exist"). -^ He soon comes into conflict w ith the bumptious, self-confident Smersh lieutenant (w ho has designs on Galina's virtue in addition to his political suspicions), but nothing results from their clashes, and at the end of artillery battalion, their
the play. Galina's fate
The
plot
is
board cut-outs,
is still
unresolved.
not important, and the characters are a pretext for
Solzhenitsvn to get
little
down
better than card-
to the true subject of
his pla\", w hich is a debate about Russia's past and present, the pluses and minuses of the Revolution, the conflict betw een the revolutionary Communist values epitomized bv Gridnev and the genuine human and moral values
by almost everyone else in the pla\ ranging from the genial, bumbling Berbenchuk and his sagacious, far-sighted staff officers (\ anin, Nerzhin, Dobrokhotov-Maikov) down to the humble peasant lad, Vachmennikov, and including even the emigree Galina. In a variety of monologues and dialogues, Solzhenitsyn examines some of the themes that w ere to become dominant in his mature works: the political and moral bankruptcy of .Marxist ideology, the disastrous effects of collectivization, the monstrous pow er of the security organs, Stalin's paranoia and his abysmal performance at the personified
start
of the
,
w ar
as
commander-in-chief, the decisive role of Russian patriot-
ism in w inning the Second It is
interesting that
\\ orld \\ ar.
some of these themes
art expressed
through the
SOLZHENITSYN
[328]
between the (personally) loyal and honest Russian emigree, Galina, and the (personally) disloyal though loyal in a political sense and dishonest Communist, Gridney, and that the debate about Russia's historical path and destiny should be set in these particular terms. Yet Solzhenitsyn does not come out unequiyocally on Galina's side. He takes a middle position, and it is significant that he hedges and qualifies many of his criticisms of Soyiet society in the pla\ precisely by placing them in the mouth of Galina, who is ostensibly (and automatically in the Soyiet context) a negatiye character and v\ho can be expected to criticize the Soyiet Union because of her background. In the mouths of \'anin, Nerzhin, and the others, the criticism is muted or yaguely loyal, and it is only in their more positiye dreams for the future that their true unorthodoxy emerges (Nerzhin's toast at the banquet is "May it be -"^ possible, in Mother Russia, to say what we think aloud!").
conflict
for
—
—
For these reasons The Feast of the Conquerors, although uncommonly bold time, now strikes the reader as less sensational than the subsequent
its
made
scandal
it
seem. In an era of genuine anti-Stalinism,
it
might almost
have passed the censorship, except for the sympathetic passages on the Vlasoyites, the yery mention of whom triggered an automatic and genuine loathing in Soyiet readers at that time.
But there
is
nothing truly seditious in
it,
noth-
beyond the pale, steps w ere taken to
ing the Soyiet security authorities could point to as totally as
was demonstrated
after its confiscation,
w hen no
legal
Solzhenits\n to account.
call
The same cannot Kok Terek,
be said, how eyer, for
a
second play Solzhenitsyn com-
(later renamed The Capmore ambitious work than Conquerors, with an enormous cast of characters, multiple changes of scene, and a text that alternates between yerse and prose, though the prose predominates. Among the characters met here for the first time are Georgi X'orotyntsev, a former colonel in the tsar's army (later to reappear in August 1914), Ley Rubin and Valentin Pryanchikoy (later to figure in The First Circle), and Payel Gai,
pleted at tives).*
Decembrists
is
a
Decembrists
much
ivithoiit
December
longer and
one of the heroes of The Tendeifoot and the Tart. Eygeni Divnich, the militantly religious anti-Communist whom Solzhenitsyn had met in Butyrki, appears under his ow n name, w hile the author's alter ego is here called Andrei
Kholudeney.t play is set in the Smersh headquarters at Brodnitz, on the Prussian w here Solzhenitsyn had been taken after his arrest. Again there is plot to speak of, and no character deyelopment. The play follows the
The border, little
fortunes of a group of prisoners from their investigation
and questioning
first arrival in
to their "trial"
the cells through
and conviction by
a military
But there are se\eral interesting formal de\elopments. The extremely large cast of characters reflects a first attempt by Solzhenitsyn at a synthesis of all he had learned about the world of the camps. Within this synthesis he tribunal.
*Fublishcd
in
volume 9 of the Collected Works
in 1981.
An
English translation appeared in
1983.
tit
mav be
relevant that the Russian kbolod,
which the name evokes, means "cold."
F.xri.F,
"in
Pf,
rpktuity"
I^-';1
Smersh operation and to describe all the which means not only the prisoners (with whom the svmpathies o\er\\ helmingh' lie) but also the Smersh personnel, ranging
encompass
tries to
I)
all
aspects of the
individuals involved, author's
from the commanding general through his officers and interrogators dov\ n to humble guards. Another feature of this synthesis is its inclusion of scenes of life among Russians who have chosen to stav behind the (ierman lines (Galina's successors as it were) and the inclusion among the prisoners of a the
White Russian colonel (Vorotyntsev),
who
sian
a Pole, a
Yugoslav, a German,
has fought with the Americans, and one
\\
a Rusho has been with the
Belgian resistance.
is
The need to pack so much information into the confines of a stage plav one of the reasons for the play's great length, and it leads Solzhenitsvn into
some
interesting experiments.
puntallv as
a
kind of chorus
The
diverse prisoners' voices are used contra-
at intervals
the interrogators in one of the scenes.
during the plav,
The
as are the voices of
several interrogations are
shown
simultaneouslv, side bv side on the stage, with the dialogue switching consecutivelv from one to another, and a similar technique
is
used to depict the
reading out of the prisoners' sentences. These devices are interesting in themselves
and
also
go some way to vary the pace, which
is
otherw
ise
rather e\en
throughout the plav's twelve scenes. Thematicallv, Decembrists shows Conquerors, containing
more
fullv
and
manv
a logical
progression from Feast of the
of the same ideas, but this time worked out
at greater length.
Perhaps the greatest development
is
in the
treatment of the White Russians and of those w ho chose to remain with the
Germans
or fight with Vlasov's armv. This time Solzhenitsvn comes off the
fence and develops the thesis that Russian history was on their side, that
they were more genuinely "Russian" and patriotic than the Bolshevik usurpers,
and that the consequences of the Revolution had been uniformlv disastrous for the Russian people. It is possible that Solzhenitsvn was "trying out" some of these ideas and not necessarily committed to them himself, but the force with which they are communicated in Decembrists goes far beyond anything in Feast of the Conquerors and makes it incomparably more inflammator\" and dangerous than its more famous predecessor. It is hardly surprising that nothing was heard of it until years after Solzhenitsvn had reached the West. Had this play fallen into the hands of the KGB, his career w ould undoubtedl) have
come
to a
It
speedy and
must be
Feast of the Conquerors
The it
^A'ay,
is
is
particularly successful.
The
verse in
not as assured and inventive as that to be found in
or as vigorous as the driving rhythms of Prussian Sights, although
Griboyedovian wit in some of the banquet exchanges. is the way in which both plays prefigure Solzhenimature work (also begun in exile), his long novel The First Circle.
does attain
But what tsyn's first
At
bitter end.
said that neither play
is
a certain
interesting
their centre, as at the novel's,
is
an impassioned debate about Russia's
and future, and Decembrists in particular anticipates the way in which Solzhenitsyn, in the novel, was to make the microcosm of his work stand for
past
SOLZHENITSYN
[330]
the world outside. In Decembrists the character of Lev Rubin is almost fully formed and is easily recognizable as the lovable Communist we will meet
again in the novel. Nerzhin-Kholudenev
Solzhenitsyn was
still
bioE^raphical character. officers
and
is
less successful,
perhaps because
unable sufficiently to distance himself from
On the opposite side of the ideological fence,
investigators clearly prefigure
some of the characters
this auto-
the in
Smersh
The First
still too \illainous, whereas in the novel they were to human and therefore more believable. Finally, we see Solzhemore become w ith the figure of Stalin, whose statues and porgrapple to beginning nitsyn
Circle,
traits
but they are
dominate the scenery
to the ground at a tense
in Decembrists (one statue
moment
in the play),
though
is it
symbolically knocked
w as only
in the novel
was to enter the action as a living character. The most striking scene in the play is a long debate towards the end between Vorotyntsev and a dying Smersh colonel called Prokhor Rublyov. V'orotvntsev puts forward what one might call a liberal, pre-revolutionary view of twentieth-century Russian history, in which he regards the Revolution as an avoidable disaster, while Rublyov defends the Revolution's achievements not in narrowly orthodox terms but from the viewpoint of its broadly progressive nature. It is stirringly written and sums up the argu-
that Stalin
ments that appear elsewhere in the play, although as a device for the author ow n voice it is too transparent to w ork satisfactorily as theatre. But in form and intensity, it looks forw ard to other notable clashes of opinion in Solzhenitsyn's later works, such as the debates between Nerzhin, Rubin, and Sologdin in The First Circle, between Rusano\' and Kostoglotov in Cancer
to speak in his
Ward, and between Lenin and Parvus
in Lenin in Zurich.
Altogether, then, the plays must be classified as apprentice works, and the
same w ould appear
to apply to the
Solzhenitsyn copied out during his
first
two volumes of camp poetry
that
year of exile. The Heart beneath
the
Padded Jacket and When They Lose Track of the Years (consisting of verses to and about his wife).-' But they were essential steps on his path to becoming a real
w
riter,
and
it
And one Biding
On I
w as
he had predicted
in his preface to
The Way:
dav, in distant exile dim,
mv
time,
I \\ ill
free
mv
tortured
memory from
its thrall:
paper, birch-bark, in a blackened bottle rolled
will consign
Or
as
all
mv
tale to the forest leaves
to a drift of shifting
snow
.-'''
Solzhenitsyn's need for peace and security in which to pursue his
liter-
was finally satisfied in September 1953 when he rented a thatched and whitewashed clay hut on the outskirts of Kok Terek. His new abode consisted of a single room, w ith a tin\' kitchen and an entrance porch, and windows facing south and west. It was unfurnished, but Solzhenitsyn had already learned how to make a bed from packing cases, and although, in Kok Terek, packing cases were like gold dust, he was able, by using his contacts ary activities
.
F.
at the co-operati\ c, to
his
bed
—
X LFD " N I
I
FKRPRTf T I
" ^' 1
bu\ sonic tor two rubles each.
wood
—and one served
as a china
used the old, l)attered suitcase that had been w
I
Three went to make
timber w as to be had
in
Kok
I
a table,
he
him since his arrest at the fashioned him a table and chair from
an exiled Ukrainian friend
front, until
cupboard. For
ith
the stunted and tw isted branches of a local shrub called saxaul
— no other
erek.
Solzhenitsyn eagerly welcomed the solitude that the possession
dwelling brought him. Adjoining the hut was
a vegetable
(jf
his
garden that
continued to cultivate, but there was no other habitation within
his landlord a
'
mattress case stutYed w ith ha\- and wood-shavings reHeved the
a
hardness of the
own
3 3
hundred vards. Immediatelv bevond
his
hedge of pricklv pear and the open steppe, with the
irrigation ditch that ran past his gate stretched the
bluish outline of the (Jhu-Ili Mountains rising in the distance. Solzhenitsvn
continued his habit of taking dailv w alks and liked to w ander along "a forsaken little path that w ound through the fields," as he wrote to Aunt Nina,
where "the
silence
w as not
of this world.""
And
in
The Gulag Archipelago he
has noted that "whenever there w as a puff of v\ind from the steppe, m\' lungs
drank I
it
would
in greedilv. In the stroll
dusk and
Solzhenitsyn w as well off v\ell
at night,
w hether
it
w
as
about alone out there, inhaling and exhaling
paid and there was
little
b\-
to
dark or moonlit,
like a lunatic."-*^
Kok Terek standards, for teachers w ere his monev on. But he liked looking
spend
doing the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and there him back to his childhood and the pungent smells of Grandfather Semyon's adobe farm in the Caucasus. This was the
after himself, readily
was one chore
that transported
new la vers of claw The roof and w eek he w as obliged to replaster the floor w ith a mixture of mud and manure to prevent it from wearing aw a\ On the tirst day after it dried, it was beautifully smooth and clean, but bv the second day a layer of dust began to appear and the floor started to break up. By the end of the w eek, Solzhenitsvn w ould be raising clouds of dust every time he lifted his feet, and it would be time to renew it again.-*'' By an odd coincidence, during the verv davs that he w as settling into new home and preoccupied with thoughts of domesticitv, he was moved his by an unexpected letter from Natalia. She had obtained his address from Aunt Nina and had written in the last da\s of August from the Black Sea, where she was spending her summer holidav. Somewhat naiveh", she proposed a friendlv correspondence in which thev could indulge in a kind of platonic, spiritual communion, and she pictured their two lives as a simultaneous ascent of two "parallel staircases." The letter touched a superstitious chord in Solzhenits) n. It was almost if Natalia had dixined his new circumstances and the loneliness that attended as his solitarv state. An amateur graphologist in Elkibastuz, to whom he had shown an earlier letter of Natalia's confirming their divorce, had predicted a happy ending. It seemed to him that this w as a sign, that Natalia's talk of a spiritual exchange w as mereh' a polite cover for deeper feelings that she dared need to renew the hut periodicalh w
ith
walls needed re-doing onlv rarelv, but everv
SOLZHENITSYN
[332]
not admit openlv tor tear of being rebuffed. In
tiis
heart of hearts he had
never beheved in her love for another man. He felt sure that she had been 'ied astrav" bv \ sevolod and that she w as now bored with him.
On
12
September 1953 he
\\
rote her a tender letter of gratitude
and
love.
Of course
he was willing to take her back, he said, if she was truly prepared to turn her back on her present life and return to him. Otherw ise he didn't see much point in their correspondence, since it \\ ould inevitably involve her in
deception and would in any case have to cease
ever her decision, he would not feel
been
wounded
if
he should remarrw
\\ hat-
or angry, just as he had not
in the past.
my
... I have seen how others have and excuse vour weakness-. I hat Sanchik whom you once knew and loved quite undeservedly would not have forgiven vou. But the present Sanya isn't even sure if there is anything to forgive. I am probably even more guilty towards you. And in any case, I haven't saved vour life, w hereas vou have saved mine and even more than mv life.'"
know how w eak
I
behaved, and
it
I
often was in
me
easy for
is
ow n
life.
to understand
—
("More than my life" w as a reterence to Solzhenitsvn's manuscripts and notebooks, which Natalia had taken w ith her w hen she w as evacuated to Central Asia during the w Natalia,
it
ar.)
seems, w as taken aback by Solzhenitsvn's
intention of leaving \ sevolod, and presumably
it
letter. She had no had not occurred to her,
from the safety of her Ryazan university post and her second marriage, to w onder w hat impact her letter might have on her ex-husband in his lonely exile. Perhaps her letter had been but an impulsive holiday caprice, brought on bv the sun and the sea? In any event, she regarded his reply as an ultimatum, and in October wrote a second letter to set him straight. Dear Sanechka, I was upset both bv the contents of vour
letter,
and bv the
fact that
\ou
totalh'
misunderstood me. I
\\
am
w hich This
w
ill
It is
satisfied
w
ith
I
w
mv
present will
life
and
v\
ish for
nothing more.
perhaps understand the
spirit in
rote to vou.
is all
have to say to vou. .\nd
I
be possible onh w hen vour
life
so, farewell until
becomes
full in all
your work but also in the personal sphere. vou and w ish vou all the ver\ best. Natasha."
only I
completely
hen vou have achieved the same vou
in
I
we meet
trust that
you w
which w ord, not
again,
senses of the ill
be happy.
kiss
not clear w hether Solzhenitsvn reacted with his promised saintliness to
Natalia's abrupt rejection of
all
his proposals,
but w
ith this letter the corre-
spondence ended.* *This exchange of and Reshetox ska\
a.
letters I
la\
subsequenth became
inu seen
onU one
a
point of bitter dispute between Solzhenits\n
of the three letters exchanged,
I
cannot sav w here
1
I-',
X I L F, D "in
P e r p k t u ir ^
Solzhenitsvn soon had something
" [
much more
3 3 3
serious to \\(>rr\ about.
For some time now he had been plagued by a nagging stomach-ache, and in October he began to sutter from intermittent but acute pains in his groin and abdomen. As a result, he lost all desire to eat and quickh' began to lose
Ihe
weight.
local
doctors were unable to offer a satisfactory diagnosis.
gynaecologist friend, Nikolai Zubov, v\ho was also
attempted to treat him, but w sion to visit
was inclined
ith
had
political exile,
no success, and advised him
Dzhambul, w here he could be seen by to think he
a
gastritis or
perhaps
a
to seek permis-
specialists.
stomach
A
had
Solzhenitsvn
ulcer, but at the
memorv of his operation in the camp. I le had been was a success, that the tumour had not invaded the surrounding tissues. Could the doctors have made a mistake? It took him some weeks to make the necessary arrangements for a medical examination in Dzhambul. The tests for abdominal complaints turned out to be all negative, but then an X-ray revealed a tumour the size of a fist growing from the back wall of the abdominal cavity. It w as almost certainly cancer. The doctors were divided over whether the tumour w as a metastasis of the old one, taken out in the camp, or a new grow th unconnected with it.* If it was the result of cells left behind after the removal of the hmph node, these malignant cells could have travelled through the hmphatic channels to the space behind the stomach. In any case, speedy treatment was essential, and since there was nothing to be done about it in Dzhambul, he was given a certificate for admission to the oncological clinic in Tashkent, back of his mind was the
told that
about
a
it
thousand miles to the west. it emerges from Soizhenipubhshed works, and from
the exact truth hes, but have endeavoured to present the picture as
me and letters to me
tsvn's account of the matter in his interview with
in his
Reshetovska\a's memoirs and her unpublished
in 1982.
*
It
is
not clear
\\
hether Solzhenitsvn ever received a report of the biopsy carried out by the
camp medical authorities on his first tumour. If the storv of Oleg Kostoglotov in chapter 6 of Cancer Ward is literallv autobiographical, he did not. Dr William .\. Knaus, who has written the best medical analvsis of Solzhenitsvn's illness (Inside Russian Medicine [New York, 1981], chap.
13),
accepts the Cancer
V\'^/-d'
version as being true for Soizhenitsyn as ueil.
19
CANCER WARD
A POLITICAL FOR was complicated
cxilc to get permission to travel
a
have to return to
—
all
the
\\
av to Tashkent
business, and Solzhenitsvn realized that he
Kok Terek
—
would
But before he did so he made an excursion into the Chu-Ili Mountains, about a for that.
unscheduled and illegal hundred miles to the east. The risks w ere considerable: if caught, he could have been rearrested and sentenced to a further term of imprisonment. But in Dzhambul he had heard rumours of an old man living in a village near the lake of Issvk-Kul w ho made infusions from a mandrake root that w ere supposed to be good for treating cancer.* The idea of folk-medicine appealed to him much more, indeed, than the prospect of radio-therap\" or another operation and he resolved to find the old man and acquire some for himself. The quest proved to be not difficult, and the old man, a Russian settler by the name of Krementsov, happil\- sold him some of his medicine, w arning him, how ever, that an overdose w as tantamount to taking poison and that it was dangerous even to inhale it. The allowable dose was from one to ten drops, to be taken o\er a period of ten davs, the dose to be increased by one drop each da v. Then it had to be gradually decreased to one drop, and an interval often davs allowed to elapse before starting again.' Solzhenits\'n seized eagerlv on this slender chance of a natural cure, bought a large quantit\ of the mandrake infusion, and returned w ith it to Kok Terek. During November and December his tumour had seemed to swell almost b\' the hour: "This tumour distended and distorted my stomach
—
* \)r
—
Knaus u
prepared
in
rites that
the
mandrake
the form of tea.
sleeping preparations.
It
It
root
is
a
\\
ell-known folk remedy
contains the chemical scopolamine,
cannot cure cancer.
3.U
in
w hich
Russia that is
is
usually
also used in
some
:
Cancer Ward
I335J
and pre\ented me from eating or sleeping. was constanth' aware of it. But the fact that it was exerting pressure on the surrounding organs and displacing them was not the worst of it. The aw ful thinii was that it was exuding poison and infecting m\' whole bod\ ."- I he mandrake root seemed to help, however. On II December he wrote to an old acquaintance. Irina Arsenveva, in Rostov that his condition had improxed and his appetite had returned. 1 wo weeks later he w as still relati\el\ cheertul, but b\ the end of the month he had started to go downhill again. ^ Throughout these weeks he had a sense of being at death's d(jor and w as conx inced he had not long to live. Indeed, in The Oak and the Calf he writes that the doctors in Dzhambul 1
.
had given him no more than three weeks. It w as on his experiences of these weeks that Solzhenitsvn drew Kostogloto\'s words in Cancer \\ ard: Although I
I'd
been
couldn't stand,
in pain tor six
sit,
or
lie
dow n
months beforehand, the \\
last
month w
as
.
.
for
agon\
ithout pain and could snatch onlv a few min-
each night. So I had plentv of time to think. That autumn I learned from mv own experience that a man can cross the threshold of death while occupving a bodv that is still not dead. Vour blood still circulates and vour stomach digests things, but ps\chologicaIly vou have completed all vour preparations for death and lived through death itself. Evervthing vou see around vou appears to vou as if from bevond the grave, evoking no emotions. Although vou have never utes' sleep
—
—
a Christian sometimes, indeed, the opposite now vou suddenb notice that you have already forgi\en everyone who has insulted you and bear no more ill will towards those who have persecuted vou. Vou find vourself indifferent to absolutelv evervthing and evervone; there is nothing vou are anxious to put right and nothing vou regret. I would even sav that it is a state
regarded vourself as
of great equilibrium and naturalness, like that of the trees and stones."*
At the forefront of Solzhenitsvn's mind at this time w as the problem of to do w ith his manuscripts in the event of his death. He knew that if found b\' the authorities thev would be confiscated or destroved. He could not send them to anyone, for his mail was censored. What he needed was a reliable person who would come out and collect them and preserve them for better times, but here, too, he was in a dilemma. He and Natalia w ere di\ orced, and their sudden correspondence had ended in mutual misunderstanding. With his ow n familv he still had no contact, and Aunt Nina w as too old to make the journew It was for this reason that he had w ritten to Irina Arsenveva. He hardlv knew her, but she was a former friend of Natalia's and lived in the same house as Aunt Nina. She could take the manuscripts to Nina for safe-keeping. But he could not tell her about it openlv. He could only w rite vaguelv of her coming out to Kazakhstan to "collect his belongings," which
w hat
she naturally did not understand (the fact that
it
w
as a
w eek's journey there
and back bv train did not make her decision an\' easier).' Realizing that it was hopeless, Solzhenitsxn resorted to desperate measures. "I hurriedly copied things out in tinv handwriting, rolled tight cvlinders,
them up, several pages at a time, in a champagne bottle. I then buried
and squeezed them into
SOLZHENITSYN
[336]
mv garden."^' As in the camps where he had tirst composed w orks, Hterature and concealment were inextricably bound up with one
the bottle in these
another.
Meanw hile,
the procedure for his
lashkent had been set in motion, go during the New Year's vacation. permit from the specifying the
\isit to
and Solzhenitsyn asked
for permission to
To make
he needed
the journe\
exact dates on
,
w hich he was
a
MVD
to travel, the place
w here he w ould
w
stav
hile
awav, the length of time aw ay, and the exact date of his return. He would authorities in Tashhave to register all this information w ith the local kent as well as at Kok I erek. At last the permit was issued. Donning his ancient army greatcoat and cavalry boots once more, and arming himself
MVD
and
supply of the mandrake infusion, he
with
a kitbag
New
Year's Eve, 1953, barely able to place one foot in front of the other.
From
a liberal
the very start he was beset with difficulties.
he was obliged to sleep
in the station at
Chu
On New
set off
on
Year's Eve
in order to catch the
morning
express to 1 ashkent. In obedience to the regulations, he handed in his idena room for the night. The w hen he went to collect his card, the dut\' officer was gone. He had got drunk celebrating New Year's Eve and been carried off unconscious to the nearest sobering-up station. The woman who now occu-
tity
card to the station officer in exchange for
follow ing morning,
pied his place could find no trace of the card and shook her head in response to Solzhenitsvn's entreaties.
The
train
exile to travel
step of the
w
as
due
at
any moment, and
it
was out of the question
without an identity card. Cards would be inspected
w ay, and
instant arrest
would
Just then he caught sight of one of the
along the platform.
The
every
follow his failure to produce one.
Kok Terek
MVD
officers strolling
w ho explained his permit. The officer was in a good
officer recognized Solzhenitsvn,
predicament and show ed the
mood and gave him
for an
at
officer his
written permission to travel.
As far as Tashkent, everything w ent smoothly. On arrival, he made his way by tram to the M\ D city headquarters and handed in his permit to sta\'. Then he travelled to the oncological clinic of Tashkent Hospital, but was refused admission without an identity card. In desperation he lay down on the fioor of the waiting-room and refused to move until they changed their minds an incident that he w as later to use in chapter 5 of Cancer Ward, when describing Kostoglotov's arrival at the same clinic. Solzhenitsvn was
—
rescued from this desperate expedient by one of the doctors arranged for him to be admitted to the
clinic,
German
who was
to take
She quickly and the following day he entered
over his treatment, Irina Meike, the daughter of
settlers.
one of the wards. Solzhenitsyn entered the hospital on 4 January 1954, and his treatment began the very next day. Dr Lydia Duna\eva, the head of the radio-therapy department, w as in charge of his case, and although she found a metastasis from the malignant lymph node, she decided that it was only a secondary tumour. The primary tumour, and the real cause of Solzhenitsvn's trouble.
-!'*.«-;*
Solzhenitsvn's mother, as a
young
girl.
I
aissia Shchcrljak,
(Private collection)
Solzhenitsvn's
Shcherbak, and
grandmother Pelageva aunt Maria (standing)
his
circa 1900. (Private collection)
The Shcherbak
familv, circa 1921. Standing at the back are
Roman,
Irina,
Maria, and
Maria's second husband, Fvodor Garin; sitting are Zakhar, Taissia, and Pelageva.
on the
left is
Solzhenitsyn; the other
may be one of Maria's
The child
stepchildren. (Private collection)
The house
Roman
in
Kislovodsk where Solzhenitsvn was born. (Private collection)
Shcherbak's Rolls-Royce, circa 1910. Roman's wife, Irina,
Taissia. (Private collection)
i
,«Vi,**'
'Vis;.
&;^":'^
is
sitting in the
back w
ith
Solzhenitsvn
in
Rostov, aged six and
a half, 1925. (Seuil)
School photograph taken in 1935. Second from the Solzhenitsvn beside him; immediateiv (with braids)
is
(Bobbs-Merrill)
Lvdia Ezherets;
in front
to his right
is
left at
of them
is
back Kirill
is
Nikolai \ itkevich, with
Simonvan;
to Kirill's left
Anastasia Griinau, their literature teacher.
Solzhenitsvn as
a
student at Rostov Lniversitv
(Seuil)
Solzhenitsvn and Natalia Reshetovskaya
immediately after their marriage, in 1940. (Bobbs-Merrill)
Taissia in the late 1930s. (Bobbs-Merrill)
Solzhenitsvn wearing his Patriotic
medal
after
participating
in
the
War
Soviet
recapture of Orel in August 1943. (Seuil)
Solzhenitsvn and \ itkevich (Seuil)
at the front in
Solzhenitsvn
reading
Gorkv's
Matvei
Kozhemyakin to Natalia during her
visit to
the front in spring 1944. (Seuil)
1944, just after signing "Resolution
No.
1."
Solzhenitsyn
on to
at the
Marfino sharashka
his thirtieth birthday.
Permission
be photographed was granted as
rew ard for good work.
The
suit
\\
a
as
provided by the prison authorities. (Pri\ ate collection)
The main (Ardis)
building of the sharashka (formerly a seminary) and the setting of The First
Circle.
Solzhenitsyn as he looked took this
at
Ekibastuz. Having smuggled his
photograph immediately
after his release. (Seuil)
number patches
into exile, he
Solzhenitsyn outside his
Solzhenitsyn successful
in
mud
Kok Terek
treatment
for
hut in
Kok Terek
after his
cancer
Tashkent. (Private collection)
in
in 1955. (Private collection)
(>ANCER
Ward
l337l
seminoma. According to medical specialists,* seminoma is a comparaform of cancer that accounts for less than one-half of one per cent of the cancer cases each \ear, and is usuall\- found in men between the ages of thirt\-fi\e and fifty (Sol/.henits\n had been thirt\ -three at the time of his first operation antl was now tliirt\-fi\e). (iiven Sol/.henits\ n's weakened physical condition and the state of So\ iet medicine in the earl\ fifties, his chances of a cure were about one in three. I)r I)una\e\a decided against surgerN' (w hich is now the preferred treatment in the West, followed b\' radio-
was
a
tivel\ rare
therapy) and prescribed massixe doses of radiation alone.
A
large purple cross
was draw n on Solzhenits\n's stomach, di\ iding his abdomen into four c]uadrants, each ot w hich w as bombarded in turn w ith X-ra\s. Ihree hea\\' rubber mats filled w ith lead w ire w ere placed over the three quadrants not being treated on a gi\en day, and a thin copper shield w as sometimes used to protect Solzhenitsyn's skin from the effects of the radiation beam.^ According to Resheto\skaya, Solzhenits\n's treatment lasted six w eeks, during w hich time he had fift\-five radiation sessions of half an hour each, with a dosage of between 12,000 and 18,000 rads.'"*! This corresponds to 's treatment in Cancer Ward, where w hich the X-ravs had begun to take effect. "This barbarous bombardment of heav\- quanta, soundless and unnoticed by the assaulted tissues, had after twelve sessions given Kostoglotov back his desire and taste for life, his appetite, even his good spirits. After the second and third bombardments, he w as free of the pain that had made his existence intolerable."'" Within a couple of weeks the tumour began to shrink and Solzhenitsyn was eating well again, but then came radiation sickness, loss of appetite, and a difficult period w hen he felt almost as ill as w hen he had arrived. His spirits were also depressed bv the sinestrol tablets he was obliged to take. Sinestrol contained oestrogen, the female hormone, and was administered on the principle that if seminoma w as a male tumour, it might be connected w ith the action of the male hormones, and a female hormone would help to reduce their effect. Now adavs that theorv is discredited.
Solzhenitsxn's description of Kostogloto\
he also noted the miraculous speed w
ith
Solzhenitsyn has described his condition during this period of his convalescence in one of his short stories, clinic. I
"My
appearance was
had gone through
"The Right Hand,"
pitiful. \\\ sallow face
— the wrinkles of
a
set in the
camp-induced moroseness,
ashen hardness of the skin, the recent corruption of m\' bod\' poisons of
mv
sickness and then
Tashkent
bore traces of ever\thing a deathlv,
first
bv the poisons of the medicine, so
cheeks had turned the colour of green."
He
bv the
that
mv
tried to stroll in the hospital
illness rests mainh on Dr Knaus's analvsis (see note p. 333). Knaus based himself on Cancer Ward znd other published sources on Solzhenitsyn's illness. He does not seem to have had an\- co-operation from Solzhenitsyn himself. t.\ccording to Dr Knaus, the figure of 12,000-18,000 rads refers to "air rads," meaning the amount of radiation emitted directU' from the X-ra\' tube. Toda\' the term "rad" refers to the
*This account of Solzhenitsvn's
dose of radiation recei\ed b\ the tumour, and on that definition, Solzhenits\n probablv received 2, 000-3. 000
rads on his
abdomen and
a
somew
hat smaller dose on his tjroin.
SOLZHENITSYN
[338]
grounds, conscious ot his ridiculous appearance in striped p\"jamas that were fit him and with his feet clad in the clumsy felt boots he had camps. After everv few steps he w as obliged to sit and rest, and occasionally, when attacked by radiation nausea, to lie with his head down
too small to
worn until
in the
it
passed."
Judging bv hints dropped
was the
in
Cancer
Ward and elsewhere, Solzhenitsvn
The stubbornness, truculence, and labour-camp veteran made him reluctant to submit to a difficult patient.
distrustfulness of
orders and led to
endless cross-questioning of the doctors about his treatment, while his natural restlessness
made him
resent his enforced inactivity and helplessness to
seem to have responded with humour. Irina Meike, the doctor who had rescued him from the waiting room, and Lydia Dunaveva, were both rewarded with affectionate portraits (as Gangart and Dontsova) in Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsvn's independence of mind also manifested itself in his determination to cling to the mandrake root infusion that he had brought with him and w ith w hich, it appears, he surreptitiously dosed himself when no one was looking. Despite his scientific training, he seems to have nursed an elemental distrust of conventional medicine and maintained, to the verv end, a superstitious faith in nature cures. At the back of his mind, at least w hen he arrived, was also the thought that if the pain became intolerable, and if there w as no hope of a cure, the poisonous infusion offered him one last freedom to end his life when he chose. As life flow ed back into his veins, however, the need for such a choice receded, and after a few weeks he began to recover some of his old vitality. His w alks in the hospital grounds became longer and occasionally w ent beyond them, although this w as officially forbidden to the patients. In Cancer Ward, he draw s a cheerfully humorous portrait of himself during this period in the guise of a letter from Kostoglotov to some friends. influence events. His doctors, for their part,
tolerance and good
—
The
onlv things that can help
mv
nausea are pickled cucumber and pickled cab-
bage, but of course thev arc unobtainable either in the hospital or the medical
and patients aren't allowed out of the gates. "Your relatives can bring you some," they say. What can a poor convict do? I put on m\ boots, fasten mv woman's dressinggown round mv waist with mv army belt, and creep over to the place where the w all is half falling dow n. I clamber through the w all, cross the railway tracks, and in five minutes I'm at the bazaar. .\lv appearance causes no surprise or laughter either on the wa\- there or in the bazaar itself, which I take to be a sign of the spiritual health of our people, w ho have become accustomed to everything. I walk about the bazaar and bargain suUenlw as probablv onlv ex-prisoners know how (pointing to some plump crcam\ chicken, and snapping, "How much do you want for that scraw nv tow 1, old w oman?") \\ hat money have I got, and how did I get it? My granddad used to say, "Look after the copecks, and the rubles 'will look after themselves." .\ clever man, mv grandfather. centre,
.
Solzhenitsyn took the
first
a
.
.
keen interest
in his fellow patients in the
time since 1945, he found himself being treated
as
ward. For
an equal, for
Ward
Cancf.r
here was aware ot his exile's status.
nob()d\
Uzbek
in
the w
arcl
turned out to he
a
\}^'}\
On
the contrarx
lahour-eanip guartl and
,
one \(jung
treelx' told
him
about his experiences, excoriating the prisoners as idlers and enemies of the people,
dreaming that he was talking to one. Sol/.henits\n's natural meant that he w as soon leading discussions in the ward and opinions on this or that subject, something that he could never
little
assertiveness airing his
have permitted himself as
Kok
in
glotov, "he found that he
erek.
I
low e\er, as he
I
later
noted of Kosto-
no longer placed himself in opposition
he was used to doing, but united with them
in their
to the others,
common
calamit\
.""
mid-March 1954 he was released from the hospital, with a warning would ha\e to return again in June for a further course of treatment. This meant that although his tumour had shrunk to less than half its former size, he could not \et consider himself cured and would ha\e to submit once again to radiation treatment. Nevertheless, he felt on top of the world. In In
that he
when he
Januar\',
arri\ed,
had been cold and pouring with
it
rain.
Now
spring had arrived, and in this southern city the trees were in bud and the first
earlv blossoms had
begun
The symbolism was centre, Solzhenitsyn
came
As he made his wa\' to the f)ld citv w as surprised to find open.
across a church that he
All the churches in Rostov
same
to appear.
irresistible.
had been closed
Tashkent. For the
in 1934,
and he had expected to
time since he was
a child, he entered church again and gave thanks to God for his recoverx'. In the city centre he took the opportunitv to look around and make some modest purchases. Again he was reminded of his childhood; apart from his
find the
in
first
a
w artime Moscow in 1943, he had not been in a cit\- since. After numbing world of the camps and exile, he w as bewildered b\ the hustle and bustle, and his amazement o\er the consumer goods available in the shops is communicated in part 2 of Cancer Ward, where Oleg Kostoglotov is flying visit to
the
portrayed making a similar pilgrimage after his release from the cancer
clinic.
Kostoglotov's reactions are perhaps exaggerated for dramatic effect, but his route through the city
is
his ill-starred visit to the
the
same
as that taken
department
bv Solzhenitsvn, including however, Solzheni-
store. In real life,
tsyn did bu\- the green-and-white striped shirt that Kostoglotov cannot afford,
and returned
to
Kok lerek w ith
it.
Late in the day he trekked across the a distant industrial
suburb, about
a
citv
to the
M\ D
stop, to deregister; then he returned to the railway station,
the night on the platform.
It
w as
there he encountered a
—and
floor in a
fit
In the
drake root. it
visit to
He
—
criminals, not
for
Kok
I
Issyk-Kul to obtain
could not
might have been due
in
The Gulag
mother smashing her baby's head on the stone
of drunken rage. morning he set off
another flying
where he spent
witnessed the sickening episode, described
Archipelago, of the sluttish
in
rowdy gang whom
he instanth- recognized as former labour-camp prisoners politicals
headquarters
mile and a half from the nearest tram
know whether
erek and on the
a further
his cure
w av home paid
supply of the magic man-
would
last
or
how much
to his secret tippling of the potent infusion.
ot
SOLZHENITSYN
[340] In Cancer
\\V/;y/
there
is
another autobiographical scene
glotov regards himself, for the
The
first
time in ten years,
figure he sees there, dressed in greatcoat
which Kosto-
in
in a full-length mirror.
and boots,
is
most unmilitarv,
more like a convict than a soldier. "His shoulders had drooped long [he] looked ago and his body \\ as incapable of holding itself straight looking
.
.
tormented, dishexelled, and neglected."'"* This portrait more or
.
less
describes
Solzhenitsvn at the same period, and he remained painfully skinny for some
A
photograph of him taken in his hut in Kok Terek soon after sunken eyes and prominent cheekbones, w hile the greenstriped shirt bought in Tashkent hangs loosely from his gaunt frame. These were the natural effects of his sickness and treatment, but in himself he w as infinitely stronger than before, and he felt a surge of renewed hope and energy. Granted the ill fortune of having contracted cancer at all, he had been e\tremel\' luck\' in having had one of the onh' two types of cancer (seminoma and lymphoma) that could be cured b\' radiation alone, and even then had sur\ ived odds of one in three to pull through. But perhaps more than just luck w as invoked. Cancer remains a mysterious illness w hose development and cure is sometimes associated with mental processes. Solzhenits\'n has described his feelings before lea\'ing for Tashkent as verging on total hopelessness, even despair. But it would appear that he never quite completely lost hope. He w as by nature an inveterate optimist, a fighter to the marrow of his bones and a firm belie\ er in the force of w ill-pow er. If mental processes can indeed influence the progress of cancer, it seems probable that Solzhenitsvn's unquenchable thirst for life and incredible powers of concentration considerably assisted him in his struggle to sur\ive. This is not to discount the importance of the medical treatment. With onl\ the mandrake root to help him, Solzhenitsvn would almost certainly ha\e died. But time to come.
his return reveals
—
—
once medical intervention had taken place, his sheer mental toughness and implacable will to live came into play and could well have influenced the speed and completeness of his recovery. He himself certainly came to believe
something a strong tion.
On
like that
purpose"
and more than once asserted,
all
another occasion he produced
tory explanation.
in later life, that
living creatures are susceptible to disease
The
a different
"w ithout
and destruc-
and somew hat contradicI could see no other me has not been mine in
cure was "a di\ine miracle;
all the life given back to around a purpose."" The contradiction ma\' only be apparent, for a believer might argue that it w as God himself w ho had inspired in Solzhenitsxn the will to resist and to overcome, in which case both man and divinity w ere working tow ards the same end (a view that Solzhenitsyn certainly holds now ). If Solzhenitsvn's first successful skirmish w ith cancer had returned him to a belief in God, this second, more deadh battle seems to have convinced him that Ciod w as not mereh' at but also on his side.
explanation. Since then, the
full sense:
The
first
it is
built
w elfare of his
pupils.
one of the happiest of
his life.
soul to the it
was the Berlik school. Solw hile devoted himself heart and
beneficiary of his restored energy
zhenitsyn genuinely loved teaching and for
a
Looking back
at this
period
later,
he declared
Cancf.r
Ward
I
34
i I
were m\ seeoml xoiilh, aitliougli hati nothing but the \\ ho had never had anv proper instruction, were very fond .\nd it gave me enormous of me. And \\ hat a lot of time I spent v\ith them! Real live children! Ihev had seen nothing thev were the children pleasure. nothing. For thev weren't allowed to leave that place either. For of exiles them the whole world consisted of w hat the\ could see there, and what thev loved exile as
I
school.
if
it
1
The children,
.
.
.
.
—
.
didn't see there they in
mv
have
life
.
—
.
I
would never
sec.
.
.
.My goodness, how the\ studied! Never
seen such eagerness anvwhere."'
Despite the urge to spend ever\' spare niinute of his time writing, Solzhenitsvn organized a geodetic club, for w hich he helped the children
make
and took them out on geodetic expeditions. He taught them astronom\', and almost ever\' evening a group of them would come to his hut, v\ here he would sit them dow n outside and study the sky with them, until they could identify every star. For this purpose he devised and built a model of the night sk\' in the shape of an upturned bowl. When all
their o\\ n instruments,
he placed
a
candle beneath
positions, each labelled
Pupils also
homew ork
came
w
it,
all
ith its
the constellations stood out in their correct
name.
indixidualh' with their school problems or with pieces
and Solzhenitsyn was well known for his discuss their work with them or their parents. He kept a special notebook for each class in w hich he recorded details of each pupil's behaviour, their likes and dislikes, preferred subjects, and spare-time interests. And nothing was too much trouble for him.'' One of his colleagues, the Cierman teacher, Frieda Chernousova, was so impressed w ith his erudition and talents that she regarded his turning to
of
w
that the\' couldn't do,
illingness to call
on
his pupils at
home and
authorship after the publication of grave mistake.
He was unlock
a
"He
A Day
in the Life of
should ne\er have done
teacher of rare talent.
an\- child's heart."
.
.
.
it.
Solzhenitsyn could find the keys to
Chernousova
recalled that he had an excellent
knowledge of German and could read English. She little
Ivan Denisovich as a
His vocation was teaching.
also recalled a significant
scene.
One day
he had gathered the pupils together to take them on an excursion.
himself was carrying his usual equipment;
a
He
knapsack over one shoulder and
a
camera over the other. The children were talking and shouting and making a tremendous racket. All of a sudden he rapped out a command in a voice that was unbelievably pow erful and metallic: "Attention!" The class instantly fell into line and froze. It w as then I realized he had once been a soldier, and no ordinary soldier either."*
The
pupils responded to Solzhenitsyn with affection and admiration, had an uncanny \\a\' of bringing out the best in them. He used to burst into the class-room like a \\ hirlwind, giving orders before he had even reached his chair: "So-and-so to the blackboard. So-and-so give me a report on the homework." It was said that he never talked down to his pupils but for he
treated
them
The two things he couldn't were unpunctualit)" and sloppiness.
like equals, despite his strictness.
abide, according to one of the pupils,
SOLZHENITSYN
[342]
"He
\\
as strict
ises,
\\
hether
it
photography w
One
anvone broke his w ord or arrived late for an late and invariably carried out his promgive us an extra geometry lesson or simply to do some
and exacting
He
appointment.
w
if
himself was never as to
ith us."'*^
of Solzhenitsvn's most prized possessions
purchased
it
from
his salar\-,
\\
because of the extra hours he put in the
\\
as his
camera.
He
had
hich w as one and half times the normal rate
—
thirt\
a
week
instead of twenty.
Almost
thing he did with the camera, in secret from everyone else, w as to
first
and cap that had been his uniform in (all of w hich he had smuggled out w ith him w hen he left), and use the self-timer to take a self-portrait. This w as one memento he w as determined to have and to keep; years later, copies of this photograph w ere to find their w av to close friends and former camp
up
dress
in the
padded
jacket, trousers,
the special camp, complete
comrades in
in
w
Moscow and be
ith
numbers
kept as a talisman.
He
eventually published
it
The Gulag Archipelago.
to w hich the camera w as put w as filming his manuscripts. now Solzhenitsyn had relied not so much on holes in the ground as on whose details he has never disclosed taught him by a fellow a method exile of concealing papers both inside and outside his hut in such a w ay that the\ would not be found even bv search parties. But with the camera he started to make microfilms, and these he inserted into the covers of tw o books, placed the books in envelopes and addressed them to Alexandra Tolsto}', at her farm in the United States. The name of Tolstoy, his favourite author, w as a kind of svmbol for him and an augurv of proper treatment. "I knew nobodv else in the West, not a single publisher, but felt sure that Tolstoy's daughter w ould not den\ me her help."-" But he did not, it seems, ever try
Another use
Until
—
—
I
to send
them.
Solzhenitsvn's relativelv high salary meant that he could his
hut instead of renting
built for cold storage
and came
would continue
the latter
it.
to an
to Reshetovskaya, he
agreement w
to cultivate
now purchase
had a cellar ow ner whereby the vegetable garden and they would
According
ith
the former
share the produce.
At the age of thirtv-five, Solzhenits\n
settled
dow n
to a life that
was the
During the day he taught at sch(X)l. chores or occupied himself with his pupils.
nearest to normal he had e\ er experienced. In the earlv evenings
he did
his
At night and during the weekends (except for the not infrequent occasions when evervone w as obliged to "volunteer" for Sunday w ork to help w ith the harvesting or other agricultural tasks), he w as kept busy w ith his writing. As usual, he filled everv minute of the daw and to the outside world presented a
picture of the contented bachelor.
But
as alw a\ s in Solzhenits\ n's case,
appearances were deceptive, and
he was far from content. Perhaps his biggest problem was loneliness. Paradoxicallv, he had felt emotionallv more secure in the camps, for there he had
known where he w as. The "enemv" had been easily recognizable and identifiable camp guards, securit\ officers, stool-pigeons, trusties and he had
—
—
Cancer Ward known how As an
were.
to deal with thcni. lie
1
had also known cxactlx
total trust
and
confidence.
total
Ihes"
tom of the heap. Solzhenitsyn had had no
among camp
w ere
all
3]
his friends
old convict of long experience, he had believed he could
glance w ho w as trustworthv and w ho not, and
had been
who
34
tell at a
friends there
together
at
the bot-
difficultv in confiding his inner-
most secrets to them, and e\en in reading his works to them to hear criticisms. Outside the camps, how ever, there w as no cement of common adversitv to bind people together, nor the same sense of confronting a common enemv. People w ere anxious to get on w ith living their ow n lives. W hat the\ valued were privacy anti family affairs. Facu people like .\Iitro\ich and other political exiles had a dimension to their lives that had not existed in the camps; this made it harder to get to know them propcrlv and pre\ented SoIzhenits\n from completeK' committing himself to them. It was all verv confusing, and
he experienced considerable difficult\
The one
in adjusting to
it.
exception to this general rule was an elderlv couple of political
exiles called Nikolai
friends. Nikolai
and Elena Zubov, w ho soon became Soizhenitsxn's
Zubov w as
the gynaecologist
who had
closest
advised Solzhenitsvn
stomach pains, and, although in his earlv sixties, was still bursting w ith energw Like Solzhenitsvn, he worked time and a half and w as indefatigablx punctilious in the execution of his duties, never hesito seek treatment for his
middle of the night to attend to a patient and keeping round the clock. In this impulsive energv and dedication to duty, Solzhenitsyn recognized a kindred spirit. Another reason for feeling comfortable \\ ith the Zubovs was that both had served time in labour camps before being exiled to Kok Terek, and the\' understood Solzhenitsvn's psvchologv. On the other hand, the\" were quite different from him in their tating to rise in the
himself on
blissful
call
acceptance of exile as the best of
all
possible worlds (after the horrors
of the camps) and in their readiness to forget the injustice that had been done to them.
Thev had come from
a small
town near Moscow
.
Elena had been mar-
meeting and marrving Zubov, had moved in with mother, though the latter's domination of her son had stretched
ried before, then, after
him and
his
Elena's tolerance to the limit.
It
w as the mother's short-sighted impulsiveness
had led to Nikolai and Elena's downfall. Some time after the war broke out, she had unthinkinglv taken in a deserter from the Red Armv and given him shelter for a couple of nights. Not long afterwards the deserter was caught and made a full confession about w here he had staxed. Nikolai's mother was almost eighty and deemed to be bevond prosecution, but Nikolai and Elena were charged and convicted as enemies of the people. Thev were each sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, to be follow ed by perpetual exile (as in Solzhenitsvn's case, two defendants meant an organization), and were that
released into exile in different places: Elena in Krasnoyarsk and Nikolai in
Kok Terek.
After
a
year of writing incessant complaints and protests to Mos-
cow, Elena had been allowed
to rejoin her
source of their present contentment."'
husband, and
this
was the main
SOLZHEMTSYN
[344]
Not long
after Solzhenitsxn got to
own
know them,
the\ crow
ned
their hap-
Ihev from the same ingenious Ukrainian who had equipped Solzhenitsvn's hut, who was an absolute wizard vxith the gnarled and twisted shapes of the local saxaul. Nikolai also had in him something of Tristram Shandv's Uncle Tob\', for he had evolved an elaborate plan for laying out his quarter-acre garden in the form of a miniature park, complete w ith a central a\ enue, apricot trees, a vineyard, hops, tobacco plants, and a semicircular summer-house. Nothing of this existed when Nikolai proudly showed Solzhenitsxn over his bare plot, piness with the purchase ot their
cla\'
hut, with a garden attached.
possessed not a stick of furniture but w ere able to order
it
but he could see the details so clearK in his mind's e\e that he referred to
them
as if the\'
were already
there.
Solzhenits\n came to adore this kindh
jolh pair
,
and spent
a great deal
"Thev were like a father and mother to me," he said and thev pro\ ided him w ith the first famih' enxironment he had know n
of time in their house. later,"
were the prototypes of the KadEven their tw o dogs, Zhuk the Alsatian and Tobik the terrier, welcomed him as part of the family, and Solzhenitsvn would take them for long walks over the dusty steppe or to the river Chu, three miles away. Tobik in time became a messenger between Solzhenitsvn's clav hut and the Zubovs'. Nikolai would tie a message to his collar and send him off to SolzhenitSN n w ith it, and Solzhenitsyn would send his reply in the same since the Fedorovsk\'s in his childhood (the\
mins
in Cancer W'urd).
fashion.
Betw een them there grew up that SolzhenitSNu's relations the a
Zubovs about
well-educated
his
w
w
ith the
riting
man w ith
trust
and love that w
other exiles, so
and show ed them
much
as
unthinkable
in
so that he confided in
his manuscripts. Nikolai
an interest in languages, architecture,
histor\',
was and
meteorolog\', as well as the medical sciences, and Elena was equally a booklover.
They became
his first readers (in the
and encouraged him w In
June 1954,
at
ith their love
the start of the
camps he had had only
listeners)
and admiration.
summer
vacation, Solzhenitsyn returned
to Tashkent for a further course of radiation treatment.
He was
given a friendh'
w elcome b\' the doctors and nurses and w as found to have improved enormoush' he had put on w eight and w as looking quite w ell. Nevertheless, he was kept at the clinic for nearK' two months. The treatment had to be interrupted at one point w hen his w hite-blood-corpuscle count dropped dangerousl\' low but it w as thereafter continued until pronounced successful. While killing time in the w ard, Solzhenitsyn read a great deal and w rote a series of critical articles on Soviet authors w ith the rhetorical title Let Us Open Our Eyes.-' It is possible that he was inspired b\' reading at the time a celebrated article in Sovy /i//> called "On Sincerit\- in Literature," by X'ladimir Pomerantsev, an anti-Stalinist plea for more openness and honesty by Soviet w Titers and a \eiled attack on socialist realism. In Cancer Ward the reading of this essa\' by one of the characters becomes an important part of the action (coincidentallv, it w as almost certainh- for publishing this article
—
,
.
C^\NCER that
Alexander
I
was
\ai\l()\sk\
disniisseci
of Novy Mir). S\dia, and even Kirill,
who
despite his resentment over the 1952 episode, had nevertheless written in
Solzhenitsvn's defence.
Fhe chief militarv prosecutor's reasons
w ere
charges
for seeking an
annulment of the
cited as follows:
from the evidence in this case that Solzhenitsvn, in his diarv and in N. D. Vitkevich, although speaking of the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, the progressiveness of the socialist revolution in our countrv, and the inevitabilitv of its victorv throughout the world, also spoke out against the personalitv of Stalin and \\ rote of the artistic and ideological shortIt is
clear
letters to a friend,
* Solzhenitsvn's
changed view of the appropriateness
from
had separated and he had
after thev
Kopelev
at
ot"
his
fallen in love
w
remarriage to Reshetovskaya dates ith
uas "the onl\' woman he could trust," and he asked Kopele\ This argument seems both to underrate the strength of
exile.
the time and to
show him
tThe November I
another
woman. He
also told
the later date that the main reason he had gone back to Reshetovskava was that she
in a
worse
light
to
burn
his letters to
him from
his actual feelings for Natalia at
than he perhaps realized.
holiday celebrates the anniversary of the Revolution (see note p.
Ryazan was coincidentallv the birthplace of Solzhenitsvn's favourite
31).
poet, Esenin.
Matryona's Place
1
3*^7]
comings of the works of many Soviet authors and the air of unreality that pervades many of them. He also wrote that our works of art fail to give readers of the bourgeois world a sufficientlx comprehensive and versatile explanation of the arm\ and people and that our literary works are no match for the adroitK fashioned slanders lA the bourgeois world against our country.-' inevitabilitx of the victory ot the Soviet
The
interesting thing about this plea
is its
erary criticism there u as in Solzhenitsvn's
revelation of
earl\- letters
how much
and how close
it
lit-
was
to the criticisms he was to voice as a mature w riter. Soviet literature's "shortcomings" and particularly its "air of unreality" were to become leitmotivs of his later criticism and the targets against w hich his own iiterarx' practice w as
directed.
The
rehabilitation tribunals
w ere
much
as
a
foregone conclusion as the
Special Board sessions and militar\' tribunals before
Soviet
Union had changed
them
Verdicts were
in that respect.
— nothing
still
in the
decided before
It was just that attitudes had changed at the top. was sweet for Solzhenitsvn to read the tribunal's final resothat he was still, after all, "a Soviet patriot," not guilty of any
the proceedings began.
Nevertheless,
it
lution, to learn
crime, and that the decree of the Special Board, passed in
those years ago,
all
July 1945, was null and void and his case closed as unproven. It was in fact a year of good news. F'irst his remarriage, then his reha-
bilitation.
But
a brief
cloud w as cast by the sudden and tragic death of his
w ho had moved
landlady, Matryona. Matryona's niece Kira,
to the village of
Cherusti across the railwa\' line after her marriage, had unexpectedly acquired a plot of
keep
it
ground
to build on.
But
for
some reason she w as not allowed
to
unless she could build something right aw ay, and there w as no chance
of obtaining the necessary timber in time.
It
so
happened
that .\Iatr\ona had
willed Kira her goniitsa, a spacious annex to her main cabin that
and no longer used.
less self-contained
w
more or Matryona
as
Kira's father insisted that
allow the annex to be dismantled right away, without w aiting for her death,
and be transferred
to Cherusti and re-erected on Kira's plot. Matrxona agreed, and the annex was duly chopped away one evening and loaded onto two
by
When
they came to the railw
a\ line, one of the Matr\ona, were trying to free it when out of the darkness, a pair of unlighted locomotives bore dow n on them and smashed the sledge to smithereens. All three were killed instanth', the engines were derailed, and the main-line express was stopped only just in time to avoid a major catastrophe.
sledges pulled
sledges got stuck.
a tractor.
Two
of the men, helped
b\'
Since the tractor driver had been moonlighting, his helpers had been drinking, and the locomotives should have been lighted, just about every-
body was
to
blame and the w hole
affair
w
as
hushed up. Matr\ona's
undeterred by the tragedy that had struck them (the other Matryona's nephew
),
man
relatives,
killed
was
quickly buried their dead and quarrelled o\er Matr\ona's
inheritance.
Solzhenitsyn was caught in the middle of this episode.
He
had watched
SOLZHENITSYN
[368]
the annex being dismantled and towed away, had been roused from his bed
and questioned bv the poHce
in the
middle of the night on w hich the accident
occurred, had attended the funeral and the wake, which was held in Matryona's
moved
house, and had subsequently ters-in-law
the
web
,
where he
house of one of Matryona's
sis-
and heard about
of family envies and resentments that lay behind the disputes over
Matryona's meagre possessions.
It
the scenes of Russian peasant
life
tuals)
to the
learnt further details of the accident
and
later
provided the
was
a priceless
opportunity to peep behind
(not often accessible to city-bred intellec-
inspirati(jn for his classic short story
"Matryona's
which he described the entire episode. The rest of the school year seemed to pass in a blur of preparations for forthcoming move to Ryazan. On visits to Moscow, Solzhenitsyn and
Place," in
his
Natalia visited his old sharashka friends Kopelev, Panin, and Ivashov-Musa-
w ives. When she was not staying w ith him in loraway at his novel, completing a full first draft by the time he was ready to move. And in June 1957 came the move itselt. Passing through Moscow, they spent a week with Natalia's uncle, Vatov and their respective
foprodukt, he worked
lentin Turkin, the
cinema
critic.
summer honeymoon
Valentin had also been through
times since that carefree
of 1940,
couple to spend their
in
when he had urged
difficult
the
Noung
Tarusa. In 1948, during Stalin's cam-
paign against "rootless cosmopolitanism"
(ie.,
interest in foreign countries),
Valentin had been publicly pilloried and his textbook on the history of the
cinema banned before publication. The charge against him was that he had written too favourably on the American cinema, particularly on the pioneering role of D. W. Griffiths, and thus slighted Soviet achievements. Since he wasn't a Jew (the campaign against 'cosmopolitans" was aimed primarily at the Jews), he had escaped with a reprimand and was able to retain his post at the Institute
of Cinematography. But the shock of being attacked
when thousands w ere
He was
still
disappearing into the camps had
the brilliant, sophisticated
Solzhenitsyn
at their first
man
left its
of the world
at a
time
mark on him.
who had
dazzled
meeting, but now had retired into himself and
become even more epicurean in his private habits than when Solzhenitsyn had first met him before the war. It was at this time that Solzhenitsyn renewed his acquaintance with Valentin's daughter, Veronica.
The
pretty fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with
from before the war was now married for the second time and had a tw o-\ear-old daughter. During the day she worked in a children's library and in her spare time was studying journalism at Moscow University, where her husband, Yuri Stein, was also studying, after seven years in the air force. They still lived in the family's cramped communal flat on Malaya Bronnaya Street, together w ith Veronica's two aunts. Veronica had followed Solzhenitsyn's vicissitudes with sympathetic interest ever since he and Natalia had been to stay with her and her mother flying pigtails
during their honeymoon in 1940. In 1945, after Solzhenitsyn had been arrested, investigated,
and sentenced,
it
w as Veronica's mother
to
w hom he
first
sue-
M ATRYON a's
Place
I^*^)*;!
s ot his w hereabouts; and it was w ith the t\\ o \ eronhad stayed during that crowded \ear from 1945 to 1946, when Solzhenitsvn w as successixelv in Hut\rki Prison, New Jerusalem, and Kaluga Gate. I he younger \ eronica had been present w hen ll\a Solomin returned from the front and described to Natalia the details of Solzhenitsvn's arrest, and in 1953 she had met Solomin vet again when he, t(M), had returned from the labour camps. Finall\', it was to X'eronica that Natalia had given Solzhenitsyn's early stories and some of his books (including the profuselv annotated copv of War and Peace) when she had left Solzhenitsvn for \'sevo-
ceeded
in
sending new
icas that Natalia
lod.
Veronica was thus aware of the various stages of Solzhenits\ n's od\sse\jails, camps, and exile, and w hen she heard of his return from
through the
Kok
him a letter saving that if he was e\er in Mosw elcome at their flat in Malava Bronnava as in the old davs. Coming at a time w hen he was still alone and feeling friendless and neglected, w ith no family to turn to, her letter had touched him, and he had responded with gratitude, saying that he appreciated her gesture all the more because he was too self-conscious, after his vears in the camps, to approach old acquaintances first. But it was not until now reunited w ith Natalia, that he had felt able to accept Veronica's offer. The return to Malava Bronnava must have evoked \ivid memories in Solzhenitsvn and Natalia and helped to cement their feeling of having completely buried the years of their separation. X'eronica and \\\r'\ welcomed them with true Russian hospitalitx' and informed them that since the\- had recently acquired an additional room on the tioor above their flat, Solzhenitsyn and Natalia w ere w elcome to stav there any time thev were in Moscow. Veronica regarded the returned exile with especial interest, and it seems that a bond of sympathy and affection sprang up betw een her and Solzhenitsyn almost immediately. She found him much changed from the impetuous and energetic student of 1940. He was now thin and had aged far more than she had expected. His hair was dull and lifeless, his eves somewhat sunken, lacking their old fire, his expression serious, and his movements slow and deliberate. At the same time, he seemed distant and absent-minded, although beneath the gentle exterior she sensed a hard, steelv centre that had not been there before. On the whole, she liked this reserved, courteous but strong-willed figure rather more than the self-centred, bumptious student of Terek, she had w ritten
cow, he w
as just as
,
1941.'^^
Natalia, for her part, was in a supercharged mood of euphoria, willing go to endless lengths to please and entertain her returned husband, full of energv and ideas, and bubbling over with happiness. It was as if she were anxious to make up for all the care and creature comforts he had missed while away and to heal the scar caused bv their separation. She arranged a shopping expedition to purchase a number of items that were available onh' in Moscow and that they needed for their new life in Rvazan, including Solzhenitsyn's first typewriter (a Moskva-4). Between them the\- planned to t\pe to
SOLZHENITSYN
[370] all
the manuscripts that Solzhenitsyn had accumulated in the four years since
from Ekibastuz
his release
—Natalia
professionall}',
employing the touch-typing
she had learned at university, and Solzhenitsyn in the classic two-finger mode.
down the Volga and which thev embarked on before settling in Ryazan. ^^ The one thing that saddened their stav in Moscow was Veronica's news of Ilya Solomin's arrest and imprisonment. It had happened in May 1946, quite soon after Ilya moved awav from Natalia's aunts in Rostov and into the unversity hostel. He had been a member of a group of students who used to meet regularly for parties, discussions, and various social functions, and between flirting they had talked politics. This had aroused the suspicions of the universitv authorities, the group was presumabh' infiltrated bv an informer, and the whole lot were rounded up and arrested. Ilva, as one of two who had served in the army and \\ ere therefore older than the others, had been sentenced to seven vears in the labour camps for anti-Soviet agitation, and most of the rest had been given five vears. Most disquieting was the news that an attempt had been made to link Ilva's case \\ ith that of Solzhenitsyn and \ itkevich (both were from Rostov), and Ilva's assertion that when shown some of the evidence in Solzhenitsvn's case, he had discovered some damaging testimonv against him bv Kirill. He had asked Veronica to pass this information on and to warn Natalia against her friend. It was yet one more point Natalia also bought tickets for a short steamer cruise
Oka
rivers,
of potential discord betw een the
t\\
o former school-friends, but
Solzhenitsyn's inclination at the time was to dismiss
Once with
a
in
it
seems that
it."*"
Rvazan, Solzhenitsvn and Natalia commenced their new life Her two rooms in the communal flat on the first floor
burst of activitv.
had grow n shabbv in the five vears that she had occupied them, and Solzhenitsvn, armed with the practical experience gained in the camps, set to w ork to rew ire and redecorate them. The smaller of the two rooms was equipped with
a
double bed,
a pair
of desks, and bookcases
all
around the walls
—
for
Solzhenitsvn and Natalia. Natalia's mother, Maria, continued to sleep in corner of the larger room,
w hich
also served as their fixing-
a
and dining-room
combined. In this way, not onlv were the rooms made more convenient for their new occupant but the shade of his predecessor w as exorcized in the same operation. The kitchen and toilet (there was no bathroom) continued, as before, to be shared with Natalia's neighbours. An advantage of the wooden house on Kasimovsky Lane was that it was still on the edge of open country, and although the Rvazan suburbs were expanding year bv vear, encroaching ever further on the surrounding fields, it still had a quiet, tree-shaded garden. In one corner was an ancient apple tree, beneath w hich Solzhenitsvn constructed a bench and table for working out of doors, and in the summer thev carried out a couple of loungers and spent w hole davs in the garden. Within a vear or two the yard of the Radio door had been asphalted over and was used as an unofficial vouths on their motorcvcles, and a food warehouse across attracted a stream of noisy lorries, but even then the garden contin-
Institute next
race-track
the street
bv
local
MaTRYONa's
l^LACF.
l37'l
a rchigc, and in w inter the "Walrus," w ho had always rexelled in was happy to chop firewood outside. "I don't remember ever having had such living conditions in all niv life," Solzhenitsvn wrote to I)r Zubov at about this time."^ And a few vears later he was to devote one of his miniature stories, "Breathing," to the jo\' the
ucd to be the cold,
garden gave him. it rained, and the clouds arc still scudding across the sky. A few drops from time to time. I stand beneath the apple tree the blossom not quite faded vet and breathe in. So what if this is only a postage stamp of a garden hemmed in bv five-storey monsters. I no longer hear the roar of motorcvcle exhausts, the v\ hine of record
Last night
—
still fall
—
.
.
.
players or the tinkling of transistors. sport of others, so long as rain,
it
will
still
we
be possible to
Even
if
you and
I
are constantly
made
the
can breathe here under the apple tree after the
live.-*^
21
THE SCHOOLMASTER FROM RYAZAN SEPTEMBER 1957 Solzhenitsvn started work as a teacher of physics and INastronomy applied for the at High School No. in Ryazan. He had 2
first
post in the spring, but o\\ ing to his prison record
the appointment to be confirmed.
had been arrested for it
had taken some time for
The appointments
Education Department expressed amazement to say
it
director of the
at the fact that
Ryazan
Solzhenitsyn
"Do you mean most uninformed Soyiet citizens,
criticizing the "personalitx- cult" in 1945:
existed as long ago as that?"' Like
she thought that Khrushche\'s speech had concerned onl\- the post-war years.
now had his certificate of rehabilitation to proye and the headmaster of High School Xo. 2, Georgi Matyeyey, whom he met at the department, turned out to haye fought on the same front as Solzhenits\n during the war." After an exchange of reminiscences, no more needed to be said. Solzhenitsyn appears to haye been as outstandinglx successful in his teaching in R\azan as he had been in Kazakhstan, and for much the same reasons. His yerye, his enthusiasm, his inyentiyeness, soon became bywords in the school, and he was found to be particularly adept at making the connection between theory and practice. In the days of his fame the headmaster told a yisiting reporter, "The main thing about him ... is his indestructible loye of life and of eyerything in life concerned with science. Say his class is coyering a particular subject. He makes a point of taking his pupils to a local factory or workshop and getting them to watch what's going on. Then he tells them to soKe a problem on the basis of what they haye obseryed at the factory. It is amazing how clear and obyious the laws of physics become when you perceiye them in life around \ou, not eyen suspecting that you Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn
his innocence,
372
The Schoolmaster from Ryazan
[373]
have been witnessing them all along." Matvevev recalled having become so absorbed in some of Solzhenits\n's poetic descriptions of phwsics when vis-
come
class-room that he forgot what he had
iting his
for
and sta\ed to
listen
until the end.'
Soviet cliches about an "indestructible love of
life"
can be discounted,
must be remembered that this account was written in the of Solzhenitsyn's success and achievement of nation-w ide fame. afterglow Nevertheless, the picture of the gifted and dedicated teacher emerges with great claritv from all accounts of his work in Rvazan. He was known for keeping up w ith the latest developments in his subject, particularlv in the field of space travel, and twice went to Moscow to lecture on the teaching of phvsics. He was also asked to write an article on earth satellites for the local edition of .A;; Agitator's \otebook (it was never published) and spoke at a local meeting to mark the launching of the first sputnik. Another interest put to good use was his hobbv of photograph v. Taking over the school photographx' club, he introduced a passion for order and precision that w as quite new to most of the pupils. Soon the dark-room was festooned with neativ tvped notices some of them in verse containing instructions on how to develop and print, or admonishing the students against waste and a meticulous filing system was introduced to keep track of club members' work. When a group of fellow teachers went on a brief hunting expedition, it was inevitable that Solzhenits\n should go along w ith his camera. And yet this appearance of plunging heart and soul into his teaching was only a facade, for Solzhenitsvn w as careful to limit his commitments at the school and to organize his life w ith the utmost rigour, so as to leave the maximum amount of time for w riting. He restricted his hours of teaching to fifteen a week for the first \ear, twelve in the second \ear, and eventuallv to onlv ten the minimum to qualifv as "emploved" and be eligible for social of course, and
it
—
—
—
—
securitv.
One
of the reporters
who
later visited the school
described his routine
as follows.
Time
is
so precious to
him
that
vou would take
motives weren't so crystal clear and fundamental.
it
for a
He
mania
if
his creative
arrives in his class-room
bell. He doesn't hang around after the end of good reason, doesn't drop into the staff room. He takes every opportunit\' of avoiding long meetings and conferences, not hesitating to use the help of one of his pupils to slip past the open door of the auditorium unnoticed. At the same time, he manages to get evervthing done. He breaks no promises, is never late, and demands the greatest exactitude from others in the fulfilment of their duties. Alexander Isavevich's punctuality is proverbial.
just
one or two minutes before the
classes and,
\\
ithout a
.
He
is
a
This self-discipline naturalh' extended into
his private life as
etovskaya has written in her memoirs of the monkish first
.
.
person of rare self-discipline.^
few vears
in
Rvazan.
"We
lived
bv
a set
life
w ell. Resh-
they led during the
of strict rules on going to the
SOLZHENITSYN
[374]
cinema, concerts, and theatres.
We
allowed ourselves
visits to
the cinema
only twice a month. As for concerts and theatres, these were limited to a visit every other month. All this was recorded. If we exceeded the quota in any
one month,
we had
to abstain the following
month
order to make up for
in
it."^
Although she was
to
complain of this
strict
regime
not without reason), Natalia seems to have accepted time. After
all,
she had read
in years to
docilely
it
come (and
enough
at the
"The Darling" and been warned. Somewhat
harder to accept was the isolation from her former friends. She still taught for \v hich, incidentally, she received at the Agricultural Institute
—
chemistry
a very good salary, thus making it possible for Solzhenitsvn to reduce his hours at the school and earn so little on his own account. But like Solzheni-
now spent no more time at her job than was absolutely would rush home as soon as she could to help Solzhenitsyn on what was by now almost their joint project, the second and third drafts tsvn himself, she necessary, and
of The First Circle.
According to Reshetovskava's memoirs, work on the second draft lasted from the summer of 1957 until mid-January 1958. An important feature of this draft was the complete reworking of the chapters devoted to Nadia Nerzhin and her life in the Moscow University hostel at Stromynka while her husband was in the sharashka. Vox this, Solzhenitsyn now had Natalia's diary to work from, and he questioned her exhaustively about her movements, thoughts, and emotions at that time, as well as about her relations with the
other girls
who
shared her room. With a few of these he also had an oppor-
tunity to talk, especially
whom
w
ith
Alexandra Popova (Olga
in the novel),
with
he and Natalia occassionally stayed v\'hen they visited Moscow.''
Solzhenitsyn was also able to discuss large sections of the novel with the originals of
some of the
principal protagonists, above
all
with Lev Kopelev
and Dimitri Panin. Together they went over some of the scenes in which all three of them appeared, and Panin, in particular, was very active in helping Solzhenitsyn think up new themes for some of Sologdin's arguments with Rubin. Although both friends figured very prominently, Kopelev seems to have taken a more detached view of Solzhenitsyn's work and to have given
what he wrote, whereas Panin had
him
carte blanche in
ical
ambitions of his
own and
took a lively interest in
In a sense this suited Solzhenitsyn quite well, for he to Panin's
literary all
and philosoph-
stages of the novel.
had moved much closer evils ot the Rev-
views on the perniciousness of Marxism and the
whereas Kopelev, though thoroughly disillusioned w ith Stalin, still less intact. Panin also welcomed Solzhenitsyn's return to Christianity, but in 1959 he wrote him a long letter saying that faith was not enough and that before Solzhenitsyn could regard himself as a true Christian he would have to submit his will to the church. Solzhenitsyn, it appears, was not prepared to make such a submission.
olution,
preserved his faith in Lenin more or
A number of meetings took place in Moscow, where Solzhenitsyn also saw the painter Sergei Ivashov-Musatov and discussed his role in the novel
— The Schoolmaster from Ryazan with him. lvashov-.\Iusato\- was not
him
1
3 7 5
]
Panin and Kopelev, and liked to talk to him about such subjects as the role ot the artist and the meaning of art in contemporarv societ\'. In the sharashka Solzhenitsvn had been a sincere admirer of Ivashov-Musatov's talent. He still treasured the pencil sketch Ivashov-Musatov had made of him there; and the artist's picture The Castle of the Holy (irail hung in his living-room in R\azan. But now he had doubts. Ivasho\-Musatov was obsessed with one project in particular Othello, Desdemona, and lago which he had started in 1956 or 1957. Solzhenitsvn felt that it was a waste of the artist's talent and argued for more "relevance." On one occasion, in 1959, during a visit to Ivashov-Musatov's studio with Panin, Solzhenitsvn exclaimed, "I can quite understand w h\ great artists have alw avs draw n on the eternal subjects in Holv Scripture, and I can see w hv thev also find inspiration in Shakespeare. But I cannot understand w h\ an artist should be so firmlv attached to the subject matter of ages so remote from ours after he but Solzhenitsvn regarded him as
as close to
as
a creative colleague
—
has been witness to the sufferings of people close
and treacherv, around him."
as
thev exist in our
Moscow
\ erv occasionallv his
Solzhenitsvn had brief
One pov
visits
of these was Nikolai in
The First
He w as now
a
b\-
friends travelled
Semvonov, the
to the top of his profession.
man who
Panin
still
down
to
all
Rvazan, and
friends living farther afield.
original of the engineer called Pota-
Solzhenitsvn had
highlv successful
him. Fidelitv, jealousv,
dav, are right in front of him and
from old labour-camp
whom
Circle,
own
first
met
in
Butvrki in 1947.
since his release had climbed back disliked
Semvonov
intenselv, but
Solzhenitsvn was verv fond of him and treasured the cigarette-case that
Semvonov had made him
in the sharashka for his birthdav.
Semvonov's
visit
gave him the opportunitv to show him the chapter placed into Potapov's
mouth, "The Buddha's Smile,"* the original idea for w hich Semvonov and he had dreamt up together in Butvrki. Contacts w ith these old labour camp comrades were extremelv important to Solzhenitsvn for a number of reasons. Ihe vear in Torfoprodukt had acted as a kind of "decompression" period in which he had begun to recover from the tensions and psvchological strains imposed b\ his term of impris-
and had commenced the painful process ot adjusting to His existence there had been of necessity solitary and reclusive. He was set apart from the rest of the villagers bv his education and experiences and had been emotionallv absorbed by the reaw akening of his love for Natalia. But now he was obliged to fit into normal societ\- in a far greater varietv of wavs, to rub shoulders w ith people of all kinds and in all walks of life, including those w ho w ere his educational, and in a few instances
onment and "normal"
exile,
life.
his intellectual, equals.
*Thc chapter is a reworking ot a well-know n camp anecdote that depicts Mrs Roosexelt arri\ ing in Moscow for a goodw ill \ isit just after the w ar and being show n round a model jail. The w hole thing
is
a
put-up job
b\'
of the prisoners) the wa\
the So\iet authorities, and the in
stor\'
which the elaborate deception
is
describes (from the point of view
mounted specialU
for her benefit.
— SOLZHEXITSYN
[376]
1
man
\\
living
w as psychologically difficult for him. He still had that sense of a ho has returned from the dead and \\ ho therefore regards the normal as somehow strange and incomprehensible. With them it was still
his
impossible to
make
friends.
None
of the other teachers
him, not even Matveyey, the headmaster.
The
\\
as
remotely close to
felt truly comho had shared similar experiences, former sons of Gulag \\ ho, like himself, had been innocent victims of Stalin's political terror. This sense of ease extended also to the Zubovs, \\ ith whom he carried on an intense correspondence throughout his years in Torfoprodukt and Ryazan, detailing his most intimate thoughts and plans. Their sensitive and concerned responses did much to buoN' him up and soothe him during this
fortable
ith
\\
were those
only people he
\\
period. .\part (for his
\\
from the
practical utilit\' of these meetings
ork on The First
compan\ was
their
three plavs dealing
ith three
w ith
his shanishka friends
another motive for restricting himself to
Among
need for absolute secrecy.
his
w
Circle),
his papers
were
of the most sensitive issues in recent Soviet
Germany; the Smersh during and after the w ar; and the terrorization of political prisoners by criminals in the camps, aided and abetted h\ the camp authorities. In addition there w as his long autobiographical poem expressing history: the unbridled behaviour of Soviet troops in occupied
brutal excesses of
sharp criticism of the Soviet regime from the very earliest days of the Revo-
onwards, and numerous other "seditious" poems, including the ode Khrushchev had done so far affected the light in w hich these works would be officially regarded. Each was, to a greater or lesser degree, "criminal," and their discoverx' would have led to fresh arrest lution
on
Stalin's death. Little that
—
and imprisonment it not worse. It was true he had devised ingenious hiding-places for most of them, but should he attract suspicion in an\- way, there was a chance the\" would be found. And now he w as w orking on \et another forbidden theme the secret prisf)n institutes set up b\ Stalin for scientists to carrx" out research and again needed perfect confidentiality. It w as this above all that motivated Solzhenitsvn's monastic life-st\ie. .\s he later wrote in The Oak and the Calf:
—
I
had to adapt m\
acquaintances invitations
had
\\
hole
—because
a single free
I
and alw ays
hour. ...
He w ent drafts
flat,
colleagues at to
to
make
a
to the .
I
tightly as possible,
as
.
need for tight security; make no friends or invite
nobody
couldn't afford to
to
mv home
let a
I
show of indifference
paper, and burning his
ith
never
.
.
.
to literature.*^
to cover his tracks b\' destro\ing
no spaces or margins and using both
fair
I
w hat I had moment.
took care never to reveal any broader interests
soon as thcv had been superseded, typing
w
and accept no
single scrap of
or allow an observant eve inside for a
w ork
enormous lengths
and outlines
.
couldn't afford to explain to anyone that in fact
hidden escape from the
Among mv
life
Ryazan
at all in
—
his
all
rough
w orks
as
sides of the
copies as soon as the final \ersion had been typed
The Schoolmastkr from Kva/an he
a habit that
hat! started in the
camps
w
antl
[377]
as destined to
the dux he was expelled from the Soviet Union,
in
continue until
1974.
no doubt that these conditions made tor immense difficulties and in e\er\ da\ li\ ing. All these drafts and copies had to be burnt sheet bv sheet in the Solzhenitsyns' stove, w hich w as situated in the shared kitchen of their communal flat. This meant sitting up late until their neighbours w ere in bed and asleep. There \\ ere a hundred other such menial tasks to be performed w ith boring repetition, all of w hich are described (\\ ith somewhat excessi\e self-satisfaction) in the opening pages of Tbe Oak and the Calf. On the other hand, some of these difficulties w ere almost certainK' of Solzhenitsvn's ow n making, answ ering to w hat w as b\ now an irresistible psvchological imperative. There was a sense in w hich he needed the whiff of
There
both
in
danger
\\
is
riting
in his nostrils,
parth
perhaps, to enable him to relixe and recapture
,
the emotional stresses of the past, and parth" because after long \ears of
conditioning he simpU"
felt
more comfortable
in
an atmosphere of embattled
conspiracv.
Evidence for
can be found
his attitude in these matters
to the details of his past. For Solzhenits\n this past
found meditation and studv,
its
remembrance
a
w
in his
response
as the object
sacred dut\
the anniversar\" of his arrest, he organized a "conxict's da\
.
."'
of pro-
on morning
F\er\' \ear. In the
he cut himself tw ent\-thrce ounces of breaci and put tw o lumps of sugar in hot w ater for his drink. At lunch time he had groats.
And
"And how
a
bow of broth and 1
I
get back to m\- old form," he later
am alreadv picking up crumbs to put The old sensations start up i\ idh .'"^
As he
a ladle
of
supper he had the remainder of the bread and groats again.
quickK'
of the da\", the bowl.
for
I
w
in m\'
rote. "B\' the
mouth and
end
licking
\
points out in that
same passage
in
Tbe Gulag Archipelago,
manv
camps "like holv relics." Solzhenits\n himself treasured the padded jacket and number patches from Fkibastuz, the aluminium spoon he had made himself there, his armv greatcoat, and his battered suitcase with the ba\()net hole in the side.* And there were reminders of this past evervw here for those w ith e\es to see. In
others did the same, and treasured their souvenirs from the
—
Milrsevo he had discovered that nearlv half the inhabitants had passed through
camps at one time or another, albeit most of them for theft. In Rvazan there was a hole in the railw av fence just outside the station that for some reason w as never repaired. Most passengers hardh" noticed it, but Solzhenitsvn did, for it was the spot w here the Stolvpin cars stopped and prison vans were backed up to load or unload prisoners even now the authorities
the labour
—
disliked admitting their existence.
More prominent ment
to the
MVD
straining at the leash
came * \\
in
was another kind of reminder,
on the south-w
from Mikhailo\
The havonet as
still
featuring a statue of a
hole had been
.
a
massive monu-
camp guard holding an
est side
Alsatian
of Rvazan, w here the main road
Solzhenitsvn was even asked to lecture in
made bv an armed guard
being transported to Fkibastuz.
at
one of the
halts
when
a local
Solzhenits\ n
SOLZHENITSYN
[378] labour
No.
camp soon after his arrival camp for women on the
2, a
in
Ryazan
—
in Corrective
outskirts of Ryazan.
The
Labour Colony was one
lecture
of his usual ones on physics and space travel, but he was terribly distracted by the emaciated faces and angular bodies of the w omen who had come to
him, and he could vividly imagine the cells they had just left, their come here, and the miserable life they would return to after-
listen to
reluctance to
wards.
One
day, finding himself in Novoslobodskaya Street on one of his
visits
Moscow, he decided on impulse to enter the "Parcels Reception Office" of Butvrki Prison. It w as full inside, mostly of women. This, he realized, was where his own parcels had come from. He recalled that on one occasion in Butyrki he and his cell-mates had discussed the problem of what job to take if and uhen thev w ere released and what v\ as the most useful thing they might do. All agreed that the most useful contribution would be to take a
to
folding stool to the Butvrki parcels office, \\
hat
went
metal in
it,
to
make
a perfect parcel. It
and contain
plastic
spoons and mugs
Solzhenitsvn w alked over to inspect the wall and
wondered w
into practice, but he
outside, and advise people on
sit
should have
list
soft sides,
as well as
of regulations hanging on the
hat chance there v\'ould ever be of putting their old plan
had barely begun
to read the notice
sergeant-major challenged him and quickly hustled him out.
On
with nothing
food and clothing.
another occasion he visited the block of
flats
when an
MVD
'"
he had helped build
at
Kaluga Gate. In those days, back in 1946, the block had been on the outskirts Moscow and hemmed in bv watch-towers and a high fence, sufficiently isolated not t(^ draw attention to itself. Now it was lost in the anonymous suburbs that stretched for miles in all directions. A sports shop stood on the spot w here the canteen and cultural and educational section had been and
of
where,
all
those \ears ago, Solzhenitsvn had recited (Jhatsky's subversive
monologue from Woe from Wit. Their old trusties' room was now part of someone's flat on the third floor, and higher up were the parquet floors he and the doors he had puttied.* Placing his hands behind his back, Solzhenitsvn paced the path that he had once paced when it had been a compound, and imagined himself back in the old days. Again that feeling of having returned from the dead, of being endowed with a double vision, came back to him. The residents of these buildings had no idea that as they strolled across the central courtx ard, thev were stepping over the ghosts of former prisoners, one of w horn had leapt to his death on this \ er\' spot. "And only had
laid
those trees in Neskuchn\- Park
.
.
.
bore witness that they remembered
happened." Unable to resist a sudden temptation, SolzhenitSNU climbed the first flight of stairs, and just below the flat w here the camp commandant's office had been, scraw led in black crayon on the white window sill, "Labour (>amp Division No. 121.""
everything, including me, and that
it
had
all
really
*lt appears that after the piil)hcati()n of /van Denisovich Solzhenitsv n
prominent physicist then h\ ing the
rooms
in that
\
antl admiretl the fact that his
was invited
to
meet
a
crv building. According to rumour, Solzhenitsvn paced
Hoors did not stjueak.
The Schoolmaster from Ryazan Unlike Nikolai \
unable and unw
an immense
itkc\ ich
[379]
and nian\ millions of others, Solzhenits\ n w as April 195S he conceived the idea of w riting
illing to forget. In
histor)' of the
labour camps, basing himself on his
ences and the stories he had heard from others.
He made
own
experi-
a tentative start,
on the vast enterprise that was to become I'he later to write in the preface to volume 1, he no longer regarded his own eleven years on the archipelago "as something shameful or a nightmare to be cursed," but had come "almost to lo\e that monstrous world." And in volume 3 he was to claim positive advantages for it. ("Life behind bars has given us a new measure for men and things. It has w iped from our eves the gummv rtim of habit, which alwa\s clogs the vision of the before abandoning
it
again,
Gulag Archipelago. As he was
man who
has escaped shocks.")''
That same spring of 1958 Solzhenitsvn suffered a relapse and was obliged to enter the hospital for a course of chcmotherap\ Natalia was desperateh' worried. Only a year ago, at her husband's urging, she had gone to the Lenin Library and read everything she could find about cancer, malignant tumours, melanoblastomas, and so on, and had come to the conclusion that Solzhenitsyn had only about four years to live. But the chemical treatment proved to be outstandingly successful, and Solzhenitsvn was discharged after onlv tw o .
weeks, although he continued to attend the hospital as an out-patient.
He
w ith infusions made from the suppiv, and v\ith another folk-remedv
also continued to treat himself occasionallv
mandrake root, of which he still had a made from a fungus that grows on birch trees.'' By the end of the treatment, Solzhenitsvn felt titter than he had done for years and was filled with optimism. The tumour seemed to have subsided and was no longer causing him discomfort. Ihat summer, after careful preparation, he and Natalia had their first proper holidav six weeks in Leningrad, which Solzhenitsyn had never visited before. Characteristicallv, he had established a card index on the city's historv and art beforehand (Natalia had done the same for its architecture), and the two of them spent much of their time wandering earnestly from monument to monument, index cards in hand, dutifully photographing and listing all the places seen, for all the world like
—
Japanese (or Soviet) tourists.
1 hey also went to concerts, the
ballet,
and the theatre. The
pla\ that
impressed them most, according to Natalia, was a little-known piece bv Alfred Jarry called The Sixth Storey, about which Solzhenitsvn later wrote to the
Zubovs: "The subject is elementarv. 'He' deceived 'her' and did not marrv her. But here, precisely, one becomes convinced that the most important thing in art is not what is said but how it is said."'"^ Later, in .4 Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he was to suggest a different conclusion, w hen a prisoner terminates a discussion about the merits of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin
with the exclamation "No! feelings in me!""' Later
To
still,
hell
with vour hoic
in his
Nobel
if it
lecture, he
doesn't aw aken good
was
to trv to find a
middle wav between these two extremes.
At some point
in
1958 Solzhenits\n decided to resurrect his old hobbv
SOLZHEMTSVN
[380]
One motive, according to Natalia, w as that he had put on weight chemotherap\' treatment and \\ as anxious to shm dow n again an impulse that drove him to imitate Panin and start doing yoga exercises every morning. But there was more to it than that. After his long years of impris-
of cvclincr.
—
after his
enclosure, he craved mobility; and although he was at last living beloved central Russia, he had seen ver\ little of it. He needed to get out and take possession of it, physically, mentally, and spiritually. He could not afford anvthing more than a bicycle, but even this had its positive side,
onment and in his
it satisfied his romantic prejudice against the noise and smell of the internal-combustion engine,* w hile simultaneously reminding him of the carefree cvclincr tours of his \outh. A bicvcle brought him one step nearer that innocent past and pushed the intervening years a fraction further aw ay.
for
Oka
Natalia bought a bicvcle, too, and they
w ent
River and surrounding beauty spots.
On
for excursions to the
one of these they
nearby
visited the
village of Solotcha, nestling deep in primeval w oods about from Rvazan. Solzhenitsyn immediately fell in love with it, and years. The toUow ing it became a favourite haunt of his over the next few summer, fixing up his heavv bic\cle w ith pannier bags and loading up w ith
beautiful
little
thirtv miles
provisions, Solzhenits\n
made
a
and Rxazan provinces meet."^ These were moving, bew
Oka Moscow
longer tour alone through the lower
region, and the vear after that he toured the upper
Oka w here
ildering, disconcerting,
the
and infuriating jour-
nevs for the ardent pilgrim. On the purely functional level, there was the sheer difficultv of finding anxthing to eat or anyw here to stay for the night. There are no inns or hotels or restaurants in the small tow ns and villages ot the Russian countrvside, and no outsider
ularh alone. Tourism
is
for
groups
is
expected to travel there, partic-
in large cities. Solzhenitsyn could rarely
and w herever he w ent w as greeted with incredulity seemed that only a thief, a spy, or a criminal on the run could be travelling at random, w ithout an official itinerary. Good Soviet cit-
anvw here
find
and suspicion.
to stav It
izens could not conceive of a solitary traveller touring the countryside for
no particular reason, and this led to all sorts of misunderstandThere were profounder disappointments too. \'isiting the ramshackle village w here his adored Esenin had been born, he found only ugliness, povertv, neglect. The monaster\- in which the poet Polonsky was buried had been knocked to pieces and its site turned into a labour camp; the poet's abandoned grave was inaccessible inside the locked compound. In almost pleasure, with ings.
every village the churches had been pillaged and turned into stables, warehouses, or clubs, their bells silenced and their murals defaced. And yet Solzhenitsyn was also stirred by the sprawling undulations of the broad Russian plain, the slow meanderings of the river Oka, the smudges of wood and forest
on the horizon, and the sheer defencelessness of these medieval-looking villages, each w ith its ruined church and bell-tow er. Beneath the surface ugli*In
his miniature storx
fun of the motor car.
"Means of
Transport,"" written not long after this. Solzhenitsyn
made
Thk Schooi.m astkr from Ryazan
[3^1
I
ness and vulgarity ol tasteless concrete boxes, loudspeakers on posts, and
garishh painted w indows, he
coiiltl still [lerceixe
sian traditions shining through,
and
his ears
Russian historx and Rus-
were
filled
w
ith the
words of
Russia's poets on the matchless beauty of the Russian countrx side.
Much
of what he saw and
felt
subse(|uentK found
of miniatinx' stories that he began to w
rite at this time.
its It
wa\ into is
a series
not clear w hat
—
new form prose miniatures ranging from about a hundred hundred words in length. 1 he\' ma\' have been suggestetl b\ linthe best-know n example of works of this kind genev's poems in prose or perhaps b\' the example of some of the Russian modernists at the beginning of the centur\ like Remizox or Zam\atin. Altogether he w rote about a do/en and a half in the course of the next four or five \ears, w ith titles like "Along the Oka," "Esenin's Birthplace," and "A Poet's Ashes." One of the earliest was probabh "Breathing," cited earlier, and another was "The (jt\ on the Neva," recalling his \isit to I.eningrad. In other respects 1958 seems to have been a quiet \ ear for Solzhenits\n. By the end of it he had completed a third, and for the time being final, draft of his sharashka novel, now called The First Circle, and put the manuscript to one side. He may even have tinkered w ith some of the material for what was to become The Gulag Archipelago. But he must then ha\e turned his attention elsewhere, for w hen he first broke into print, it w as not w ith an\ of his literary w orks but w ith an article in the local Ryazan new spaper, the Priokskaya Pravcla, entitled "Post Office Curiosities," on the failings of the Soviet postal service, which appeared in March 1959.' Ihis article, a kind of curiled
him
to try this
to three
—
—
,
osity in itself,
is
actually rather revealing of Solzhenitsvn's psychology at the
shows the way in w hich his barrack-room-law \'er s\ ndrome, so noticeable in the prisons and camps, continued to operate in much the same way when he was back in civilian life. In his later memoir. The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenits\n maintained that his exasperation w ith the inefficiencies and bureaucratic mentalit\- of Soviet officialdom had been held rigidly in check in Ryazan. "Though, at ever\- step in my daily life, I collided with rude, conceited, stupici, and greed\' bureaucrats of every degree and in every institution, and though I sometimes saw a chance to crash through a barrier and sweep away the rubbish w ith a w ellaimed complaint or determined protest, I could never allow myself to do so, time, for
it
never take half
a step
out of line in the direction of rebellion, of resistance,
but had always to be a model Soviet citizen, always to submit to every bully
and acquiesce in an\' stupidity.'"^ In fact, as the very tone of this passage suggests, he was not nearl\' as successful in suppressing his anger as he subsequently made out, and the Priokskaya Pravda article was a result. A year later he wrote a similar article complaining about the railway's practice of selling two tickets for the same seat, and sent it to the newspaper Giidok (The Train Whistle). The perfectionist temperament that was so profoundly and nobly affronted by the human waste and misery of the Gulag Archipelago was equally irritated and exasperated, it seems, by these infinitely more petty
SOLZHENITSYN
[382]
bureaucracy, but the difference w as that, w hereas the profounder rebeUion had resulted in the w riting of an excellent novel and was to produce several outstanding works of literature in the years to come, all that the lesser irritation could spawn w as indignant missives to the newsfailings of the Soviet
papers in the
spirit
of "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells."
It is
just as well that
Gudok discouraged him h\ not printing his contribution."''' The interesting thing about these articles is that they show Solzhenitsyn grappling, how ever superficialh', w ith themes from contemporary Soviet life
change from his almost total immersion in the past. At about the time ot newspaper article, in casting around for a subject to w rite upon, he upon the idea of describing his work at the school. Reshetovskaya writes,
as a
his first hit "I
remember
for
one night
that
mv
husband w
photography, feverishly making notes,
radio dial, for an outline of 'One
What became nitsvn's
of this outline
new-found
Day
as seated in the corner in the
weak
in the Life of a
we
reserved
light given out
by the
School Teacher.'
"-"
not known, but neither the theme nor Solzhe-
is
interest in
contemporary subject matter seems
survived for long. Instead, on 18
May
to
have
1959, he transferred the idea to a story
that he provisionally entitled Shch-854, about a
labour-camp prisoner
in Eki-
bastuz.
The
stor\-
w
as
based on an idea that had
first
come
to
him
in 1952,
w hen
he w as bricklaying in Kkibastuz. It
was an ordinary camp day
—hard,
as usual,
and
I
was working.
I
w
as helping
hand-barrow full of mortar, and I thought that this w as the way to describe the w hole w orld of the camps. Of course, I could have described my w hole ten years there, I could have done the w hole history of the camps that way, but it was sufficient to gather everything into one day, all the different and to describe just one day in the life of an average and in no fragments to carry a
.
.
.
way remarkable
prisoner from morning
till
night.-'
had lain dormant. Now it suddenl\- reappeared occupy all Solzhenitsyn's w aking thoughts. Somewhere at the back of his mind he recalled l\)lsto\''s dictum that a novel might take for its subject the life of all Europe for a century or the life of a muzhik for a single day. I olstov had tried both, and had been more successful w ith For seven years
again and quickly
War and to the
day
this idea
came
to
Peace than with
narrower form.
in the life
It
A
History of Yesterday, but Solzhenitsyn
followed naturally from his attempt
felt
drawn
to describe a
of a schoolteacher, but was now centred on the subject that he
—
most deeply about the camps. At the same time, it unlocked the passions that had been thwarted by his failure to make progress w ith his history of the camps and opened up a new channel for them to flow into, w hile bringing several of his preoccupations together into a single focus: "It seemed to me that the most interesting and important thing to do w as to depict the felt
fate of Russia.
Of
all
the drama that Russia has lived through, the deepest
was the tragedy of the Ivan Denisoviches. I wanted concerning the false rumours about the camps.""
to set the record straight
The Schoolmastfr from Ryazan The
stor\'
Solzhenits\n wrote
Denisovich Shukhov
is
wakened on
is
[3^3]
deceptivel\- simple in outline.
a frost\"
u
inter's
morning
l)\
—
Ivan
the sound
hammer hanging on a hrass rail the traditional eamp signal for rexeille. Although feeling fexerish, he forces himself to leap from his bunk and start
of a
the day's ritual.
As
the heavily laden latrine tank
is
being carried out b\ some
to swab out the 'guardhim to breakfast in the steaming mess hall, watch him go through the monotonous and immutable procedures of the roll-call, bodv search, and march to the work site, and see how the prisoners reluctantly prepare to w ork in the sub-zero temperatures. The stor\ then builds to a climax in which Shukhov and his fellow bricklayers become so carried avvav bv their w ork that thev disregard the final whistle and run the risk of being penalized for failing to stop in time and line up for the return march. Once back in the living compound, Shukhov performs a number of chores and does a personal favour for an imprisoned Moscow intellectual named Tsezar Markovich, bv queuing for Markovich's parcel at the post office and saving Alarkovich the trouble. Markovich pa\s him for his favour and also lets Shukhov have his camp supper, since he will not need it that e\ ening. Shukhov uses the money to buy some tobacco from another prisoner, performs some more little chores, chats w ith his barrack-room comrades, and falls asleep content. "The dav was over, a da\' without a cloud, almost a happv day." The story is narrated entirelv through the eves of Ivan Shukhov and
other prisoners, he house.
from
is
grabbed bv
a
warder and sent
We then accompany
his point of view, yet in the third person, allowing the author to break
into the narrative
and offer
his
ow n comments and observations w
ithout
interrupting the flow (rather according to Percv Lubbock's distillation of the
Jamesian method). The language was colloquial, rac\ (to the point of obscenity in places, though Solzhenitsvn generallv found euphemisms for his more colourful expressions), rich in folk idioms and allusions, \et also fresh and
studded w
ith
neologisms invented bv Solzhenits\n on the solid foundation
Shukhov was depicted
of his study of Dahl's lexical principles. Ivan crafty
and cunning but
tradition (clearly a brother of \
was sharpened bv the
as a
essentially moral picaresque hero in the Russian folk asil\'
Tvorkin), whose struggle for sur\
ival
was a considerable achievement, but Solzhenitsvn had surrounded his hero w ith such a rich cast of characters that he w as able to endow the story w ith quite another dimension. There was Tsezar Markovich, a screen w riter from Mos-
cow
hellish
regime of the labour camps. This
representing the metropolitan intelligentsia;
naval captain from Leningrad,
onage
after
having w orked w
who had been
ith
in itself
Commander Buinovskv,
jailed
on the suspicion of
the British as part of allied co-operation dur-
w ho had
ing the war; Tiurin, Shukhov's brigade leader, a doughty peasant
been exiled to Siberia imprisoned for his nationalists,
as a
faith;
a
espi-
kulak during collectivization; Ahoshka,
former prisoners of w
Ukrainian guerrillas. Central Asians
representing every category of prisoner
ar;
—
known
a Baptist,
Latvian and Lithuanian
in short, a galler\
to Solzhenitsvn.
of r\pes
Lach one
SOLZHENITSVN
[384]
occupied only
a
paragraph or a page or
t\\
but the effect of their repeated
o,
appearances and combined stories was to create
a
panorama of Soviet hfe and
Soviet history, a universalized portrait of suffering and oppression. Liberal hints indicated that, during these years, there had been very little to choose
between life inside and life outside the camps, in other w ords, that the Soviet Union was one gigantic labour camp. And the character of those who survived it was perforce bitter, distrustful, long-suffering, and yet stoic and in the long run triumphant over those responsible for the oppression. It is doubtful \\ hether even Solzhenitsyn recognized the extent of his achievement. The story had seemed to come so easily and naturally; into it had flowed all his stored-up knowledge and experience, but set dow n in a kind of shorthand, concentrated and extraordinarily rich. Its elements had
come from
diverse corners of his past.
The
figure of Ivan Denisovich
Shu-
khov, for instance, the "Shch-854"* of the title, as well as his name, had come from a soldier in Solzhenitsyn's battery. Shukhov had not been partic-
was simply that Solzhenitsyn later rememand likeable fellow and that somehow his face, character, and even his manner of speaking suddenly seemed to fit Solzhenitsvn's requirements. "Quite unexpectedly, w ithout any choice on my part, ularly close to Solzhenitsyn.
bered him as
It
a decent, honest,
and then the face, then some of his past, w here he first the name was from and how he spoke, began to enter my tale."-' His actual biography had been quite different. He w as never, so far as Solzhenitsyn knew, arrested or imprisoned, w hereas the fictional Shukhov's .
.
.
.
.
.
biography w as a composite of the biographies of other peasants whom SolAnd it was deliberately designed to be
zhenitsyn had met in the camps.
typical rather than idiosyncratic or sensational. ical
element as well.
myself been
a
"I
There was an autobiograph-
could ne\er have described him successfully
simple bricklayer in the camps.
One can't gain a
it
I
hadn't
proper under-
standing of the meaning of such w ork from mere hearsay. I describe a peaswith a peasant's shrewdness and a convict's shrewdness, but, of course,
ant,
one
is
bound
to
draw on
one's
own experience,
just as
one does when describ-
ing an\' character."-"^
For many of his leading characters, Solzhenitsyn drew on prisoners he had known in Ekibastuz. The naval commander Buinovsk) was based on Captain Boris Burkovsk\- from Leningrad except for one episode during the morning roll-call w hich was taken from an incident that had happened to Vladimir Gershuni. Tsezar Markovich, the script writer, was based on a .Muscovite, Lev Grossman (w ho had once been a pupil of \'alentin 1 urkin, though neither Solzhenitsyn nor Grossman had know n of their connection at the time). The early life of Tiurin, Ivan Denisovich's brigade leader and
—
the son of a family of kulaks,
someone he *Shcb
is
w as based on
later referred to (in
stories told to Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago) as Nikolai
K
by
(other
the t\\cnt\ -sixth letter of the Russian alphabet. If each preceding letter stands for 999
prisoners in the camp, then readers, of
how
big the
camps
Shukhov \\
ere.
is
the 25,829th prisoner, a vivid indication, to Soviet
The Schoolmaster erom Kva/an
[3^5]
Tiurin's character were apparentlv modelled on someone else). Alvoshka the Baptist and the canteen orderlx according to (Captain Burkovskv in a later interview, were also based on recognizable prototypes.
parts of
,
Perhaps because of
this
adherence to
real
people and
writing of Shch-854 proceeded with unusual speed.
term finished,
at
than
six
little less
the end of June,
w eeks
in
all.
As
it
was
Bv
real events, the
the time the school
virtually complete, having taken a
in the case of The First Circle,
all first
drafts
were burnt and the fair copy was carefully concealed.""" During the first part of the summer holidays, Solzhenits\n and Natalia carried out a major reorganization of their living arrangements. The two gymnastics teachers who shared their communal flat on Kasimox sk\- Lane had decided to move out and go elsew here. Solzhenitsvn suggested to Natalia that they bring her two aunts Nina and Manva from Rostov to live with them. Since Maria had moved to Ryazan to look after Natalia, they had managed alone, but Nina was now approaching eighty and Manva wasn't much younger. It was arranged for them to exchange their flat in Rostov for the extra room in Ryazan. Solzhenitsvn was particularly grateful to Nina for all the \ears w hen she had sent him parcels, and he knew that Manva had helped as well. Their move had the additional advantage of filling the flat with one famiK w hich made conditions much easier for the concealment of manuscripts and the burning of drafts in the kitchen stove. But it also had its draw backs. For Nina and Manya, the move from Rostov, w here they had spent their entire lives, was a painful wrench. Relations between them and Maria or between them and Natalia were not alw avs of the smoothest. The tw o old ladies w ere not blood relatives and seem to have retained a decidedly aristocratic streak. They were reserved and somewhat haughty in their demeanour, w ith the curt manners of the upper class and no disposition for gossip or small talk. But they were also disastrously helpless in practical matters and therefore dependent on the practical Maria's goodwill (as well as on Natalia's salary) for their daily comforts, a dependency that thev were sometimes reminded ,
of
when
relations deteriorated.
For Solzhenitsyn there was the burden of living v\ ith four women, of whom three were elderly and had lived alone for most of their lives. He was used to the chattering of Maria, who loved to talk endlessly about her childhood and youth in the "good old days" and w as an inveterate gossip, and he enjoyed the care and attention that these more or
women
lavished on him. But he found
hile the
it
difficult to
less unoccupied endure the small talk, w
atmosphere of teacups and old lace that they created was somew hat at odds with the unvarnished manners he had acquired at the front and in the labour -"^ camps. While in Rostov to arrange the move, Solzhenitsvn and Natalia had taken the opportunity to visit a number of their old friends, including Nikolai V'itkevich, who had at last married and was completing his Ph.D. dissertation. But the two friends were further apart in their view s than ever. Solzhe-
SOLZHENITSYN
[386]
nitsvn had been taking a keen interest in the Pasternak case. The preceding October the award of the Nobel Prize to Pasternak for Doctor Zhhago had created a furore in the Soviet Union, and the storm had continued \\ ell into 1959. But when Solzhenitsyn tried to discuss the subject with Nikolai, the latter w as completely uninterested. He was more concerned about some sort of dispute in the chemistry department of Rostov University, where he was now w orking, and about the problems he was having in gaining promotion. Academic politics were more interesting to Nikolai than events in the outside
world, w hereas for Solzhenitsyn
it
w
as just the reverse.
From Rostov the Solzhenitsyns travelled w est to the Crimea to visit Nikolai and Elena Zubov, who had been freed from exile the preceding year and had come dow n here to live. Their move had been complicated by the one of their daughters was very ill and by their desire to visit Elena's sick and aging mother en route. The place where Nikolai had succeeded in finding w ork w as not in the lush Mediterranean Crimea of Russian romantic fiction but a barren and cheerless area on the north shore. Solzhenitsyn, when he saw it, commented that it differed from Kok Terek only in that it was surrounded by sea instead of desert, but the Zubovs were their usual, fact that
equable selves and uttered no complaints. Solzhenitsyn was delighted to see them, for the Zubovs were
still
his
and confidants. As he had said in one of his earlx' letters to them, "sitting dow n to w rite to you always puts me into a particularly good mood in which everything seems simple and I feel free to bare all my feelings to you. And no wonder. Only w ith you was I able to share three such difficult and lonely years."- On this occasion Solzhenitsxn brought them the completed version of The First Circle they had been the earliest readers of the first drafts set dow n in Kok Terek, and now they w ould have an opportunity to compare. But he forbore to tell them about his new est w ork, Shch854, perhaps in the interests of secrecy or perhaps because it w as still not closest friends
—
completeh' finished.
The
tw o
w eeks
that Solzhenitsyn
unusually sedentary for them In the
Crimea w ere no timetables. the beach and go swimming. In
and Natalia spent
—no guidebooks, no
mornings they would take
a stroll to
in the
itineraries,
w as siesta time, and in the evenings they would w alk or swim once more. Even in the southern heat, however, Solzhenitsyn could not bear such inactivity for long and soon started work on a story he had been planning for some time, about the death of his lorfoprodukt landlady, Matryona Zakharova. Its provisional title was based on a Russian proverb, "Without a Righteous Person No Village Can Stand,"* but after struggling for some da\s with it, he seemed to run into a blind alley. According to Reshetovskaya, he felt that he had exhausted the image of Matryona and had nothing left to sav about her, although his theme w as still not fully devel-
the afternoons
it
*"Righte()iis person"
word meaning and
is
an approximate translation ot the Russ'vdn
a virtuous
nol)ilit\ ot spirit.
person
just short
of
a saint,
pi airJiiik, a higlih
charged
but well above the average run in goodness
The Schoolmaster erom Ryazan oped.
I
therefore laid
le
Haek
it
in R\a/.an, the
13^?]
aside unfinished.-^
two
them
ot
settled
down
with the three old ladies
Ihex thenisehes moved into the room \aeated
in their
Hat.
the g\
now enlarged m instruetors, w
hieh w as iw iee the si/e ot their pre\ ions one and allowed
them
to spread thenisehes a 1
hours
week, instead
a
while the old ladies took the other two
little,
or the past \ear Solzhenitssn had been teaehing tor onl\-
rooms.
at that le\el,
ot his initial titteen,
although
it
kept his
l)\
and
salar\- \er\-
this \ear
low
.
twehe
he asked to eontinue
Throughout September
and into the beginning ot Oetober, he worked at Shch-S54 onee more and Oetober 1959. All in all the w riting of it eompleted his re\ ision of it on had taken just over three months. 1
now quiet
1
extreme and ran more or less to a timemornings he would rise earlv and do his yoga exercises, after w hieh he liked to chop and saw firewood, sometimes w ith Natalia. In her memoirs there is a picture of the two of them at w ork with a cross-cut on a heft\- log of w hat looks like birch. To ease the task for Their
life
w
as
in the
table set b\- Solzhenits\ n. In the
Natalia, Solzhenitsx n introtluced the idea of counting the strokes
cut through a single log, and devised other
ony of the
little
games
it
took to
to relieve the
monot-
task.
much
of the day, Natalia was away teaching at the Agricultural and Solzhenitsxn usualh" had to spend a certain amount of his time at school. The headmaster had asked him to take on mathematics in addition the marking would to physics and astronomy, but Solzhenits\'n refused take too much time. It seems that on one occasion he w as even approached to take over as headmaster, but hastih' declined that too. Nothing could have been further from his desires. \\ hen not at school, Solzhenits\ n read, w rote, or typed, and hated to be disturbed. He systematicalh discouraged visitors, with the grudging exception of his shanishkn friends from Moscow Man\' years later, after their separation, Natalia was to accuse Solzhenits\n of having deliberateh' cut her ties w ith her other R\azan friends and estranged her from her colleagues at the institute. There was much truth in this. Solzhenits\n was undoubtedly unsociable, w as obsessed w ith his w ork, was utterly self-centred, and was unyielding in the demands he made on Natalia, insisting that she both assist him and observe all the conditions he set. After sixteen years of lonely, "bachelor" life at the front, in the camps, and in exile, he w as also more set in his ways and more rigid in his attitudes
For
Institute,
—
.
than ever.
But there w ere other barriers Natalia's former marriage.
to socializing in
Most of her
during her years with \ sevolod.
He
Ryazan that arose from had been built up
circle of friends
still
lived in
Ryazan, and mixing with
meant running the risk of meeting him too. SimilarK w ith the scientific club and other places w here her colleagues from the Agricultural X'sevolod was alwa\s likely to be there. A further Institute congregated complication and embarrassment was that \ sevolod was now living w ith Natalia's and Solzhenitsyn's old childhood friend Lvdia Ezherets. Lvdia had these friends
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[388]
never approved of Natalia's abandonment of X'sevolod and return to Solzhenitsvn, mainly because of the children, and had tried to talk Natalia out of it.
After the separation \ sevolod had cried out his sorrow
s
on Lvdia's shoul-
der and within an amazingly short time had married her. She had kept her room in Moscow in order not to lose her registration there but was now
Moscow and Ryazan. new life-stvle and
dividing her time between
Natalia largely acquiesced in her
w titer's w
the tic
ife
and helpmate more than she
side she decided that
and
t»>ok lessons in
it
w as time
relished the role of
later admitted.
cooking and sewing to help her achieve
full-time professional
woman,
On
the domes-
to turn herself into a proper housekeeper,
she had had
little
this aim.
As
a
opportunity or taste for
had been looked after bv her mother for all but Moscow. But now she acquired a sewingmachine (a cosy photograph of her at work on it appears in her memoirs), turned her hand to the arcane arts of pickling and bottling, produced kasha and curtains for the admiration of her husband and aunts, and tried her best to become a housew ife in the traditional manner, though not alw ays, it seems, with a high degree of success. She also typed, filed, and read things for Solzhenitsyn; and in the composition of The First Circle she was summoned to assist as source, collaborator, and critic. In all this, it is true, she was commanded by Solzhenitsyn, but she also seems to have found it novel and flattering and w as w illing to fall in w ith all of his schemes. In her memoirs she notes of this period that she and her husband "w ere living in a state of
housew ork, and
in an\ case
the six years she had spent in
complete harmony.""*^ SolzhenitSN'n
w
as
now
settled for the first time in his life
to organize his literary affairs
more
and was able
systematically. In exile he had started
which he collected information on music and literature. The literature now began to bulge from the vast amount of data collected and had to be constanth" rearranged and relabelled. Solzhenitsvn's method w as to w rite out notes, in the best schoolmasterly fashion, on this or that w titer and file them aw av in folders marked "Russian Literature," "Soviet Literature," and "Western Literature." To widen his range of knowledge, he bought an enc\ clopaedia of w orld literature, and at the same time started to build a systematic library, for w hich he bought, according to Natalia, books by Herzen, Dosto\'evsky, Tolsto\ Hemingway, Graham Cireene, Richard Aldington, and many classics from the eighteenth century. He also subscribed to Soviet collected editions of the w orks of Chekhov, Kuprin, PauAnatole France, and joined a childhood favourite stovskv, Prishvin, and files in files
especialh'
,
—
—
three separate libraries in Ryazan.
Reading nitsyn
all
was very
these books strict
w as
a different matter, especially since
Solzhe-
about apportioning his time betw een w riting and read-
and Reshetovskaya reports that he was a very slow reader. He tried, she works that had a high reputation as models of literature, and developed a complicated and idiosyncratic system of rating them w ith a combination of dots, plus signs, and exclamation marks. Naturally his tastes ing,
savs, to read only
The Schoolmaster from Ryazan He
fluctuated.
[3^9]
quickly went off Anatole France and Kuprin; on the other
hand, he gave the very highest marks to the nineteenth-centurv Slavophile poet Fyodor liutchev, especially to his celebrated p)eni "Silentium,"'" w hich
reads as
the great poet had been able to see, across a century, into Solzhe-
if
nitsyn's very soul, sending
A
He
read. allv
him an admonition and
a
warning.
very different response was evoked by some of the Soviet authors he attracted
v\'as at first
grew disenchanted w
ith
by the limpid prose of Paustovsk\- but gradu-
Paustovsky's long and rambling autobiograph\
as it appeared in its multiple episodes.* He felt that Paustovsky had become bogged down in the story of his life, "which threatens to occupv two out of the seven volumes of his collected works." Worse still, Paustovskv was deliband most painful events in Soviet historv, erately avoiding the principal which meant that he had tailed to find his true subject "in an epoch when
—
—
"^'
one cannot help finding one's theme. A few months later he was similarly exercised by the first instalments of Ilya Ehrenburg's long series of memoirs. People, Years, Life,f w hich w as liberal literary journal Novy Mir{\ew World). SolzheEhrenburg was "arguing with the dead and trying to prove to the living that he was honest and clever," in Reshetovskava's words. Later he somewhat modified his viev\'s and was much interested b\' Ehrenburg's reminiscences of the Civil War period. "There are profound thoughts there
being serialized in the nitsyn
that
I
that
felt
have never encountered elsewhere.
esting.
Manv
of the portraits are also inter-
"'-
But
didn't alter Solzhenitsyn's general disapproval of writers
it
w ho w rote
Reshetovskaya notes that he didn't disapprove of such, onlv of memoirs b\' writers, feeling that they were "a prod-
their autobiographies.
memoirs
as
uct of narcissism on the part of the author" and an admission of failure, signifying the
w Titer's
"inability to elevate himself to an artistic generaliza-
what he has observed.'"' Spurred on by his mounting irritation, Solzhenitsyn sat dov\n and w rote another indignant article, this time not about the post office or the railw ays but on a subject that w as much dearer to his heart literature (disregarding the fact that if it w as published, the true nature of his interests would be revealed). Entitled "An Epidemic of .\utobiogration of
—
phies," the article asked, to write a simple
ten about
by
does
their contemporaries or
a challenge: "Isn't
to this
"Whv
a writer
autobiography? Those
about time that
it
by
who
who
is
capable of creating need
prove worth\' of
'literarv scholars,' "
at least
it
will
be writ-
and ended w
magazine publishers put
a
ith
stop
epidemic of autobiographies?"'"*
Solzhenitsyn sent the article to the Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literar\ * Paustovsky, a romantic novelist and stcjrv writer, was one of the Soviet Union's best-known and best-loved writers. His autobiographical cvcle of five books, known collectivelv as The Tale
of Life, appeared in instalments \ People, Years, Life
was
reappraisal ot the twenties
and Tsvetae\a.
from 1946 to 1962.
serialized in
and
its
Sovy Mir from 1961
to
1964 and v\as noteworthv for
its
frank treatment of proscribed writers like Babel, .Mandelstam,
SOLZHENITSYN
[390] Gazette)* in
November 1960 with
a
covering note: "I should prefer not to
receive a courteous apology to the effect that 'unfortunately the editors don't
have the space to publish published. If
I
am wrong,
this.' If I
I
am
right,
request a rebuttal."
request that
I
The
article
my
article
be
was signed, "A.
Solzhenitsvn. Teacher." Eleven days later the article was returned with a curt rejection and no rebuttal. Paustovskv, to
whom
Solzhenitsyn had boldly
copy of his article, did not reply at all, despite the fact tsyn had also praised the first part of Paustovskv's work for sent a
that Solzheniits
form
as "a
chain of free-flowing novellas."^' It
appears that Solzhenitsyn sent this article to
a
number
of other pub-
but nobody was interested.
lications in addition to the Literaturnaya Gazeta,
As he later wrote in his own autobiography. The Oak and the Calf, it was probably because nobody had heard of him. In The Oak he further writes that although his article "looked like an attack on memoir literature generally, its purpose was to express
real
great dark epoch and yet
my
exasperation
were forever trying
v\'ith
writers
to sidle
who had
round
it,
seen the
ignoring the
things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, and sealing our
eyes with emollients
till
we no
longer saw the truth. "^^ This was undoubt-
edly an important ingredient in his anger, but his distaste for literary
remained very
oirs
his
real,
w hich
is
presumably
\\
hey he
felt
mem-
obliged to preface
own work in that genre with an apology. Solzhenitsyn was to argue later own memoir was "different," and certainly the circumstances of its
that his
however, and in its "argument \\ ith time," it removed from Ehrenburg's apologia pro vita sua. Age and sense of past achievements were enough to produce a change of perspective.
publication
was not a
*
The
L
nion.
\\
ere. In its goals,
really so far
Lilenitiirnayu Gcizeta
is
pul)lished three times a
week and
is
an
official
organ ot the Writers'
22
ON THE THRESHOLD DESPITE ALL THESE preoccupations, "linguistic exercises"
kept up since the sharashka.
Solzhenitsvn did not omit his daih"
with Dahl's dictionary, w hich he had rehgioush'
He
felt
he needed
this regular session in order to
steep himself continually in the spirit of the Russian language and to refresh
himself by repeated immersion. Years ago he had realized that the
\\
titer's
might be not just to rescue forgotten areas of Soyiet experience and history from obliyion but also to liberate the Russian language from the dead weight of Soyiet cant and cliches that were pulling it down. Judging the task
sickness of the language to be seyere, he had determined on radical mea-
—namely,
to reyiyify it by returning to its natiye and traditional roots and in folk speech. \ ladimir Dahl's dictionary w as the greatest repository of pure Russian language ayailable to him. Influenced by the great German philologists of the nineteenth century, Dahl had gone to the common people to document and define the character ot the Russian language. Moreoyer, he had responded to the genius of the Russian language by organizing his dictionary according to the roots of w ords, rather than the words themsehes. Ihis proyided scope for illustrating and analyzing the enormous wealth of prefixes and suffixes w ith w hich Russian is endowed, constituting one of its greatest glories and offering a yast repertoire of nuances of mean-
sures
in folklore
ing.
In the century or so since Dahl compiled his dictionary', Russian has all Indo-European languages in becoming relatix ely more and less synthetic, a deyelopment that Solzhenitsyn respected in his w riting. But it has also suffered an unnecessary impoyerishment of yocabulary and forms, partly under the weight of tw entieth-century innoyations
follow ed the path of
analytical
39'
SOLZHENITSYN
[39^] in scientific
and partly of
and bureaucratic language, partly as a result of sheer neglect, purging of modern Russian literature of so many
as a result of the
leading
its
\\
titers
of talent.
From
his yery first
experiments in yerse, Sol-
zhenitsyn had sought to do two things: to cleanse his language of bureau-
and industrial jargon and cliches (except w here he used them for
cratic
satirical
purposes); and to refresh and enrich his lexicon either with old forms of
ords taken from Dahl or with
\\
found
new
coinages formed according to the rules
Dahl, but not actually pre-existing in the language.
in
monl\' difficult to illustrate this process in lytical
and uninflected
as English, but at
its
It is
uncom-
language as determinedly ana-
a
lovxest
and most feeble
it
might
be likened to forming the non-existent "ept" from "inept," or reintroducing an archaic word like "ruth" b\- analogy with "ruthless," and so on. English barely tolerates such tricks and brands
them
as barbarisms,
but Russian
is
and more hospitable. Eyen so, Solzhenitsyn did not escape similar charges of barbarism and bathos when he was published, and his reforms were always to be controyersial. Curiously enough, one of the few Hying Russian writers he later came to admire for his style was Vladimir Nabokoy, whose linguistic yirtuosity deeply impressed him. But Nabokoy was altogether too Westernized in his yocabulary and syntax to serye as a model, and the two men \yere poles apart in their aesthetic sensibilities. Solzhenitsyn's innoyations and coinages were a highly conscious and calculated affair. Natalia noticed that in going oyer his writings he would make a note of all the neologisms and new expressions and mark them in the
more
flexible
margins, taking care not to exceed a certain quota per page.' if
he oyerloaded the
accepted.
He
text, his
innoyations would stand
vyas also painstaking in his choice of
less
names
He
realized that
chance of being
for his characters.
His fayourite name of "Nerzhin," for instance, had been inspired by the Belorussian yillage of Syerzhen, which he had come across at the front. For
some reason the name of the yillage stuck in his mind, and he tried to adapt it. His first attempt was "Syerzhenin," but that was unsuitable because it seemed to share the same root as the Russian yerb svergat\ "to oyerthrow." He then tried "Kerzhin" and only later came to his final form of "Nerzhin."-* On other occasions he picked the names that appealed to him from ready-
made
lists.
For instance, the eyocatiye name of Shkuropatenko giyen to one
of the prisoners in Shch-854 belonged to one of Natalia's students at the Agri-
names Obodoysky (in August 1914) came from a list of pupils who had attended the Ryazan Secondary School for Boys in 1904 and w hose names appeared in a book published to mark the cultural Institute (there
is
no law of
libel in
the Soyiet Union), and the
of Gangart (in Cancer W'anJ) and V'arsonofiey and
school's centennial.'
formed a deep attachment same author's dictionary of Russian proyerbs, a copy of which Aunt had once giyen him in boyhood but w hich he had long since lost. This,
In addition to Dahl's dictionary Solzhenitsyn to the Irina
*
Nerzhin
also has overtones of the Russian nezhiiy,
meaning "tender."
On
thf.
ruRFSMoi-i)
[393
1
gave rise to extensi\c annotating, copv ing, and rcclassit\ ing, a task in which Nataha helped him by typing out the proxerhs he had marked and fihng them. His dream, she writes, was to have a big \ase filled with eards on w hich all the best proverbs were written, so that he eould pick out a card too,
at
random."* In the
autumn of 1960 Solzhenitsvn returned
to his stor\- about .\latr\ona
Zakharova and successtully completed it. It is not known what had prevented him from finishing it earlier, but it mav ha\e had something to do v\'ith the deeper level of meaning that Solzhenitsvn wished to achieve. The storv of the old woman's penurious life and needless death in a train accident was affecting in itself, but Solzhenitsvn seems to have felt that it contained a greater significance than that, and in his final draft he was able to find a satisfactorx' wa\' to dramatize and universalize Matrxona's fate. .\t the heart of the storv, in its final form, w as the message that Matrvona, despite her sknenlv wa\s and low intelligence, \\ as a genuinelv good and moral person but that there was no room for her in the grasping, materialistic culture of contemporary Soviet societv. Being old, infirm, and ill educated, she \\ as at a fatal disadvantage in dealing \\ ith ambitious relati\es and unfeeling local officials and was the \ictim of repeated injustices. \\ hen she fell ill, she w as dismissed from the collective farm (the onlv emplover in the village apart from the peat-works); since she was semi-literate, she was unable to deal w ith the forms thrust at her by the bureaucrats and hence received no pension; without a job, she got no allowance of peat for cooking and heating. Yet she was still expected to work for nothing at harvest time, to help friends and relations dig their cabbage patches. Her good nature was taken for granted, and her w illingness to work hard exploited. The culmination \\ as her brotherin-law's demand that she break up her house and allow him to cart aw av her annex for his daughter, and her death in helping him carrv out this removal, which was entirely against her o\\ n interests, was her final sacrifice. "We all lived beside her," concludes the first-person narrator, "and never understood that she was that one righteous person w ithout w hom, according to the proverb, no village can stand. Nor any city. Nor our w hole land."' It was a storv very much in the idiom of the late Tolstov, and bv implication deeply subversive. Ihe peasants were depicted as living in poverty and squalor, totally at the mercy of despotic officials from the village soviet, the collective farm, and the peat-works, and just as alienated from them as any pre-revolutionary peasant from his landowning masters ("Just as the\had formerly stolen wood from the landowners, so they now hauled off peat from the Trust"). B\' a variety of hints Solzhenitsvn even managed to suggest that they had been better off before the Revolution: at least they hadn't had to harness themselves to the plough, as Matryona and the other women did regularly every year. The whole story was also bathed in a kind of Christian light. Although there was nothing overtlv religious in it and although Matryona was not represented as a believer (apart from attending church on feast-days), she and the other characters were all described and judged in '^
SOLZHENITSYN
[394]
terms of Christian morality, while the proverb that gave the story its name, and with which it ended, not only was traditionally Russian in character but
world view. Finally there was the sweep of that was one village he had happened to observe; it had spread
also expressed a Christian last
sentence.
The
not limited to this
people's travail, Solzhenitsyn seemed to be saying,
through the entire land. Having completed the story to his satisfaction, Solzhenitsyn put it aside and found himself thinking about his experiences in the hospital at Tashkent. Apparently, he was not yet ready to contemplate
a
major prose work on the
subject, but he turned his attention to a particular incident that
him
the time and remained graven in his
at
had shocked
memory. One day during
his
convalescence, v\hile strolling in the hospital grounds, he had encountered
man
feeble old
struggling to
obvious sickness and grossly
and he asked Solzhenitsyn to the receptionist.
Once
a
way through the main gate. he man's distended belly made it difficult for him to walk,
make
his
assist
I
him
there, the old
as far as the
man grew
admissions office to see
arrogant,
demanding
treatment on the basis of his earlier services to the Revolution.
It
special
turned out
documents that during the Civil War he had served in a Cheka detachment," where he had been responsible for hacking hundreds of people to death with a cavalry sabre. Looking at the old man's now sclerotic and enfeebled fingers, Solzhenitsyn had tried to imagine them as instrufrom
his
"special
ments of death and had
felt
repelled
by the very thought of having helped
him.
The
figure of the revolutionary executioner
was
at
the opposite pole to
Matryona, but perhaps for that very reason spoke to Solzhenitsyn's creative impulse almost as strongly as the old woman. Employing a first-person narrative very much in the style of "No Village Can Stand," he s\\ iftly retold the incident in the form of a short story. In a way it \\ as a neat reversal ot the Matryona theme. The narrator's Samaritan-like compassion for the old man turns out to have been lavished on a moral monster, and the reader's
one of indignation and outrage rather than of sympathy for the it seemed, had two faces. Shch-854 and "No Village Can Stand" glorified the more or less passive, martyred figures of Ivan Denisovich and Matryona, summoning compassion and humility from his readers, while "1 he Right Hand" smote the wicked Comrade Bobrov and appealed to the reader's sense of outrage and scorn. They were two sides of a single sensibility, often in uneasy juxtaposition with one another and w resresponse
is
oppressed. Solzhenitsyn's muse,
tling for
supremacy. Only w
Old 1 estament
ith
the passage of
many
years did the vengeful.
side of Solzhenitsyn gain ascendancy over his Christian
humility.
Ihe
like the Matryona story, was consigned to Solzheand he then took up a completel)' different kind ot project a play about contemporary life, set not in the Soviet Union but in a mythical country intended to represent a kind of composite of both East and West. "The action takes place in an unknown country at an unknown "
Right Hand,"
nitsyn's desk drawer,
—
On thk Thrkshold
I395I
period, and the eliaracters ha\e international names," he later told an inter-
viewer. "1 did this not beeause
wanted
to treat the
regardless of
\\
I
wanted
to conceal
moral problems of society
my
in the
ideas but because
hether the\' were capitalist or socialist."
Solzhenitsyn was also chafing over his inability to w
rite
remotelv publishable under Soviet conditions, and that
I
developed countries, It is
possible that
anvthing that looked b\-
choosing
a
neutral
and a more abstract theme, he thought he might somehow produce something that would make its w av into print. 1 he subject of the plav was the return of two scientists, Alex Coriel and terrain
flict
town after a long term in labour camps charge ot murder, their subsequent careers, and the ensuing conbetween them. When the play opens, Philip has alreadv been home for
five
years and has
Philip Radagise, to a southern seaside
on
a false
become head of
a bio-c\bernetics laboratorv at the local
university, whereas Alex has only just arrived after spending five vears in
Thev meet at Maurice Craig, an elderh' professor of music, a gourmet and bon vivant, w ho is living with his voung third wife, lillie, a journalist. Alex learns that .Maurice is estranged from his daughter from his first marriage, Alda, although she lives in the same citv; and in the course of his conversation with his old friend Philip, we learn of a critical difference betv\een them: w hereas Alex has come to terms with his past, is prepared to talk freely about it and even "bless" it for v\'hat it has taught him, Philip is ashamed of it, has completely banished it from his mind, and refuses to discuss it. Nevertheless, he is still perfectlv friendh' and invites Alex to join his laboratory, which Alex agrees to do. In the next scene (the play is divided into scenes and has no acts), Alex has a tender reunion with his cousin Alda but is disturbed to discover how neurotic she is. He persuades her to undergo treatment at the bio-cvbernetics laboratory, where techniques have been evolved to stabilize erratic personalities and cure neuroses. She agrees, and later in the play we discover that the treatment has been a success. Meanw hile, Philip is engaged in an interdepartmental battle for more funds and has decided to seek militarv support for his laboratory. At a partv he throws to celebrate the success of his manoeuvre, he triumphantly parades the cured Alda before an admiring general and announces the establishment of a separate institute of bio-cvbernetics with himself as its head. But Alex has become disillusioned w ith the w ork of the laboratory. Alda's cure has estranged her from him, and the collaboration w ith the military is the last straw: he announces at the part\' his intention to join Philip's arch-rival, Terbolm, who runs a laboratorv devoted to social, the wilderness to gather his thoughts and readjust to freedom. the
home
ot Alex's uncle,
not biological, cvbernetics.
At the climax of the party, 1 illie arrives to announce that her husband, is dying and has expressed a last w ish to see Alda. Alda bursts into tears, and it is clear that this sudden grief has undone her cure. Philip and his colleagues return to the room and accuse Alex of having deliberateh' let her go to Maurice out of spite. The penultimate scene show s the death of Maurice,
— SOLZHENITSYN
[396]
Maurice, while an eccentric distant over him. Alda
is
relative,
of returning to Philip's laboratory for join
Aunt
Christina, reads the Bible
terriblv distraught but afterwards
announces her intention
more treatment, while Alex goes
off to
Terbolm. Solzhenitsyn entitled the play The Light Which
very limited success in making
it
Is in Thee,
but had only
relevant to both East and West.
matter, the use of "biofeedback" techniques to modify the
Its
human
a
subject
personal-
was certainlv topical both in the Soviet Union and in America. Biofeedback machines were already in existence to control certain bodilv malfunctions such as irregular heartbeat and hypertension, and new developments were making it possible to use them, instead of drugs, as relaxants and tranquillizers. The idea that a young woman like Alda could undergo "neurostabilization" was therefore not entirely far-fetched, and Solzhenitsyn had obviously done some homework. But the setting of the plav, the main characters, the conflicts, and even the ethical dilemma at the centre of the play inevitably reflected Solzhenitsyn's experiences and had an indubitablv Soviet stamp to them. Alex was a transparent stand-in for Solzhenitsvn himself, and Philip for Nikolai Vitkevich. Maurice Craig and his young wife were modelled on Valentin Turkin and his third w ife; Alda was based on Turkin's daughter, Veronica; and Aunt Christina owed her character, including a love of cats, to Solzhenitsyn's ity,
aunt
Irina.
The
southern seaport was, of course, Rostov.
In his treatment, too, Solzhenitsyn
usual preoccupations.
was unable
The labour-camp theme
to get
spoke for
awav from
itself
(where
but in the Soviet Union would two scientists be returning to civilian
his else
life after
twelve years in the labour camps?) Kquallv characteristic was his portrait of
from a "three-letter institution" (the D7 F in the play Department of Thoughts and Feelings), who had his own reasons for being interested in neurostabilization.* The scene showing Aunt Christina reading from the Ciospel of St Luke over the dving Maurice was more overtiv religious than anything Solzhenitsyn had done in this line before, but in other respects it followed recent developments in his thought fairly faithfully. He also underlined the significance of this scene bv drawing on St Luke for his title: "Take heed, therefore, that the light which is in thee be not darka fire-eating general
ness."!
The
plav was quite different from those he had written before in that
it
and a number of characters associated with them represent the forces of hedonism (it is not without significance that Philip and Tillie are sexuallv promiscuous as well), \\ hereas Alex and Terbolm are aware of a deeper set of values, and Alda is the "candle in the wind," buffeted by blasts from both sides. It showed Solzhenitsyn tack-
was
a
plav of ideas. Philip, Maurice,
Tillie,
*Solzhenits\n's theme turned out to be uncanniK prophetic in vieu of the initiated poiicv of incarcerating dissidents in
tThe
quotation
is
from Luke
11:35.
The
KGB's
soon-to-be-
mental hospitals.
plav circulated under the
title
of C.aiidk
but in his Collected Works, Solzhenitsvn has restored the original, biblical
title.
in the
Wind,
On thk ling
(>.
Snow 's theme of the "two
P.
equipped
Thrkshoi.d
to
do
cultures"
as a teacher of science
and
I
3
97
I
— something he was eminently w —and indicated
a practising
riter
an extension of his range, but the characters were too bl{K)dless, and the conflicts too obvious, for
it
to
be verv interesting
drama.
as
Solzhenits\'n later acknowledged his failure in The Oak and the
I
realized tor the
right,
first
time how
piece of
a
work mav
(.'alf.
stul)l)ornl\ refuse to
come
even after four or Hvc rewritings: vou can throw out w hole scenes and
—
them w ith others and it still looks hopelesslv artificial. spent a go(xi on it and thought had finished but no, it u as still no j^ood. I had based it on the true story of a particular Moscow family; I did not cheat once; I expressed only ideas I sincerely held, man\ of w hich I had long since cherished, refusing from the very first act to humour the censors whv, then, was it such a failure? Could it possibly be because had avoided a specifically Russian setting and that off Russian ground 1 am doomed to lose my feel for replace
1
deal of labour
—
I
—
I
.
.
.
the Russian language?**
Nonetheless, Solzhenits\n w as pleased w
owing
to a rather curious incident, \'eronica
ith his pla\ to
became
her second husband, Yuri Stein, had recently
its first
moved
begin w reader.
ith, and She and
to a slightK' larger flat
Chapaye\sky Lane, w here they also kept a room free for Solzhenitsyn, and one day Natalia rang to say that she and Solzhenitsyn would shortly be coming to Moscow and might w ant to spend the night there. On the e\ ening in question, \ eronica waited up for them. \\ hen the\ failed to arri\e, she went to bed, where she had a painful dream about herself and her dead father. Later that night she woke in great distress and could not go back to sleep for a very long time. The follow ing day Natalia rang to apologize: they had been in Moscow but had spent the night elsewhere. Noticing some sadness in Veronica's voice, Natalia asked what the matter was, and when Veronica explained about the dream, she covered the receiver and asked her to hang on for a minute. A few moments later, Solzhenitsyn came onto the phone and began to question Veronica closely about her dream and the time when she had dreamed it. Veronica asked Solzhenitsv n w hether, on top of becoming a fatalist since he left the camps, he had started believing in dreams as well. Solzhenits\n told Veronica that Natalia would explain everything the next time she was in Moscow After a short interval, Natalia came to Moscow and handed Veronica a brown paper parcel. In it, she said, was Solzhenitsvn's new plaw two of whose leading characters were based on Veronica and her father. On the night they had been planning to come to her, just w hen she had dreamt her dream, they had been visiting friends in another part of Moscow All had stayed up very late to hear Solzhenitsyn read some extracts from the play, and according to their calculations he had been reading the scene betw een Alda and her father at the very moment w hen Veronica had been having her dream. Since this was such a striking coincidence, Solzhenits}'n wanted in
.
.
Veronica to be the
first
to read the play.^
,
SOLZHENITSYN
[39H]
Oddly enough, another moeiel for one of the characters in the pla\' arrived Ryazan shortly after it was finished Aunt Irina, w ho paid the Solzhenitsyns a visit in January 1961. Solzhenits\'n was extremeh anxious to please this favourite aunt of his childhood and went to unusual trouble, for him, to entertain her and make her feel at home. He and Natalia showed her Ryazan and took her for trips in the surrounding countryside. They even proposed that she leave her adobe hovel in Georgievsk and move closer to them, hi the village of Davydovo, next door to their favourite excursion spot of Solotcha, there was a house with a garden for sale, w hich they were prepared to buy for her. Irina could live there, and they would visit her regularly, using the house simultaneously as a country cottage where they could rest and relax. Irina appears to have seriously considered the idea. She liked the surroundings, and she had struck up friendh relations w ith Natalia's mother and aunts. But after years of solitude and a lifetime spent in the Caucasus, she was set in her v\ays. Above all, there was the problem of her many cats. How could she possibly get them to R\azan, since no one in the family possessed a car and there was no question of taking them by train? Nor was there any question of leaving them behind. They were her whole life now the object of all her thoughts and feelings, and she had developed highl\idiosyncratic views about their immortal souls. She later wrote to Maria, "[Cats] are indeed the true followers of Christ. People, on the other hand, are far remo\ed from the teachings of Christ." In the end she decided not to make the move. She was too old, she said, and "it's better not to budge the elderly from their well-worn grooves.'"" Apart from Aunt Irina, visitors to the Solzhenitsvns were now few and far between. Natalia's aunt Zhenva came from Kislovodsk once or twice. Alexandra Popova came down from Moscow Nikolai Potapov called on his way to a new job on the river Kama, and Panin and Kopelev appeared infrequently. One day Solzhenitsyn was astonished to receive a visit from Leonid \ lasov, the former naval lieutenant he had met on the train to Rostov in 1944, whom he had narrow h escaped in\olving in his dow nfall by describing
—
in
,
Vlasov's view
s
in a letter to
\ itkevich.
be the same chirpy sparrow
who had
The
diminutive V'lasov turned out to
captivated Solzhenitsyn during their
and the two of them got on famously. X'lasov announced was living in Riga but that he was obliged to visit Aloscow from time to time and would call again, and before he left he invited Solzhenitsxn to visit him in Latvia. In Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn continued to isolate himself from the mainstream of the city's life and to preserve his jealoush' guarded privac)'. But he did make one pair of new friends, an elderh' couple w ho in some sense came although to occupy the place that the Zubovs had held for him in Kok Terek he continued to correspond with the Zubovs as before. The new couple, V'eniamin and Suzanna I eush, were both Jew s, both mathematicians, and both worked at Natalia's Agricultural Institute, where she first got to know them. \ eniamin w as extremely tall (well over six foot six, according to one
train ride together,
that he
—
'
On the Threshold
I399]
account) and thin, w ith gentle, delicate features and an inner peace that was reflected in an expression of
complete repose. Suzanna,
physical and psychological opposite
—not
much
over
his wife,
five feet,
was
his
vivacious,
smiling, emotional, and extremely sociable.
Like the Zubovs, the leushes had also suffered
at the hands of the though not to the same degree. V'eniamin \\ as a mathematician of great brilliance who had won a Stalin Prize for his mathematical research in the aircraft industry. At the beginning of the fifties, during Stalin's drive against "rootless cosmopolitans," he had been dismissed and had found it
authorities,
\\ ork in Moscow. After a long search, he had found Ryazan Agricultural Institute, and w as now chairman of its
impossible to find further this post in the
mathematics department. Despite this fall from high position and the difficulties the\' had experienced, neither V'eniamin nor Suzanna seemed in the least bitter about it. On the contrary, they
were
like
the
Zubovs
in that
they seemed outstandingly
equable and contented.
And
unusual combination of
political clear-sightedness, personal
it was this composure, and reasonableness in their dealings w ith others that must have reminded Solzhenitsyn vet again of his old friends in Kok Terek. Both the Teushes were
yet they had forgotten nothing, and
cultivated intellectuals in the old, pre-revolutionar\' tradition. \'eniamin adored
book about it. He was also interested had w ritten books on Chekhov and the history of the Jewish people, but was now devoting most of his attention to his childhood passion of anthroposophv, Rudolf Steiner's mystical religion based on the ideas ot Goethe. Suzanna Teush w as less interested in abstract ideas than her husband, and it is not clear whether she shared his interest in anthroposophy, but she was a woman of impeccable taste with a strong leaning tow ards the visual arts and a natural sense of style. The thing that seems to have impressed ever\bodv who knew the Teushes was their absolute lack of pettiness and vulgarity. There seems not to have been a shred of vanity or falsity in their make-up. Veniamin, in particular, was frank and honest to a fault, a man of transparent integrity who could be utterly trusted. What they possessed, in short, was that elusive quality called music and
at
some point had written
in art, architecture, history,
and
a
religion,
'
breeding. In the smug provincial atmosphere of Ryazan, the Teushes shone like a beacon of culture and learning, and it w as not long before they and the Sol-
zhenitsyns had become good friends.
been the chief bond, and
at
An
interest in literature
seems to have
some point Veniamin became Solzhenitsyn's
chief reader and literary confidant
—again
filling
the role formerly occupied
by Nikolai Zubo\ (and carrying out a function of great importance to Solzhenitsyn). Teush read most of the works that Solzhenitsvn had written in exile and was very impressed with them, praising their originality of thought and language. But the work that he picked out as truly extraordinary was Shch-854. It is not clear whether the version he read was the original, longer one or a revised version that Solzhenitsvn prepared in the summer of 1961.
SOLZHENITSYN
[400]
Perhaps
it \\
he
as
who
advised Solzhenitsvn to remove
versation between Burkovich and
explained the
wav at
the language.
At It
it.
a
long polemical con-
(in
which the former
the Americans had been deceived about the Soviet stan-
who persuaded him to tone down some of Teush is said to have w ept over the tale the first was, he said, a work of Tolstoyan power and achievement,
Sebastopol) and
dard of living time he read
Isezar Markovich
all
events,
with immenselv far-reaching
and
and book was published; according to one source, he also told Solzhenitsvn, "There are three atom bombs in the world: Kennedv has one, Khrushchev has another, and vou literature,
social
political implications. Soviet life
he said, could never be the same again
if
this
'""
have the third. Such extravagant praise was obviously music to Solzhenitsvn's ears, but
what was he
new
to
do about
it? F'or
the time being he was concentrating on a
revision of The First Circle, but at the back of his
over the possibility of
at last revealing
mind he was turning
himself and submitting his work to a
wider audience. There w ere advantages and disadvantages in this. As he later wrote in The Oak and the Calf, the great advantage of the underground writer
was
to
be able to write
in
complete freedom. "He needs
censors nor editors in his mind's eve; nothing confronts rial.'"^
And
to
keep neither
him except
Solzhenitsvn had exploited this advantage to the
his
full.
mate-
But the
accompanying disadvantage w as that he was deprived of rigorous criticism and had no w a\' of discovering his strengths and weaknesses or of estimating his position in relation to the larger w orld of literature. 1 eush's praise was all verv well and had set him thinking, but he thirsted for an objective, professional assessment of what he had w ritten. He felt "clogged and supersaturated" anci "was beginning to suffer from lack of air in the literarv underground." He also thirsted for recognition. Despite his modest facade, he had lost none of his old ambition, none of his self-confidence and drive. If he talked about "no hope of publication in his lifetime," he w as not being insincere, but there was a strong element of insurance in such pronouncements, an anticipation of the worst for fear that the best might never come to pass. In
manv
of his later statements, Solzhenitsvn has implied that
time he w as aloof from the mainstream of Soviet literary
life,
took
all
little
this
inter-
and regarded it as somehow trivial and irrelevant, but this is essenAs we have seen, he had tried to break into print w ith articles criticizing the bureaucracy. He had submitted his article on literary memoirs to the Literaturmiya Gazeta, regardless of the fact that publication would reveal to its readers in Ryazan that he really did have literary interests. And in truth, his thrusting, restless, activist nature was always at war with the secretive, reclusive, conspiratorial habits of the hyper-suspicious labour-camp vetest in
it,
tially a pose.
eran.
for many vears this active and opinionated critic had, of course, followed developments in the Soviet literary world w ith more than ordinary interest. Ever since reading Pomerantsev's article "On Sincerity in Literature," in the December 1953 issue of Novy Mir, he had kept up with that
On thk
ruRKSHOi.i)
l4"i|
magazine antl had rcatl in it unorthodox stories by Tendrvakox and ()\echkin and controxersial articles hv Ahramov, i.itshit/., and Shcheglox. He also knew that Alexander \ardovskv, whose Tyorkin he had so admired at the front, had been dismissed from the editorship o( Novy Mir for daring to pub1
lish
them.
Nor
could he ha\e missed the other contradictor\ signs of the
Soviet Union's zigzag path tow ards lil)eralization
—the dropping of the
sec-
ond clause from the accepted doctrine of socialist realism at the Second Congress of Soviet Writers in 1954;* the posthumous rehabilitation of famous but officially discredited and censored w riters like iiabel, Bulgakov, Koltsov, and Ivan Katayev; the rehabilitation of Olesha and Zabolotskv; the reappearance in print of Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Zoshchenko; and then the speeches on literature at the 1 Wentieth Fartv (Congress in 1956, when Sholokho\' had attacked the Writers' Union in no uncertain terms and denounced its general secretary, Alexander Fadeve\ ("Why has nol)od\' told him that the Writers' Union is not a military unit and certaini\ not a penal colons' and that no writer wants to stand to attention in front of Fadeyev"). Shortly afterwards Fadeyev had committed suicide. All this had happened before Solzhenits\n returned from exile (it has since been dubbed the period of "the thaw," after Fhrenburg's 1954 novel of the same name), and it would be surprising if Solzhenitsvn had not shared at least some of Kopelev's optimism. But then had come a period of confusion, encouraging Solzhenitsyn's pessimistic belief that little fundamental had changed. Khrushchev's "secret speech" had indeed spelled the end of easy certainties and ready-made solutions, but it had also opened up a yawning chasm of doubt into which nobody wished to fall. Was everything to be allowed now or w as this only a tactical retreat from the old Part\- line? 1 he rehabilitations of writers from the twenties and even some emigres such as Ivan Bunin seemed to open up the possibility of direct communication with .
.
.
'"*
,
the pre-Stalinist past, but did this also sanction emulation and imply toler-
ance for opposing points of view
?
Would
writers
now
be able to imitate the
daring formal experiments of their predecessors instead of being strapped to the procrustean bed of socialist realism?
The
questions were endless, the
answers few, and neither rulers nor ruled seemed to know exactly w here they
were going.
come w ith the two volumes of a new miscellany Moscow (containing works by Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Tsvetayeva) and the serialization again in Novy Mir of a new novel by Vladimir Dudintsev under the provocative biblical title Not by Bread Alone. The novel was not of a very high literary quality, but w hat distinguished it Signs of liberalism had
called Literary
—
*The
official definition
—
of "socialist realism" had been set out in 1932
was founded and all Soviet writers v\ere obliged being the basic method of Soviet literature and
to join.
It
when
the
literarv criticism, requires
truthful, historically concrete representation of realitv in
its
from the
artist a
revolutionarv development. .More-
over, truth and historical completeness of artistic representation
of ideological transformation and education of the working
Union of Writers
read as follows: "Socialist realism,
man
must be combined with the in
the spirit of Socialism."
task
SOLZHENITSYN
[402]
from the usual stuff was its attack not just on insignificant incidental details but also on certain negative features fundamental to the Soviet system, such as the ruthlessness of the Partv hierarchv, the untrammelled power of the bureaucracv, and the nakedness of their struggle for power. Moreover, the novel had suggested that these features were just as prominent under Khrushchev's rule as they had been under Stalin's that nothing in the system had really changed. There were also pointers in the other direction. Khrushchev, in a speech made in 1957 under the title "For a Close Link between Literature and Art and the Life of the People," had expressed views seemingly identical with the Stalinist line of the past: "Literature and art are an integral part of the
—
nation-wide struggle for communism. literature
and
art
is
.
.
.
The
highest social function of
to stimulate the people to struggle for ever
new
successes
communism.'"^ At the same time there rose to prominence die-hard v\ riter called Vsevolod Kochetov, whose new novel,
in the building of a
crude
Stalinist
an "antirevisionist" tract entitled The Brothers Ershov, specialized
in scurrilous
lampoons and vicious caricatures of the liberals. It was published while Kochetov was still editor of the influential Literatunmya Gazeta (although he was to lose his editorship in 1959), which gave it the weight almost of an official pronouncement. And finally there had been the disgraceful affair of Doctor JMvago and the witch-hunt against Pasternak. Here, if anywhere, was a cautionary tale for a writer like Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak had begun to work seriously on his novel not long after the end of the Second World War. He broke off in 1950, began again in 1953, after Stalin's death, published some poems from it in the magazine Znamya in 1954, and completed it sometime in 1955. It was clear from the note preceding the poems that Pasternak hoped for publication of the entire novel, and in 1956, in the liberal atmosphere ushered in by Khrushchev's "secret speech," he had entrusted a copy to the Italian Communist publisher Feltrinelli. By the end of that year, however, it became clear that publication would be no simple matter. Even Novy Mir had rejected it, explaining in a long and detailed letter of criticism (which was published two years later) that "the spirit of your novel is that of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution.""' Pasternak had not w ritten an "anti-Soviet" novel, nor had he rejected he had virtually ignored the Revolution as such. His crime was much w orse it, bypassing politics altogether. His aim, he said in reply to the letter, had been "to bear witness as an artist, not as a politician. A work of art cannot be all on one plane; it has to speak on different levels'"'' and this in a country where politics presumed to dictate everything in life, down to the very movements of a man's soul. Ihe other sticking point v\ as Pasternak's treatment of the intelligentsia. As his Novy Mir critics noted, the dying of Doctor Zhivago at the end of the twenties symbolized the virtual end of the Russian intelligentsia: "In your opinion, those members of the Russian intelligentsia whose road parted with that of Doctor Zhivago and who began to serve the people went astray from their true goal, spiritually destroyed themselves.
—
—
.
ON
THK
THRESHOL
I)
f
4
' •
^
]
and created nothing worthwhile."'** To understand the flavour of this argument and the cause of Pasternak's disagreement with his critics, it is sufficient to take out the words "to serve the people" and substitute "to serve Stalin,"
was the
for 1929
year of the Five-^ear Plan, of the collectivization of
first
agriculture, of forced industrialization, of the terrori/.ation of independentK'
thinking w It
riters,
and
ot Stalin's
undisputed ascendanc\' o\er the country
w as probabK' nai\e of Pasternak ever
lished, but
to expect his no\
speech" and diatribe against Stalin, there w as
at least a
not understood the reservations and limitations w ith
hedged
el
to be
pub-
he can be forgiven for thinking that after Khrushchev's "secret
his denunciation.
Khrushchev and
with Stalin's assistance, over the backs ot
his colleagues
men
like
I
chance. But he had
w hich Khrushchev had had climbed
rotskv
,
to
power,
Bukharin, Rvkov,
and Kamenev. Thev \v ere "Stalin's heirs" in a v erv real sense of the word, and thev had no intention of letting his marvellous totalitarian machine run down to the point where thev themselves would be threatened. The mild and pacific Pasternak, w ith the clear vision of an artist, w as too ruthless for the blustering bullies in the Kremlin, and unfortunatelv premature. Pasternak had agreed under pressure to rew rite some of his book, though not to betrav its artistic message, and also to request Feltrinelli to return his copv. But it was too late. Translations were in progress in a varietv of countries, and in 1957 the novel appeared, to world-w ide acclaim. The follow ing year, in October 1958, Pasternak w as awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and a veritable whirlwind raged about his head. At first he accepted it, then, under intense pressure, rejected it. 1 he Literatiiiiuiyci Gazeta labelled him a "judas," a "rabid individualist," a "malicious
literarx-
snob":
"He
has put
a
hands of the enemv bv giving the bourgeois publishing houses his book, which is saturated with the spirit of anti-Sovietism." Pnvcda called him an "internal emigrf^ and his book a "literarv weed."''' Ihe hastih convened board of the \\ riters' Union took the extraordinarv step of expelling
w eapon
in the
—the
first such major expulsion since that of Anna Akhmatova and .MiZoshchenko in 1946 (and rivalling, in its seriousness, the expulsion of Boris Pilnvak and Kvgenv Zamvatin from the All-Russian \\ riters' Association in 1929).* And on the dav that Pasternak declined the prize, \'. E. Semichastny made a public speech of unparalleled violence and vulgaritv, raising a theme that w as to be taken up bv the entire Soviet press in the davs
him
khail
*
Akhmatova and Zoshchenko had been
expelled after a Central
Committee
resolution
was passed
censuring the magazines Leningrad and Zvezda for their editorial policies in general and for publishing "ideologically harmful"
works bv .-\khmatova and Zoshchenko
paign against them was led bv .\ndrei Zhdanov
and
a
in particular.
head of the Communist Partv
in
The camLeningrad
scourge of writers. Zamvatin and Pilnvak had been expelled for publishing their noncon-
formist works abroad. Zamvatin's (a
,
We had appeared
in
Prague, and Pilnvak's Mahogany
simultaneous Soviet edition of Mahogany had been banned
at
the
last
in Berlin
moment, thus making
it
appear that the Berlin publication w as an intentional evasion of the censorship). During the controversv over Doctor Zhivago, Alexei Surkov, the secretarv general of the
had made the links Pilnyak, a book bv
explicit: a
"Thus,
Russian w
ill
be
for the first
second time
in
our histor\
published abroad."
after
W titers'
Union,
Mahogany by Boris
SOLZHENITSYN
[404]
—
the idea that Pasternak should leave the Soviet Union and emigrate West.* Pasternak was horrified bv this threat and eventually wrote a personal letter to Khrushchev begging to be allowed to remain. Solzhenitsvn had followed the progress of the Pasternak affair with fascinated revulsion, but it is difficult to know whether he drew anv direct comparisons or conclusions from it. Pasternak w as a \\ orld-famous poet with a reputation dating back to before the Revolution, whereas he was a total unknown with a camp record behind him. Pasternak's novel had almost entirely to
come
to the
evaded the issues of collectivization, the purges, and the camps bv stopping short of them, whereas in Shch-8S4 and The First Circle Solzhenitsvn had tackled them head-on by making them his verv subject matter. And if Doctor Zhivago was anti-Soviet, v\hat epithet could qualifv Feast of and some of his camp verses?
the Conquerors,
Decembrists ivithout December,
On
the other hand there was encouragement to be found as well. In
had been unthinkable that a major writer should hand his novel Western publisher before it had been approved at home, let alone that it should be published abroad and not in the Soviet Union. There was also the relative mildness of the sanctions. Writers in the thirties and forties had gone to jail for far less, and others had been physically liquidated. Even expulsion from the Writers' Union w as a trivial punishment in comparison with the question of survival. What the campaign showed was that there were still strict limits w ithin w hich Soviet writers were compelled to operate and that those who exceeded the limits would find the full force of the Soviet media used against them. But it also showed that it was nowpossible to defv the government machine and remain not onlv alive but at at least if you had a reputation. Then there was the unexpected liberty Stalin's
day
it
to a representative of a
—
The barbarous treatment of Pasternak had attracted indignant responses from all over the world. Telegrams and letters had flooded in, by no means exclusively from people hostile to socialism, but from writers of all shades of opinion, including Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Halldor Laxness, Mulk Raj Anand, and Jorge Amado. Stalin would have dismissed these protests, but Khrushchev's new policy of detente and increasing contacts with the West had introduced a potent newfactor into the relation between Soviet writers and the Soviet government. Finally, there was the indefinable impact of the Nobel Prize itself. Had that new
force of foreign public opinion.
not also conferred a considerable degree of immunity on Pasternak?
As
the furore over Doctor Zhivago died aw ay, the political
seemed to swing the other way
pendulum had Con-
again. In January 1959 the Twenty-first
had prtxluced nothing to compare w ith Khrushchev's "secret Twentieth Congress, even though the general line remained But in May had come the Third Congress of Soviet Writers,
gress of the Party
speech"
at the
anti-Stalinist. *
Among other
Pasternak
.
.
.
and breathes."
Semichastnv speech contained the follow ing passage: "If u
things, the
Pasternak with a pig
.
.
.
then v\e have to sav that
has fouled the spot
w here he
ate
a
pig w
ill
e
compare
never do what he has done.
and messed on those
b\-
w hose labour he
li\es
On where
a distinetly
respected noxelist to
Surkov
thf.
Thresh old
[4"
5
I
lil)eral
trend was
whom
Solzhenitsvn had sent his youthful stories, replaced
Konstantin Pedin, the once-
visil)le.
as secretary' general of the Writers'
Union, and TvardovskN's
statement as editor ot Novy Mir was contirmed. Khrushchev, flushed
rein\\
ith
ascendancy at the recent Party congress, even good word to sav about Dudintsev, whom he had harshly criticized
his success in establishing his
had
a
the year before.
Nevertheless, the Writers' Congress had also been notable for the
ber of prominent absentees.
Many
num-
writers had xoted with their feet and
expressed their disapproval of recent trends by staying away. So obvious was it
that Party
spokesmen had raged about
of the writers, fhe message was
a
"conspiracy of silence" on the part
rammed home
that the Pasternak affair had done incalculable harm to Soviet literature, and gradually a new thaw set in that was to surpass not only the original thaw of 1954 but also that of
1956-57.
1
his
time the major role v\as played by young writers comparatively
new to the Soviet scene. The leaders of the members of the middle or older generations nova,
I
vardovsky, and Victor Nekrasov
earlier liberalization
— Ehrenburg,
—whereas the new
had been
Paustovsky, Paleaders
were
rel-
newcomers who had grow n up since the war. 1 he best-known among them was a young poet called Evgeni Evtushenko, who had come to prominence in 1956 with his long poem "Zima
ative
Station" and then proceeded to turn his poetic career into a public spectacle
much to
as
Mayakoxsky had done
forty years earlier.
have been moulded by Stalin's terror, and
his psychological
He
make-up.
He was
this
And
made
a great difference to
daring, provocative, and controversial.
lacked the fear of the older generation and
ficult" subjects.
Evtushenko was too young
having cultivated
made
a point
his popularity
of tackling "dif-
among
the
young and
progressive, he attempted to use this as a lever for advancing the liberals'
Other young poets followed suit: Andrei \'oznesensky, Bulat Okud(who w as FLvtushenko's wife for a v\hile). Among prose w Titers Vasily z\xyonov, a young doctor turned w riter, played a role
cause.
zhava, Bella .\khmadulina
analogous to Evtushenko's, with his slangy
young and
tales
of
life
among
the alienated
and sons" theme, w hile the short story flourished as never before since the twenties. Yuri Kazakov, Daniil Granin, Yuri Nagibin, Vladimir Tendryakov. Efim Dorosh, X'ladimir Soloukhin, Vladimir Maximov, and many others stretched "socialist realism" to its outer limits and helped give Soviet literature an interest and variety that it had lacked for nearly thirty years. In all this the younger generation had been supported by certain liberal elders such as Ehrenburg, Paustovsky, Kornei Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, and especially Tvardovsky, who gave them every encouragement and published
his exploitation of the "fathers
many
of them in the pages of Novy Mir. But there remained a strong
conservative camp, with leanings towards Stalinism and a desire for strict party discipline in literature. This group included figures like Leonid Sobolev,
SOLZHENITSYN
[406]
Alexander Dvmshits, and Vladimir Ermilov, as well as the now notorious Kochetov. In truth, Kochetov had lasted only three years as editor oi Literaturnaya Gazeta, but in 1961 he was appointed editor of the influential monthly magazine Oktyabr (October), which he proceeded to turn into a bastion of reaction, and was already working on a new polemical novel, The Secretary of the Regional Committee, which was to contain a vicious lampoon of P>tushenko.
Bv
the time that Solzhenitsyn began to think seriously about publica-
world was therefore divided into two warring camps, a way, the divisions in the Party and the country. It was a novel position for the Soviet Union to be in and was undoubtedly the result of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin campaign and struggle for personal power. For the first time Solzhenitsyn could perceive prominent figures who seemed to share some of his own views on the past. Nevertheless, he still hesitated to reveal himself. "It seemed to me at the time, and not without reason, that such a revelation would be extremely hazardous: it might tion, the literary
situation that reflected, in a sharper
my manuscripts and of my own liberty."^" What helped was the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party, to change his mind and especially the line it took on de-Stalinization and October held in 1961, congress made by Tvardovsky. speech to the the The emphasis the congress placed on de-Stalinization came as a surprise to almost everyone. True, it had been maintained as official Party policy ever since Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956 and had been reaffirmed at the Twenty-first Congress in 1959, but after the first wave of reforms of 1956 and the consequent shock of the explosion in Hungary, the official policy had been to soft-pedal it. One reason was that Khrushchev, despite his overall ascendancy, still had pow erful opponents within the Politburo. It was as though the Party leaders, after the terrors of Stalinism, had instinctively, out of self-protection, wanted to ensure that no man should henceforth be given complete hegemony. The two most powerful men after Khrushchev, Frol Kozlov and Mikhail Suslov, w ere hardliners who acted as an ideological brake on their impetuous leader, while the other members of the Politburo maintained a middle position between the two extremes. At the Twenty-second Congress, however, Khrushchev seems to have determined to reduce the power of his opponents once and for all; and to do this he chose to raise once more the spectre of the "anti-Party group" and the need for more reform. It is difficult to know, in retrospect, how far Khrushchev had meant to go. As in his "secret speech" on Stalinism five years beforehand, he grew extremely emotional when speaking on the second day and appears to have been carried away by genuine feelings of outrage and regret for the past, which led him perhaps further than he had intended. At the climax of his speech, he made a dramatic promise to erect a monument in Moscow "to the memory of the comrades who fell victims to arbitrary power" and concluded, "Comrades! Our duty is to investigate carefully such abuses of power in all lead to the loss of
their aspects.
all
Time
passes and
we
shall die, since all of us are mortal,
but as
On long as
we ha\e
the strength to
Thrfshold
thf.
work we must
[40-]
clear
up man\ things and
tell
the truth to the Partv and our people.""' Superficially,
him
it
looked as though Khrushche\ were carr\ing
all
before
and taking a further significant step along the road of de-Stalinization.
was
it, and thev were and contents of T\ardo\ sk\'s speech, which w as read w ith close attention by the w riters. r\ardovsk\ a candidate member of the Central Committee in his ow n right, adopted a position of solid support for Khrushchev. He said that Soviet literature had benefited immeasurablv from the reforms introduced after the 1 w entieth Congress in
This, at
least,
hov\'
the intelligentsia chose to regard
particularh' encouraged b\ the tone
,
had undergone a period of moral regeneration and spiritual uplift. it feel shackled hv the past, and w riters had flourished in the new atmosphere of freedom. But this, he felt, was still not enough. In an obvious reference to Kochetov and his friends, he pointed out that "too man\ writers" were finding it difficult to adjust to the new atmosphere and still vearned for the eas\' certainties of the past. Moreover, Soviet literature had still not taken full advantage of the opportunities opened up to it b\' the Tw entieth Partv (Congress. It was still not sufficienth' devoted to the Iruth (w ith a capital 7 ) in all its aspects and therefore w as not fulfilling its responsibility to its readers, 'if I am not mistaken," continued Tvardovsky, 1956.
No
It
longer did
it
was Suvorov who
said that a soldier takes pride not onlv in his victories in
battle but also in the privations he has
paign.
We
writers,
when
had
to
undergo
in the
telling of the feats of labour of that
course of the cam-
wonderful
soldier,
the people, often keep completely silent about the privations and difficulties he
has had to undergo in his great campaign. feelings of a
man w ho
has overcome
We are w ounding the rightfully
indefatigablv towards his loftv chosen goal. But that feeling of pride
and pa\ ing proper tribute
noble disinterestedness, and readiness, this
proud
the difficulties in his path as he marches
all
we
should rather be reinforcing
to his bravery, endurance, patience,
make any
sacrifice.
But
can be done onlv by show ing the labours and ordeals of our people
in a
manner
that
is
if
necessary, to
totalh truthful and faithful to life,w ithout varnishing and
The
cunningly smoothing out
all
contradictions.
exists,
but out of inertia
its
outw orn survivals continue
and
our press in general. --
in
Tvardovskv's speech made
a great
.
.
.
cult of personalit\"
impression on
to
echo
in
all literar\
w
ithout
no longer
our literature
circles,
not least on Solzhenits\n in his provincial backw ater. "I couldn't
and
remember
w hen I had read anything as interesting as the speeches at the Twentv-second Congress. In my little room in a decaying w ooden house ... I read and reread those speeches, and the walls of mv secret world swaved like curtains in the theatre, wavered, expanded, and carried me queasily with them."-^ Khrushche\'s emotional speech about
monument
telling the truth to the
people and erecting
seemed to echo his deepest feelings. Telling the truth about these victims had occupied virtualh' all his waking thoughts for the past ten years, and he had a pile of manuscripts to prove it. As for Tvardovskv's speech, Solzhenitsxn couldn't help being pleased by its
a
to the victims of Stalinism
SOLZHENITSYN
[408]
and patriotic reference to Suvorov; and its injunction to "show the labours and ordeals of our people in a manner that is totally truthful to life" seemed to describe exactly the tale of Shch-854 nestling in its hidmilitary metaphors
ing place. Izvestia, to w hich he subwas still as avid a newspaper reader as he had been when a student and army captain), but to be absolutely sure of getting a full version of 1 vardovsky's speech he \\ ent to the cit\' reading-room and read it in Pravda. There the thing that struck him most forcefully was 1 vardovskv's words about writers' not having taken advantage of the possibilities opened up to them by the Twentieth Congress, and his hint that Novy Mir might publish bolder and more polemical works if onl\ it had them. Solzhenitsyn had liked T\ardo\skv ever since he had stumbled across Vastly Tyorkin at the front, leading him to conclude that Tvardovskv w as perhaps "our best Soviet poet." He especially approved of Tvardovsk\ \s peasant origins, his profound understanding of the common people, and his feel for their language. B\' the same token, w as it not a hundred to one that Tvardovskv himself would respond to the peasant figure of Ivan I3enisovich Shukhov and the tale of his "labours and ordeals"? But still Solzhenitsyn was a prev to agonizing doubts and fears. Since the preceding spring a cop\' oi Shch-854 had been with Kopelev in Moscow, and Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev had draw n up a short list of writers to w hom it might be show n. With this in mind, Solzhenitsyn had revised the text one more time, omitting some of the biographical detail concerning the main characters, toning dow n its political outspokenness, and polishing the st\'le. A few people had read it already. Some had praised it to the skies, others were slightly more reserved, but all agreed on its outstanding importance as a social and political document, and everyone wanted it to circulate. But Solzhenitsyn w as reluctant to take risks, and it w as Kopelev w ho persuaded him that in the aftermath of the Twenty-second (Congress, the time was right to submit the work to Tvardovskw""^ It would appear from Kopelex 's later remarks that they had little hope the book would be published. Kopele\'s argument to Solzhenits\n was that since the manuscript had been shown to certain people and had made such a deep impression, news of it was bound to travel, and there w as a danger that Solzhenits\n might be accused of circulating the work illegally. If it was submitted to Sovy Mir, it would automaticalh' be read by members of the staff, and any further circulation could be described as accidental. It was decided to ask Kopelev's w ife, Raisa Orlova, to take the manuscript to Novy Mir.* Kopelev himself preferred not to do so, because he was in the midst of
Solzhenitsyn read most of these speeches in
scribed (he
w as one of those who did not have the highest opinion of Ivan Deiiisovich it know n and published. The phrase "It is a t\ pical production storv," which Reshetovskava attributes to Kopelev in her memoirs, u as indeed said b\' him, but it was offered to r\ardovsk\' as a possible argument to *
v\
It is
true that Kopelcx-
hen he
first
read
it,
but he was unstinting in his efforts to get
use with Khrushchev, not as
a literarv
appreciation.
The copy that Solzhenitsyn
later sent to
On an acrimonious dispute w
THRKSHoin
thi
ith the editorial staff,
Pages.
including Ivardox
w as
their refusal to support a liberal anthology he
[409]
in\()l\ed
v\
sk\',
over
ith called I'anisa
-^*
On
4
November
1961 Solzhenitsx n took a train to
discussion of the matter during the
November
holidas'.
Moscow
for
lo preserx e
one
last
his secret,
room at a hotel instead of staxing w ith \ eronica or another of and saw only the Kopelews. 1 he hotel he had chosen was in Ostankino, near the site of the former sharashka, and in the intervals between reading a translation oi For Whom the Bell lolls (borrowed from Kopelev) he he booked
a
his friends,
still enclosing the site and recalled the crow ded da\s he had spent there with Kopelev, Panin, hashov-Musatov, and his other
strolled along the fence
w as there that he had begun to w rite seriouslw V\ ould the others w ith Kopelev and approve of his present enterprise, and w ere his old dreams of freedom and fame about to be realized, or was he thrusting his head into a noose again? Once more the optimistic activist w arred with the suspicious convict within him. He w as almost fortv-three. ( j)uld it be that friends."*^ It
agree
his long-awaited, eagerly thirsted-for yet inxoluntarih'
w as about
dreaded
literar\
career
to begin?
the Kopelexs bore the follow ing inscription: "1 o ni\ dear friends, Le\ and Ra\a, w ho started the unforeseen nioxement of this tale." * Tartisa Pages
w as
a
literar\
almanac edited bv Paustovsky and containing
positix e critical
poems b\ I s\eta\ e\a was widely regarded as a
appreciations of formerly taboo figures like Bunin and Meverhold and
and ZabolotskN
,
as v\ell as prose
bv some younger Soviet
writers.
It
challenge to socialist realism and a manifesto of re\isionism, and sold out
matter of da\s. 1 arusa
is
a district just outside
.Moscow
.
its
75,000 copies
in a
^3
BREAKTHROUGH
I •
HE STORY OF how Shch-854 made its w ay from an outer office of Novy Khrushchev and eventual pubHcation (as A
JL/l//> to the desk of Nikita
Day
in the Life of Ivcm Denisovich)
has been told and retold so
many
times that
now legendarv, and like all legends, it has acquired such embellishments along the w ay that it is sometimes hard to disentangle fact from fiction. The book's physical path, however, from the Kopelevs to a copy-editor named it is
Anna Berzer, and from her to Nozy Alirs editor, Alexander l\'ardovsky, and thence via Khrushchev's private secretary to Khrushchev himself (and via Khrushchev onto the desks of members of the Presidium) is well attested, and there can be little doubt as to the accuracy of the general picture.' Raisa Orlova delivered the manuscript to Noiy Mir in mid-November 1961, immediateK- after the holiday, with strict instructions that it be passed directly to Tvardovsky. It was a week or so before Berzer got around to looking at literary
it,
and
but
when
political
she did, she was
at
boldness and showed
once struck by it
its
exceptional
to a colleague in the critical
section of the magazine, Kaleria Ozerova, to check her impressions.
Ozerova
was something quite out of the ordinary. Both women realized, how ever, as the Kopelevs had done, that the story's frankness and outspokenness presented special dangers and problems. It was not that the labour-camp theme w as entirel\' new Solzhenitsyn has given the impression in some of his public statements (and especially in The Oak and the Calf) that Ivan Denisovich appeared in an almost total void and that
asfreed that Shcb-SS4
.
was nothing remotely comparable in existence at the time, but that is not quite true. Ever since Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956, the camp theme had been bubbling just below the surface, and a number of returned
there
410
Brfakthroucjh
I
4
I
I I
w rittcn powerful ami harrow ing memoirs about their experimemoirs of Olga Adamoxa-SHo/.berg, for instance, were alreadx in Berzer's possession (the\ were sul)sec]uentl\ draw n upon h\- SoI/.henits\n for The (iiilag Archipelago). FAgenia (iin/.burg and Dimitri \ itko\sk\-, to name but tw o of the best, were hard at work on extraordinar\' exposures of the death camps of the Siberian Far Fast, and \ arlam Shalamox had already completed and shown to friends his sequence of tightK' crafted stories on his experiences in Kolvma.* Among the Moscow intelligentsia the closure of most of the camps and the mass rehabilitations were a prime talking point, and man\ manuscripts were circulating from hand to hand. Sol/.henits\ n, in his isolation in Ryazan, knew little of these, for none of them had succeeded in breaking through the barriers into print. 1 here w as still a conspiracx" of silence about the camps as far as literature was concerned. It was one thing for the first secretary of the Party to stand up at a congress and denounce the prisoners had
ences. 1 he
another for a literary magazine actualh- to print something on the subject (Khrushchey's "secret speech" remains to this day unpublished in the Soyiet Union). And not eyen Tyardoyskw whose bold words at the congress had echoed Khrushchey's and w ho enjoyed a certain immunity as a candidate member of the (Jentral (>ommittee and a meml)er of the Supreme Soyiet, had been able to get a frank exposure of the camps into his journal (although \nvy Mir w as far and aw a\' the most "liberal" and outspoken of all So\ iet magazines). The surface of Soyiet literature, therefore, had remained yirtually undisturbed by this seething commotion in the depths, and literary life w as conducted as if nothing much w rong had eyer happened; there were only a few dark hints to indicate the reason for the eyils of Stalinism, l)ut quite
"holes" in so
many
people's biographies.
was in this atmosphere that Anna Berzer contemplated w hat to do next. She agreed with (Jrloya that if the story went through the usual editorial process, it would run into insuperable difficulties. Someone on the staff was sure to try to block it out of caution or fear, and then it would be rejected like all the other manuscripts on the camps. How eyer, she sensed that what she held in her hands was sensationally good, perhaps a masterpiece, and again she agreed w ith Orloya: the one man who would appreciate it and be in a position to do something was Tyardoysky. Her task, therefore, was to get it directly to him and persuade him to read it personally, but this apparently simple operation was in fact no eas\' matter, for reasons that haye to do \yith the w ay Soyiet literary magazines are organized. Like all Soyiet magazines, Novy Mir had (and has) an enormous staff by Western standards and a structure both bureaucratic and hierarchical. Editorially, it was diyided into three sections, coyering poetrx', prose, and criticism respectively. Each section was staffed by rank-and-file copy-editors like Berzer and Ozeroya, who represented the lower end of the hierarch\' and performed the daily task of editing and correcting and preparing manuscripts It
*Solzhenits\ n makes an exception for Shalamov, whose stories and verse he seems to have read as earh' as 1956.
— SOLZHENITSYN
[412]
a regular basis and whether the authors were new and bee^inning, or old friends with established reputations. But they were not members of the editorial board, and their subordinate position was symbolized by their having their offices on the first floor, whereas the editor and his
for the press.
It
was thev
v\'ho dealt
know them
consequently got to
with the authors on
best,
worked on the third. Each of the three sections had
associates
a chief to direct
it.
Chief of the prose
Shch-854 arrived in the office was Evgeni Gerasimov, an unin-
when
section
and journalist who nevertheless presided over the best section critical section w as about to be taken over by the up-and-coming young critic Vladimir Lakshin, and the poetry section to ever\one's surprise the weakest, although the magazine had an outstanding poet as editor w as directed by Tvardovsky himself. The section chiefs also sat on Novy Mir's editorial board, of which they were junior members, together with co-opted members like the writers Igor Sats, Alexander Maryamov, and spired in the
w
riter
magazine. The lively
—
—
ItJ^or
top of the heap sat the magazine's ruling quadeputy editor, Alexander Dementyev; his secAlexander Kondratovich; and the managing secretary,
Vinogradov, while
ternitv:
at the
1 vardovsky; his
ond deputy
editor,
first
Boris Sachs.
Anna
Berzer knew that any one of her seniors had the right to
demand
it, if and that any one of them might take fright and possible recklessonly to "protect" Tvardovsky from the consequences of his ness. If the work were to get as far as the censorship board, for instance, and be rejected there, it might provoke recriminations and even sanctions against
reject
to read the story
w ere not w ithout foundation. In the past questionable manuscripts had been handed straight to the security organs. Only that year there had been the notorious incident in which the manuscript of a new book by the distinguished novelist Vasil\- Grossman Life and Destiny had been confiscated by the KGB after the editor of Znamya, Vadim Kozhevnikov, had sent it to them. Grossman himself had been forced to yield up all the magazine.
Such
fears
—
his copies
of the novel on pain of instant arrest, and even the carbon paper
had been borne away by the police.-* There w as scant chance of such a response from the members ot the Novy Mir board, but this w as the general atmosphere in w hich even the most liberal magazine was obliged to operate, and there was a distinct possibility of a well-meaning board-member's stopping the novel in its tracks. For this reason, Berzer planned a special strategy for reaching Tvardovsky directly. and ribbon used
in
typing
it
had the manuscript retyped. The original, according to Solzhenitsyn's usual thrifty custom, was typed on both sides of the paper, with single spacing and no margins. Merely to look at it strained the eyes and First she
Grossman's novel resurfaced and reached the West almost twenty \ears later in circumstances were even more dramatic than its disappearance. Apparently, it was secretly microfilmed b\- someone high up in the Party (or by the relative of a high-up) v\ ho had access to the type-
*
that
script,
writer
and the microfilm was stored in a safe place. In the late was informed of the film's existence and arranged for it
published
in
Sw itzerland
in
1980 (an English translation
is
seventies, a dissident Soviet to
be smuggled out.
in preparation).
It
was
— liRK
AK IHROUC.H
I4
I
?
)
deterred one troni reading on. Another disagreeable feature w as the eoniplete
absence of an author's name.
supph' one, whereupon the
summoned
IJer/.er
(]uiek-\\ ilted
skv," whieli was dul\- typed in beneath
was
read\' for presentation, but the
members
and
ot the editorial boarti
Kopele\ and asked him to
Kopelex thought up "A. R\a/.antlie cr\
ptie title.'
problem was how get
it
to
I
to
\artlo\sk\
,
The manuscript bvpass the other particularK since
he preferred to delegate such things and to read manuscripts onl\ after
his
deputies had seen them.
Her
solution
w
as to exploit the problematical subject
matter o( Shcb-S.W
and turn it to her adxantage. Approaching her immediate superior, (ierasimov, she asked him w hether he would like to read "a stor\ about the camps." Foreseeing nothing but trouble, CJerasimox waved her awaw She then did exactly the same w ith Kondratox ich and Sachs and received more or less the
same response. Dementyev, the other deput\ editor, w as not usualK on the premises, and Berzer now had the right to approach \ardo\ sk\ (Choosing her moment and her words, she went up to his office on the third floor and laid two manuscripts on his desk: Sophia Petrovini, h\ L\ dia (^huko\ska\a,* and Shch-854. 1 hey were both unusual, she said, and both controversial. Sophia Petrovna was about the great purge of 1937 and a mother's suffering, I
while Shch-854 it
\v
as
about "a prison
camp
.
seen through the eves of a peasant""^
voiced, she said, the thoughts and feelings of the Russian people.
She could not ha\e put
it
more cunninglv or temptingh'. 1 vardovskx's
peasant origins and predilection for peasant themes were well know n in Mos-
He
had made his name w ith his intimate portrait of poems on village and peasant life, and AV/:v Mir had a reputation as a publisher of "country prose." He would take onl\- one manuscript home to read, he said, and without hesitation picked up Shch-854. Solzhenitsyn's and Kopelev's calculation that rvardo\sk\ would be attracted by the theme of the story had proved fullv justified. The date was 7 Decem-
cow
literary circles.
Vasily Tyorkin and his
ber 1961.
custom when reading manuscripts at home how one da\- later, he began to read Shch854. After a few pages, he is said to have felt that it w as inappropriate to read it in this relaxed position, so he got up, dressed, and read the storv through the night, stopping only to make himself tea in the kitchen. According to Solzhenitsvn, he read it through twice and was so excited that he could not sleep afterwards and was absolutelv bursting to share the good new s w ith someone. Unfortunately, it w as still earh' w hen he finished (Reshetovska\a says 5 a.m.), and Tvardovsky w as obliged to contain his impatience until the relatively late hour when metropolitan intellectuals stirred from their slumIt is
was
said that Tvardovsky's
to take
them
to bed; that
is
,
bers.
There followed an a\'alanche of telephone *Chuk()vskava's novel, written in 1939
purges
in literary
terms
at
Tw o
1-0,
was
a rare
in
Russian
in the
W est
English translations bear the latter
—
to Kondratovich, to
example of an attempt
the time thev were happening.
Union, but has been published Deserted House.
—
calls
It
both under title.
to deal
with the
has ne\er appeared in the Soviet its
correct
name and
as
The
— SOLZHENITSYN
[414]
—
to find out who w as hiding beneath that transparent Berzer, to Kopelev pseudonym of A. Rvazanskv. He was deHghted to hear that the author was genuinely unknown, an obscure schoolteacher from Ryazan, and not a
on him. According to Reshetovskaya, he upbraided Kopelev for being so secretive about his friend and not having drawn Tvar-
professional pla\ing a trick
when
dovskv's attention to the storv
"You
Kopelex'
came
to discuss Tanisa Pages.
should be proud to have such a friend. He's got a wonderful, pure, and
Not
great talent.
a
drop of falsehood
What happened
next
is
in it."'
not clear. According to one w
riter close to
Novy
Mir, Tvardovsk\- insisted on reading passages aloud to his wife over breakfast. He then rushed to the Novy Mir offices to get some extra copies, but 9
Saturday and no one was there except the cleaners. By nowunstoppable, Ivardovskv broke open Berzer's desk, took out the four extra copies and dashed off to the flat of his friend Semyon Lungin, where Victor Nekrasov, another Novy Mir author, also happened to be staying. "A new-
December w
as a
born!" he proclaimed. "Victor, go for a bottle. After all, I'm a colonel and you were onlv a captain.'"' Such kidding w as very much in Tvardovskv's stvle (as was the vodka at the slightest pretext), and it may have
genius
is
been on this occasion that he also joked to Nekrasov: "Do you remember how one great writer went to see another great writer? I'm joking, of course, because I don't consider you a great writer. But a great writer has just been born nevertheless."
*
to join them, and the morning was progressively drunk. Tvardovsky was the loudgrowing spent in talking and seen I \ardovsky as excited and never that he had said est. Nekrasov later even w hen enthusiastic about a manurestrained, he was voluble. Usually announcing that his only unquenchable, w as occasion he this script. But on
was summoned from home
Igor Sats
aim
to Nikita. it!
henceforth w as to get the story into print.
in life
It's
.
.
.
They
go to the very top,
"I'll
say that Russian literature's been killed.
in this folder with the ribbons. But
vet. We've sent a telegram.
.
.
.
We'll take
who
Damn and
blast
him him under our wing, help him, is
he? Nobody's seen
book through."^ Later, he said to the novelist \'era Panova, by a new Gogol.'"' "Believe it received a telegram from Kopelev: "AlexSolzhenitsyn 1 hat same day article very much w ants to see you with delighted Trifonovich ander regards" ("article," of course, and congratulations possible soon as come as evening, Solzhenitsxn learned that Ringing up Shch-854). w-ord for was the code night, and the follow ing day, on sleepless and excitement Tvardovsky's of Tvardovsky himself, from telegram received a he birthday, forty-third his
and push
his
or not, I've got a manuscript
—
—
*Tvardovskv's reference was Nikolai Nekrasov in 1845,
to
DosUnevskv's
first
noxel. Poor Folk,
when Nekrasov was planning
to
launch
w a
liich
new
he sent to the poet literary miscellany.
Nekrasov read the novel and was so impressed that he rushed to the home of the celebrated literarv critic Vissarion Belinsky and exclaimed, "A new Cogol has arisen!" Belinsky is reputed to have replied, "CJogols grow in your imagination like mushrooms," but w as equally impressed
when he
read the novel.
HROUGH
BrKAK'1 inviting
him
to
come
to
postal error, he received
Moscow
at Xozy Mirs expense. As the resuh of a two copies of the telegram, as though to underline
the importance of the occasion.
'"
That night, according to Reshetovskaxa, to sleep.
His
U'Sl
mood was one
it
was Solzhenitsx
n's
turn not
of exultation and triumph, although, throughout
the da\- he had remained outwardl\- calm, mercK repeating to himself over how tunnw" I xardovskv was ver\' much on his and over, "How funny mind just then. A few days earlier Natalia had bought a cop\ of Tvardovskv's latest narratixe poem. Distant Horizons, and Sol/.henits\ n had i)een admiring the author's political frankness and artistic skill. Now the famous author had responded with admiration of his own. Nearlv a vear later, Solzhenitsvn w as to w rite to Tvardovsk\ "The greatest happiness that 'recognition' has given me 1 experienced in December last vear, w hen \ ou found Denisovich worth a sleepless night. None of the praise that came afterw ards .
.
.
,
could ever outstrip that.""
On Tuesday, 12 December, Solzhenitsvn had a free da\ from school and caught the seven o'clock train to Moscow. Picking up Kopelev en route, he made his wav to the \ovy J//r offices. Tvardoxskx' had not vet arri\ed, so Kopele\' took him to meet Anna Berzer and her colleagues on the first floor. Solzhenitsvn w as
unaw are of the
role that Berzer had played in getting seems that he took an immediate liking to this diminuti\ e and marvellously intelligent w oman. Not so, how ever, to the second deputy editor, Alexei Kondratovich, who struck him as a pompous and self-important bore. Tvardovsky arrived at half past one, straight from a meeting on that year's Lenin Prizes for literature. He was a big man in all senses of the word, and he greeted Solzhenitsyn gravelv and politelv, and w ith a certain solemstill
manuscript to 1
his
\
They went
ardo\ sk\
but
,
it
Movy Mir boardroom, w hich also served and seated themselves round the long, oval editorial table, w ith Tvardovskv and Solzhenitsvn at the two ends. Also present were Kondratovich, Dement\ev, Sachs, Berzer, Mar\amov, and, after a little w hile, Kopelev, who was invited to join them. The discussion was led bv Tvardovskv, w ho began in a more or less businesslike fashion but soon grew animated and launched into a veritable paean of praise to Solzhenitsyn's storv, quoting his favourite episodes with relish and permitting a broad smile to stretch graduallv from ear to ear. What made him a great editor, apart from his excellent taste, was preciselv this boundless enthusiasm for works by other authors, and an abilitv to share in their triumphs that was rare in a poet of such achievement himself. Facing nity too.
as
Tvardovsky's
upstairs to the
office,
Solzhenitsvn he said:
You have
know
which schools vou studied, no need either to I he fact that \ou chose a small form show s \ ou instruct or to nurse you. are an experienced artist. Vou have described onlv one da\ and \ et evervthing written a marvellous thing.
but vou have
come
to us as a fullv .
.
I
don't
formed
in
writer. V\'e have
.
,
— SOLZHENITSYN
[416] there
is
to say about prison has
been
said.
.
.
.
Your choice of hero
not Tsezar, for example. ... In some ways vour book toyevskv's] House of the Dead: there intellectual, ple.
.
.
.
whereas here the
The dav chosen
show evervone both .
.
.
.
.
.
is
is
why
he omitted
so ordinarv that
that
through the eves of the peo-
not even bath dav.
you don't show any
.
.
.
You
was
horrors.'-
to pretend that
encomium
he had remained
rela-
of Tvardovsky's. Perhaps that
speech (which he himself noted down) from his detailed
description of his relations with
came
it's
and on the Siberian [sic] construction projects. the commander, and even Fetvukov evokes sympathy.
this extravagant
this
excellent
at the front
One feels so sorrv for And the good thing is
unmoved by
is
even better than [Dos-
see the people through the eyes of an
intellectuals are seen
In later years Solzhenits\'n tively
we
is
the Calf when he he deliberately put up a true that
Novy Mir
to publish the latter in 1975.
It is
in
The Oak and
and indifference, responding only grudgingly to the compliere heaped upon him. But this was mainly a defence mechanism
front of reserve
ments that \\ and a sign, among other things, of his own insecurity: he could not bear to be snubbed or disappointed after investing such great hopes in his story; he was simply steeling himself against the worst. In fact, it is clear even from his o\\ n account of the meeting that he was deeply flattered. This exalted recognition was balm to his battered ego, belated recompense for all those years of suffering and toil, and he wasn't above playing up to his hosts' amazement over the crabbed, eccentric appearance of the original manuscript, or coquettishly flaunting his tiny salary of sixty rubles a
part-time teacher in salary).
He
Ryazan (passing over the
fact that
month
as a
he lived off Natalia's
thoroughly enjoyed his role of the indigent, provincial nobody \\ hich only
and had deliberately dressed shabbily for this solemn occasion,
provoked more amazement from his metropolitan companions. The other members of the editorial board were briefer in their remarks, and Solzhenitsyn was relieved to discover that they had very few criticisms
make or suggestions for changes. The main problem, it seemed, was the title, which nobody liked. After an animated discussion, in v\hich Kopelev also joined, they unanimously settled on .4 Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* Afterwards the talk became more personal. Tvardovsky and the others asked Solzhenitsyn about his past in the camps (Kopelev was able to join in when they talked about the sharashka) and his life as a teacher in Ryazan. They wanted to know w hat else he had written, but Solzhenitsyn was evasive. He told them that although he now regarded himself as primarily a prose writer, he had begun with verse since it was easier to memorize in and had written quite a lot. He also told them about the occasion the camps w hen he had been caught during a search v\'ith a fragment of Kkibastuz in verse on him and had passed it off as Tvardovsky's. At the end of the meeting, Tvardovsky insisted on draw ing up a conto
—
*
—
title is One Day .... hut the Russian "one" simply plays the role of the therefore prefer A Day which Russian otherwise has no equivalent. the stress supplied hy the numeral.
The accepted
article, for lifts
1
.
.
indertnite .
,
which
I
Brkakthrolgh tract at once.
He wanted
to
pay Solzhenits\ n
others pointed out that the proper rate for a
lower
— 300 rubles
a signature,
and
this
I4 at
first
I
"
the highest rate, but the
pubhcation w
was agreed upon. The
as
total
somev\hat
w as quite
—the ad\ ance aUme
handsome compared w ith Solzhenitsvn's usual earnings exceeded two years' worth of his salary. Tyardoysky's parting words w ere that he could not
give a firm promise
of publication, or say anything about dates, but that he promised to do his best.
by
He also handed
his
two
cles in the
made Dementxev and Kondratovich, from w hich the obstaw ay of publishing it became clear. Both editors praised the story Solzhenitsyn the preliminary reports on the story
deputies,
and power, but both expressed doubts about its political the more negative of the two: "Seen from this acceptability. horrible inside the camp and just as horrible beyond its boundaangle, it is we don't publish, it will look as though we fear the ries. A difficult case: if truth, and we will only drive it underground, from where it w ill spread all over. But publication is out of the question, because it shows life too onesidedly, involuntarily twisting and upsetting the proportions." Kondratovich had more praise for the story but was also pessimistic about its publication chances. "It's a pity, but we probably won't be able to publish it," he began, and he ended up: "It's very talented, but how can we publish it?"'' Solzhenitsyn took the two reports home with him, together with a copy of the contract. When he arrived, w rites Reshetovskava, he seemed dazed. "Silently he opened his brief-case and showed us a large, thick sheet of paper on which the word CONTRACT was written in large letters. I couldn't '""^ believe my eyes. I sank down helplessly on a chair and burst into tears. In answer to Tvardovsky's pressing questions about what else he had written and might be able to offer Novy Alir, Solzhenitsyn had mentioned his early verse, some of his miniature prose pieces, and "a short story," having in mind "Without a Righteous Person No Village Can Stand" (he regarded his other work as too controversial to mention at that stage). He now settled down to prepare the story about Matryona for publication, toning it dow n a little and cutting out some of the sharper comments, and on 26 December returned to Moscow to deliver these things to Tvardovskv. "This story can't fail to appeal to Tvardovskv," he had said to his wife while working on it, and he was right, learning of Tvardovsky's enthusiasm on his third visit, a week later, to discuss Novy Mirs opinion of it. But he was disappointed by Tvardovsky's reaction to the other things he had offered. The verse was dismissed as uninteresting: "Some of it is publishable, but we want something to make a bang, and this isn't it" (to Lakshin, Ivardovskv had said that the verse wasn't worth reading). As for the miniature stories, Tvardovskv seemed perplexed by the unusual genre and failed to take them seriously, regarding them as "jottings on your scribbling pad for further use." What he yearned for as an editor was something strong and striking that could stand comparison with Ivan Denisovich. These little pieces were too fragile and precious, too much in a minor key to suit 1 vardovskv's present for
its
literary skill
Dementyey was
requirements.'"'
SOLZHENITSYN
[418]
The
old vear \\ as almost at an end, and the school holidays had begun. wonderful moment for Solzhenitsyn. Still basking in Tvardovsky's praise and the wonderment of the Novy Mir staff, he could relish for the first time some of the rew ards of authorship, v\ ithout yet suffering the responsibilities of fame and controversy. The difficulties that lay in the way of pubin any case, lication loomed only indistinctly in the unforeseeable future It \\
as a
—
they weren't his problem: Tvardovsky had promised to take
all
that
on
his
shoulders.
Something of Solzhenitsvn's mood
time can be deduced from a Zubovs in the Crimea in response The letter was begun some time before at this
playfully affectionate letter he wrote to the to their belated birthday greetings. his trip to
My
Moscow on
26 December 1961.
kind, dear friends.
Don't reproach yourselves for forgetting mv birthdav. It doesn't feel in the Furthermore, my birthday this year was least as if vou had forgotten me. .
anyway something
.
.
of a red-letter dav
—
it v\
marked by
as
a
telegram from Alex-
ander Trifonovich (not unknown for his poem Distant Horizons, etc.). On the twelfth I went to Pushkin Square to meet him. What will come of it all is still unclear.
Mavbe
which case
I
w
w
I
After his return from
You w ill be it
ill
know more bv the time
Moscow
I
mv
to the
end of this
letter, in
spare time (being too bashful to admit
have been amusing mvself w
foolhardy enough to attempt to write.
A Day
come
he did add something:
surprised to hear that in
even to vou)
I
add something.
ill
in the Life of
ith literature, that
is
One of the things I wrote was
to say, a
I
was
yarn called
Ivan Denisovich, and after the Twenty-second Congress
I
Nozy Mir. NATs reaction exceeded my wildest expectations and was expressed in telegrams and expressions of delight. They decided that I was some kind of a literary rough diamond and didn't even seem to w ant to make any changes or corrections. All this took me by surprise, just as it will surprise you. Perhaps you will get a thought that the time w
chance to read
it
as ripe to publish
one day
(if
they publish
accepted the story, has signed
great,
So
To
and
it
doesn't
that's the
and sent
it).
a contract for
The editors want depend on them.
thousand new rubles.
it
it
off to
That is, the editorial board has and paid me an advance of a
it,
to publish, but the chances are not very
news, and of course the whole thing has knocked
me
sideways."^
celebrate the glad news, Solzhenitsyn and Natalia decided to spend
New
Year in Moscow w here most of their friends seemed to be. Even Teush was there now, having retired from teaching a short while before, so that Ryazan seemed perfectly empty. The thought of Teush reminded him that this would be a good moment to review his security precautions. Ever since exile he had kept up the habit of concealing his manuscripts in case of random searches by the KGB, and of burning most of his notes and drafts. the
But over the years,
,
as
he had gradually returned to
a
normal way of
life,
he
liRK A Kl
HROUfJH
I
4
I
9
I
had inevitably grow n laxcr. The sheer hulk ot" his archixe had also grown tremendously, until it had reached the point where he was having to conceal well o\er a dozen full-length works, including an extrenieh' long novel, together
with notes and drafts that he
still needed in order to complete work in progmanuscripts in cramped single spacing, he was unable to reduce their bulk significantly, and all this paper somehow had to
Facu by
ress.
t\
ping
all
his
be found hiding-places that were both secure and easy to reach. I'here were few friends he could trust w ith such a delicate task, but the Teushes were evidently among them, and on New Year's Eve, having gone through his manuscripts a last time and burnt what seemed no longer necessary, he and Natalia travelled to Moscow with a suitcase containing most of the rest. It was on this train journey that there occurred a curious incident illustrative of some of the tensions induced by Solzhenitsvn's secretive way of life and the strains imposed on his naturally impetuous nature. Soon after they left Ryazan, a drunken hooligan began to make a scene and abuse some of the passengers not far from where Solzhenitsxn and Natalia were sitting. None of the other men in the train raised a finger to stop him, and Solzhenitsyn felt an irresistible urge to jump up and put this insolent hooligan in his place, but he realized that if it came to a hght, he w (;uld almost certainly be dragged off to the police station for an explanation, and that would mean risking his precious manuscripts. "So in order to fulfil my duty as a Russian, 1 had to exercise a quite-un-Russian self-restraint. 1 sat there, feeling ashamed and cowardly, staring at the floor while the women scolded us for our unmanliness.'"'
w hen he came
\'ears later,
the
memory
of
it still
constraints that
Oak and the Calf, seem s\'mbolic of the larger
to record this incident in 11k
rankled, and
it
also
came
w ere increasingly imposed on
to
his natural desire to tight.
This was one of
many
always
humiliating wav, but just as aggravatingh
in
such
a
when
times
m\' secret
life as a
w
riter r()hl)cd
—of m\
me
—
iKJt
freedom of
mv freedom to speak mv mind, m\ freedom to stand up straight. We all had heav\' loads on our backs, but I w as also dragged dow n, and mv spiritual
action,
energies diverted from literature, by unwieldy burdens hidden beneath the surface.
for
It
Mv
l)ones
would ache w
ith longing: straighten
up, straighten up
if
vou die
it!'**'
was with
Teushes'
a great
flat later
that
sense of
morning
they walked out of the around Moscow, having left the case
relief, therefore, that
to stroll
of manuscripts in the Teushes' safe-keeping.
To
celebrate the occasion, Sol-
zhenitsyn allow ed himself to be persuaded to buy
Reshetovskaxa
"a miracle, a real event
later,
tainly, Solzhenitsyn
w as not much given
—
a
new
suit. It
w as, wrote
especially for me."'''' Cer-
to dressing up.
On
the contrary, he
took a perverse pride in his shabbiness. In exile he had flaunted his fraying
army
greatcoat and faded
rushed off to buy visit to
new
artiller\-
clothes.
And
breeches long after most other exiles had
donned for his first make an impression. 1 he
the nondescript attire
Novy Mir had been deliberately chosen
to
— SOLZHENITSYN
[420] role of
sona.
dow ntrodden outsider matched his inner vision of his authorial perw as not something he could lightly abandon just because he had a
It
in his pocket.
thousand rubles
Alexandra Popova, and on New Once again they found him at work on vet another version of Othello and Desdemoua, though six years had passed since he had started it; and once again the two men fell into a furious argument about the nature and purpose of art. A few months previThcN' toasted the new year of 1962
Year's
Dav
Ivashov-Musatov
visited
\\
ith
in his studio.
ously Ivashov had written to Solzhenitsvn, "Life and invariably provoke in
me
rejection or admiration," but the
played out in the
life
its
manifestations
violent emotions of sorrow or joy, anger or delight,
drama was always seen
one
as a personal
of the individual, and the figure of Othello personified
the worst traged\' that could befall the individual: faith betrayed. For Sol-
zhenits\n, this w av of approaching
somehow evaded
too abstract and
life's
problems seemed too private and
the social evil that preoccupied his
own
thoughts. His attitude, according to Reshetovskaya, w as that Shakespeare's
how could they more than the lives of living prisoners w ith w hom he had man\ hardships?-" It was the same argument that Solzhenitsyn
characters had been depicted in thousands of paintings, so
preoccupy an shared so
artist
had deployed on offered the
his visit to the studio
same
repl\-.
What
but the nature of
societ\' at large
with Panin
evil.
tsyn, the loss of faith in societ\' or in one indi\idual,
was your w hole
life?
1959, and Ivashov
Which blow s
when
that individual
struck hardest, the impersonal blows of
from your nearest and dearest?*
society or a blow
The
in
him was not the scale of evil in What was worse, he asked Solzheni-
interested
next day, Natalia returned to Ryazan, and Solzhenitsyn went to
on "Matryona." There were only it was still the holiday period and several members had failed to appear. Once again it was Tvardovsky who led the discussion. As Solzhenitsyn had predicted, he liked the story very much for its \illage subject matter, for its peasant heroine, tor its pure Russian language, laced w ith proverbial expressions and popular diction. But it had also placed him in something of a quandary. In the first place it was the Novy five
Mir
offices to hear their verdict
of them round the oval table this time
—
—
even more
critical
of Soviet reality than Ivan Denisovich. Ihe
latter, after all,
and referred to a period and a phenomenon that v\ere supposed to be w ell in the past and that had the labour camps been roundh' condemned by the highest in the land. Matryona's stor\', however, was set in 1956, only a few years beforehand, and referred to a time and a place that had suffered no such obloquy. As Fvardovsky saw it, the author was "determined to show the village at its worst. You might have had been
set in the late forties
given us one *l
am
—
little
iiuichrcd to
have had
a social
glimpse of the sunny
Manin Dew
Everybody
hirst for the suggestion that
in sight
b\-
was
allegorical.
is
a
degen-
hashov-Miisatov's painting
content as well and that Sol/.henits\ n misunderstood
interpretation, the subject
had been duped
side.
it.
According
may
to this
Othello stood for the Russian intelligentsia, which
lago-Stalin into betraying and murdering the Russian people (Desdemona).
Brkakthrough erate or a vampire.
added up
.
.
.
Your searching
I421I
ga7.c has
missed nothing."-'
to a devastating picture of degradation, corruption, cupidit\
moral depravity
in the
It ,
all
and
heloxed Russian countryside.
1 vardovsky also found the treatment "a
bit
too Christian" for a Soviet
and the story "aesthetically thinner" than Ivan Denisovich. But worst all was the feeling that it was too subversi\e to publish and that he dare of it, a feeling that had evidently been reinforced by Alexander publish not Dementyev at a discussion before the meeting. Dement\'ev was so convinced of its unpublishabilit)- that he had declined l\ardovsk\'s invitation to speak to the author and had left the room before I vardovsks' launched into his monologue. Yet despite his forebodings, 1 vardovsky plainly ivaiited to publish it. He likened it to the moral tales of Tolstoy and praised its "realism w ithout an adjective" a reference to the Soviet distinction between the "critical realism" of the nineteenth-century classics and the "socialist realism" of Soviet authors. It was clear that Solzhenitsvn's story was much closer to "critical" than to "socialist" realism, but Ivardovsky dared not say so in front of his subordinates. He also realized by now that it would be absurd to expect any sort of orthodox) from Solzhenitsyn. "Tm not saying you should have made Kira a member of the Komsomol," he commented at one stage, and when the discussion was over he said in his favourite joke\' manner, "Please don't become ideologically reliable. Don't w rite anything that m\- staff could pass without my having to know about it."-The conference had gone on for three hours, most of them taken up b\' Tvardovsky as he had gone round and round in circles, trying either to jusjournal,
—
tify a rejection
Berzer, to
of the story or else to find reasons for publication.
whom
Solzhenitsyn had taken
a liking
during their
Anna
joint editorial
Denisovich, later told him that she had never seen Tvardovsk\and indecisive. His literary instincts were at war with his political ones. But at the end of the day the matter was left open. Tvardovsky seemed to be saying that the story was unpublishable, but at the same time he asked Solzhenitsyn to leave it with him so that other members of the board
work on Ivan so confused
might read
it
too.
Lastly, he sought to reassure Solzhenitsyn on the subject of Ivan Denisovich.
He
wasn't yet sure
how
to
go about getting
hurry us, though. Don't ask which issue everything in his power to push
it
it
will
it
be
published: "Don't try to in."-^
But he would do
through. Solzhenitsyn believed him and
w as glad to leave all the arrangements to Tvardovsky. "Not evervthing depends on x\lexander Trifonovich," he wrote to the Zubovs on his return to Ryazan, "but everything that does depend on him w ill be done. Neither he nor his staff can recall a work that ever had such a big impact on him. And so we will
have to
wait."^"^
Solzhenitsyn had decided to devote the next few months to revision of The First Circle,
of the novel. With luck,
it
a
complete
making this his fourth and, he hoped, final draft too might be published in time. Accordingly, he
SOLZHENITSYN
[422]
returned to his routine ot hurrying
home from
ing every
moment
social life
went bv the board, and he
of his spare time to his
\\
school after lessons and devotriting.
Once
again friends and
tried to put the fate of Ivan Denisovich
completely out of his mind. In March 1962 he wrote the Zubovs:
Mv
affairs in
Moscow have come
zine hasn't contacted me, nor time, ril keep
ing the
mum
I
to a
them.
complete I
for another couple of
March holidays
I
shall
For two months the maga-
halt.
think that A. T. must be having a hard
months and then go there
be staying put
—
I
shall
again.
Dur-
be even busier than during
term time.-'
There were
feu' interruptions,
any, although he did
Novocherkassk.
It is
and Solzhenitsvn was anxious not
make an exception
for an
unexpected
to allow
visitor
from
not clear from Reshetovskava's version of this episode
had obtained Solzhenitsvn's name or whether her arrival at accidental. At all events she was a stranger, Dr Anna Dzhigurda, and she was travelling in search of a cure for her geologist son who had recently contracted cancer. Solzhenitsvn gave her a portion of the mandrake root and told her about the birch fungus that was supposed to help. In return Dr Dzhigurda, a surgeon, asked whether she might examine Solzhenitsvn, to w hich he agreed. "You were born lucky!" she exclaimed when she had completed her examination. His tumour, she said, had detached itself from his body and shrivelled. There was no more danger.'^ A few years later, when he came to w rite Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsvn modelled the figure of the young geologist, \ adim Zatsvrko, on Dr Dzhigurda's son. Another interruption provoked mixed feelings in Solzhenitsyn. In February 1962 Nikolai \ itkevich moved to Ryazan to take up a post as a senior lecturer in chemistry at the Ryazan Medical Institute. Natalia looked torward eagerly to meeting Nikolai and his wife once more and renewing their old friendship, but Solzhenitsyn was not thrilled. "They'll start visiting us. VYe'll have to exchange presents."-' Times had changed since the climax ot their friendship during their years at the front, and Solzhenitsyn anticipated little pleasure from Nikolai's arrival now. Nevertheless, a childhood friend w as a childhood friend. The \ itkeviches were w elcomed on arrival, and soon the four w ere going on bicycle rides together and meeting at one another's homes. Despite his forebodings, Solzhenitsyn did attempt to be sociable. By the time of the Ma\ holiday, Solzhenitsvn had finished his revision of The First Circle and w as readv to hide several copies of it before allowing himself to relax. At least one of them w ent w ith him to Moscow, where he learned that not much had happened to Ivan Denisovich in the four months he had been away, rvardovsky was perplexed as to how to approach the problem of publication. If he set the w ork in type and submitted it to the censorship, they were bound to reject it, and there was e\ery chance they would report the book's existence to the C>entral (Committee or the K(JB, and that would irrexocably stop it.
how the their
visitor
home was
Breakthrough 1
paign
I4-3I
he point was that Khrushchcx's renewal of his de-Stalinization camat
liberals
the 'I\\enty-second Congress had not been quite the success the
had hoped
for.
The
congress had not endorsed
proposals, the final resolutions
all
made almost no mention
of Khrushchev's of "mass repres-
sions" under Stalin (a key phrase of Khrushchev's that had indicated an intention to go well
bevond the resolutions of the 1 wentieth
monument
the idea of a
to the victims of Stalinism
(>ongrcss), and had been completeb
dropped.
Khrushchev's weakness was masked, however, b\ feverish at
home and
acti\ it\
abroad, bi foreign affairs he intensified the Berlin
threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East
crisis
both
and
Germanw He resumed
ith .Marshal Tito, a move that was intimateh' linked w ith deand was strongly opposed bv man\' members of the Presidium. And, most significantly of all, he made the decision to send ballistic missiles to Cuba. At home he continued to attack Stalin in public, and in April promulgated a decree that cancelled aw ards, dating back to March 1944, to seven hundred former NKV'D officers for the "e.xemplarv execution of government tasks." Ihese tasks were not specified but probablv referred to the mass deportations of Ukrainians, Crimean Tartars, and other peoples from territories recaptured from the Germans tow ards the end of the v\ ar. The period covered bv these awards, incidentalh', included the time when Solzhcnitsxn was arrested and affected all ranks of the securit\ police, up to and including the former head of Smersh, Sergei Kruglov. It was another straw in the w ind that Bukharin's w idow w as received b\ Khrushche\ and apparenth' assured that her husband w ould be ofhcialh exonerated of the "crimes" he w as alleged to have committed.* 1 o all appearances, then, the omens w ere mixed, and the main tide was not running quite so strongh' for Khrushchev as appeared at the time. 1 he main bod\' of the Party remained suspicious of Khrushchev's domestic reforms and were made uneasv b\' his adventures in foreign policv. The\ preserved, at best, a silent neutralitv between him and his opponents, waiting to see which side would w in, w bile the conservatives made it clear that the\ w ere still a force to be reckoned w ith. Khrushchev therefore needed allies in his struggle for change, and he w as w ell aw are that his most reliable and eager supporters w ere to be found among the intellectuals. Of all the literar\' intellectuals, T\ardovsk\ w as the most prominent and most influential supporter of the Khrushchev line, and thanks to his seat in the Central Committee had a good view of the pow er struggle in progress there. He also had a shrew d idea of just how strong the conservatives still were, and he resolved not onlv that it w ould be necessarx' to circumvent them if /vY/w Denisovich were to be published but also that its best chance la\- in its being offered to Khrushchev as a weapon in his struggle for more reform. 7 vardovsky therefore decided to compose a preface that w ould present the
the dialogue
w
Stalinization
*In the end Bukharin was not rehabilitated.
SOLZHENITSYN
[424]
storv in this light and to look for a Party connection
who
could get the man-
uscript to Khrushchev.
Meanwhile, he was basking in the reflected glory of his discovery and showing the manuscript to various luminaries in the literary establishment. One of the first to read it had been the venerable and universally loved critic and children's writer Kornei Chukovsky, to whom Tvardovsky had shown it when thev were both relaxing in the government resort area of Barvikha. Chukovskv had at once recognized the story's qualitv and had congratulated Tvardovsky on his discovery of a major talent. Later he had the idea of writing a report on the storv and sending it to Tvardovsky "in case it should come in hand\' for you." Headed "A Literary Miracle," the report w as unstinted in its praise. Shukhov, wrote Chukovsky, was a generalized portrait of the Russian common man: resilient, stubborn, hardy, jack of all trades, cunning, and kind-hearted" a close kin to Vasily Tyorkin. The story was written in a wonderfully pure and traditional Russian with an admixture of camp slang, which did not draw attention to itself but seemed as natural as breathing. The theme was tragic the evil repression inflicted on innocent men over a long period of years, and their suffering at the hands of "armed scounvet the author had not taken the path of easy indignation and fierce drels" denunciations, and "in this lies his greatest achievement: nowhere does he
—
—
—
He
express his passionate rage.
Chukovsky noted a powerful, original
is
not a polemicist but a historian."
that "this story
marks the entry into our
literature of
and mature writer. ... In every scene the author chooses
and every time is victorious." He warned with the text or edit it, pointing out that its apparent eccentricities showed the w riter's mastery of the Russian language, not his weakness, even if a few of the near-obscenities would have to be toned down or removed. Otherwise, there was nothing in it that could not pass the censorship, for the story dealt with events that were past and was "totally dedicated to the glory of Russian man." It would be terrible to -^ think that such a story might not see the light of day. Chukovsky's comments about the censorship and the story's innocuousness were clearly intended for Tvardovsky to show to the higher powers, and his report gave Tvardovsky the idea of collecting similar reports from other outstanding Soviet writers, since this would create a momentum for the story and help convince the political bosses that this was indeed an excepthe line of
maximum
resistance
Tvardovsky against trying
tional
work of
to tinker
He drew up
literature.
a short list
of authors to
show
it
to:
Paustovsky, Marshak, Fedin, and Ehrenburg. In the case of Ehrenburg,
Tvardovsky was for some reason unwilling to act as the go-between himself and persuaded a reluctant Solzhenitsyn to deliver the manuscript personally. It turned out that Ehrenburg w as away, but Solzhenitsyn was astonished to learn from his secretary, Natalia Stolyarova, that he had already read it. So had Stolyarova. She praised it and said she was especially pleased that Stalin wasn't even mentioned in it.* "However," she added, "I don't understand *Stolvarova had herself served Soviet
Union from
Paris).
She
a
sentence in the labour camps (after her voluntary return to the
also
gave Solzhenitsyn information
for
The Gulag Archipelago.
Brf.akthrough
whv
wasn't written from the point ot view
it
In the e\ent,
ot
l.hrenburg declined to write
I425I
an a
intellectual.""''*
report on the novel, as did
Fedin. Privateh', I'cdin assured Tvardoxsks' that it w as a hopeless enterprise and that he w as w asting his time. Marshak, on the other hand, w rote in much the same vein as (^huk"oper subject matter for serious
literature.
24
A TRUE HELPER OF THE PARTY
ON
HIS
ning
a
RETURN from Moscow
summer
to
Ryazan, Solzhenitsxn started plan-
was to be his hrst, and he some of the popular landmarks Lake Baikal, the Enisei holiday
visit to Siberia. It
—
was anxious
to see
River
formed part of the itinerary of almost
—
that
all
Soviet tourists to the
region.
He and constraints of
Natalia set off at the end of June. Solzhenitsyn disliked the rail travel,
the submission to timetables, and the fuss and bother
of catching trains, but he had no choice. travel,"
are too
course,
it's
not our style of
many changes
travel not visiting
"Of
he wrote to the Zubovs from one of their stopping places. "There of train, too many stations, and too little fresh air. You on your muscles but on your nerves. But there is no other w ay of
such distant places."'
The
journey out took almost a week, and on one of their legs Solzhe-
nitsyn had a chance meeting that he was later to describe in The Gulag Archi-
MVD
He found himself sitting beside a young officer who had just completed his training at the Tavda Academy and was on his way to start work in the Irkutsk labour-camp complex. The officer was friendly and talkative and told Solzhenitsyn what a mess the camps had fallen into
pelago.
MVD
since Khrushchev's liberalization of them, and
how
insolent and hostile the
(when Solzhenitsyn was in exile), when had been even worse, with the prisoners
prisoners had become. Back in 1954 the liberalization process began,
it
work and buying themselves television sets with their own money. The young officer waxed indigant at the very memory of it, quite unaware of who it was beside him, drawing him on with innocent questions and sympathetic commiseration. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn realized, he was not a flatly
refusing to
427
1
SOLZHENITSYN
[428]
bad voung fellow
companv he kept
It
.
all
was simply
that his training, his surroundings,
and the
conspired to convince him that labour-camp prisoners
were a desperate, cruel, ungrateful, and virtiialK' subhuman race who deser\ed no understanding or svmpathv w hatsoever and w ho responded only to compulsion and force. Doubtless he described this angry diatribe w hen he called on one of his old Ekibastuz friends, Yuri Karbe, who was now living in Sverdlovsk. In
bv
its
due course the Solzhenitsyns reached Lake Baikal and were impressed is astonishing," Solzhenitsvn w rote to the Zubovs,
grandeur. "Baikal
"and somehow the word 'sacred' doesn't seem, out of place."* Ihev spent its shores and dav-dreamed of building a cottage there,
several days exploring
Solzhenitsvn humorouslv described in that same letter to the Zubovs. "V\ e've chosen a 'Happ\' \ allev' w here we've decided to build our cottage (300 steps above the railw av line). There will be a small halt below, water from a mountain spring, solar panels on the roof to charge our batteries during the da\', and paths and summer-houses among the cliffs."After thev had been to Sludyanka, at the southern tip of Lake Baikal, thev learned from Maria in Rvazan that a telegram had arrived from Ivardovskv, asking Solzhenits\n to go at once to \ovy Mir. She had informed a project that
Tvardovskv that Solzhenitsvn w as
in Siberia
care of the post office in Krasnoxarsk,
some
through which he would be passing on
kal,
was extremelv reluctant to cut short distance aw av and it had been such
but that he could be contacted
five
hundred miles west of Bai-
his return journev.
his holidav. Siberia a
huge enterprise
Solzhenitsyn
was such an immense
to get there that he did
not w ish to waste the opportunity. But Ivardovskv's telegram aw aiting him in
Krasnoyarsk contained exciting news: "Cable immediately chances short Moscow re preparation manuscript for setting."' Setting was an immense step forward. It was the stage at which the
visit
v\ork
w ould have
have decided on
to be submitted to the censorship, it
and Tvardovskv w ouldn't
unless he had good reason to believe
it
would
pass. Sol-
zhenitsvn had w anted to spend some davs travelling dow n the river
but he decided to omit that part of his )ourne\ and return to
ELnisei,
Moscow bv
2
Tvardovskv w as duh* informed bv telegram. It was raining the night they arrived in Moscow. The follow ing day, a Sunday, the\' hurried out to Zhukovka, a resort area on the outskirts of Moscow, where the Kopelevs had a dacha. "You're now the most popular man in Moscow," said Kopelev, "and I'm green with envy about it.""^ He told SolzhenitsN'n of the praises being heaped on Ivcjn Deiiisovich by Chukovsky, Marshak, and the others, and about the large number of unofficial copies ot the novel being passed from hand to hand. Some said there were as many as five hundred. Reports had come in of its being read as far afield as Kiev, Odessa, and Sverdlovsk. Readers w ere doubly anxious to grab it w hen they could because nobody believed that, w ith such a subject, it would ever get
July.
*A
reference to
a
well-known Soviet song that contains
a line
about "the sacred Baikal."
A rRLE Hflpfr ok ihf Pari
y
[429]
w hen Solzhenitsyn rang Anna Berzer, she
into print. Later,
told
him
that
the manuscript had been read and approved by no less a person than Khru-
shchc\
private secretarw \ ladimir Lebedev,
's
who was
to Khrushche\ himself. But before he did so, he
certain changes,
proposing to show
w anted the author
to
it
make
which was whv Solzhenitsvn had been summoned from
Siberia.
The
changes tc^ok place in the \ovy p.m. on Mondav, 23 julv 1962. Ever\one was there the tirst discussion o\ Ivan Denisovich, with the addition of a
editorial conference to discuss these
Mir boardroom again, just as at
at
1
newcomer, \ ladimir Lakshin, who had just taken over the section of literary criticism. Tvardovsky was beaming. He felt that his campaign for publication was at last beginning to bear fruit and that his unorthodox methods were justified.
He
explained to Solzhenits\ n how he and Dementx
w ith some help e\ from Lakshin, had drafted a letter to Khrushchev in w hich the\ stated as the unanimous opinion of the \aiy Mir editorial board that hw! Denisavich should be published, and had requested Khrushchev to give the matter his personal attention. (This unanimitv w as no fiction 1 vardovskv had insisted on taking a formal vote on it in June.) 1 hev had also quoted the favourable opinions of several leading writers that Tvardovskv had collected through the spring and summer. Instead of approaching Khrushchev directlv, how ever (w hich he might have done since they were personallv acquainted), Tvardovskv had judged it wiser to hand this material, together with a copv of the manuscript, to Lebedew who had since read the storv and expressed his enthusiasm. 1 hev had thus gained a valuable allv for the final approach to Khrushchev. 1 vardovskv then explained the changes that Lebedex' w ished to see made. Most of them centred on the figure of Captain Buinovskv, the ex-naval commander and former Partv member, who in the final pages is condemned to the punishment cells for a heroic gesture of defiance. Solzhenitsvn had conceived and shown him semi-satiricalh', but Lebedev wanted the comedv toned down so that Buinovsky could emerge as a "positive hero." He also wanted Solzhenitsyn to moderate some of the language, particularlv some of the camp slang and the repeated references to the camp officers as "vermin." There also had to be at least a token condemnation of the Ukrainian nationalists, the Banderites (from Buinovskv if not from the narrator); the prisoners should be shown as having some hope of freedom; and there should be a mention of the fact that Stalin had been responsible for all these crimes. When Tvardovsky had finished, he invited comments from the others, and Dementyev took over; but whereas Tvardovsky's tone had been neutral and dispassionate, Dementvev was more aggressive. He thoroughlv agreed with Lebedev's criticisms and had others of his own. The conversation about the Eisenstein film The Battleship Potemkin was an insult to Soviet art and should be cut. Shukhov's conversation w ith Alvoshka the Baptist about God should also be cut, and there were manv more criticisms in similar vein. Dementvev had alreadv irritated Solzhenitsvn bv his refusal to attend the
—
,
SOLZHENITSYN
[430]
discussion ot his story about Matryona, and as earlv as his
first visit to Novy Dementyev's hypocritical charm, which he regarded as a cover for political orthodoxy. Now Dementyev seemed to be standing in his way, dissipating the effects of Tvardovsky's reasonableness and infuriating Solzhenitsyn with his pedantrv. In The Oak and the Calf he describes himself rephing as follows: "I have waited ten vears and I can w ait another ten. I'm in no hurry. Mv life doesn't depend on literature. Give me back my manuscript and I'll be on my wav."^ Reshetovskava repeats his description of this scene in her unpublished chapters, but also records (presumably basing herself on Solzhenitsvn's notes) that at one point his tone became more reasonable: "I will not agree to revisions that \\ ould destroy the harmon\" of my stor\' or go against mv conscience. ... I cannot write for some particular category of readers, I have to reckon w ith my material, and I have a generalized reader in mind."'' Whatever the exact nature of his response, Tvardovsk\ w as sufficiently alarmed to interject, "You don't have to do anything. Ever\thing we've said today you can take or leave as you think fit. It's just that we all very much w ant the manuscript to get through." After this there was an aw kw ard silence the rest of the board-members had little to say. Onl\- Lakshin joked that he was against removing Solzhenitsvn's veiled sw ear-words from the text, since he had started using some of
Mir Solzhenitsyn had taken
a dislike to
—
home
them
at
script
aw av and work on
himself. Eventually, SolzhenitsNU agreed to take the it
one more time, with
objections. In his pocket diar\' he
made
a
a
view
to
manu-
meeting Lebedev's
note next to the date, 23 Juh':
"Difficult conference at N.M."**
He
during the next three days. With Buino\ skv no problem to reduce the comedy and stress his heroic side; and he did, after hesitation, put into the commander's mouth a criticism of the Banderites. Coming from a Party member and not the narrator, it sounded quite natural (although later, for another edition, he cut it again). It w as also easy enough to tone dow n the language and slip in a reference to Stalin, which he did in the jokey style ("Old Whiskers") of his letters to Nikolai \ itkevich from the front. He drew the line at show ing the prisoners hoping for freedom, how ever, and similarly refused to cut either the Potemkin or Alyoshka scenes. On the whole he was w ell satisfied, as he wrote in a letter to the Zubovs while still engaged on this work.
accomplished
he had no
his task
difficulties. It
w
as
.\ccording to A.T. and Co. m\' story
is
making
satisfactory progress, hi literary
been unprecendentedly unanimous praise: exceptionally favourable reports have come in from Chukovskv, Ehrenburg, and others. Before the last stage is tackled, I have been asked to carry out a bit more work on it, \\ hich
circles there has
I
am
doing now.
hardiv believe
On Berzer.
it
Nobody is setting conditions are we reallv so near?*^
that
would cripple the book.
I
can
—
26 July, Solzhenitsyn handed in the revised manuscript to Anna not clear how much of a hand Berzer herself had in the final
It is
A True Helper of the Party editing.
In
impeccable
Moscow tact in
litcran
circles she
was kn(n\n
[43 for her erudition
']
and
handling authors and their manuscripts. She was also one
of the few editors in the So\iet Union know n to be totally on the author's side
and adept
at
deceiving the censors. Certainb', she had early adxised
Solzhenitsyn not to
make
too man\' concessions in advance, since one could
never know w hat would pass and w hat not (he later assessed the changes he as amounting to less than one per cent of the text). Berzer w as rapidly becoming the only person at Novy Mir w horn Solzhenitsyn fully trusted. As it turned out, he w as not alone. Anna Berzer's office on the first fioor of the Novy Mir building had become a kind of unofficial club for the liberal authors published by the magazine, where they would meet at five o'clock after a day's w riting to toast "Asva," as she was affectionateK called, exchange the latest gossip, and drink themselves under the table. Among the leading and more convivial members of this club were \ ictor Nekrasov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Xaum Mendel (w ho published under the name of Naum Korzhavin); and on that evening of 26 July, As\a had promised them a rare treat: a meeting with the mysterious author of .A Day in the Life of Ivan De-
made
nisovich.
The meeting was
arranged
request of Nekrasov, w ho had
at the
felt a
Tvardovsky had confided in him the morning after reading Ivatt Denisovich. Nekrasov had also been astonished by the book and genuinely w ished to express his admiration to the author, especially after hearing from Berzer w hat a charming and modest man he was. Solzhenitsyn, though generalh' avoiding Moscow literary circles, was not averse to meeting Nekrasov, for he in turn had deeply admired Nekrasov's best-known book. In the Trenches of Stalingrad, w hen he had read wins you over with ks genuine truth it in the camps in 1947 C'7he book about war and is as different as heaven from earth from everything else that has been written about the w ar,"'" he had told Natalia in one of his letters, adding that it made him nostalgic for his army days and covered the same subject matter as he had w anted to cover in his projected but unw ritten w ar sort of proprietary interest in the author ever since
.
.
.
novel, The Sixth Course). Solzhenitsvn's
first social
meeting w
ith a
group of Moscow w riters turned man he was struck by
out to be very agreeable, although as an abstemious the quantity of wine and vodka sion as remarkably sober
by
consumed (Nekrasov
later recalled the occa-
their usual standards). Nevertheless, he joined
the toasts to Ivan Denisovich, literature, \ovy Mir, and e\en Confucius
—whose
them and compared with Christ's. Nekrasov told Solzhenitsyn about his trips abroad and how difficult it had been, on a recent visit to Italy, to remain quiet about Ivan Denisovich w hen Soviet literature was criticized for its lack of realism. teaching Solzhenitsyn expounded to
Solzhenitsyn found Nekrasov animated, interesting, and sociable but was rather taken aback w hen Nekrasov suggested they pass to the "thou" form and call one another bv their Christian names. The prim schoolmaster was unused to such metropolitan informalit\" and agreed only after much hesitation. On a more serious note, Nekrasov praised Solzhenitsyn for his
SOLZHEMTSYN
[432]
camp in such a w av that all camps \\ ere included and to \\ rite "Matrvona" so that the whole countryside \yas described: "Tell me, how vyas it you were able to write lOO per cent truth? \\ hat's the secret of your art?" Solzhenitsyn replied disingenuously, "The secret is that when \ou\e been pitched head first into hell you just write about it." Nekrasoy wondered aloud w hat sort of impact Ivan Denisoiicb w ould haye when it was published. W ould it start a conflagration or would eyery thing stay as before? Solzhenitsyn replied, "But it's not a sensational exposure; it's the people's ability to describe a single
point of yiew
.""
7 he follow ing day Solzhenitsyn w ent back to \'ovy Mir to hear w hether the reyisions he had made vyere acceptable. On this occasion his meeting w as with Tyardoysky, Berzer, and the managing secretary, Boris Sachs. lyardoysky and Berzer professed themsehes satisfied, but Sachs wanted to cut more of the swear-words, and Solzhenitsyn agreed to remoye another three. Tyardoysky then gaye Solzhenitsyn a copy of his preface to read. Solzhenitsyn disliked the w hole idea of a preface. \\ hy couldn't the reader be left to make up his ow n mind, without being "prepared" in adyance? And he particularly disliked the use of the word "happy" to describe han Denisoyich's day. It would seem that lyardoysky had borrowed this idea from Chukoysk\ w ho in his reyiew had underlined the fact that this grim picture described a "happy day," and not one of the worst days. He had eyen, according to one report, suggested that this go into the title: "han Denisoyich's Happy Day," but this had not found fayour w ith an\ one. In response to Solzhenitsyn's objections, howeyer, Tyardoysk\' agreed to remoye the offending ,
adjectiye.*
Tyardoysky still declined to show Solzhenitsyn the opinions w ritten by Chukoysky, Marshak, and the others. He didn't want to spoil Solzhenitsyn, he said, to which the latter responded that the time for spoiling him was already past. And it w as true, for the w ords "genius," "a work of genius," and similar extrayagant praises were to be heard from all sides, and Solzhenitsyn had already been told by Kopeley of the gist of the famous writers' reports. Yet he remained in total command of himself and, while exulting inwardh', had steadfastly refused to betray any outward emotion. "You are taking this thing much more calmly than any of us," Anna Berzer had said to him one day. "We are all worried, but you're not." This was not quite so. Reshetoyskaya notes that he w as tense and w ound up, finding it difficult to sleep, and had started taking bromide at night.'" Tyardoysky's last words as Solzhenitsyn left the \ovy A//;" office vyere to ask whether he had an\ thing else to offer them. "In my yiew," replied Solzhenitsyn, "it's now up to A'017 Mir to do its bit. When that happens, I won't be slow to follow
it
up."
"
For the second half of the summer holidays, Solzhenitsyn planned to *Tvardovsk\- had probablv been misled bv indicating that
it
however, would have been
a
a
phrase
in the
happy day." To
concluding lines of Ivan
"happy" without distortion of Solzhenitsvn's meaning.
had been "almost
a
call
it
Deiiis(rcich
qualification,
A Truk Hfipfr take to his bicvcic again.
I
Ic
ok thk I^ariv
had arranged
I433I
to tour the Baltic States
u
ith his
rediscovered friend Leonid \ lasov, for which purpose he took his bicvcle on the train to Riga. Apart from the phxsical exercise and the chance to see
new
however, he had another motive for seeing \ lasov. lie wanted Vlasov to repeat the story of an episode that he had been involved in at the beginning of the war and that he had first told Sol/henits\ n during their chance meeting on the train from .Moscow to Rostov in 1V44. Solzhenitsyn places,
had never forgotten felt it
w as
in his
mind.
just
w
it
and now wished
to write a short storx
hat he needed for offering to
Novy Mir.
I
he
about
title
it
—he
w as alreadv
The holidav was interesting and successful. Solzhenitsvn returned bronzed and slimmer, with three rolls of film he had shot on the trip. But almost immediatelv he w as forced to take to his bed with an attack of sciatica, a legacv of the camps. In order not to waste anv time, he occupied himself in
bed v\ith revising The Light Which Is in Thee. Sufficient criticism had now accumulated to make him thoroughlv dissatisfied w ith it, and he continued to work on it throughout the first half of September. Meanwhile, the decisive moment had arrived in I vardovskv's campaign to have Ivan Denisovich approved at the highest level. Khrushchev w as spending the summer in the south and had left for when Solzhenitsvn went to Riga, at the end
the Crimea at about the time
of Julv. On 6 August 1962, Tvardovskv sent the revised manuscript to Lebedev, who w as still in Moscow, together with his covering letter to Khrushchev and the selection of reviews. For about a
month
afterwards, nothing
much happened,
except that
Dmitri Polikarpov, head of the cultural section of the Central Committee, rang Ivardox skv and asked for
a
copv. 1 his w as rather surprising, since the
whole point of approaching Lebedev and Khrushchev had been to outflank Polikarpov, a notorious reactionarv. However, news of the stor\''s special status must have percolated to a verv high level, for Polikarpov rang back later to say he would not oppose publication. On 7 September, Khrushchev received the American poet Robert Frost, who was in the Soviet Union as part of the Soviet- American cultural exchange programme, at his villa in Pitsunda, on the Black Sea coast. Ironically, Ivardovskv was supposed to be in America carrving out the Soviet part of the exchange, but he w as indisposed and could not go. Frost was accompanied by Lebedev and the Soviet poet Alexei Surkov, formerly head of the Writers' Union. According to Reshetovskava (whose unpublished chapters contain the fullest account of these events), Lebedev and Surkov began talking about Ivan Denisovich in Khrushchev's presence. "What's that?" Khrushchev allegAnd w hen Lebedex' explained, edlv said. "What are vou concealing from me?" '"^
he demanded to see the manuscript.
Oddlv enough
(in
Reshetovskava's account), Lebedev had forgotten to
bring the manuscript w ith him and was obliged to
Returning, he
is
.Moscow to get it. Khrushchev sometime
flv to
said to ha\e read extracts aloud to
between 9 and 14 September, deliberately choosing the "positive" scene of
SOLZHENITSYN
[434]
main emphasis. Halfway through, Khrushchev summoned Mikoyan to listen, too, and is said to have been particularly touched by the way that Ivan Denisovich, when laying bricks, so carefully husbanded his mortar. When the story was finished, Khrushchev asked Lebedev why Tvardovsky didn't simply go ahead and publish it. Lebedev pointed out that it was not so easy and reminded Khrushchev of the difficulties Tvardovsky had experienced with his own poem Distant Horizons. Khrushchev then said that both he and Mikoyan approved of Solzhenitsyn's story and saw no reason the building of the generating station for his
why
it
could not be published.
Khrushchev and his entourage returned to Moscow almost immediately after the reading, and on 16 September 1962, Lebedev rang Tvardovsky: "Trifonich, there is justice in this world!" That same day, Anna Berzer despatched a letter to Ryazan bearing the glad tidings: "Now we can say that Ivan D is on the very threshold. We are expecting news any day."" But there was still no official word from the Central Committee, and Tvardovsky was on tenterhooks. "If they refuse Lll resign," he is said to have threatened to his colleagues. Finally, at midday on 21 September, he received his promised call, but it was not at all what he had expected. "Deliver us twenty-three copies by tomorrow morning!""' Tvardovsky was flabbergasted. He did not possess twenty-three copies. deliberately kept the number down so as not to let the story circulate had He (he was unaware of just how many were circulating, and it was certainly not his fault). To type up twenty-three copies w as out of the question in a single night, so he grasped at the only other possibility: a limited printing of the
necessary copies. Novy
Mir
didn't have
its
own
presses,
it
was
a
dependency
of Izvestia. Tvardovsky rang the head of Izvestia's printing department and
arranged to have four machines set aside from printing Izvestia that night and reserved for printing twenty-five copies of Ivan Denisovich.
Berzer and Kondratovich w ere put in charge of the operation and ted four proof-readers and an equivalent latter the text It
was
a far
number
allot-
of type-setters. For the
presented major problems of style, spelling, and vocabulary.
cry from the dull and cliche-ridden speeches of government lead-
Nor did the unorthodox nature of the contents escape them, though they were sworn to secrecy about this strange project. They worked feverishly through the night, and at dawn the next morning the copies were bound in the distinctive light-blue covers of Novy Mir and the plates locked aw ay in the Izvestia strong-room. Later that morning twenty-three copies were delivered to the offices of the Central Committee and the remaining two to Tvardovsky (one of w hich he later presented to Solzhenitsyn). Khrushchev ordered the copies to be distributed to members of the Party Presidium, and on 23 September departed for (>entral Asia to inspect the virgin lands and look into agriculture there. 1 hree days later Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow for a short visit. Apart from Berzer's vague letter of the sixteenth, he knev\- nothing of the past month's events and immediately telephoned her for the latest news. "Tell me just one thing. Has he read it?" ers.
.\
"Yes.
He
liked it." Solzhenitsx n hurried rf>und
the whole story.
mented
away
Me was
t(j
see her,
com-
w hich
.
.
.
People have
a desire
Fired on bv this good news, he worked
that's clean."'
at the \'lasov storv,
and she told him
thought that m\ entr\ into literature would be
people would be so tuU ot enthusiasm.
something
I435]
naturally elated. Returning to Ryazan, he
to Natalia, "I ne\er
like this, that
to touch
Iruk Hklpkr of ihk Party
at that stage
bore the
title
of
"The CJreen
Cap." rhe Presidium held its meeting sometime in the middle of October. Xobod\' know s exacth w hat w ent on there, or indeed w hether there w as one meeting or tw o. In his ow n memoir Solzhenits\n refers to onlv one meeting, but others, including Zhores Medvedev,* maintain that Ivati Denisovich was discussed at two meetings. .According to them, the first time it came up on the agenda several members announced that they had not had time to read identified by rumour as Frol Koziov and Mikhail Susit. Other member.s lov objected to the book, pointing out that the camp guards ought not to have been depicted so unta\ourabl\'. Yet another source has Khrushchev wagging his finger at the pair of them and declaring, "How can we fight against the remnants of the personalitv cult if Stalinists of this t\ pe are still among us.'"'*^ At another point he is reported to have said, "There's a Stalinist in each of \ ou; there's even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out
—
—
"'"^
this evil. If first
these reports are to be believed, Khrushchev did not get his
time, and the matter
Now
w
\\
as raised at a
wav
the
second meeting one or two davs
mainly silence, although someone is supposed to have would it be grist to?"-" Goaded bv this general lack of enthusiasm, Khrushchev demanded, "Whv don't \ ou sav something?" And when no discussion was forthcoming, he said, "1 here's a Russian pro\"erb that says silence is consent."-' The resolution to publish was proposed bv Khrushchev and seconded by Mikoxan. One last remark b\- Khrushchev later later.
asked,
there
"Whose
passed into
as
mill
Moscow
folklore:
"This
isn't a
campaign,
it's
a policv."--
Tvardovskv was unofficially informed of the result by Lebedev on 15 October 1962, but it w as another five days before he received a copy of the official resolution. For this he was summoned to a personal meeting with Khrushchev, which lasted for more than two hours. Khrushchev, he later reported, was in a mellow philosophical mood. He praised Ivan Denisovich as a life-enhancing work that was fulh* in the spirit of the Tw entv-second Congress. It would have been harmful, however, if not so well written. Some people had w anted the camp administration to be presented in a more sympathetic light, but he had retorted, "W hat do you think it was, a holiday resort?" Khrushchev commented on the strange wav the book had been presented for his approval and said he found the whole process abnormal. "\\ hat have we got the state machinery for?"-^ he asked irritably. How ever, he did not go back on his permission to publish. Perhaps it was at this point that Tvardovskv raised the question of the ,
* In
Ten Years
after
Ivan Denisovich.
SOLZHENITSYN
[436]
it is generally known that he seized the opportunity of this meeting to suggest to Khrushchev that the censorship be lifted altogether.
censorship, for
made bv kisses," Tvardovsky later reported himself as saying. you abolish the censorship of imaginative literature? Books are what could be worse than that?"-^ circulating in illegal copies According to Zhores Medvedev, Tvardovsky was deeply convinced of the need to abolish the censorship and had gone to the meeting w ith Khrushchev intending to argue for such a step. I lis contention was that editors were far more responsible and experienced than censors, since censors, for the most part, came from among the less successful employees of the publishing houses. "I mean, vou wouldn't give them my job, would you? So wh)' can't I, a member of the Partv's Central Committee, a writer and an editor, decide whether or not to publish a particular story or a poem? After all, our entire and then some total stranger editorial staff discusses it and comes to a decision from Glavlit, some fool who understands nothing about literature, goes and "Babies aren't
"Why
don't
—
—
blue-pencils our decisions."-''
According to both Solzhenitsyn and Medvedev, Khrushchev heard Tvardovskv out with some svmpathv. In Medvedev's version, Khrushchev is
even said
to
have expressed enthusiasm over the recent decision to stop "We lifted the censorship on foreign cor-
censoring foreign correspondents:
respondents and look what happened. Nothing.
They
told rather fewer lies."-^
Solzhenitsyn, however, feels that Tvardovsky took an over-optimistic view of Khrushchev's reactions and fell into the trap of attributing to the Soviet leader
what were essentially his ow n opinions. But even in this more Khrushchev is not seen as contradicting 1 vardovsky's
mistic version,
pessiasser-
tions.
In respect of the censorship their conversation remained inconclusive, but the more important practical matter was resolved. Ivan Denisovicb could be printed. Returning to his office, T\ ardovskv at once dispatched a telegram to Solzhenitsyn in
Ryazan, w hich reached him that same Saturday evening. number magazine congratulations Tvardov-
—
"Story appearing eleventh sky.
"" The following day Solzhenitsyn
replied.
Dear Alexander I rifonovich, I had lately been of the opinion (and become completely resigned to the idea) that Ivan Denisovicb wouldn't get through. So much the more unexpected and pleasant was it to receive your telegram yesterday, for which many thanks.-**
And
the day after that he wrote to the Zubovs.
Dear friends, As an amusing example of something that in, say, the late autumn of 1953,* never thought I w ould live to see, let me inform \'ou that Ivan Denisovicb has reali/x how radically my life is changing, what been passed for pii hiicat ion. ... I
1
*I.e.,
when
Solzhcnits\ n was in exile and had his second txnit ot cancer.
A
Truf. Hki.pkr ok
great spiritual opportunities arc opening
dangers (fame, success,
moment
I'm
loss of
thk Party
[43 "1
up before me, and
also
what
spiritual
conscience and feeling, hack-work). ... At the
overwhelmed and have
lots
of letters to write, so please forgive
mv
brevitv.-'
His
mood continued
be one of suppressed jo\'. Had he allowed his would have shouted his \ ictors to the roof-
to
natural exuberance tree rein, he tops, but \ears of
camp
training followed b\
dissimulation had taught check.
I
lis
him
more \ears of concealment and emotions and hold them in
to discipline his
natural optimism had been o\erlaid
1)\
pessimism born of
a
bitter
w as for this reason that he had replied to I vardovsk\- in such sober terms and kept up his bantering tone w ith the Zubovs, although w ith the latter he had allowed himself to strike a more solemn chord. But this stoicism exacted a price. According to Resheto\'ska\a, he began to dream more frequentiv One night it was Khrushchev stopping a train and making Solzhenitsv n board it. .Another night he dreamt that a big conference w as in progress and that someone came out and announced that Ivan Denisovich had been passed for printing, after w hich he was surrounded by eager students of literature. On still another occasion he dreamt he w as at a concert given bv the \\ ell-know n conductor Konstantin Ivanov and the pianist Bella Davido\"ich, but w hen the conductor bent forwards to speak to her the\- turned into 1 \ ardovsk\ and .Anna Berzer. Yet things seemed to be going his wav. On Sunda\ 21 October 1962,
experience, and a superstitious fear of the worst.
It
.
word of explanation, Pravda published ''The Heirs of Stalin," an poem bv Evtushenko, in w hich he u arned against those Stalinists who still held positions of power and wanted to turn back the clock. Like Ivan Denisovich, Kvtushenko's poem w as well know n in .Moscow literarx circles and had begun to circulate privatelw Its sudden publication in such an without
a
anti-Stalinist
authoritative organ signalled a victorv for the liberals and a blow against the
conservatives.
One week It
later,
Solzhenitsxn was called to
turned out that these were the page-proofs
Moscow
—the
to correct the prrx)fs.
final stage.
As he
later
discovered, he was supposed to have corrected the gallevs as well, but these
had not been show n to him,
e\ identlv for fear that
of the changes he had agreed to
make anv .As
it
to.
he w ould take back some
At the page-proof
stage,
it
w as impossible
alterations of substance.
happened, he had
just
completed
his
new
stor\'
based on the epi-
sode related to him h\ Leonid \ lasov, w hich was now called "Incident
at
Kochetovka Station." The episode concerned a middle-aged man who had turned up unexpectedK" at a small railwav station behind the front lines in the earlv part of the w ar and reported to the local commander that he had become separated from the train transporting him to the rear. He w as one of several hundred soldiers w ho had escaped from Cierman encirclement and were being sent to the rear to be reallocated to new units. 1 he suspicions of the commander, a vouns Red .Arm\ lieutenant, were aroused bv the man's
SOLZHENITSYN
[438]
evident good breeding, his "prerevolutionarv" manners, and an extraordi-
nary
of the tongue
slip
name
tionary
\\
hereby he referred to StaUngrad by its pre-reyoluThe lieutenant concluded that the man was a
of Tsaritsyn.
W hite Russian spy who had been infiltrated through the lines at the front, and handed him oyer to the NK\ D, knowing full well that he was condemning the man. w ho protested his innocence, to either death or a long prison sentence. In Solzhenitsyn's hands the story tion to
"The Right Hand"
became
in that the reader
that occurs just before the story's end,
a parable, similar in
is left
though the yictim, Tyeritinoy,
The
innocent sufferer like Matrvona, not an agent of repression. narrated
b\'
the
young commander
— Lieutenant \
zhenitsyn portrayed, and satirized, his naiVe, idealistic,
The
and
fatally
narrow
construc-
ponder the reyelation
to
own younger
in his blind
Zotoy,
asili
in
an
is
story
w horn
is
Sol-
self: puritanical, loyal,
devotion to the Soviet cause.
Zotov likes Tverisympathy right up until the fatal slip over Tsaritsyn, w hen his Soviet education and Red Army training, w ith their emphasis on the eternal need for vigilance, take over and cancel out this fellow-feeling at a stroke. His friendliness gives w ay to mortification as he suspects he has been taken in, and his subsequent hostility enables him to send 1 veritinov to possible death on the slenderest thread of tragedy of the storv, as told bv Solzhenitsvn,
tinov and
is
draw n to him.
He
treats
him with
is
that
friendly
suspicion.
Solzhenitsvn's descriptions of the station behind the front lines and of the chaos and turmoil of the
he had
\"et
first
among
\ear of the w ar w ere
done, and the picture of his \ounger
the best things
Zotov w
self as
as richer
and
more three-dimensional than the autobiographical characters in the plays (in the narrators had been merely observers). But "Incihis stories up till now dent" w as now here near as tightly w ritten as his other stories and show ed a lamentable tendency to w ant to turn itself into a novel. There were numerous irrele\ant sub-plots, and Solzhenitsvn seemed over-anxious to stuff in as much information and comment as he could (perhaps sensing that this was the nearest he would ever get to writing his novel about the w ar). The result was a baggy and shapeless holdall that could ha\e done w ith considerable ,
pruning before publication. Nevertheless, Solzhenits\ n had once again displa\ed his talent for putting his finger
on the sore spots of recent Soviet
controversial subjects he raised in this short
disastrous start to the
w
ar; Stalin's
history.
work were
Among
the
many
the Soviet Union's
leading role in that disastrous
start;
the
who was winning the w ar; the ill treatment of soldiers w ho had escaped from German captivity or encirclement; and the hidden tyrann\ of the secret police, who continued to relative indifference of the peasants near the front as to
monitor and control the movements of Soviet soldiers and the Soviet populace even at the time of their most harrow ing and tragic defeats at the beginning of the war. In his asides and comments, Solzhenitsvn was even able to bring in the thirties
(as
he had done
in Ivan Deni.wvich),
but the main emphasis
A Truk Helper of the Party
l4 3yJ
was on the multiple tragedies of the war.
On
the night before his departure to
Moseow
to
cheek the proofs, Sol-
zhenits\ n read his just-completed story to Natalia and to Alexandra Popova,
who was But
as
staving with
them
for a
few days, and was pleased bv their praise. a menacing storm
he travelled up to the capital, he was aware of
hanging not onlv over him but over the entire countrv, a crisis that threatjust as effectively as any local or literary conflict to sweep his storv
ened
—
the Cuban crisis, which had just reached its climax. Nearlv a week had passed since President Kennedv had called Khrushchev's bluff over the rockets on Cuba bv displaving aerial photographs of them and announcing his blockade. Ihe question on evervbodv's lips was: Will Khrushchev tell
awav
his ships to
run the gauntlet? Ciiven Khrushchev's unpredictabilitv, no one
anv certaintv whether he would or he wouldn't. was the eve of the November holidav, exactiv a vear since he had agreed to send his storv to Novy Mir. 7 his time, instead of staving in an obscure hotel in the suburbs, he had been bookecl into the luxurious Ukraine Hotel near the centre, all expenses paid by Novy Mir. He found the editorial offices in a festive mood. Raisa Orlova had told him how members of the editorial staff had embraced one another and done no work the preceding Mondav, when they heard the news of permission to publish. "If onlv vou knew how manv people were jumping with jov, and verv good people too!"^" Now the staff gave him the latest news. Literarv Moscow was agog at the prospect of seeing Ivan Denisovich in print. Novy Mir had been inundated with phone calls. The girls who did the proof-reading had gushed over Shukhov and exclaimed over the names Solzhenitsvn had given some of his characters: \ oikovoi (meaning "wolfish"), Alyoshka, with its echoes of Dostovevskv. "Now a new literature is beginning," said one of the editors.^' Solzhenitsvn did not see Ivardovskv on this occasion, but Boris Sachs passed on to him one last request from Lebedev. This was to remove one religious remark put into the mouth of the brigade leader Tiurin: "I crossed mvself and said to God, 'Thou art there in heaven after all. Creator. Thv patience is long but thv blows are heavv.' " Plaving for time, Solzhenitsvn said he would think about it and took the page-proofs back to his hotel. He sat there with the proofs on the desk before him and the radio on, listening to the latest news from (]uba. If there was to be a world conflagration, the proofs hardly seemed worth correcting. But that very weekend Khrushchev decided to back dow n, and the crisis began to subside. Solzhenitsvn's storv would appear after all. There remained the problem of what to do about Tiurin's invocation of the Lord. Certainlv Solzhenitsvn owed Lebedev a favour. If it had not been for his energetic advocacv, the storv would never have got into print at all. On the other hand, Tiurin was a kev figure in the storv, in some ways more important than Ivan Denisovich himself, for through him Solzhenitsvn had managed to contradict the whole official version of the historv of the preceding twentv vears and to smuggle in a true account of collectivization and the could sav It
\\
ith
SOLZHENITSYN
[440]
Lebedev had been right to spot the danger, though too and too superficially. Solzhenitsvn pondered the request. Rereading the story, he found his camp days coming back to him, remembered his comrades and the cruel torments they had endured, and pictured their joy that at last the truth vyas emerging. For the first time, he writes in The Oak and the Calf, he \\ ept oyer his tale, and realized he \\ as bound to refuse. During his brief stay in Moscow Solzhenitsyn had two important meetwith Anna Akhmatoya and with V arlam Shalamoy. It was Kopeley ings who took him to see Akhmatoya on 28 October 1962.* Akhmatoya was fiattered to hear that Solzhenitsyn knew her Poem ivithoiit a Herat by heart. He told her he had found it difficult and obscure at first, but then it had become clear. She read some of her poems, and he praised her patriotism, calling terror of the thirties. late
,
—
her, in effect, "the soul of Russia."
but she found his manner
He
also read
some of
his poetry to her,
of reading strange and later told Lvdia Chukoy-
much of it and that in poetry his prose, howeyer, she had only the was "yulnerable." Por Solzhenitsyn Ivan Denisovich in a samizdat copy and had said She had read his[hest praise. two hundred million citizens of the think that eyer\ one of the time, "I at the Now she was this and learn it by heart." should read story Soyiet Union described him to Chuacquaintance, and the next day to make his delighted We'ye foryoung, and happy. bearer of light. Fresh, sharp, as "a koyskaxa he listens exist. Eyes like precious stones. And stern: people that such gotten according to Chukoyskaya, Akhmatoya's lexicon, saying." In what he's to this latter comment was the highest praise. Akhmatoya asked Solzhenitsyn whether he realized that in a month he w ould be the most famous man on earth. Solzhenitsxn replied, "IVe got strong neryes. I coped with Stalin's camps." But Akhmatoya pointed out that Pasternak had not coped w ith fame. Fame was difficult to handle when it came late.'" The meeting with Shalamoy must haye been yery different in tone. Shalamoy had suryiyed seyenteen years in the notorious camps ot Kolyma, in north-eastern Siberia, and had written a series of maryellous and carefully wrought stories about his experiences, $ as v\'ell as some less interesting yerse. Solzhenitsyn had alw ays supposed that there must be other suryiyors like himself writing about the camps, but Shalamoy was the only one who had come to his attention in 1956 he had read some of his poems and had "tremrecognized a brother."'^ Later he acknowledged that "Shalamoy's bled as experience in the camps w as longer and bitterer than my ow n, and I respectfully confess that to him and not to me was it giyen to touch those depths of skaya that she had not been able to make
—
I
*
Akhmatova was one
ot"
the candidates for the Nobel Prize that year
(it
was won by John
Steinbeck). t
Akhmatova's long and complex poem
is
partly a distillation of
memory,
partly a meditation
on
and parti v a poetical statement on Russia's destiny. It is regarded by many as the crow ning achievement of her life's work, but has never been published in full in the So\ iet history,
Union. IThcN- have been translated into Knglish in two volumes: Kolyma Tales Graphite {\c\\ \ork, 19S1), both translated by John Cilad.
(Si:\\
York, 1980) and
— A Truk Hflpf.r of thi Party
[44
i |
savagery and despair towards w hich lite was dragging us all.'""* Sol/.henits\ n seems to have preferred Shalamov's verse to his prose (in The Oak and the (Utlf he expresses the view that Shalamox's prose had suffered from the isolation in v\hieh he had written it and that it eould easilv have been impro\ed "w ith no change in the range of material or the author's viewpoint"),'' and at their meeting he asked Shalamov to send him a selection so that Solzhenits\ n could offer it to Movy Mir. Before his departure for Ryazan, Solzhenitsvn was given the set of gallev proofs that had been kept aw av from him bv Novy Mir (marked "Author's copv. Return bv 25/10"), and also the twent\-fifth copy of the special edition that had been printed for the Central (>ommittee. A few days after his return, he received a long letter from 'I\ardovsk\-, in which the latter hastened to assure him that no harm had come of his refusal to accept Lebedex's last suggestion.
says that (iod exists),
"Regarding that
you perhaps went awav
bit
(where Tiurin
feeling rather apprehensive,
but everything is all right, although I did have to 'seek advice' on that point one telephone call was enough to settle it."''' FxardovskN' also ga\e Solzhenitsvn the annoying news that he and Novy Mir had been prevented from being the first to write openlv about the labour camps. (iod know
lest,
the It
nothing special, but
s it's
published
just
a
where words
first
time.
still it's
happened
all
the same. Izvestia has
rubbishy story called "Rough Diamond," bv one (jeorgi She-
The
like
"nark," "grass," and "morning praver" appear in print for
storv's shit-awful, not
worth bothering about.'
turned out that Alexei .\dzhubei, Khrushchev's son-in-law and edi-
wind of the impending publication oi Ivan had assembled his staff and harangued them for being too slow. "VVhv is Novy Mir opening up such an important subject as the camps and not us.'" Someone had recalled that two vears previously the\' had been sent a story about the camps by a writer living in faraway (Jhita, almost on the Chinese border, and that it had been rejected. There was no trace of it in the office, but they had managed to trace the author, Georgi Shelest, and he had tor-in-chief of /zt'dv/z^, having got Denisovicb,
dictated
it
over the telephone to them
at Izvestia's,
considerable expense.
It
had then been rushed out on 6 November, in the newspaper's holida\' number. In the event, the story's quality was so low that it sank w ithout a trace, to become merely a footnote to the saga of Ivan Denisovich, but Tvardovsky was understandably upset by Adzhubei's cynical opportunism and later '" snubbed him when Adzhubei tried to appear friendh The third theme of Tvardovskv's letter w as Solzhenitsyn's future and .
the testing time that lav ahead of
him
after the publication ot Ivan Denisovich.
Repeating Akhmatova's w arning about the dangerous effects of fame ("the brilliant rise
of a big
new name
over the literary horizon"), Tvardovsky
expressed the hope that Solzhenitsvn would be able to preserve his dignity, maturity, moral strength, and "the integrity of your wonderful talent." At times, wrote Tvardovsky, he had
wondered whether Solzhenitsyn's concern
SOLZHENITSYN
[442]
for his integrity w as not perhaps excessive, "amounting almost to indifference to the opportunities that the publication oi Ivan Denisovich will open up to vou," and Tvardovskv confessed that he had been a little hurt by Solzhe-
nitsyn's
guarded response
'pleasant' "
word
"that feeble
by which
to his telegram of congratulations, especially to describe Solzhenitsyn's feelings,
Tvardovsk\- said he had found insulting. Nevertheless, it \\ as now to Solzhenitsyn's self-restraint that he w as appealing, and he hoped that Solzhenitsyn
would
the blandishments that would
resist
come
w ay
his
to let other editors
something" for their journals, to w rite screenplays, and so on. have "a in anvone's hands, plead your prior commitment to Novy vourself put "Don't right to hope for this), sav that it takes everything that have some (we Mir comes from vour pen." In conclusion, Tvardovskv apologized for offering so much advice, "but vour literary youth (despite the artistic maturity of your little
talent) obliges
me
to offer these
and perhaps even offend
words of caution, even
if
they are superfluous
you."''''
letter ("Your letand concern over me, that
Solzhenitsyn appreciated the delicacy of Tvardovsky's ter I
am
deeply
moved
.
.
.")
from Sovy Mir, he wrote,
him
to
me
so friendly, even full of such love for
w as
He
and apologized
for
strongly.
has trained
me
I
felt
seeing the fat letter
impulse had been that
said he
ant," but he added, "I should have been insincere
more
On
at length.
its editors wanted was sorry if his self-restraint had caused having hurt Tvardovsky w ith the word "pleas-
his first
cuts.
make more
offence,
and wrote back
no wild joy
to expect the
at the time.
worst
I
much more
if
may
I
had expressed myself my whole life
say that
often than not. ... In the
let good luck fool you, or bad luck frighten you.' " His greatest happiness had come, he wrote, when he learnt that Tvardovsky had found Ivan Denisovich worth a sleepless night. He w as aw are of the dangers of fame and w ould not let himself be devoured by it. "But I foresee that its duration w ill be brief, and I want to use it as
camps
I
took to heart the Russian proverb 'Don't
sensibly as possible for the sake of the works
I
ha\e already written."
Solzhenitsyn also w rote that he had long ago decided not to give interview or to reply to attacks on to
all
the letters he receix ed.
He
him
in the
a single
newspapers, or even to reply
had been w arned
at
the Novy
Mir offices
that
plans were afoot to film his book, and had accepted the staff's advice not to get involved or to try to
w rite
the script.
And
he w as prepared not to promise
prose or verse to anyone but Novy Mir.^^^ the characters of the two men mostly at their Tvardovsky w as w arm, big-hearted, and generous, frankly delighted at the other man's success and eager to do everNthing he could to help. He was touchinglv anxious for Solzhenitsyn's welfare, full of tactful advice and judicious comment on the pitfalls that lay ahead. At the same time he had the proprietary instincts of the editor, proud of his discovery and loyal to the new writer's talent, but also demanding loyalty in return and not hesitating to express his picjuc at w hat he took to be the younger man's ingratitude. Solzhenits\'n, for his part, responded graciously, underlined the areas where
The exchange showed
best.
A
I
he was in agreement w
Hf.lpkr ok the Party
RUF.
ith
vardovsky, and
1
made
it
[443]
plain that he
prepared to take the older man's advice and consider himself author."
It is
true there were
some
was
fully
"Xovy Mir
a
reservations. Solzhenitsxn v\as careful to
exclude "plaxs" from the works he would offer to \ovy Mir (he had
t\\
o more
or less ready), and he stood his ground on the coolness of his response to
Tvardovskv's congratulatory telegram, explaining
But
was
it
all
done
\\
ith tact
dinary flash of insight
and understanding
b\- his
it
camp
— reinforced bv
training.
that extraor-
duration will be brief") that
("I foresee that [fame's]
was the hallmark of Solzhenits\'n's mature and sometimes piercing vision. It is \\
orth d\\ elling on this point because Solzhenitsvn later gave a slightly
different picture in The Oak and the Calf. Taking the unsatisfactory nature of his it
subsequent relations w
rvardovskv
ith
as his starting point,
he projected
back onto these early days of their friendship and implied the existence of
between them than seems
a greater friction
have been the case. In
to
sense, the unedited chapters of Reshetovskava's memoirs are
Certainly, she had her o\\ n scores to settle
tive.
time she came to write them, but there
is
w
ith
a useful
this
correc-
Solzhenitsvn bv the
nothing to suggest that she leaned
two men's friendship. For instance, immediately after selectively quoting from his reply to rvardovskv in The Oak and the Calf., Solzhenitsyn writes, "We were already on terms of such
to either side in her depiction of the
warm
we had
friendship, although
his colleagues present.
.
.
never once met tete-a-tete, w
Shortly afterw ards
.
I
w as
at his
follows this with a matter-of-fact description of the delivery to
Mirs Xo\ember
of an advance copy of Novy
none of ," and Tvardovsky
home
ith .
.
.
issue (containing Ivan Deniso-
"We
embraced, and Alexander Trifonovich w as as happy as a schoolboy,""^' and so on. As usual in Solzhenitsvn's memoir, it is Tvardovskv's moods that are described and commented upon, usually slightly patronizingly, while the reader is left to conclude that Solzhenitsvn is unmoved. 1 he picture looks somewhat different in Reshetovskava's version, how-
vich).
ever. First of
she quotes a further passage from Solzhenitsvn's letter to
all
Tvardovsky. I've got
another story ready to give to \ovy Mir.
I
shall
be
ver\- interested to
hear
was thinking of coming to see vou and bringing it with me on 14 or 15 November. But now it seems you won't be there, so I'm wondering whether it's worth coming. Actually, all I want to do is deliver the storv to the your opinion of
it.
I
office as quickly as possible.
All last year
I
felt a
.
.
.
desire to
meet vou sometime
tete-a-tete,
of the editorial board present, and ask your advice about lie is
ahead.
I
hope we
will find an opportunitv in
convenient for you to come to Ryazan
Reshetovskava then describes
gram
inviting
Solzhenitsyn to
Embankment on
either 15 or 16
"This was the meetinsj that
my
—be our
all
December guest.
w ithout the
rest
sorts of things that
or Januarv?
Or
if it
'^^
how Tvardovsky responded
with
a tele-
come to his flat on the Kotelnicheskava November. Solzhenitsyn chose the fifteenth. husband had
so looked forward to," writes
SOLZHENITSYN
[444]
Reshetovskaya, and she gives an account of the meeting as Solzhenitsyn had described
it
to her. Evidently the
two men had
talked excitedly for hours,
interrupting one another, discussing their literarv plans, other writers, ature in general, and agreeing
on
just
about everything.
I
liter-
vardovsky had
been "tenderlv solicitous" towards Solzhenitsyn and on receiving "Incident Kochetovka station" had said tactfully, "It sometimes happens that one story is successful and the next one isn't," and had begged him not to lose at
heart if it was a failure. (In The Oak and the Calf Solzhenitsyn describes Tvardovskv as "very agitated when he took the storv from me, and still more so as he read; he could not have dreaded failure more if the work had been his
own.") Reshetovskava also describes the
arrival of the
Novem-
proof copy of the
Mir (omitting Solzhenitsyn's picture of the bulky Tvardovskv dancing about the room crying, "The bird is free! The bird is free!") and adds that although Tvardovskv offered it to Solzhenitsyn, the latter declined, "bringing aw ay with him instead a rapt admiration for Tvardovsky and his And childlike smile, w hich had somehow been miraculously preserved. when they parted, they embraced and kissed for the first time."^'' Natalia was supposed to meet Solzhenitsyn at the station at ten o'clock that evening but bumped into him on the very threshold of their flat. He was ber Novy
.
.
.
standing there in his grey overcoat, clutching his grey brief-case, his face radiant.
"My
appear
to
in
fatuated with friendship.
star has risen!"
both Pravda and
He
told her that favourable reviews
Izvestia.
And
were due
according to her, he seemed "in-
rvardovsky, and what he took to be the
start
of their true
""^"^
In these last days before the publication of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenilife assumed an almost surreal quality. In Moscow the name of his was on nearly everybody's lips, and its publication was awaited as a major political event. xMore and more people v\ ere becoming aware of the author's true name and identity, although the copies circulating still bore the
tsyn's
story
pseudonym A. Ryazansky. Sergei Ivashov-Musatov wrote that he had recently attended a gathering of a dozen old friends where the sole topic of conversation had been the keenly awaited publication of no. 1 of Novy Mir, which was to carry a sensational story by a previously unpublished author. "It turned out that by some sort of miracle a half o( those present had already read the story and were fully aware of the author's name." They had original
1
been deeply impressed by the story's outstanding qualities and had said that Moscow was agog and waiting for publication day. "I was astonished,"
all
w
rote Sergei.
his old Ekibastuz comrade, later wrote to say that had read the story "a month before publication," under the name A. R\azansky, but had deduced who the author was after recognizing the description of Ekibastuz and particularly some of the characters, such as Buinovsky and Tsezar Markovich. "Naturally, after discovering who the real author w as, I was so surprised that I blabbed about it, and rumours fly around
Vladimir Ciershuni,
he, too,
A Moscow ulations
I
KLK Hi
i.i'KR
OK
rm Pakiv
I445I
as tast as in camp." Other Iricnds in the know wrote with congratand requests for copies it w as obvious that Novy Mir w ould sell out
—
overnight/^
As a result ot all this excitement, Solzhenits\ n could hardh sleep, lie was still w aiting anxiousix to hear Tvardovsky's verdict on "Kochetovka," and was determined to exploit his impending fame h\ publishing as man\vxorks as he could. 1 o this end he took out his labour-camp pla\ I'be Rcpiihlic of Labour and hastil)' revised it, changing the hero's name from Ner/.hin to Nemov, emphasizing the romance between Nemo\ and L\uba, and toning down some ot the harsher expressions in the light of the experience he had
He
gained in editing Ivan Denisovich. Tenderfoot
and the Tart, playing on
ning to take hold
Mir
as
among Moscow
a
also ga\e
new xogue
intellectuals,
soon as he and Natalia had retvped
Literary
work was slow
ed,
how ever,
it
for
slang that
and planned
to take
b\' his
other duties. it,
He
a
it
to
,\V/i,7
still
had to
his school
being inspected during these crowded days of mid-November. Solzhenits\n w as caught up in
was begin-
it.
keep up his teaching and marking, and, as luck w ould have that,
The
a less political title.
camp
On
w as
top of
curious episode concerning a fellow
teacher of his, Mikhail Potapov.
Potapov was involved
in a t\'pical Soviet quarrel
over living-space and the desire of another famiK to
expand
at his
expense.* 1 hese neighbours,
it
in the
between neighbours block w here he
li\
ed
appears, were also aching
revenge on Potapov's wife for having informed the authorities some of them were drawing illegal pensions. As a result of their scheming, Potapox- w as framed on charges of haxing raped a fourteen-\ ear-old gips\girl who lived in the same building and of having sexuallv assaulted a fivevear-old girl. Ihe other teachers had hrst heard of these charges the preceding summer, w hen Potapov had been summoned to the cit\" inxestigator's office and had never returned, but the trial was taking place onlv now in November 1962, and it quickh' became clear that the evidence was being rigged. Although excluded from the court-room, the teachers saw and heard the parents of key witnesses, all children, rehearsing them in the evidence they were to give and threatening them w ith dire punishment should thev stumble or make a mistake. 1 he sentence was severe: twelve vears in strict-regime labour camps. to get their
that
,
1 he teachers wrote a collective letter of protest to the court, as a result of which thev were summoned one bv one to the district Partv headquarters and threatened w ith dismissal from their jobs for "casting aspersions on Soxiet justice." Fortunatelv for Solzhenitsvn, impending fame made him invulnerable to the threats of the district Partx', and he decided to take the matter further. No longer x\ as he to be fettered bx his anonvmitv and prison past. He knexv that Potapov had alreadv served nine vears in the labour camps under Article 58 (the same article under xvhich he himself had served) and *This subject later found literary expression in The hcankiad, by h\ David Lapeza (New York, 1976; London, 197S).
X'ladiniir \'oino\ ich, translated
SOLZHENITSYN
[446] that he
had made things worse
against a co-defendant.
for himself
Thev were
decided to use his position to w also able to use his
Ols^a
by refusing
rite a protest to
new Moscow
to give false testimony
thus fellow veterans, and Solzhenitsyn the
Supreme Court. He was
connections to persuade an Izvestia reporter,
Chaikovskava, to investigate the case and give
it
publicity
(it
eventually
took three vears to get the case reviewed)."*'^
On Saturdav, 17 November, Solzhenitsvn received a telegram from Tvardovskv approving of "Kochetovka" and asking him to phone. When he rang that evening, Tvardovskv asked him to come to Moscow the following dav to go over the storv w ith him in preparation for its publication in the Januarv number of Novy Mir. He apologized for the short notice, but a plenarv meeting of the Central Committee was to begin on Mondav and Tvardovskv, as an alternate member of the committee, would be obliged to attend. It was necessarv to do the work before the meeting if the story w as to meet the deadline. first snowfall of the w inter to catch Sunday morning and meet Tvardovskv at the Novy
Solzhenitsvn hurried through the the seven o'clock train on
Mir
offices.
November
The preceding dav had been w hen the
the official publication dav of the
were sent out and and their friends. It w as the last peaceful dav, the lull before the storm, and Tvardovskv told Solzhenitsyn that the atmosphere in the offices had been "just like in church." One by one people had come in, handed over their seventy copecks in silence and received the long-aw aited copies. Triumphantly, Tvardovsky laid Izvestia on issue of .V017 Mir,
the staff were able to
buy copies
the table opened at page
5,
with
subscribers' copies
for themselves
its
long review of
.4
Day
in the Life of
Ivan
by the well-known Soviet w titer Konstantin Simonov. To skimmed the first paragraph and put it aside, saying, "Let's get down to business." Tvardovsky took this, probably correctly (though Solzhenitsyn denies it in his memoir), as an affectation and walked out of the room, leaving Solzhenitsyn to peruse the article alone. Solzhenitsyn later complained to Natalia that Simonov had w ritten "nothing about the language, about the penetration into the soul of an ordinary man," which suggests that he had expected rather more of this erratic establishment writer than he admits to in Ilje Oak and the Ca/f.^' They then got down to business. According to Reshetovskaya, Tvardovskv began by asking Solzhenitsyn how he wanted him to comment on "Kochetovka" "with or without an anaesthetic." Solzhenitsyn rejected the anaesthetic, but w hen Tvardovsky produced a stream of criticisms, he vigorously rebutted them one by one, leading Tvardovsky to remark, "Why don't you try to hold the w hole line instead of fighting for every foxhole?""^*^ Nevertheless, judging from his comments in The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn was grateful for Tvardovsky's perspicacity in editorial matters. This was particularly true when shortly afterwards they discussed "Matryona." Tvardovsky had decided that he should publish the two stories together in the January issue of Novy Mir. They would make quite a splash, a worthy Tvar-
Denisovich,
dovsky's chagrin, Solzhenitsyn
—
A Truk Hi
I.HI
r
ok ihk Pariv
f447l
follow-up to Ivan Iknisovich. Almost anything with Solzhcnitsvn's it,
he
felt,
was the
was publishable now
.
What he was concerned
name on
about, however,
literarv c]ualit\'.
Mis attention to
detail in discussing the
second story was remarkable,
and Solzhenitsyn was impressed by Tvardovsky's knowledge of country and grasp of popular custom. Examples of
this superior
knowledge
arc
life
quoted
seems that Solzhenitsyn was somewhat readier "Kochetovka."* It must have been now that Solzhcnitsvn's cumbersome and didactic title, "Without a Righteous Person No Village Can Stand," was replaced bv the more evocative "Matryona's Place. "t In addition, the action of the storv was moved back from 1956 to 1953, to blunt its political sharpness and topicality. A change was also made in the other title. Solzhenitsyn had called it "Incident at Kochetovka Station," since Kochetovka was the real name of the station where the original incident had occurred in 1941. Tvardovsky's arch-enemy in publishing, however, and the editor of the reactionarv literarv magazine Oktyahr, was Vsevolod Kochetov, a neo-Stalinist, and it was thought to be needlesslv provocative to leave such a similarity of names in a story about in
The Oak and
the (Ja/f,
and
it
to accept these corrections than in the case of
Solzhenitsyn therefore renamed
the effects of Stalinism.
Krechetovka Station. "t It w as probabh' on
ond and
last call
this visit to
Moscow
on y\nna Akhmatova.
It
it
"Incident at
that Solzhenitsvn paid his sec-
appears that she read her master-
piece. Requiem,^ to him, but Solzhenitsyn criticized
it
in
terms reminiscent
of those he had once used in objecting to Ivashov-Musatov's Shakespeare
your verses are always about one person's destinv." Akhmatova was evidently surprised and rejected the criticism. "Do you mean to say vou can't convey the destiny of millions bv describing the fate of a single person?" she asked him, and pointed out that in her epilogue she had expanded the poem's meaning to encompass "millions."" They apparentiv discussed domestic matters as well. Akhmatova asked Solzhenitsyn whether paintings: "It's a pity
*
It
must not be forgotten
that, for all his love of the countryside
zhenitsyn, unlike Tvardovsky, was a town bov. zation of the village has not, to
tThe customary Russian
title
my
The importance
and the Russian
village, Sol-
of this fact for his later ideali-
knowledge, been discussed.
of "Matrvona's //owe" does not reallv convev the nuance of chnr in the
Dvor means literalh' the working space around a peasant's or smallbetween wings, if the hut has them, or between the hut and outbuildings such
title AlatryonitJ dvor.
holder's hut, or
as stables or pens.
It is
often translated as "vard," but Solzhenitsvn cleari\-
means
to include
both the buildings and the \ard. Dvor also has rural and folk oxertones that are missing from
"home." I Solzhenitsyn restored the original title
when he came
to republish the storx
in his (Collected
Works. ^Requiem, about .Xkhmatova's loss of a son in the purges, was written between 19.^.^ and 1940 and memorized by .A.khmatova and a few friends. It was not published until 1963. "Lydia Chukovskaya, who reported this meeting, thinks that .\khmato\a nonetheless took Solzhcnitsvn's criticism to heart, and quotes as evidence
her epilogue:
These two
"And when,
lines
driven
do not appear
mad bv
in the
torments,
published
/
te.xts
two
lines that
.Vkhmatova
later
added
to
.Marched the regiments of the condemned." of Requiem.
SOLZHENITSYN
[448]
Moscow but he repHed,
he was now thinking of moving to
mv
old ladies under
care,"
,
and indicated that
it
was
he had grow n more sombre since their first meeting. "1 here's over his face," she told Chukovskaya."^*^
A
"I
have several
She found that kind of shadow
unlikely. a
Moscow and found Tvardovsky hen he rang to confirm the time of their meeting. "Come right over on the double!" he exclaimed excitedly. When Solzhenitsvn arrived, he heard that several thousand copies of Novy Mir had been diverted to the bookstalls set up in the Kremlin for delegates to the plenarv session of the Central Committee, w hich I vardovskN had been attending all week, and that Khrushchev had announced from the platform that .4 Day iu the Life of Ivan Denisovich was an extremely important work which they should all read. \\\e delegates had trooped off to buy it and had emerged from the meeting each clutching two volumes, one red containing materials for the plenary session and one blue containing Solzhenitsvn's story. Elsewhere in Moscow the magazine had sold out completely, despite the printing of several thousand extra copies, and was already a collector's item.'" The press w as unanimous in its praise. Tvardovsky's preface had carefully prepared the ground by linking the story with the name of Khrushchev and Khrushchev's speech on de-Stalinization at the Twenty-second Party in
week
later
Solzhenitsvn returned to
mood
an ebullient
v\
—
—
—
Congress.
The ture.
subject matter of Alexander Solzhenitsvn's tale It
echoes the unhealthy phenomena
in
our
life
is
unusual in Soviet
associated
w
ith the
litera-
period
of the personality cult, now exposed and rejected by the Party, .\lthough these events are so recent in time, thc\past its
w as
like,
we
consequences
in the
fully,
now seem \ cry remote
to us.
present must not be indifferent to
courageously, and truthfully can
and irrevocable break with
it.
But w hatever the
Only by going
into
we guarantee a complete
those things that cast a shadow over the past.''
all
This w as the theme taken up by the reviewers. Simonov (in the reviewinitiall\- declined to read) wrote that the myth that Stalin had not know n w hat w as happening in the country had now been
that Solzhenits\ n had
exploded forever and praised Solzhenitsvn as a "mature, unique master." Five days later, \ ladimir Krmilov, a notorious secret-police informer, timeserver,
and hack
critic,
beloved of the Soviet establishment, fulsomely praised
Solzhenitsvn in the pages of Pravda, likening him to lolstoy but also firmly
yoking him
"There can be no doubt that the fight against the up b\ the Party and the Soviet people since the Twentieth and Iw entv-second congresses of the CPSU, will continue to facilitate the appearance of works of art outstanding for their Ihe possibilit\' of telling the truth has ever-increasing artistic value. been affirmed by the Part\' and the people."'" The tw o leading Soxiet new spapers had set their official seal on Solzhenitsyn's reputation, his respectability, and his transformation from an enemy of the people into a national hero. Catapulted to fame virtually overnight, to Party policy.
consequences of
Stalin's personality cult, taken
.
.
.
A Iruk Hklpfr of thk
I^arty
(449]
\\ as now acclaimed as an exemplary and writer. "The Party has called u riters its helpers," Simonoy \\ rote in Izvestia. "I belieye that Alexander Sol/.henitsyn in his story has shown himself a true helper of the Party in a sacred and vital cause the struggle against the personality cult and its consequences.""'
the provincial schoolmaster from Rya/.an
citizen
—
25
THE CREST OF THE WAVE SiMONOV, no
risks
Ermilov, and the many
critics
who
followed them were taking
hen thev placed Solzhenitsyn's story firmly within the bounds
w
an instrument in the process view of their political leader, of de-Stalinization. This, after all, was the place, and it is clear first in the Khrushchev, w ho had authorized the story in advance. Nothing down been handed that the political line to be taken had of
official
that
Party policy, emphasizing
happens
in the public
spontaneously, least of
The work was thought. Even
thus
all
made
in the Soviet
thereby making
it
Union
is
supposed to occur
"spontaneous" praise or "spontaneous" criticism. safe for public
Tvardovsky's preface, with
udices, served to soften tent,
domain
role as
its
and
more
consumption its
—
or so
Khrushchev
calculated appeal to Party prej-
partially neutralize the story's subversive con-
palatable to the hierarchy.
What exactly the Party line was to be can easily be gauged from the very titles of the first review s (the editors who w rote the headlines being closer to Party control than the writers w
ere):
"About the Past
Name
in the
Name
of the
Must Not Future"; "In the Name Truth Be the Full "Let Truth"; Necessary Bitter But Flappen Again"; "A Be Will Never But It Was "Thus Repeated"; Not Be Told"; "This Must of Truth, in the
Again"; "In the
and the way of
Name
life in
of Life"; "This
of the Future." In short, ran the message, the events
the labour
camps described
in Ivan Denisovich
undoubt-
edly existed once, and should be known about, but they belonged irrevocably to the past, to the era of the euphemistically named "personality cult."
Under
the
civilized rule of Stalin's successors, these
more enlightened and
problems and "mistakes" had
all
been
face the future with optimism and
rectified,
a sense
450
and
of security.
it
was now possible
to
The
(]rf.
ST of ihk
W ave
l45
'1
This theme w as taken up in the IxkIn of the reviews. 1 vard(n sk\ had tone bv specifically linking the grimness of Solzhenitsvn's subject matter w ith Stalin's crimes and emphasizing the abilitx' of So\ iet literature to confront the problems ot the past. Krmilov, true to his obsequious charset the
very existence of the story to the Partv's wise policv of
acter, attributed the
renouncing Stalinism and thanked the Partv for making
it
possible to
tell
the
(The Light), a mass-circulation illustrated weeklv, called the storv "profoundh' Partv-minded." Simonov approvinglv quoted Khrushchex on Stalinism, and Drutse, in the literarx' magazine Druzhha Wiroclov truth. Kruzhko\-, in Ogonyok
(Friendship of the Peoples), took up Krmilov's theme of gratitude to the Partv for
haxing created the opportunitx for such In a
number of cases
it
was
be published.'
a stor\- to
clear that these genuflections
than the ritual obeisances customarih' exacted from literarv
were
critics
little
more
under the
Soviet Union's feudalistic rules for intellectual debate and that the work's
sharper and more literarv qualities had immediateh' been recognized. Most critics
agreed w
ith
1
vardovsky (and Chukovskv
in his appreciation) that the
unsensational presentation of the material enhanced storv gained in
power from the
its
author's self-restraint.
impact and that the
Thev noted
the "ordi-
nariness" and typicality of Ivan Denisovich and his comrades, taking the
point that thev to
w ere not criminals but innocent Soviet
citizens
imprisonment and hard labour bv an unjust regime acting
zhenitsvn's stor\'
and fortitude.
w as
And
for once, called
it
a
its
h\mn
to these people, to their courage,
condemned
illegallv. Sol-
good humour,
economs- of means seemed miraculous. Ermilov, right
"epic," evoking the
name
of Tolstov, w hile man\' others
recognized the w ork's greater affinitv with the classical Russian prose of the nineteenth century than with Soviet literature. All agreed, moreover, that despite the painful subject matter, the stor\'s ultimate effect was to inspire
hope and provide a sense of uplift. Such a comforting conclusion was verv important in the Soviet context, for one of the fundamental tenets of socialist realism w as (and is) that w orks of art should encourage optimism and proclaim the resolution of conflicts; and what better resolution could there be than to sav that the whole problem was over and done with? But the more perceptive critics were not prepared to stop there. Encouraged, perhaps, bv the storv's exceptional patronage, they drew rather more far-reaching conclusions. Grigori Baklanov, a not untalented novelist and chronicler of Second
World War
subjects (rather in the
mould of Simonov, but
at that
time more
honest) wrote an excellent, long review in the Literaturnaya Gazeta in
he pointed out that
A Day
in the Life of
w hich
Ivan Denisovich was one of those rare
creations that change one's vision of the world, after
w hich
it is
"impossible
go on writing as one did before," for it had created "a new level of dialogue with the reader, and on this level much that until recentlv seemed perfectlv satisfactory is now hopelesslv outdated and boring." Baklanov shared in the general admiration for Solzhenitsvn's main characters, shrewdlv picking out the brigade leader Tiurin as equal in interest to Ivan Shukhov, but he also to
— SOLZHENITSYN
[452]
—
the securit)' guards, calling them "hardly which w ent well bevond most official comment, for the active role of the M\'D and NK\'D in these repressions was usually passed over in silence. Baklano\ also anticipated w hat w as to become one of the principal Why stir up the past? Why rub salt in objections to Solzhenitsyn's story sa\ing that the onlv wa\- to heal the wounds was to admit the wounds? them squarelv in the first place. Finally, Baklanov correctly identified two of Solzhenitsvn's most powerful underlying themes, w hich were now here stated explicith- but e\er\where implied. One, that these e\ils had occurred because the Soviet people had blindh' believed w hat they were told and not the evidence of their ow n eves and ears; and, two, that not only would life in the Soviet Union have been better and more humane w ithout Stalin's policies but that manv of these policies had remained unchanged (contrary to w hat raised the question of the villains
Soviet,"
—
—
the Partv line maintained).
Baklanov's analvsis was echoed two weeks later in the Moscow newspaper Moskovskayci Pra-cda (Moscow Truth), by the critic I. Chicherov, who pointed out how much of Stalin's w ar effort and industrial production
—
had been directed inw ards, at controlling his ow n people, rather than outwards, against external enemies. And he mentioned another objection being made against the stor\- (that it would "give comfort to the Soviet Union's enemies") onl\- to dismiss
as a pretext for hypocrisy.
it
in Dnizhba Xarodov. With great prescience, he declared that Solzhenitsvn's storv represented a personal duel betw een Ivan Shukhov and Stalin (had he said between Solzhenitsyn and Stalin, he
Furthest of
all
went Drutse
would have been even nearer the mark), in w hich the undoubted w inner w as Shukhov. It had been said, w rote Drutze, that Stalin did not love the masses. Worse than that, he had despised them and turned them into cogs, and Ivan Detiisovich w as the storv of w hat had happened to those cogs behind barbed w ire. What w as needed w as a restoration of their moral rights. Unfortunateh', there were "certain big cogs" who found life all too comfortable "watching over the little cogs" and who were still around, making such a restoration difficult to achieve. Even more controversially, Drutse pointed to the similarities on both sides of the wire. "Are we not struck by the austere landscape of this stor\- because we, too, as often as not, scanned the sky w ith morbidlv strained eves? Did .
.
.
And
didn't
we
we
not also lay bricks, each in his
also look back
on each day,
just like Ivan
own
wall?
Denisovich,
and w ith a logic inscrutable to common sense rejoice inw ardly, 'Oh well, the ?" In other words, Ivan Denisovich wasn't just day didn't go too badh' about the camps but about the w hole of Soviet societ\- under Stalin and, insofar as the "big cogs" were still in place, partly about the Soviet Union .
.
.
todav as well. It is
no wonder
that for a few
,
heady w
eeks, Soviet intellectuals thought
that the censorship had been abolished. If stories like Ivan Denisovich could
be published (which, to
tell
the truth, had evaded the censorship; had the
professionals at Cdavlit got hold of Ivan Denisovich,
it
would have been torn
Thf. (^rest of thk to shreds), if articles like Baklanox's
"The Heirs of
Wave
145^1
and Drutse's coukl appear
in
the naticnial
to seem To cap it all, rumours spread that F\)likarpov, the Party's top ideological watch-dog, was in trouble with Khrushchev. Apparently Khrushchev had onlv just got around to looking at Doctor Zhivago, and he felt that the novel w as so highbrow that it would ne\ er ha\e appealed to the masses an\-wav and w as therefore not worth the international scandal that had been provoked by banning it. Since Polikarpov had been responsible, he received a reprimand, and there was talk that the ( Central Committee's cultural section was to be abolished and replaced h\ a much
press, if
that almost anything
smaller
bodv w
ith
Stalin" could he printed in Pravdci,
was
more
time
limited powers."
Academy
at the
hegan
possihie.
Polikarpov's problems were this
it
compounded when he appeared
of Pine Arts to present the
official
about
at
Partv
list
of
candidates for the forthcoming elections. Normally, there would have been
no doubt about its automatic acceptance. The academy, like the Artists' Union and most other organizations in the arts, was firmly in the hands of the cc^nservatives, headed in this case by Victor Serov and Alexander Gerasimov, though it was true that Serov had lost his post as president of the academy the preceding year.
On
this occasion the
unthinkable occurred: Polikarpov
was hooted off the stage, and the meeting broke up in disarray. As in the Writers' Union, so in the other creative unions the liberals were in the ascendant, and everywhere the call was for less control and less censorship.' In this atmosphere, in the eyes of the
tsyn was more of a hero than ever, and
(as
Moscow
intellectuals, Solzheni-
Tvardovskv had predicted) he was
little something" to publish or perform. To most of them he said no, if onlv because he had virtually nothing to offer. Tvardovskv had already seen and commented negativeh' on his verse. His
inundated with requests for "a
only tw o publishable short stories w ere already w
ith A'017
Mir, and he regarded
The First Circle as far too sensitive and controversial to show to anyone just yet
—
it
was
still
being kept in concealment, together with the w orks w ritten
Kok 7 erek. There remained
his plays, which he had carefully excluded from his promise to Tvardovsky and in particular The Tenderfoot and the Tart, which he had taken to Aloscow with him w hen going to discuss "Matrvona" and "Krechetovka." On that trip, it seems, he had taken the play round to Oleg FTremov, the director of the Sovremennik (Contemporary), Moscow 's new est and most experimental theatre, and either then or a few days later had given them a in
,
reading of
Soon
it.
An
actor
after the
who was
present described the scene as follow
s.
awesome experience of One Day, Tvardovskv told the members of w ould shortly be coming to see us. Naturally, we
the theatre that Solzhenitsvn
held our breath:
And recoiled ous man who
W hat
would this mysterious new colossus be like? w hen he actually appeared, because it was
in surprise
stood before us.
He looked
like a dental
We a
waited.
very curi-
technician or a bookkeeper.
was made of rather good wool, but extremely old, w ith old-fashioned trousers as wide as the shoes which no one in Moscow circles had worn for His
suit
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[454] vears.
And
football
The
\\
his hat
ith
it
\\
as incredibly
crumpled,
in the school yard.
.
.
as if his physics pupils
had played
.
actor noticed nothing special about Solzhenitsyn's face, except for
an impression of bad teeth,* nor did he care for his manner of reading.
He
read rather badlv, like a
somew hat hamm\
verv intense, assiduous, even zealous
in his
when changing camp commandant
forgot to change voices
out e.xactlv
like
the
provincial actor. True, he
was
"performance," but he sometimes
would come minor error. The
characters, so that the "tart"
—there was
that kind of
reading was everv bit as curious as his appearance."*
Nevertheless, the director and actors were deeply affected by the contents of the plav.
we cried openly who commented
"We were
professionals and accustomed to the drama, but
after the first act." This,
that
when he had
it
seems, surprised Solzhenitsyn,
read these scenes to former prisoners they
had laughed rather than cried. But he was pleased by the excellent reception his play was accorded, as well as by Efremoy's decision to put it on, though he v\as somewhat alarmed by the speed with w hich Efremov \\ anted to press ahead. With his experience and know ledge of the vagaries of the Soviet erar\'
world, Efremov wanted to take advantage of the moment.
And
lit-
Solzhe-
was a hot property, whose name would automatically fill the theatre. Efremov offered to rehearse day and night and put the play on within a month, in time for the New Year holiday, and even to accept changes in the text as they went along if Solzhenitsyn w ished to make further revisions. But Solzhenitsyn took fright. He did not like to be rushed he w as used to taking and it seems that he also wished to consult Tvardovsky about the his time wisdom of such a step. He later wrote about his fears in The Oak and the Calf: "What if some 'top people' happened to see it before its premiere, got angry, and put the lid not only on the play but on the stories that should be appearwas 100,000, ing in Novy Mir any time now? The circulation oiNovy Mir whereas the Sovremennik auditorium seated only seven hundred people.""" In his memoir Solzhenitsyn attempts to throw the blame for this delay onto Tvardovsky and Novy Mir. Tvardovsky had not cared for the play when he read it and had told Solzhenitsyn that "it doesn't come off artistically you're ploughing the it isn't theatre," and that it w as 'Tvan Denisovich again '"^ Solzhenitsyn comments that it wasn't the same old field. same old field. Tenderfoot dealt w ith an entirely different sort of camp, a regular corrective nitsyn
—
—
.
.
.
.
.
.
—
labour
camp
instead of the special
what he means.
camp
of Ivan Denisovich.
Tenderfoot belonged to a different period
of the Gulag. For the chronicler and the historian
*
Another Moscow
intellectual
who met
although his teeth were crooked,
the\-
the general austerity of his expression.
catch a stranger's attention.
Solzhenitsvn
impressed
at
b\- their
Thev and
in the
One
can see
development
— w hich Solzhenitsyn
about
this
also
time has commented that,
strength and naturalness and relie\ed
the eyes were invariably the
first
things to
'1"HK
considered himself to be
—
it
(^RKSr
()!•
rilK V\
AVK
1455
was new subject matter. Besides,
treatment of the labour camps was bound to be different from there
no evidence that Sol/henitsvn ever used
is
dovsky also had
a point. /Vrtisticallv speaking,
as Ivan Denisovich
and represented
Consciouslv or tinconsciouslv,
I
this
(though
than
a literarv
advance.
vardovsk\' w as judging Sol/henitsvn's out-
put by the exceptional standards of his
lirst published storv, and in judgement than Solzhenitsyn himself, w ho had appreciation of the worth of his work when it was not prose.
was
to
show
Of
Ixar-
liut
was the same grountl
'/'eiuicrfooi
a regression rather
a theatrical
a story
argument).
I
a surer
this he a
poor
course, one cannot entirely discount the motive that Sol/.henits\ n
attributes to
I
vardovsky
— namely,
his professional jealousy of other literary
no exception to the general rule in being riddled with clicjues of one kind and another, not all of them based on ideological alignments; and loyalty to one's magazine, publishing house, literary institute, or theatre was often fierce and consimiing, providing a sense of identity that was entirely missing from the Writers' Union, and serving as a substitute for political activities that would be normal in other societies. Alexander Dementyev, for instance, Ivardovsky's bosom friend and literary confidant, w hom Solzhenitsyn disliked because of his reser\ed attitude to Ivan Denisovich and "Matryona's Place," was motivated almost entirely l)y his fanatical devotion to the magazine and his desire not to see its existence and role jeopardized by attempts to overreach itself. Solzhenitsvn's portrait of Dementyev in The Oak and the Calf is a caricature. Dementyev, according to one who knew him well, was "a cunning old fox w ho w as totally absorbed in Novy Mir and devoted his life to getting it out and helping it through the censorship." It is true that Dementyev would have rejected Ivan Denisovich if he had thought it would endanger his beloved joiu^nal, but not because he was a Party hack. To Solzhenitsvn's irritation, Dementyev was one of those w ith \v hom Tvardovsky had discussed his play and who agreed w ith 1 \ ardovsk\ that it wasn't suitable for Novy Mir. Under pressure, 1 vardovsky did exentually consent to Solzhenitsyn's approaching one of the theatres. In his memoir, Solzhenitsyn records Ivardovsky's dislike of the Sovremennik ("I must warn you against those theatrical gangsters!")" and says that vardoxskv suggested instead the more conservative Mossovet 1 heatre, run l)\ that same \\\v\ Zavadsky, now aging, whose theatre studio Solzhenits\'n had once attended in Rostov. Zavadsky was an old friend of 1 vard()vsk\'s and had staged the dramatization of Vasily Tyorkin, but Solzhenitsyn was not attracted by this prospect, or swayed by the sentimental connection w ith his youth, and ne\ er made the approach, preferring instead to go to the Sovremennik. The weeks and months following the publication of A Day in the Life of outlets. Soviet literary circles are
I
Ivan Denisovich
\\
ere naturally difficult for Solzhenitsyn.
1 \
ardovsky had been
would not turn his head. le w as too old and experienced for that, and all who knew him in those years agree that he withstood the pressures remarkably well. Nevertheless, the pressures were
correct in anticipating that fame
I
SOLZHENITSYN
[456]
enormous and presented problems both moral and practical. He was indeed flooded with letters from all over the country, to which he and Natalia did their best to reply. The majority were friendly and admiring, but there were also hostile and even abusive epistles, many of them from members, or exmembers, of the security services and from neo-Stalinists in the Party. In due course Solzhenitsyn was to find a literary use for these letters, but in the short term they were a sharp and unpleasant reminder of a still-powerful current of opinion within the country, and distinctly upsetting in their often personal scurrility.
There were also endless invitations to attend this or that function, to become a member of this or that body, to contribute articles, lectures, stories, and to meet this or that eminent person. Most of the invitations he refused without a second thought, but membership in the Writers' Union, which \v as offered to him almost immediately and went through on the nod, was to prove invaluable, for it enabled him, a few months later, to give up teaching and live as a full-time writer without incurring the charge of "parasitism," a crime much publicized and persecuted during Khrushchev's rule and applied to almost anyone without a regular job.* Membership in the union also gave him pension and social-security rights and allowed him entry to the "restricted access" sections of libraries, where he could consult the books and journals that had hitherto been beyond his reach. Fame also presented Solzhenitsyn with the dilemma of how to use it. On the one hand he was anxious to get further \\ orks into print (or onto the stage), but on the other he w as frightened of committing a blunder. "I did not realize the extent of my newly won strength," he later wrote, "or, therefore, the
degree of audacity with
inertia kept
me
\v
hich
I
cautious and secretive. ...
could I
was
now in a
behave.
The
force of
hurry to stop before
I
was stopped, to take cover again and pretend that I had nothing further to offer and nothing further in mind." It was the old convict's mentality of .") that he had trained suspicion and distrust ("Don't let good luck fool you himself to live by, and years of conditioning couldn't be undone in a day if at all. This was why he leaned so heavily on Tvardovsky for advice, while simultaneously resenting his dependence. Years later, when he came to write his memoir, this resentment rose to the surface and he was to criticize Tvardovsky for having wasted time and failing to take advantage of the favourable situation as well as for having suppressed his play. But it is clear that he was just as culpable, as he freely admits elsewhere ("my anxieties about Novy Mir fettered me less than my excessive caution").^ Not surprisingly, he was pulled in two different directions, and it was to be a good three years before he resolved the doubts and misgivings that now began to beset him. For the moment Solzhenitsyn w as happy to take Tvardovsky's advice in most things, and in no area v\as he more faithful to Tvardovsky's recommen.
.
—
dations than in his relations with the press, Soviet as well as foreign. *This was the charge on which the voung Leningrad poet losit" Brodsky was months later, in March 1964, and sentenced to five years' compulsory labour.
to
be tried
a
few
ThK
("RK si ok IMF W'avf,
Newspapermen
tried to toree the doors of
rooms
I
to
mv
...
I
w hieh
in
nn home and
w ere telefihone
calls
ot
the
45
"I
Moseow hotel in Moscow
from embassies
school in Ryazan; written cjiiestionnaires were sent from press agencies. said not a single
answ cring
men,
sta\ ed; there
I
\\
word
to an\ of
too. (]iiestions that
act of rebellion or a life
daring to rebel,
I
was would be asked
them. ...
if once started bv Soviet new swould predetermine mv response: either an immediate of cheerless conformitw Not wishing to lie, and not
estern correspondents,
I
I
afraid that
I
(]uestions
preferretl silence.'"
On the whole he was successful in his campaign to fight off an interOn 28 November Soi-ietskaya Rossiu published a brief biographical note \
views.
about him, composed jointlv by himself and
I
\
ardovskx
.
This called
him
"the son of an office worker," recorded the earl\ death of his father from
unknow n
causes, and after
summarizing his education and arm\ career stated was arrested on unfounded political charges and sentenced to eight vears' imprisonment," after w hich he ser\ ed a period of e.xiie. hi 1957 he was "completely rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti'' and was now working as a teacher. This w as the sum total of the information that SolzhenitsN'n wanted printed about himself, and only one reporter succeeded in making a slight dent in his defences \ ictor Bukhanov, of the that in 194.^ "Captain Solzhenitsyn
—
national press agency, Novosti.
Bukhanov,
He
around.
like all the
but from beyond
a lesson,
disturb the students."
of
whom
other iournalists, was very
called at the school
He
and managed
much
given the run-
to observe SolzhenitsMi giving
a glass partition, so that his
presence "v\ouldn't
talked to Solzhenitsvn's colleagues and pupils,
all
professed themselves amazed bv his sudden success and said thev
had never suspected his secret life as a w riter. Only the headmaster had had an inkling that he was busy w ith something, but had concluded he must be writing a physics textbook "v\hich he is fully qualified to do." His pupils reported that he w as a first-rate and much respected teacher, that he was proverbially punctual, punctilious, and exacting, and that the language of Ivan Denisovich w as not the language he used in class. All praised his highly developed sense of responsibility and capacity for hard v\ork. Bukhanov gleaned a number of details about Solzhenitsvn's hobbies and habits from Natalia, w hom he found "cultivated and somev\ hat more open" than her difficult husband. "She is just as reluctant to talk about her husband as he is about himself. But being a woman she is less strict in her observation of this principle." She gave him tv\o snapshots of Solzhenitsyn (presumably
—
v\'ith
permission), and
couple:
"God
Bukhanov heard from others
that they v\ere an
icieal
grant every family the same happiness." Bukhanov also man-
Kasimovsky Lane, w here one evening he watched "He v\'as dressed in a padded jerkin and a fur cap v\ith its ear-flaps and straps hanging dow n undone. I w as astonished to be reminded of Ivan Shukhov. For all the intellectual disparity between them, the story's author and hero are united by something basic and aged to
visit
the
flat in
Solzhenitsyn go into the yard to chop wood.
unforgettable."
SOLZHENITSYN
[458]
But Solzhenitsvn himselt was virtually impossible
to talk to.
He continues to refuse to give interview s either to Soviet or to foreign journalists. He doesn't conceal his dislike for members of the press. ... It is difficult for a reporter to talk to Solzhenitsvn. His invariablv polite but firm "noes" reduce one to despair.
w
ill)
I
and captivated to speak to
For nitsyn.
all
had been w
as
my
his effort
his
lie
charm, but
I've
had enough
(in effect against his
me w ith
—
that
w as
his intelligence
m\-
last
attempt
Bukhanov had got about four sentences out of Solzhe-
to deprecate the fact that the first re\iews oi Ivan Denisovich
ritten before
to expectations?
should
.Moscow
editor had instructed."
stories before publication
up
in
Rvazan. Solzhenitsvn conquered
in
me w ith
him
One was
him four davs running
talked to
and met him
He
publication and that he had been paid for his
its
—
a
dangerous precedent. What
if
he could not
repeated the idea that the path from w
titer to
live
reader
only through his books, comparing his present situation unfavour-
w ith that of nineteenth-century writers: "Nobody them for sensational stories; they were simply read." x\nd he starBukhanov by saving severely ("without a hint of humour in his voice"),
ably (and inaccurately) pestered tled
"You'll find
all
that out after m\- funeral."
There w as much
w
that
Solzhenitsvn's not to allow
as
admirable
in this
dogged determination of
himself to become an empty celebrity and to
it w as a matter was one w ay, after all, of dealing with the problems posed by fame. And partly it w as a demonstration of independence, a declaration that he was not like other men, that he would not be seduced down the primrose path to become a celebrity. For this reason he refused the he offer of a spacious flat in Moscow It seemed a good decision at the time valued his privacy and needed the isolation that R^ azan provided although he was to regret it bitterh in later years. But there was also an element of naivety and misunderstanding about it. SolzhenitsNii's strength as a creative writer w as that he had been cut off from the normal w orld since early manhood and had steeped himself in the Russian classics of the past. This was the source of that amazing "purity" that everx one noticed in his w ork, as if he w ere virtually untouched h\ the last thirt\- \'ears of Soviet literary history. Every great man, it seems, has a touch of the innocent about him. It is this that gives him that special angle of \ision and single-mindedness of purpose; it is the price he pays for his singularity. Solzhenitsvn was an innocent in the ways of the world. He absolutely refused to play the game the way the press and the literar\' w orld w anted him to, or any other game except his own, and, as it happened, that too demanded privacy, secrecy, and conspiracy ("silence, exile, and cunning"). .\n illustration of this mixture of naivet\' and suspicion occurred when Solzhenitsvn \ isited the Moscow Arts 1 heatre to talk to some teachers and students from the theatre's drama school. He was clearly uncomfortable w ith
preserve his modest\' in the face of extreme temptation. Partly
of sheer self-preservation
—
it
.
—
—
—
the conxentional format of "the writer meeting his readers" and sharplx' declined
The Crest to talk
about his personal
seemed
to strike
him
life
of the
Wave
[459!
or working habits. 1 he whole arrangement
as artificial
and insincere, although once he got into
unease vanished and he was perfectK' charming. Even
stride his
resist pillor\ing the reporters
example of
w ho had pestered him
journalistic superficiality,
visited his battery
he quoted
during the war to write
a
a feature
in
so,
Rvazan, and
correspondent
about
life at
his
he couldn't as
an
who had
the front. "I
him," said Solzhenitsyn, "that he was wasting his time. 'Vou won't be able to write anything useful, because tomorrow you will leave here. To understand, you have to be a part of the batter\-, fight with it, and not know told
whether vou are going
to live or die, or
'
die.'
whether vour comrades w
ill
live
or
"'-
As an
indication of
what sometimes sets the literarv writer apart from was not w ithout merit, and Solzhenitsyn's aim in
the journalist, the example telling the story
was
to support his contention that the writer can write only
about what he knows. But
in a sense it was to underrate the role of the would be severely crippled if thev follow ed Solzhe-
imagination, for writers
nitsyn's injunction literally. Fortunately, Solzhenitsvn himself ignored the
moral of
this storv in his
major novels.
Later that evening the subject of journalism came up again. Solzhenitsyn had begun his talk by asking whether anv journalists w ere present and
had been satisfied to hear that none was. Halfw av through the evening, he suddenly broke off and exclaimed in a surprisingly angry voice, 'Tve been deceived! You said there were no journalists present, but I can see one in the audience." At this a young
man who had been
taking notes stood
up and
admitted to being a student journalist, but said that he had come out of curiosity and did not plan to
w
rite
anything.
He
then launched into an unex-
pectedly bold attack on Solzhenitsyn's remarks. Solzhenitsyn was wrong, he said, to
be so contemptuous of journalists and to think that they were auto-
would publish things against his will. As for besieghim in Ryazan, they had only been doing their job, and if Solzhenitsyn would show some understanding for their position and co-operate a little, he matically dishonest and ing
wouldn't have so
many
difficulties.'''
Solzhenitsyn accepted the student's remarks w
ith
good humour and
apologized for his harshness, but nevertheless called him over afterwards to
check that he would not write anything. figured
many
It
was
a
curious episode that pre-
later ambiguities in Solzhenitsyn's relations
with the press.
There were two other attempts, besides Bukhanov's, to find out more about Solzhenitsyn's character and past. One resulted in a short and uninformative background piece by I. Kashkadamov in the Uchitelskaya Gazeta (Teachers' Gazette); the other, more interesting, was a longish article about Solzhenitsyn's years in exile that appeared in the Kazakhstan new spaper Lenimkaya Smena (The Lenin Shift). Some enterprising editor discovered that Solzhenitsyn had spent his exile in Kok Terek, and a correspondent called Kungurtsev w as dispatched to interview the teachers at his former school and his former landlady, Katerina Melnichuk, and to inspect the thatched
SOLZHEXITSYN
[460]
adobe hut on the edge of the desert where Solzhenitsvn had lived. He was remembered with great affection. Former colleagues recalled his great erudition, former pupils his painstaking instruction and love of his subject, and all
rejoiced in his present success.'"*
Although Solzhenitsvn cared responsibilities of fame, the latter
evening in December an
little
either
for
the privileges or the
One
proved harder to avoid.
Saturdav
from the Provincial Partv Committee came to the school to inform him that he was to report to Polikarpov at the Central Committee offices in Moscow the following Mondav, 17 December, for a verv important meeting. The Provincial Committee w ould send a car to take him (he was a VIP alreadv, whether he wanted it or no). Solzhenitsvn decided to make a show of his independence and to resist anv attempts to co-opt him. "I deliberately w ent along in the suit I had bought at 'Clothes for the \\ orkingman' and wore to school; in my much-mended shoes w ith patches of brow n leather on black; and badlv in need of a haircut. This w ould make it easier for me to balk and feign stupidit)."" It turned out that he had been invited to a grand gathering at the Pioneer Palace on Lenin Hills, w here Partv leaders were meeting four hundred writers, artists, and other members of the official
creative intelligentsia.
Despite his shabbv dress, Solzhenitsvn w as invited onto the podium to shake hands personallv w
Khrushchev and be introduced to the entire w ith Tvardovskv, and during one of the intervals was introduced to a short, unassuming man in rimless glasses whose face wore a thoughtful expression. This turned out to be \ ladimir Lebedev, Khrushchev's secretarv and the man w ho had done more than anvone, w ith the exception of Tvardovsky, to get Ivan Denisovich published. Solzhenitsvn was favourablv impressed bv his modest manner and gladlv met his request for a signed copv of his story. The rest of the meeting was not so agreeable. Unbeknow n to Solzhenitsvn, Khrushchev had been taken two weeks beforehand to an exhibition, "Thirty Years of Moscow Art," at the Manege Gallerv, at which a group of modernist and abstract painters had been invited to display their art in three separate rooms. Khrushchev had been speciallv led into these rooms by the arch-conservatives Serov and Gerasimov, whereupon he had exploded w ith indignation, calling the artists parasites and pederasts, threatening them w ith expulsion to the West, and jeering that their canvases looked as if they had been painted by idiots. ith
gathering. For the rest of the time, he sat
As long
as
genuine
art.
I
am chairman
We
of the Council of Ministers
aren't going to give a
we
are going to support a
copeck for pictures painted bv jackasses.
Historv can be our judge. For the time being historv has put us this state,
and we have
to
answer
for evervthing that goes
on
in
it.
at the
head of
Therefore
we
are going to maintain a strict policv in art. ...
Your prospects here
are
nil.
What
is
hung here
simpiv anti-Soviet.
is
Art should ennoble the individual and arouse him to action. of a picture like this?
have taken
a lot
To
cover urinals with?
.
.
.
The
.
.
.
It's
amoral.
W hat's the good
people and government
of trouble with vou, and vou pav them back with this
shit.""
— The Only
(^rest of the
Wave
I461
|
the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny had the courage to answ er Khrushchev
back, while the rest stood
The
bv
in
bemused
Khrushchev's
silence.
the Manege, all the leading newspapers had taken up the cry of more discipline in the arts. Editorials had appeared calling for all the unions of creative workers to be joined in one monolithic union, thus making them easier to control and less susceptible to da\' following
visit to
nonconformist deviations. In the event, nothing came of
this
extreme demand,
but Khrushchev had clearly sent out word that the arts needed careful w atch-
and the conservatives, w ho had stage-managed the campaign, were in Several Stalinists had been restored to positions of prf)minence. Three days after the Khrushchev outburst, Serov had been elected president of the Academ}' of Fine Arts, despite the earlier booing of Polikarpov, and conservatives occupied key positions in most of the creative unions, leaving onlv the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union as a place w here liberalism still seemed in control. Khrushchev w as due to speak again that dav in the Pioneer Palace, vet ing,
full cry.
seems that the w riters gathered there were extraordinarilv complacent they heard the keynote speech bv Leonid Ihichev, w ho w as chairman of the ideological commission of the Central Committee. According to rumour, Ilvichev spoke for ten hours, w hich would be a record even bv Soviet standards. It is more likely that the entire meeting lasted ten hours. Nevertheless, Ilvichev's speech was inordinately long. In it, he admitted that people had been asking for an end to censorship. "Exhibitions w ithout juries, books w ithout it
until
editors, the right of the artist to display
he wishes. 'Let us create as restrict us.' "
And
we
without an intermediary an\ thing
ourselves wish,' these people say. 'Do not
he was defensive about the role of the Party and the
influ-
ence of the West. But he quickly dashed any hopes that he or Khrushchev
sympathized with these trends. Art, he declared (including
literature),
must
continue to be "Party-minded." There was no such thing as peaceful coexistence between the various trends in
art.
concept alien to Alarxism-Leninism. that the Party, expressing the
Freedom of creation was
"It
is
a bourgeois
the great good fortune of our art
fundamental interests of the people
.
.
.
defines
the tasks and direction of artistic creation."'
Most of
was directed
and led on from Manege. "Formalism," in all its guises, was his principal target. But a number of writers were attacked, including Ehrenburg, whose memoirs were continuing to appear in \oz-y Mir. There was also an extraordinary clash between Khrushchev and Evtushenko. The following day, 18 December, had been set for the world premiere of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, whose first movement was a setting of Evtushenko's poem "Babi Yar" to music. Although the performance had been authorized by Khrushchev, Ilvichev now appealed to Evtushenko and Shostakovich to cancel it, w hile Khrushchev himself intervened to say it was inappropriate, because there was no longer any antiSemitism in the Soviet Union. Evtushenko disagreed and refused to cancel Ilyichev's speech
Khrushchev's reactions to the exhibition
the following day's performance.
He
at visual artists
at the
also enthusiasticalh-
defended the mod-
— SOLZHENITSYN
[462] ernist artists, saving he
work
will
was convinced
that "formalistic tendencies in their
be straightened out in time." Khrushchev commented, "The grave
hump-backed,"
straightens out the
Sergevevich,
we have come
to \\hich
way
long
a
Evtushenko retorted, "Nikita
since the time
when only
the grave
straightened out humpbacks. Really, there are other ways."'** All in
all,
the
omens were bad, but
it still
didn't
seem possible that the
great breakthrough achieved with the publication oi Ivan Denisovich had been in vain or that the
momentum
of liberalization could be halted so abruptlv.
Indeed, Iva>} Denisovich had been specificallv exempted from criticism bv chev, and the presentation of sonallv
its
was eloquent testimony
Ilvi-
author to the audience by Khrushchev per-
to
continued high standing
its
v\'ith
the Party
leaders.
The
following day the Shostakovich
not before Evtushenko had added some
symphony was performed, though new lines to his text in the light of
Khrushchev's criticisms and before the choir had attempted to resign. Appar-
were dissuaded at the last minute bv a stirring speech from Evtushenko in his best platform manner. In the evening the xVIoscow Conservatorv was packed with liberals, though the government box was emptv and the television cameras originally set up to cover this gala performance had been dismantled. The atmosphere was electric, and at the end, when Evtushenko and Shostakovich took their bows, the hall exploded in applause. It was a salute to the two men's courage, and a demonstration of liberal
entlv, thev
solidaritv, as
much
Two davs
as appreciation of the
later all further
performance.
performances were cancelled, and
Ilvichev returned to the offensive
at
a
week
another meeting with writers,
later
artists,
and cinema workers. Again he concentrated on the artists, although this time praising Ernst Neizvestny for his "civic maturity" and singling out Evtushenko and the voung novelist \ asilv Axvonov for similarlv "mature" behaviour. Other artists, writers, and musicians were attacked for "formalism" and refusing to toe the Party line. As if to underline that the authorities meant business, the mildlv liberal editor of the influential Literatuniaya Gazeta,
Kosolapov, was shortly afterwards replaced bv the conservative Alexander
Chakovsky. It is
phony to,
not clear whether Solzhenitsvn attended the Shostakovich svm-
concert.
but
all
It is
not the sort of thing he would normallv have been attracted
his liberal friends
were
there,
and
at least
one
Moscow
(Evgenia Ginzburg) later claimed to have met Solzhenitsvn there.
writer
'*^
New
Eve saw him celebrating in the rather unlikelv company of Oleg Efremov and the actors at the Sovremennik Theatre. There were candles, fireworks, champagne, and voung actresses in skimpv dresses dancing the twist a far cry from chopping firewood in Rvazan. It is not recorded whether Solzhenitsvn danced as w ell. 1 he December issue of Novy Mir was verv late in appearing and did not Year's
reach the news-stands until early January 1963, about a
have done.
It
month
after
it
should
turned out that the second instalment of Victor Nekrasov's
Thi, (Irkst ok ihk
Wave
travel notes, Both Sides of the Oeean (the first instalment
w ith
l4'^>3J
had appeared alongside
This was the and Nekrasov's notable fairness to the Soviet Union's ideological enemies was regarded as seditious. He had also included some remarkably sympathetic descriptions of American abstract art, which was the w rong thing to be doing at that particular time. On 20 January 1963, Izvestia printed a swingeing attack on Nekrasov and by implication on Novy Mir for pla\ing a "dangerous game" in failing to attack the Soviet Union's ideological enemies and ignoring the cold war.
Ivan Denisovich), had run into heavy trouble
the censors.
part dealing with Xekrasov's visit to America,
—
—
Not long
January issue of i^ovy Mir came out, carrying "Matryona's Place" and "Incident at Krechetovka Station." Surprisingly, the\' had hardly been touched by the censors, perhaps in deference to the patronage of Khrushchev, w hich was perceived to be still continuing. Regular readers of Novy Mir and everyone with the slightest feel for literature read the stories avidh' and welcomed them as proof that Ivan Denisovich had not been a Hash in the pan and that a major newwriter had arrived in their midst. I he portrait of the old and humble village woman, Matryona, particularly stirred readers' breasts with its evocation of patriarchal Russia and its compassion for the "insulted and injured." The name of Dostoyevsky was now joined to that of Tolstoy in the general search Solzhenitsyn's
after this, the
two short
stories
for comparisons.
Solzhenitsyn's star seemed
still
to be riding high.
uar\' a journal specializing in the republication
.Midway through Jan-
of fiction for a mass audience,
the Romati-gazeta (literally. Newspaper-novel), published
.4
Day
may even have been
in the Life of
second and Zhores Medvedev), and a few weeks later the publishing house Sovetsky Pisatel (Soviet Writer) brought it out in book form in an edition of 100,000 copies. Both editions immediately sold out. It would probably have been possible to sell ten times as many, but Soviet publishing is not geared to the market. As in all other forms of Soviet enterprise, production runs are decided at the top, according to complex political criteria, not on the basis of demand, and the story was never reissued. Interestingly enough, Solzhenitsvn exploited the occasion of these reprints to restore some of the cuts that had been imposed on him by Lebedev and Xovy Mir and to make a number of minor improvements. It w as a bold step to take in the generally fearful atmosphere of Soviet publishing, but nobody seems to have noticed or complained. Ivan Denisovich in 750,000 copies (there third impression, according to
a
26
FIRST DOUBTS
As
two main factions in the Partx' and camps continued, there v\'as no wav in which Solzhenitsvn could keep out of it. At the political level, Khrushchev came under fierce attack bv the conservatives (said to be led bv Frol Kozlov) in the early months of 1963 and was severely weakened by the Cuban fiasco. He had also stirred up a hornet's nest at the November 1962 plenarv session (the one at which the delegates had been seen clutching their red- and blue-covered books) by proposing sweeping administrative reforms in the Party's structure, whose ultimate effect would be to reduce the role of ideological control and make Party bosses more accountable for their decisions. This, too, w as anathema to the conservatives, and it w as the force and skill of their counter-attack that had driven Khrushchev (and his watch-dog over the arts, Ilvichev) onto the defensive and caused them to change their line. But the conflict was by no means resolved, and the signs in the press were confusing. For example, as early as January 1963 a critic called Lydia Fomenko made a public attack on the hitherto sacrosanct Ivan Denisovich in Literaturnaya Rossia (Literary Russia). Praising it for its "bitter truth" and
THE POLITICAL
L the
Struggle between the
corresponding
literary
1 1
literary skill, she nonetheless
accused
its
author of failing to disclose "the
full
dialectic of that time." Ivan Denisovich expressed "a passionate 'no!' to Stalin's
order,"
Fomenko
wrote, but
it
"failed to rise to the philosophical level of the
period, to a broader generalization capable of embracing the contradictory
phenomena of that
era."' In other words, there was no optimistic conclusion and no indication that there were "good Communists," even in the camps, who understood what was happening and would help to put everything right in the end. But the riposte to Fomenko came from, of all people, Ermilov,
464
First that
i
s
I
same sneak and informer who had nevertheless
mand" and this
Douh
time
in Izvestia,-
tuhilletl the "scjeial
when it Krmilov reproached Komenko
praised Ivan Denisovicb in l*nivda
first
unity of the story
This did not contrar\',
mean he had
demanded failed to
I
eom-
appeared. Writing
for asking too
the author of Ivmi Denisovicb ("Write about this as well as that!"), artistic
4''' 5
that he stop precisely
much of when the
where he had.
grasp the dialectic of Stalin's time; on the
he had done so perfectly.
K\en more confusing was the fact that the main l)od\ of the article in was deyoted to a blistering attack on l-Jirenburg and his memoirs in Navy Mir, that is to say, on a v\ riter judged to be in the same camp as Solzhenitsyn and standing for more or less the same sort of things. Stranger still, although Khrenburg's memoirs, dealing as they clid uith the period w hen Stalin v\as aliye, had also been authorized by Khrushchev, it could not have been simply a case of attacking Khrushchev's favourites, otherw ise Solzhenitsyn would have suffered too. Only a month or so later did it emerge that there \v as indeed a distinction (in the minds of the authorities) between the two men, that Khrushchev had withdrawn his support from Khrenburg (though he was maintaining it for Solzhenitsyn), and that therefore the word had gone out to "get" him. The occasion of this revelation w as vet another meeting between the Party leaders and the writers, this time six hundred of them, which took place in the Kremlin on 7-8 JVlarch 1963. Again Solzhenitsyn was present and again Ivan Denisovicb was singled out for praise by Khrushchev, but this time the general atmosphere v\'as grim and threatening. "It was rigged," Solzhenitsyn later w rote, "so that the Stalinists had a preponderance of five and the air was filled with harsh invective and destructive hostilitv to one v\
hich these remarks appeared
.
to
.
.
anything that gave off the faintest w hiff of freedom."^ Ilvichev, the Party's ideological watch-dog, spoke
again attacked formalism and abstractionism in
speech, he expressed satisfaction that a
"What
is
particularly important
ideas of the Party, the very
A number lessness,'
is
that,
art.
on the
first
day and
Referring to his earlier
more orthodox
line
now
prevailed.
under the influence of the healthy
atmosphere of creative discussion has changed.
of creative workers have begun to lose their feelings of 'defence-
people have been speaking out about Party-mindedness and national
and about socialist realism, w ithout fear of being considered and conervatives." And he added ominously, "Everything is returning to its place" (meaning that all the conservatives were returning to
feeling in art,
reactionaries
their places)."*
The
came with Khrushchev's extraordinarily long speech was clear that his main aim was to put a stop to any ideas of liberalization in the arts and to halt the trend that he himself had started. Far from showing himself sympathetic to Tvardovsky's earlier plea for the suspension of censorship in the arts, he was at pains to go the other way. "We must bring all the Party's ideological weapons, including such powerful instruments of (>ommunist education as literature and art, into combat real sensation
the following day.
It
SOLZHENITSYN
[466] order," he said.
Party will line." his
"On
demand
questions of creative art the Central Committee of the
of everyone
.
.
.
that he abides unswervinglv
by the Party
Like Ilvichev the dav before, he attacked Ehrenburg unsparingly for
memoirs and conducted
a sort
of verbal tour of the
arts: literature (w
hen
he abused Voznesenskv and Axyonov), painting, music, the cinema, the thelambasting innovation and experiment and lauding orthoatre, even jazz
—
doxy. Party loyalty, and socialist realism. At last, quite unexpectedly, he turned to the heart of the matter and addressed the central problem lying behind
all
the other problems
—namely,
the Party's attitude to Stalin and Stalinism. Ehrenburg's real crime,
it
turned
had been to suggest in his memoirs that in the thirties everyone had know n about Stalin's crimes but had been powerless to do anything and had therefore watched what was going on "in silence and with clenched teeth." This went much further than Khrushchev himself had gone in his speeches to the Twentieth and Twenty-second congresses, for it cast doubt on Khrushchev's claim that he and the other party leaders were ignorant of the out,
worst excesses of Stalinism. Did the leading cadres of the Partv know about the arrests of people at the time? But did the\' know that people were being arrested w ho were They believed Stalin and did not in no way guilty? No, thev did not know Yes, thev knew
.
.
admit the thought that repression could be applied against honest people devoted to our cause.
Even more unexpectedly, Khrushchev went out of his way to speak warmly of Stalin personally and reveal that "at Stalin's funeral many people, including myself, had tears in their eyes. These were honest tears. Although we
knew of
Stalin's personal shortcomings,
The monstrous in his "secret
still
we
believed in him."
crimes of which Khrushchev had spoken
at
such length
speech" were now suddenly reduced to "personal shortcom-
and Stalin was once more the beloved leader. The about-face could not ha\'e been more dramatic, and many theories have been adduced to account for Khrushchev's sudden change of tack. That his position as leader was severely weakened as a result of the Cuban crisis is without question. Undoubtedly, Kozlov and his allies w ere strengthened by Khrushchev's failure, and whenever there are foreign-policy problems in the Soviet Union there is alw ays great pressure for more conformity and discipline at home. The position of Ehrenburg as a witness was also rather special, in that he, as much as Khrushchev and some of the other political leaders, had once enjoyed Stalin's favours, and although he was still telling less than he knew, there was always a chance he might go further and reveal all. Ihe conservatives had perceived this from the beginning. At the very first meeting between the Party leaders and the intellectuals, a conservative writer, Galina Serebrvakova, had electrified the gathering by revealing that Stalin's favourite secretary, Alexander Poskrebvshev, was not only (contrary to popular belief) alive and well but w as also w ritiner his memoirs, in which he accused Ehrenburef ings,"
First Doubts
l4'^J7]
of having been an accomplice of Stalin's. Ihis theme had been taken up bv
Ermilov
in his attack
returning to
The
it
on Ehrenburg
in Izvestia,
and now Khrushchev was
again.
point was that
Ehrenburg had written, "e\er\bod\- knew," time far more than mere writers like himself. .\nd this was the central dilemma of de-Stalinization, which Khrushchev, in his impulsive w a\ had failed to foresee namelv. Where do vou stop? If de-Stalinization was taken to its logical conclusion it would indicate that most of the top leaders, including Khrushche\' himself, were responsible tor the crimes ot Stalinism. Even more w as this true of the upper levels of the bureaucracy in every sphere of Soviet life, ranging from the armed forces to the economics ministries, from the police to administrators of the arts, w hich is why the conservatives had such powerful support from the Partv and government apparatus. Only a Nuremberg-stvie trial could deal with the enormity of the crimes committed against the innocent Soviet population, and since Khrushchev had no intention of going that far, he was bound to twist and turn in draw ing the line. What the conservatives had apparentlv done was to point out to him the dangers of the path that he w as follow ing and to convince him that it would inevitablv lead to disaster. Khrushchev, therefore, had to preserve de-Stalinization in the form of a tactical manoeuxre by the Party and pre\ent it from becoming a major change of policy, let alone a moral crusade, w hich is w hat some of the intellectuals wanted it to be. And in the rebuke to Ehrenburg was concealed vet another axiom of Party policy, namely, its monopolv of wisdom and truth. It was one thing for Khrushchev to make speeches on Stalin's crimes, but quite another for mere w riters to take up the same theme. Writers w ere unreliable: thev could not be trusted to toe the Partv line, to go just so far and no if,
as
this implicated the Party leaders of the
—
,
—not even Ehrenburg, with
farther
When
a lifetime of zigzagging experience behind
down, there could be no question of abandoning the censorship and Partv control over w riters, for no one could tell w here this would lead. As evidence of this danger Khrushchev revealed that Soviet publishing houses and literary magazines had been "flooded w ith manuscripts about the life of persons in exile, in prisons, and in the camps" since the publication of Ivan Denisovich. "Take my word for it, this is a ver\' dangerous theme. It's the kind of 'stew' that \\ ill attract flies like a carcass, enormous fat flies; all sorts of bourgeois scum from abroad w ill come crawling all over it." It was a restatement of one of the conservatives' favourite arguments about not w ashing dirtv linen in public, and also a reference to the enormous interest being him.
the chips were
taken abroad in Ivan Denisovich. all
The book had
alread\-
been translated into
the major languages (two different English translations had appeared
bv
January, one month after Russian publication, and two more would follow in the *
A
same year)* and was now being
translated into
many more,
including
Soviet-sponsored translation of Ivan Denisovich began serialization in the Moscov: Xezis in
December 1962 and w
as
subsequently published by Penguin Books.
The
translator,
Ralph Par-
.
SOLZHENITSYN
[468]
those of most of the satelhte countries of Eastern Europe. Speculation in the
Western press about the meaning of its pubHcation was rife, and, of course, Western commentators on the contents of the storv could afford to be far more outspoken than their Soviet counterparts. Solzhenitsvn's reputation survived this meeting unscathed, but it was clear that the whole balance of the Partv's attitude had tilted stronglv against him, as it had against most of the other writers associated w ith Novy Mir Ehrenburg, Nekrasov, Evtushenko, Axyonov, Voinovich, Yashin. Indeed, a few davs beforehand "Matryona's Place" had been heavily attacked bv the conservative novelist and editor of Znamya, \'adim Kozhevnikov, in the pages of the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Kozhevnikox complained that there were too many "querulous" stories and tales appearing in Am'v Mir and said that he had experienced a feeling of "deep spiritual pain" while reading "Matrvo-
—
na's Place."
me
was written bv its author when he was mind in w hich he could not with anv depth understand the life of the people, the movement and real perspectives of that life. In the earlv postwar years such people as Matryona reallv did harness themselves to the plough in villages ravaged bv the Germans. The Soviet peasantrv performed a great feat It
seems to
still
that "Matrvona's Place"
in a state of
in those
circumstances and gave the people bread, feeding the countrv. This
To draw the Soviet Bunin village of our dav is historicallv incorrect. Solzhenitsvn's storv convinces one over and over again: w ithout a vision of historical truth, of its essence, there can be no complete truth, no matter how great the talent.' alone should evoke feelings of reverence and admiration. village as a
argument used by Lydia Fomenko about Ivan Dehad "failed to rise to the correct philosophical level" and "reconcile contradictions," and in "Matryona" he lacked a vision of "historical truth." These were but euphemisms for toeing the Party line, which decreed that anv shortcomings depicted in literature should be local and particular, and be contrasted unfavourabh" w ith the generallv positi\e march of Soviet society tov\'ards a radiant Communist future. Another essential was that any shortcomings so described should be shown as being the fault of something other than the Soviet system (in this case the Germans) or as belonging to the distant past and since overcome. (The criticism would have been even harsher had the critics known that the time referred to in "Matryona" was not 195 3 Stalin's time but 1956 Khrushchev's.) In fact, the logic of this position was that no shortcomings should be described at all until after they had been corrected. The reference to the pre-Soviet and antiSoviet Russian writer Bunin was also ominous. Bunin was held by Soviet It
was
nisovich.
essentially the
In that story Solzhenits\n
ker,
\\
ho had responded
—
—
—
to the prudishness of Soviet sensibilities
by toning dow n some of
Solzhenitsvn's saltier expressions, was falselv accused of having exercised a political censorship
of the text, and a ri\ai translation was commissioned from
The
latter's
mid-Atlantic \ersion was indeed racier in
choose between the two translations
in
its
Max Havuard and Ronald
vocabularw but there w
as
Hinglc\
nothing to
terms of accurac\', and neither was ver\ satistactorw
First Doubts critics to
ha\c w
[4'^'y]
rittcn in the ninctecnth-centur\' tradition ot "critical real-
ism," w hose "task"
it
capitalism and tsarism.
had
l)een to excoriate
Now
ism had been superseded
that these e\ils
b\' "socialist
Russian societx' for the evils of had been oxercome, critical real-
realism,"
\\
hich could not but approve
of socialist societv and be optimistic. Interestingly enough, the mention of Bunin's
name w as
quite perceptive on Kozhevnikov's part, for Solzhenits\n
\olume of his stories. From avowed and perceived kinship w ith the Russian writers of the nineteenth centur\' was to be turned against him, and he would be described more and more as a "critical realist" out of his time.
him and had
did admire
now
caretully annotated a
on, however, Solzhenitsvn's
Two
reviews did not constitute a campaign. Indeed, an\\\ here else but
Union two negative voices among a chorus of praise w ould have gone virtuall)' unnoticed; but one of the first casualties of censorship is free and spontaneous opinion. All public utterances instantlv acquire symbolic value and are minutel\- studied for "clues" to attitudes and positions. Readers and w Titers alike become morbidh sensitive to nuances; virtually nothing is nor is it meant to be. These review s were therefore ever taken at face value taken as a hint, or a testing of the political w eather, to see w hat the response would be. And when there w as no othcial response, the criticism grew bolder. A critic called Laguno\ lumped the Solzhenitsyn of "Matryona's Place" with Ehrenburg, Nekrasov, Axyonov, and F>tushenko and said that what the\ all had in common was a desire to "distort our reality and purposely play up the Soviet
—
aspects." Semyon Babaxevsky, a best-selling pedand cheap optimism, twice w inner of the Stalin Prize, wrote that it is "always much easier to describe the bad, the dark, and the dirty than to praise the good, the radiant, and the pure. What could be simpler than to take, say, the old woman Matrvona and depict her in totally black [sic] colours, and present her life in such a w av that the collective farms are to blame for everything.?"'^ In April Oktyabr joined its voice to the chorus with a critical article by N. Sergovantsev. For the time being such voices were still in a minority; and apart from Lydia Fomenko, almost no one raised a word against Ivan Denisovich. "Krechetovka," for instance, was generally praised, its setting in 1941 makits
darker,
more negative
dler of Party slogans
.
.
ing
it
.
.
.
easier to accept as a description of the undesirable past. Solzhenitsyn
now thought and
.
the
it
reasonable to press ahead with attempts to get The Tenderfoot
Tart performed. Fie had completed his revision of the text and was
anxious for the So\remennik 7 heatre to go ahead. But in the
atmosphere, Efremov was in difficulty.
It
about labour camps w hen the Part\ leaders had made this subject
new and changed
was not so simple it
to stage a play
clear that the\
played down. Solzhenitsyn decided to turn to his
w anted
first political
more help would be forthcoming. Having sent him the play at the beginning of .March, he called on him in his office on 21 March. As it turned out, Lebedev was unhelpful. His first reaction on receiving the play had been to ask whether Tvardovskv had read it. and w hen he patron, X'ladimir Lebedev, to see whether
SOLZHENITSYN
[470]
discovered Tvardovskv's dislike of the plav, this seemed to confirm his disinchnation to get involved. able in literature.
The labour-camp theme was no
The Sovremennik, he
said,
\\
own
longer desir-
as interested in the plav onlv
would fill the theatre. "I do not doubt for its would break the dow n, as the saying goes, in their doors theatre-goers that what sort of thing went on in the camps." But the eagerness to find out whole thing was impossible because of those "huge fat flies" (in Khrushchev's phrase), the foreign correspondents and "home-grown philistines," who would sensationalism and because
.
applaud
.
it
.
it.
Three months later Solzhenitsyn went to visit Lebedev for a third and last time, and Lebedev expanded on what was wrong with The Tenderfoot and the Tart. What Solzhenitsyn had failed to do, he said, was to show that some people had been successfuUv re-educated in the camps. Somehow it alwavs seemed to come out that the dishonest triumphed and the honest were doomed to destruction, which was a contradiction of socialist realism. Besides, the plav w as an "insult to the intelligentsia," since it show ed so manv of them fighting for privileges at the expense of their principles. Interestingh' enough,
word about the plav had got round and had even reached Khrushchev, who thought it was a dramatization of Tcati Denisovich. "Let them put it on," he had said while under that impression, but Lebedev had explained to Khrushchev that the plav w as not about Ivan Denisovich and w as not acceptable.^ Luckilv, Ivafj Denisovich itself retained
its
relative inviolability through-
out 1963, although in most other respects the atmosphere steadily worsened.
At the end of March the Writers' Union held a plenarv session at w hich the "voung" writers Evtushenko, \ oznesenskv, and Axvonov were heavilv criticized on a varietv of grounds; Grigori Baklanov, Yuri Bondarev, and Bulat Okudzhava among the slightlv older generation, were also taken to task; and there were even rumours that Tvardovsky was to be replaced as editor of Novy Mir. Immediatelv afterw ards a hvsterical campaign of vilification was directed against Evtushenko for having published his Precocious Autobiography magazine LExpress) without permission and without lull, which mav ha\e had something to do w ith the fact that Frol Kozlov had a heart attack in Ma\' and disappeared from the scene, leaving the conservatives temporarily leaderless. Then, at a plenarv meeting of the Central Committee in June 1963, Khrushchev back-pedalled somewhat from his earlier, hard position. He declared himself no longer in favour of a single, monolithic union for the arts. On the other hand, he had come round to thinking that a single publishing house would facilitate the Party's control, and he was still in no doubt that such control was necessary. Meanwhile, in May, Tvardoxsky had given a relatively outspoken interview to Henry Shapiro, the chief Moscow correspondent of L'PI, in w hich he had defended all \'ovy Mirs authors and had singled out Solzhenits\n and Ivan Denisovich for specially high praise. Solzhenitsyn was aware of these fluctuations in the political arena. The publication and success of Ivan Denisovich had, as he later put it, drawn him
abroad
(in the
Paris
clearance from the Soviet censors. After that there was a
First Dolbts
4" 1
i I
and he couldn't help know ing w hat w as going Lebedev had been occasioned hv an invitation to attend the June Partv plenum, \\ hose main theme was once again the Partv's policy on the arts. Normally, such invitations w ere much sought after and prized, but Solzhenitsyn had absolutely no desire to spend a week in into the Party's court circles,
on. Indeed, his third visit to
hot,
sweatv Moscow listening to boring
affabilit\' itself,
continued high standing literature
and
political speeches. Lel)ede\
had been
despite his criticisms of lendcrf'oot, confirming Solzhenitsvn's
politics.
at
Khrushchev's "court." Thev had chatted about his albums of photo-
Lebedev showed Solzhenitsvn
graphs of the famous, including man\ authors, as well as Khrushchev, Gromyko, and other bigwigs on foreign tours, and insisted on photographing
Me was surbv Solzhenitsvn's request to be excused from the plenum, but agreed to it readily enough, leaving Solzhenitsvn to hasten back to Rvazan. It was Solzhenitsyn's last term at the school. He had given in his notice on the strength of the royalties from Ivan Denisovich and his tw o stories. There were also abundant royalties from abroad, where he had become an international celebrity overnight, and it seems that the film studio Mosfilm had conSolzhenitsvn so that he could take his place in the album too.
prised
tracted to produce a film of Ivati Denisc/vich. Perhaps because of this
departure from the world of teaching, he had
and
June completed
on
felt
an urge to w
impending
rite
about
it,
contemporary subject, "For the Good of the Cause." The theme was simple enough and based on a real incident that had occurred in Ryazan. A technical school, housed in makeshift, inadequate premises, is at last, after many delays and disappointments, about to move into a new modern building. So enthusiastic are the students that they have given up their holidays and much of their spare time for nearly a year to act as unpaid labourers and hasten its completion, but at the very last moment the building is commandeered bv a Moscow ministry for use as a scientific institute. Nothing that the school principal can do is sufficient to shift the corrupt district Part\' secretary, Knorozox', from his decision in favour of the ministrx', and it emerges that the whole switch has been master-minded by the scheming director of a local factory, Khabahgin, w ho hopes to become head of the new institute. The principal, students, and staff of the school are deeply upset and disillusioned but are obliged to make w av "for the good of in
his first stor\
a
,
the cause." In
its
formal aspect the storv w as an uncomplicated example of
socialist
was based on the temporarily notorious figure of A. Larionov, w ho had committed suicide after his shady dealings in the meat market had been exposed. Grachikov, secretary of the town's Party committee and the "positive hero" of the storv, w ho takes the school principal's side, was based on the Party organizer in Solzhenits\ n's own school, and the character of the principal was modelled on someone else Solzhenitsvn knew. In the story they appear as little more than cardboard cut-outs (as are the students and the one other teacher w ho is mentioned), manipulated to illustrate the story's didactic message, and it was onl\ the realism after the "thaw" of 1956. Knorozov
— SOLZHENITSYN
[472J
message that contained anything unusual about it, for, as in Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn had inverted the pohtical moral that socialist realism was supposed to carrv. Khabalvgin, Knorozov, and the men from the ministry who
come from Moscow
to inspect the school
—
in other
the establishment and the upper Partv hierarchy
pulous
villains,
while the heroes were the
hierarchv or outside
A
it
"little
words,
—were
people"
all
members
of
satirized as unscruat
the bottom of the
altogether.
particular aspect of this
w as underlined
in the description of the dis-
trict secretary.
h was been it
Knorozox's boast that he never went back on
in
Moscow w ith
StaHn's word, so
it
v\as
still
his
word. As
it
had once
toda\ w ith Knorozox's word:
was never changed or taken back. And although Stalin w as long dead, Knowas still here. He w as a leading proponent of the "strong-willed school of
rozo\
leadership," and he saw
other
It
w av of running
was the problem of
thev were
still
in this his greatest virtue.
things.
He
could not imagine anv
''
Stalin's heirs in a
hrml\- in place and
new
guise,
and the message was that
running the countrv as before. pleased with the storv when Solzhenits\'n
still
seems that Tvardovsky w as it to him in June, for he immediatelv scheduled it for the Julv issue oi !\ovy Mir. It was at once a riposte to those who had criticized Solzhenitsxn for being unable to w rite about anything except the gloomier aspects of the past, especialh' the labour camps (even, "Krechetovka" had been about a man destined for the camps) and a blow in the struggle against the neo-Stalinists It
delivered
what \m"v Mir needed, especialh' now after the Partv plenum, when Khrushche\- had slighth' opened the gates for the liberals again. Solzheni-
just
tsvn, too,
w as
satisfied b\'
1
\ardovskv's prompt response and in general
felt
hopeful about the w av his career was developing.
Among
other
omens
that encouraged Solzhenitsvn's
time were some unexpected encounters w
ith
optimism
at this
the establishment. In Februarv
1963 he had been invited to address seventv members of the Soviet Union's supreme Militarv IVibunal, that same tribunal under whose auspices the Special Board had sentenced him in 1945 to eight years' imprisonment and perpetual exile. He was even able to joke about it and was met with a s\mpathetic response. The\' told him endless horror stories about the camps and the work of the tribunal in the past, answered his questions w illinglv, seemed genuinelv indignant, and discussed Ivati Denisovich with sincere admiration. "I looked about me," Solzhenitsvn later wrote, "and was amazed: thev were human beings! C>ompletelv human! Now the\' were smiling, and franklv explaining how thev had onlv wanted to do good."'" Solzhenitsvn realized that there was an element of show in it all, but the verv fact of their meeting him spoke volumes about the change. Ihe deputv chief militarv prosecutor. Colonel D. T. Terekhov, had also received him in his office and described to him the arrest and investigation of Stalin's former minister of state securitv
— 1
First Doubts
Ahakumov and
[4"
3
w ho had master-minded Terekhov had interrogated before thev were shot. Solzhenitsvn recognized in him a man of exceptional forcefulness, honesty, and talent, of the kind w ho might cleanse the land of injustice, and felt that there might reallv be on the wav a new order that was readv to reform Soviet society." But not everything looked rosv that summer, for the honeymoon period of his friendship with Tvardovsky appeared to be fading a little, and a certain amount of friction was creeping into their relations. On Solzhenitsvn's side it was occasioned by an uncomfortable sense of being patronized. Of the many works he had offered Tvardovsky for publication, 1 vardovsky had Victor
of the secret-police official
the "doctors' plot,"* Mikhail
Rvumin, both of
whom
taken only three short stories: "Matryona," "Krechetovka," and the
Good
now "For
of the Cause." Solzhenitsyn's Uric poems, some extracts from The
Way, his miniature stories, his labour-camp play, and perhaps also The Light Which Is in Thee (though it is not clear whether Solzhenitsyn had vet shown him this play) had all been rejected. Moreover, Solzhenitsvn had a suspicion that I vardovsky had somehow played a role in the Sovremennik's decision not to proceed w ith Tenderfoot, and he resented the fact that Tvardovsky had failed to put in a good word for it with Lebedev. He felt that it had been one thing to defer to Tvardovsky 's judgement w hen he was unknown, but now he was world famous and, in many people's judgement, a better w riter than Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky, for his part, seems to have felt that he w as in a position of tutelage vis-a-vis Solzhenitsyn and that he had a proprietary right to Solzhenitsyn's work, in view of the unprecedented and successful campaign he had waged to publish .4 Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He had recognized in Solzhenitsyn a natural ally, and he certainly hoped, with Solzhenitsyn's help, to advance the cause of his magazine, but he also thought, not without justification, that Solzhenitsyn ow ed him something too. It must also be acknow 1edged that in matters of literary judgement he had right on his side, for everything he had rejected of Solzhenitsyn's so far had been second-rate, and everything he had accepted, apart from "For the Good of the Cause," had been excellent. Indeed, one can only admire his restraint in not jumping on the
bandwagon of Solzhenitsyn's popularity
The
at the slightest
ditferences of taste and interest betw een the tw o
opportunity.
men
also emerged \ovy Mir published Shalamov's poetry. To his astonishment, Tvardovsky was uninterested in their labour-camp themes and rejected them on grounds of form they were "too much like Pasternak." As Tvardovsky later wrote to Shalain
Tvardovsky 's response
to Solzhenitsyn's suggestion that
*In No\ ember 1952 nine Kremlin doctors were arrested and charged with conspiring with the British and American intelligence services to murder So\iet leaders, and w ere said to have been responsible for the death ot Andrei
Zhdanov
in 1948.
Since the doctors were Jewish, the accu-
had anti-Semitic o\ertones, but the doctors were saved bv the death of Stalin in March 1953 and were released a month later. The v\hole episode is usuallv referred to as the doctors"
sations
plot.
SOLZHENITSYN
[474]
mov, thev were not the sort of thing at all, in his opinion, that would appeal Novy Mirs readers. '" Solzhenitsvn conceded Tvardovskv's right to regard himself as a better Ivardovsky was a famous poet. But as it happens, Solzhejudge of poetrv nitsvn had stumbled across a peculiar prejudice of Tvardovskv's. Andrei Sinyavskv, who had recentlv contributed a long article on Pasternak to Novy Mir, reports that although Tvardovskv had supported the article on political grounds, he had said to him, "I've only one request to make of you please don't make Pasternak out to be a classic." Tvardovskv was convinced that Pasternak \\ as a minor poet, destined to sink \\ ithout a trace. He also exclaimed one dav with distaste, "He's no better than that Mandelstam,'"^ meaning to
—
—
that he didn't care for either of them.
He
was,
it
seems, e.xtremelv hostile to
modernism in all its forms, holding that a writer should be popular and read by the masses. This was what had so endeared Solzhenitsyn to him, for thev w ere cast in the same mould and shared the same literarv values. Shalamov, on the other hand, was a modernist. Even his short stories, despite the rawness of their material, were highly wrought and polished, with an emotional restraint that went well bevond Solzhenitsvn's in Iva)i Denisovich. Solzhenitsvn was w illing to tolerate the modernism for the sake of the subject matter,* but Tvardovskv was not. It was this intolerance, coupled with Tvardovskv's jealousx', that explained whv Novy Alirs poetrv section was so weak.
A
disharmony between the two men also sprang from their difI vardovskv was the most remarkable Russian editor of his time, but he was a Partv member and a high Soviet functionary, and this w as verv important to him. A w titer w ho worked with him over man\' vears has characterized him as follows: certain
ferent perceptions of the world.
7 vardovskv was not
a political radical
verv influenced
behaviour bv
bv nature, he was a Partv lo\alist and but he w as also a superb editor and had an unerring instinct for literar\' qualitv. He was constitutionallv incapable of publishing inferior work, he sought excellence in evervthing, and it was this that led lish
him
in his
into politicallv
Ivan Denisovich.
He
this,
dangerous waters, particularlv w hen he decided didn't look for trouble, he didn't
want
to
pub-
trouble, he didn't
came, and he did his level best to get out of it, but he w as ow n high editorial standards, and on that front he wouldn't compromise. He was therefore constantlv finding himself put into ambiguous situations in which he felt deeplv unhappy and verv uncomfortable, but there was nothing he could do about it. like
trouble
draw n into
w hen
it
by
it
his
'"*
Despite this inner conflict
—or perhaps because of —1 vardovskv was it
and
manoeuvring
a past
master
mum
possible past the censors and their political mentors.
at Soviet literary politics
*i3cspitL' feeling that Shalaniov's prose stvic still
his
able to admire his achievement.
words."
He once
at
had suffered from told Kopelev,
"You
maxifound the
to get the
his isolation,
He
Solzhenitsyn was
can't get a razor-blade betw een
'
KiRST Doubts
l4"
5
]
w as precisely here that Solw as to a system of literary (and increasingly political) values older and more disinterested than those of the Soviet establishment, values that he had imbibed from his immersion in the classical Russian literature of the nineteenth century. As he later wrote of Tvardovskv, "he was too reach' to beliexe that this s\stem was all-embracing and durable. He could not imagine an\one rejecting the system from the outset. He could not imagine my discerning or knowing tactics of
it
absorbing, even exhilarating, but
zhenitsyn parted
company from him.
it
Solzhenitsyn's loyalty
things about literature or politics that he himself could not see or did not
know."'' This judgement, characteristically harsh, puts the blame
all on one and perhaps exaggerates Solzhenitsyn's own feelings at this time, but it does point to a fundamental difference between the two men. Solzhenitsyn was able to take this stance because he was an outsider. His prison experiences had set him apart for all time from the Soviet establishment and the world of political and social orthodoxy. As he later noted in The Oak and the Calf, "I could never be so candid w ith [Tvardovskv], so at ease with him, as I could with dozens of people on \\ hom the groves of Gulag had cast their indelible shadow."'''' The dividing-line between them w as still the barbed-wire fence and the ploughed strip, a ghostly barrier that continued to separate the oppressed "us" from the privileged "them." It was membership in this grim club that still guided Solzhenitsyn in man\- of his judgments of others, and from which he derived an essential element of his own iden-
side
tity.
Nor can one lution.
Even
if
was not prepared
One
discount Solzhenitsyn's egotism, ambition, and iron reso-
he understood Tvardovskv intuitively and intellectually, he to
make any allowances
or to budge an inch from his plans.
of his enduring strengths, as a writer and as a man, w as this absolute
refusal to
compromise; but
it
made
for
some
difficult relationships
and some
turbulent scenes, especially in his dealings with his editor.
One such Moscow on
scene occurred in July 1963. Solzhenitsyn and Natalia were
way back from Leningrad. Solzhenitsyn was in a dudgeon about some changes that Boris Sachs had allowed the censors to make in "For the Good of the Cause" without asking his permission (among other things, they had removed the word '"strike" from his description of the protest the students proposed to stage), having only just discovered them when the July issue of Novy Mir appeared. Here was a perfect example of his differences with the magazine. Such practices, he told Tvardovskv, had become so normal that no one noticed them any more. Tvardovsky sided with Sachs and accused Solzhenitsyn of "flaunting his principles." But Solzhenits\n felt betrayed. For him, every word counted. Even if other authors acquiesced in such treatment of their works, he was not going to join them. This little contretemps then escalated into a more serious confrontation. Tvardovsky had just returned from a meeting with Ilvichev to discuss the composition of the Soviet delegation to a conference of a hundred writers that was to be held in Leningrad the following month. The conference w as in
their
SOLZHENITSYN
[476]
to be a symposium on the novel jointly sponsored bv UNESCO and the Communist-inspired Community of European Writers (COMES). It w as one of a series of events (the just-completed Moscow International Film Festival w as another) designed to demonstrate the Soviet Union's policy of cultural coexistence with the West. After some pleading, Tvardovsky had managed to secure the inclusion of Solzhenits\n in the Soviet delegation, w hich, in terms of Soviet literary politics, meant a signal boost for Novy Mir and the
entire liberal
As
it
camp.
happens, 1 vardovsky had
drinking bouts
—
his
answer
just
come round from one of his
to the insoluble
periodic
problems that beset him.
It
had
summer, and he had been taking to the bottle somewhat more than usual. His eyes were still bloodshot, his skin sagged, and he was chain-smoking with nervous concentration; but he was also elated been
by
a particularly difficult
his success
with Ilyichev, and he confidently expected Solzhenitsyn to He was still furious with
agree to go. But Solzhenitsyn refused point-blank.
the censors, he detested 'Fvardovsky's drinking habits, and he
mined not
to
w
aste his time at conferences.
As he
later
was
deter-
wrote, "It would be
what I thought, and ... to go there like a pet monkey would be shameful." But Tvardovsky was appalled: "I made it my business to see justice done. You can refuse if you like, but it's your duty to be there
quite impossible to say
in the interests
of Soviet literature.'"**
\ ictor Nekrasov,
Tvardovsky.
He
who w as
present during this conversation, sided w ith
himself could not go, because he was
still
under heavy attack
from the authorities for his travel notes. An official "investigation" into his behaviour abroad had been going on in Kiev for months, and he w as on the brink of expulsion from the Party. He felt that Solzhenitsyn ought to go, not so much for the sake of Soviet literature as for Tvardovsky's sake. According to Nekrasov's account of the scene, Tvardovsk\- openly pleaded w ith Solzhenitsyn and virtually went down on his knees to him, but Solzhenitsyn was adamant. He gave no explanation and no reasons, and Nekrasov felt that for the first time he was seeing a completely new side of Solzhenitsyn. In his view Tvardovsky deserved support, if only in the form of gratitude and a
human response
to his misery.'*^
The COMES meeting went ahead without Solzhenitsyn, who writes that he w as obliged to decamp from Ryazan on his bicycle to avoid giving a negative answ er to all the telegrams and official invitations that came for him. It was not a success, for it revealed a wide chasm between Western and Soviet w titers in their attitudes to literature. In desperation Ehrenburg was freed from disgrace and dispatched to Eeningrad by Khrushchev personally to pour oil on troubled w aters, and in a speech of brilliant diplomacy he did do something to draw the tw o sides together, but there w as no real meeting of minds. 1 here was, howexer, a curious postscript. In an apparent attempt to underline the Soxiet Union's sincerit\ in seeking closer ties w ith the West,
Khrushchev invited a group of tw enty-eight writers on the Black Sea. There he treated them to one of his
to his villa at Pitsunda, long, rambling speeches
I'iRST DOL'B TS that took in
(
Aiha,
1
liingan
thing but culture, in tact
he suddenix broke
olt
,
(-hina, tsarisni, Stalinism, clisarnianKiit
—and w
and
I4"
as
in\ ited
1
incongruousK threatening \ardo\ sk\ to read aloud I
ers present as
Khrushchex
peasant
itii-
estern w
speech, but the extraordinarx thing ai)out
's
Then
lonu satirical
poem " xorkin in the Next \\ orld." " xorkin," w ith its earth\ oms and untranslatable expressions, w as just as batHing to the \\ 1
I
—an\-
in tone.
iiis
~
it
rit-
x\as
its daring political content, as daring in its x\ax- as Ivciii Dciiisoiich, x\ hich had condemnec] the poem to circulate imderground tor much ot the nine xears since it was x\ ritten.* It seemed that Khrushchex x\as anxious once attain to use literature to demonstrate his broadmindedness and to dissipate, bx this gesture, the gloom induced bx' his uncompromising speech. Ihree dax s later, "Tvorkin" x\as published in Izirstia.-'*
An Txardox
skx' in
men
both
argument \\ ith on the part ot" Txardox skx is quoted as
interesting aspect ot Solzhenitsx n's description ot his
\\
ith
saying that the
The Oak aud
the (Ailf'xs the insularitx
regard to contemporarx literature.
sxmposium xxould
in anx' case
it
rexeals
be pointless, since there xxere
no noxels \\ orth arguing about: "It is doubtful \\ hether a nox el can be x\ ritten in our time." To this, Solzhenitsx n boastfullx ripostes, "G/;/ccv Ward x\as alreadx" begun. The First Circle had been finished a x ear before, but didnt knoxx in x\ hat form 1 dared offer it to Tvardoxskv. And I x\ as supposed to sit in a sxmposium, bound and gagged, listening to fortx mouths chorusing, 'The noxel is dead!' 'The noxel is obsolete!' 'There can be no more nox"-' els!' Yet this was a conference attended bv William Golding and Angus I
Wilson, Alain Robbe-Cirillet and Nathalie Sarraute, Hans berger and Jean-Faul Sartre,
\\
here nox
els
Magnus
En/.ens-
bx Giinter Grass, Tieinrich Boll,
Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, and Saul Belloxx xxere also discussed. It was hardly likelx- that the death of the nox el \x ould be the main point on the agenda it x\ as little more than a rhetorical slogan to draxx attention to the main subject matter. Solzhenitsyn, b\- reason of his long x ears of imprisonment, and Txardovskx', as a result of his ideological blinkers and ignorance of foreign languages, had barely heard of the names of the leading European and American novelists of the time, let alone read and understood them. Yet they xxere quite ready to dismiss them our of hand. Meanxx hile, at the sxmposium itself, the senior Soviet delegates (though not Tvardox skx' and not Ehrenburg) devoted their efforts to a violent attack on Jox ce, Kafka, and
—
Proust and a justification of their non-publication in the Soviet Union. Despite
Khrushchev's halt-hearted liberalization, the Soviet Union still
in the literarx'
as a
whole
xxas
Dark Ages.
In August, Solzhenitsyn did escape
on
his bic\ cle.
He and
Natalia w ent
*"Tvorkin in the Next \\ orld" w as l)egun, and largeK completed, in 1954 and was said to have been circulating in saniizdat since about 1957. A continuation of Vastly Tyorkiii, it purported to
show T\ orkin's adventures
in the
"next world" after his death, but the next w orld bore a sur-
prising similarity to Stalin's Russia, skv.
The poem appeared
(1963).
in Izvestia
which \\ as niercilesslx criticized and satirized bx' T\ ardovon 18 .\ugust 1963, and a few dax s later in Sovy Mir. no. 8
SOLZHENITSYN
[478]
on
a caretulh'
planned tour of "Russian antiquities," setting out from Me-
shchera, in Ryazan Province, and cycling through the provinces of Ivanovo
and Yaroslavl to
Moscow
—through the heartland of ancient Russia.
Thev
and Rostov the Great, inspecting the monasteries, churches, and fortifications of the Middle Ages, taking photographs, making notes, and camping out overnight. Soon after arriving back in Ryazan, they set out on another ride, this time to Tula Province and Yasnava Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. For Solzhenitsyn, with his deep love of Tolstoy, it must have been in the nature of a pilgrimage; but he visited the picturesque, unspoiled cities of Suzdal, Vladimir,
had started collecting material once more for his big novel on the Revolution, tentatively called The Red Wheel, and it may be that he was already planning the scene that was eventually to appear in August 1914 \n \\ hich the
now
young Sanya Lazhenitsyn (based on Solzhenitsyn's father) confronts an aging Tolstoy at Y'asnaya Polyana to ask him for his thoughts on the purpose of life
and the writing of poetry.
On this Tula trip, they also paid a visit to Kulikovo Field, site of the famous fourteenth-century battle between the Russians and the Tartars, a turning point in Russian history. There they inspected the ruined medieval church of St Sergius of Radonezh, whose iconostasis had been chopped up for firewood, whose flagstones had been carried off by the nearby villagers to pave their yards, and whose cupolas had been plundered for their tin. They clambered up the unusual cast-iron tower erected in 1848 to mark the site of the battle and made the acquaintance of the dogged and faithful caretaker, Zakhar Dmitrievich. Zakhar fascinated them by his prickly gruffness, by his dedication to the church and monument, and above all by the devotion with which he had sewn a special pouch inside his tattered jacket in which to carry and cherish the Kulikoxo visitors' book. Disgusted by the disrepair into w hich the site had been allowed to fall and yet captivated by its air of desolation, Solzhenitsyn spent a whole day wandering about the field, reconstructing the epic battle that had been fought there, and he and Natalia spent the night in the caretaker's hut at the latter's invitation.
Two
years later
Solzhenitsyn described the caretaker, the monument, and the day he had spent there in one of his finest short stories, "Zakhar the Pouch."
By
the time the Solzhenitsvns returned to Ryazan, a
new
controversy
was breaking over "For the Good of the Cause." On the very last day of August, a deputy editor of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, Yuri Barabash, pub"What Is Justice?" in which he called the story "a faillished an article ure." He was right, but for the wrong reasons, since he maintained that the
—
—
defects of "Clause" "had
much
in
common
with those that
critics
had already
noted ... in 'Matryona's Place.' " Solzhenitsvn's main mistake, he wrote, had been to "operate with abstract categories that were empty of concrete social content,"
and
his
view of
life,
as reflected here,
was
just as "archaic"
as in the earlier story.""
The ters
Literaturnaya Gazeta followed this
up
b\'
printing three readers'
supporting Barabash's criticism. Then, quite unexpectedly,
it
let-
published
First Doubts another article
I479J
favour of the storv, this time bv the mildly liberal novelist
in
Daniil Granin,
who
zation of Soviet
life
praised
and
it
as a contribution to the necessary democrati-
a plea for
greater justice. Almost immediately after
that the paper changed tack yet again
v\ ith another attack both on the story and on Granin's defence of it, adding an editorial note to the effect that Sol/.henitsyn had violated the canons of socialist realism b\ "mechanically
itself
the tradition of critical realism to socialist soil." By then it was October, and, appropriately enough, the ultra-conservative magazine (and Novy Mirs chief ideological adxersarv) Oktyahr, edited b\' Kochetov, published a harsh attack on both "Matryona's Place" and 'i"or the Ciood of the Cause." In the same issue Oktyabr printed a glowing review of a new work about the labour camps called Endurance by a former prisoner, Boris Dyakov. Dyakov was a loyal Communist w ho had remained faithful to the Party and who had survived his ordeal by becoming a trusty. He rejected
transplanting
.
.
.
Solzhenitsvn's criticism of the trusties as parasites and stool-pigeons and praised
them as loyal helpers of the regime.-' At this juncture Novy Mir returned
to the fray with three readers' letters
praising "For the Ciood of the Clause," onl\- to find itself attacked bv the Literaturnaya Gazeta for selecting only favourable letters and suppressing the
unfavourable ones. 1 his drove Novy Mir to investigate
and
its
readers' letters in
had received a total of fifty-eight letters about which fifty-five story, of were completely in favour, two had stylistic the criticisms, and only one was hostile and couched in such abusive language that it was unpublishable. These facts were conveyed to the Literaturnaya Gazeta in a "letter to the editor," at the end of which Novy Mir revealed a little secret. 1 Welve of their favourable letters had been sent simultaneously to the Literaturnaya Gazeta, v\'hich had published not one. It w as the Gazeta that had been guilty of suppression, not Novy Mirr^ I he debate then died down, but what was interesting about it \\ as not just the light it threw on the tug of war between the conservatives and liberals or on the fluctuations of Solzhenitsyn's reputation but also the fact that it took place at all over such a mediocre storv. From the point of view of the passion displayed and the space devoted to them, virtually no distinction was made between "Matryona" and "Cause," vet one was a masterpiece and the other a pot-boiler. And "Cause" attracted far more attention than Solzhenitsyn's much better storv "Incident at Krechetovka Station." At the same time, nobody bothered to say how badly \v ritten "Cause" \\ as the conservatives because they had other, more damning accusations to make against it, and the liberals because they didn't w ant to damage their case. It was a typical instance of politics completely overriding literary values. detail
to discover that
it
—
—
27
LENIN PRIZE CANDIDATE HAVING GIVEN UP
his teaching post, Solzhenitsvn
ahh more time in w hich to pursue preoccupation was to get something else into
now had immeasur-
his hterar\- career.
print.
I
lis
His two plaws and
first
his
\erse iiad proxed frustratingh unpopuhir w ith Ixardovskx and other ihakovsky and Isavev. A third candidate, Cionchar, w as an ex-ofhcio vice-chairman of the prize committee. 1 o a certain extent, committee members were tied bv the nominations made by the organizations they represented. The Sheep Bell and Into the Storm, for instance, had been proposed bv the board of the USSR Writers' Union, while Prometheus was the nominee of the Writers' Union of the Russian Republic. Because of the conspicuous safety of
its
subject matter, Prometheus
SOLZHENITSYN
[4«2]
—
had the most nominations of all including one, according to Zhores Aledv'edev, from the Directorate of Weather Bureaux of the Central Provinces, which gives one some idea of the processes at work behind the prize awards. It w as reasonablv clear that, given their ow n preferences, committee members would plump for something safe and uninspiring, but clearer still that thev would do w hat the\' w ere told: if an order came from on high to vote for Ivan Denisovicb, the\' would do so w ithout blinking. And here la)' the chief
hope of Solzhenitsvn's supporters. At first there seemed to be something of
a
bandwagon
rolling in Solzhe-
nitsvn's favour. In mid-|anuar\- 1964 izvestia published an interview
prototype of one of the most memorable characters tain
in
w
ith the
Ivan Denisovich, Cap-
Buinovskv, the lo\al (>ommunist naval captain w ho is dispatched to the cells for arguing with the guard commander in one of the closing
punishment
scenes of the book. His original.
curator of the naval
museum
Commander
Boris Burko\skv, was
now
of the cruiser Aurora in Leningrad, and he
enthusiasticalh' confirmed the truthfulness of Solzhenitsvn's portrayal of
Ekibastuz and
its
prisoners (thus refuting conservative accusations of exag-
BurkoN sk\ asserted that the
geration). B\' the greatest iron\-, like the prisoners in the no\el,
had
in their hearts
men
in the
camps,
"ne\er broken with the
done to them w ith the Party or our and thousands like me were phvsicalK' torn from the Party and people, but our hearts and thoughts were still with both.""* Ihis was undoubtedly true of Burkovskv, but it hardl\ coincided w ith Solzhenitsvn's portraits in his stor\'. On the other hand it made perfect propaganda for the Party, and had ne\er identified the evil SN'Stem.
I
Lenin Prize.
mouthpiece of the Party, Pravda, pubby Samuil Marshak," winner of the Lenin Prize the preceding \ear, and at a VV riters' Union meeting in early February to discuss the nominations, letters urging support for SolzhenitsN'n w ere read out from Kornei ('huko\ sk\- and Ilya Ehrenburg, w hile
At the end of January the
official
lished a strong article in favour oi Ivan Denisovich
Lev Kopelex took the
floor to
endorse
his old friend.
\ovy Mir
also published
Januar\ number an extraordinarily long and detailed article by V'ladimir Lakshin called "I\an Denisovich, His Friends and Foes." Lakshin anain its
h'zed
all
the articles that had appeared on Ivan Denisovich throughout the
year, carefully dissecting the hostile critics'
one
arguments and rebutting them
b\' one.''"
oped
But the conservatixes w ere not inactive, either, and in February develtheir counter-attack. At a combined meeting of the Moscow and the
Russian Republic branches of the criticized b\ a secretar\
\\ titers'
L nion, Ivan
of the
Moscow Union, and by two
"experts": Boris
oi Endurance, and, for some reason, Ceneral A.
devoted to
a
Denisovich
Dmitri Fremin (once a scourge of Dudintsex's Sot
vicious attack
on Lakshin and
Fodorskv.
his article, for
it
once been endorsetl b\ Khrushchex
.
All this
w as
hea\il\'
Bread Alone),
Dyakov, author time was
Much
w as still telt w ho had,
to assault Solzhenitsxn's supporters than the author himself, all,
liy
sater atter
w as then reproduced, together
Lenin Prize (candidate
l4^3l
with an approx ing editorial note, in the Literatunuiya Guzetu (without indication that the Gazetas editor
—Chakovsky—was
Lakshin's article had stirred
storm of controversy. The \oung Yugo-
a
slav critic Mihajlo Mihajlov (later to
was
visiting
article
Moscow, was
told
He
Ivan Denisovich as critics to
a
in
it
almost
letters a da\-,
ill
tell
\"ou
the preceding Near,
riter's Spiritual
e.\tra\agantly)
w
I
progress Veniamin
nitsxn and the \\
on
of
all
ot his
them
who
\()u are."^
1
me
he idea of
I.
Teush w as w
riting an article,
Mission," in w hich he
Solzhenitsvn has been
filled
spiritual hurricanes: a hurricane of love
Ivan Denisovich has
first
Chicherox-, and even as this
"A. Solzhe-
commented (some-
phenomenon.
this
The atmosphere around expanding
w ho
dissident in \'ugoslavia),
kind of litmus paper had been voiced bv one of the
write about
debate w as
a
told Mihajlov of a saving then current in .Moscow: "Tell
what \ou think of One Day and
what
become
bv Lakshin that since the publication
he had been recei\ ing up to 150
favourable.
an\'
a rival candidate).
become
a sort
w
and
spinning and ever-
ith
a
hurricane of hatred.
of touchstone, or, as one reader put
it,
an
X-rav apparatus that virtuallv automaticallv sorts people into the living and the dead, w
ith
dead, w ithered
Teush had been given sands
—of
letters that
souls.''
access to the hundreds
Solzhenitsvn had received as
—perhaps
a result
e\en thou-
of the publication
oi Ivan Denisovich and "Matrxona," and he built his article around cation of this material and an analvsis of the responses.
He
a classifi-
found, naturallv
enough, that an overwhelming majoritx' of readers faxourable to the stories had themselves suffered in the labour camps, or had relations or close friends who had served and often died in them. Thev were supported bv others w ho
were appalled and shamed b\" the revelations made bv Khrushchex Solzhenitsvn, and others about Stalin's terror and the horrors of Gulag, and by those members of the intelligentsia, the Party, and the bureaucracy \xho sincerely desired a change for the better and a more humane society. Together they composed a majority of those x\ ho xx rote. On the other side were former prisoners, like Boris Dyakov, xx ho had survived more or less comfortably in the camps bx' co-operating xx ith the authorities; former camp guards and officers of the camp administration; and members of the Party or the bureaucracy xxho w ere either implicated in Stalin's crimes and still shared his ideas or xxho simply believed in strong-arm methods and feared that change of any kind xxould bring anarchy and the loss of at least some of their privileges. These divisions reflected more or less accurately the divisions in society at large, and for this reason it xxas easy for the t\xo main camps to fall in behind their leaders and take up positions for the political battle over the Lenin Prize. In this sense the struggle over Ivan Denisovich xxas xery much part of a larger struggle then in progress. But the reasons tor the ferocity vx'ith XX hich this particular battle \x as fought also have to do \x ith the peculiar ,
qualities of the story itself,
dimensions of
its
success.
\x
hich completelx' transcended the social and political
SOLZHENITSYN
[484]
These were,
in the first instanee, its hterarv quahties.
It
is
hard tor
how bleak and barren the Soviet Hterarv scene is and was (especialh in the earh' sixties), how parched and starving Soviet readers are for contemporarN' hterature of anv quahtw If one casts one's mind back over the nearlv fort\- vears since the Second World War, one finds barelv haUa dozen writers whose names stand out as possibK' ha\ing worldclass literar\- talent: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Solzhenits\n, Brodskv, Sinvavand three of these were of an older, skv, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Nekrasov pre-war generation. Dozens of Soviet w riters ha\e been translated into Knglish and other foreign languages, but most stand out onl\' because of the emptiWesterners to grasp
just
—
ness of their surroimdings, so that, ironicallv,
Russian w cal
riter to
be translated into English
—than
for a second-rate
scandal
As one
critic
is
easier for a third-rate
riter
a politi-
or a first-rate Italian one.
has aptlv noted, most Soviet so-called literature consists of
rh\thmic prose.
editorials in \erse or in the\' fulfil the
—
French w
it
pro\ided he provokes
fimction of
sense of the word, but
a free
press
I
he\' are read
— not
and
that literature
listened to because
is
free in the
proper
and its writers are sufficientK' skilful to smuggle in ideas and issues that get smothered in the newspapers. (This is not, bv the wa\ to be taken as a slander on the writers. Man\' of them perform miracles bv wav of allegor\' or indirection, it is
freer than the actual press itself,
,
and
in
another setting would certainh' do as well as an\'one
—w
lettres the\-
can be more daring
and read w
ith
more
—an
— and
else.) In heUes-
are therefore listened to
respect.
In such a setting
an editorial
ithin limits
.
\
Day
editorial of
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
imcommon
was
also perceived as
daring, force, and impact. But
much
w as a genuine work of art. Paradoxicallv, as the English critic Max Ilavward has noted, although Ivcin Denisovich was published in Moscow for a\owedh' political reasons and was receixed both there and abroad mainl\' as a political sensation, it w as one of the few Soviet prose works since the war that could stand completeh' as a work of art and be discussed exclusi\el\' in terms of its aesthetic achie\ement, quite apart from its political qualities. It w as a universal statement about the human condition, and it w as for this reason that comparisons were made w ith Tolstov and Dostovevskv and that hungr\' readers cherished the book. Ihus far, one supposes, the Western reader is able to follow and svmpathize, but there was another dimension of the book that is difficult to describe and summarize, but without which no account of the impact oi Ivan Denisovich would be complete. This dimension one can onb' call spiritual, not out
more than
that,
it
of an\' sentimental regard for the attributes of the alleged "Russian soul" but
simply because it relates to that sphere of human existence w here morality and faith conxerge and w hose workings are bevond our conscious understanding. It is a sphere that in the Soviet Union has been so scorched by Marxist theorv and Son iet practice that it had seemed, during Stalin's rule at least, to have succumbed to total atrophy. Perhaps the simplest wa\- to illustrate the impact oi Ivan Denisovich and
— Lf.nin Frizk
(^
an 1)1 date
14^^51
what it meant to Soviet readers is to reproduce some ot the comments quoted by Teush. "iMv face was smothered in tears," wrote one woman. "I didn't wipe them aw a\' or feel ashamed, l)ecause all this, packed into a small number of pages of the magazine, was mine, intimately mine, mine for e\er\ dav of the fifteen \ears I spent in the camps." Another woman: "I wept and can weep now but at the time there were no tears." And a laughed. ... man: "Although I w ept as read it, at last felt myself to be an equal citizen with all the rest, whereas up to now I felt only hostile looks reminding me of Pechora and Norilsk."* And another: "For me and others like me \-our stor\' was the last hope that justice still exists somew here, that it has not vanished or died out." And another: "At last the chill of estrangement is beginning to melt. We too, all of us, are being given some human svmpathw" Even more striking were readers' responses to the author himself: "I kiss your golden hands"; "Thank you for your truthfulness"; "Let me bow to the ground before you, dear friend"; "Thank goodness that you exist look I
,
I
I
.
after yourself. \
our existence
is
"We
our happiness";
we
love \ou,
.
.
believe
you, we wish you health and strength, thank you"; "Please accept our love and gratitude, beloved w riter, great writer"; "Thank \()U for \-our love and courage".
And,
at greater length:
Thank xou, dear
friend, cf)mrade
and brother! Thank vou
achievement, thank vou from the bottom of
mv
heart.
I
for vour tremendous would give vou any-
remembered Sivava Alaska and X'orkuta'J' w ept as read thev were all familiar characters, as if from mv ow n brigade. Thank vou once more! Please carry on in the same spirit w rite, w rite. Keep \\ ell, dear thing, anything. Reading your story .
.
.
I
the frosts and blizzards, the insults and humiliations. ...
I
I
.
—
friend.
Vou have
nothing can w ipe
already it
left
vour name
.
in the history
.
.
.
.
of Soviet literature, and
awaw'"
—
Perhaps all this does reflect the "Russian soul" in its emotional fulsomeness and hyperbolic expression. But it also reflects the spiritual w asteland that was Soviet literature before the appearance of Ivan Denisoi'icb, and the
enormous sense of
spiritual
and psychological
relief
induced bv reading
Solzhenitsyn's story (and reinforced by "Alatryona's Place"). In these cir-
cumstances the debate about Ivan Denisovicb took on a significance that had never attended the discussion of any work of Russian literature before, either before or since the Revolution. It w as indeed a literary struggle and a political struggle, but it was also a struggle for the hearts and souls of the Russian people.
Solzhenitsyn was inundated with such letters, which had kept coming throughout 1963 and v\hich now increased again as a result of the debate over the Lenin Prize. One consequence of his conscientious reading of them
was the unpleasant discovery
that although the
Gulag Archipelago no longer
*T\\)urt's
proachable and that
ment
issued
ruling."
The secretary took the document and read out the ing a
summary
full
contents, includ-
of Solzhenitsyn's military record, details of the charges against
him, and the Military Tribunal's judgement that there had been no case to answer and therefore no crime. Pavlov rose to his feet: "1 am defeated. I offer my apologies." But the damage had been done the prize had gone elsewhere. The slander had also proved extraordinarily effective, a fact that \\ as noted in the appropriate places and stored away for future reference.
—
28
NOT ANOTHER PASTERNAK SOLZHENiTSYN
ACCEPTED THE Lenin Prizc committee's decision philo\\ as aw are of the prize's s\'mboHc importance and the boost his victory would have given not onh to himself but also to the liberal cause as a \\ hole. In his memoir he suggests he was in two minds about it. "\\ innintj the prize would have had its advantages: it would have consolidated mv position. But there were more disadvantages. An 'established position' carried obligations to be lo\al and grateful."' Yet his presence in Moscow during the judging and his meeting with Ivardoxskv indicate that he w as keener on w inning than he would later care to admit. Certainb', the defeat of his book, and with it of T\ardovskv and Sovy Mir, did nothing to improve his chances of further publication. To get something published w as now Solzhenitsvn's chief preoccupation, and throughout the spring and earh' summer of 1964 he carried out a thorough revision of fhe First Circle to make it more palatable to the authorities. In its original form the novel had stuck with extraordinar\' hdelitv to the facts of Solzhenitsvn's imprisonment in the shcinisbka and the work he had been engaged on there, although it had telescoped events from his three years at Marfino into just over three days. The central narrative thread of the novel was the Soviet diplomat's telephone call to the American embassy to warn it of the espionage rendezvous in New York. Solzhenitsvn had begun the novel with this and then had sw itched to the sharashka (called Mavrino in the book), to the team of prisoner scientists working on voice prints and their remorsesophicalh', although he
.
.
.
—
less
search for the identity of the erring diplomat (called Innokcnti Volodin).
The
leading members of the team w ere Lev Rubin (modelled on Kopelev), Gleb Nerzhin (based on Solzhenits\n himself), and, slightly to one side,
496
Not Anothf.r Pastkrnak Dimitri Sologdin, for
I
497
I
horn the protot\ pc had been Panin. \ Olodin was in
\\
of the novel v\as shown entering Lubvanka and enduring all its humiliating reception procedures as a prelude to interrogation. The novel ended w ith the refusal of Nerzhin to continue working at the sharashka and his departure for an unknow n destination
due course
arrested,
and
in the closing chapters
the
in
the general camps.
.\round this bare framework Solzhenitsvn had constructed a noble and comprehensive narrative encompassing almost the whole of Soviet society. At its centre, and described in the greatest detail, were the imprisoned scientists, a company of volatile, highlx intelligent, and articulate intellectuals who, in their working hours, carried out the scientific tasks assigned to them (creating a walkie-talkie radio, a scrambler telephone,
but who,
in their free time, passionately
and
voice decoder)
a
debated major issues of philosophx',
politics, and moralit\ and above all the rights and w rongs of Soviet history. Iheir debate was gi\en added poignance b\ the fact that the\ were all the innocent victims of that history, and it w as broadened b\' the illustrations ,
way that history was w orking itself out in other At the lower extreme of this iinhers conceritrationnaire were the regular hard-labour camps (of the type that Ivan Denisovich inhabited, and worse). 1 hese were largely off-stage in The First Circle, though it was made clear that all the privileged scientists in the sharashka had come Solzhenitsvn offered of the
areas of Soviet society.
from that nether world and constantly risked being sent back there if the\' should slip or step out of line. It was the upper layers that concerned Solzhenitsvn now, the first circle of hell (where the scientists were) and above. In addition to the lives of the prisoners, he was able to depict those of their guards and bosses, the M\'D and personnel and the military scientists
MGB
in
charge of the prison institute
—notably Adam Roitman (based on Major
1 rachtman) and Anton Yakono\- (based on
(Colonel X'asiliev).
Solzhenitsvn was able to make connections w
ith
Through them,
the higher reaches of the
Soviet security services, the Party, and the government, the minister of state security, Victor
Ihrough some
ot the free
workers
up to and including Abakumov, and even Stalin himself.
at
the sharashka, Solzhenitsvn was also
able to trace paths to the Soviet intelligentsia and ultimately to the erring
diplomat, Volodin, and his famih', so that almost the whole of Soviet society
was connected by the for the
w hole net
In this tic
it
was
sufficient for
to be set sw a\'ing.
way Solzhenitsvn achieved
form akin
and porone strand to be jerked
silken threads of Solzhenitsvn's narrative
trayed as a single v\eb, in which
to that of
A Day
in
The First Circle
in the Life of
a
perfection of artis-
Ivan Denisovich, endow ing the
w hole of Soviet society, including the inmates of bound together in an indissoluble symbiosis, in which the society of the camps w as but a microcosm of life outside. But in The First Circle he had achieved it with infinitely more richness and diversity, and made explicit what was only implicit in Ivan Denisovich nameh", that in the
reader with a sense that the the camps, was
—
oppressive anthill of the contemporary So\iet Union, those
in the
labour
SOLZHENITSYN
[498]
camps were
freer than those allegedlv
calh', the land of
Gulag
\\
as the
and formally
only place where
a
"at liberty." Paradoxi-
Soyiet citizen had nothing
further to fear.
The principal illustration and expression of this freedom in the noyel were the debates between the prisoners, notably between Nerzhin, Rubin, and Sologdin, though many more prisoners \\ ere draw n into the discussions in the course of the narratiye. The two sides of the central issue were personRubin, the Leninist, rejecting Stalin but still ified by Rubin and Sologdin clinging to the socialist ideals of the Reyolution; and Sologdin, the Christian and militant anti-(>ommunist, asserting the prior claims of morality and personal faith. Nerzhin \yas shown as oscillating between the two (rather as Solzhenitsyn had done between Kopeley and Panin in real life), but gradually moying closer to Sologdin as his faith in Marxism and the justice of the Soyiet system was eroded. At the centre of Solzhenits\'n's fictional uniyerse were
—
moral it\' and the claims of conscience; and the "message" of insofar as
it
could be reduced to a formula, was that
man
this crucial debate,
should "belieye his
eyes and not his ears," should listen to his moral instinct and his conscience
and behaye accordingly. It \yas in line with this precept that Nerzhin vyas shovyn, at the end of the noyel, yoluntarily abandoning the sharashka, where he was inyohed in helping an immoral goyernment and embracing the dangers of banishment to Siberia. There were numerous sub-plots in the noyel. One concerned Nerzhin's relationship w ith his vyife Nadia (modelled on Natalia), who was studying at Moscow Uniyersity and dared not reyeal that she w as married or where her husband w as Hying. Another told the story of Nerzhin's innocent romance lieutenant at the sharashka called Simochka, w hile still others with an described relationships between the prisoners and their wiyes, or between prisoners and some of the \yomen who worked in the institute. Innokenti Volodin's family relationships occupied a significant place in the narratiye, and in one part of the noyel, Solzhenitsyn entered into Stalin's mind and attempted to offer a psychological portrait of the tyrant from inside. The noyel was also filled w ith stories and anecdotes, including a spoof reworking of the medieyal Russian epic The Lay of the Host of Igor, in the form of a Soyiet-type trial of Prince Igor for treason, and a satirical account of a mythical yisit to Butyrki Prison by Mrs Rooseyelt, for w hich some show cells are prepared and the prisoners issued w ith special clothing and luxuries tor the
MGB
"^
duration of her
yisit.
The problem
that Solzhenits\ n faced in his reyision
the noyel less controyersial politically and
One
vyay
was
more
to cut certain chapters altogether
a satirical analysis of dialectical materialism,
(called
w
how
as
to
make
acceptable to the censorship.
—
for instance,
one on Lenin,
one about the need
for resistance
"The Word Will Smash Concrete")! and two shovying
Innokenti's
centurv, the Lay is the onh Russian work of medieval times to known to e\er\' Russian schoolchild. tThis chapter was renamed "On the Back Stairs" w hen the novel was restored to its full length
*
Probably written
have become
in the twelfth
a classic
of ninetv-six chapters.
and
is
Not Another Pasternak gradual conversion from Soviet orthodoxy to
Elsewhere he cut scenes and
distrust.
lines
[499]
a position
of scepticism and
and dropped some of
his sharper
statements.
1
his
still left
many
things requiring change, and of these the most fun-
damental concerned the nature of Innokenti X'olodin's telephone
call at
the
beginning of the book. In his original version, Solzhenitsvn had stuck to the
was obvious that this \ersion could its morbid sensitivity towards all things military and connected with security, the Soviet censorship would never have permitted it. Indeed, he would have courted arrest by submitting it for publication in the first place. Solzhenitsvn therefore changed the subject of the conversation to a warning to a w ell-know n Soviet doctor not to hand over some medicine to a Western colleague on his next trip abroad, since the gift would be used against him and he could be arrested.* From the point of view of the plot, the substitution was very neat and true stor\" of the atomic secrets, but
never be printed
allowed the novel to preserve respects
it
the Soviet Union. With
in
were rather
consequences
in other
far-reaching. In terms of the moral debate about
w hether
its
original shape, but
its
or not the prisoners should agree to help the government, effect: the
handing over of medicine
to a foreign doctor
it had a tri\ ializing and the betra\al of
the dangers involved to the Soviet doctor concerned could hardly be
pared w
ith
trading in atomic secrets and with the betra\al of
a
com-
Soviet agent
The truth was infiniteh' more dramatic than the ficand Solzhenitsyn has several times lamented the necessity of making the change. Yet in some respects the change was for the better. In the question of espionage and the acquisition of militar\- secrets, the beha\ iour of the Soviet government w as not essentialh' at variance w ith the practice of other governments. It is far less easy to condemn such behaviour as embassy.
to a foreign
tional substitute,
morally reprehensible than
hounds and persecutes for
its
it is
to despise the actions of a
citizens simply for contacts
w
government
ith foreigners
humanitarian purposes, such as the sharing of medicine. Both
that
—even
t\
pes of
were going on, and both involved the active participation of the securit\" services, but the medical theme show s clearer evidence of moral baseness than espionage does. Furthermore, although Solzhenits\n and man\- dissidents were eventualh' to reach a point w here the\- would w hole-heartedl\oppose and condemn the acquisition b\- the Soviet state of anv more pow erful w eapons whatever, there were few Soviet citizens if anv not already activity
—
behind bars,
who
could have reached that conclusion
—
b\-
1949,
when
the
Even in 1964, most people would still have pureh fictional terms, therefore, the new (fic-
action of the no\el takes place.
been equivocal about tional)
it.
In
motivation w orked better than the old (true) one.
The
relationship
between
tant in another respect.
The
real life
and fantasy
no\el was, after
all,
in the no\ el
based on
real
w
as
impor-
people
in a
Man\' of the characters' prototypes knew of Solzheof them, and some, like Kopelev, Panin, and Sem\onov,
real place at a real time.
nitsyn's fictionalization * Solzhenitsvn
had the background of the "doctors' plot"
of the telephone
call.
in
mind w hen he
altered the character
SOLZHENITSYN
[500]
had helped Solzhenitsvn with some ot the scenes. Most approved of what he had done or simply shrugged their shoulders and gave him carte blanche, but what would Kopelev make of his fictional double's new motivation? It was perfectly plausible, and in the circumstances of the labour camps the prisoners would have had very little choice anyway. The fictional Lev Rubin (whatever Kopelev in real life might have done) would have had little difficulty in rationalizing
Party, after fiction. It
all,
away any
ethical objections that sprang to
mind.
The
And
fiction
was
could never be that wrong.
w as understood
that novels
had
to
obey
in
their
any case,
own
laws and couldn't
be tied too tighth' to the real-life events that inspired them. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn felt constrained to show a copy of the version to Kopelev, it
and
a further
of objections,
who w ith
day discussing
w hich Kopelev
his wife, Raisa Orlova, spent it
with Solzhenitsyn.
later
summarized
new
two days reading
They both had
a
number
in a long letter to Solzheni-
s on the novel as a whole. "Muster your patience," and then may heaven guide you." The most interesting point in the letter seems to have been Kopelev's division of the novel into two layers: what Solzhenitsyn had seen and depicted from nature and what he had imagined (i.e., life in the sharashka and life outside). According to Kopelev, the scenes in which Solzhenitsyn had written out of his own experience were immeasurably stronger than the rest, and this led to an "inner duality" in the novel, weakening its total impact, for he found it difficult to believe in "those homunculi w ho perforce are conceived in new spapcr and
tsyn, setting out his view
he wrote, "read
it,
archival test-tubes.
The
"-
mind appear
scenes Kopelev had in
to have
been those describing
Soviet "high society" and the intelligentsia. Kopelev had a right to criticize
because he knew them
than Solzhenits\n (indeed was
far better
a
member
of
them) and understood how they worked. While he may have taken umbrage at the fact that
Solzhenitsyn had
caricatured them,
it
was
made fun
also true that
of the xVIoscow intellectuals and
some of Solzhenitsyn's
simplifications
sprang from ignorance of his subject matter. Another irritating feature ot Solzhenitsyn's novel, from Kopelev's point of view
with which he pronounced his xerdict on these
was the self-confidence
,
circles, leading
imbued w
protest in his letter that Solzhenitsyn appeared to be
ous certainty that he held felt
that Solzhenitsyn
"all
Kopelev to
ith a
danger-
the truths in the hollow of his hand." Kopelev
had strayed out of
his
depth and that certain parts of
the book had suffered as a result.
Kopelev's criticism holds additional interest in that
it
offers a kind of
commentar\' on the book's central motif of believing one's eyes and not one's ears. On one level Solzhenitsvn persuades the reader that he should believe the misery, poverty, and corruption he sees all around him and not fine words and promises about the radiant future that lies just around the corner. In the book it was Rubin, Kopelev's fictional double, who w as most subject to this roseate delusion,
Kopelev's tsyn's
and Rubin's character more or now Kopelev was in
at that period. \ et
own maxim
less
a
faithfully reflected
way
turning Solzheni-
against him. In attempting to describe people and aspects
Not Another Pasternak
[501]
of societ\' that he did not know and had not seen, said kopelev, Solzhenitsxn
was being
false to the truth,
and
in these
passages his narrative lacked \eri-
similitude.
Kopelex's reproach w as to become zhenitsvn's fiction in later \ears and
made (though
there had been
Much
commonplace of
criticism of Sol-
recorded instance of
murmurs about
his portraxal of the
intellectual Isezar Ahirkox ich in .4 earlier).
a
first
is
Day
the
in the Life of Ivan Denisovicb
its
being
Moscow someu hat
debate has taken place over the perceived disparit\' in Solzhe-
works between the autobiographicallv grounded passages and those were entireh' imagined. Solzhenits\n acknow ledged the gravit\- of the charge in his letter ot replv and rejected it as too sweeping. "It is not for me to judge," he w rote, "but I would be a dead duck if I were to believe that cannot w rite out ot my imagination, for one cannot see evervthing for oneself." He was also able to point out that Kopelev had underestimated Ivan have been an oaf if Denisovich and "Matrxona's Place": "Wouldn't had listened to vour advice on both occasions? Therefore \ou cannot ask me to accept vour tastes without convincing proof."' It was a good point but did not necessarilv invalidate Kopelev's criticism on this occasion. 1 he success ot Ivan Denisovich and the short stories (w ith the exception of "For the Good of the Cause") was undoubtedly due to their having been nitsxn's
that
I
I
firmh' rooted in autobiographical
I
manv
realit\', just as
of the best scenes in
The First Circle deri\ed their power from the same source. But there were
manv
striking scenes, characters,
and episodes w
ith
no autobiographical
basis,
and not even the scenes depicting Stalin, later to be much criticized, w ere as weak as some ha\e alleged.* It is true, howe\er, that Solzhenits\n did seem to
need
a firm
autobiographical substratum from
take off and that his
remained
in close
own
touch w
it
—or could draw on w hen the other characters — w tended and
ith that
author projected himself into
become
hich his imagination could
\\
particular brand of realism flourished so long as
substratum
it
l)ut
to
ither
w hen too far removed from personal experience. It would appear from Reshetovska\ a's account of this exchange that Kopelev also commented unfavourably on the interrogation chapters, but how exactly is unclear. Admitting that others had made a similar criticism, Solzhenitsvn promised to give the matter some thought and also said he w ould do everything in his power, w ithin the limits posed by the form of the novel, to mitigate the negative effects on the character of Rubin of the change of artificial
plot.
Three years *.According to
w hen the novel w as
later,
one source,
circulating in samizdat, Solzhe-
\'ictor Ilvin, then secretary of the
Moscow branch
of the Writers'
KGB), once asked Solzhenitsvn, atter reading The First Circle, uhether Solzhenitsvn had ever met the former minister for state security X'ictor Abakumov, for the portrait of him in the novel was "very, very accurate." It appears that Union (and reputed
to
be
Solzhenitsvn had gathered
a
a lot
responsible for interrogating
connection w
Heutenant-general in the
of information from the prosecutor D. Terekhov,
Abakumov
ith the "doctors' plot"). Incidentallv,
stov in terms similar to those used by the critics of Solzhenitsyn, saying that error to introduce the figure of
Napoleon
who was
(Abakumov had been arrested in Chekhov, among others, had criticized Fol-
after Stalin's death
into
War and Peace.
it
had been
a
major
SOLZHENITSYN
[502]
nitsvn sent Kopelev a letter in
\\
hich he referred to these earlier discussions
"As you know," he wrote, "there were weighty reasons why I couldn't give an accurate description of what actually happened. At the same time I was determined to preserve the central theme: that an excellent man with ideal convictions needs no practical criteria of good and evil, since he is sufficiently guided by his convictions." He had been in a hurry at the time, he wrote, and that w as w hy he had picked up the typical theme (for the period described) of "giving away medical secrets." But he had not foreseen \\ hat unpleasant consequences there would be for Kopelev, when read"I must say I had never expected such a ers took the novel too literall\ primiti\e approach from literary men. To think that the literary public, which has more experience than most of the relationship between a prototype and invention, should insist so obstinately on confusing a prototype with a fictional character, and a plot with the true course of events. I hope, nevertheless, that this refers only to a tiny minority and that it won't be generally read that way." Solzhenitsyn wrote that he had had similar discussions with other prototypes in the novel but that it was less of a problem for them, since they were not known in the literary world. Kopelev should regard this as a "letter of rehabilitation" and show it to anyone who, after reading the novel, might refuse to shake his hand."^ about the
plot.
.
Not
everything, in
had been plain
fact,
sailing
with the other proto-
types. Sologdin in the novel allow ed his decoding device to be burnt, just as
Panin had done
w
ith
in real life,
but
w hereas Panin had
also refused to co-operate
the authorities, had gone off to Elkibastuz rather than co-operate (and
had played no small fictional
role in
persuading Solzhenitsyn to do the same), the
Sologdin destroyed the design only as
a tactical
the details in his head in order to bargain with Colonel
measure and kept
Yakonov
Moreover, Sologdin stayed in the sharasbkci, leaving Nerzhin whereas Panin had done the opposite. There
is
no evidence that Panin w
his biograph\- at the time.
On
as
unduly upset by
to
for a reward.
go off alone,
this alteration in
the contrary, he took an active part in helping
Solzhenitsyn modify his fictional double in order to make him more accept-
more outspoken and more was possible to admit even fifteen years later. Panin w illinglv helped Solzhenitsyn invent new dialogue and new arguments to put into Sologdin's mouth, and he seems to have been flattered to be asked to do so. But he w as also guided, it appears, by a certain vanity, w hich manifested itself in a desire to see himself portrayed in a flattering light. And in later years, when he came to write his own memoirs, he expressed the hope that in revising The First Circle vet again, w hich he knew Solzhenits\n to be doing, Solzhenitsyn would bring his fictional counterpart closer to reality. "I hope that w hen it is published, Sologdin w ill be rehabilitated by the author and transformed from a lady's man and a careerist into something more worthy of, and nearer to, his living prototxpe.'"" At last the revision was finished. The novel was reduced from ninetyable to the censors, for the real-life Panin had been
openly anti-Communist
in
1949 than
it
Not Another Pasternak cightv-scvcn chapters
six to
w
(this
as the \crsion that
world and be translated into foreign languages), and
was softened. What remained was
material
dards, with tutes,
its
still
of Stalin. Vet there w as
With
a
small chance that
it
first
had
at
round the
politicalK' sensitixe
controversial by Soxiet stan-
its
daringh" hostile depiction
would jump the hurdles stand-
it.
his usual
thoroughness and his
person to see
it
"ofhciallx"
once perceived the
literarx-
for planning, Solzhenitsyn set
flair
about preparing the ground. For some time the
as to traxel
its
between prisoners and guards,
vivid account of the hostile relations
ing in front ot
w
detailed description of one of the hitherto-secret prison insti-
its
bleak picture of Soviet societx at large, and
its
l5ircumstanees t\ung
and circumstances had kept them apart, and
And
in the
mother had not been just an adjunct appeared to him she x\ as a w orld in herself."* his
them
end parted them
to his father, as she
together, for
good.
had alx\ays
—
1
his appears to
Solzhenitsyn xxas
been on one of
be
first
directlx'
shown
autobiographical, though
his
mother's
letters
his early visits to Georgievsk, for
in the version of 7'be First Circle that
w as shoxxn
Solzhenitsyn goes on to describe batches of
it is
not clear xxhen
and diaries. It must have the above passage appears
to Ivarciovskx'. letters tied
up
x\
ith
coloured
ribbon, bundles of theatre programmes, old newspapers, photographs, note-
books, magazines,
all
miliar to Innokenti
of them breathing an atmosphere that was totallx unfaand that he had formerly disdained. In his mother's
handxvriting he finds reminiscences of her xxent straight to his heart, of a xxhite
mother,
as
ried a\x ay,
an enthusiastic teen-age all
girl,
life as a
student.
June night xxent
x\
in
"One
description
Petersburg xxhen his
ith a croxx
ti,
all
equally car-
Moscow Art Theatre troupe at comments, "A breath of that jov
crying for jov, as thev met the
And Solzhenitsyn He knexx of no such theatre company
Petersburg Station."
touched Innokenti.
today, and
if
there
SOLZHENITSYN
[520]
w
—
he could think of no one staving up
all night to meet it except tor Department with bouquets ordered on expenses. Certainlv no one would weep for jov on such an occasion."' The key element in this passage is Innokenti's discovers of his mother's jottings on "ethical considerations," in w hich she praises such old-fashioned concepts as compassion and tolerance, and he is particularlv struck bv one formulation: "\\ hat is the most precious thing in the world? It seems to be
as one,
representatives ot the Cultural
the consciousness of not participating in injustice. Injustice
you
are,
always was and
it
alwaxs will be, but
it
let it
stronger than
is
not be committed
through you." There are similar passages on "Truth, Goodness, and Beautv" w ith capital letters), and Innokenti realizes that "six vears ago, he w ould not have noticed" these passages.
(all
At the end of
it all,
he comes to another realization (omitted from the
version show n to Tvardovskv).
These vellow ing pages confronted him w
ith
the abounding varietv of conflicting
currents and ideas, the imaginative freedom and anxious forchotiing that w as the
Russia of the 191{)s
been taught
—the
in school
pre-revolutionarv decade, which Innokenti had
last
and college
to regard as the
most rotten and shameful
the entire historv of Russia, so pitiful that had the Bolsheviks not extended
helping hand, Russia would simpl\- have crumbled from within and collapsed
in a
in
ruins.
Yes,
it
had been
a
part too helpless. But
much w
Innokenti realized that up
The
too garrulous decade, in part too self-confident, in
hat a crop of
fresh idea that he
till
now had of
idea of pre-revolutionary Russia. idea that riage,
new
makes perfect sense
in
And
risen
his
what
a sprouting of ideas!
robbed.''
mother was inseparable from
his
Solzhenitsvn links this with another
terms of the novel and of Innokenti's mar-
but that also contains more than
had prevailed:
shoots,
now he had been
a grain
of autobiographv: "His mother
from the grave, she took her son aw
a\
from her daugh-
ter-in-law."
From father
this part of the past,
Zakhar and
tsvn paid a
it
was but
his familv. In 1964,
visit to his
a short step farther
during
back to Grand-
a trip to the south,
Solzheni-
grandfather's old estate near Armavir. Zakhar's
man-
and neglected but still sturdy, was now occupied h\ a collective farm. Solzhenitsvn had no difficultv in entering and w alking around and w as quickh- able to identifv the former dining- and draw ing-rooms, the various bedrooms, and other parts that he had heard described or seen in photographs. Afterw ards he prow led the gardens and was impressed to see that Zakhar's original lavout had remained more or less unchanged, with its orchard, avenues of poplar and plane trees, kitchen garden, rose garden, and so on. Evervthing was overgrown and terribh' neglected now but the principal features had proved surprisinglv durable. Solzhenitsvn hung around for the best part of a day, taking notes and writing down his impressions. He would dearh' have liked to question some sion, dilapidated
,
K.NTER THK K( B i
of the old
men
know n /akhar
much
lie
antl
I
Manx
saw working on the farm.
eould doubtless ha\e given him
5 ^
'
I
them would ha\e
ot
\ i\ itl
descriptions and
\alual)le information. But he dared not, for fear ot re\ealing his iden-
The shade of his grandfather did, however, materialize at one point his w anderings. W hile contemplating the empty reservoir, which had once su})[)lied the house and gardens w ith piped w ater and w hich he remembered ha\ ing seen brim full in some photographs, he caught sight of a pair of small l)o\s pla\ ing nearl)\ "\\'h\ is the reservoir dry?" he asked. Ihey told him that "old Shcherbak had put a spell on it." Sol/.henitsyn asked them w ho Shcherbak w as, and the bo\s explained that he had once owned the place but that w hen it w as expropriated during the Revolution, he had put a curse on it, so that the w ater wouldn't flow any more.** For more information about Shcherbak and his life, Solzhenitsyn had to turn to .\unt Irina in (Jeorgievsk, whose earlier tales he remembered from his childhood. lie asked her to write her memoirs for him, since she was virtualK the tmh one ali\e who could remember it all. Aunt Maria, his mother's tity.
during
.
sister,
might
Irina's
education and intelligence.
also ha\e l)een able to provide
Nor
some information, but she lacked
did she hold the same fascination for
SolzhenitSN n that Irina did, for he was as anxious to hear about her
life as
he
was about Shcherbak's. Sol/.henitsvn's reunion
w
ith
w
ith his
aunt and the relationship he established
her also appear to ha\e been fictionalized in the
version of The First
full,
ninet\ -six-chapter
where Innokenti, after scrutinizing his mother's an impulse to call on an elderly uncle and learn still
('/uxle,
suddenb feels more about the past. He
papers,
finds his uncle living in a crooked
little
wooden
between the w alls of houses, so that no trees or gardens are to be seen. The door, w ith fretted panels, leans at a crazv angle and Innokenti is unable to obtain any ho\el, one store\- high, in a cobbled street that runs directly
answer to his knocks or to gain entrance through a tiny gate leading into the yard. The street seems emptv, until he catches sight of an old man approaching slowh', carrx'ing two full buckets of w ater. The old man is skinn\-, has one shoulder higher than the other, and is concentrating so hard on his task that he pa\s no attention to Innokenti. The latter, however, recognizes the
man
as his uncle and thev embrace. The uncle ushers Innokenti into the entrance passage of his tiny house and hrmh' bolts the door. Innokenti finds himself in an interior like none he
old
has ever seen before.
The short passage had betw een the rooms, ing,
a
low
ceiling, a
two cupboards, and two
gate,
w
ith
all
microscopic w indow looking out onto the
regular doors.
the doors
w
ere askew
old-fashioned patterned carving.
the air inside
w as heavv and
stale, for
the
.
it
.
.
some
To go
obliged to bend your head and also to keep the ceiling. There were three tinv rooms,
,
And lined
in all the
w
ith felt,
rooms, and others fold-
through any of them, you were
clear of the
lamps hanging from
w ith w indow s facing the street, and double w indow s had been stuffed w ith all
cotton wool, tinv glasses, and coloured paper, so that only the ventilation panes
SOLZHENITSYN
[522]
could be opened, but even these had strips of shredded nev\ spaper hanging in
them: their constant trembhng
in the
draught frightened the
flies
Innokenti's sense of the grinding poverty of his uncle
the uncle's clothing: his shirt
is
unmentionable, his jacket
is
aw
ay.*^
reinforced
by
in rags, his trousers
held together only by patches, his boots a cobbler's nightmare. Innokenti
is
He
had come with the idea of staying the night, but his impulse now is to leave as quickly as possible. Gradually, however, as his uncle lovingly shows him round the house and small court-yard garden, Innokenti w arms to his uncle's dignified acceptance of his lot, to his sharp intelligence, and to his sly humour. For his uncle is not oblivious to his poverty; he comments wittily on it and can see himself from the outside. More importantly, he proves to be a perceptive critic of the life he observes around him, and as their intimacy grows, Innokenti learns of his uncle's actixe hostility towards Ixnin and Stalin and his conviction that Soviet power is both alien and illegitimate. He has remained faithful, in other words, to the beliefs and values he held before the Revolution. Throughout this chapter the fictional demands of the narrative have to be met, and it would be excessive to identify the characters of Innokenti and his uncle w ith those of Solzhenitsyn and his aunt in every detail. Ihat the physical appearances and living conditions of the fictional uncle and real aunt do more or less coincide, how ever, was later confirmed by a photograph of Irina at her gate that appeared in Stem magazine in 1974, and there are reasonable grounds for believing that the psychological understanding between uncle and nephew reproduces fairly accurately that which grew up between the real-life nephew and his aunt. There remained the figure of Solzhenitsyn's father, about w hom least of all was known. Again we find echoes in the life of Innokenti. 'innokenti didn't remember his father but those around him never tired of telling the son about him. Innokenti was used to feeling very proud of him.""' There was little Solzhenitsyn could do to fill the void, however. He remembered his mother's stories, but there was hardly anyone alive w ho had known his father. Solzhenitsyn would have to re-create him, and R-17 would be in depressed and repelled.
.
.
.
.
.
.
part the realization of this aim.
The peace and quiet of Rozhdestvo was a godsend. He could write all day and every day if he w anted, and yet he was w ithin an hour and a half of Moscow if he needed to go there. And in the summer of 1965 he went there quite often, sleeping at the Steins if the need arose to stay on. In August he and Natalia went to central Russia on a camping holiday, on w hich they were joined by Dr Zubov, who had come up from the Crimea specially for the occasion.
They
gathered
in the Steins' flat to
make
the final preparations,
and on the evening before their departure the leushes dropped in for a drink and a chat, accompanied by two young friends of theirs: Ilya Zilberberg, an engineer and anthroposophist disciple of I eush's, and his w ife, Ellya. i he appearance of comparative strangers in the flat on social occasions was com-
—
'
P^
mon enough
in
N T F. R
to
K( B
K
i
I
those davs. Solzhenitsx n was such
matic figure that people were eager
enough
H
1
know someone
a
5 - 3
I
mysterious and enig-
him, and those luck\themseKes ot the chance. presence in good part, and con\ersa-
just to take a look at
in his circle otten a\ ailed
Sol/henitsyn seems to ha\e taken their
w hether there could he a return to the The general opinion was that there couldn't. Despite some ominous signs since Khrushchev's departure, it w as felt that liberalization had gone too tar, and authorities like Nadezhda Mandelstam were quoted as believing in the impossibility of a tion re\()l\ed aroiuid the cjucstion of
past (meaning a return to Stalinism) in Soviet society.
reversal.
On
another topic, Solzhenits\ n
nineteenth-centurv thinker
(-]uoted the case ot
who had encoded
his
(>haadaye\
."^
the
manuscripts and hidden
them sheet bv sheet in different books in his library. Only in Soviet times, one hundred years later, had the\- been discovered and decoded, and they had been prepared for publication, but publication had then been banned because of the manuscripts' "reactionarx content." This curious incident had obviously made an impression on Solzhenitsyn and he later cited it in the opening pages of The Oak and the Calf. The evening broke up relatively early because the Solzhenitsyns w anted prepare for their departure the follow ing da\-. It w as then that Solzhenito '
tsyn seems to have
shown some curiosity about the tw o strangers in their remembered seeing Solzhenitsyn and Teush con-
midst. Ilva Zilberberg later
deduced that by Teush seems to
ferring in a corner and looking in his direction, from w hich he
he was the subject of their
discussion.
have been satisfactory, however, for Zilberberg to help
him
fit
a
Whatever was
said
few minutes later Solzhenitsyn in\ ited
the roof-rack onto his
little
Moskvich, and they
chatted about motoring matters before amicably parting.'It is not know n w here the Solzhenitsyns spent their camping holida\" it
may have been
in the
Tambov
region,
w hich Solzhenitsyn w
as
studying
for the purposes of The Gulag Archipelago and his proposed noxel about the
Revolution. But w hile they were awa\-, there were some ominous developments in the political world. An important ideological conference took place to discuss Party policy.
According
to Solzhenitsyn,
it
was dominated by
KGB, who
in
new Party-state control committee
to
Alexander ("Iron Shurik") Shelepin, a former chairman of the 1963 had been appointed chief of
a
enforce ideological orthodoxy. Shelepin role in
the overthrow of Khrushchev
and
have retained close links w
to
is
thought to ha\e played
a
major
had appointed him) through the appointment of
(althcKigh the latter
ith the
KGB
his friend Vladimir Semichastny as his successor. At all events, his promotion to full membership in the Presidium in 1964 had been w idely regarded as a reward for his and the KGB's services during the coup. At the August conference Shelepin is said to have been a leading advo-
who underwent a conversion to mystical Christianwere harshly critical of Russian history and Russian society. When the first letter was published, in 1836, Chaadayev was declared insane and placed under medical supervision. Most of his writings were not published in his lifetime.
*Piotr Chaadavev was a friend of Pushkin's it\-
and w hose
Philosophical Letters
SOLZHENITSYN
[524]
cate of closer ideological control. Coexistence with the
on
West should not
take
overtones or implv the "ideological disarmament" of the Soviet
pacifist
people, but should be accompanied bv a sharpening of the struggle in the
of ideas. De-Stalinization w as sapping the people's w
field
and
halted,
w as time
it
ill
and should be "enemies of
to resurrect Stalin's "useful"' concept of
seems, was paid to cultural matters. had been sound and should be revived.* Novy Mir should be investigated and prevented from giving so much comfort to the bourgeois enemv. There w ere even rumours that the KGB had called for the arrest of "a thousand intellectuals" as a precautionar\" measure, but this w as probablv a later reaction to the events that followed. Solzhenitsyn heard about these things upon his return from holidav. They reinforced the fears that had never been far from his mind since the fall of Khrushchev, and his first thought was for his novel with Novy Mir. Its chances of being published now seemed more remote than ever. Tvardovsky's enthusiasm remained high, but the position of the magazine w as too precarious for him to take any major risks at the moment, and he lacked the connections in high places that he had possessed under Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn had heard on the grape-vine that he, Solzhenitsyn, had also been critthe people." Particular attention,
Zhdanov's 1946 decrees on
it
literature
icized at the ideological conference for "distorting the true picture of the
labour camps."
He
felt
exposed and vulnerable, especiallv because the pages
of The Gulag Archipelago were lying on his desk, and he decided that the safest
course would be to forget First Circle
On
ideas of publication for the
moment and
get The
6 September 1965 he went to see Tvardovskv at his dacha in Pakhra
to ask
w hether he could
and w
as in
made
his request,
an
take the novel awav. Tvardovskv had been drinking
frame of mind, so that when Solzhenitsvn 1 vardovsk\" on the raw and trigger off reproached Solzhenitsvn, not for the first time, for
irritable, obstinate
other resentments.
having
all
back from \ovy Mir.
it
seemed
He
to catch
in samizdat and thus reach the West. This was a particularly sore point w ith Tvardovskv, for that spring he had been summoned to see Polikarpov at the ideological section of the Central Committee, confronted with a copv of Grani, and asked to explain the stories' appearance there. In the eves of the authorities, the interest of an openh let his
miniature stories circulate
anti-Soviet journal in the v\'ork of an\ Soviet author
was
at best politically unreliable,
and
at
w as proof that
that author
worst activelv collaborating with the
Soviet Union's enemies. Tvardovsky had told Polikarpov that
it
was incon-
ceivable that Solzhenitsyn had had anything to do w ith their publication,
and that in any case "most of the stories" were not his w ork. But since then he had learned that the Soviet w omen's magazine Semya i shkola (Familv and School) had actually set them up in type and was planning to publish them, with Solzhenitsyn's active help and connivance. Such a step w as out of the
—presumablv Semya
question for works that had alreadx' appeared in the West
*See note
p. 403.
FNTF R
THK
K( B i
[
5 2 5
1
and Solzhcnitsyn was deceiving them on this point. Tvardovsky himself \\ ould be exposed as having lied to Polikarpov, and all this for stories that he genuine!) believed to be second-rate. Solzhenitsvn could at least have told him about the negotiations w ith Semya i shkola. "I put mv head on the block for \ ou, and what i
know
shkola didn't
But worse
still v\
this
as the prospect that
do vou do?"'' Tvardo\sk\ also had harsh words to sav ab(Hit Sol/.henits\n's beard. There w ere rumours, he said, that Solzhenitsvn had grow n it so that if he wanted to slip across the frontier, he could sha\c it off again and cross unrecognized.
Me
revealed that at a meeting he had attended in Novosibirsk a
w ritten question had been handed in asking w hether it w as true that Solzhenitsvn had once worked for the Ciestapo, and that Polikarpox had \irtuallv accused Solzhenitsvn of handing Grani his stories himselt.
Given Tvardovskv's aggrieved and petulant tone and the strained atmosphere of the meeting, these snippets of information emerged as accusations rather than as the warnings the\- were presumablv meant to be, and it was Solzhenitsvn's turn to take umbrage. He was not the sort of man to forgive a slight, and although the camps had succeeded in mellow ing him for a while, his attitude to those w ho w ere not close personal friends had not reall\- changed verv much. Tvardovskv's words hurt, and he carefullv noted them dow n for the book of memoirs he was planning to write (he had been taking notes since the day of his first editorial conference at Novy Mir, but it w as only recently that the idea had begun to form in his mind of putting them into a book). Apart from feeling resentful, he remembered the notorious recent confiscation b\' the KGB of X'asilv Grossman's novel Life and Fate^ and w as genuinely apprehensive that the same might happen to him. In explaining the matter to Tvardovskx', he bungled it, however, and instead of being honest told a schoolboy fib about
w ishing
to "correct the
grammar." Tvardovskv was incredulous, and even more so when Solzhenitsvn at last explained his true motive. There was nothing wrong with the Novy Mir safe, he said, and refused to let the novel go. Then he asked that just one of the four fair copies be left at Sovy Mir, which had, after all, signed a contract to publish it and paid Solzhenitsvn an advance. The book was rightfully theirs. But Solzhenitsvn w as adamant, and his iron w ill easily prevailed over Tvardovskv's. The follow ing dav he w ent to the Sovy Mir offices and removed all four copies in a suitcase brought specially for the purpose. He took the suitcase to the Teushes, who had just returned from their summer holidav, and left it there w ith three copies inside. A fourth w as delivered to the literarv critic Yuri Kariakin, at Pravda. For some reason, although he no longer trusted Tvardovsky or Novy Mir to keep his manuscript safe, Solzhcnitsyn still had faith in the ultra-orthodox Pravda and w as still hopeful that the newspaper's mildly liberal editor, Alexei Rumyantsev, w ould publish one or tw o chapters as he had promised. '"^
*See note
p. 412.
'
SOLZHENITSYN
[526]
With these
deliveries safely accomplished,
Solzhenitsvn returned to
Rozhdestvo in a much more relaxed state of mind. The date was 8 September. Four clavs later, on 12 September, X'eronica Stein arrixed in a state of great agitation, bearing two items of bad new s. 1 he preceding evening the KGB had raided the Teushes' flat and carried off all three copies of The First Circle. Three days prior to that, on the ver\- day Solzhenitss n had returned to Rozhdestvo, the KCiB had arrested the literar\' critic Andrei Sinyavsky, for smuggling stories to the \\ est. Solzhenitsxn w as petrified by this new s. According to Veronica, all the colour drained from his face, leaving it an ashen gre\', and he w as momentaril\' speechless." He thought at first that he must have walked into a trap, and he bitterly regretted having removed the novel from Novy Mir. Sureh' it gave as much cause for his arrest as the works Sinyavsky had sent to the West. What was the meaning of it all.^ As at the time of Khrushchev's overthrow his feelings were akin to panic. He w ondered w hether the police were looking for him, and whether perhaps thev had already been to his flat in Ryazan and searched it. Perhaps they w ere on his track at that \ er\' moment? It was late afternoon. Throwing all his manuscripts and some clothing into the car, he decided to set off for IvardovskN's. Despite the fact that they had only just quarrelled and that he had ignored Tvardovsky's ad\ice in removing the novel, he felt that Tvardovsky was the only person w ho could advise him. But before leaving he had the presence of mind to have his photograph taken, so that his miser\- might be registered for posterity.'*^* Solzhenitsvn dro\e to 7 vardovsky's by a circuitous route, so as to avoid entering Moscow He ran out of petrol about a mile short of his destination and had to w alk the last bit of the wa\', carrying a jerr\'can in his hand. T\ardovsky reacted to the new s of the novel's confiscation w ith admirable calm. Cione was the petulance and chagrin of the preceding week; in its place were sincere distress and a grave determination to sort the matter out. After prolonged thought he decided that the best course would be for him to approach Demichev the next morning. Then he changed his mind and suggested that Solzhenits\n w rite Demichev a letter. They sat down to draft it together, but disagreed over the wording. Solzhenitsxn w as for a strong protest and wanted to refer to the novel's "illegal" removal, but IvardoNsky was more cautious. Who knew w hat w as legal and illegal when the security service was involved? He insisted that the tone of the letter be kept mild and respectful. After yer\' little sleep that night, Solzhenitsvn dnne into Moscow where he w as greeted by new s of fresh calamities. Only the day before, a second w riter, the little-know n Yuli Daniel, had been arrested by the KGB. More to the point, it turned out that at the time w hen Ihe First Circle was confiscated, the KGB had also found and taken the archive that Solzhenitsvn had ,
.
,
deposited w
only
earl\-
ith
Teush
tv\o
and half \ears ago.
fhis archive contained not
versions of Ivan Denisovicb, "Matr\'ona's Place," Fhe Republic of
*The photograph
appears in Solzhenitsyn:
A
Pictorial Record, p. 60.
Enter THH KCiB
[527]
Labour, and so on, none of which was very important, but also copies ol his early camp verses and his verse play. Feast of the Conquerors, one of his most
very few intimates had ever seen the play, and he had never attempted to "lighten" it for publication. It was too inflammatory, too damning. And now it was in the hands Tif the KGB.'** "anti-Soviet" works.
It
over.
Only
looked to him as
if
a
his brief
but glorious literary career was already
—
30
THE TURNING-POINT THE
KGB RAID and the confiscation of
and archive constituted
his novel
the most serious blow to strike Solzhenitsvn since his cancer of twelve
years beforehand. According to his later assessment, he
felt
it
worse even
than his arrest eight vears before that.
The
catastrophe of September 1965 w as the greatest misfortune in
seven years. ¥or some months \\
ound
that
—
w ound
right
.
.
of
some
line or other
though
were
it
through the breast,
The
could not be pulled out.
it
memory pain.
a )a\ elin
felt as
I
from
\\
a real,
ith
mv
fortv-
the tip so firmlv lodged
slightest stirring within
mv impounded
all
unhealing phvsical
me
(perhaps the
archive) caused a stab of
.
Throughout this period I felt a constriction in mv chest. There was a sickening tug somewhere near my solar plexus, and I could not decide whether it was a spiritual sickness or a foreboding of some new grief. Ihere w as an unbearable burning sensation w ithin me. w as on tire, and nothing helped. Mv throat was always dry. I felt a tension that nothing would relax. You seek salvation in sleep (as you once did in prison): let me sleep and sleep and never get up again! Switch oft and dream untroubled dreams! But w ithin a few hours the shutter of the soul falls away and a red-hot drill whirls vou back to realitv. Everv dav vou must I
tind in yourself the will to put
one foot
in front
of the other, to study, to work,
and must do these things, although in reality vour mind wanders every five minutes: Whv bother, what does it matter now ? In your daily life you seem to be acting a part. You know that in realitv it's all gone pfft. It is as though the world's clock had stopped. Thoughts of suicide to pretend that the soul can
.
for the first time and,
How
I
hope, the
them again
in
volume
.
last.'
serious these thoughts of suicide
referred to
.
2
of
71x'
528
were
is
not certain. Solzhenitsvn
Gulag Archipelago, but from there
TUF
c(]uallv clear that the itica ot suicide
is
it
ts\n\s l)asicall\- sanguine in
TURNIN(;-P()INT
1965, he writes, "I
w oukl
circiniistances
ion that "a suicide
w ho has
is
1
[5-9]
was realK
t|uite
ahen to Sol/heni-
and optimistic tennx-ranient. Apart from
that period
was conxinced throughout m\- lite that never in anv contemplate suicitle," and he goes on to state his opin-
alw a\
game of
s a
bankrupt, alw a\s
man
a
in a cul-de-sac, a
man
and doesn't ha\e the will to continue the strugIn such circumstances it takes "more will-power to stav ali\e than to
gle."
lost
the
life
-
le.
\\ ill-power
had,
Sol/henits\ n certainix
according to his memoir,
l)Ut
intermittent feelings of hopelessness persisted tor about three months, during
which he
dail\'
for arrest
and
operate w
ith an\' in\ estigation
expected to be arrested, lie psvchologicalK' prepared himself long imprisonment.
a
He
decided that he would refuse to co-
and composed
a ringing declaration in
"Conscious ot m\' responsibilit\' to m\' predecessors
ad\ance:
in the great literature of
1 cannot recognize or accept the right of gendarmes to superx ise it. answ er no questions under interrogation or in court. This is m\ first and
Russia, will last
1
statement."'
One tsvn's ger,
ma\' easily believe that these were the worst months of Solzheni-
life,
and w
but
it
was not
in his nature to
ith his characteristic resilience
The most immediate
remain inactive
he took steps to
in the face
of dan-
a\ ert further disasters.
was presented bv his notes and unfinished drafts which he had taken to Moscow with him w hen Rozhdestvo. \\ ith the aid of some ex-prisoners who were helping risk
for The (iiihig Archipelago, hastily leaving
him gather information spot in the provinces.
and arranged
for the book, he transferred everything to a
He also completed
for the fourth
and delivered
copy of The
his letter to
Tirst Circle to
remote
Demichev
be retrieved from
Pravda and delivered to Novy Mir. Quite apart from the confiscation of the other three copies, there was now no hope that extracts would be published in the Soviet
whom eral
Union's leading daily. Rumvantsev, the mildly
liberal editor
on
Solzhenitsyn had pinned his hopes, was dismissed as part of the gen-
upheaval, and his successor, Mikhail Zim\anin, chairman of the Jour-
nalists'
A
Union, was know n
to
be
a hardliner
sign of the tension that Solzhenitsvn
the generally strained atmosphere in
and
cronv of Brezhnev's.
a
w as under
Moscow
time— and of —was the
at this
literary circles
row-
had w ith Tvardovskv over the return of his novel. The ground for it had already been prepared by their disagreement over Solzhenitsvn's letter to Demichev. Tvardovsk\ had been further upset to that Solzhenitsyn
learn of the confiscation of the archive, including a play that Solzhenitsyn
himself acknowledged
w as
—by Soviet standards—
virtually treasonable.
When
w as returned to Novy Mir by Karvakin, Solzhenits\n seems to have expected Tvardovsky to welcome it back and lock it up in his safe again, but Tvardovsky refused. He was badly frightened h\ the news of Solzhenitsvn's "anti-So\'iet" play and took the viev\- that Solzhenitsyn himself w as to blame for the confiscation bv having removed the novel in the first place. the novel
In The Oak and the C^//" Solzhenitsyn builds a big scene out of this inci-
dent and compares Tvardovsky unfavourabh' w
ith
Pushkin w hen the
latter
SOLZHENITSYN
[530]
was editing the journal SovremetJtiik. It is inconceivable, he writes, that Pushkin would have turned away a novel being similarly hunted by Benckendorff,* and he describes himself as leaving Tvardovsky's office with his "orphaned and unwanted novel" under his arm."^ It is possible that Tvardovskv's fear at this juncture was excessive, but it is hard not to regard Solzhenitsvn's later account of it as exaggerated. Tvardovsky had every reason to feel vulnerable. Sinvavskv, the better-known of the two arrested writers, was one of Novy Mir's star critics and a highly controversial one, celebrated for his spirited advocacy of Pasternak's poetry and his satirical attacks on Partv stalwarts. The arrest of Sinvavskv was as much a black mark against Novy Mir as was the confiscation of Solzhenitsvn's archive, and Tvardovsky felt doubly threatened. In a more cohesive and less hagridden society, Tvardovskv, Solzhenitsyn, and the families and friends of Sinyavsky and Daniel might have got together and made common cause against the common enemv, but the legacy of Stalinism was still strong. Not only was there not the remotest chance of such solidaritv being manifested but even within the separate circles there were splits and backbiting, and individuals were often left to fight their battles alone, t
A week or so later,
this painful rift
Party-inspired
rumours
that
was widened bv Tvardovskv's
had w
to publish a letter that Solzhenitsyn
had
he
ritten
refusal
defending himself against
collaborated
with
Germans.
the
Solzhenitsvn implies that Tvardovskv's chief reason was injured pride, because the top copv of the letter had been sent to Pravda (before Solzhenitsvn
knew
of Rumyantsev's dismissal) and only a carbon to Novy Mir, but a careful reading of his
memoir
disagreement
\\
to writing to
reveals that Tvardovskv's rejection
ith Solzhenitsyn's entire strategv
Demichev,
as
was part of
a
deeper
over this period. In addition
Tvardovsky had suggested, Solzhenitsyn had
also
fired off letters
of protest to Brezhnev, Mikhail Suslov, and Yuri Andropov
(asking Zhores
Medvedev
to post
them
Moscow). In
in
his
account of the
affair,
Solzhenitsyn says he was afraid that Demichev might suppress his
letter,
but
it
seems equally
practice of firing off as a direct
likelv that
manv
he
\v
as
simply following his old
protests as he could.
connection with Demichev,
it
To
Tvardovskv,
camp
who had
looked as though Solzhenitsyn were
simplv trving to go over Demichev's head and thus over Tvardovskv's
and
as
hv Ivardovsky refused to help." In essence it was a conflict of perceptions. Tvardovsky was very much a man of the Soviet establishment. He knew better than most how the Party and government hierarchies worked, who was responsible to whom, who owed w hom a favour, and how one worked the levers of power that were available. But he was fullv prepared to abide by its rules and in the end well,
*
this
appears to be the
real
reason
Count Alexander Benckendortt was chief of the
\\
secret
pohce under Nicholas
I
and became
Pushkin's particular tormentor after the Decembrist rebellion of 1825.
tin a postscript to I he Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsvn later conceded that his comparison of Tvardovsky v\ ith Pushkin had been unfair and that Ivardovsky had behaved reasonabh' in not v\
ishiny to take back The First Circle after the
KGB
raid.
The Turning-point submit to w h;ite\cr he w
Lv^
'
]
on the other hand, hatl sjient eomfortahU again, and after the conhseation of his arehi\e, he fek that he might he battling for his \er\' life. In these eircumstanees, an\ thing was allowed, just so long as he survived. W hat did it matter to whom he wrote and in what order? Hut to too nian\
TvardoN
\
as told. Sol/.hcnits\ n,
ears outside the
sk\
it
looked
like
s\
w
stem e\er to
ilful
fit
in
self-indulgence.
'rhe\ parted on \er\ bat! terms, and Sol/.henits\'n drove back to Rozh-
So far as he could tell, \er\- few people \ et knew of summer-house, and he took great care to see that an\ letters he sent were posted in either R\ a/an or Moscow But it was isolated and exposed, and he felt xulnerable there. If the K(IH did hnd out about it, he could be picked up antl jailed before an\ one knew Moreover, there no longer seemed to be much point in Natalia's sta\ing on her job in Obninsk had still not materialized, and she would ha\e to return to R\azan for the start of the dest\() to rejoin Natalia. his precious
.
.
—
school vear. farcical stor\' of how Natalia w as finalK' excluded from the Obninsk was further depressing exidence, if evidence was needed, of the amazing lengths to w hich the Soviet authorities w ere apparenth' prepared to go now to thw art Solzhenits\n's most innocuous plans. Quite apart from the
1 he
institute
confiscation ot the archi\e (and there seems to ha\e been
the
two
sets of events),
no connection between
nothing could have been more calculated to reinforce
Solzhenits\n's growing sense of fear and apprehension. Despite Demichev's
phone
call
of |ul\ and the categorical assurance of the director of the institute
appointment was guaranteed, the necessarv confirmation bv in Moscow had not been forthcoming. Instead, the academ\- had ordered that all the dossiers of the successful applicants for some sixt\- senior and junior vacancies that were being filled that summer be submitted for scrutin\-, and finding nothing irregular in Reshetovskaya's application, it had arbitrarilv cancelled all appointments. Since manv of the junior staff had already been engaged and had resigned from that Natalia's
the
Academ\ of Medical Sciences
meant throwing them out of work, Imt the academ\was adamant and decreed that "all staff engaged as a result of the examination are to be dismissed from the posts thev are holding." A new examination commission was appointed to replace the old one, and the whole examination w as held again. Again, Reshetcnskaya was selected for appointment, whereupon the academv adopted a special resolution to change the composition of the institute's academic council. Seven Obninsk scientists were dismissed and replaced by five appointees from Moscow w ho attended onlv one meeting that at which the second round of voting was due to take place. K\ en now the voting was supposed to be by secret ballot, which still gave Reshetovskava a chance, so the vote w as postponed indefinitely on the grounds that no ballot papers had been prepared. Finally a special meeting of the presidium of the Academv of Medical Sciences was called in Moscow with onl\" one item on the agenda: Should Reshetovskaya their pre\ ious jobs, this
,
—
be allowed to take part
in the
competitive re-examination tor the post of
SOLZHENITSYN
[532]
A
senior scientific assistant at the Medical Institute in Obninsk?
galaxy of
Zhores Medvedev, who had been active, with Timofeyev-Ressovsky, in lobbying Demichev and others on Reshetovskava's behalf. From the papers in from of him, Medvedev saw that Reshetovskava's application and supporting documentation had been subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny; it uas equally clear that not the slightest weakness had been found in her qualifications. Nevertheless, the presidium recommended that Reshetovskava be excluded from the competition on the grounds that an employee of an agricultural institute could not possibly fit into a medical institute, even as a chemist. 1 he institute's director. Professor Zedgenidze, refused to implement the recommendation, saying that it was illegal to exclude her, \\ hereupon the academx' cancelled the "chemical" vacancy altogether and had it rescheduled as a "medical" vacancy under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health. Strictly speaking, such a transfer required the approval of the (Council of Ministers of the USSR (the approximate equixaat least in theory), and it may be that the appointlent of the British cabinet ment was even discussed at that level, but nothing was ever made public about it.'^ Medvedev and Timofevev-Ressovsky both suffered as a result of their exertions on Reshetovskava's behalf. Medvedev was denied an already agreed exchange visit to the United States to work in a genetics laboratory there, and Timofeyev-Ressovsky was almost denied an American prize for his research. An attempt was made to persuade him to reject the prize on the grounds that its award w as a proxocation, but 1 imofevev-Ressovsky refused, and the insignia were informally delivered to him by a visiting vice-president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences before the Soviet authorities top brass attended the meeting, as
\\ ell
as
—
w ere able
By
to intervene.
little drama had played itself out, Natalia was back in Ryazan and Solzhenitsvn had found a nev\- refuge: the dacha of Kornei Chukovskv at Peredelkino, the writers' colony just outside Moscow Chukovsky had pronounced A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich "a literary miracle" w hen given it by Tvardovsky to read. Like Ehrenburg and Marshak, he was an elderly survivor of the years immediateh before and after the October Rev-
the time this
.
olution, but as a literary critic and children's writer he had survived the years
of Stalinism physically intact and morally uncompromised, and was univer-
He
met Solzhenitsyn in 1963, when SolChukovsky was meticulously neat in his habits and, according to an eyewitness, had called for his tie beforehand, saying, "The greatest living writer of our country is coming to see me, and I must be properly dressed."' Solzhenitsyn, wearing a light-blue knitted shirt, grey sailcloth trousers, and an anorak, had surprised everyone present by his cheerful informality and by the athletic w ay he had bounded up the stairs. Earlier reports of his cancer had persuaded them that Solzhenitsyn was a seriously sick man, but he had laughed and told them that although the tumour in his stomach had been "this big" (showing them two sally loved
and respected.
zhenitsvn called on him
had
first
at his xilla in
Peredelkino.
The Turning-point
[533]
no longer bothered him and was completely cured. ()\er discussed l)osto\e\"sk\ Ciorkv, Zoshchenko, and other w Titers, and afterw ards the\ had \isited Pasternak's grave together. Ihereatter the two men Ix-came friends, though not meeting ver\' often, because of Solzhenitsvn's distance from Moscow K.ven when he did come he generally avoided Peredelkino. h was too fashionable, and he had no desire to go where other w riters congregated. But (^huko\sk\ had remained solicitous of Solzhenits\n's w ell-being. On one occasion he had asked Solzhenits\'n w hether he had enough monev to live on. Solzhenitsyn replied that he w as all right. " Ihe main thing is not to spend too much mone\' on \'ourself." Pointing to his shoes with inch-thick soles, he had added, " I hese will last me eight years at least. "^ In earl\' 1965 the two men had discussed for the first time the possibility of S()lzhenits\ n's coming to work at (^huko\ sk\'s dacha ((>huko\ sk\ w as now aw a\' a great deal receiving medical treatment at where Second Lieutenant Solzhethe government sanatorium in Barvikha nitsyn had once spent his weekend on leave from the front). Nothing had been decided then, but in the aftermath of his archi\e's seizure Solzhenitsxn w ent to see C^hukovskv again, and (>hukovsky repeated his offer. Apart from the comfort and convenience, Peredelkino w as a much safer place than Rxazan. Solzhenits\n w as too isolated in R\ azan, w ithout triends or influence. He had made enemies there w ith his story "For the Good of the Cause," based on a true incident in Ryazan, and .\Iedvedev has suggested that one of the reasons for the authorities' reluctance to let him mo\e to Obninsk w as that the\- had established an efficient s\stem of surveillance in R\azan and didn't w ant to have to start again in another tow n.'^ If Solzhenitsyn happened to be arrested in Ryazan and a scandal ensued, it could alw a\s be shrugged off as an excess of zeal on the part of local officials, w hereas in Obninsk or Moscow the authorities would have to do it openh' and face a clenched
fists),
lunch the two
it
men had
,
.
—
public outcry.
Solzhenitsxn mo\ ed into Peredelkino sometime before the end of Sep-
tember. Apparenth" the original plan had been for him to use
a
couple ot
rooms above the garage, but in the end he occupied a ground-floor room opening off the dining-room, which had formerly been used by Chukovsky's daughter L\dia, also a writer. (]hukovsk\'s rooms were upstairs. Solzhenitsyn insisted, however, on looking after himself, doing his own shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and would not hear of anyone else's doing it for him. .\11 the houses in Peredelkino are set well back from the road and are surrounded by trees and large gardens. It is a perfect place to find peace and solitude, and here Solzhenitsyn settled dow n to aw ait developments and brood on the meaning of the KGB raid. It was here that Kopelev telephoned to inform him that "his case" had been passed to the public prosecutor* and here, too, that the Etkinds found him w hen they called on their w ay back to *This is v\hat Solzhenitsyn writes in The Oak and the Calf (p. 398), but it is not quite accurate. Everyone else inxolved agrees that it u as never "the Solzhenitsyn case," but always "the Teush case."
SOLZHENITSYN
[534]
Leningrad from a holiday in the south. Solzhenitsyn was sitting alone in his room. Although it was evening, he had not bothered to s\\ itch on the light and was unoccupied a phenomenal rarity for a man so proverbially busy. His face was grim and drawn when he told them about the loss of his archive, but he perked up sufficienth to chat during the evening and later accompa-
—
nied
them to the station.'" At other times he paced the garden. I
strolled for
grounds w
hours through the dark cloisters of the pine trees
ith a heart
empt\ of hope,
vainl\ trying to
in
comprehend
Chukovsky's
my
situation,
and, more importantly, to discover some higher sense in the disaster that had I had come to grief and I did not understand. I seethed. I had long ago come to understand the meaning of my arrest, my deathlv illness, and manv personal misfortunes, but this disaster I could make no sense of. It rendered meaningless everything that had gone before."
befallen me. ... rebelled.
...
What made
I
was his complete ignorance of supposed that he was followed from Novy Mir after picking up the copies of The First Circle and that the KGB had swooped on Teush's fiat just as soon as they knew where the novel was, fearing that Solzhenitsyn was about to put it into samizdat. Discovery his situation hardest to bear
the motives for the
KGB
raid.
He
had
first
of the the archive containing his early works must have been a lucky and
unexpected bonus. But that theory was demolished w hen he learned that the archive had been confiscated not from Teush but from Ilya Zilberberg, the young engineer and anthroposophist he had met on the eve of his holiday. There had been two raids simultaneously, one to pick up the novel and the other to confiscate his archive.
This evidence of prior planning based on the KGB's evident foreknow 1edge of what they were seeking showed the raid in a much more sinister light, and it must have been the shock of this discovery that had turned Solzhenitsvn's mind to thoughts of suicide. It also appears to have induced a feeling of blind panic,
w hich
led
him
into the fateful error of isolating himself
from the other people involved in the affair and the case that grew out of it. It was an understandable reaction during those early days w hen he literally awaited arrest, but in the w eeks that follow ed he w as cut off from first-hand information about how the case was progressing and prevented from learning facts that might have changed his perception of the KGB's motives and intentions. Instead, he brooded on the event in the solitude of his room, making only occasional sorties to contact the Steins and learn from them how the investigation was going. He could not understand why the KGB agents had chosen to raid Zilberberg as well as Teush. How had they learned of the
important
and when and why had Teush given it to his young From Veronica and Yuri Stein he learned that Zilberberg was an ardent admirer of Teush's, a frequent visitor to his home and an occasional visitor of the Steins as well. He was therefore well acquainted
archive's whereabouts,
friend in the
first
place?
— rH
F.
TURN
I
N G - PO N T I
[
5 3 5
]
with those of SolzhenitsNn's unpublished works that had been passed around
among Stories
friends to read
—
as v\ell as
The First
('AUidle in the
(Circle,
with certain items restricted to
Wine/, the Miniature
much narrower circle, camp \erses. All of these a
such as The Way, The Republic of Labour, and earl\ had become part of a much larger How of unofficial reading that was so popular
and hungrib dexoured
in
Moscow
literar\' circles at
the time, and although
Solzhenitsxn had alw a\s been careful to distinguish between works that could
go into samizdat and be copied and those that could onK be read, in the relaxed atmosphere of the earh sixties these restrictions w ere interpreted fairh' liberallw Furthermore, the Steins' flat was well known as a literarv "salon" w here a great deal of samizdat was discussed and passed around. hat the Steins were unable to tell Solzhenitsxn was what else, if an\ thing, leush might have show n Zilberberg, and for some inexplicable reason neither the\' nor Solzhenitsvn seem ever to have asked. Solzhenits\n did have a single meeting w ith the 1 eushes to clarif\' certain details, but this question \\
appears not to ha\e been raised. Solzhenitsxn jumped to the conclusion that
leush and Zilberberg had been unforgi\abl\' lax w ith his papers, had read in their entiretx', and had discussed their contents over a tapped tele-
them
phone.
'-
At
that stage Solzhenitsvn seems to have regarded Zilberberg as the
chief culprit in the affair, a theor\
that
w
as influenced, perhaps, b\
hypothesis that Zilberberg w as an informer. Later he came to blame
more, describing him, decent fellow but,
According
in his
ow n account of these
alas, careless, a
to Solzhenitsvn, he
had
muddler, visited
a
I
the
eush
events, as "a thoroughly
happ\ -go-luck\ conspirator."
1 eush to remove the main portion
of his papers shortly before the raid took place,
but Teush had "broken the
and out of carelessness failed to replace them again. (>onsequently, instead of leaving onh' safe works in Teush's possession, SolzhenitsN n had left some of his most sensitixe material, and it was this that Teush had transferred to Zilberberg and that had fallen into the hands of the KGB. As for Zilberberg, Solzhenitsx n w rites that he "did not rules," extracted things to read,
know and had not checked up on" him as and was unaware of leush's intention."
a
possible recipient ot his papers
Seen from Solzhenitsvn's \antage-point and in the light of his conviction KGB raid was directed exclusiveh at him, this scenario contains a great deal of logic, but Zilberberg has since w ritten a book on the subject that the
that puts Solzhenitsxn's version into doubt.
The to
first
him only
thing Zilberberg makes clear
in the
tsvn apparenth'
summer
first
'"^
is
that 1 eush passed the archive
of 1965 and not earlier
thought.
Teush did
in the year, as
so because he
Solzheni-
was planning
to
go
two months and w as afraid to leave sensitive material lying about in an empty flat, particularly since he had reason to believe that he w as under some sort of surveillance himself. The preceding year he had written his long article on Ivan Denisovich and its importance for Soviet societw Although he awa\' for
had
strictly limited the
number of copies
to five
and had forbidden
its distri-
SOLZHENITSYN
[536]
bution ot
its
samizdat, one copy had "got away" and there had been a
in
circulation.
1
ing a snoopy neighbour and a strange telephone
decided to entrust
rumour
here had also been one or two suspicious incidents inyoK-
all
call.
leush had therefore
the remaining copies of the article, together w ith Sol-
zhenitsyn's archiye, to his
young
triend
w
hile
he \yas away.
happened, Zilberberg was also planning to go away for a month in mid-August, but since his mother was staying in Moscow and since their communal flat was shared with two other families, he felt there was little likelihood of anyone's breaking in while he was away. In fact, there was no break-in, but on the day of his return, on 1 1 September, he was yisited by agents of the KGB and the archiye was remoyed, together w ith a large quanand tity of his own papers. By this time, Teush w as also back in Moscow
As
it
,
his flat
was raided on the same day.
Zilberberg demonstrates that the archiye w as handed to him b\
Teush by the KCiB agents at the moment of confiscation. He reproduces the exact wording on the search record drawn up by the agents, which includes item no. 10, "a white paper packet measuring 38 cm x 24.5 cm. fhe packet bears a rubber stamp marked 'mechanical engineering.' On being opened, the packet w as found to contain a brown enyelope, in which were found a number of typed and handwritten manuscripts."" The record goes on to list about two dozen items, some ot them anonymous, a few signed with Solzhenitsyn's real name and seyeral in a sealed parcel
w
ith his
and that the
seal \yas
found
to be intact
pseudonym "Stepan Khlynoy." Zilberberg
states categorically that
he had read neither Feust of the Conquerors nor any other work in the archixe that had not been passed round to eyeryone in their circle, so that he could not haye "talked on the telephone" about them or shown them to an\one else.
Zilberberg giyes
Lubyanka by the with 1 eush on
a
detailed description of his
interrogations at the
inyestigator in charge of the case and of his consultations
how
as the " leush case,"
to respond.
The name
of the case throughout was giyen
and the subject of the inyestigation w
as said to
be leush's
on Solzhenitsyn. According to the inyestigator, this "libellous" and anti-Soyiet article had been discoyered in the luggage of a foreign tourist as he was leaying the country. Although the article w as unsigned, inyestigations had led the KGB to Teush, and they were now trying to determine how many copies existed and whether the article had been distributed b\' Teush. Under Soyiet law at the time, the composition and possession ot "libellous" manuscripts was not a crime, whereas deliberate circulation was. The inyestigator made it clear that the KCiB had been tapping a number of telephones for quite a while, including those of Zilberberg and Teush, but he needed more substantial eyidence if charges were to be brought. Some of this was communicated to Solzhenitsyn b\- the Steins at the time, but it seems he found this explanation of the case difficult to belieye. VVh\ would the KCiB haye gone to the trouble of a double raid simpl\- to article
confiscate an article about him, especially
when
the
flats
they yisited con-
The Flrning-point taincd his
dence?
In
(537I
works? SiircK it could not ha\c been a colossal coincias to conchule that the confiscation ot The hirst (jix/c had coincidence. The tletectixes hatl been on their \\a\ out ot
i|
Crimea, calling on correspondents, picking up material, and whenever possible visiting places that figured in his narrative. Hut again there w ere problems.
I
he axerage proxincial Russian
strangers
—especially when they
highK
is
start to ask
nits\n pointed out w hen already in the West,
gather firsthand information.
where the peasant
it
As Solzhe-
was cxtremeU'
difficult to
Province, for instance, to
—there
are
still
afraid to talk to a stranger about
all
them
to question
— any
questions.
lambov
to
rebellion had broken out
ing there, but the\' are
was frightened
went
"I
susjiieious of strangers
awkward
for tear of putting a speed\'
e\ ewitnesses fixit, and I m\ self end to m\ expe-
dition.""^
One
other chore that Sol/.henitsyn accomplished that
summer was
to
write a further letter to Ix'onid Brezhnev, protesting once more against the confiscation of his archix e and the statements being Part\- meetings. "Slanderers
ha\e declared \\
ar in the
various proxinces that
in
same
employing even
unit
and w
awarded
as
a traitor, a collaborator, or in effect a
official
made
an otficer
I,
tx\()
against
him
x\
.
.
.
ho tought the entire
actixe-service medals,
member
at secret
propaganda channels
\x
as either
of the Ciestapo." Apart from
reports of this kind, Solzhenitsx n had received information about mxsterious
play and novel, information that came from upper reaches ot the Partx'. I he First Circle w as being passed around among senior members of the C>entral (Committee and the Writers' Union, and Feast of the Conquerors xxas being shox\ n both to these and to leaders of the Artists' and Musicians' unions, the calculation being that their content was so blatantlx' anti-Sox iet that all right-thinking (Communists were bound to be revolted by them. Such an assumption w as some-
dealings
sources
x\
x\
x\
ith his confiscated
ithin or close to the
hat unfair to the noxel.
true that The First Circle
It is
w
as ultimatelx" anti-
(Communist in content, but the political message xxas vxell buried and Solzhenitsyn had toned it dow n from his original, sharper version. It x\ as more overtly anti-Stalinist than anti-Communist, and until the confiscation there had been grounds to hope that it still might see publication one dax'. But \x ith Feast of the Conquerors, it did not stand a chance and that xxas the point of the KGB's strategy. This "anti-Soviet" play composed in the labour camps xxould be used to discredit Solzhenitsxn's entire
taken in conjunction
output.-^ It is
not clear how
of these works. In his
be sharp
in
much
Solzhenitsxn's letter said about the circulation
memoir he
writes that his
first
inclination
had been to
tone but that the journalist Ernst Henri* persuaded him to be
more diplomatic.
In the end, he
aimed
reproaches
his
at the Writers'
Union
rather than at the Partx' itself and also offered a sort of apologia for his vision
of the role of the xxriter.
I
knoxx that
in
mv
x\
orks strike
some people
our past and contemporary
ture to keep quiet about. But * Ernst
Henri
is
the pen
name
of
life
if
as too sharp,
the xvriter
is
Semyon Rostovsk)
exposing unpleasantnesses
some reason they xxould prefer
that for
.
litera-
not permitted to express the people's
— SOLZHENITSYN
[562]
common
pain and anxietv,
if
the writer cannot be a kind of cybernetic "feedback"
for his society, then the writer
is
unnecessary and Hterature will be replaced by
cosmetics. Sickness can be cured only
if it
is
diagnosed and named in time
twenties v\ ho warned about and the personality cult, but they w ere liquidated instead of being heeded. As the proverb goes: Friend and your flatterer I cannot be.^'
driven inwards,
it
festers.
There were
\\
riters in the
Stalin's character
end of July 1966 and was never answered or acknowledged. Solzhenitsvn came to feel, how ever, that it had helped his cause with the authorities, and it may also have contributed to his obtaining
The
letter
was posted
permission for part
meeting
1
at the
of Cancer
in the Central Writers'
Ward
Club
to
be discussed
later that year.
at a Writers'
Union
V THE BEST FORM OF DEFENCE SOLZHENiTSYN HAD COMPLETED part earl\- summer. Like A Day in the
I
Circle,
m Rozhdestvo in the
Ivan Denisovich and Ike First
described a group of people cut off from the mainstream of society
it
world whose boundaries were arbitrary. was not a labour camp but a cancer clinic the Tashkent clinic Solzhenitsvn had attended in 1954. The novel's action was set a little
and isolated In this case that
of Cancer Weird Life of
in a smaller, artificial
—
it
later, in 1955.
As
in all novels* set in
such "closed" institutions, the characters had
been chosen to represent
a cross-section of societv.
were Oleg Kostoglotov,
a
The two
principal patients
former labour-camp prisoner now
in
administra-
had been w hen undergoing treatment), who was suffering from cancer of the abdomen, and Pavel Rusanov, a highranking official in the Communist Partv, with cancer of the neck. These two w ere the protagonists in the ideological and ethical conflict that lay at the tive exile (as Solzhenitsvn himself
* Solzhenitsvn did not in fact accept the epithet of "noxel" to describe Cancer
Ward: he preferred
the traditional Russian term oi povest\ which can be approximately translated as "tale."
explained his reasoning in The Oak and
more and more blurred is
in
—
it is
it is
light in construction
too man\- of us readilv
"The dividing
our countrv, and the result
of course a short storw though
the novella
the Calf:
call a 'novel.'
a large
is
a
lines
He
betw een genres are becoming
devaluation of forms. Ivan Denisoiich
and dense one. Less substantial than the story
and clear-cut
There are
and
in subject
several story lines,
ideas. .\ tale [potest']
is
and the action almost
is
what inevi-
tablv extends over a fairlv long time. .\ novel [roman] (odious word! surely v\e could find a better one?) differs from a tale not so
and
a rapid
tempo can
the breadth of
its
much
in size,
nor in the duration of the action (compression
number of
also be virtues in a novel), but in the
horizon, and the depth of
prefer the term "novel" to describe Cancer
its
destinies
ideas" (pp. 24-25 n.). Nevertheless,
Ward and have used
563
it
throughout.
it
embraces,
I
personally
SOLZHENITSYN
[564]
heart of the novel, a conflict bctw een matcriaHsm, pohtical e.\pedienc\', and
on the one hand, and altruism, spiritualit\ and compassion on the champion of altruism, \\ as autobiographical in conception and undoubtedh' served as the mouthpiece for manv of Solzhenitsvn's own view s, although the details of his arrest and imprisonment were parth" based on the experience of his former sergeant Il\a Solomin. Through Kostoglotox', Solzhenitsxn was also able to introduce the charming, old-world figures of a pair of elderly exiles named the Kadmins (based on Nikolai and Elena Zubo\ ), and between them, these three characters represented the forces of decency and affection. But whereas the Kadmins had o\ercome the malignity of the societ\ in w hich the\ found themselves w ith submission and love, Kostoglotov's defence of personal libert\' and search for justice and compassion were truculent and aggressive, and there w as little doubt as to where Solzhenits\n's true sympathies lav. Kostoglotov w as the champion of freedom against the forces of political paternalism and authorit\". selfishness
,
the other. Kostoglotox
Rusano\
members of which the
,
his
,
opponent, personified
authorit\',
and through Rusanox* and
his family, Solzhenitsvn offered a picture of the corrupt
Partx'
establishment operated to control society and of
tarian attitudes to the people
it
go\erned. Despite
a
its
way
in
authori-
heroic attempt on Sol-
zhenitsvn's part to be objective in his portrayal, the character of Rusanov
came out close to caricature, w hile that of Rusanov's daughter Aviette, a young establishment poet moving in fashionable literar\- circles, overstepped the bounds of realism altogether. In the last chapter, w here she w as shown visiting her father and cheering him up with all the latest gossip from literary Moscow, Solzhenitsvn mercilessly satirized the capital's intellectuals, going well beyond the sarcastic picture of the intelligentsia that he had painted in The First Circle (and hinted
at in Ivan Denisovich). Arra\ ed around these two protagonists were the other patients, two of
w hom could be
view of the world, and one for w ere Efrem Podduvev, a former construction worker (and congenital liar) w ho w as suffering from cancer of the mouth; and \ adim Zatsvrko, a young geologist and Party loyalist (inspired h\ the story of the lad\' doctor who had visited Solzhenitsxn in Ryazan to obtain some of the mandrake-root infusion for her son) w ho had cancer of the leg. Each represented a different facet of the materialist attitude to life: Podduyev a negative one of opportunism and deception, and Zatsvrko, who was portra\ed as being in the heroic mould of the positixe heroes of So\iet fiction, a more attractive one of self-abnegation in the name of the cause. Kostoglotov's ally, Dxoma, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy also suffering from cancer of the leg, simpl\- represented childlike honestx' and human perplexity in the face of the enormous, and seemingh- unjust, challenge of his illness. said to stand for Rusanov's
Kostoglotov's. Rusanov's
The
allies
confrontation of
all
these characters with the terrifying threat of
death from cancer lent the novel an existential resonance that w as more overt than that
in either
Ivan Denisovich or The First Circle (although death had been
an unseen presence
in
both of them), and Solzhenitsyn explicith- drew atten-
Thk Bfst Form tion to this clement
of Dffencf.
[5'^'
5]
by the rather crude device of having Podduvev read
Tolstov's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and undergo a sort of conversion. This later led man\- critics to praise Cancer Ward for being more profound than Sol/.henitsvn's other novels. Yet
clear that unlike, sav, The
it is
Magic Mountain or
The Rack (with which Solzhenitsvn's novel has been compared), Cancer Ward
was not about the
existential
dilemmas posed
b\'
death or the meaning of
death, or even about the meaning of illness in a fundamental wa\', but rather
about the light that
which
life
illness
and death throw on the
The hidden theme
of Cancer
Ward w as
cations for the health of Soviet societv.
was
ethical
dilemmas with
confronts us, particularl\- in their social and political application.
set in 1955,
when
in fact de-Stalinization
This was
de-Stalinization had
being fiercely debated and opposed; and
whv
begun
a close
\\
its
impli-
in earnest
but was
still
examination of the ebb and
flow of Kostoglotov's and Rusanov's illnesses reveals that there
and reciprocal relation between them.
and
the action of the novel
is
an intimate
hen Kostoglotov's recover\'
is
at its
height (coinciding with successes in the policv of de-Stalinization), Rusanov's sickness intensifies;
when Kostoglotov
ated with some parallel
experiences a relapse (usuallv associ-
political setback),
Rusanov
is
shown
to be
on the up
and up. It
w
as in this context that the relationship
doctors acquired
its
betw een Kostoglotov and his
true meaning. Solzhenitsvn's portraval of the doctors in
—
Cancer Ward particularly of Lvudmila Dontsova, the head of the radiologv department (based on the real-life Lvdia Dunaveva), and her assistant \ era Gangart (based on Irina Meike), and their dailv cares was later widely praised as a triumph of old-fashioned realism (it was, if anything, "real" socialist
—
realism, or socialist realism as
it
might have been without the ideological
trimmings, rather in the manner of the celebrated building scene
in
Ivan
But Kostoglotov was shown coming into conflict with them o\er the question not simply of what his treatment ought to be but of who should decide it and on w hat grounds. In so doing, Kostoglotov raised the issue of whether a man had the right to dispose of his own life, and of the ethical and also political dilemmas posed bv the paternalism, however benevolent and even idealistic, that the doctors exercised in w ielding their pow er. Dontsova argued that the doctors had the right to determine the treatment and to use it on the patient, w hatever the consequences, because thev were the experts and their aim was to save the patient's life (even if thev inadvertently ruined or destroyed it as a result of the malignancy of the illness or the inadequacy of the treatment). It was not difficult to see that these arguments contained a metaphor for socialism or that Solzhenitsvn was opposing personal liberty to the w ell-intentioned despotism of the doctors. In part 1 of Cancer Ward the dilemma was not resolved. The doctors did, after all, save Kostoglotov's life, when his preferred method of dosing himself w ith the mandrake-root infu-
Denisovich).
sion and relying on faith and will-pow er had failed.
On
the other hand, there
remained the larger question. Saved his life for what? For what what sort of society, and w hat sort of country?
sort ot
lite,
SOLZHEMTSVN
[566]
The
question w as raised but not answered in part
At the end of the seemed to be in the ascendant. He \\ as much recovered from his sickness and able to enjo\' hfe again, so much so that he \\ as engaged in a double flirtation in the hospital by day with Dr Gangart and by night with a pretty young nurse called Zoya. Rusanov, by contrast, was going 1
.
part, Kostoglotov
—
through
a difficult period, leaving the reader
ever, the
with
a sense
of optimism.
How-
words w ere spoken bv Rusanov's daughter Aviette an ominous or an ironic ring to them, depending on one's
first part's last
and had either point of view
"Don't worrv," she told her father, "evervthing
.
is
going to be
" all
right. Everything.
Solzhenitsyn had submitted the novel,
Mir
soon
as
as
it
was readw and on
journal's staff to discuss
the meeting, the
were
in
more
18
Marvamov, Berzer) members of the editorial board
junior people present (Lakshin,
(Dementye\', Kondratoxich, Sachs) were against. 1 he
They found
and thev disliked
its
objections
lumpv and
were
shapeless,
tendentiousness, particularh' in individual scenes, such
w ard about
Stalin's culpabilit\' for the
ingrad blockade and the chapter on Aviette's
who had
latter's
the composition of the novel
as a conversation in the hospital
gradov,
meeting of the
a
Generallv, according to Solzhenitsvn's version of
it.
favour of publication, while the older
of two kinds.
other works, to Sovy
like all his
June there was
Len-
her father. Igor Vino-
visit to
recenth' joined the board, announced, "If
we
don't print
no reason for our existence," and Tvardovsky, summing up, spoke powerfulh in the novel's favour.
^this,
I
see
Art does not exist
knows
it is
a
in this
weapon,
it
world to be
loses
we
its
a
weapon
fire-pow er.
in the class struggle.
We are quite free
in
Once
it
our judgements
no more concerned w ith w hether it will get bv or it in the next w orld. The w ork is topical in that it presents a moral reckoning on behalf of a new Iv aw akened people. Unfinished? Great works alwavs bear the mark of incompleteness. Resurrection, 7 he Possessed trv to think of a single exception. Ihis is something we want to publish. If the author will work on it a little more, we will launch it and fight for it to the limit of our powers and bevond!' of this piece of vours:
not than
if
we were
are
discussing
.
.
.
.
—
.
.
.
.
.
—
It
sounded almost
like a repeat
of the decision to launch Ivan Denisovich,
but Tvardovskv was not w ithout his criticisms.
He
still
disliked the
title,
he
agreed that the Leningrad blockade discussion w as one-sided and wanted Hitler mentioned as well as Stalin, and he, too,
felt
that the Aviette chapter
was a lampoon on the intelligentsia and should be omitted. Solzhenitsyn, as w as by now his custom, had made a virtuallv stenographic record of e\erything that was said and answered the points one b\ one. He absolutely refused to tone dow n the character of Rusanov, as some of those present had suggested, or to soften his references to the svstem of administrative exile. But
he did agree to make most of the changes proposed bv 1 vardovsky, and a week later he returned the manuscript, revised and shorn of the Aviette chap-
The Best Form with an alternative
ter,
title
suggested
of Defence The
in brackets:
[567]
Ward
at the
End
of the
Avenue.
Unfortunateh', bv the time the\ came to discuss
Tvardovsky had changed
his
mind.
He demanded
it
a
week
after that,
further cuts and altera-
by Dementyev and Sachs, and began to drag his feet over publication. 1 he circumstances were not favourable. The magazine was alreadv having great trouble w ith Alexander Bek's novel The Xezv Appointment and Simonov's War Diaries, both of w hich haci been announced but were being held up bv the censors.* He wasn't sure w hether they could take on vet another controversial major work. Besides, "we have to have the sort of manuscript in which we can defend anv passage w hatsoBut Solzhenitsyn, alas, ever because we share the ideas expressed in it. ..." always been. Perhaps they would try for publiis the same as he has following that basis he w as prepared to sign a contract cation the vear. On for the novel at once and offer an advance of 25 per cent. In the meantime Solzhenitsvn could be getting on with, and perhaps finishing, part 2.Solzhenitsvn was intenselv irritated bv this unexpected turn of events. He had been genuineh- happv to be reconciled w ith Tvardovskv and had tions along the lines earlier suggested
.
basked
.
.
in the latter's sincere praise of the novel's artistrv,
doubts and resentments returned.
He felt
he distrusted and had alw avs regarded as
but
now
all
his old
that Dementvev and Sachs, w horn his enemies, had been w orking on
Tvardovskv to change his opinion and had engineered matters so that they were present at this second meeting, w hereas Lakshin and Solzhenitsvn's other supporters were absent. Concealing his feelings, however, he simplv said that he would not sign a contract and w ould take the manuscript w ith him.
The Xozy Mir debacle had the
first
place
it
important consequences for Solzhenitsxn. In
hastened a decision that he had alreadv been moving tow ards
but that he might have postponed itv
—namelv,
if
publication had seemed a real possibil-
to let his novel circulate in samizdat. In this wa\" he
the readers he so desperatelv craved and
w hereas with The
First Circle
w ould reach
would
get
at least a limited public,
he had reached virtuallv nobodv. Secondly, he
made in response to Xoiy Mir's demands. And thirdh he felt moralh' free of A'ocy Mir. Up till now a sense of obligation had bound him to Tvardovskv and his magazine, how ever erraticallv of late, and it w as a relief to shed it. His resolve to try samizdat \\ as fortified bv a conviction that he had nothing to lose. His panicky fears about w hat the authorities might do to him w hen thev had read and digested Feast could restore the cuts that he had reluctantlv
,
,
*The
Xeii-
Appointment was
a
novel about the death of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin's fellow-
Georgian and people's commissar
for
heavv industry during the
thirties.
Ordzhonikidze
onlv go\ ernment leader to protest against Stalin's terror and to be killed as
was ne\er published and subsequentK' circulated to be a relati\elv
unexpurgated account of
in
samizdat. Simono\
his experiences as a
Second World War, and to contain se\ere criticism of my know ledge, appeared in samizdat.
to
Stalin.
\\
ar
's
a result.
War
\\
as the
The
novel
Diaries
w ere
said
correspondent during the
rhe\' ha\e not been published or,
SOLZHENITSYN
[568]
the\' had done was distribute it up their campaign of slander, but this could hardlv hurt him, since the people w ho were reading it were hostile to him anyway. It anything, it helped, for it added to his reputation, and each negative rumour spread about him provoked a score of rebuttals from \\ ellw ishers. It also demonstrated the authorities' helplessness. If that was all they could manage, he had little to fear. Nothing he released now could be as damaging as his play.
of the Conquerors
had pro\ed groundless. All
among themselves and somew hat
ion)
News
of the novel's circulation (though
among
certain
Moscow
what he took
livid at
touch w 1
step
intellectuals
to be a breach of
still
in a
Aorv
.l//>'s
security.
Solzhenitsvn to check the matter, but the
ith
highh- restricted fash-
who was
soon reached Tvardovskv, I
latter,
le tried to get in
though aware of
vardovskv's efforts, had no desire to talk to him and w rote a letter instead. If
thought
I
\()ii \\
ere upset because the tale* has
the editors of Aory
Mir ...
author has this right, and of
it.
What
is
more,
I
it
I
become know n
to others besides
should be bound to express surprise.
would be strange
if
vou ever intended
.
.
.
Every
to deprive
cannot allow Cancer Ward to repeat the dismal career of
me mv
Circle]: first there w as an indefinite period of w aiting, during which the author w as repeatedly asked bv the editors not to show it to anyone else; and then the novel w as lost both to me and to those w ho should have read it, but it is being distributed to a few select persons on a secret list.'
novel [The First
Solzhenits\n later heard that Tvardovskv had wept w hen he read this letter,
dovsk\
w
—
and w ith Tvarw hich w as exactly
but he remained unmoved. Ihe break with Sovy Mir
—w
as almost complete.
He w as
on
his
ow n now
,
hat he wanted.
His latest idea was to tr\ to achieve something through the \\ titers' Union, which he knew included a number of liberals among its rank and tile, particuiarh' among the \ounger members. It had looked as if an opportunit\' might present itself at the Writers' Congress planned for )une, to which he would have had access as a bona tide member of the union, but the congress was postponed until the end of the year, and Solzhenitsvn w as impatient to
move quicker than that. He therefore managed to arrange for a discussion ot Cancer Ward to be held at the (Central Writers' Club in Moscow .\fter three .
months of delays and three postponements, the meeting was held on
November It
17
1966.
was
billed as an
"expanded session" of the Bureau of the Creative
Prose .Association of the .Moscow Writers' Organization within the Russian
W titers' Union. In other words, it was at a relaand w as one of a series of occasional meetings to discuss individual books. But as the chairman, C. Berezko, noted, the attendance on this occasion w as extraordinariK high (tiftv-two w titers were present), and it appears that tickets for the event were extremely hard to come b\". Berezko Republic's branch of the
tively
*I.e.,
low
(.'aiicer
level
Ward. See note
p. 563.
.
The Best Form also indicated that the
of
Defence
meeting had been called
that the usual reason for such sessions
\\
at
[5*^9]
Solzhenitsvn's request and
as "a difference of
the author and the publisher," suggesting that Solzhenits\
outflank
A oi'y.l//>.
This
was presuniahK wh\'
I
opinion betw een
n's
purpose was
to
\ardo\sk\ had instructed his
staff not to attend.^
B\ and large, the w Solzhenitsx n's literar\
s\
hierarch\
riters
w ho gathered
in the
,
club that afternoon were
Of his known opponents
mpathizers and supporters.
in the
onlv Zo\a Kedrina addressed the meeting. Notorious for
trial of Sin\a\sk\ and Daniel, w here she had appeared on behalf of the Writers' Union, she w as noisiK heckled when she rose to speak, and X'ictor Xekrasov led a mass w alk-out long before she had finished. For this reason, criticism of the novel was fairb muted and more or less followed the lines of the arguments made earlier at \oiy Mir. Man\ people were made uncomfortable bv the portrait of Rusanov, w hich thev felt revealed too much hatred on the part of the author and therefore constituted an artistic failure. Others felt that the labour-camp theme intruded overmuch, or were disturbed bv the novel's "naturalism."* There was w idespread criticism of the Aviette chapter, w hich w as described as farcical and exaggerated, and a few people expressed unease over the w a\ in w hich discussions of Tolstox's storv The Death of Tcan Ilyich and of \'ladimir Pomerantsex 's article "On Sincerit\" in Literature" seemed to have been
her recent role as a "social accuser" in the
"dragged into" the noxel artihciallw Against fa\()ur of
its
this
was
set a
chorus of praise
publication. Solzhenits\n
in
favour of Cancer
was compared,
Ward and
in his literarv
and preoccupations, w ith the classics of the nineteenth centur\ were drawn between the novel and Tolstov's storv, mosth"
,
and
in
methods parallels
to the novel's
\\ ith reference to more recent literature, Solzhenitsx n's fate was w ith that of Babel, Bulgakox Platonov, Zamvatin, Zabolotskx compared Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, and Pasternak all of them classics of the Soviet
advantage.
,
—
w ho had suffered hea\ il\- at the hands of the authorities for the courage and honestx" of their w riting. Alexander Bek's blocked novel w as recalled, and man\- speakers expressed indignation that two such outstanding works w ere being denied publication. The best contributions came from the \eteran novelist \ eniamin Ka\erin and from Arkadi Belinkox a brilliant and her\ critic w ho had himselt spent thirteen \ears in the camps for his "anti-So\iet" w ritings. Kaverin pointed out that in addition to talent, Solzhenitsxn had two indispensable qualities for a great writer: "inner freedom and a powerful strixing for truth." He was the most impressive of a w hole group of promising nexx w riters x\ ho \xere revitalizing Soviet literature. "The new x\ riting has arrixed, and the old, era
,
reptilian,
crawling literature that understood service to society as
a straight
W ho now
remembers the books that line betw een txxo points ... is hnished. were full of lies, distorand that were published in millions of copies .
*A
reference to
.
.
some of the medical
detail in Cancer
Want and
bv Soviet standards, treatment of Kostoglotov's sexual
\
perhaps to Solzhenitsvn's frank,
earninss.
SOLZHENITSYN
[570] tions,
and praise of Stalin, open or camouflaged, and remote from the truth?"
Cancer
Ward should be published immediately, for doomed to failure. He cannot write
zhenitsyn are
"all efforts to silence Sol-
from the way
differently
he writes."' so special.
still more accurately on w hat made Solzhenitsyn "The outstanding merit of the works of Alexander Isayevich is
that thev
ere actually written.
Belinkov put his finger
\\
A man got many
he wanted to write." There were great experience of it,
life
and perhaps the
to the point of writing the
traditionalist, as
books about and he had
talent to write excellent
but for some reason they never had. Solzhenitsyn had done
restored Russian literature to
it,
former greatness. But he was not
its
some people seemed
books
other writers, said Belinkov, with
just a
to think. "Solzhenitsyn creates a
new
system of Russian prose, because he introduces into the composition of his art new unknown, or forgotten ideas of good and evil, life and death, and the relationship between man and society. The apparently traditional nature of his style is similar to the art of the Renaissance, which was close to the art ,
of the ancient world, but only at a distance and on casual inspection. Solzhenitsyn's writing
is
not only similar to the Renaissance;
sance of Russian spiritual
At the conclusion of ment.
He
it is
in fact the renais-
life."^
the discussion, Solzhenitsyn
thanked the participants for their
many
was invited
to
com-
kind words and above
all
His years of solitude as a writer had had both advantages and disadvantages. The fact that he had been writing virtually for himself meant that he had never had to wonder whether this or that w ork for their professional criticism.
would "pass." On the other hand, in isolation one inevitably became less demanding of oneself, and it was essential to receive informed criticism of one's work. That was why he had requested this discussion, particularly since he w as being deprived of publication and the natural responses of his readers.
He went
on to discuss some of the points raised by the other speakers,
"not in the spirit of petty polemics" but simply in the interests of clarification. First there
Some
was the
title.
Was
it
meant
to be a
symbol?
speakers have said that there was a cancerous grow th in our society. Yes,
there was. But that wasn't
Ward,
Cancer Ward:
w
it
as the sickness
1
what had
1
in
had
in
mind.
When
I
called the
mind, and the struggle against
book Cancer
this sickness.
I
w ould not depress the reader or reduce him to despair. ... I used it because I reckoned to overcome it in resolving the question of the struggle between life and death. That was why I quite calmlv emploved this title, that and no more. boldiv gave
it
this title
because
I
reckoned that
I
Another question concerned the confinement of the action w
ithin the
walls of the hospital ward, thus curtailing the view offered of Soviet society as a
w hole.
W asn't
Recentlv
1
this unnecessarily restrictive?
Solzhenitsyn thought not.
have come to the conclusion that literature can never describe the
whole of our world, can ne\cr encompass everything
.
.
.
But
it
has one inter-
esting qualitx
any work of of planes
is
.
Let
Bf.st
HF.
I
mc make
literature can
a
Form ok Dkkencf
comparison u
become
ith
[5~i]
mathematics.
a cluster of planes. In
defined as an aggregate of planes
It
seems
passing through
all
to
mathematics, a
me
that
a cluster
gi\en point
.
Each author chooses a point corresp(jnding to his experience and inclinations. But each point can have a myriad planes passing through it, tilting in all \nd vou can take any subject you like. This subject w as possible directions suggested to me bv mv illness, w hich gave me a chance to obtain a virtually professional know ledge of it so as to verifv m\ treatment. I might not have chosen the cancer \\ ard, but something else entireK But if \-ou w ant to go beyond .
.
.
.
the confines of the cancer ward, \()U will find those same planes everywhere.
Solzhenits\"n then touched on a
number
of other questions. Since 90 per
cent of the speakers had been critical of Rusanov, he
felt
there
must be some-
thing to this criticism, but, unfortunately, no one had been able to indicate a
way
of putting the character right, and he
\\
as
still
proceed. .\s for the Aviette chapter, he agreed that
puzzled about how to
it
was
farcical
by
but said
mouth only statements and opinions actually people and reported in the Soviet press. It was his little joke
that he had put into her real
The
certain kinds of critics.
uttered against
collection of Tolstoy stories, including The
Death of Ivan Ilyich, had actually been on the shelves of his ward when he was in Tashkent, as had the copy of Novy Mir containing Pomerantsev's article
He
"On
Sincerit\ in Literature," and both had led to discussions in the
could truthfulh" place his hand on his heart and say,
w
ard.
have invented
"I
nothing."^
down, Solzhenitsvn tossed
Just before he sat
in a small surprise.
Since
his negotiations
with Xovy Mir over the novel had proved inconclusive, he
had sent
two other reviews, Zvezda (The
off to
it
the former based in Leningrad and the
and Pro.s-/6»r (Expanse), w ell known, in Alma-Ata
Star)
latter, less
(by going to the provinces, Solzhenitsyn was trying to circumvent veto).
His announcement had the desired
able to close the meeting, a
number
effect.
of speakers
Moscow 's
Before the chairman was
demanded
to
know w hat
decision was being taken. Lev Kopelev proposed that a transcript of the dis-
cussion be sent to Zvezda and Prostor. Another speaker suggested that Moskva, the magazine of the
Moscow branch
of the
W riters'
Union, and
its
publishing
house be approached to publish the novel and that any decision reached should be by the entire meeting, and not just the secretariat. In the end, two resolutions
were passed, one
to
send off the transcripts, the other to urge publi-
cation as soon as possible.
Pressing
home
his advantage, Solzhenitsvn
conclude from our discussion that when it
to the
Moscow in
part in our
immediately asked, "May I second part, I can bring
finish the
"Of course," replied the chairman, Alexander Isayevich, in my own w ould ask you, "And the name of those present toda\-, to visit us more often and take Writers' Organization?"
to general applause.
name and
I
life
I
and our
The meeting was
discussions.'"^
—
minor triumph for Solzhenitsyn and had the addidozens more copies of Cancer Ward into circulation in samizdat. As news spread of the discussion, more and more people w anted
tional virtue of putting
a
SOLZHENITSYN
[572] to read the novel,
and those
pressed to lend copies,
if
who had
participated in the discussion
were
thev had them, to friends and to friends of friends,
where further copies were made and passed on.* In this way, pressure was built up on the authorities to do something about it. It was a relatively newtactic for Solzhenitsyn (though he had tried it, in a limited and modest way, v\ith his Miniature Stones), and he was impressed with its efficacy. He was beginning to realize the value of the Soviet Union's still tiny, but growing, body of independent opinion and to appreciate the importance of publicity,
when
was amplified by foreign radio stations broadcasting back beyond that body of Soviet listeners to foreign broadcasts there was the foreign public itself, and its opinions, too, were important to the Soviet authorities. The possibilities for exercising influence, it seemed, were far greater than he had once imagined. During that crowded month of November 1966, he proceeded to put these new discoveries to the test. A Japanese newspaper correspondent, Komoto Sedze, had recentlv sent him a request for an interview or for written replies to five questions. Solzhenitsyn had routinely refused such requests up till now but this time he decided to accept and arranged to meet Sedze at the Writers' (>lub the dav after the discussion of Cancer Ward. It was a brilliant and bold tactical move. The club was such a public place that when Solzhenitsvn met the correspondent, with his official interpreter and a photographer from the Novosti press agencv, who set up floodlights to take pictures, the club emplovees and bystanders assumed it must be official, whereas Solzhenitsvn had deliberately not sought the necessary permission and was particularlv
it
into the Soviet Union. Furthermore,
,
acting quite outside the normal Soviet regulations. The interview lasted only about twenty minutes (Solzhenitsyn discovered that Sedze himself had been a Soviet prisoner of war and had spent three years in the labour camps), but
the written answers to Sedze's questions had already been prepared, and
Solzhenitsvn simply had to hand them over.'" In view of the noveltv of this direct communication with the outside
world, Solzhenitsvn's statement was
fairlv
circumspect.
He
did not refer to
the confiscation of his novel and archive or to the ugly rumours that were
being circulated about him
at secret
meetings, but he did mention the exis-
tence of The First Circle and the fact that as his
two unpublished
Wind.
He
hoped
to finish the
it
had not been published,
plays. The Tenderfoot and the Tart
also described the subject of Cancer
Ward and
as well
and Candle
in the
indicated that he
second part quite soon. Asked to offer
his
views on
a
standard cliche, "the writer's duties in defence of peace," he gave a characteristicallv individual
The
fight for
peace
is
answer:
"I shall
broaden the scope of
this question.
only part of the writer's duties to society. Not one
little
*rhis ma\- be an exaggeration on my part. Arkady Belinko\' writes, in Novy Zbtirnal, no. 93 handed copies to union members personally, one at a time. Each member was obliged to sign for his copy and to read it in a room specially set aside for that purpose.
(1968), that Victor llvin
In this w ay, further circulation of the typescript was some copies got a way.
restricted. It
is
probable, however, that
The Best I'orm bit less
important
is
defence of peace must begin
in the soul
of evcr\'
[573)
the fight for social justice and for the strengthening of
spiritual values in his contemporaries. effectix e
Defence
oi
human
Russian literature, and
I
being.
I
This,
—w \\
and now here
ith the
as
else,
is
w here the
defence of spiritual values
brought up
in the traditions
cannot imagine m\self working as
a
of
writer without
such aims." "
Another personal rule that Solzhenits\n now broke was his refusal to make public appearances. Fhe first time was almost by accident. .\ friend casualh' asked him w hile the\' w ere w alking in the street whether he would agree to speak at the Kurchato\- Institute of Phxsics. Sensing that this would give him another opportunitN' to make his presence telt in the capital, Sol/.henitsvn assented, and the meeting w as fixed verv quickb so that there could ,
While preparing this lecture, Solzhenits\n sta\ed at the Steins' flat, and \ eronica Stein w as the involuntar\' w itness of how much it meant to him. Returning from her office in the late afternoon, she thought she heard his voice and imagined he must be saxing something to her. W hen she popped her head inside the door of his room, how e\er, she found him rehearsing a scene from The First Circle w here the engineer Gerasimovich has a brief prison visit from his w ife and as he looked up, she be no
official interference.
— —
saw tears in his e\es.'-
W hen Solzhenitsvn arrixed at the institute that exening, he found si.x hundred people present and w as given an enthusiastic reception for his readings from Cancer Ward, Candle in the Wind, and the ostensibh' "forbidden" The First Circle. New s of his appearance quickly spread, and soon he was inundated w ith invitations from all over Moscow. He accepted as manv as he could, and everxthing seemed to be arranged: permissions were granted by the directors of various institutions, dates established, notices put up, and invitations sent out, but at the last minute each lecture w as cancelled. At the Karpov Institute, Solzhenitsx n arri\ ed in the car that had been sent for him only to find a notice pinned to the door: "CJancelled ow ing to the author's indisposition.""
turned out that the Moscow
Cit\' Party Committee had been ringing w arn everybodx- off, threatening the institute directors w ith reprisals if they went ahead with their meetings. Semichastny, the head of the KGB, denounced Solzhenits\n's effrontery at Party ideological conferences and briefing sessions for Party propagandists, but, paradoxically, his fulminations only increased Solzhenitsyn's self-confidence. If that was all the head of the dreaded KCiB intended to do to him, there was no danger. It was It
round
to
difficult,
however, to find other platforms to speak from,
until, quite
pectedly, he was in\ ited to the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Studies
No\ember
unex(a
pre-
With a premonition that this might be his last opportunit)-, Solzhenitsyn went along prepared to speak as well as to read; after treating his listeners to two chapters from Cancer Ward, he seized on a question from the audience in order to get a tew \ious meeting there had been cancelled) for
things off his chest.
30.
— !
SOLZHENITSYN
[574]
must explain
I
appearances,
vou.
\\
I
hv, although
have
now
I
used to refuse to talk to reporters or make public
started giving intervie\\
and
s
believe, as before, that the writer's business
I
am
standing here before
to write, not to
is
platforms, not to keep explaining himself to newspapers. But a lesson: the
\\
riter exists not to
\\
ma\- think has no business at
all
This organization took awav
mv
.
.
.
There
to tutelage over the arts, that
supervising literature
mv
haunt public
have been taught
but to defend himself.
rite
no obvious claim
certain orga)uzatwii that has
I
—but
a
is
you
that does these things.
which was never intended for publication. Even so, I said nothing, but went on working quietly. However, thev then made use of excerpts from mv papers, taken out of context, to launch from the plata campaign of defamation against me, defamation in a new form form at closed briefing sessions. What can I do about it? Onlv defend mvself novel and
archive,
—
So here
I
without
mv know ledge and
am! Look, I'm
in a restricted edition
still
and
Look,
alive.
contrary to is
this
my
head
wishes,
is still
among
being circulated
on
my novel
mv
shoulders. Yet,
has been published
the chosen
\ sevolod Kochetov, the chief editor of Oktyahr. Tell me, then,
denv mvself similar privileges? Whv shouldn't from the same no\el here todav?
I,
—people
whv
the author, read
like
should
I
vou chapters
'"*
w as an
It
to be heard
carried
awav
and these w ere extraordinary
extraordinar\- performance,
from b\-
a
\\
ords
public platform in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn was
the strength of his feelings
—
recklessly, exaltedly.
He
imag-
ined he could see before him the face of Semichastny, and his resentment
knew no bounds. "In jov,
a
loud voice, and with a feeling of triumph and simple
explained myself to the public and paid him hack.
I
An
insignificant con-
and perhaps in the future too, ... I had been granted an audience of half a thousand and the freedom to speak!" The son of Gulag w as trulv unbending his knees and straightening his back. As he later wrote vict in the past,
when
describing this scene:
Vou would have
to live
through
a
long
life
of slavery,
bow ing and scraping to w ith the rest in hyp-
authoritv from childhood on, springing to your feet to join ocritical applause, all
this as slave
nodding assent
and
to patent lies, never entitled to
citizen, later as slave
Don't look round! Don't break ranks!
from
platform w
a
ith
an audience of
—
five
answer back
and convict: Hands behind your back! to appreciate that hour of free speech
hundred people,
also intoxicated
w
ith
freedom.''
But even more important w as another sensation that accompanied this explosion of anger and truth: "This was perhaps the first time, the very first time, that I felt mvself, saw mvself, making history." The legend of Solzhenitsvn was being born. He read some chapters from The First Circle, but this time the most provocative ones, the most political ones, instead of the domestic chapters he had read at the Kurchatov Institute.
the
Within davs the news of
his outburst
KGB had travelled round Moscow,
to hear
it.
and of
his daring defiance of
but Solzhenitsyn w as no longer there
Also contributing to the legend were those sudden disappearances
— The Best Form
oe Defence
[575]
December he shaved off his beard once more work on 1 he (iulag Archipelago, not so pimpernel. He was beginning to Hve a Hfe now that
of his, and at the beginning of
and shpped awav to much a musketeer as far surpassed, in
his hide-out to a
excitement and danger, the
lives
of his fictional heroes.*
Between December 1966 and Februars' 1967, Solzhenitsvn produced second draft of the
first six
parts of The (iulag Archipelago, revising
ing over fifteen hundred pages in
two and
a half
months. Alwavs
his
and retvp-
a
strenuous
worker, he surpassed himself on this occasion, working sixteen hours
a
day
two shifts. He had read somewhere the theories of the German doctor Beckmann that sleep was more refreshing and that vou needed less of it if vou went to bed at sundown and rose w ith the sun the next morning. Going one better than the theorv, he established a routine w herebv he w ent to bed at eight o'clock each evening and rose again at two. From two to ten in the morning, he worked his first shift, took a break for an hour, then w orked again from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening, and then in
—
had a further free hour before going to bed again. He also washed, cleaned, and cooked for himself, and as a result of this killing timetable, he had one or
two bouts of
He
illness.
"^
did not omit to take his faithful transistor radio with
of being w ithout
news was unbearable, even
—the idea — and some-
him
in his rural solitude
Radio Libert\', and other Western stations. Apart from his usual curiosit\', he w as listening for news of his interview w ith Komoto Sedze, w hich the latter had agreed to publish during the first w eek of the new vear (not onlv had Solzhenitsx n gone over to the
how found time
to listen to the BB(^,
w ith his new tactics of communicating directlv w ith abroad, but from the ver\' outset he also tried to control both what w as published and when and where). He was puzzled and disappointed to hear nothing, and concluded that either Sedze had grown afraid or the interview had been suppressed bv his editor. Solzhenitsvn's little "bomb" had failed to go off. (Onlv much later did he disco\er that he w as w rong. Fhe interview had been published in Japan, but no echo of it had reached the \\ est. I le had overestimated the closeness of the cultural ties between Japan and the Western world.) Irked bv this failure, but in other respects encouraged by the general success of his new polic\' of openness, Solzhenits\n pondered his next move. .\s earlv as the preceding J ul\ he had hit upon the scheme of writing an open he idea had been suggested letter to about a hundred of his fellow writers. to him b\' a similar open letter w ritten in the spring of 1966 by two priests attacking the behaviour of the officialh approved Orthodox church.' To write and send such a letter w ould be a gamble, for the challenge would be offensive
I
While Solzhenitsvn was awav, the authorities carried the campaign against him into his home district ideological secretarv, Alexander Kozhevnikov, denounced Solzhenitsvn at a local Fartv meeting for his "harmful influence on Soviet youth" and quoted passages
*
town of Ryazan. The from The and
Feast of the Conquerors
the Tart.
under the mistaken impression that he was
Natalia got to hear of
Kozhevnikov.
it
and personallv delivered
a letter
citing The Tenderfoot
of protest to an astonished
SOLZHENITSYN
[576]
and more overt than anything he had done before. On the other \\ ere now w riting such letters all the time. The Sinvavskv-Daniel trial had provoked a w hole spate of them, not only of the mild varietx' that he had refused to sign but also more outspoken ones, such as the eloquent letter that the young intellectual Alexander Ginzburg had addressed to Premier Kosygin or the fiery denunciation of Mikhail Sholokhov by Lvdia Chukovskava after Sholokhov's disgraceful remarks at the Party (>ongress. If he w ere to do something similar, w ith his fame and reputation behind him, the impact would be enormous. None of these other authors of open letters had been arrested or charged w ith an offence, so the chances of getting aw ay w ith it seemed good. However, he needed a pretext, and he decided that the forthcoming Congress of Soviet Writers would be the ideal moment. 1 he congress had just been postponed until the spring of 1967, w hich would gi\e him time to make the necessary preparations. far
cightier
\\
hand, lesser-know n personalities
\\ hen he returned to Ryazan at the beginning of March, the government seemed to be becoming e\en more restrictive than before. In December it had ratified a new decree establishing two new paragraphs of the criminal code directed against "anti-Soviet" statements and unauthorized demonstrations. But the opposition was also stronger. A group of distinguished aca-
demicians and
intellectuals, including Shostakovich, Kaverin,
amm, and
—
Mikhail
—
Romm,
new name on such appeals Andrei Sakharov, had signed a letter of protest w hen the decree w as first promulgated, and in January a group ot young people had demonstrated in Pushkin Square against the new law although several of them were arrested as a result. Also arrested were Yuri Galanskov, for publishing a new samizdat journal, Phoenix 66; Alexander (iinzburg, tor compiling a "w hite book" on the Sin\a\sk\ -Daniel trial and sending it to the West; and tw o of their friends, for helping them. In February, shorth before Solzhenits\n's return, two of the \oung demonstrators had been tried and one of them, \ ictor Khaustov, sentenced to three years in a labour camp. Like Sinyavsky and Daniel before him, Khaustov had held firm under cross-examination and did not renounce his opinions Igor
I
a relatively
,
or admit an\- guilt.
'^
Solzhenitsyn must have been aw are of these developments, but the dem-
\oung poets were remote from those members of the literary and his ow n immediate concern was to secure a final decision on Cancer Ward. Part 2 had been almost completed before he went away, and w ith his usual love of m\'stification he had arranged for his not quite final draft to be forw arded to Fx ardo\ sk\' a month before his return, thus leading Tvardovskv to think he w as in Ryazan rather than somewhere
onstrators and
establishment that he knew
,
quite different. Relishing this opportunity to exercise his old labour-camp skills
of "throw ing up a smoke-screen," and his role of the cunning outsider,
he had accompanied
dovsky that the assuring
him
it
latter
w
ith
an elaborately misleading
could be "the
first
that their inabjlity_to agree over part
his attitude to A'017 Mir. "I
letter
reader of part 2"
continued to follow the
1
had acti\
informing Tvar-
he wished and no w av affected ities and the policy in
if
Tm
Bhsi I'orm ok Dfkkncf.
[5"~1
of voiir maga/inc with complete approval." This was untrue, hut Sol/.henitsvn
felt
he needed to
Ixardoxskx to
flatter
lull
and make
his susjiicions
things easier for himself. In his account ot the matter, he suggests that he
was alread\ anticipating
rejection
1)\
Ixardoxskx and was simpl\
tr\
ing to
keep things polite, but sul)set|uent exents indicate that he had not realK gi\en
up hope. Part
1
had been rejected
magazines had declined to
l)\
Solzhenitsx n had ended
[>art
both Zvczda and
extracts.
j"»ul)lish 1
/*rostoi\
Aory Mir was
of G///aT \\V//Y/on
and three other
his last hope.'''
a relati\el\
optimistic
was under control, and he was full of hope, whereas the Partx official Rusanov was still sick and \ iewed the future w ith misgixing. In part 2, however, the pendukmi gradualK sw img the other w a\ Kostoglotov's cure was more or less completed, but at the cost of se\ere radiation sickness and imknow n damage to his libido from the hormone treatment. I lis romances with /o\a and Dr (iangart both entled inconclusi\el\ He had neither the appetite for ph\sical sex w ith the one nor the psxchological strength to sustain a marital relationship w ith the other. The novel ended enigmaticalK w ith Kostoglotov pa\ing a \isit to the i ashkent zoo, w here the animals reminded him of people he knev\' (a fierce, vellow-exed tiger recalled Stalin, though Stalin's name w as not mentioned cxplicitK ). One animal w as missing from its cage. A macacjue monke\' had been blinded w hen someone threw tobacco in its eves, and the monkev's fate was compared, metaphoricallx to Kostoglotov's. I he "tol)acco," in his case, had been his labour-camp sentence and his illness; and "no one" w as responsible, just as the monkex s assailant had remained anonxmous. He had survixed, but the cure had almost killed him, and he remained a sort of cripple. Rusanov, by contrast, was completeh' cured and had been discharged even before Kostoglotov the car taking him aw av had narrow 1\ missed runnote. Kostoglotox
s illness
.
.
,
,
—
ning dow n Kostoglotov their
sxmbolic expression of
in the drivewax', a suitablx'
mutual antagonism. In part 2,
more
attention
was paid
doctors than had been possible
duced.
Dr
in part 1,
and some
nex\
Oreshchenkox-, a retired general practitioner
xx
ho obxiouslx enjoxed
made to embodv a surprising plea for the medicine; and the humane surgeon. Lev Leonidovich, xxith
the author's approval,
of private
and xxork of the figures were intro-
to the personalities
x\
as
virtues a
more
than usual sxmpathx' for the sufferings of his patients, turned out to have learned his compassion in the labour camps, like Kostoglotov. 1 ogether
x\
ith
Dontsova and Ciangart, these "good" doctors xxere placed in opposition to
Nizamutdin Bakhramovich, and his hangers-on, x\ ho x\ ere lazy, technically unqualified, and interested only in personal advancement. The ultimate fate of the good doctors xxas perhaps symbolized bx' Dontsova's their venal chief,
discovery that, as a result of too
much exposure
to the
X-raxs
(in
the selfless
pursuit of her duty), she herself had contracted cancer.
Two nexx
patients in part
2
xxere also of interest for Solzhenitsvn's grand
design.
Maxim
C^halx',
learned
how
manipulate the system, was
to
an unscrupulous Communist "businessman" a naturally ally
xx
ho had
of Rusanov's, and
SOLZHENITSYX
[578] a
lugubrious librarian called Shulubin gravitated to Kostoglotov. Shulubin,
an Old Bolshe\ik and
was suffering from a severe and terminal w hich endowed his conversations \\ ith Kostoglotov with a particular pathos and urgencv. Once a true believer, he had become thoroughlv disillusioned w ith the crueltv and corruption of Soviet societv, but not with socialism. Into his mouth w as placed an eloquent plea for "ethical socialism," based as much on the ideals of the Russian socialists of the late nineteenth centurv as on the theories of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. \\ hat Shulubin advocated was perhaps an earh' variant of "socialism with a human face," and so persuasive was his reasoning that for several vears he was taken to represent Solzhenitsvn's own views on socialism. Onl\ much later did Solzhenitsvn reveal that this was not so. He had passed that point long ago in his own development, but had found it interesting to make the best possible case for socialism through the medium of a svmpathetic character. His own views, as embodied bv Kostoglotov, Oreshchenkov, and the Kadmins, entailed a rejection of socialism, but the\' had of necessitv to be camouflaged if he was to stand an\" hope of Soviet publication. \\ hen he arrived at the Novy Mir offices on 16 March 1967 to discuss the form of
a loxalist,
rectal cancer,
novel once more, Solzhenitsvn found that although the entire editorial board
had read part 2, the meeting with Tvardovskv was to be tete-a-tete. Tvardovskv w as in a deep depression. In the course of the winter, the Central Committee had sacked his two most faithful deputies, Dementye\' and Sachs, w ithout even asking him. \ovy Mir had been attacked in Pravda and was finding it harder and harder to get things past the censorship. And Tvardovsk\ himself w as under a cloud. After failing to be re-elected to the Central Committee, he had been rejected bv the Supreme Soviet and had been ostentatiouslv passed over for a medal that w as awarded to colleagues who had Sholokhov, Pedin, Leonov, and Tychina. As a result, toed the Partv line he w as more preoccupied than ever w ith the fate of his magazine. He had managed to maintain the qualitv of his editorial board bv signing up the liberal writers Efim Dorosh and (>hingiz .\itmatov, but his freedom of manoeuvre was greatl\- limited and he feared that there was little hope of publish-
—
ing Cancer this,
Ward during
the
onh' the highest praise for
One
2
vear.
He was
desperately sorr\- about
"three times better" than part
1
and had
it.-"
ma\' assume that Solzhenitsvn was disappointed by this new
was no one still
coming
because he had found part
s. There Union likelv to print it, and publication was chances seemed even slimmer after the two men had
else in the Soviet
his goal.
But
become embroiled
his
in a sillv quarrel of the sort that
had spoiled their tw o
previous meetings. Tvardovskv was irritated bv some news that had been
passed to him the dav before bv Georgi .Markov,
Union
secretariat, to the effect that Cancer
a
member
of the Writers'
Ward had been published
in the
was true, it made his task of securing Soviet publication impossiblv difficult, and he w as angrv w ith Solzhenitsvn for manoeuvring behind his back. SolzhenitsNn tried to soothe him h\ explaining that it w as only one chapter and that it had appeared in Czechoslovakia, w hich was hardly the West.
If this
— The Best Form
W est.
Ic
1
explained that
in
had also been ottered
that
response to
a request,
viewed b\
a
he had sent them
added
a
a
ehapter
that sinee
Sloxak journalist (sinuiltaneousl\-
tew months pre\iousl\ he had been inter-
a
Japanese correspondent
as well).
turned out that l\ard()\sk\ knew about the Japanese
It
due
intormation that
tiie
I579]
to sexeral So\iet niaga/ines. lie
then he had also gi\en an interxiew to slipping in
Defence
of
to lea\ e for ltal\ the next da\
tor a
meeting of
briefed on the latest tiexelopments before his departure
—
was
article. lie
COMES
had l)een
antl
was probablv
that
wh\ he had been told about the Cancer \\V/yv/ chapter as well. And this, too, was a bone of contention between them. Almost their tirst quarrel had been over Solzhenitsxn's refusal to go to Leningrad for the in 1963. In the
winter of 1965,
of (X)MKS and had refused to
noxel and archix ing
normalh
,
w
e,
1
(X)MKS
sxniposium
\ardo\sk\ had been in Paris for
comment on
w as w ell and work-
assuring \\ esterners that Solzhenitsxn
had been
hile \'igorelli, the secretarv general of CX).\IES,
reported as sa\ing that he had had "a friendh' chat" w
been told that the novel and archix
e
meeting
a
the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn's
Solzhenitsxn and
ith
had been returned to him. Solzhenitsvn
now reminded IvardoNskv how much he hated \
igorelli for this
and hinted that he expected better beha\ iour of IxardoN skv on
his
statement
forthcom-
Rome. As tempers rose, Tvardovsk\- exclaimed over Cancer Ward, "E\en
ing visit to
publication depended entireh' on me,
I
wouldn't publish
if
W hen Solzheni-
it!"
tsvn asked wh\', he replied, "Because of vour non-acceptance of the Soviet regime.
You
refuse to forgi\ e the Soviet regime anxthing.
forget anvthing.
You have much
explain that he was
full\' in
too good a
favour of the Soviet regime in
elected deputies to independent workers' Soviets
treel)
could not be false to his
memorv and
w ere. Ivardovskx' invoked the societ\' that
.
You
.
.
refuse to
memorv!" Solzhenitsvn its
tried to
original
— but
that a
form
w
riter
describe things otherw ise than as thev
collective farms as a "sacred" aspect of Soviet
Solzhenitsvn refused to respect, but Solzhenits\n pcjinted out
w ere not mentioned in his novel and that the true objecbook la\- elsew here. "What reall\- casts its shadow o\er the w hole the prison-camp s\stem. No countr\' can be healthv w hile it carries
that collective farms tions to the
book such
is
a
tumour inside it" (he was, incidentallv, contradicting his statement Club the preceding November that there was no s\mbolism
the Writers' it).
He
until
also
reminded Ivardoxskx' of something
he started receiving
letters in
at
in
had not know n
that he himself
—
response to Ivan Denisovich
that
Khru-
w ho had presided over the run-down of Stalin's labour-camp empire, had also been responsible for establishing a new netw ork of camps almost as oppressive as Stalin's, and that these camps were still in operation.*
shchev,
Nevertheless, Tvardovsk\' insisted that Solzhenitsvn had gone too *In one respect
—
that of the food pro\ided in the
camps
than Stahn's (according to one storv, Khrushchex',
— Khrushchev's were
when
presented w
camps, halved the amount for food because he was appalled by the shchev's rule that three kinds of
camp regiment were
ith
said to be
far.
worse
the budget for the
cost). It
was under Khru-
introduced, according to the rations pro-
vided and the restrictions imposed on the prisoners: normal, intensified, and se\ere.
SOLZHENITSYN
[580]
vou must make some concessions to the Soviet regime. vou can't afford iwt to vou can't fight a howitzer with a pea-shooter." Until six months earlier, Solzhenitsvn would probablv have agreed with him, but now he w as not so sure. He felt that writers at last had public opinion and he was determined to exploit a how itzer of their ow n it to the hilt. Cancer Ward, he told 1 vardovskv, was alreadv circulating, and nothing could stop it now. If nobody would publish it in the Soviet Union, it no longer mattered to him. "Mv books can wait, Alexander Trifonovich. shall die, and evcrv w ord \\ ill be accepted, just as it is. Nobodv w ill w ant to correct them!" T\ardovskv was irritated by these high-flown words and poohpoohed them as self-infatuation. Solzhenitsvn, he felt, was striking attitudes. "Sav what vou
like,
—
In the long run,
—
—
1
"
There's nothing easier than telling vourself that vou're the
and
all
know
Tvardovsk\' did not letter to the \\ riters' a
onh brave
one,
the rest are poltroons, alwavs readv to compromise."-'
w
of Solzhenitsxn's resolve to
Congress, nor did he
know
rite
an open
that in addition to sending
chapter oi Cancer Wardlo Slovakia, Solzhenitsvn had that verv week (per-
haps even that dav) handed
who had lator
a
complete copv of Part
1
to the Slovak journalist
w ho w as also a transsome months previouslv to response, Solzhenitsvn had sent him ten
interview ed him. This journalist, Pavel Licko,
from Russian, had written
to Solzhenitsvn
inquire about his latest work. In
pages from Cancer Ward, and Licko had arranged for their publication in the It w as a w orld scoop, and Licko w as subsequentlv asked Union and trv to get an interview w ith Solzhenitsvn. He was well equipped for the task, having served as an officer in the Soviet armv during the w ar and speaking fluent Russian, but v\hen he approached the \\ riters' Union in Moscow he was repeatedlv told that Solzhenitsvn was busv or ill, or even almost dN ing, and could not receive visitors. Licko was also denied a permit to visit Rvazan. Having sent a telegram to Solzhenitsvn and received an invitation to visit him, however, he had managed to pull
Bratislava Pravda.
to visit the Soviet
,
sufficient strings
there
sk\';
in \
through
his militarv contacts to obtain the
permit and had
week preceding Solzhenitsyn's talk with Ivardovhe had spent six hours in Solzhenitsvn's companv at his new flat
travelled to
Rxazan
in the
ablochkov Passage." Unfortunatelv, Licko proved to be an erratic witness,
dered his storv of this unique
visit to
who
later
sequent accounts of w hat he saw there are not to be fulh' trusted.
however, take down views (Solzhenitsvn
a relativelv
and the interview, when
ungarbled account of Solzhenitsyn's
wrote to him
later
it
turni Zivot (Cultural Life)
appeared
on
31
embroi-
Solzhenitsvn's home, so that his sub-
listing
some of the worst
in the Bratislava literarv
March
He life
did,
and
mistakes),
magazine Kul-
1967, attracted a great deal of atten-
becoming a prime source of information about the reclusive author for some years to come. In it, Solzhenitsvn gave the fullest and frankest account
tion,
of his
life
yet to appear anywhere, underlining his military record, pointing
out that he had been sentenced not
in a
court of law but by the "extra-judicial
decision" of a special tribunal, and listing his labour
camps and
his place of
Thf Best Form of Defence
Among
[5H1]
works he drew special attention to (dancer Ward, of completed part 2; The First (Jircle, w hich he said had taken him nine \ears, off and on, to complete; and his pla\s I'he '['einlerfoot and the Tart and (aduIIc in the Wind. Of the latter he commented, "1 do was successful w ith it. Ne\ertheless, both the Vakhtangox and not think Lenin Komsomol theatres w anted to stage it at one time." I le also mentioned his miniature stories and said he w as aw are that thev had appeared in translation in the English magazine Encounter, although he had had nothing to do exile.
which he
his litcrarv
had
said he
just
I
with
it.
As on
interesting as the details of his biographv
literature.
Owing
I
le
admitted that he w as not w
to the circumstances of his
literature. Nevertheless,
life,
w ere
the
\
iew
s
he expressed
read in world literature.
ell
he had had time
Russian
onI\- for
he had decided opinions on w hat to expect
in the
near future. "I have a subjective impression that literature in \\ estern Europe,
perhaps because
it
has not experienced anv upheavals for the past se\eral
decades, ma\' be rather shallow
.
The foundation of
experiencing of social processes. Eastern Europe, has endured profound upheavals. Eor this reason
literature lies in the
in I
w hich
am
I
ver\'
deep
include Russia,
hopeful for
its
future." Russian literature in particular, he said, had alwavs been
literar\'
characterized bv
its
sensitivitv to suffering, but
now
it
w as exposed
to dan-
gers of a different kind. "In our countrv vou sometimes hear that writers
should paint false
and
w hat
is
going to happen tomorrow
literature
is
cosmetics." 1 he dut\' of the writer
a pretty picture
justifies lies.
Such
of
.
1
his
is
was not exclusivelv towards societv but also tow ard each individual w ithin society, and their interests did not alw avs coincide. Ehe individual had manv problems that the collective did not know how to solve. Solzhenitsyn also elaborated on an idea that had caught his attention at the Writers' Club discussion of Cancer Ward. Yuri Karvakin had been one of those who expressed reservations about the portra\al of Rusanov, and had quoted Camus's w ords that art of the higher kind should not pla\' the part of prosecutor. Solzhenitsyn had replied at the time that this raised the issue of "the correlation between the present time and eternitv" in a work of art, and now he took up the idea once more.
The
writer needs to maintain a balance between the two categories of the present
and
eternity. If his v\ork
aeteniitatis,
much
then his work
is
so topical that he loses his view of things sub specie
v\ ill
quickly die.
conversely, should he devote too
and "air." The writer stands at all times between and should forget neither the one nor the other.
force, dis
And
of his attention to eternit\- and neglect actualitv, his work loses
Tw o further points
its
it
as
writers.
its
colour,
and Charyb-
of note emerged from the Licko interview.
that Solzhenitsyn did not regard for society to persecute
this Scylla
One was
unusual or even necessarily undesirable
"There have been manv cases
in
which
society treated a writer unjustly and he fulfilled his vocation nevertheless.
SOLZHENITSYN
[582]
The The
writer must be prepared for adversity. This
is
an occupational hazard.
writer's lot will never be easv."
Secondlv, Solzhenitsvn voiced his thoughts on his preferred method of
composition said,
in his novels.
1 he genre he regarded as most interesting, he
was the "polvphonic novel"
(a
term
first
coined to describe the novels
of Dostovevsky). Solzhenits\'n's definition of the polvphonic novel seemed
from the accepted one. In his view, the touchstone of the it had no one hero. "The way I interpret polyphony, each character, as soon as the plot touches him, becomes the main hero. That way, the author is responsible for, say, thirty-five heroes and doesn't give preference to any one of them." He had \\ ritten two books in this way, he said, and was planning to write a third.-' It was a few days after this interview that Solzhenitsvn had gi\'en Licko a copv of part 1 of Cancer Ward. His idea seems to have been to get the novel published in a "friendly" East European country if publication was impossible in the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia was particularlv suitable just then, in view of the liberalization that was taking place in the months preceding the "Prague spring." Bratislava was also a good choice. It was less in the limelight than Prague, so that plans for publication there would be less likely to attract attention.* At a later date Licko w as to claim that Solzhenitsvn had asked him to seek publication in England or Japan as well, "since he believed "-^ that E^ngland and Japan had the most deep-rooted cultures in the world. In view of certain conflicts in Licko's evidence, this storv w as disbelieved by most of those who heard it; but in the light of Solzhenitsyn's known ideas and plans at this time, it is not entirelv implausible. Later, uncier pressure at home, Solzhenitsvn denied that he had "authorized" anvone to publish Cancer Ward, but it is quite possible that he had a contingency plan whereby Licko was to act if anvthing untoward should happen. He was still apprehensive about the possible results of his forthcoming open letter, and he anticipated all kinds of unpleasantnesses, up to and including arrest. It is equally plausible that Licko confused what Solzhenitsvn was saying to him, but unlikely that he imagined the w hole idea of publication in the West. The theorv that Solzhenitsvn may have envisaged Western publication to differ a little
polvphonic novel was that
Ward is given credence b\' a similar moxe that he made a month when he gave explicit instructions for The First Circle to be published in the West. The person he entrusted with this mission was Olga Carlisle, an American journalist of Russian descent and the daughter of the man who
of Cancer later,
had carried out the microfilms of The
w w
as in
Moscow
as preparing.
First Circle,
to collect material for an
\ adim Andrevev. Carlisle
anthologv of Soviet poetry that she
Although he had never met her before, Solzhenitsyn was
influenced in her favour bv the kind of subjective "signs" that appealed to his intuition: her kinship
with V'adim Andrevev (and through him with her
grandfather, Leonid Andrevev), and the fact that her maternal grandfather
had been the *The
Socialist Revolutionary politician Victor
Chernov. Her pedi-
printed and bound and lying
Slovak edition of Cancer Ward was actually w hen the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, but
it
in the v\'arehouse
never w ent on sale to the public.
Thk Best Form of Defence
l5^3l
gree on both sides, from Solzhcnits\n's point of view, was impeccable. Fur-
thermore, she was
a
good friend
ot
Kornei (Jhukovsky (who had put
it all, her photograph had stood on the desk where he worked in (>huko\skv's dacha. He had studied it manv times, w ithout ever thinking that he would one da\' meet this attractive woman and call on her for help. Chukovskv's information that she was in Moscow must have struck him as a w onderful coincidence or even an "act of God," w hich is how he described to her Licko's recent visit to Rvazan. 1 hev were walking back to her hotel from the flat where they had met (for the second
Solzhenitsvn in touch with her) and, to cap
time, that evening), and Solzhenitsvn described to her the details of his dif-
and his plans for dealing with it. The KCiB was tr\ing to him into silence, he said, but he had outflanked it by giving part of Cancer Ward to Licko, and now he wanted her to see that The First Circle appeared in the \\ est, first in America and then in other countries. "It is a big book mv life," he told her, adding that it was his most important w ork, the one that mattered and would hit the Soviet leadership ficult situation
throttle
1
—
the hardest. Fie also told her he wanted
it
to "stun public (jpinion
throughout
known." .\t the same time, absolute secrecv w ould have to be preserved and no mention made of his participation in this decision. "You can imagine w hat would happen to me if vou w ere found out." He also told her of his plan to send an open letter to the forthcoming Writers' Congress in Ma\' and asked her to do what she the world. Let the true nature of these scoundrels be
could, as a journalist, to get
publicized in the
it
accepted the assignment eagerlv. Flving to her father
in Paris
W est.
\\ estern
Carlisle
seems to have
Kurope, she contacted
and took the microfilms from him. Bv the end of
.\pril
1967 they were in America.-' Solzhenitsvn's most important novel publication in the West. Part
1
w as now launched on the road
The Gulag Archipelago, his ultimate exposure, was almost complete and safe-keeping of trusted friends.
to
of his second novel was half-wav there, while
The
nitsvn's letter to the congress. 1 he
in the
decks were therefore cleared for Solzhe-
first
draft
had been finished the preceding
summer, when Solzhenitsvn first thought of the idea, but since then had lain untouched. On his visit to Moscow, however, Solzhenits\'n took the opportunitv to show this draft to Chukovskv, Kaverin, Kopelev, and one or two others, and to ask their advice. On 24 March he returned to Rxazan and in I he principal change he and more general. Originally,
three days v\Tote out a completelv revised text.
introduced was to make the it
had resembled some of
letter less personal
his earlier (private) letters to the authorities, con-
centrating on the confiscation of his novel and archive and listing his personal
Now it began with a resounding denunciation of the Soviet system of censorship, w ent on to rehearse the injustices perpetrated against Soviet writers over the preceding fortv vears, and onlv then referred to the persecution and harassment inflicted on himself. From a personal, if eloquent, plea for justice for one man, it had turned into a thunderous denunciation of the entire conduct of the literary establishment, and was no longer a petition but a demand for justice for all. According to Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn's
grievances.
SOLZHENITSYN
[584]
favourite listening during the da\'s w hen he
Beethoven, and
much
of
it
was written w
ith
was composing the
letter
Beethoven's Ninth S\
was
mphonv
plaving in the background.-"^
When
the letter
was
finished, Solzhenitsyn
at
something
w riting
a letter to
found himself
of a loose end and tried to catch up on correspondence,
Mmeiim ("How Russian it is, how characteristic, the collection of names and objects, and how verv timelv!").* He put together a critical article on Gribovedov from notes written earlier, and even found time to read some stories mailed him by beginning w riters and to send them his comments. But somehow he could not settle, until the thought crossed his mind that he might not survive the release of his open letter unscathed and that it w ould be a good idea to write a sort of valedictor\' literarv testament (for w hich he also had notes readv). In a month of sustained elation, from 7 April to 7 Mav, he w rote Shalamov and thanking X'ladimir Soloukhin
for his Letters from a Riisshin
150 pages of an apologia pro vita sim, describing and anahzing his thoughts and actions from the moment he had decided to offer /iv/;; Denisovich for publication up to and including his most recent quarrel w ith I vartiovsky.-' His account w as selective, polemical, and hugely entertaining, a step-by-step justification of his past behaviour and a rollicking denunciation of his enemies. In these pages he could let his hair dow n and give vent to his deepest feelings, but he also had a didactic intent: to explain to himself and others how it w as that he had reached the end of his tether and w h\- he had decided to launch his open letter. It w as a means of coming to terms w ith himself in the lull before the impending storm and was eventualh to form the basis of the first four chapters of his "literar\' memoir," llje Oak and the Calf. There remained onh the task of sending his open letter to the intended he recipients. With the help of Natalia and several assistants in Moscow prepared 250 tvped copies of the letter, each signed with his own hand, and in the last five davs before the congress had them posted from difterent districts in Moscow (never more than two in the same box) to outw it the postal censorship. The recipients were chosen with meticulous care and included all the people whom Solzhenitsyn regarded as honest and genuine w riters, leading members of the Writers' Union and other public figures, a sprinkling oi apparatchiks to confuse the KGB, and w riters representing each ot the nonRussian republics. Curiously enough, Solzhenitsyn placed great hopes in the
o\'er
,
non-Russians (but w took place).
as
disenchanted
This careful planning ations,
and
b\' their
reactions
when
the congress
-^
it
duly bore
was the hallmark of Solzhenitsyn's
fruit.
The
style of oper-
vast majority of the letters reached their
on 18 Ma}' was hardly a
destination, and well before the opening day of the congress,
1967, the text
was being circulated
congress delegate
who
didn't
in samizdat, so that there
know about
it.
*Soloukhin's book, published in 1966, was about icons and icon collecting, and contained,
among
other things, an impassioned plea for the preservation of Russian churches and their
contents.
'
33
LETTER TO THE WRITERS' CONGRESS FOURTH ALL-UNION Congfcss THEsolemn
of Sovict \\ riters
affair to celebrate the fiftieth
a
\v
as
intended to be
anniversary of Soviet pow
er,
w hv it had been held over from the preceding year. According to Zhores Medvedev, preparations for the congress were exceptionally thorough. Both the Writers' Union and the ideological department of the CJentral C.ommittee w ere determined to ensure a tacade ot complete unanimity, to w hich end the lists of w titers w ho w ished to speak w ere \\
hich was one of the reasons
and the texts of all the speeches approved in advance. commission w as set up to accomplish this task, and speakers were warned that they must on no account depart from their prepared statements. It was feared that some delegates might try to raise the subject of Sinyavsky and Daniel, whose imprisonment w as still a rallying point for opposition to the Part\' line. And to make doubly sure that there would be no untoward incidents, no guests \\ ere invited from the other creative unions (artists, com-
carefully scrutinized
A
special
As a result, the enormous Main Hall ot the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was four-fifths empty w hen the congress opened It w as clear that the organizers had done their job w ell. Observers found it the dullest congress in the entire history of the Writers' Union. Once posers, musicians, and so on).
.
Demichev had demanded absolute loyalty to the doctrine of socialist realism opening address, there w as nothing further to discuss, and the general tone was summed up tow ards the end of the congress by a complacently ironical Sholokhov: "Judging by the past few days, everything is going as it should w ith good people: quietly, peacefully, calmly, w ith no sharp speeches in his
and no unnecessary outbursts
—
in
other words, everything in the garden
585
is
SOLZHENITSYN
[586]
lovely, so that everyone breathes freely and smiles benevolently, and the atmosphere in the auditorium is so tranquil that some in the audience have been dozing off."Whether Sholokhov's irony was meant to be pointed is not clear. He certainly was no friend of Solzhenitsyn, but he could hardh' ha\e been unaware that behind the scenes the atmosphere was anything but tranquil. Just about every delegate present \\ as aw are of Solzhenitsyn's letter, and by the second or third day all of them had read it. It was the main topic of conversation in the intervals between the sessions, at mealtimes and in the corridors of the congress hall, completely dominating all other concerns. Never had the contrast been greater betw een the unruffled, dead surface of Soviet literary life
and the seething passions underneath. F^or the first time since the early thira writer was trying to make a connection between the real problems facing So\iet literature and the empty formalities of its ceremonial. Solzhenitsyn had divided his letter into three parts. In the first he confronted head-on a subject that had not been tackled since the late twenties: the censorship. Now here in the Soviet constitution, he w rote, was there any provision for a censorship board. Its very existence was illegal, w hich was presumabh' w hv it was never publicly mentioned. Yet it gave arbitrarx' power ties,
over w Titers to indi\ iduals w ho hadn't the faintest idea of survival of the
drag out
its
literar\-
merit.
"A
Middle Ages, censorship has managed, Methuselah-like,
existence almost to the twent\-first centurw Perishable,
it
to
attempts
to arrogate to itself the prerogative of imperishable time, of separating
good
books from bad." Soviet writers, continued Solzhenitsyn, were not supposed to express their own judgements on man and society, and when they did,
works were mutilated beyond recognition. He then listed some of the and the writers who had suffered from it, ranging from Dostovevsky to Pasternak. Curiously enough, he also struck a nationalistic note, pointing out that "from the national point of view" the censorship was short-sighted and foolish. their
specific absurdities of the censorship
Our
literature has lost the leading position
century and the beginning of this one.
.
.
.
it
To
occupied the entire
of our country now appears imnieasurablv more dull,
Not only does our country
at
trivial,
—
the end of the last
w orld the
literary life
and inferior than
it
—
hv this in world opinion but world literature is poorer for it too. If the world had unrestricted access to all the fruits of our literature, if it were enriched by our spiritual experience, the v\ hole artistic exolution of the world would move in a different way, acquiring a new stability and rising, indeed, to new heights.' really
is.
.
.
.
lose
Solzhenitsyn formally proposed "the abolition of
all
censorship" of imagina-
and the granting of independence to publishers. In the second part of his letter, he dealt with the role of the Writers' Union. The union not only had failed to defend a long list of persecuted Soviet writers but had itself often led the persecution. There was no need for this tradition to be maintained, he wrote, and he proposed that union
tive literature
Letter to the Writers' ('ongress guarantees to defend
members should henceforth he
its
"so that past illegahties w Thirdl\- and lastlx
case and defend
He
him
,
ill
clearl\-
[5*^7]
formulated
not be repeated."
Solzhenits\ n called on the union to consider his o\\ n
against the persecutions to w hich he had been subjected.
repeated the complaints (and more) he had voiced
in his lecture at
the
Lazarev histitute: about the confiscation of his works, their restricted circulation among Partv loyalists, the campaign of slander against him conducted at Part\- meetings, the blocking of Cancer Ward, the refusal to perform or publish his plavs and screenplay, the refusal to reprint any of his pul)lished works in a collected edition,* and the cancelling of his public lectures. "Faced v\'ith
these flagrant infringements of m\- copyright and 'other' rights, will the
Fourth Congress defend me or w ill it not? It seems to me that the choice is not w ithout importance for the literar\- future of some of the delegates themselves." Solzhenitsvn concluded with a ringing declaration that he would from the grave even more fulfil his duty as a w titer "in all circumstances
—
successfullv and incontrovertibly than in
my
lifetime."
In this, his first polemical public statement w ritten for a large audience, Solzhenitsvn had tvpicallv gone to the heart of the matter in naming censorship as the chief enemv of Russian literature and in divining that it w as the
one subject the congress organizers would want to avoid. His letter went well bevond his earlier statements and set a pattern for many public utterances to come, mixing concern for national pride and the national interest with a more specialized care for the fate of the national literature and alarm over the treatment of his
own
works, linking them firmly as ditterent tacets
of the same, central problem. In other words, the central problem of Russian literature and the problem of Solzhenits\n w ere one and the same thing. letter, Solzhenitsyn had what the response would be, halt hoping that he would be invited to the congress to defend and discuss it. On 19 Mav, he had lunch w ith Kapitsa, w ho thoroughly approved the contents of Solzhenits\n's letter and later commented, "The technological revolution w ill
After seeing to the deliver\- of the copies of his
stayed on in
do
far
more
Moscow
to find out
for general prosperity than an\- socialist rexolution.""^ For the
next tw o davs Solzhenitsvn staved in Peredelkino, discussing possible strategy with Chukovsky and others, and on the day of the congress opening gave a reading at a research institute in the Moscow suburb of Bogorodskoye. The hall was half empty, and the reading (of the Spiridon chapters from The First
did not go well. Solzhenitsyn then read some of his miniature stories and his letter to the Congress. It was the only public reading of the letter in Moscow (Solzhenitsyn stood up to read it after having sat to read from his Circle)
works) and had an immediate impact on w ho greeted it w ith genuine applause.
his
otherw
ise
lukew arm audience,
Solzhenitsvn was all the more disturbed by the absence of such a collected edition in the Soviet Union because he had just learned of the publication of one by Possev in West Germany (indeed a friend had recent!) brought him a copy from there). *
SOLZHENITSYN
[588]
But
it
\^as not the congress platform,
the academician
Tamm
and
a
group of
Mozhayev
and that evening,
after
dinner with
his colleagues, Solzhenitsyn
heard
had been no mention of the letter in the public sessions of the congress, although most of the delegates had talked of nothing else in the corridors outside. Ihe next day, the Solzhenitsyns lunched with Shostakovich and his young wife, Irina Supinskava, who fetched them in her car and took them to Shostakovich's luxurious dacha in Zhukovka. Shostakovich, too, seemed to approve of Solzhenitsvn's letter,
from
his friend Boris
that there
him a "truth-seeker," and presented him with a signed record.''* Meanwhile, the congress continued as the authorities had planned, and only one person present found the boldness to challenge the leadership. A writer named Vera Ketlinskaya got up and complained that although it \\ as admissible to criticize or dislike this or that author, it was intolerable simply to ignore someone and pretend that he did not exist, "as our speakers have done with regard to the talented author Solzhenitsyn." She was evidentlv called
greeted
\\
ith
loud applause (the stenographic record has
a suspicious
space where applause would normally be recorded),! but that was
blank
and was no mention of Solzhenitsyn's letter.*^ Medvedev tells the story of a popular poet who, after downing several drinks at a party, announced his intention of going up to the platform the follow ing day and reading the letter aloud to the delegates. He even extracted a solemn promise from another writer present, w ho was due to chair one of the follow ing day's sessions, to call on him at the appropriate moment. But when the next day's sessions began, the prospective chairman was absent, and his replacement read out all,
there
an apology, saving that the other writer had been unexpectedly taken
The
poet
w as unable
to take the initiative himself,
ill.
and thus the contents of
the letter remained excluded from the debate.
ful
The ease with w hich this was accomplished may be ascribed to the careway in which the delegates to the congress had been picked beforehand.
Hardly anyone of independent views attended,
a
circumstance that was
all
the easier to arrange because of the natural distaste of most writers of conse-
quence
for being marshalled
and manipulated
like
puppets. But there was
plenty of support in the form of unofficial letters and telegrams to the con-
The most significant, urging an open discussion of Solzhenitsyn's lethad eighty-three signatures on it, including those of just about every writer, critic, and editor of consequence in literary Moscow (though with the exception of Tvardovskv, Lakshin, and the upper echelons of Novy Mir) J A number of writers wrote individual letters, of w hich the most outspoken came from the young prose w riter Georgi V'ladimov, w ho w ent even further
gress. ter,
*
According
to Shostako\ich's
and Solzhenitsyn teenth
Symphony
fell
memoirs
out two vears
(1969) for
its
(Testimony), as edited b\'
later, after
Solomon
V'olkov, Shostako\ich
Solzhenitsyn had criticized Shostakoyich's Four-
undue pessimism.
tin the unpublished chapters of her memoirs, Natalia Reshetoyska\a confirms that there was applause. She reports Solzhenitsyn as haying been told that Tyardoysky \\ as among those vyho applauded.
Letter to the Writers' Congress
[5^9]
than Solzhcnitsxn in his denunciation of the iniquities of the censorship and the pusillanimity of the union leaders. Sol/,henits\n letter. In his
like a
man
was
gratified
memoir he
voluntarily
quences from
mounting the
his effrontery.*^ That
to put his affairs in order acting.
His
\\
and genuineh surprised 1)\ the success w ritten and disseminated mv
confesses, "I had
and send
\\
(jf
his
letter
scaffold," fullv expecting dire conse-
as
his
whv
much
he had gone to so
trouble
manuscripts safely to the West before
ords about accepting death and speaking from be\'ond the gra\e,
while rhetorical, undoubtedK reflected
a
dread of the reprisals that he antic-
ipated from the goyernment side. Vet nothing happened and nothing said, not
even
after the letter
had appeared
back again. Solzhenitsyn does not say so this, too,
he had arranged
b\'
handing
in the
in his
a cop\- to
was West and was broadcast
account of the matter, but
Kfim Etkind on the eye of
the latter's departure for a literary conference in \ ienna. Etkind passed a S\\ all
edish editor of his acquaintance and asked
him
to see that
the major Western newspapers, and this dul\' happened on
after the congress ended. "^
A
3
it 1
it
to
appeared
in
Ma\', shortly
photographer w ho visited Solzhenitsyn
at
Chu-
koysky's dacha that week found him pacing the garden with his transistor
BBC had and w ould broadcast it back. "* He did not realize how successful he had been, howexer, until he attended a public meeting organized by the Writers' Union on 31 May 1967 to celebrate Paustovsky's seventy-fifth birthday. Paustovskv had long been an idol of the liberals, and even Solzhenitsyn shared the general respect for him, despite having criticized his autobiography in the past. The meeting had
radio in his hand,* waiting impatiently to discover whether the
obtained the text of his
been organized
letter
as a kind of liberal counterblast to the Writers'
Congress,
which few of them had attended, and was full to overflowing (over 900 writers w ere estimated to be present). Kaverin, as chairman, made a long speech in praise of Paustovsky's career, in the course of w hich he defined three main strands in Russian literature: the romantic (of which Paustovsk\ was the best living exemplar); the "dramatical grotesque," typified bv the late Bulgakov; and philosophical realism, whose leading exponent at that time was Solzhenitsyn."
At some point during the meeting, Kaverin went up to Solzhenitsyn and complimented him on his tactics. "What a f^rilliant move that letter of yours was!" And Solzhenitsyn was even more surprised to learn that 7 vardovsky approved of his letter, although Tvardovsky had not signed the collective letter of support.'- His information about Tvardovsky's attitude came at second hand, and he did not know that Tvardovskv had done more than approve or write in support, that he had been active behind the scenes. The secretariat of the Writers' Union had called a confidential meeting immediately after the congress to discuss how to respond to Solzhenits\n"s letter. They had regarded the letter as a "blow below the belt" and w anted to reply *. According to Natalia Resiietovskava, the radio
Komoto
Sedze.
was
a gift
from the Japanese correspondent
SOLZHENITSYN
[59o]
in kind, but the degree of support for Solzhenitsvn within the Writers' Union and the hullabaloo created abroad by the publication of the letter had caused them to have second thoughts, and Tvardovskv (supported, it seems, by Simonov and Polevoi) had vigorouslv persuaded them to take a different line. Thev should publish a statement, he said, confirming that there was no blemish
on Solzhenitsyn's war record, admitting that his letter contained things that deserved attention, but sternlv admonishing him for the "sensational" manner in which he had behaved. Having grudgingl\- accepted this suggestion, the secretariat asked Tvardovskv to invite Solzhenitsvn to their offices to confirm that this would satisf\' him before thev submitted their proposed statement to the Central Committee for final approval (one of the reasons they always moved so slowly and ponderouslv was that everything had to be approved bv the Central Committee's ideological section before anv action could be taken). Tvardovskv experienced his usual difficulty in tracking the elusive author down but finallv reached him on 8 June 1968, just before Solzhenitsvn w as to leave for Rozhdestvo. Over the telephone, he implored
drop e\er\'thing and come at once to Novy Mir, but Solzhenitsyn was He thought that Tvardovskv wanted to persuade him to make a retraction. If not, and if Tvardovskv was readv to publish something, he would let him wait until after the weekend. The BBC had announced three readings of his letter during the next few days, and he preferred to wait for
him
to
suspicious.
these to
He
make
his position stronger.'''*
therefore arranged to see Tvardovskv on 12 June, and only then did
he learn about the union's climb-down and the reasons for Tvardovsky's sense of urgencv. Tvardovskv rushed
him
off at once to the union's offices (situated
house that Tolstov used as his model for the Rostovs' residence in War and Peace) to meet \ oronkov and three other members of the secretariat, including the loyalist Cieorgi Markov. The meeting lasted for a couple of in the
hours and was friendly. Markov explained hypocriticall)' that Solzhenitsyn's letter couldn't
was too
be discussed
tight," but that
now
at the Writers'
Solzhenitsyn would help them "find
were
Congress, because "the agenda
thev were readv to consider a
way
it
and hoped that
out" of the difficult situation they
(meaning the clamour from abroad for an explanation of their attihad come well equipped, bringing copies of his earlier letters to Brezhnev and Demichev, as w ell as of his letter to the congress, and he informed them of its prehistory, starting with the confiscation of his archive and ending with his dismay at receiving no answer to his in
tude). Solzhenitsvn, as usual,
complaints. 1 hat was why, as a
last resort,
he had resolved to address the
congress (though he fibbed that his reason for not sending the letter
was
*
It
v\
eekend learning
appears that, between listening to the
how
BBC
broadcasts, Solzhenitsyn spent
to use a scythe. Natalia Reshetovskaya reports that
Rozhdestvo on 14 June, Solzhenitsvn had scvthed the entire plot to do such a thing.
him
when
it
composed was his desire for moderation). Markov and company feigned sympathy ("Of course Comrade Brezhnev
first
—the
first
when
much
of that
she arrived in
time she had
known
Letter to the
(Congress
\\'riters'
1
591
I
letter") but were elearl\ disturbed by the fact that produced his congress letter in so man\' copies and that it Solzhcnitsvn had had got abroad so quickb lad it been his intention to appeal to the Soviet Union's "enemies" over the head of the union? Not at all, replied Sol/henitsvn innocenth'. He had prepared sufficient copies to reach all the delegates
never got to see your
I
.
to the congress, because in the past his letters in single copies
had been pigeon-
holed and never answered. As for the circulation of the
letter abroad, he had had nothing to do with it. It had come about because of the union's delav in answering him. Thev should have called him to the platform, allowed him to read it into the record, and then discussed it. Solzhcnitsxn's logic was unassailable. The secretariat members were almost certain that Solzhcnitsvn had deliberately moved to outflank and put pressure on them, but thev w ere too dim-witted, and too hampered b\ their inabilitx' to call a spade a spade, to be able to counter his arguments. The conversation then mo\ed to Cancer Ward. Solzhcnitsvn v\ as w rong, said Markov, to say that Novy Mir had refused to publish his novel, and he appealed to Tvardovsky to confirm this fact. Tvardovskv agreed, dismissing the argument he had had w ith Solzhcnitsvn over part 2 as "just talk." The secretariat members were worried about the circulation of Cancer VV^r^(and,
and about rumours that they might even be abroad. Solzhenits\n simph' replied that he w as not to blame, but 1 vardovsky seized on their anxieties to secure an advantage. 'That's just wh\' I say that Cancer Ward must be published immediatelv. That w ill put a stop to all the hullabaloo in the West and prevent its publication there. We must put excerpts in the Literaturnaya Gazeta two davs from now with a note that the storv will be published in full." to a lesser extent. The First drcle) in samizdat
,
Solzhenitsyn w as astonished to hear them agree, and then to be actuallv
thanked for coming and explaining. In Tvardovsky's limousine on the wav back to Novy Mir, Tvardovskv planned w hich chapter to offer to the Literaturnaya Gazeta, while Solzhcnitsvn savoured the fruits of victorv. "That dav I
experienced for the
first
time
successful show of strength. .
.
.
that
in
mv
life
.
.
And how w ell
.
what
and no other, from the dav thev are
Union appeared
in the Literaturnaya Gazeta,
Cancer Ward. Solzhcnitsvn heard that
department of the
Demichev was * Natalia
(Central
Committee
No
his
statement from the
had been vetoed bv the cultural at
the suggestion of
Demichev.* some-
meeting with the secretariat for four davs.
Ward and include
it
in
observation that Solzhenitsv
five or six
days
in v\hich to set a
the relevant issue, whereas the two davs that were
short a time and produced the dela\' that ga\e n's original
Demichev
his chance.
account of the meeting w as
November, v\hen
the prospects for publishing Cancer
may have
An
earlier
chapter from left
v\ere too
She adds the interesting much more positive than
comments were added Ward weve alreadv much worse.
the one he eventually published, and that the satirical tone and sceptical in
a
nor did an extract from
Reshetovskaya, on the other hand, has suggested that Solzhenitsyn himself
meeting would have given the Literaturnaya Gazeta
only
make
feeling particularlv hostile towards Solzhcnitsvn since
been partly to blame by delaying Cancer
it
feels like to
born."'"^
Unfortunately, the triumph was short-lived. Writers'
it
thev understand that language
SOLZHENITSYN
[592]
one
in the
to friends
KGB had sent him a tape of Solzhenitsyn describing their meeting and mimicking Dcmichev
Soviet hterature depend).
As
in the process (on
a delaying tactic,
such minutiae does
Demichev suggested
that
all
fortv-two secretaries of the Writers' Union should read not onlv both vol-
umes of Cancer Ward but also The First Circle and Feast of the Conquerors before coming to a decision, which would take some time. Before sending off the manuscript of Cancer Ward, Tvardovsky asked Solzhenitsvn to make one or two cuts to render it less provocative, to which Solzhenitsvn agreed." By now Solzhenitsvn was well advanced in his preparations for writing the first in his series of planned novels on the period of the First World War and the Revolution. Volume 1, now to be called August 1914, would deal primarily with General Samsonov's campaign against the Germans on the eastern front, and especiallv the Battle of Tannenberg, marking Russia's first big defeat in the war.
He
had the material he had collected when
still
a
student in Rostov, but he needed some local colour and extra background information. Accordinglv, he and Natalia decided to take to East Prussia
to inspect
a trip that
summer
and Lithuania, accompanied bv Efim and Ekaterina Etkind,
some of the
Just before thev
places in left,
\\
hich the novel's action occurred.
Solzhenitsvn was involved in a collision in his
Moskvich and w as obliged to get the bodv repaired (it had been rammed and stove in from behind after he braked to avoid a pedestrian). Getting a repair done quickh' through the official repair shops in the Soviet Union is almost impossible, but Solzhenitsvn found an enterprising mechanic who was a specialist in working on the side, and became quite fascinated bv this man's cheerful ingenuitv in cheating his bosses. Solzhenitsvn had recently accepted a
commission from Mosfilm
in a school,
the
first
but he
now
week of Julv,
to
\\
rite a screenpla\' that
make
resolved to
jotted
down
his screenplay of The Parasite.
he had intended to
set
the mechanic his hero and, during
preliminarv notes for what was to become
"''
Almost the first use Solzhenitsvn made of the car after its repair was to an unorthodox interview He w as visited bv a former labour-camp prisoner called Leonid Samutin, who before his arrest had fought with V'lasov's forces on the German side. Solzhenitsyn at once interviewed him for The Gulag Archipelago, but not trusting the walls indoors, he took Samutin into the garden and sat him in the Moskvich to ask him some questions.'' 1 he Solzhenitsyns and the Etkinds finallv set off in the second week of July. Their first goal was a village near Smolensk, where Solzhenitsvn sought out Tvardovskv's brother, Konstantin Ivardovskv, who, unlike the famous editor, had stayed on the land and worked for the village's collective farm. From there thev drove north-east into what had once been East Prussia. Apart from inspecting the terrain over which Samsonov's armv had fought, Solzhenitsvn w anted to revisit the places where he himself had fought with his artillerv batterv, and he was filled with nostalgia when thev arrived. As usual they camped along the way, spending cheerful evenings around the campfire, cluring w hich Solzhenitsvn recited the whole of Prussian Nights to the Etkinds from memorv. take
down
.
Letter to tin was not able
Ic
I
to follow
(Congress
\\'RrrERs'
his routes
all
the
way
159^1
—some of the places now belonged
w here Saiiisonov had fought and where he himself had been
to Poland. Hut he was able to soak up the physical appearance and atmosphere of these forests and marshes, to \ isit the solid and once-prosperous Prussian villages that had formerh' so impressed him, and to tour old Kcinigsberg (now Kaliningratl), w ith its memorial to Kant and its air of bourgeois Driving into Lithuania, the Solzhenitsyns parted from the Ktkinds stabilitx continued on to Latvia to stay for a while w ith Olga Zvedra, the widow and .
of the noted revolutionarx' leader Ivan Karpunich. Solzhenitsyn planned to write about Karpunich and Olga in his historical no\el and had
come
to
question Olga and study her papers.'*^
would appear that during the course of the summer of 1967 Solzhecame close to being reconciled with his old school friend Kirill Simonnitsyn As long as nine years ago, he and Natalia had sent greetings to Kirill on yan. It
the occasion of the latter's fortieth birthday, but Kirill had not replied (he later
Now
claimed not to have received anything, owing to his change of flats). it was Kirill who initiated the first move. According to the sketchy
account he has given of
it
in his
pamphlet about Solzhenitsyn,
Kirill
and
his
sister Nadezhda had been provoked by the controversy surrounding Solzhenitsyn's letter to the Writers' Congress to write to him and suggest a reunion. The first response apparently came from Natalia, w ho asked Kirill to write Solzhenitsyn a more personal letter, and Kirill wrote again. It seems that either then or in a later letter Kirill must have mentioned his suspicions about
Solzhenitsvn's role in his interrogation of 1952 and referred to the fact that
he had been shown the record of Solzhenitsyn's ow n interrogation, for in a reply dated 26 June 1967 Solzhenitsyn reproached Kirill for having been
duped by the KCiB
into beliexing that Solzhenits\n's statements of 1945 had
been made
He
such
in 1952.
also regretted that Kirill
was opening old wounds
at
a time.
According to a former friend of Kirill's, Kirill w as alarmed by the very outspokenness with w hich Solzhenitsyn referred to such sensitive matters and by the fact that he had sent his letter through the open post Kirill was convinced that his own letters were subject to being opened by the KCiB and felt that the same might also be true of Solzhenitsyn's. He therefore w rote a carefully worded letter in which he accused Solzhenitsyn of taking a onesided view of life. "Objectively speaking, you have become the standardLenin, whom I'm convinced bearer of Fascist reactionaries in the West. to, yes, and old Marx and love you used you and honour just as much as fashion. 1 hink about severest the Engels too, would have condemned \ou in
—
.
.
.
These sentiments did more or less reflect Kirill's sentiments at the time, but apparently he stressed them in case his letter should fall into the hands it!"
'
of the It
KGB. appears that Solzhenits\'n did not take offence, for further correspon-
when Solzhenitsyn turned
dence led the two
men
up
at Kirill's flat,
there was no reply
for
about an hour, Solzhenitsyn scribbled a note and returned to
to arrange a meeting, but
to the bell. .After waiting in the slip
it
lobby
through
SOLZHENITSYN
[594] the door.
When
he opened the flap of the letterbox, he caught sight of
frightened to
two
Kirill's
was evidently too open the door. Solzhenitsyn lowered the flap and left, and the
slippered feet standing stock
still
in the halKvav: Kirill
friends never met, either then or later.
'"^
Towards the end of the summer, Solzhenitsvn retired to Rozhdestvo and plunged into work on the first volume of his historical epic. Before disappearing, however, he sent word to Olga Carlisle to proceed at full speed with the preparation of the American translation of The First Circle and to aim for publication in the winter of 1968, in approximately eighteen months' time. A few weeks later, Carlisle came to AIoscow to secure Solzhenitsyn's approval for the rather cumbersome arrangements she had made. In addition to retaining a translator (Thomas Whitney, a friend), she and her husband, Henry Carlisle, proposed to act as editors: her husband would also be the book's literary agent for foreign sales, another friend would act as a lawyer to draw up the necessary agreements \\ ith Harper & Row who would prepare to publish in strictest secrecy and another friend, Harrison Salisbury (the Soviet-affairs specialist of the New York Times), would guarantee to the publisher the book's quality. Whether it was made clear that all this would cost large sums of money in editorial, agency, and legal fees and in incidental expenses is not known (the translator, having inherited a small legacy, had agreed to work for nothing). In her book on the subject, Olga Carlisle reports Solzhenitsyn as saying that money was no object. "Money must be spent freely, nothing must be spared. There must be no thought to money. "^^' In view of the later controversy that erupted betv\ een them, it may be doubted that Solzhenitsyn, with his seven-vear-old boots and habit of feeding himself out of tins, had the slightest idea what fabulous sums could be spent in America on these subsidiary literary services. Meanwhile, there was no movement on Cancer Ward. lovxards the end of August, Solzhenitsyn had suggested to 1 vardovsky that thev sign a contract for the novel. That would formalize the situation and might provide some momentum towards publication. But Tvardovsky refused, saying he could not do so \\ ithout permission. Not long afterwards Solzhenitsyn heard a rumour that Cancer Ward was to be published in Italy. 1 he rumour proved false, but it provoked Solzhenitsyn into \\ riting a letter to the Writers' Union secretariat pressing them to come to a decision on Cancer Ward. It was four months, he wrote, since over a hundred writers had supported his letter to the Writers' Congress, and three months since four members of the secretariat had agreed to publish a statement refuting the slanders about him and to
—
—
"look into" the question of publishing his novel. In that time
new
slanders
had been spread by Party activists (to the effect that he had defected to Egypt or England) and he had heard that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was being secretly removed from Soviet Cancer
Does the
secretariat believe that
these endless delays, that
it
w
ill
Navy Mir was ready do so.
libraries.
Ward but was awaiting permission
mv
to
to publish
storv will silently disappear as a result of
cease to exist, so that the secretariat will not
Letter to the Writers' C^ongress have to vote on w hcthcr to include
in,
or exclude
it
from, the literature of this
June meeting I warned the secretariat that we must make publish the story if we wished to see it appear first in Russian, that
country? ... At the haste to
it
[595]
12
under the circumstances we could not prevent
its
unauthorized appearance
in
the West.
And
he increased the pressure bv blaming the union
manv months,
.\fter the senseless delav of
does happen, secretariat.
...
the time has
will clearly be the fault (or
it I
insist that
my
in
come
to state that
perhaps the secret w
if it
ish?) of the
story be published without delavl"'
Instead of treating this as an open letter, Solzhenitsvn
them
advance.
made
fort\-t\\o
ho w ere supposed to be reading his no\el, plus one to the secretariat office, and he did not show it to an\one. The response came quicker than he had anticipated. On 18 September 1967 Tvardovskv summoned him to Xo-cy Mir and told him that three days previously the secretariat had held a meeting to consider a replv and that it would meet on 22 September, w ith Solzhenits\n present, to discuss the whole question again. At the secretariat meeting, 1 vardovskv had held out for publication of Cancer Ward and had been supported b\' two of the members, w hile several others had appeared to waver. "Things aren't altocopies and sent
to the forty-tw o secretaries
gether hopeless," he told Solzhenits\
twenty-second would be
n.
\\
Nevertheless, the meeting on the
had been given and w ere highl\- indignant about it. Their strategy would be to concentrate on Feast at the expense of Cancer Ward, and it would be Solzhenitsyn's and l\ardovskv's task to reverse these priorities. (T\ardovsky w as practicalK' the onlv member of the secretariat not to have a difficult one. All the secretaries
Feast of the Conquerors to read
read the play: he refused to accept
it
from the
KGB,
and Solzhenitsvn
he had no other copy available to give him. Simonov was another
honourabh' refused
to read
said
who had
it.)
Solzhenitsyn agreed to w
rite out a preliminar\- statement in w hich he from Feast. He also wrote down some answ ers to possible questions and meticulousK prepared some clean sheets of paper, numbering them and ruling in the margins, on w hich to note down a record of the discussion. He had taken to doing this not onlv at Sovy Mir but whenever he was involved in literarv discussions, calculating that the sight of him taking down their w ords w ould inhibit e\ en his most rabid enemies and induce an element of caution. Coincidentallv it enabled him to keep his head down and have time to think l)efore answ ering some of the hotter questions. -The gathering took place in the former "Rostov mansion," started at 1 p.m. and ended at 6 p.m. Konstantin Fedin, chairman of the Writers' Union, had been called in to preside, although he w as se\ent\ -fi\e and in pof)r health. As a reasonably talented novelist of the twenties and thirties, Fedin had once possessed a certain authority among the writing fraternity but had squandered most of it as a result of his cow ardh' behaviour during the Pasternak
would
try to deflect attention
SOLZHENITSYN
[596]
w as the authoritx' of his office, not the man, that was now needed, and the certaintv that he would remain loyal to his political masters. Interestingly enough, some of the more prominent writers on the secretariat, including Sholokhov, w ere absent from the meeting, but there w ere still over thirtx members present, as w ell as an ideological w atch-dog from the cultural department of the Central Committee, Comrade Melentyev, who took notes throughout. It was, in general, a far more hostile assembly than that which had gathered at the Writers' (>lub some ten months earlier. The secretariat had taken the precaution of conyening two hours before Solzhenitsyn's arri\al to agree on the line to be followed (presumably laid down by Melentyev). In this sense it was to be a typical Soviet business meeting, w ith the main decisions taken in advance and the roles of the participants well rehearsed. The only problem this time was that the sacrificial victim had prepared a different script and w as determined to thw art the leadaffair. It
ers' intentions.
In his opening speech, Fedin expressed distaste for Solzhenitsvn's latest
He
letter.
leagues
found
("We
are
it
threatening and offensive,
made
the face of his col-
a slap in
to appear as scoundrels rather than representatives of
the creative intelligentsia"), and an attempt to force their hand. In this he
was supported b\
se\eral others, including \ oronkov,
who broadened
How
attack to include Solzhenitsvn's relations with the West.
to the congress reach the "filthy bourgeois press" so soon,
broadcast so eagerh' by foreign radio stations, and
answ er
this
why
the
did his letter
why was
it
being
didn't Solzhenitsvn
"loathsome bourgeois propaganda" and dissociate himself from
it?
The temperature rose rather quicklw
.\t
one point Solzhenitsvn snapped
w as "not a schoolboy" obliged to jump to his feet and answer each question as it was asked. He would take several and answer them together (in this w av he was able to answ er only those he chose to and ignore others). that he
Alexander Korneichuk, a third-rate Ukrainian playwright, alleged that Solzhenitsvn's letter had been broadcast before the congress opened. Not so, said Solzhenits\n. But instead of reph ing to the question of how it got abroad, he counter-attacked w ith one of his prepared answers. is made here of the word "abroad," as if it whose opinion is greatlv respected. Perhaps this is understandable to those who Hood our literature with lightweight sketches about lite abroad. But this is alien to me. I have never been abroad. Throughout my life I have had the soil of mv homeland under mv feet. Its is the only pain
\ ery suggestive
referred to
and
some high
effective use authorit\-
.
.
.
I
feel;
He
it
the only subject
I
write about.
recited once again the various slanders and sanctions he
w
as
being
subjected to through secret Part\ channels and offered chapter and verse.
News
of a secret directive banning the
of IvaiJ Denisovicb and ordering
him
in several letters,
its
librar\' circulation
of T
Day
in the Life
withdrawal from the shelves had come to
one of w hich, from the Oimea, he quoted verbatim.
Letter to the Writers' Congress
[597]
statement that he had defeeted to F.gypt had been made by a Party propaganda official in the Moscow suburb of Bolshexo. Ihe allegation that he had gone to F.ngland had been made b\' a Major Shestakov in Solikamsk. Party activists in \arious parts of the country had accused him ot collaboration during the \\ ar and said that he had been released from the camps either by mistake or before his time was up. X'ladimir Semichastny, a former head of the KCiB, had accused him of "materially supporting the capitalist world
The
by not
collecting his royalties,"
and so on.
After this fighting response (which,
among
other things, testified to the
excellence of Solzhenitsyn's sources), the balance of opinion shifted a
little in
Afanasy Salynsky and Konstantin Simonoy, supported by Tyardoysky, suggested that Cancer Ward be published and a communique issued defending Solzhenitsyn's record. Fedin held back, saying that Solzhenitsyn should first make a statement denouncing the use made of his name by "our enemies in the West." Korneichuk, noting Solzhenitsyn's evasions ("You were asked questions but you failed to answer"), weighed in v\'ith that orthodox view of world affairs that Solzhenitsyn refused to take into account: "Do you not realize that a colossal, world-\\ ide battle is being fought under very difficult conditions? We cannot stand aloof. With our works we defend our government, our Party, our people. We travel abroad to Solzhenitsyn's fayour.
.
carry on the struggle." Korneichuk added nitsyn's "nasty, insulting
zhevnikov concurred. But
Surkov
(a
.
.
.
it
.
.
upset he had been by Solzhe-
foul" play. Feast of the Conquerors. \
was
left to
The
adim Ko-
the senior secretary present, Alexei
prominent baiter of Pasternak),
Solzhenitsyn and his novel.
how
to spell out the real objections to
publication of Cancer Ward, he said, "w ould
be more dangerous than Svetlana's memoirs"* and would be used against the Soviet Union.
"The works of Solzhenitsyn
those of Pasternak: Pasternak was a
man
are
more dangerous
divorced from
tsyn has a bold, militant, ideological temperament and
life,
is
a
to us than
while Solzheni-
man
possessed by
an idea."
When discussion turned more specifically to Cancer Ward, a new argument was introduced namely, that Solzhenitsyn was not a talented writer anyway. Sergei Baruzdin, a w riter of children's books, said he had ne\er been impressed by Solzhenitsyn's works. Toktobolot Abdumomunov, from Kirghizia, said that Cancer Ward w as too gloomy ("There are many tedious
—
passages, repetitions, and naturalistic scenes").
The Georgian
Berdy Kerbabayev, from Turkmenia, had found Solzhenitsyn attempted to stem the tide of the Conquerors.
At the very
start
Irakly
Abash-
more than 150 pages, and
idze confessed that he had been unable to read
it
first
"nauseating."
of
all
by renouncing
Feast
of the meeting, he had read out a prepared
statement saying that he had "long since disowned" this play, which w as the
work not of the mature writer Solzhenitsyn but of the nameless prisoner Shch-232, written at a time of hopelessness w hen millions were being repressed. *The
reference
is
to Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva,
Letters to a Friend, in 1967 shortly after she
had defected
who pubUshed
to the \\ est.
her memoirs, Tzi-enty
SOLZHENITSYN
[598] "I
now
bear as
responsibility for this play as
little
and books that
for speeches
wish to bear
many
other authors would
wrote in 1949," he had said
they
he added
a
new
eyer w idely circulated or printed,
I
solemnly declare that the
threateningly.
w
bilitx is
ill
And now
thrust: ""U Feast of the Conquerors full
on the organization that has the only remaining copy. ...
fall
this organization that
is
is
responsiIt
disseminating the play."
Solzhenitsyn also attempted to answ er some of the criticisms of Cancer He denied (not altogether truthfully) that the title and subject matter
Ward.
were symbolic. The book was rooted in autobiography, and its texture was too dense to be a symbol. Nor was the story "anti-humanitarian." In it, life conquered death. "But I do not belieye that it is the task of literature ... to or to tone it down." Mo\ing to more comfortable ground, conceal the truth he vyas able to demonstrate the misconceptions on w hich a number of the more detailed criticisms had been based, and he concluded by urging them .
to publish Cancer
.
.
\\'a;Y/
quickly, before copies reached abroad.
There were signs that not all the speakers were against this idea. Eyen some of those who had attacked Feast of the Conquerors expressed satisfaction that Solzhenitsyn w as willing to renounce it publicly. It was suggested that if Cancer Ward were sufficientK- reyised in consultation with Sovy Mir, a way might still be found to publish it, despite the criticisms that had been heaped upon it. But in the end the whole issue got bogged dow n in the question of w ho w as to make a statement first. Solzhenitsyn insisted that it w as up to the Writers' Union to publish his letter and refute the slanders about him. "Konstantin Alexandroyich [Fedin] says it is I who must resohe the situation. am bound hand and foot and gagged how am I to resohe it? It seems to me that this would be an easier matter for the mighty Union of Writers. My I
—
eyery line
is
suppressed, while the entire press
Fedin was adamant that
Surkoy
who
it
put the matter
dissociate yourself
is
should be the other
from the
in a nutshell.
role ascribed to
of leader of the political opposition
in the
in the
hands of the Union."
way round, and
again it was whether you the West," he said, "that
"You should you
in
state
USSR."
ll^e Oak and the Calf Solzhenitsyn (he called it his Borodino)* battlefield metaphor of a employed his enemies to flight. general putting triumphant himself as a and described "Deploxing m\ forces eyer more boldly, steadily broadening the front, setting the bounds of battle to suit myself, no longer merel)- answ ering their questions but follow ing my own plan, I driye them headlong oyer the field of Borodino to their remotest defence works." There was talk of artillery sal-
Portraying this meeting later in his fayourite
yoes, wheeling cayalry, and
marching dragoons
—good,
stirring stuff
—but
at
in 1812 between the Russians and Napoleon's invading seemed to have ended in stalemate, but it in fact marked a turning-point in the w ar and the virtual end of Napoleon's advance. Tolstoy celebrated the battle in nationalistic terms in a famous section of War and Peace. Solzhenitsyn tirst made the comparison in a letter to Tvardovskv (quoted bv Reshetox skava in her unpublished chapters), explaining it by saying, "For a long time neither side could understand the meaning of w hat had happened or w ho had won. But the French were mistaken in celebrating the fact that thev had held on to their terri-
*The
Battle of
armv.
.\t
Borodino took place
the time
it
Letter to the Writers' Congress
[593 3l
unbidden 'guardians,' and would declare, for all to hear, his unwillingness to have anything to do with the enem\ provocateurs of our countr\ But Sol/.he.
nits\n did not
do
so.
.
.
.
The writer A. Solzhenits\ n could dexote his is
homeland and not
to
its ill-w
ishers.
I
his literarv abilities conipletelv to
ie could,
but he does not w ant
Such
to.
the bitter truth.
The
Lit era til may a (iazetci
had got the best of both workls. It had pubw hich though not nearh militant enough b\ Part\ standards, \\ as still the most anti-\\ estern statement he had e\er made, and it had used the occasion to launch a w ide-ranging attack on all aspects of Sol/.henits\ n\s beha\ iour. It w as the first official response that Sol/.henits\ n had e\er received to his letter to the congress and was to set the ofhcial line for some months to come. And \ et, w hile totalK' negative in tone and content, it could have been worse. No actual sanctions were threatened. .And it did lea\e loopholes. W hile The First Circle was denounced as "containing malicious slander on our social s\ stem," (.ancer Ward w as mereh described lished Sol/.henits\ n's letter,
as "in
need of substantial
idecjlogical revision,"
and
after criticizing Solzhe-
anonvmous authors had added,
nitsvn's refusal to attack the West, the
"Whether A. Solzhenitsxn w ishes to hnd a w a\' out of this cul-de-sac depends primarih on himself." In other words, it was still possible for him to make amends b\' producing a statement. Then, it was implied, there might be a chance for his "ideologically revised" books to be published. It was, as Solzhenits\ n righth' di\ ined, a repK from weakness, and he had not the slightest intention of comph ing. But others w ere outraged b\ the c\nical, sneering tone of the piece, its anonvmitx and the fact that this w as the hrst frontal attack on Solzhenitsx n after two \ears of silence. L\ elia Chukovskava, who had grown friendh with Solzhenitsxn during his long sta\ s at her father's dacha and w ho had grow n steadih more radical in her political \ iew s over the same period, wrote a thundering defence of Solzhenits\ n that rivalled his o\\ n statements in its eloquence and excoriating irc^nv. "Vou see, the\' have to in\ ent a w a\" of dealing w ith a w titer w ho still carries on exposing Stalinism after the command has been gi\ en to forget about it," she w rote. And about his letter to the congress: ,
W hen
I
read this extraordinary letter for the
first
time,
it
seemed
to
me
that
had trodden, pondered and w eighed everything it had had to suffer, counted up its losses and its casualthose w ho w ent to their destructies, pra\ ed to the memory of the persecuted Russian literature
itself
tion outside the prisons
had looked back over the path
—w eighed up
through the persecution of w
riters,
—
the loss to the spiritual
and,
w
the words: "Enough! This must not go on!
Valentin Turchin,
a
voung ph\
that he
w as cancelling
ith
it
in
w ealth
ot
our countrv
the voice of Solzhenitsvn, uttered
We
sicist,
Solzhenits\n's defence and circulated
announced
it
shall live differentlv!"-
wrote another eloquent
letter in
samizdat. At the end of
it,
he
his subscription to the Literatiirnaya Gazeta
SOLZHENITSYN
[634]
and suggested that others who
felt
likew ise should
known how manv complied, but Zhores Aledvedev Solzhenitsvn that in Obninsk,
at least
do the same.
It
is
not
book on responded to
states in his
ten research scientists
and mailed their July copies back to the new spaper's editor, Alexander Chakovskv, as a mark of disgust."^ There were many letters in this vein. As so often happens v\ith officially inspired attacks in the Soviet press, the rebuttals they evoked w ere more effective than the original accusations, and this particular article raised a small storm of protest. But there were
Turchin's
other
call
letters, too,
almost certainly
officially inspired, sent
tiiniaya Gazeta but to Solzhenitsvn personally.
from
mathematics
a teacher of
are a schizophrenic souls of others
bv
things Soviet.
And
w
One
not to the Litera-
such purported to be
North Caucasus. "You and all you can do is corrupt the your bile and your fanatical hatred of all
in Solzhenitsvn's native
ith a vile, black soul,
filling
so,
them w
ith
of course, the anti-Soviet radio stations and rotten
West are delighted to arm themselves with your filth. And you gladly offer them your evil-smelling trash, for which there isn't and cannot be any demand among us." It was the same message as the newspaper's, phrased in more direct language, and it ended w ith a frankness that w ent beyond the new spaper's officialese, reflecting more accurately the true feelings of the KGB: "There's no room for you in our country. Get out! Stop bothering us. Get out of this Can't you understand that neither \'ou nor your filth is life altogether. needed by any of us Soviet people? Scram! I think it was a mistake to let you out of jail. You should have been shot. And only the genuine humaneness of our government permits you to exist. Get out!" The letter was signed by Lydia Kizieva, mathematics instructor at a teachers' training college in Stavpublishers in the
.
.
.
ropol, in the Caucasus.
come
Had
the sponsors of the letter planned that
it
should
from Solzhenitsvn's native province?''
The
authorities
were
clearly casting about for the best
w av to deal with made up their
the problem that Solzhenitsvn posed for them and had not
mind.
Ihe
Litenitiiniaya Gazeta article
was
a
holding operation, leaving
a
small loophole through w hich Solzhenitsvn could return to the fold should
seems that there w as no agreement on what to do next. At this point someone must have suggested that the best way to discredit the author w as to send Feast of the Conquerors to the West and let it be published there. Its anti-Soviet sentiments and especially its open sympathy w ith the Nazis' Vlasovite allies were calculated to arouse a wave of indignation against Solzhenitsyn, particularly among his supporters on the left. Discussion of this idea must have reached a fairly advanced stage, because in late summer, on a routine visit to the (Central Committee's cultural department from Novy Mir, Lakshin and Kondratovich were confidentially informed that a copy was already in the West and was due to be published bv Mondadori. Solzhenitsyn w as finished, they w ere told, and would certainly go to jail.''' Alarmed by this intelligence, the two men informed Tvardovsky, who at once started looking for Solzhenitsvn. Solzhenitsyn, as usual, was hard to he so desire, and
it
Portrait of thk Artist at Fifty find,
sky
but
when he heard
at his
of
I
vardovskv's reason, he rushed to see
1
3 5
]
vardov-
dacha. Tvardovskv repeated the story in greater detail and anx-
iously asked Sol/henitsvn whether he
He was
K'
eager to read
it,
but he
still
still
possessed anv copies of the play.
could not bring himself to accept
a
copy
(which effectively meant from the KGB). Solzhenitsyn assured him that he possessed no copies, and that, if the work should ever reach the West, it could only do so via the K(jB.
from the
secretariat
Their meeting was the most cordial for many months. Tvardovsky was a sami/.dat work bv Zhores Medvedev on the ditficult\' for Soviet scientists Of maintaining links with abroad, and praised the l)ook highly.* Solzhenitsyn, who had grown friendly with Medvedev as a result of the latter's efforts to get Natalia a post in Obninsk, was both pleased and surprised. In former years 1 vardovskv' had been suspicious of samizdat (and had refused to publish Medvedev's book on Lysenko) but now seemed to have changed his mind and was reading a great deal of it. Furthermore, Tvardovsky (albeit reading
involuntarily) had a
Fedin
in
new work
in
subject of the letter
discussed other listened to the
\\
—
his
January
letter to
was Solzhenitsyn, drew the two men together. They
orks in samizdat, and Tvardovsky confessed that he
BBC
(insisting that the
time for the news), and confided article
samizdat himself
defence of Solzhenitsyn. This circumstance, and the fact that the
in
two men
listen together
when
it
now was
Solzhenitsxn that he had sacrificed an
on Marshak and was holding up the publication of a volume of his works because of a refusal to remove some remarks on Solzhenitsyn
collected
from the
text.
Solzhenitsyn
dovsky
felt
so
warmed by
this
meeting that he confided to Tvar-
the existence of The Gulag Archipelago,
and offered
to let
him read
it.
Judging from some of Solzhenitsyn's remarks in The Oak and the Calf, he expected such a reading to open Fvardovsky's eyes still further to the iniquities
of the Soviet past and to strengthen the spirit of rebellion that he sensed
was growing in him. Soon afterwards, he took steps to extract a copy of the manuscript from a distant hiding-place and brought it to Moscow to show Tvardovskv, but other events intervened and 7 vardovsky could not find the time to read
it.^
The meeting
Tvardovsky 's dacha took place on 16 August 1968. Four days later there occurred an event that was to mark the end of an era throughout the whole of Eastern Europe and the USSR the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The liberalization of the Party and government in the latter country, and the attempt to introduce "socialism with a human face," had in their way been a logical culmination of the policy of de-Stalinization inaugurated by Khrushchev in 1956. If the Hungarians had been premature at
—
in
attempting to draw conclusions from de-Stalinization overnight, the Czechs
and Slovaks seemed *The book was
to
have followed
and more evolutionar\' path,
evcntualh- published in the West as The Medvedev Papers,
Fruitful Meetings hetiveen Scientists of the World
(London, 1972).
a safer
and
with the subtitles
Secrecy of Correspondence Is Guaranteed by Lav:
— SOLZHENITSYN
[636]
and had waited for the reforms to be initiated by the Party itself. Nothing, it seemed, could stop them from taking their own destiny in their hands and producing the first genuine and stable liberalization of a Communist regime that the world had vet seen. But on the black night of 20 August the attempt was brought to an abrupt and brutal end by Soviet tanks, and the Soviet government demonstrated once again that it would tolerate no challenge to its centralized and absolute power. The impact of this invasion on the Soviet population as a w hole is not known, since no instruments exist for ascertaining or measuring such data. But the impact on the Soviet intelligentsia was crushing. The liberalization in their own countrv, initiated bv Khrushchev, had been braked and then reversed under Leonid Brezhnev, but so long as liberalization persisted in
neighbouring Czechoslovakia, there was
had some momentum, that
a sense that the original
impulse
still
was not lost, and that liberal reforms might even return to the Russians from their more fortunate neighbours to the West. With the crushing of the Czechs, however, it became clear that, on the contrary, everything w as over and that things from now on would become even bleaker at home. The majoritv of Soviet intellectuals felt bewildered and oppressed by and perhaps ashamed of their country's despotic action this cruel blow but were too cowed and frightened to take positive steps. Only one group all
—
thought differently: the tiny band of activists responsible for starting the Chronicle of Current Events and the Democratic Movement. At the time of the invasion, they were attending the trial of Anatoli Marchenko, the author of
My
Testimony. Copies of the book were already circulating in samizdat and had reached abroad, but Marchenko's trial, which opened on the very day of the invasion, was officially for the minor offence of breaking the internal-
passport regulations.*^
At an impromptu meeting, seven attending the
trial as unofficial
friends of
Marchenko who had been
observers decided that they would organize a
demonstration the following Sunday to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. There was no chance of attracting public support. Sponta-
neous demonstrations are anathema to the Soviet authorities and are heartily feared bv the average Soviet citizen. What awaited them was certain violence
from the police, arrest, and probable imprisonment. And so it was. At noon on Sundav, 25 August 1968, the seven young people w alked into a corner of Red Square (the old Execution Ground, a favourite tourist spot in front of St Basil's Cathedral) and sat down, holding makeshift banners with slogans on them: "Hands off the CSSR" and 'Tor Your Freedom and Ours." Among them were two women. One, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, had her small child w ith her in a pram. The other w as Larisa Bogoraz, and among the men was Pavel Litvinov. Predictablv, the demonstrators were pounced upon, their banners ripped to pieces, and the\' themselves punched and thrown into police cars
— but not before thev had been seen by
carry round Soviet
Moscow and
Union
that
same
sufficient people for the
then abroad, whence
evening.'^
it
w as broadcast back
news
to
into the
PoRIRAir OK THK ArIIST AT
As Anatoli
^
saved the honour
I'll
IV
K)
3
~ I
akobson wrote soon attcrwards, these se\en incli\icluals an entire nation. Hut apart tVoni this one heroie gesture,
ot
there were tew other signs of protest, hi
the scientihe institutes, higher-
all
educational estai)lishnients, creative unions, literar\ niaga/.ines, and so forth, special meetings
were
called
the Party to obtain endorsements
l)\
ol"
jnibiic
statements applauding the in\asion of (>.echoslo\akia, which were then printed in the Soviet press.
and
their jobs
Even
I
Onh'
braxe
a few
\ardo\ sk\
felt
therebx risking
spirits refused to sign,
At Nrrcy Alir, obliged to go along w
their reputations.
onl\
Igor \ inogradov objected.
ith the
general line,
it
onl\ tor
the sake of shielding his alread\' beleaguered journal. But in his indi\ idual
capacitv
I
\ardo\sk\' resoluteb' refused to sign a collecti\e letter
l)\
So\
iet
writers in support of the invasion, despite the huge pressure that w as put
upon him and the further damage
to his reputation in otticial quarters.
quandarw POr some time
past he had s\mpathv. In Jul\ of the preceding vear the plavw right Pavel Kohout had caused a sensation bv reading Solzhenitsvn's letter to the Fourth \\ riters' (Congress aloud to a congress of Czech writers, after which the letter had acted as a ralhing cr\' for part of the Czech reform movement. Solzhenits^n had also received man\- in\ itations to go to Czechoslovakia (none of which he had been allowed to accept) and w as aware of the impending publication of Cancer Ward m Bratisla\a. He was therefore
Solzhcnitsxn found himself
regarded (Czechoslovakia with
in a
a special
—
news of the invasion and shocked, too, that he had seen it coming and not realized it. He w as staving in Rozhdestvo at the time, completing his revision of the ninet\'-si.\-chapter version ot The First Circle, and had ignored the obvious signs: "For da\ s and nights on end, tanks, trucks, and service vehicles had been pouring southw ards along the high road a hundred vards from mv cabin, but still I supposed our leaders w ere doing it onlv to frighten the Czechs, that these were just manoeuvres."'" Solzhenitsvn writes that his first thought w as to compose a public statement in the \ein of Herzen's celebrated essa\- "Lament," w ritten a centur\earlier.* He would take it to a number of prominent liberals in the Soviet intelligentsia (he mentions Shostakovich, Rostropovich, Kapitsa, and Fvardovskv as candidates), get them to sign it jointh' with him, and make it pubparticularlv shocked b\' the
lic.
With
this in
mind he
did,
am ashamed to showing it to anvone. He
lines of "I
be
seems, compose a brief statement along the
it
a Soviet"
but
at
the last
decided against that, too, fearing that he would
wrath on
his
*Published
in
tOn
I
am
call
dow n
Herzen's journal Kolokol (The
Bell), 3 It
March
1863, in response to Russia's brutal
included the w ords
"Uhen
the very day
when
Lityino\ and his friends demonstrated in
of imitating Herzen and of
somehow making
a protest.
that Kopelex' couldn't stand another prison sentence, to
time to think of the consequences. But
—
I
walk dow n the
afraid to be recognized as a Russian."
Red Square
Solzhenitsvn v\as yisited in Rozhdestyo by Panin and Kopeley and their u
clear
further ofticial
head.t
suppression of the Polish rising of that year. street,
moment shrank from own but
considered issuing the statement on his
letters
won't be of any help."
I
can't for the
(25 August),
and spoke then Raisa Orloya, Kopeley's w ife, objected w hich Solzhenits\n replied, "This is no
life
of
me
iyes,
think w hat to do.
One
thing
is
SOLZHEMTSYN
[638]
This
at first sight surprising decision
w as not
in fact uncharacteristic.
At the time of the protests over the Daniel and Sinyavsky trial, Solzhenitsyn had shown his distaste for signing collective letters. And his instinct in making public statements was to stick to the familiar ground of literature or to the even more familiar ground of his own problems and his duel \\ ith the authorities. He was not ready to act with the selfless and uncalculating bravado of the young dissidents of the Human Rights Movement, nor yet to
—
become
a
tribune of the people.
Justifying his decision later in The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn wrote that neither the time nor the cause
was
right for him.
This is the question to ask: Am I crying out against the greatest evil? Cry out ves, if vou have never seen anything so horrible in just once and perish for it all vour life. But I have seen and know n many w orse things. ... To cry out now w ould be to denv the w hole history of our country, to help in prettifying Wait until they it. I must preserve mv vocal chords for x\\q great outcry.
—
.
.
.
begin translating Gulag into English."
But
this explanation
is
unconvincing. There was no chance of Solzhenitsyn's
"perishing" for a protest over Czechoslovakia.
On the contrary,
being already
a pariah, he had less to lose than most other people and would simply have been acting true to the authorities' opinion of him. Nor would a cry over Czechoslovakia have "denied" Soviet history: to denounce one injustice is not to approve of other, unmentioned injustices. Solzhenitsyn was simply being prudent. As he writes about that same period in another context: he who fights and runs aw av, lives to fight another day. Solzhenitsyn tried to preserve his position b\' w riting that "from then on I bore an additional w eight on mv back. At the time of Hungary, I was a nobody, and it didn't matter w hether cried out or not. Now it was Czechoslovakia, and I held m\- tongue." But then he w cnt on to criticize 1 vardovsky and the Aory Mir staff for behaving in basically the same w ay, for toeing the 1
line in
order to save the magazine for future battles.
It is
hard to see that
there w as an\- essential difference between them, and one cannot escape the impression that in his description of these melancholy events, Solzhenitsyn tried to
have
it
sensible path
was
others to sign
Tvardovskv
the one hand, he seemed to say, he took the
and saved himself
because he
a hero,
On
both ways.
it.
felt
This, he
for bigger things,
but on the other he really
indignant, drafted a statement, and almost got felt,
gave him the right to be contemptuous of
doing nothing about Czechoslovakia. The pity is that his self-centered account tended to obscure w ho the real heroes were the tiny band demonstrating on Red Square and the remarkfor also
—
—
able fact that
members
of the opposition w ere
all
ways: the dissidents, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky. In
heroes in their different a
spectrum of opposition
and dissent from their government's oppressive action, the dissidents w ere at the left extreme, with Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovsky in the middle and the conformists on the far right. Solzhenitsyn
may have been
farther to the left
Portrait of thk Artist at Fifty than Tvardovskv, but both were hampered by their
and
their different plans for future battles. It
members to cut
K'39]
ties to
was the
the estabHshment
dilemma of all unw illing)
classic
of Soviet society opposed to their rulers but unable (or
themselves loose bv going into
consequences. Solzhenitsvn's
total
opposition,
movement tow ards
\\
fearsome
ith all its
this latter position
was steady
and inexorable and had been continual during the three years since the confiscation of his archive, but he had not vet travelled the w hole distance. He still had a toe-hold in the establishment and could not follow the dissidents into open rebellion. Another outstanding indi\ idual who w as beginning to feci this dilemma keenly was the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. Sakharox a pillar of the Soviet scientific establishment, thrice a Hero of Socialist Labour and "father" of the Soviet H-bomb, had begun to take an interest in public-policy questions as early as 1958, when he tried to get the Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing extended. Unsuccessful then, he had returned to this question in 1961 and 1962 and had been instrumental in persuading the Soviet leaders to sign a nuclear test ban agreement with the United States in 1963. At the same time, Sakharov had broadened his scientific and political interests. He had intervened in the education debate then raging in the Soviet Union, helped ,
to destroy the influence of Lvsenko's pseudo-scientific theories in the fields
of biology and genetics, and in 1966 was one of the twenty-five co-signatories
Tw entv-third
Congress of the Communist Party calling on These activities had made Sakharov decidedh' unpopular with the Soviet establishment, and he was steadily of a letter to the its
leaders not to rehabilitate Stalin.
demoted
in his scientific
work, though remaining an academician. But what
signalled a major rupture with his former colleagues and the Part\- leaders
was his celebrated memorandum "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," released in May 1968, a few months before the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The memorandum
and co-
called for a genuine coexistence
operation between the Soviet Union and the United States and canvassed the idea of a convergence of their for both sides, zation, the
and
two
in the Soviet
social systems. This would mean changes Union would require complete de-Stalini-
ending of censorship, the release of
political prisoners,
and
a
reform
of the economic system.
The memorandum
at
once began to circulate
in
samizdat and
in
August
1968 was widely published in the West, as a result of w hich Sakharov was
removed from
secret
work and given
to
understand that
his status
would be
irrevocably altered. Almost simultaneous w as the invasion of O.echoslovakia, signalling the effective
end of that period of
liberalization
timidh inau-
gurated by Khrushchev and inexorably throttled bv Brezhnev.
among those w ho read the memorandum in samizdat he had evidently noted Sakharov's name on some of the petitions interceding for Galanskov and Ginzburg, and he was intrigued bv Solzhenitsvn was
in 1968, just as
w ith some of the larger questions There w as, one feels, a hint of ri\ alr\' in Sol-
the eminent phxsicist's attempt to grapple that
were
also troublinir him.
SOLZHENITSYN
[640]
—
Sakharov had got his memorandum one of the people he had had in mind to sign the statement on Czechoslovakia, and he decided to seek a meeting \\ ith him anvwav. The two men met a few davs after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in the house of a mutual acquaintance (although recently dismissed from secret work, Sakharov was still circumscribed in his movements and could go onlv to places that he was in the habit of visiting and that had previously been checked bv security agents). Solzhenitsvn found himself charmed bv Sakharov's "tall figure, his look zhenitsvn's feelings tow ards Sakharov
—but Sakharov
in first
\\
of absolute candour, his
as also
warm,
gentle smile, his bright glance, his pleasantly
r's" and by his carefully knotted tie and buttoned jacket, betokening an old-fashioned gentility that was somewhat at variance w ith Solzhenitsyn's own preference for generally more informal attire. The contrast in dress, to judge from Solzhenitsyn's account of the conversation, was reflected in their talk, w hich w ith interruptions lasted for four hours. Solzhenitsyn's manner seems to have been importunate, excitable, even hectoring. He was anxious to dispute Sakharov's ideas and criticized him unceremoniously, not hesitating to put forward his own views on the problem of Russia's future, without stopping to think whether he might be hurting Sakharov's feelings. Sakharov, for his part, was calm and reserved, polite and affable, and listened carefully. "He was not in the least offended," writes Solzhenitsyn, "although I gave him reason enough. He answered mildly, tried to explain himself w ith an embarrassed little smile, but refused to be the least bit offended the mark of a large and generous
throaty voice, the thick blurring of his
—
nature.
"'-
Solzhenitsyn did not omit to mention Czechoslovakia, but Sakhann' seemed as perplexed and helpless as he. No other prominent figure had made a move, and the two of them evidently did not feel strong enough to make a gesture on their own. The seven demonstrators on Red Square thus remained virtually isolated. Apart from occasional refusals to sign official letters of
support for the invasion (or diplomatic "illnesses" coinciding with the meetings
where decisions
to
send such
letters
were
protests consisted of the circulation of a few
ance of some political
taken), the only other overt
anonymous
leaflets,
the appear-
and the writing of one or two letters. Mindful of the mistake they had made with the trial of Ginzburg, Cialanskov, and company, w hose year-long investigation had allowed a considerable head of steam to be built up behind the protest movement, the authorities moved rapidly to deal w ith the demonstrators. Gorbanevskava, as the mother of a three-month-old child, was remanded for a psychiatric examination, pronounced mentally disturbed, and released into the care of her mother. Victor Fainberg, a tourist guide, had been so badly beaten that he couldn't be show n in court and was similarly recommended for psychiatric examination he w as later diagnosed to be suffering from "residual s\ mptoms of schizophrenia" and confined to a special psychiatric hospital (meaning a prison hospital) in Leningrad. As for the remaining five, their investis;ation was concluded graffiti,
—
Portrait of thk Ariisi
ai
I-ifiv
K>4
i I
v\ith unprecedented speed on 12 Septeml)er, their trial opened on 9 October, and bv 12 October 1968 it was all over. Two of the demonstrators, \ ladimir Dremhuga and \ adini Delaunav, were sentenced to three and two and a halt \ears imprisonment respectively in normal-regime labour camps. Pavel Litxinov, Larisa Bogoraz, and Konstantin Babitsky were sentenced to hve, four, and three vears of internal exile in Siberia. On the \er\' e\e of the demonstration, Litvinov had put the finishing touches to his massive documentation of the Ginzburg-CialanskoN- case. The Trial of the /'our, and launched it into samizdat, and Natalia (iorbane\ska\ a was performing the same service for Litvinov and her fellow demonstrators. Red Square at Soon w as to
appear ten months
later and describe these events, and the trial that follow ed, minute detail. At the time when these events were unfolding, Solzhenitsyn w as preoccupied w ith a long-term dream of his that at last seemed to be approaching reality, namely, to finance the construction of a church. The outward signs of his religious belief had been few since his return from exile. In R\ azan, he had never gone near the local church, but after the publication of .4 Day ill the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and especialh' '\\Iatr\ona's Place," w ith its overt
in
religious message, he priests, including
had made the acquaintance of
a
number
of
Moscow
such prominent and outspoken preachers as Father Alex-
ander Men, Father Dimitri Dudko, and Father V'sevolod Shpiller. also
known
to have written a
number
circulated in samizdat and then appeared abroad.
resembled some of
He was
of prayers, ot w hich only one had
Known simply
as "Prayer,"
and structure: "At the height of earthly fame I gaze w ith wonder at the path that has led me through hopelessness to here to w here I have been able to convey to mankind some refiection of Ihy radiance," it began, and continued in the same vein. it
his miniature stories in tone
—
Fhere was nothing mystical or intimate about his faith in the
w
his prayer. It
Lord, his confidence that the Lord would
assist
expressed
him
to con-
good works, and reflected his eminently practical attitude to reliGoci was there to help him accomplish things. Solzhenitsvn also seemed gion have little interest in the clerical aspects of the church or in its pastoral to work. Panin, w ho was eventually to convert to Roman Catholicism, had frequently admonished him for his reluctance to submit to the authority of the church and had accused him of the sin of pride. And Natalia Reshetovskaya has stated that Solzhenitsyn never kissed the hands of Orthodox priests, as true members of the church were supposed to do; nor did he seem attracted to the mysteries of the church ritual. tinue
ith
—
It is
rather surprising, therefore, that he should have
come
to the idea
now what he had in mind, and he intended ro\alties. The church w as to be called the Church
of building a church, but this was to finance
it
from
his foreign
was to be a dissident artist named Yuri was intended to be quite a big complex, with a reading-room and librar\-, and an adjoining lecture hall. Only the best priests would be invited to serve, and the church w ould be sump-
of the Holy Trinity, and
its
architect
Titov. According to Reshetovskaya,
it
SOLZHENITSYN
[642]
tuousK decorated. In August and September, Solzhenitsyn, Titov, and some of their friends among the priests set out to look for a suitable site, and their preference rested on the district of Zvenigorod (where the appropriately named
Jerusalem had once been situated). Titov produced a number of designs for the church, some of them apparently quite spectacular, but in the end it was never built (at least one of the priests felt that Solzhenitsyn would do better to spend his money on restoring ruined churches rather than
camp
of
New
on building a new one). Rumours that Solzhenitsyn was to build a church flew round Moscow for many months, and it was alleged that he had made some sort of deal w ith the government in order to have access to his royalties from abroad, but this latter rumour was patently not true, and speculation '^ died after a while.
Meanwhile, Solzhenits\n soon returned
where he learned Ward and The appear, having been pub-
to Rozhdestso,
of the publication in the West, in quick succession, of Cancer First Circle. Part
lished in
England
1
of Cancer
b\-
Ward was the first to Head in the last days
the Bodle\-
of August.
The
re\iew
s
were respectful but somewhat inconclusive. Most reviewers noted the author's tendency to discursiveness and his old-fashioned ideas about causality and narrative structure, but they saluted the seriousness of the theme and Solzhenitsyn's courage in daring to write openly and honestly about forbidden topics. In the end, however, apart from describing the novel's plot and subject matter, they preferred to suspend judgement until part 2 was available. Less than v\\o months later
came
the publication of The First Circle (w hich,
United States, preceded the appearance of Cancer Ward), an altogether bigger and more new sw orth\- event. Harrison Salisbury, in the Sunday AVi:; York Times, called it ''the greatest Russian novel of the last half of the century" and made the obligator\- comparisons to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chein the
khov (invoking the shades of Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Thackeray, and Dickens elsewhere in his review). Franklin Reexe, in the Chicago Tribune, wrote that Solzhenitsyn w as one of the finest novelists now living anywhere, whether in
Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or North America, and many commenw idely quoted remark that Solzhenitsyn w as
tators repeated Evtushenko's
"Russia's only living classic."
The
sense of occasion was heightened by an
avalanche of news stories describing Solzhenitsyn's embattled situation in the Soviet Union and speculating on how his novel had reached the West (and
whether its publication w ould now harm him); and selection by the Book-ofthe-Month (>lub helped to ensure that within a week or two The First Circle had entered the best-seller lists and was climbing rapidly. But there were also demurring voices. The novel's nineteenth-century aura, structural looseness, and strong documentar\ element disappointed many. "The world of Jo\ce, Mann or Proust doesn't exist for [Solzhenitsyn]," wrote one. He seemed to be unacquainted w ith Freud or Kafka, had no know ledge of modern depth psychology or w ith other contemporarx w ritings on prison camps, and had w ritten a no\ el that w as "less modern" than Doctor Zhivago or The Master and
Mannar it a.
Portrait of the Artist ai I
1-ifty
l'^>43]
he British rcspcjnses had fewer reservations, perhaps retleeting
admiration of traditional reaHsm than was prevalent
in the
a greater
United States.
JuHan Svmons, in the Sitnclciy Times, ealled it a "majestic work of genius," whose e.\plorati(^n of people's behaviour in extreme situations made "the mass of contemporarv fiction dealing with this theme look trivial by comparison." Ronald Ilinglev (in The Spectator), trumping Harrison Salisbur\', described SoizhenitSN n's novel as "arguably the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth
centurv," while those
who acknowledged
fashioned technique nonetheless praised
nitsN'n's
daring conception and
its
sur-
were much more receptive to Solzhesardonic humour than the Americans seem to have been). Raymond
buovancv of tone
prising
untidy construction and old-
its
its
(the British
Williams, in I he Guardian, introduced the interesting idea that The First Circle
was more important and con\'incing than Cancer U^/v/ because it was less like literature, and he met the challenge of its unusual subject matter by refusing to recognize "the frontiers between the imaginative and the real." Solzhenitsyn had refurbished traditional realism and transformed it in order to be able to describe a
An
new
realitv.*
unfortunate b\-product of the mvsterious manner in w hich the two
West was the still-simmering controversy over w hether the author had desired publication or not, while new disputes broke novels had arrived in the
out over copyright and the quality of the translations. In the case of Cancer
Ward, the Bodley Head, with the help of Pa\el Licko, had more or
less
secured
England and had quickh' published a Russian text to support its claim, but rival Russian texts were published on the Continent, notably b\' Mondadori in Italy (in addition to the Possev text that had started the rush), and in America no few er than four publishers had announced their its
copxright to the
title in
intention of publishing
it
there. After the appearance of Solzhenitsvn's state-
ment in Le Monde, two of them, Dutton and Praeger, had withdrawn, leaving two others to fight it out. Farrar, Straus and Giroux claimed copyright on
Head
and accused the rival Dial Press of Giroux and the Bodle\' Head were endangering Solzhenitsvn's safety, and perhaps even his life, w ith their
the basis of the Bodley
edition,
piracy. Dial countered that Farrar, Straus and
claim to authorization, and issued their ow n translation of the entire novel in early 1969.
By
this time, the
Bodley Head had
also prepared a translation of
volume 2, so that Farrar, Straus and Giroux were able to issue the novel in one volume almost simultaneously with Dial. In the matter of translations, there was not much to choose between them. The Bodley Head version had been done b\' Nicholas Bethell and a Soviet emigre journalist called David Burg.t It was not a distinguished piece of work, bearing many signs of the haste and extensive editing to which it had been subjected, but the Dial translation was no better: its flatter and *
It is
not clear
Tolstoy
\\
hether W'ilHams w as aw are of the
in his lifetime,
ature and
life.
tHis
name
real
is
w ho w
fact,
but a similar claim had been
as praised for his abilit\' to "erase the
Alexander Dolber^.
made
boundaries" betu een
for
liter-
SOLZHENITSYN
[644]
more
literal
rendering of the original Russian simplv reflected American taste
in this matter, rather
A more of The First
than having anv greater accuracy.
serious difference of taste had manifested itself in the translation
Circle.
There had been no problems over copyright, but Thomas
Whitney's original translation also bore signs of extensive editing
(in this
case
and was rejected outright by Collins, the English publishers. Collins commissioned three of England's best translators Max Havward, Ronald Hingley, and Michael Glenny to produce a new version (it was published under the pseudonym of "Michael Guvbon"), but their translation, though somew hat smoother and more literary than Whitney's, also contained a large quota of errors and was, if anything, even further from the texture and spirit of the original. It looked uncomfortably like a repetition of the squabbles and multiple competing translations that had been such a feature of the foreign publication oi Ivan Deiiisovich six years earlier, and gave Solzhenits\'n considerable cause for concern, rhen, as now, it helped to divert attention from literar\' matters to the purely political sensation that seemed inseparable from Solzhenitsyn's name and all his work. Under normal circumstances, it might never have happened. Solzhenitsvn is the sort of meticulous author who would have taken a personal interest in the selection of his translators (as he has done since his arri\al in the W est), and would have demanded a voice in the arrangements that w ere made, had he been given the opportunity. But then, nothing w as normal in his literary career, and this haste, this jostling competition between over-eager publishers and their harried translators, was but a by-product of the secrecy, the w eb of conspiracy, and the atmosphere of political intrigue that envelopeci his every move. His books had become contraband, and the Soviet authorities had succeeded, through their persecution of the author, in surrounding them w ith the aura of forbidden fruit. Solzhenitsvn (given his outlaw status) w as not entirely dissatisfied with this process, for the persecution, like most attempts at censorship, was doomed to produce the opposite of w hat w as intended. It simph' spotlighted his work, inflated his reputation, and, by draw ing w orld-w ide attention to him, reinforced his immunity. In a sense the authorities pla\ed into Solzhenitsyn's hands, and the poor translations and competing editions might have seemed a small price to pay for the protective publicity they afforded (the competition and the ensuing recriminations mereh" magnified Solzhenitsyn's attraction for the mainh' h\ the
(>arlisles)
—
sensation-hungr\ tions begin to
\\
loom
estern press). as a
Only
later
—
did these inadequate transla-
problem, and by that time Solzhenitsyn had forgot-
utilit\' in his struggle w ith the So\'iet government. Ihe Soviet authorities w ere not averse to trying to exploit the situation they had brought about. Some of Solzhenitsyn's friends feared that Solzhenits\n would be put on trial for having sent his manuscripts abroad, but Solzhenitsyn himself seems to have been confident that that w ouldn't happen. "No," he said one day in response to a question from Zhores Medvedev, "I think that's unlikely. They've already exhausted themselves in that direc-
ten their temporar\ practical
Solzhenitsvn with two of his pupils in the village of Miltsevo
Natalia Reshetovskava at Miltsevo after
being reunited with Solzhenitsvn in 1956. (Private collection)
^gj^W^
in 1956. (Private collection)
^
;
The house on Kasimovsky Lane (ground floor
left,
in
Ryazan where Solzhenitsyn and Reshetovskava
lived
with three windows) from 1957 to 1969. (Private collection)
Solzhenitsyn on Rvazan Station on the day
of his arrival in spring 1957.
The
Sawing wood vate collection)
at
Kasimovskv Lane.
(Pri-
hole in
had been made bv a convov guard's bavonet when he was still a prishis suitcase
oner. (Private collection)
^"'^^SwafF^
The
tennis player, 1959. (Private col-
lection)
In the garden at
Kasimovsky Lane, 1958.
Left to right:
Maria Reshetoxskava (Natalia's mother),
Solzhenitsvn, Flena 7.ubov, Nikolai Zubov, Natalia. (Private collection)
Sol/hcnitsyn
at his rustic
writing tabic
in
the
woods
at
Solotclia U'''63),
on Cancer Ward and wrote "For the Good of the Cause." (Private
Solzhenitsyn's tion)
summer
cabin
at
\\
Ikt'. i.j
worked
collection)
Rozhdestvo, which he purchased in 1965. (Private collec-
Solzhenitsvn
at
Rozhdest\ o on the day he learned
had been confiscated by the September 1965. (Seuil)
that his manuscripts
KGB,
12
Solzhenitsvn with his Uvo closest friends from his sharashka days, Lev Kopele\ (Rubin
The First
Circle)
and Dimitri Panin (Sologdin)
at
Rozhdestvo
in 1967. (Seuil)
in
Solzhenitsvn making the sign ot the cross over Ivardovskv in his cofhn (Uecember 1971). (Seuil)
Solzhenitsvn's time.
The
room
at
Chukovskv's dacha
in Peredelkino after
he had
left
it
for the last
pitchfork was intended for self-defence in case of need. (Private collection)
Solzhenits\ n
\\
ith
Heinrich Boll
in
Lang-
Solzhenits\n
with
press
photographers
enbroich on the dav of his expulsion from
outside his house in Stapferstrasse, Zurich,
the Soviet Union, 14 January 1974. (UPI)
spring 1974. (Re.x Features)
Solzhenitsyn receiving the Nobel Prize Features)
in
Stockholm four years
late,
December
1974. (Re.x
Solzhenitsvn
at
Harvard, June 1976. (Wide World Photos)
Solzhenitsvn and his second wife, NataUa Svetlova,
New
York
in
July 1975. (Rex Features)
at
the
AFL-CIO
kincheon
in
Portrait of
thf.
Artist at Fifty
tion with the trials of Sinyavsky, Daniel,
and the
rest.
l'''45l
Now
they've got to
think up something new."'"*
Meanwhile, nobodv seemed to know what had become of Victor Louis's copy of Cancer Ward. l\Thaps it w as the one that ended up at the Dial Press or that reached Dutton or Fraeger before they abandoned their intention of publishing the novel themselves. Certainly it contributed to the general confusion, and not long after his trip to Europe, in September 1968, Victor
Louis himself turned up in, of all places, Rozhdestvo. Solzhenitsyn knew from the customs officers that his summer cabin was known to the authorities and therefore probablv under surveillance, but he was nonetheless surprised to find Victor Louis openly on his doorstep. Ostensiblv, Louis had come to explain that he had not taken a cop\' of Cancer Ward to the West, but his real purpose was to try to interview Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsvn was repairing his Moskvich and crawled out from beneath it,
covered in
oil,
nitsyn discovered
when his unexpected visitor arrived. Ihe moment who it was, he refused to answer any questions and
Solzheordered
Louis off the premises. Louis returned on 24 September, however, and w as number of pictures of Solzhenitsyn's cabin \\ ith a telephoto
able to take a
which he later sold to the West German illustrated w eekly Stern. Some time afterw ards, Louis haw ked around the West a purported "interview" with Solzhenitsvn, but a careful reading reveals that all the direct quotations lens,
in
came from other sources and
it
that Solzhenitsyn had said not a
word
to
Louis himselt.
The
"interview" eventually appeared, after
many
refusals, in the Inter-
national Herald Tribune, with a prefatory note explaining Louis's role as a
privileged Soviet journalist and a purveyor of material that the Soviet authorities
wished
esting
to
chiefly
send to the West. Louis's piece said nothing new; it was interas an example of "soft" propaganda. Solzhenitsyn was
Dostovevsky and Tolstoy, his cabin at Rozhat Yasnaya Polyana (and his w hich w as nearer the mark). Louis also summarized the
disparagingly compared
w
ith
destvo mockingly likened to Tolstoy's estate
beard to 1 olstoy's,
accusations recently
made
against Solzhenitsyn in the Literaturnaya Gazeta,
adding that Solzhenitsyn owed alibis to his
been
him
his
his
cunning and
his ability to
manufacture
experiences in the labour camps. But these experiences had also
undoing: "The time Solzhenitsyn spent
so deeply that he
in
camp and
in exile
shocked
became one-track-minded and can hardly keep
ott this
subject in his work."
This had become
a leitmotiv
of official criticisms of Solzhenitsyn, as had
the accusation that he was working for the enemies of the Soviet Union, especially the NTS, abroad. But Louis added a new and up-to-date twist of
own. The NTS, he wrote, accompanied its publication of Solzhenitsyn's works in the West with advertisements stating that "the construction of a Soviet power and the Communist society does not worry Solzhenitsyn. his
.
Party are not life
named
in his story,
.
.
but they are present there as
and mankind." Yet Solzhenitsyn, "who
is
a
member of the
evil foes
of
Writers' Union,"
SOLZHENITSYN
[646]
did not protest against these statements.
W hat
seemed
like a not7 sequitur
about
w as then follow ed up and expanded: "He disagrees with the Writers' Union on many counts, but he doesn't v\ ant to return his membership Nor would the Writcard because it gives him considerable advantages. ers' Union like to expel him, because he is a popular author." In other words, the Writers' Union zvoitld like to expel him. It \\ as the first time the subject the union
.
.
.
had appeared in print, even in this negative form, and the cautiousness of its formulation was an indication of indecision on the part of the authorities. At the same time, it \\ as a useful trial balloon and offered an excellent opportunity to test foreign reactions and to prepare foreign public opinion for what might now logically follow. Perhaps this was the "something new" that Solzhenitsvn had predicted to Medvedev.''' At the end of November 1968, Solzhenitsvn paid another visit to Ivardovsky and Novy Mir. He had with him a cop\' of The Gulag Archipelago for Tvardovskv to read, just as he had promised some weeks before. But Tvardovskv w as busv again and hard to pin dow n. He w as having a room added to his dacha to hold all the complimentary books he had been sent over a lifetime in the literary world, and was too busv supervising the workmen to come to the ofhce. At last he appeared in Moscow on 24 November, for a meeting of Novy Mirs Party committee, and afterwards the two men talked in I vardovsky's office. Tvardovsk\' was preoccupied and pensive. He had recently been a candidate for membership in the Academy of Sciences, but had been turned dow n on orders from above. He was also apprehensive about his letter to Fedin, which had just been broadcast by the BB(>. He felt it might compromise him further. But about the BBC^'s current readings from Cancer Ward he was enthusiastic and generously complimentary, telling Solzhenitsvn, "You're more famous in pAirope than am now." He asked Solzhenitsvn how he was survixing and offered him money from his own pocket, but Solzhenitsyn declined. What he would like, he said, was a further advance from Novy Mir on Cancer Ward 60 per cent, instead of the 25 per cent he had already received. This w as more difficult for Tvardovsk)-, since he had to get permission for such a payment from the Izvestia accountants, but he promised to do his best (and in due course was successful getting the w hole of the advance for Solzhenitsyn, instead of just 60 per cent).'"^" There v\as no question of showing The Gulag Archipelago to Tvardovskv on this occasion. There was too little time, and Solzhenitsxn needed to sta}' w ith I \ard()\'sk\' for the several da\s required to read it. He could not aftord to let the manuscript out of his sight, or run the risk of accidents. They arranged the reading for May Da\ the follow ing spring: Txardovskv would go to Rozhdestvo to Solzhenitsvn's "hunting lodge," as he pla\'fully called it, which he now knew about and read The Gulag Archipelago there, just as he had read The First Circle in R\azan. What Solzhenitsyn did have to show IvardovskN w as his freshly completed screenplay of The Parasite. The screenplay had been commissioned by friends at the Moscow Film Studios (Mosfilm) the preceding year in order to ,
I
—
—
—
—
I
POKTRAIT OF
TH
F.
ArTIST AT FiFTY
K>47]
although there was httle hope that the him would ever be made. Solzhenitsvn, it seems, still nursed a fascination with the cinema, although he was not hopeful either. The Parasite was a comedy
provide him with some monex
,
(unique in Solzhcnitsvn's oeuvre), but he had not been able to resist taking a elections and making satirical fun of them. politicallv controversial subject
—
—
Even when he had removed some of the more subversive still
The girl,
passages,
it
w as
rather too sharp for the prevailing atmosphere.
screenplav describes the adventures of a privileged young
when
Elvira,
she tries to get her
strange provincial town. She
is
damaged
Moscow
car repaired quickly in a
referred to the mechanic Pashka, notorious
w here he works and carrying out repairs on the side (he is the "parasite" of the screenplays's title), and he agrees to help. But hrst he must satisfv two important, queue-jumping clients w ho are clamouring for his assistance as well, an army major and the chairman of the the chairman's repair job is particularlv imporlocal electoral commission tant because the following dav is election day. Pashka completes the work and then stavs up all night to repair Elvira's car (falling slightly in love w ith her in the process). The next morning he learns that the Party bosses are searching for him. He flees with Elvira in her half-repaired car. After a comfor his skill in cheating the garage
—
ical chase, his pursuers catch up w ith him and inform him that it is election day (he has forgotten) and that he is guilty of the crime of not voting the onlv man in the town not to have done so. He w illingly allows himself to be dragged to the polling station, so that the election chairman can have his 100 per cent turnout and close the polls, as usual, ten hours ahead of schedule. The Parasite was the lightest work Solzhenitsvn had yet w ritten and had some amusing scenes, such as the initial collision between Elvira and an army vehicle and the chase through tow n and countrvside. Solzhenitsyn also got in some thrusts at the pett\- bribery of small-tow n life and the ridiculous hvpocris\' of the Soviet electoral process, but the characters were caricaeven the amusing Pashka, w ho w as modelled on the Ryazan mechanic tures
—
—
who had which
repaired Solzhcnitsvn's car for him.
a stranger
w as show n breaking
all
the
One
unw
scene in particular, in
ritten rules
voting secretly, stuck out as a naked polemic, even though true incident that had
happened
to
it
by insisting on w as based on a
Georgi Tenno.'
Solzhenits\n delivered three copies of the script to Mosfilm on 26
November and the
1968,
was presumablv read and shelved. ^^ Tvardovsky of \ovy Mir also read it but found it too sharp for
where
editorial staff
it
w ith one section (presumabl) that based on 1 enno) removed. Tvardovskv's joking comment after reading it was that Solzhcnitsvn's place publication, even
was "inside" and "the sooner the guished
among
better."''"'
After that the screenplay lan-
Solzhenits\n's papers and did not appear until 1981,
when
it
was published in volume 8 of his collected w orks in Russian. That November, Ilenrv Carlisle went to Moscow to seek further instructions on the preparation of The Gulag Archipelago for publication. The launching of
I'he First Circle,
apart from the question of the unsatistactory
SOLZHENITSYN
[64H]
had been a great organizational and commercial success for the and Harper & Row and the publishers had sold the rights for other translations all over the world. Thev were disturbed, however, bv the disputes and sometimes rancorous litigation that had broken out between the various publishers of Cancer Ward, and bv rumours that Solzhenitsvn had w ritten a revised and longer version of The First Circle that he w as contemplating releasing as well. 1 his second prospect would spoil the impact of the Harper & Row edition and throw doubt on the ow nership of the copvright. Journalists and rival publishers were alreadv questioning Harper & Row's credentials, vet the publisher was sworn to secrecx nobodv knew of Olga Carlisle's role as Solzhenitsvn's representative and of the authorization he had given her. Solzhenits\ n's situation w as apparenth too delicate for I lenry (>arlisle to meet him face to face. A message was passed through an intermediary, and Solzhenitsxn replied similarlw He was satisfied with the publication of The First Circle, w ould not release the additional chapters he had written, and wanted Olga Carlisle to handle The Gulag Archipelago in the same fashion as the first book w ith one proviso. She was not to enter into a contract with Harper &: Row until the translation w as readv (w hich he hoped would be in 1970). She should then send a coded message and wait until he gave her translation,
Carlisles
,
:
—
instructions to proceed.
Onh
in the
event of his arrest or death should she
go ahead on her own.-" logether w
ith these instructions Carlisle
West. One, from Solzhenitsvn, was for
brought two requests to the
a small tape recorder.
The
other,
from Kornei Chukovskv, w as for telegrams and letters of congratulation to be sent to Solzhenitsvn on his fiftieth birthda\'. Quaint as the custom max seem to Westerners, fiftieth birthda\ s are an occasion of great importance to Soviet w titers. For the vast majoritx- w ho enjov official approval, it is marked by adulatory articles and statements in the literarv press (and in the national press, as well, it the author is important enough) and shoals of telegrams and letters to his home, not onl\' from official bodies like the various levels of the Writers' Union (all-union, republic, province, and town) but also from "workers' collectives" and committees all over the countrv. Such outbursts ot acclaim are carefullv orchestrated, but thev do sometimes coincide with true popularitv, as had been the case w ith w titers like I vardovskv and Nekraso\ Ihere seemed little chance of Solzhenitsxn's l)irthda\ being so marked, and (^huk()vsk\- w as anxious that the impetus should come from elsew here. Telegrams and letters from abroad would demonstrate world-w ide support tor Solzhenitsvn and strengthen his position in his duel with the Soviet .
authorities.
December 1968, at home in Ryazan. and messages of support did indeed pour in from abroad, and there were man\ laudators articles in the Western press to celebrate the occasion. But what trulv surprised and moved Solzhenitsvn was the enormous volume of cont^ratulations he received from within the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn spent his birthdax
Telegrams,
letters,
,
1
1
Portrait of thk Artist at Fifty
No
one had been
informed. There w as not
ofrtciall\
t''>49l
word
a
in the Literatiir-
naya Gazeta, either before or after his birthdas'. But letters and telegrams
began arriving the rate of at
up
a full
w eek beforehand and
On
to seventy at a time.
v\
ere being brought to the
the da\'
postmen w ere
itself,
flat at
calling
thirt\-minute intervals, so that Solzhenitsxn, Natalia, her mother, and
aunts were unable to open the letters quicklv enough before the next batch B\' the end of the w eek, there \\ ere more than hve hundred telegrams and about two hundred letters, and a further hundred messages arrixed at Novy Mir. According to Zhores Medvedev, Sovy Mir also sent an official telegram, as did the Rvazan and \ oronezh branches of the Writers" Lnif)n, the Czech \\ riters' Union, and a number of Moscow theatres.-' The tone of most of the letters rexived memories of those he had received after the publication of /iy//; Denisovicb. "Please do not lav down vour pen." "I rejoice that our generation's sufferings have at least produced such sons." "You are mv conscience." "We read vour books on cigarette papers, which makes them all the more precious to us. If Russia is paving dearlv for her great sins, it is surelv for her great sufferings, and so that shame max not utterly demoralize us that xou have been sent to her." Tvardovskv xxrote, "May vou live another fiftv x ears and mav vour talent lose none of its splendid strength. All else passes, onlv the truth xvill remain." And Lxdia Chukovskaya: "In vou the dumb have found their voice. I can think of no x\ riter so long axxaited and so sorelv needed as vou. Where the \xord has not perished, the future is safe. You have restored to Russian literature its thunderous poxver."-Solzhenitsyn was deeplv stirred b\' these messages, although he tried not to shoxx it outxxardlv, even to his familv. \ eronica Stein, his sole guest on that memorable da\', reports that after helping the xxomen to open and sort the letters in the morning, Solzhenitsvn disappeared into his stiidv to x\ ork. He came out brieflv for lunch and to drink tea x\ ith some local women x\ ho had called to congratulate him neighbours xvho helped him \x ith t\ping, copying, sending out duplicated letters, and so on and then \x ent back
came.
.
.
.
—
to xxork again, all, it XX
he
x\
that
xx
as typical of Solzhenitsxn to treat
as gloxx ing inside. it
—
hile Natalia shox\ed the visitcjrs
He
it
as a
normal
bred hx pocrisx' and obliged him to behaxe
To
give
holidax slides. All in xx
orking dav, even
He
had
someone
a
a
in
xx
theorx that
present
is
avs that it xx
as
xx
ere false.
to avoid receiving gifts himself
and
rarelx gax e
He
an intrusion on
inexitablv to impose vour
oxxn taste on that person and therefore to limit and constrain him.
money
if
hated making concessions to conxention, feeling
also disapproxed of gift-giving.
another's privacy.
some
them, except
He
in the
tried
form of
or purelv utilitarian objects.'^
This unbending attitude
to the harmless courtesies of ex ervdax
Solzhenitsyn's penchant for taking theories to extremes.
As
life
a result,
shoxx
ed
even his
best impulses and most attractive qualities could express themselves xxith
such uninhibited force that thev became oppressive, cancelling out the pleasure thev evoked. Solzhenitsxn
x\
as not incapable of generositx
initial
—quite
— SOLZHENITSYN
[650]
Medvedev
the contrary. Zhores
describes in great detail Solzhenitsyn's attempts
drug from America for the ten-year-old Ryazan who had developed an acute form of leukemia. He was prepared to spend up to five thousand dollars of his American royalties to pay for the drug. In the event, the drug was obtained for nothing but did not prove as effective as had been thought, and the little girl died two years later. ""^ Solzhenitsyn's offer to use foreign royalties from Ivan Denisovich referred to funds that were blocked to him personally, but later, when money from the Nobel Prize became available to him, he \\ as generous to friends in need and had no hesitation in sending them sums of money. Like many proud and self-centered people, he \\ as a better giver than receiver. His fiftieth birthday was therefore treated much like any other day. Solzhenitsyn not only liked to ignore the conventions, he took a secret and perverse delight in flouting them (thus demonstrating that he was not indifferent). But it was not entirely a normal working day. Buoxed up by this tidal wave of love and admiration from his loyal readers ("Let me scorn mock modesty and admit that I held my head high that v\eek"), he spent part of the time in his stud\' composing a suitably solemn acknowledgement: "I thank the readers and writers whose greetings and good wishes on mv fiftieth birthday have so moved me. I promise them never to betray the truth. Mv sole dream is to )ustif\' the hopes of the Russian reading public." There was nowhere in particular he could send it no Soviet new spaper w ould publish his words without instructions from above. But for form's sake he addressed it to the that year to obtain an expensive
daughter of a friend
in
—
Literatunniya Gazeta before releasing
Solzhenitsyn was to feel pleased
w ith
now
at
himself.
it
into samizdat."'
the height of his powers and had every reason
He
had entered into
the strongest and most ruthless government in the
a
single-handed duel with
w orld and had more than
ow n. Llis losses had been the confiscation of his archive, the public on him, the refusal to publish Cancer Ward and The First Circle in the Soviet Union, and poor translations in the West. His victories had been his letter to the Fourth Writers' Congress, his completion and the safe dispatch abroad of The Gulag Archipelago, and the publication of his two major novels abroad. He was physically safe and had embarked at last on his series of held his
attacks
historical novels.
\o
his admirers, especially inside the Soviet
dom, independence,
purity, justice
—and
in a
Union, he symbolized
free-
narrower sense embodied the
hope that the reforms of the Khrushchev era and the move towards the deStalinization of Soviet life were not entirely lost. He was not alone in this the dissidents were fighting the same battle, often w ith a greater disregard for their personal safety. But w hat Solzhenitsyn uniqueh' possessed was his literary talent and his charisma. He had a natural instinct for battle tactics for know ing w hen to advance and w hen to retreat, w hen to attack and when to defend, w hen to kick up a fuss and w hen to keep quiet. It w as here that his convict experiences stood him in such good stead. In The Gulag Archipelago he had seen the camps as a metaphor for the w hole of Soviet society (the
Portrait of the Artist at Fifty metaphor had appeared
in
Gulag Archipelago made
it
['^)5i]
(Jirc/e as w ell, hut The and developed the metaphor with greater complexity) the Soviet Union was one big labour camp. In dealing with its leaders, Solzhenitsyn instinctively drew on his past experience with the camp bosses. It was one of the keys to his success (and also the key to some of his failures). As he himself was to put it to 1 vardo\ sk\' a vear later:
—
This
a different
is
age
Ivan Denisovkb and The First
explicit
— not
that in
greater part of vour literarv Hfe
which nou had the misfortune
—and
different skills are
of the world of forced labour and the camps.
can sav without affectation that I and ov\e no less to it, than I do to education there, and it w ill last fore\cr. \\ hen am
belong to the Russian convict world no Russian literature.
I
got
mv
I
less,
I
considering anv step of importance to m\- future, of
m\ comrades
and
I
in the
The camps had
listen
above
to the voices
all
m\
a bullet,
place.-''
bred their ow n antidote: the one place where truth had
—
in Stalin's Russia
the greater gulag of Soviet Russia
w
I
camps, some of them alreadv dead, of disease or
hear clcarlv how thev would behave in
been preserxed
to live the
needed. Mine are those
—had
the gulag
itself.
sent
its
And combined
messenger to haunt
with
this
implacable
and this incomparable battle instinct w as the artist's flair for self-dramatization and the power to communicate in \ i\ id, unforgettable language the nature and progress of his struggle. Of course he could hold his head high, and of course he was the object of passionate admiration, of idolization even, and deservedlv so. At the same time there was the mvsterv of his personalitv, the secrecv surrounding his dail\' life dictated partly bv the exigencies of his struggle, but also consciously manipulated by Solzhenitsyn. The artist was not content with mere art: he would make a dramatic parable of his life as well, and art from that parable, and a parable from that art (his memoir. The Oak and the Calf, would put the finishing touches to both). There was a holy innocence as well as calculation about the gusto w ith w hich he fashioned his role, playing hideand-seek w ith Ivardovsky and other friends, acting the Scarlet Pimpernel in matters great and small. It added to the mystery and fascination of his image, lending him an aura that was of the greatest assistance in his battle with the authorities. And if this was true inside the Soviet Union, it w as even more so abroad, w here the mystery of his personality was compounded b\' distance and ignorance. An example of the effect this produced in b\standers w as an article, in the form of a pen portrait, by an anonymous Soviet intellectual, which reached the West shortly after Solzhenitsyn's fiftieth birthday and w as published first in the emigre journal Vozrozhdeniye ("Rebirth") and then in some Western newspapers. It is interesting both for its more or less reliable description of Solzhenits\n's ph\sical appearance and for the idealized and lyrical haze through w hich the w titer view s Solzhenitsyn's personality. Physically, Solill
to reveal the truth
—
—
zhenitsyn
is
described as follows:
—
— SOLZHENITSYN
[652]
He
has an original and fascinating appearance. His eyes are blue, not light blue
but an intense blue, w
ith a
and w hen he looks
vou thev grow
and
he's a big
at
man
\v
—
you might even say scintillating arm and confiding. His features are big,
vouthful sparkle
generally, with broad shoulders and big hands, but well
shaped. He's blond, and despite having something Nordic and Scandinavian in
His hair and beard are both fair, his face (the and kind. He speaks rather fast and very to the point; he's purposeful, self-disciplined, businesslike and precise, but at the same time a bit of a dreamer, w ith a touch of pleasant naivety about him. He's modest, but conscious of his role and worth. He speaks figuratively, without his appearance, very Russian.
upper
part) icon-like, his eves lively
using a single cliche, and his language
mannerism
—
it is
is
a pleasure to listen to,
simple, unaffected, without a trace of
it is
good, pure, genuine Russian.
Meeting Solzhenitsyn, continues the unknown author, "was an enorin our grev life," especially when he was compared with the people one met every day.
mous event
You
experience Solzhenitsyn as a real
slightest trace of timidit\' or
Man (with
embitterment
in
a capital letter):
him, there
is
there
is
not the
nothing petty or dis-
make-up, everything about him is in a major key, organically no posing or affectation. Optimism, faith in the future, extraordinary simplicity, directness, and an enormous, almost childlike interest in everything around him in the people he meets, in their work and opinions, and all this benevolently and w ithout bias.-' honourable
in his
major, there
is
—
In other words, a secular saint. To a people starved of.spiritual nourishment and desperate for beauty, justice, and truth, Solzhenitsyn was as if heavensent, God's messenger on earth, a reassurance that the Russian people and Russian literature had not lost their spirituality. In a country with a centuries-old tradition of deifying its great men, it was inevitable that Solzhenitsyn
would sooner
or later reach the
moment
of his apotheosis.
'
56
EXPULSION FROM
THE WRITERS' UNION IT .
and
IS
IN the nature of things that no
man be
successful in
all
that he under-
takes or experience complete happiness in every department of his at precisely this
moment
life,
of his greatest fame and popularity, Solzheni-
tsyn was experiencing, in his private
life,
the exact opposite of his public
His marriage \\ as about to collapse. A sign of what was afoot was a seemingh- trivial incident w itnessed by \ eronica Stein on the very day of his fiftieth birthday. For some years past, Solzhenitsyn had been allowing Natalia to handle almost all his correspondence. This gave her an opportunit\ to keep up with what he \\ as doing and to feel wanted and useful. On the evening of his birthda\ Solzhenitsyn emerged from his study and handed Natalia a letter to post to Elena Chukovskaya (Lydia Chukovska\a's daughter), in \\ hich he informed Elena that he would be coming to Moscow in three days' time and would like to stay at the Chukovskys' dacha. On reading it, Natalia created a noisy scene, accusing Solzhenitsyn of being selfish and never thinking of her. Why couldn't he go to Moscow on a weekend so that she could accompany him? A row broke success.
,
out that lasted until bedtime, completely ruining the
latter part
of the birth-
day. After Solzhenitsyn had gone to bed, Natalia continued sobbing well into the night in the small
At the
room w here she and
X'eronica were sleeping.
root of this outburst lay Natalia's jealousy of his
Moscow
friends
and probably Elena in particular. For most of the past two years since Solzhenitsyn had fled to the Chukovskys after the confiscation of his archive, Elena (known universally as "Lvusha" in Moscow literary circles) had been helping him w ith his work, gradually increasing her involvement to the point where in all but name she had become Solzhenitsvn's private secretary. By
653
SOLZHENITSYN
[654]
profession she was a chemist hke Natalia herself, but slightly higher
Moscow
up the
Organic Chemistry. She was also Kornei Chukovskv's favourite granddaughter (her father, Tsezar Volpe, had died in the w ar, leaving her an orphan) and from him, and from her mother, had absorbed a lifelong passion for literature. Elena was in her mid-thirties when she met Solzhenitsyn and was ladder, a senior researcher at the
—
Institute of
unmarried as she is to this da) Perhaps the very strength of her personality has something to do with it. When asked to describe her, friends come up with an assortment of flattering adjectives: noble, disinterested, dedicated, generous, intelligent, broad-minded. But they also indicate a quizzical, sceptical mind, absolute independence of spirit, a good sense of humour, and a sharp tongue adept at puncturing affectation and pomposity. The picture is of a clever, subtle, discriminating person w ith a mind of her own. And yet, with all
.
these qualities, she
who seem
is
also
one of those strong, saintly Russian
While her grandfather w
others.
her affections and to his declining vears
worship
women
to find their deepest satisfaction in life in devoting themselves to
his
whom
as alive,
it
was he who
lay at the center of
she dedicated the bulk of her attention. During
and especially
after his death, although she
memory and work on
his literary archive, she
continued to
seems to have
him and his work worthy of her character and
transferred the focus of her attention to Solzhenitsyn. In
her noble, generous nature found
a
cause fully
talents.
Because Elena about
it
herself,
it
is is
still
living in the Soviet
impossible to describe the
Union and has not written full extent of her work for
Solzhenitsyn. Ever since publishing Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn had been
accustomed to
combine
from admirers and
to receiving secretarial help
the day-to-day it
w
work had been done by ith a full-time job,
friends.
Much
of
Natalia, insofar as she had been able
but w
ith the flood
of correspondence that
followed the publication of Ivan Denisovich and with the lengthy revisions of
The First Circle and Cancer Ward (the few photocopiers that existed in the Soviet
Union w ere kept under
clearly too
brought
much
lock and kev
—and
for her, so that others in both
in to help.
still
are),
the labour
was
Ryazan and Moscow were
Elizaveta \ oronvanskaxa, in Leningrad, accompanied
trips as an amanuensis and typed up and The Gulag Archipelago. Reshetovskaya writes, "My husband could approach her w ith literally any request any time, and she would do e\ervthing she could for him." She had even learned to type for Solzhenitsyn's sake, and there were many like her.' Natalia w as thus w illv-nillv distanced from her husband's work, which
Solzhenits\ n on one or
final
versions of
77:?^
two research
First Circle
from being the product of one man at his desk had turned into a cottage industry, especially when, in 1964, he launched in earnest into The Gulag Archipelago. There was the ver\- size of the task. Interviewing or reading letters from 227 ex-prisoners, registering and copying the interview s, obtaining and absorbing a mass of factual printed material, typing and retyping sections of the enormous manuscript, correcting and copying a final draft of
K.X
well over
t\\
PULSION KROM IHK WrIIKRs'
o thousand pages
—
all
this rec|uirecl
LMoN
['^555]
an arm\ of helpers, not to
speak of intermediaries for arranging confidential interviews or scouring provincial libraries for
obscure and hard-to-find books.
\\
hen he came
at last to
begin August 19H, he used the same s\stem, and again there was no lack of volunteers. Finalh', there against the authorities. \\ riters'
and
fift\'
his public
campaign
copies of his letter to the
Congress had had to be tvped, addressed, and mailed from
of postboxes in the \\
was the work required by
1 wo hundred
riters'
Moscow
Union
,
as did forty-four copies of his letter to
a varietv
members
of
with his transcript of the Cancer UV//W discus-
secretariat,
Others were tvped for samizdat or for carrving abroad, and man\ of who helped in this w av reported back to Solzhenitsvn on proceedings of meetings thev had attended or the remarks made bv idethe sion.
the sympathizers
ological
spokesmen
at
was Solzhenitsvn able
closed meetings of the Partv faithful. ()nl\- in this to learn
what Zimvanin had
said to a
meeting of jour-
nalists, or of the instructions issued to provincial librarians to
books from the shelves.
1
wav
remove
his
hese snippets of information Solzhenitsvn would
and timing, he judged among his enemies and rejoicing his friends. For this not insignificant group of people, Solzhenitsvn's struggle was their struggle, he was their leader and standard bearer, and it was this idea that Pavel Licko had clumsilv tried to convev in his BBC interview in London in 1967, but which a poor translation had converted into the image of Solzhenitsvn at the head of a "private armv."^ There was an "armv," an arm\ w ithout arms, a largelv silent mass of supporters content to assist him behind the scenes or to back him passivelv, and for the most part unw illing to come out into the open and risk their securitv. In such circumstances it w as inevitable that Natalia should get pushed somewhat to one side and that others should emerge to take on the extra work. Elena gave up some hours at her institute and worked part-time in order to devote herself more fuUv to it, and thanks to the w eight of her personalitv, her drive, and her energv quicklv came to occupv a special position in Solzhenitsvn's esteem, enjoving his complete confidence and trust. She was also one of the few people whose criticisms he heeded. With her outspokenness she did not hesitate to comment on his writing, particularlv his political w riting, and he frequentlv took her advice. For Natalia the whole thing w as bew ildering. From being an obscure lecturer at an agricultural institute, she had gone on to become the consort of Russia's most famous and acclaimed writer. The doors of .Vorv Mir, of the Taganka and Sovremennik theatres, of the Writers' Club, and almost of the Kremlin itself had been thrown open to her. She had hob-nobbed w ith the mightv and w as simple and straightforward enough to have enjoyed this sudden prominence. But her husband, from the start, had reacted strangeh to his fame. He had often avoided the great, declined their invitations, and insisted on skulking in his ow n backvard. In a w av this guaranteed a continuation of their domestic cosiness. In her book on their life together, there are then hoard the
moment
until,
with his inimitable
right to
make them
flair for tactics
public, sow ing confusion
SOLZHENITSYN
[656]
them taken in Ryazan that seem to sum up her vision of one of them she is show n sitting at an electric sewingSol/,henits\n leans ox er her w ith a bemused smile on his face.
two photographs
ot
their married Hfe. In
machine, w
hile
is plaving the piano and gazing into the distance, while he, thousand Holh w ood movies, leans on the back of the piano
In the other she in
homage
in
an attitude of contemplation. I
his
to a
w as
Natalia's
image of how
their marriage
ought to be:
bourgeois
a
paradise, an island of calm and domestic bliss amidst a sea of troubles. this
calm was ruptured by sudden fame, she w
gracious consort of
a
celebritw to
pla\'
as
still
w
illing to
When
become the
the part of the famous man's wife,
entertain and be entertained, enjoy the privileges and
fulfil
the duties of a
was for Solzhenitsvn. 1 he picture Louis and the Soviet media had begun to present of him as a
person in the public eve. But none of that \ ictor
this
greedy philistine eager for creature comforts, luxuriating in his foreign royalties and social success, was totally w ide of the mark. He could not have cared to
less for
how
w orldly goods and social acceptability (the portrait owed more Union officials themselves behave and feel than to any accu-
Writers'
assessment of Solzhenitsvn). Quite the contrarx', he
rate
uncomfortable w ithout
a hair shirt
of
some
kind.
positively
felt
Ihe thing that absorbed 90
per cent of his energy and time was "the cause": collecting material, writing, distributing, devising strategy.
up more and more of his And what it now brought
life,
in
It
was
this that
had progressively swallowed
leaving almost no time for domestic concerns.
its
wake was odium and
insults, brickbats instead
of plaudits, and continual harassment by the political and literary establish-
ment.
Even
man
this,
Natalia could probably have borne
—
side
by
side with the
she loved. She w as loval to her husband and would have followed him
anyv\'here.
But
his
fame had coincided w
ith
other developments in their rela-
them apart. First, there had been the incident w ith the woman in Leningrad. Such an occurrence was almost inevitable in the light of Solzhenitsvn's celebrity. He was deeply fascinating to many tionship that conspired to drive
women, with
Many
ality.
his
romantic past, his
air
of mystery, and his vibrant person-
of his most devoted helpers were
women, and
probable that their motives w ere mixed: the cause pion w as masculine and not
at all
v\
it is
as noble,
more than its cham-
but
bad-looking. Voronyanskaya, though no
longer young and though apparenth' disinterested, had been a party to the
Leningrad romance and had helped to deceive Natalia over Solzhenitsvn's being there. And \ oronx anskava w as one of Solzhenitsyn's
real reasons for
principal literary assistants as well. I
he Leningrad incident had been patched up, although
it
had led to
separate rooms. But equally serious had been the domestic repercussions of
the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn's archive and his hasty departure from Rozh-
destvo (and therefore from R\ azan). Solzhenitsvn truly thought that his
life
w as in mortal danger. Yet w ithin days of his arrival in Peredelkino, Natalia had been on the telephone demanding his immediate return to Ryazan. She
a
Kx PUIS ON I
1
ROM in
I
Wriikks' Union
K>
5 7
I
said, and was also threatened 1)\ the m\steon leush (the Teushes were her friends too; I'eush had been her rioiis raid eolleague). She eould not understand \\h\ Sol/.henitsx n should want to sjX'nd such a solemn and decisive moment aw a\' from her.^ Perhaps this fatal misunderstanding was hound up with a more profound ps\ choiogical trauma. It was the K(iR raid tiiat had remindetl Sol/henits\ n so forcefulK' of his convict past and that hastened a reversion to his to a period and a frame of mind that w as outside his old w a\- of thinking w relationship ith Natalia. The true son of (lulag had been abandoned b\- her was and indeed not know n to her. The man she received back into her marriage and into her bed had been rehabilitated, born again, to all intents and piu'poses a respectable Soviet citizen. But now he was diving down to the felt
loncK and abandonctl, she
—
depths again, depths to \\hich she could not follow
The
.
fact that Solzhenitsvn's destination after his dive
had been the (.hu-
kovskws was partiv accidental. Kornei, Lvdia, and Klena could ha\e been only dimlv aw are of Solzhenits\n's state of mind w hen he w ent to them, of the complex reorientation taking place in his
could certainlv follow appropriateness,
if
him mentalK' and
mood and
his thinking. But thev and there was a certain finding refuge with them.
spiritualK',
not ine\itabilit\', in his
was manv-lavered and not just might have been conventional once, for Natalia was sensitive to sexual rivalrv, and Elena's devotion to Solzhenitsvn certainlv seems to have had emotional overtones. A friend of both w omen w ho w andered into Elena's room one dav was amazed to find the w alls, shelves, and bookcases plastered with photographs and mementoes of Solzhenitsx n. W hen he made some platitudinous comment, she shook her head and said, "1 hat's all over Natalia's jealousv of Elena, therefore,
conventional.
now."' 1 his
It
is
not to sav that the relationship was any other than platonic or
that Natalia's personal feelings for Elena
w ere necessarih' unfriendly.
It
was
perhaps that Solzhenitsvn's post-birthdav departure to Elena's somehow
svmbolized everything that had gone w rong w
ith their
marriage
in the pre-
ceding three to four years.
covite,
may also have been aw are of the unfiattering comparisons that made between Elena and herself. Elena was a sophisticated Mussteeped in culture and a member of a famous literary family. She had
read
the books, and more, that Solzhenits\n had read and had a far broader
Natalia
could be
all
cultural
background than
he. Natalia, b\' comparison,
was
a provincial school-
marm. She was a gifted amateur pianist and out of a sense of duty tried to read one or two of the "thick" magazines, but her real interests barel\- went beyond the meetings of the Ryazan chapter of the Mendeleyev Society and amateur dramatics at the institute. Of all the friends that she and Solzhenits\n had in common at the time and w ho have commented on the subject, only Dimitri Panin recalls being impressed by her intellect. He found her brilliant in everything she touched chemistry, music, photography vivacious, if moody, companion and a thoughtful, hospitable host.*^ Others, including some who were later to take her side in the split w ith Solzhenitsyn,
—
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[658]
found her affected, gossipy and vain, bourgeois
in her tastes,
and hmited
in
her opinions.
Such judgements mav
reflect the
meetings with Nataha. Panin
time and circumstances of people's
recalls her chiefl\'
from
a
period
\\
first
hen she and
Solzhenitsyn were falling in love again and during their early years in Ryazan. Others met her only in the aftermath of Ivan Denisovich, when Solzhenitsyn's fame was thro\\ ing the first strains on their marriage. \ eronica Stein, her cousin, affirms that Natalia
is
at heart a
spontaneous, emotional
woman who
good and bad news. "If she's in a bad mood, she's plunged into despair." But what seems to have tipped the scales of opinion against her was her pretentiousness and her sometimes comical attempts to live up to the role of "the great writer's wife." Zhores Medvedev recalls that whenever she accompanied Solzhenitsyn, she w ould refuse to let him out of her sight, and insisted on sitting in on all of his conversations, no matter what the subject. Medvedev came to the conclusion that she was trying to hear and memorize everything so that she could write it down once she got home, and he w as not surprised to learn soon afterwards that Natalia was keeping a diary. Another friend remembers her as a terrible name-dropper, while a third describes her as mimicking her husband: "I'm sorry," she would when time say, looking at her watch, "I can spare you only ten minutes" was not really a problem.*^ It seems that all this represented her idea of how a w Titer's w ife should act, and she reinforced this image of herself by reading heaps of literary memoirs. Her particular favourite, according to \ eronica Stein, was the diary of Tolstoy's wife, which she read several times. At one stage she bought a notebook, divided it into columns, and wrote out the psychological characteristics of Tolstoy and his wife as she perceived them (again, it seems, in imitation of her husband's method of analysis he was doing the same with Lenin). She then w ent through the notebook putting ticks against the qualities she felt she and her husband shared w ith the Tolstoys, and crosses where she felt they w ere different. Perhaps it was at this moment that she conceived the idea of someday writing a memoir of her own.* Insecurity clearly had a lot to do with her behaviour and her loneliness. It should not be forgotten that in his years in Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn had virtually cut her off from her former friends and colleagues. He and Natalia had had no social life to speak of, and it was all for the sake of his work, his need for secrecy. Then, for the sake of his work, he had had to spend long periods away from Ryazan and consequently away from her, and for the sake of secrecy (over Gulag) to exclude her from many of his arrangements. To him it seemed both inevitable and logical (forced on him by circumstances, by a cruel government), and her resistance seemed blind selfishness. In their increasingly frequent quarrels, he accused her of "tearing his guts out" with her nagging and of completely disregarding his literary work and professional reacts equally strongly to
—
—
* In the
unpublished chapters of her memoirs, Reshetovskava
volume of \'an Ciogh's
letters that
states that
it
w as the reading of
pro\ided the main impulse for her to undertake them.
a
Expulsion from
He
thf.
Writers' Union
[*^'59l
a life. She \v as sucking and public activities put together.'' To her, his fanatical devotion to his work and his longer and longer absences in Moscow seemed equally selfish. After the incident w ith the Ix-ningrad woman, she had been pathologically jealous, endlessly questioning him on where he \\ as going, turning out his pockets, trving to catch him out. This behaviour had prompted him to start giving her his unsealed letters. Then she had gone through a period of estrangement. She had complained that since their marriage he had overshadowed her and cramped her devel-
problems.
told her that he could not
more energy out of him than
his
w
endure such
riting
opment, quoting Nikolai Vitkcvich and her mother and aunts in support. She tried to move aw av from him, to take less interest in his work, to develop her own interests in amateur photographv and especiallv in music.'" Solzhenitsyn encouraged her in these plans and helped her to get lessons for a while from the celebrated and eccentric Soviet pianist Maria Yudina. Yudina was politically bold (she had read Pasternak's poems at some of her concerts w hen Pasternak was in disgrace) and w as noted for her religious piet\'. She deeph' admired Solzhenitsvn, having sought him out after the publication of Ivan Denisovich, and readilv agreed to teach Natalia (although it was true, as Solzhenitsvn had written to her, that Natalia "w asn't developed enough for a teacher of her calibre"); and it appears that the two women became quite good friends." Natalia's efforts to break awa\ from her husband's spell, however, ultimatelv failed. She was too dependent on him, too loneh' on her own, and he was still the onlv source of glamour in her life, even if he wouldn't behave conventionallv. She was still Mrs Solzhenits\n, it was her one consolation, and she wanted the world to see and acknow ledge it, to w itness her bv his side. Unfortunately, not even this seeminglv small concession was easv for Solzhenitsyn to make. He simplv could not see whv it was important to her. He himself set little store bv appearances and seemed unaware of the nuances that lay behind them. And his unawareness was compounded b\ his indifference to personal relations. As he later confessed, "I had a theor\- that one's personal life should be regarded as secondarv and the kev to mv behaviour was that I reallv treated it that wav and I was constantlv making mistakes." According to his ideas, personal life should account for only about 5 per cent of one's time and emotions, while the other 95 per cent should be devoted to professional duties. It was no wonder that he neglected personal life and failed to understand his wife's needs. Instead of offering her a partnership, he was passive, simply buying time and a quiet life. .
.
.
keep demanding that I spend more time w ith her, pav her more and be more affectionate, and this happened ever\ time she came to but the moment she arrived everything would be gloom and endless
She used
to
attention,
me
.
.
.
until she left all mv \\ ork would just slip from mv hands was alwavs soothing her and saving things up the whole time. That's a perpetual mistake of mine and the cause of manv errors I've made, not onlv in this sphere but elsewhere as well. If onlv could carrv on w ith mv work
conversations, and again. x*\nd
.
I
I
.
.
SOLZHENITSYN
[66o] uninterrupted,
if
the w av of work,
only if
we
only
and then something else. got w orse and worse, but .
with
my
The
could arrange
it
so that private matters didn't get in
could get another chapter w
I
.
.
all
And I
so
I
let
ritten, finish this
book,
things slide year after year, and things
wanted w as not
to be interrupted
and
to get
on
work.'-
conflict
that brought less
w as probably and
insoluble.
They were
less satisfaction to either
locked into a marriage
of them and in which the
needs of one contradicted the needs of the other. And yet, until 1968, no immediate threat had seemed to be in yiew But earlier that year SolzhenitsNU had acquired another woman helper w ho combined Elena C^hukoyskaya's .
interest in literature, strong will,
were
and talent for organization, with qualities that
more appealing and dangerous. Natalia Syetloya w as not only the ways of underground typing and the preparation of samizdat
infinitely
adept in
but also young, beautiful, and alluring. Like Solzhenitsvn, Natalia Syetloya was a mathematician. At the time of their meeting, she was w orking for her doctorate and w as a teaching assistant to Professor Kolmogoroy at Moscow Lniyersity, who regarded her still only twenty, she had married young mathematician named Andrei Tiurin, by whom she had had a son, Dmitri, in 1962. In 1964 they had decided to part, and were diyorced a year later, though remaining on the friendliest of terms. Natalia's mathematical training obviously offered one affinity with Solzhenitsyn, but more important was her interest in literature. As early as the fifties she had been reading the still-forbidden poetry of Akhmatova and Pasternak. Later she had been one of a group of young people w ho attached themselves to Nadezhda Mandelstam and helped her with secretarial work. Among other things she had typed out Osip Mandelstam's Voronezh Notebooks, much of his poetry, and some stories by Bulgakov.'^ Through her involvement with samizdat, Svetlova had recently got to know a number of dissidents. This had started with her introduction to Gorbanevskaya in 1967. Soon afterwards she had met Ginzburg, Litvinov,
as
one of
his star pupils. In 1960, while
an eyen more
brilliant
Larisa Bogoraz, and man\' of those associated with the foundation of the Chronicle of Current Events. After Ginzburg's sentencing, in January 1968, she had also become friendly with Ginzburg's fiancee, Irina Zholkovskaya.
She did not count herself
as a militant,
however. Apart from signing one
collective letter to Komsoniolskaya Pravda to protest an article slandering
Ginzburg and
his co-defendants,'"*
and
briefly attending
one or two
trials,
she had preferred to stick to the literary side of dissent, and she regarded
some of the more outspoken dissidents as reckless and extreme. Her first meeting w ith Solzhenitsyn had occurred in the small
flat
on
Lane near the Central Post Office, where she lived with her mother, Ekaterina (an aeronautical engineer and herself a formidably intelligent and efficient woman), her stepfather, Da\'id Svetlov, her grandmother, and her small son Dmitri. A mutual friend (possibly Shafarevich) had brought SolV'asilicvsky
WrIIKKs'
KXPUI.SION FROM IHl
LMoN
''l I
6
I
J
ot introtlueiiig them, and it seems between them was immediate and mutual. What Solzhenitsyn particularK hked about her w as her pugnacious character, her quickness of mind, and her versatiht\ She had an answer for e\er\thing, and a practical Hair that seemed capable of overcoming e\'ery difhcultw With her knowledge of the ways of sami/dat and the world ot the dissidents, she w as
zhenitsvn there for the express purpose
that the attraction
.
also able to be very useful to him.
ie later said
I
of his attraction to her:
she's able to come up w ith She has such fighting spirit, she She simpb was born to do battle, and that's what brought us together. She has a firm and joined me in mv struggle and we went side b\ side. excellent grasp of any situation, is very intelligent, and alw a\ s has lots of ideas on how to act, what to do, and what response to make.''
She thinks
\\
ith electronic rapidit\
the strongest argument and give
it
.
... In an instant
to \hukovskava, and a couple of open letters appeared in Solzhenitsvn's support, one signetl bv fourteen people and another bv thirtv-nine (though there w ere hardlv anv w riters among the .
latter),
.
.
but according to Solzhenitsvn onlv seventeen members of the union
some sort of protest. The most noteworthv was a visit by seven .Moscow writers to \'oronkov to point out that it was disgraceful for a writer as eminent as Solzhenitsvn to be expelled bv the votes of a handtul of obscure
registered
and unknow n w be discussed
riters
from the provinces, and
This, thev asserted, was not onlv their of a large
to
demand
that the expulsion
plenarv session of the Writers' Lnion with
b\' a
number
of
w
riters in the
own
full publicit\
opinion but expressed the view
union. \'oronkov promised to pass their
request to the higher authorities, but the onlv result w as that the Party bers
among
summoned bv
the seven were
their district Partv
mem-
committees and
reprimand for violating Partv discipline. It was reported that at a meeting of the prose section of the .Moscow branch of the Writers' Union, tw entv-two writers voted against a resolution approving the expulsion, but
giv^en a
the
"^
names of the dissenters are not known. Perhaps more painful than anv of this
for Solzhenitsyn
w
as
Tvardov-
wreck because of the pressures being heaped on Novy Mir bv the Central Committee, and still reeling from the blow of Solzhenits\n's expulsion, Tvardovsk\- is said to have exploded on being show a copv of Solzhenitsvn's letter. "He's finished us!" was his first reaction, meaning that the letter would be used against Aocv \Ur. And he tried to sky's response. Alread\' a ner\ous
down so that he could summon him for a discussion (he knew nothing of the Rostropovich arrangement). But Solzhenitsyn was determined to lie low in Zhukovka until the initial storm had died dow n. A few davs later, judging that Tvardovskv's rage would have subsided, he sent track Solzhenitsvn
him
a conciliatorv
which, among other things, he explained his
in
letter,
reasons for phrasing the open letter as he had.
By
\\
riting this letter
...
I
have shown that
say, "I will lav
down m\
blow
and perhaps
for blow
,
life,"
think tw ice before touching of rising graduallv from
mv
I
am
hit still harder.
me
I
shall resist to the last; that
not joking; that
again. ...
I
So that feel that
I
if
shall
\\
hen
I
continue returning
they are wise, they will
my
\\
hole
lite is a
knees, a gradual transition from enforced
process
dumbness
to free speech, so that m\- letter to the congress and this present letter have been
moments of high
delight, of spiritual emancipation.'"
SOLZHENITSYN
[682]
Typically, despite the friendly tone, Solzhenitsyn
constrained to
felt
still
deceive Tvardovsky as to his present whereabouts bv arranging for his letter to
be carried
The
the
all
think that he
as
\\
way
still
to
Ryazan and posted from
seems to have had
letter
reported to have said after reading all,
he was
in a
Tvardovsky should
there.
out of town. its it,
desired effect. "Well," Tvardovsky
is
"he was entitled to write as he did: after
camp while we were sitting around editing magazines."" In Medvedev later that month, he was even more
conversation with Zhores
He compared Solzhenitsyn to a bird that fiercelv defended young when attacked bv a bird of prey, as opposed to those birds (writers) who ran away under pressure. "One should judge a man not by his hottempered letters but bv his work." Tvardovsky compared Solzhenitsyn to complimentary. its
Gorky, and
his letters to the authorities
with Gorky's
Lenin (and
letters to
Lenin's to Gorky), in which no punches had been pulled. But those letters,
he added, had longer. It
all
since been locked
awav
so that
nobody knew of them anv
'-
was
ironic that
Tvardovsky should invoke Lenin
in
defence of Solzhe-
when Solzhenitsyn himself had gone far beyond "a return to his own thinking about the future. The chapter he was even
nitsyn at a time
Leninism"
in
then writing for August 1914 was
a
debunking of Lenin, and
of the psychological and political distance betw een the two
it
was
men
a
measure
that Tvar-
dovsky did not realize the true position. The "thirty-nine" had also quoted Lenin as a defender of pluralism, and Zhores Medvedev, the only individual to write a personal open letter in support of Solzhenitsyn, had linked his remarks to a general attack on Stalinism and the re-Stalinization of the Party. Only Solzhenitsvn's confidants Natalia Svetloxa, Igor Shafarevich, and that tiny circle of trusted friends who had been allowed to read the full version of
—
—
The Gulag Archipelago
realized
how much
further
down
the opposition road
Solzhenitsyn had already travelled.
Another interesting difference between Solzhenitsvn's latest letter to the his letter to the Writers' Congress was in the huge volume of support the latest letter received from the West. Perhaps it was because the issue of expulsion from the Writers' Union was clearer-cut cut than the some\\ hat more technical questions of the v\ orkings of the Soviet censorship, the difficulties of publishing, and the campaign of official slander against him enumerated in his first letter. Expulsion was a punitive sanction, whereas the letter to the congress had led only to official silence and slanders under the union and
counter.
The national
him
first
PEN
response came
Club
to
in
mid-November
in a
telegram from the Inter-
Konstantin Eedin, expressing shock and imploring
to intervene personally to reverse the ruling. Eedin's reply
\\
as a master-
piece of Soviet stonewalling: "I regard your telegram as an unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of the Writers'
Union of the USSR, the
observance of whose rules
its
same day,
a
lies
exclusively within
competence."
On
the
long statement was put out by the Erench "National Writers'
The Taming
of .Voi)
(68
.1///?
3]
Committee," rehearsing all the sanctions carried out against Soviet writers in the past and concluding unctuously, "Yet despite all this, we still wish to believe that there will be found in the high councils of the nation, to whom we owe the Dawn of October and the defeat of Ilitlerian fascism, men capable of realizing the wrong that has been done and of putting it right. This for the common cause for which we li\e, fight, and die." .\mong the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Elsa IViolet, Louis Aragon, and Michel Butor. Another protest to Fedin came in earlv December from an international group of writers bristling with famous names: Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote, Kurt \ onnegut, Carlos Fuentes, Yukio Mishima, .
.
.
—
Giinter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Friedrich Diirrenmatt, Jean-Paul Sartre (again),
and Igor Stravinsky, manv of w hom joined the British writers W. H. Auden, J. Aver, Graham Greene, Rosamond Lehmann, Muriel Spark, Philip Toynbee and some more French, German, and American writers in signing one of the strongest letters of protest ever to appear in the London Times: "The silencing of a w titer of Solzhenitsyn's stature is in itself a crime against civilization. Should this appeal fail we shall see no other wav but to call upon the writers and artists of the w orld to conduct an international cultural boycott of a country which chooses to put itself bevond the pale of civilization until such time as it abandons the barbaric treatment of its writers and A.
.
.
.
artists."'^
There was little chance that the Soviet authorities would respond to such threats (nor was there ever any sign that the threat would be translated into action
when
the Soviets refused to budge). Indeed, an editorial in the
Literaturnaya Gazeta three weeks before the Times letter had ities'
made
the author-
determination quite clear. Solzhenitsvn, said the editorial, had virtually
made common cause with
the enemies of the Soviet system. His letters,
statements, and manuscripts were travelling abroad through
"organized and steered by
a practised
have elevated him to the rank of
hand.
'leader'
.
.
.
The enemies
illegal
channels
of our country
of 'the political opposition in the
USSR,' which has been fabricated bv them."'"^ The only really serious charge in the article was the allegation that part of Solzhenitsyn's royalties from Ivan Denisovich had been paid by the American publisher Praeger to an organization called the International Rescue Committee,* w hich, the newspaper said, had organized "hostile acts" against the Soviet Union and its allies. But Ekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet minister of culture, who was in Paris during the last days of December, repeated Fedin's line that "the Solzhenitsvn affair is a
domestic
affair," adding, for the benefit of foreign public opinion, that "if
he writes good books we will publish them."" Meanwhile, evidence was emerging of the ludicrous lengths to w hich the Writers'
Union had been forced
to
go to effect the expulsion
in the first
*Praeger's intentions in pa\ing the mone\' to the committee were evidenth honourable, in that
thev did not want to take Solzhenitsyn's royalties for themsehes, but sighted to assign in this \\a\'.
them
it
was naiVe and shortwere paid oyer
to such a cause. Eyidently, only the first year's royalties
SOLZHENITSYN
[684] 12 of the
place. Issue no.
by now indispensable
Chronicle of Current Events
contained a description of the Gogolian events that preceded the meeting in
Ryazan.
It
appeared that the expulsion had been planned
November. The
at the
beginning of
Ryazan branch of the union, Ernst Safonov, had been so appalled at the prospect that he had volunteered for an appendicitis operation and gone straight to hospital. Of the five remaining branch members, four had been summoned for individual interviews and informed of what was expected of them (the young poet Evgeni Markin was promised a flat if he co-operated, and was duly awarded one). A fifth writer, Rodin, was ill in the town of Kasimov, 120 miles away, but on the day of the expulsion was dragged from his bed and obliged to drive to Ryazan. One hour before the meeting, the five writers were grilled by the ideological secretary of the Ryazan party and given their final instructions; after the meeting, another secretary visited Safonov in hospital to obtain his vote, for it had to be unanimous. Safonov refused at first, but w as obliged to comply a month later.
secretary of the
"^
Perhaps one reason for the generally muted response of Soviet liberals w as a perception that the government had defi-
to Solzhenitsvn's expulsion
nitely
made up
its
mind
that
w
inter to reassert close control over
all
areas of
and that it was dangerous to draw attention to oneself. Certainly the pressure was considerable, and it quickly became clear that after "dealing with" Solzhenitsvn, the authorities were anxious to get to grips with those whom they saw as his backers and supporters at Novy Mir (little suspecting the fissure that had opened up between Solzhenitsyn and cultural
and
intellectual
life,
Novy Mir). I
he primary target w as Tvardovsky himself.
dovskv's standing in
official
A
sort of index of
Tvar-
eves had been provided during the year by the
"By Right of Memory," which he had started middle of 1969. A copy of the early version had been submitted by Tvardovsky to the magazine Yunost ("Youth") as early as 1967, but the magazine had rejected it. After reworking the poem, Tvardovsky had decided to publish it himself in Novy Mir and in the spring of 1969 had set it in type, intending to publish it in the April issue. It w as rejected by the censors, however. Ivardovsky had resubmitted it for the May issue, and again in June, but on both occasions it was rejected. Tvardovsky had then had twenty proof copies of the poem bound separately (rather along the lines of Ivan Denisovich seven years earlier), one of which he presented to Solzhenitsyn and another to Roy Medvedev. His intention was to supply the remaining copies to members of the Writers' Union secretariat and perhaps to the ideological section of the Central (Comfortunes of his latest long poem, in
about 1966 and completed,
in a revised version, in the
mittee, so that publication of the
poem
could be "discussed"
at a
higher
level,
were rebuffed and the copies declined. A factor in this rejection may have been the poem's contents. For the first time Tvardovsky had turned to his childhood for inspiration and could not help dwelling on the fate of his father, who had been proclaimed a kulak
but
all
his overtures
a
The Taming
ok
.Vol
)
M/R
l^^XsJ
and deported to Stalin's labour camps. Solzhenits\n had found the poem too mild and apologetic, yet the very mention of the labour camps and Stalin's repressions had become taboo, and there \\ ere manv lines that could cause offence. Ixardovskx' was evidentb' aware ot this, tor he explicitly refused, in the poem, to hide behind the skirts of the censorship and to express the things that burned his soul. It w as the poet's dut\ "to utter all the unuttered omissions of the past."' Unfortunately, Tvardovskv had arrixed at such sentiments too late for them to be published openly in the Soviet Union any more. But there was more to the official ban than just a distaste for the contents of I xardovsky's poem. The time had evidently come for him and his magazine to be silenced, and this w as the simplest way for the authorities to show their displeasure. Then, in the late autumn of 1969, the authorities benefited from w hat seemed like
an amazing stroke of luck. Tvardovsky's poem appeared
NTS
Tvardovskv w
journal Possev.
Committee and asked
as
immediately
summoned
to explain, (^f course he could not, but
that he write a stinging statement
hated
was demanded
denouncing the publication and pouring
scorn over the
Nl
poem had been
given a different and provocative
S.
it
in the
to the Central
Tvardovskv did so
more so since the ("On Stalin's Ashes")
willingly, the title
and had been printed in its earlier and less finished version of 1967. What he seems to have overlooked in his ready indignation, however, was that the poem couldn't have reached Possev through samizdat, since it had never been circulated in its earlier version. It could only have been supplied by someone at Y'unost, w hich suggests that it might have been deliberateh' planted. Tvardovsky wrote his statement, and the Writers' Union did what it had done w ith Solzhenitsyn's disclaimer over Cancer Ward two years previously it suppressed it for three to four months, so that 1 vardoxskv appeared not to be reacting. In the meantime, Voronkov started putting pressure on Tvardovsky to resign. Similar suggestions had been coming from the Writers' Union secretariat for over a year now, but only at the end of 1969 did the pressure become irresistible. At first there was an attempt to accomplish the matter politely. Tvardovsky was invited to hand in his resignation for "health reasons" (that old Soviet stand-by), and the pill was sugared by the simultaneous offer of a permanent secretaryship in the Writers' Union highly paid sinecure that was the equivalent of being kicked upstairs. When Tvardovsky still refused, it was decided to get at him by changing his staff. Officially, the Writers' Union had no authority to dismiss an editor, but it could dismiss and appoint members of his editorial board. The usual thing was to do this in consultation with the editor, but in extremis the editor's wishes could be ignored. This had happened in the case of Dementyev and Sachs in 1967, and now the union used its powers again to fire Kondratovich, Lakshin, Sats, and \'inogradov all the section heads and all Tvardovsky's
—
—
—
trusted lieutenants. In their place
who were
came
five mediocrities, third-rate
guaranteed to take union orders and toe the Party
This was accomplished
at a special
line.
hacks
"^
meeting of the secretariat that w
as
SOLZHENITSYN
[686] held
—
tvpicallv
—
in
T\ardovskv's absence
Tvardovskv appealed, but
his appeal
was
rejected,
the changes appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta for issue, the
week of February 1970. and an announcement of 1 1 February. In the same
in the first
newspaper published Tvardovsky's long-delayed disclaimer over
"By Right of Memory," so that the well-schooled Soviet reader would get the message: Tvardovskv was being punished for allowing his work to be published abroad (which was only part of the truth). To rub salt in the wounds, the Writers' Union summoned Tvardovsky that same dav to a meeting to discuss relations with COMES, the European Writers Association, of which Tvardovsky was the Soviet vice-chairman. V igorelli, the association's secretary-general, had sent a vigorous protest on behalf of the association over the union's expulsion of Solzhenitsvn, and the
meeting was being held to determine the Soviet reply. In fact, there was nothing left to decide, since the decision had been taken at a higher level. Tvardovskv was instructed to write a stiff letter to Vigorelli, announcing his resignation from the post of vice-chairman and Soviet withdrawal from the association as a whole. Just as a liberal literary journal, or
was no longer needed, could
now
its
liberal editor,
so the pretence of co-operation with the rest of
be dropped, and with
it
Europe
the Soviet figure-head.
Tvardovsky needed no more urging. The replacement of his editorial his abrupt removal from COMES added up to a comprehensive humiliation both at home and abroad. He sat down at once and wrote a letter of resignation from Novy Mir. It was the end of an era, and bv the time it occurred, the end was no longer unexpected. For weeks before the actual announcement, Moscow had been full of rumours, and in the last days, in early February, writers and friends of Novy Mir had flocked to the elegant offices in Maly Putinko\sky Lane, partlv as a show of solidarity, partly out of curiosity, and partly, it board behind his back and
last respects to the dying was strangely muted. Solzhenitsyn describes a group of writers, led bv Mozhayev, hastily composing a last-minute collective letter to Brezhnev.'*^ But the text was kept secret, even after Tvardovsky's resignation. On the very last dav, the offices and corridors were packed with sympathetic visitors, standing about in groups, smoking and wondering what was going to appear in the Literaturnaya Gazeta on the morrow. When the final announcement came, they accepted it calmly, fatalistically, almost as a relief. In the next few weeks, Efim Dorosh, a talented prose writer, A. Maryamov, and M. Khitrov announced their resignations from Novy Mir, giving the Writers' Union a clean sweep of the liberals, but apart from that, there w as remarkably little public reaction to the change. Only two written protests circulated in samizdat, and both were anonymous a bad sign when dozens of human-rights activists were willingly going to jail for signing their protests w ith their right names. Solzhenitsyn's attitude to these events seems to have been contradictory. On the one hand, he couldn't but be depressed and angered by the virtual
seems, out of journal.
And
a
subconscious desire to pay their
\et the whole thing
—
The
'I"amin(;
ok Nov) Mir
[om reports to Moscow of the av v\
.
it
it
that
Solzhenitsvn's absence had both cast a shadow over the proceedings and in a
way also dominated them. At the end of his prepared speech, Dr Gierow had added the impromptu remark that "the Swedish Academy regrets the reason w hv Alexander Solzhenitsvn has deemed it impossible to be with us today" and said that the prize would be awarded to him "at a place and time still to be agreed." There was a long pause that seemed to some observpeculiar
ers to contain a
compound
of embarrassment, shame, and silent respect for
who looked for the empty chair that was were surprised to find it had been forgotten. The silence was ended w hen the king of Sw eden rose to his feet and led the assembly in a round of applause. Professor Arne Tiselius, a former winner of the Nobel the missing
supposed
w
titer,
while those
to be there
Prize for chemistry, said in his keynote speech afterwards, .
.
.
"we appreciated hom-
the motives that ha\ e prompted [Solzhenitsvn] not to attend. 1 he
is, if anything, reinforced by his absence."' There were one or two side-shows as well. The academy had put on a display of Solzhenitsyn's works that w as moved from the reception to the banquet and then back to the academy again. A Swedish human-rights organization had put together an even bigger exhibition that was displayed in the premises of the Workers' Educational Ontre in Stockholm. Fhe Educational Centre abutted the Grand Cinema, w here a world premiere of the AngloNorwegian film of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (starring Tom Courtenay) w as given for the benefit of the royal family and the remaining prize winners, but the exhibition was ostentatiously boycotted by the Nobel Foun-
age just rendered
719
SOLZHENITSYN
[720] dation on the grounds that copies of Solzhenits\ n's
v\
it
contained,
among hundreds
orks published in Russian by the
of other books,
NTS. The
Soviet
embassy, which had been active throughout in bringing pressure to bear on the Swedish Academv and the Swedish authorities, managed on the fourth or hfth dav to have the exhibition closed on the grounds that it was a threat to Soviet-Swedish relations. The Nobel ceremonv itself and all associated events w ere bovcotted bv representatives of the Soviet Union and the countries in
the Soviet bloc."
These squalid manoeuvres were standard Soviet practice and barely raised an evebrow in the bustle and clamour of Nobel Prize week (one of the successes of Soviet propaganda has been to persuade the rest of the w orld that such behaviour is more or less normal, at least on the part of Communist countries). But it had its effect on the Swedish Academv, which refused to accept any books from the closed exhibition for its ow n collection and grew decidedly timid in its dealings with Solzhenitsyn. It soon emerged that among the materials he had forw arded at the academ\''s request was a brief autobiographv of about three pages, w hich he urged the academv to make public at once, since he was "deprived of a platform in the Soviet Union. "^ For some inexplicable reason the academv declined and said it would publish the autobiograph\' in its vear-book nine months later, until w hich time the document would remain secret. Feeling bound by his obligations to the academv, Solzhenitsvn did not release it into samizdat, so that man\' facts of his biographv remained unknow n for another vear, adding to the mvsterv of his past.
Meanwhile, the larger controversv around his name continued to rage world-w ide. In November, shortlv before the Nobel ceremonv was due to take place, Rostropovich had created headlines bv releasing a long open letter about Solzhenitsvn to the world's press. Announcing that it was "no longer a secret" that he was sheltering Solzhenitsxn in his house, Rostropovich declared that he had been impelled to w rite his letter by the Soviet campaign against Solzhenitsvn's Nobel Prize. It was the third time, he said, that a Soviet writer had been gi\ en the Nobel Prize. In two cases the award had been regarded
as a "dirty political
game," but
in
one (Sholokhov's)
as a "just
recognition of the outstanding world significance of our literature." If Sho-
lokhov had declined to accept the prize, Rostropovich would have understood that the Soviet authorities no longer trusted the objectivity and honesty of the Swedish academicians, but
now
accepted the Nobel Prize sometimes
it
w ith
appeared that the Soviet authorities gratitude and sometimes
w ith
curses.
campaigns against Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and other composers and cited a long list of senseless censorings and bannings w ith w hich he w as personallv acquainted. I le w as not concerned w ith political and economic questions, he wrote, but wished that somebody would explain to him "whv in our literature and art people completel}- incompetent Rostropovich referred to
in this field so often
earlier
ha\c the
final
word?
discredit our art in the eves of our people?"
\\\\\ are thev given the right to It
was alwavs,
it
seemed, because
Thf, Start of a \'ast Entfrprisf. "there
w
as
an opinion" handed dow n from on high. Rostropox ich eonckided
that after his letter "there will
am
not afraid of
it.
1
through
undouhtedU be an
openlx sa\ what
must not be submitted right
["::i1
I
'opinion" about nie, but
think. Talent, of
to the assaults of the past.
.
.
.
whieh we
Sol/.henits\ n seeks the
w rite the truth as he sees it, and see no reason tow ards him at a time w hen a campaign is being launched
his suffering to
to hide m\- attitude
I
are proud,
1
against him.""*
Rostropox ich had apparentK dratted his
letter
while on
a
\
isit
to
Lon-
don at the end of October to recei\e the gold medal of the Ro\ al Philharmonic Societx but it was onK w hen back in .Moscow in Noxember that he decided to make it pul)lic (it was formalK addressed to the editors ()\ Pnivda, Izvestia, Litcraturnayci Gazeta, and Sovetskciya Kiiltiira, none of w hich published it), and he posted it on the e\e of his departure for a concert tour in \\ est Germanx Some obserxers concluded from this that he would not be punished for it, but he was immediateh banned from going abroad again ,
.
(alreadx-arranged tours to France and Finland were cancelled) after his return
from German\
,
and
in
time began to hnd that his Soviet tours were being
cancelled as well.
From
a different
On
Solzhenitsx n.
10
source came another open declaration in support of December, the da\ of the Nobel ceremonx Arthur ,
Miller announced in the Sei:: York Times that he, too, after
popular author
in the Soviet
a
long run as a
Union, had been banned from Soxiet stages and one of his plavs had been suddenh- cancelled,
that a telexision production of
either as the result of a preface he had Russia. h\ his
w
ife
defence of Solzhenitsxn
W hatever
at
Until
ritten to a
book of photographs,
the time of his expulsion from the
W riters'
//;
Union.
the reason. Miller declared his solidaritx w ith Solzhenitsvn
Rostropoxich and his disgust w in the
x\
hige .\lorath, or for having signed an outspoken letter in
now some
ith this
new evidence
md
ot Soxiet intolerance.'
foreign observers haei professed to see a certain leniencx'
Soviet government's attitude to Solzhenitsx n over the Nobel Prize
Most of the official attacks, thex' felt, had been directed as much against the Swedish Acaclemx' as against Solzhenitsx n himself, and there had been nothing like the scurrilous insults hurled at Pasternak. This was true, but probablx' reflected the authorities" uncertaintx and the problems caused them affair.
b\'
Solzhenits\n"s greater pugnacitx
,
rather than anx' sudden teelings ot remorse
December xxhen Pnivda published a wicie-ranging attack on the whole phenomenon of dissidence, with Solzhenitsvn featured as public enemx" number one. There was little new in it. Solzhenitsvn was labelled a "spiritual emigre, hostile and alien to the entire life of the Soviet people," who had tried to "blackmail" the \\ titers' Union bv threatening that his works w ould And their w ax' to the \\ est and then conniving at their appearance there. Feast of the Conquerors w as mentioned again. But perhaps the most menacing note w as sounded in the comparison
or indulgence. This
xxas
borne out on
17
and Anatoli Kuznetsov on the (me hand, and Solzhenitsvn, Bukovskv, and Amalrik on the other. This x\ as the first time
betw een Solzhenitsvn, 1
arsis,
SOLZHENITSYN
[722] that Solzhenitsvn had been
lumped w ith the
dissidents in the official press.
Tarsis and Kuznetsov had gone abroad, while Amalrik had just been sentenced to three vears in a labour camp and Buko\ sky would shortly be in the dock again. The inference was plain: one or the other aw aited Solzhenitsyn in the not too distant future. Another theme w as that all these individuals were the tools of Western intelligence serxices. It w as an argument that would resurface again and again in the vears ahead, in ever new variations.
The
article
was signed with the nom
de
plume
"I.
Alexandrov," which
is
customarilv reserved for authoritative statements by the Soviet leadership, and therefore had the force for loval Soviet citizens that a papal decree has for Catholics.
It
was followed bv harsher outbursts
in
Krasnaya Zvezda (Red
organ of the Soviet armed forces, and Kommunist vooruzhennykb sil (Armed forces Communist), a newspaper devoted to questions of ideology and propaganda. According to Zhores Medvedev, surveillance of SolzheniStar), the
tsvn's friends
and familv
w as
circle
Xorw egian government
intensified,
and pressure w
as applied
on
Hegge withdrawn.'^ For most of December and januar\ Solzhenitsyn w as too preoccupied w ith familv affairs to pav much attention to w hat the Soviet press was saying about him. While his quarrel w ith Natalia simmered on, playing havoc with his nerves and keeping him jumpilv on the defensive, Natalia Svetlova, her
the
to have the journalist Per ,
mother, stepfather, and son w ere able to exchange their small lievskv Lane, plus a smaller,
two-room
flat
that Svetlova
universitN' co-operative, for a big, old-fashioned,
Lane, also just off Gorky Street.
on 30 December 1970
(slightlv
The
extra space
four-room
came
fiat in \'asi-
owned
flat in
in a
Kozitsky
just in time,
because
prematurely) Svetlova gave birth to
a son.
name of Ermolai,
based,
Solzhenitsvn chose for him the quaint and archaic
—
still
on the Greek Hermes "herald of the people." An immediate result of the child's birth was that Svetlova was dismissed from her job. POr the past six months she had been carrying out research and lecturing in applied mathematics at the Labour Institute in Moscow. A friend had obtained the post for her, despite knowing of her pregnancy and who the father was. In a tvpicallv Soviet compromise, he had told her that this might create difficulties for him but that she should stay until the baby w as he
said,
born and see what happened. If the institute bosses kicked up a fuss, she would have to go quietlv; if they didn't, she could stay. In the event, the bosses didn't wait for explanations but simply dismissed her the moment thev learned the new
s,
taking
it
as self-evident that she
would accept
it.
Not
long afterwards her mother, Ekaterina, w as dismissed from her engineering job for becoming the grandmother of Solzhenitsyn's child.' In Februarv 1971 pital,
having
Tvardovskv was discharged from the Kremlin Hos-
made an astounding recovers His thrombosis had been
resolved,
was parth' gone, and he was able to speak again, albeit with difficultv. Soon after his return home, Solzhenitsyn and Rostropovich went to see him. Solzhenitsyn knew how delightedly Tvardovsky had received the news of his Nobel Prize in hospital. "Bravo! Bravo! Victory!" he was said to his paralysis
— The Start have cried to the nurses.
1
o Ro\' Medvede\
him
,
\\
ho had
\
[72 3I
isited
him
at
the end
our prize too," meaning Novy Mir's.^ Solzheparth" parahsed and gave him the freshK completed
of October, he had said, "It nitsvn found
ok a \'ast Enterprise
still
is
tvpescript at August 1914 to read
(
1
vardo\sky had seen an
He
earlier version the
him his letter to was he who had introduced them and told him of all the difficulties surrounding the Nobel Prize and his manoeuvres to get it presented in Moscow Tvardovsky could still hardlv speak, but intermittenth' beamed his interest and approval. Before leaxing, Sol/.henitsvn devised a svstem of different-coloured markers so that 1 vardovskv could indicate which parts oi August 1914 he liked and which parts he didn't he was still anxious to have Tvardovskx's opinion, despite their man\' squabbles. The markers w ere for use in case 1 vardovsky's speech failed to improve preceding spring, hut not the complete Suslov
— reminding
r\ardo\sk\' that
text).
also read
it
.
or deteriorated. It
must have been
just before or just after this visit that Solzhenits\ n
finished the third part of The
Oak and
the Calf, in
which he described
his
expulsion from the Writers' Union and the breaking up of Novy Mir. There
we
find strident criticism of Tvardovskv's beha\iour
and the harsh and
unfeeling reflection on Tvardovskv's cancer that was to shock so man\' readers
when
selves
can
up
live
the to
memoir was published: "Cancer is the fate of all who give themmoods of bilious, corrosive resentment and depression. People
through hardship, but from hard feelings thev
perish.'"^
next part of the memoir, describing Solzhenitsvn's Februarv
visit,
Vet
in the
there
was
an immenselv tender description of Tvardovskv's disablement and of the
understanding betw een the tw o men.
AT's powers of active response were paralvscd, but kindlv feeling streamed from his eves unstemmed, and his face, exhausted as it w as bv illness, still retained its old, childlike expression.
\A'hen .\T
w
something and could not hand w hich w as w arm, and free and alive. He squeezed mv hand in reph and in this wav we understood each other well enough. Understood that all was forgiven between us. Ihat all
manage
it,
I
as particularlv anxious to finish saving
helped him out bv taking his
left
—
,
.
.
.
the bad things, the hurts, the troubles, might never have been.'"
Which mood represented the true Solzhenitsvnr Both, of course, w hich is what made him so baffling to deal v\ith. Negotiations with the Sw edish embassv had come to a temporar\ halt. The Soviet authorities had in the end expelled Per Hegge, and Solzhenitsx n was having trouble with the Nobel lecture that he had promised to write. He felt drained bv the emotional stresses he was undergoing and found himself listless and apathetic. "I had thought of mv Nobel lecture beforehand as a scouring peal of bells. This, more than anvthing else, made the prize w orthwhile. I sat down to it, I even wrote it, but it came out in a form difficult to digest." He was anxious to write about social and political problems, w hereas he had deduced from the speeches of his predecessors that the main theme
SOLZHENITSYN
[724]
He tried to combine the two, but friends to w honi he showed the lecture pronounced it a failure. Solzhenitsyn then wrote to the Nobel Foundation asking w hether he might forgo the lecture, since he should be art and literature.
theme, and the foundation readily agreed. an effort to "shield" the author, as it thought, from the adverse publicitv attendant upon an admission that he preferred to write on social and political themes, the foundation invented a reason of its own. Solzhenitsyn would not be writing a lecture, it announced, because he did not know-
was having
How ever,
how
difhcult\- sticking to the
in
to deliver
If
it.
he sent
cepted bv the censorship;
if
it
it would be interwould be accused of com-
openlv through the mail,
he sent
secretly, he
it
mitting a crime."
The
intention
was perfectly laudable, but
it
backfired.
could not see that this seeming admission of his impotence
—was
The
foundation
—and acceptance
more damaging than the real reason. When he heard the Nobel announcement on the BBC's Russian Service, he was furious and the next day fired off a telegram to Nils Stable, the foun-
of the Soviet rules
dation's director.
It is
for Solzhenitsyn
not clear whether Stable received
Solzhenitsyn released
later
it
to reporters in
Moscow.
prised b\' \our explanation of the motixation for lecture.
never expressed any such thing to you.
I
essar\- at all,
literature
is
you ought
alien to
me
—
to cite
"I
but
a
few days
extremely sur-
refusal to deliver a
If
some explanation
Nobel is
nec-
the truth: the very genre of the lecture on
to talk of the nature of art, creation,
broad judgments on present
to avoid
my
it,
am
ask you to correct your mistake and
social life
make
it
and
its
ulcers.
and beauty and ... I sincerely
public."'- Characteristically, he
now resolved to w rite the lecture after all. There w ere other niggles and anxieties that spring. The Nobel Prize brought with it the sum of about $78, ()()() at the then current rates of exchange, and Solzhenitsxn w anted to have at least a part of it to take care of his new faniiK
make
.
The
Soviet authorities, however, could not miss this opportunity to
life difficult for
him.
When
he asked for $3,000 to be transferred to his
account in dollar certificates for use
in
Moscow's hard-currency shops, the
government insisted on levying a 30 per cent tax. Solzhenitsyn protested that this
was prize mone\' and not subject
to tax, but the
government refused
to
listen.
That spring an attempt w as made to evict Solzhenitsyn from Rostropovich's dacha in Zhukovka. It was understandable that Solzhcnitsyn's presence there rankled. Zhukovka and the adjacent district of Barvikha were elite encla\es, completely closed to ordinary Soviet citizens,
outcasts like Solzhenitsyn.
And
let
alone to social
Solzhenitsyn was living there quite unoffi-
One day
March, he returned from a short jaunt on skis to find a small police delegation awaiting him, led by the head of the Moscow regional passport office, Anosov. This was not the first visit
cialK-,
w
ithout being registered.
in
by the police. A captain had called to see him the preceding autumn but appeared to have been satisfied w hen Solzhenitsyn informed him that he w as a guest of Rostropovich. Now the police had returned in greater force and at
The Start
of
\'ast Enterprise
a
[725]
—
there was a major in addition to the head of the passport and another captain as well. Solzhenits\n was aware that his sittiation was delicate. According to So\iet law e\er\- Soviet citizen w as supposed to he registeretl in his place of main residence, and Solzhenits\n's registration was in R\azan. This mo\e against him was therefore not unexpected. But he hadnt the slightest intention of compUing and with his usual thoroughness had alreach composed a a higher lc\cl
office,
,
letter
of protest to the police, read\' to send off (and release into samizdat)
moment
that an\ thing happened: "Serfdom w as abolished in our countr\ The October Rexolution is said to have swept awa\ the last remnants of it. 1 am, theretore, a tree citizen of this countrx not a serf or a slave. ." When .\noso\ and the police ofhcers informed him of the purpose of their visit, he was not surprised and greeted them calmK even affabh tr\ing to bluff them into dropping the whole matter and imph ing that the\ would get into some kind of undefined "trouble" if the\ persisted w ith their mission. \\ hen the\' insisted that he do something about obtaining a residence permit or return to R\azan, and informed him of their decision to report him, he lost his temper and exclaimed defiantK', "I won't do it! Make m\ own wav to R\azan? Til neither go nor let m\ self be carried there. And if the court issues an order? I won't obev it! If I go, it w ill be in chains!"'^ As usual w ith bureaucrats, the histrionics worked. Ihe police delegation w ithdrew abashed, and Solzhenitsvn w as not obliged to release his fier\ letter on "serfdom" after all. But Solzhenitsxn's prixate life was still in turmoil. Natalia had failed to return to .Moscow after the November holidax s, and he had no idea where she had gone or w hat her plans w ere. hi tact she had gone to the countr\side to sta\' w ith some friends from the .\gricultural Institute in Rxazan, and had taken Solzhenitsxn's carh letters w ith her, especialh those w ritten from the sharashka and later in 1956, when thev were coming together again. She immersed herself in their tender and eloquent rhetoric, so replete with affirmations of eternal love, vividlx' recalling the vears of their greatest happiness and lulling her into a belief that her marriage could still be saved. Her Ryazan friends, in w hom she had once confided w hen deciding to leave \ se\"olod and return to Solzhenitsxn, seem to have encouraged her in the belief that a divorce w as avoidable, and she decided to tra\ el north to Riga to consult a lawver there. On the w a\', she classified and copied out extracts from Solzhenitsvn's letters to support the point that he truh' lo\ed her and had sw orn
the
in 1861.
,
.
.
,
eternal
but the law ver w as obliged to disabuse her:
fidelit\-,
circumstances, where there was another
guaranteed under Soviet law their relations
.
The
letters
and had no bearing on
look for a job and to adopt a child
if,
woman and
,
a
divorce in their
a bab\',
was virtualh
touched onl\ the moral aspect of
legal matters.
She advised Natalia
to
as she claimed, she felt so stronglv
about her childlessness.'^
w ith this and returned to Rvazan. On the w a\ under the influence of Solzhenitsvn's old letters, she had decided to
Natalia was not satisfied to Riga,
SOLZHENITSYN
[726]
make
on her memoirs
and found that the writing acted as a form at the opening chapters, and the more she wrote, the more she convinced herself that a divorce was unthinkable. Eventually, she returned to Moscow but the very thought of Solzhenitsvn with Svetlova and the child made her insanely jealous, just as a visit to her mother in Ryazan and the sight of their flat brought on uncontrollable fits of weeping. Her isolation in Mosco\\' was compounded by a quarrel w ith the Steins. She felt that Veronica had betrayed her by going to meet S\etlova and see the baby and by accompanying Solzhenitsvn to the a start
at last
of therapy. For several weeks she worked away
,
Sovremennik Theatre
after Natalia's "disappearance," as if to set the seal of
new family. Natalia found such behaviour on the part of her cousin disloyal and "demonic" and refused to have any more to do w ith her. Another painful spot was her relationship w ith her former piano teacher Maria Yudina. Vudina was shocked by the rift between Natalia and Solzhenitsxn, but Natalia could not bring herself to tell Yudina who the other woman was, because Svetlova (w ho had been baptized only recently) w as Yudina's god-daughter. Yudina subsequenth* learned the truth from Nadezhda Alandelstam and planned to write Solzhenitsvn a letter, but soon afterwards caught pneumonia and died without doing so.'^ NatalNatalia and Solzhenits\'n finalb met again on 26 February 1971 ia's birthdaw Solzhenitsvn, according to Natalia, was filled with remorse, wept, and said how relieved he was that Natalia had taken sleeping tablets instead of the mandrake infusion and had survived. When she asked whether she could mo\ e back to Zhukovka w ith him, he said that he would rather not just vet and that she should "w ait a \ ear," meaning a \ear from the time of her attempted suicide. I le feared that otherw ise Zhuko\ka would onK remind her of w hat had happened there and have a depressing effect on her. In return, he agreed that he would do nothing about a divorce until then, so that she would have time to recover her strength and build a new lite."^" The knowledge that Natalia was set against a dixorce was extremely painful for Solzhenits\n, and life w as made even more difficult when Natalia began visiting their old friends (the Kopelevs, (]hukovskys, Etkinds, Panin, Suzanna Teush, Father Shpiller) to seek their support and to show them extracts from the letters she had been reading (she also sent some ot the extracts to Solzhenitsvn himself to remind him of his former love for her). Although discreet and tactful b\- nature, she now flaunted these intimacies as weapons in her private struggle, and Solzhenits\n did not know how to react. Seemingh all-powerful in his confrontation w ith the Soviet government, bestriding the world's stage w ith his books, his public statements, and his actions, he was yet helpless when faced w ith the w rath ot a discarded woman. One is reminded of Cyril Connolh 's dictum that "in the sex w ar, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, \ indictiveness of the female," and no remark could l)etter summarize the relations between the Solzhenitsyns. Not the least of the many surprising features of Solzhenitsx n's memoir. The Oak cDul the (Ailt\ is the \ eil of silence he draw s over this dramatic struggle. public approval on Solzhenitsyn's
—
.
of a Vast Kntfrprisf.
The Start
which paralleled and at times completeh overshadowed the public was engaged in. ()nl\' occasionalK does he drop his guard and slip about the true state ot
affairs
tion in the spring of 197
I
felt this
way
—
in
mv
upon me,
ith a
left
place, drained
the pot-holes on the highw av of
put up w
m\
life
to disregard, to let slip,
the fore, painfullv forced itself
all
in a hint
exhaus-
1
me
man would have been
battle he
as in the following explanation of his
largely because that side of
motion had caused
[727]
mv
deep, an abvsmal marital
life.
rift,
t(j
u hich tension and ceaseless
leave out of accrmnt,
me more
more of
came
to
exhausted than another
mv
strength perhaps than
For the preceding
five vears had and had continuallv postponed anv I
was invariablv short of time to finish some work, or some part backed down, coaxed, w heedled, just tf) gain another three months, one month, two weeks of precious working time, so as not to be torn awav from what mattered most to me.' decisive action:
I
of a work, and every time
Now
I
mind was made up, however, he still found himself same time, he w as depressed and debilitated bv the knowledge that he could do practically nothing for the moment to aid and protect S\etlova and their child. U ithout a divorce, he w as powerless to marry her and give the child his name. Ihis meant that if the worst came to the worst, and he w as imprisoned or exiled abroad, she would have no standing in his affairs. She would have the right neither to visit him, nor to follow hiin abroad, nor to receive his income, nor to manage his literary estate. He could not obtain for her an\' of the monex that was rightfully his that his
uncharacteristically helpless. .\t the
without going through
a
humiliating procedure specially devised for this pur-
pose. Atter Solzhenitsyn had protested against the levying of the tax, the
Ministry of Foreign Trade had decreed that each of his applications to receive a
portion of the
each time
it
money should be examined by
a special
committee and that
should take a separate decision on w hether to pay the mone\'
what form, and at what exchange rate. In this w a\ the Xobel Prize winner was effectively prevented from enjox ing his prize. To overcome some of these difficulties, Solzhenitsx n made a redoubled effort to see that his last w ill and testament w as properly legal and watertight, and sent a copy to Dr Heeb in Sw itzerland. As an earnest of Solzhenitsyn's newly aw akened concern for political and religious opponents of the
over, in
regime, the will decreed that in the event of Solzhenitsvn's death, disappear-
would be set up to help Union. The money for it would come from his royalities, particularly the ro\alties from The Gulag Archipelago, and he hoped that others would make contributions once the ance, or imprisonment, a fund for social purposes political prisoners
fund
\\
and
their families in the Soviet
as established. Elaborate
arrangements w ere made for the publication
of his still-unpublished works, and Natalia Svetlova was designated his main
and main executor. In the event of his death or disappearance, to be published world-wide w ithin tw o weeks, and in such circumstances, "no protest from me, in w riting or h\ word of mouth, from beneficiarx'
the will
w as
— SOLZHENITSYN
[728]
prison or in an\" other place w here
modit\
or a single
a single point
In addition to his
\\ ill,
mv
word
freedom
in this
\\
is
restricted, can cancel or
ill.""^
Solzhenitsyn succeeded in sending to
Dr Heeb
the balance of his literarv archive, including an additional copv of The Gulag Archipelago.
He was
not prepared to publish
it
\et.
On
the contrary, he had
Had
decided to put off publication for several more years.
West,
as
he gone to the
he had half expected, to collect the Xobel Prize, he would have
it right a\\a\\ according to his original plan. But now he w as "tr\ing up an excuse for deferring it, for delaying the cup that I could not in the end put from me." He decided that he was justified on two grounds. First, publication might hurt some of the 227 ex-prisoners who had given him their testimony. Secondh he needed more time to write his series of novels on the Revolution. "The Gulag was onlv the offspring of the Revolution and heir to it: if I had had to w rite about Gulag in secrecy, writing about
published to think
,
the Rexolution required even greater secrecy, deeper burrowing, stranger contortions. certainly it." It
no
To make
more important, w as I who must do
haste with the Revolution was even
less urgent.
And
as things
had happened,
it
was, of course, a rationalization of other needs, as Solzhenitsyn secretly
acknow ledged to himself (". it was not just an excuse, though if I am to be strict w ith myself I shall do better to acknow ledge it as such"), and in the end he hit on a compromise: he w ould postpone a decision until Lenin came to play a decisive role in his series of novels. This would come in about book 4. At the rate he w as going, that might give him from three to six \ears more. In the meantime, he would suppress the chapters in w hich Lenin appeared in the first three volumes, much as he had done with the controversial chapters in the original version of The First Circle. Having made this .
.
felt, as he reports, much happier. "This final deadline brought and case into mv life. For the time being, postpone ever\thing else, and work, w ork, w ork. But after that, a head-on clash w as inevitable. Ihere w ere no more loopholes."'*''
decision, he light
But he still needed to have an additional cop\- of Gulag in the West, for w ith the (^arlisles w ere beginning to deteriorate, and he felt he no
relations
Dr Heeb the preceding sum of money representing the The sum would ha\ e been greater,
longer completely trusted them. Olga had been to see
summer and had arranged
to
hand over
a
world-wide roxalties of The First Circle. apparenth", had she not insisted that she should keep some back as a reserve against expenses on Gulag, but it w ould still not amount to as much as SolzhenitsN n had anticipated. Secondh', Olga w as decidedh reluctant to let any
part of the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago out of her hands and, accord-
ing to Solzhenitsyn, was refusing to
Dr Heeb have
a copy. She still felt and Solzhenitsyn did not w ish to provoke an open break, partly because he feared his secret might come out and partK because he w as genuinely grateful to Olga (Carlisle for what she had done for him. What is more, she had recently informed him or so he understood that the English translation of Gulag w as read) w hich let
that she should control world-w idc publication,
—
,
Thk Si art of
a
\'ast Kntikprisk
I729I
meant that \\ hen the time came the all-important American edition coukl be pubhshed in a matter of weeks.-" With his Hterarv affairs more or less in order, Sol/.henits\n was read\ the open publication in to dehver his next blow to the Soviet government the West oi' August 1914. It meant a great step forward from his previous position u ith regard to TIk' First (Jirc/e and Cancer Wani. 1 hen he had been obliged to dissemble, pretending that he had had nothing to do w ith Western publication and disappro\ed of it and that he would prefer publication in his homeland. Now he knew that Soviet publication was out of the question, even though there was little in the novel to w hich the Soviet censorship could take exception. He was irrevocably persona non grata, beyond the pale, and
—
not even a eulogv of Brezhnev could appear o\er his name.
come out
fore afford to
He
could there-
into the open.
Even so he felt the need for some sort of smoke-screen, how e\er thin and transparent, and he decided to offer the novel to a number of Soviet publishing houses first. The chances that they would accept the offer were infinitesimal, but it would blunt an\' future accusation that he was turning his back on his homeland or deliberateK going abroad first. He could alw a\s say that he had offered them the no\el in good faith and that thev had rejected it, and that onlv then had he sought publication abroad. 1 he problem was that he did not w ish to send the manuscript, because he was afraid of its being copied and finding its wav into samizdat before he could publish it himself. At Rostropovich's suggestion, he sent letters to seven publishers informing them of the novel's completion and asking them whether thev w ere interested in publishing it. There w ere obvious risks involved one of the publishers might ask to see it but in the event, none of them did, and the way ahead was clear. This strategv of camouflage worked beautifuUv, as is clear from a Moscow dispatch that appeared in the Neiv York Times that spring.
—
—
Solzhenitsyn u as reported todav to have offered his several Soviet publishing houses in the
ban on the printing of Friends if
.
.
.
w orks
said that earlv last
in this
latest
novel August 1914 to
that the authorities
would end the
countrv.
month Mr. Solzhenitsvn
sent letters
.
.
.
inquiring
they were interested in seeing the manuscript.
As of a few davs
The
his
hope
ago,
Mr. Solzhenitsvn had not received
a reply.
were reported to have described Solzhenitsyn's actions had advised him to take the manuscript personally to the publishing houses and not wait for them to reply. 1 he article continfriends in question
as "stubborn," since thev
ued:
But the 52-vear-t)ld novelist has refused
to
show the manuscript
in
advance for
two reasons, thev said. The first relates to his feeling that as the w inner ot the Nobel Prize, he should be approached bv the publishers. Ihe other is a fear that the manuscript might be smuggled overseas
if
he allowed
it
to circulate freelv.-'
SOLZHENITSYN
[73^^]
1 he deception
\\
as complete.
mation to the press knew the to be foreign publication.
Not even
full st(jr\
,
the friends he used to pass infor-
so that one ot his major fears appeared
This cover would be blown
as
soon as the Paris
edition appeared, but for the time being no one could suspect store
—once
again, the Soviet authorities
seemed
to
w
hat
have been put
w
as in
in the
w rong.
On
June 1971 the charge was detonated. The
11
the press gleaminglv fresh copies,
VMCA
presented to
smelling of printer's ink, of August
still
The accompan\ing
1914, complete and unabridged, in the original Russian.
statement was brief and noncommittal, merelv noting that the subject of the novel w as the earh davs of the First it
was the
of
first
a
on the eastern front and that
\\ Orld \\ ar
planned multi-volume work. 1 he author's cop\ right was
emphasized, and Dr Heeb was said to be ready to prosecute any unauthorized publication or translation. (>uriosit\' about the novel was intense. The first rumours of its existence had leaked as earh as the preceding November, at the height ot the fuss over the Nobel Prize, but despite the novel's title, nobodv had quite expected the
severeh' historical novel that
was indeed the
start
it
turned out to be. Solzhenits\n's chief subject
of the First
World
W ar,
and
in particular the disastrous
advance of General Samsoncn into East Prussia and his resounding defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg. 1 his was the subject that Solzhenitsvn had studied w ith such ard(Kir all those years ago in the libraries of Rosto\', as a callow \ outh of nineteen, and he w as immensely satisfied to have bnmght it to frui-
seemed an affirmation of the tightness of his choice ot subject, and ot and consistenc\ in his career that he had feared broken by his imprisonment and exile. 7 he Samsonov campaign w as w hat he called a "nodal point" (a term borrow ed from mathematics) in histor\', a moment in the sweep ot time that exemplified the development and conflict of forces critical for man's destiny. Each of his planned series of novels would be devoted to one nodal point (\\ hich is w h\ he w as calling them "nodes" or "knots" rather than no\ els), consisting of ten to tw ent\ days described in great detail and density, and the aim was to plot the graph of this period of Russian histor\' by fixing these points along a curve. In discussing this first volume later, Solzhenitsyn had this to sa\ about his intentions. tion,
it
a continuitx
—
—
.\1\
idea in the
World
\\ ar,
first
decided to choose I
had made
node was
even though a single
to
I
couldn't portray the
event
—
a battle
as 1937,
when returned keep a number of the 1
—and through
w hen
I
in that
I
it
show the whole
was onl\ nineteen.
to this subject
First
many
.
.
.
\\
And
I
ar. it's
years later, in 1969,
I
same compositional writing, and the images had to
earlier chapters in the
tunction, though of course the texture, the actual
be reworked
w hole of the
history has never been told in our country, so
earh
this choice as
characteristic that
was able
as follows.
its
was an adult now
.'-
Solzhenits\ n had been able to draw on his military experiences for the battle scenes.
The technologs was
different, of course, but military strategx'
The Start of had not changed
much, and
that
all
put to particularK good use alized his
with
memories of
his
\\
L73'1
artiller\-
in Aiii{iist 1914. Sol/.henits\
arm\ experiences,
a military cast
\'ast Enterprise
a
hich seemed such a natural subject for a
of mind and
a
in
\\
hen
extended and loving
in righting
his
smoke" in the it w as at last, Solzhenits\ n had garnered
in
In a ver\' real sense (and this
remained
in Fast Prussia,
forexer w ith
sta\'
him
as
was no accident
in
notebooks were burned. But here
detail, the
oxer this terrain
man
fondness for military metaphors. As he
noted in Ibc GuUig Archipelago, his arm\' novel had "gone up
Lubvanka furnaces
were
service
n had not \et fiction-
experiences that
1944
—
but transposed backwartls
1-5,
w as noted
w hose neat
b\" readers), a
villages
an image of F.uropean
in time.
part of his heart had
and apple-pie farms were
U)
ci\ ili/.ation.
camunder the bareK disguised name of Isaaki (nicknamed "San\a ') Lazhenitsxn. Indeed, most ot the members of Solzhenitsvn's famil\- appeared in the pages dexoted to scenes behind the lines in proxincial Russia, including (irandtather Zakhar, Lncle Roman, Aunt Irina (all under their own (Christian names, though with Shcherbak metamorphosed into Fomchak), and abo\e all his mother laissia (here renamed Xenia). Also here were laissia's stern schoolmistress and patron, Alexandra Andreveva (Kharitonova in the no\el), w ith her husband, daughter, and son, and mixed up w ith them, the Fedorovsk\ s (Arkhangorodskx s) from Solzhenitsvn's own childhood. So his xouth that other untouched period was It
that Solzhenits\n\s father had also fought in this
paign or that he turned up
in the no\el
—
—
partly here too, especially in the descriptions of his paternal grandfather's
farm
in Sablia
and
his
reminiscences of Rostov. Rostov in the
period was hardh' different from what
New Economic
had been before the First \\ orld \\ ar, and it w as that atmosphere, those colours, and those sights and smells that Solzhenitsxn associated w ith w hat he now took to be the golden PolicN
age of pre-re\olutionar\ Russia. in his
\\ hat
visits to
known and
seen personalh'
conversations w
ith his relatixes
he had not
childhood he had made up for w
during
it
ith
Kislovodsk, Pyatigorsk, Georgievsk, and
Arma\
ir
in
1956
and 1964.
Ihese
pastoral scenes of the
North Caucasus and southern Russia were
obviously the "peace" parts of w hat w as Solzhenitsvn's bid to w
War and
rite a
tw en-
man\ ways abandoned lOlstox' for Dostovevskx', but the old sage's influence on him w as still stnjng, as w as show n b\' Solzhenitsx n's argument in the pages tieth-centur\
Peace. Spiritualh
and
intellectually, he
oi August 1914 with Tolsto\'s theorx' of historx- (Isaaki ally
meeting and arguing with
or\'
of love) and above
all bx"
I Olstox'
is
had
in
portrax ed as liter-
about something else
—1 Olstox's the-
the force of Tolstoy's example.
He
xv
as, for
Solzhenitsx n, the very model of what a major Russian author ought to be.
hen August 1914 appeared, Solzhenitsx n was more than usuallx nerfirst time he had stepped out of his immediate experience and tried to deal x\ ith a period not his own. He had done his research w ith txpical thoroughness, right dow n to the studx of social minutiae. Andrei Sinvavsky's wife, Maria Rozanova, w ho \x as friendix w ith Natalia Sxetlova and had once trained as a jeweller, tells of being introduced \\
vous about readers' reactions. For the
SOLZHENITSYN
[732]
about this time and of being asked to advise him on what wore before the Revolution, and on what occasions. She told him w hat she knew, and he jotted her answers down on an elaborate chart
to Solzhenitsvn at
jewels ladies
he had compiled, coxering dress, jewellery, and various other aspects of
social
behaviour."^ This was for his next novel, March 1916, but the same technique
had evidently been applied
to August 1914.
The
winter before releasing August
1914, he had also distributed thirtv copies of the novel to friends with a
questionnaire that thev
\\
ere to
new
and
this
One
touching detail
is
sky's opinion of the novel,
out, detailing their criticisms
—"because
to me.""^ He had evidently anticipated more made him extra sensitive to it. that he w as particularly anxious to have Tvardov-
the historical novel was criticism than usual,
fill
and one reason
for his
dismay
Tvardov-
at finding
sky paralysed and unable to talk in February had been his disappointment not being able to hear Tvardovsky's verdict.
On
at
May, he move one
a return visit in
—
had found Tvardovsky considerably improved he was able to whole side of his body and to talk a little and Solzhenitsvn had been gratified to hear his novel pronounced "marvellous." Despite his patronizing attitude to Tvarclovsky's social and political views, he still respected the older man's literary taste, and nothing was more important to him than the latter's
—
approval.
The
initial impact of the book's publication on the West was inevitably and commercial. The boldness and originality of Solzhenitsyn's gesture (not to speak of its apparently impeccable legality) immediately caught the world's headlines: once again the intrepid and embattled author had outwitted his clumsy persecutors, while the book's appearance in Russian set off a wild scramble for translation rights among Western publishers that far exceeded the early competition for Cancer Ward and The First Circle. Solzhenitsvn w as under the impression that with a Western law ver in place and with himself releasing a single copy oi August 1914 for initial publication in Russian, he could control its translation, distribution, and publication in the West as successfully as any "normal" author from a "normal" country, ancl in a manner that would make up for the deficiencies in the publication of his earlier works. But the battery of obstacles extra-legal, legal, social, and psychological placed in the w ay of such an operation by the So\iet authorities proved to be too much for him. Without the possibility of direct and open communication, he was obliged to delegate everything to intermediaries, and above all to Dr Heeb, who, with all his industry, integrity, and dedication to Solzhenitsyn's cause, was unable to cope with the enormity of the task. Faced with an avalanche of telegrams, letters, and phone calls from
political
—
—
interested publishers, but inexperienced in literary matters, Ileeb took the
apparently sensible step of placing world rights to the novel in the hands of
Dr Otto Walter of the small, independent Clerman publishing firm of Luchterhand. Heeb was familiar with Luchterhand as the publishers of the German edition of (mincer Wan/. The preceding year he had confirmed their
— Thk Start
of a Vast Entfrprisf.
l7
3
3l
them the e.\ckisi\e new translation of Solzhenits\ n's short stories and prose poems in a single volume. Luchterhand had acquired their original title to Cancer Ward from the Bodlex Head in F^ngland, and Heeb had simultaneously recognized Bodle\' Head's world rights to (mincer Ward, as well as to Solzhenitsyn's play The Tendetfoot and the Tart (w hich the Bodley Head had recenth' published in a limp translation under the e\en limper title of The Love-girl and the Innocent). In doing so, I leeb seems implicit!) to ha\ e recogedition as the "official" one in his eyes and had granted right to bring out a
nized Pavel Licko's original claim to represent Solzhenitsyn in this matter a
claim with some justice, though Solzhenitsv n later denied
clear
whether that was part of Heeb's
plan.
It
w
it,
and
it
is
not
as a side-effect of his prag-
matic idea of finding someone capable of handling the matter, and
Heeb had
apparentlv been more pleased by his dealings with the Cancer Ward team
Head, Luchterhand, Farrar, Straus and Ciiroux, in America, and Mondadori, in Italv) than bv those with The First (Circle team, consisting of the Carlisles and Harper & Row Not surprisingly, the relevant rights to August 1914 went to none other than Luchterhand, the Bodley Head, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Mondadori. The decision was controversial at the time. It was well know n in America that Farrar, Straus and Giroux were far from being the highest bidders: Little, Brown, of Boston, had offered $600,000 for the U.S. rights, almost twice what Farrar ultimatelv paid. In Germany, Fischer (the German publishers of The First Circle) offered $80,000, Suhrkamp $165,000, and LangenMiiller an undisclosed amount that they claimed was "in any case more than anyone else had offered," but Luchterhand paid onlv $104,000 for the entire world rights. " The arrangement w as presented as a triumph for literary values and the integrity of the small companies over the cheque-wielding affiliates of conglomerates, and it is true that the personal qualities of the men (Bodle^'
.
heading these firms (Otto Walter,
Max
Reinhardt, of Bodle\ Flead, and Roger
Straus, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) weighed heavily
obvious sincerity as translations,
Dr Heeb. But
it
\\\x\\ a
man
of such
cannot be said that the cause of better
which Solzhenitsyn had announced
as
one
ot his tw in aims in
Dr Heeb, had been noticeably served by the deal. The Bodleytranslation of Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn's easiest book) had been less
retaining
Farrar
than distinguished, their translation of Tenderfoot pathetic, and their "new"
w as an Germany, Luchterhand had produced a lacklustre Cancer Ward (distributing the work among three translators for speed), and the translator of a new Ivan Denisovich version had removed her name from the translation as a result of "editorial improvements" made by the publisher. In short, there was no existing rea-
version of Ivan Denisovich (prepared as a basis for the film script)
uninspired rehash of the two main existing translations.
In
son, other than the "niceness" of the proprietors, to expect any better translations It
was
result
from these houses than from others, or any improvement on the past. and the a cosy arrangement that, as the translation arrangements were ultimately to show, moved Solzhenitsyn not a whit forward in
—
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[734] his
quest for accurate versions of his works. Only in France was a sort of
progress made. Luchterhand sold the rights for August 1914 to Editions du Seuil, a committed Catholic publishing house \\ ith a strong interest in social and political issues. Apart from having recenth' issued a collection of documents on the "Solzhenitsyn affair," Le Seuil had had no contact with Solzhenitsvn's works until now but it w as to assume an increasingly important role ,
in the future.
Solzhenitsyn's other aim in publishing directly in the
an end to pirated editions of his works, but in
this, too,
brought out an unauthorized photocopv of the tions supplied b\' Flegon himself.
for
and
to put
Within two months the indefatigable Alexander Flegon* had
successful.
lation
West was
he was only partiallv
serial rights to the
He
YMCA original,
with
illustra-
then had the effrontery to offer trans-
very companies that had signed an agreement
them with the Bodley Head. At
same time, as a result of Heeb's and the deals he concluded at more
the
refusal of the highest bids for the novel
modest terms, rumours began to circulate, especially in Germany, that Heeb was not SolzhenitsN'n's true representative at all or that he was deliberately flouting Solzhenitsyn's interest for the sake of some other, more mysterious goals. So persistent were these rumours that Solzhenitsyn was obliged to issue two statements on the subject, one of which he sent to Heeb and the other to Per Hegge in Xorw ay, asking the latter to publicize it in the Western press. Among other things he denounced Flegon by name, and the Bodley Head was able to stop this illegal edition by means of a writ in the British courts.-^
Not long afterwards, on 21 October 1971, the Langen-Miiller Munich announced to a startled world its publication
ing house of
publishthat
day
of a complete Cierman translation oi August 1914 in a print run planned to
The translator, Alexander Kaempfe, hundred pages of dense and difficult Russian into eight hundred pages of German in about fifteen weeks if not a record, then at least a major feat of translation. Kaempfe, although he had worked in haste, was no hack. He was recognized as one of Germany's top translators from Russian, and the embarrassing part of it was that Luchterhand had also tried to commission him, but he had declined on the grounds that he was "too busy." His defection was a double blow, particularly since the German record of translating Solzhenitsxn was no better than the English. reach one hundred thousand copies.
had apparently translated nearly
six
—
*
Flegon specialized
Soviet
Union
in publisiiing
Russian-language editions ot
\\(irl;s
that
had appeared
in
the
samizdat and had no copsright protection. lie had earher pubhshed Russian
in
Ward and The First Circle (neither of them authorized) and had produced A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and "Matryona's Place" from the the case oi August 1914, Flegon argued that the work had circulated in
editions of both Cancer
photographic reprints of texts in
Novy Mir. In
YMCA Press and therefore did not fall under the copyw hen challenged in court by the Bodley Head, that in publishing no\el abroad, Solzhenitsyn had broken Soviet law and that he therefore could not claim
samizdat prior to right law his
s.
Me
copyright in illegal
it.
its
publication by the
also claimed,
Thirdly, he maintained that Solzhenitsyn's agreement w
under Soviet law and thus
null
and void.
He
lost
on
all
ith I)r
three counts.
Heeb was
also
-
The Start
of a Vast Kntf.rprisf.
[735]
Of
the two main Ivan Denisovicb translations, one had been translated not from Russian but from F.nglish, while the other was the work of four different hands. Ihe Luehterhand experienee w ith their Ivan Denisovicb and Cancer Ward has already been mentioned, and even The first CArcle, the w ork of only two translators, had been spoiled by haste. Luchterhand's embarrassment over the Kaempfe translation was eompounded by the fact that their ow n plan w as to bring out the translation the follow ing .\ugust, a w hole year hence, for somef)ne had concei\ed the curious notion that it would be a nice publicit\ gimmick if all hfteen planned translations of the novel w ere issued in the same month "August" in .\ugust. This, too, was to end up causing problems, but for the time being, Luehterhand tried to plug the dam b\" securing an injunction against Langen-.Muller. Herbert Fleissner, a swashbuckling Sudeten German who had made a fortune out of his popular new spapers and w ho was the managing director of Langen-Miiller,* also tried to claim that Solzhenitsvn's no\el had circulated in samizdat and therefore was in the public domain. \\ hen it was pointed out that samizdat did not constitute publication under the terms of the Universal Copyright Convention (Solzhenitsvn had been careful not to give it to samizdat anyway), he changed his tune and argued that Solzhenits\ n had had foreknowledge of his translation and approved it. Ihis w as easiK' demonstrated to be false, and Fleissner lost his case.-*^ A subsidiary reason of Solzhenitsvn's for wanting to publish his book openly in the West w as his desire to reach readers in the Russian emigration and to ask for their help. He w as aware that the older ones would not only remember many of the events he v\as describing but also see them from a perspective that was different from the accepted Soviet one. In the freer atmosphere of the \\ est, they would have been able to preserve documents, letters, and tamily archives that were too dangerous for Soviet citizens to possess. In a special postscript to the novel, after explaining how he saw his historical task, Solzhenits\n described his difhculties and concluded w ith the
—
follow ing appeal. I
am now
abroad w
ith
a
simultaneous plea for criticism, corrections, and supplements, especialh w
ith
publishing the
first
node of
regard to historical personages on I
but
would be strictly
grateful for
whom
1
have
for Russian readers
little
any unpublished materials
with respect to the following places.
* It appears that Fleissner
.
.
material.
.
.
relating to subsequent vears, .
had both personal and professional reasons
for
\\
anting to pull off his
German w ho had been expelled from the Sudetcnland after the war, he w as in anv bitterly anti-Communist. One compan\ in his publishing group had published one of the
coup. case
work
ni\
.\s a
original
Cierman translations of
personal interest
in
Ivaii Denisovicb,
and Fleissner seems
Solzhenitsvn. But perhaps the main motive
\\
to ha\ e felt that
as Fleissner's
w
he had
ish for a
a
major
scoop to afhrm his importance as a publisher. Sometime beforehand, he had been manoeuvred out of the exclusive German publishers' club known as Books of the Nineteen, supposedly on account of the flambovancy and sensationalism of his popular new spapers, and his place literary
had been taken by none other than Luehterhand. Luehterhand on this occasion.
to upstage
He
therefore had a double motive for wishing
SOLZHENITSYN
[73^] I
for
am hopeful that me anv material
the pubHshers that
is
sent
\\ ill
take on themselves the
work of collecting
in.-*^
There was an extra stroke of boldness in this appeal. 1 he Russian emigres had traditionally been regarded by the Soviet government as unmentionable. Every effort \\ as made to portray them as renegades and traitors, the personification of counter-revolutionary decadence and black reaction. To maintain contact with or
show an
interest in
them
\\
as in itself potentially seditious,
and Soviet citizens were encouraged to ignore the emigres' existence completely and regard them and their children as consigned to "the rubbish bin of histor\'." Publishing a book that not only might be read sympathetically h\ emigres but was specifically intended "for Russian readers abroad" was doubly provocative, and it announced vet another of Solzhenitsyn's ambimettious intentions, namely, to bring the departed Russian millions back aphorically, at least into the national fold, to heal the split caused by the Revolution and Civil War, and to show that it w as by no means irrevocable or irreversible. It was part of that same impulse that had informed his sympathetic portrayal of former Vlasovites and emigres in his early (unpublished) pla\s. The Russians were all one people and should be together. His passionate desire \\ as for national unity and harmony, matching his deeply felt religious impulse towards the old Russian ideal of sobonwst* in national life. Like all his other intellectual enterprises, it was vastly ambitious and, also like them, seemed to fly in the face of history. But that was not sufficient to deter him now. If one of his aims in publishing his big series of novels was to reverse the consequences of the October Revolution, the other was to restore unity to his divided and suffering people.
—
—
*SobonH)St
is
difficult to define. Brieflv,
it
suggests that
a familial, spiritual
replace formal legalism as the guiding principle of national nation's goal.
The
and bv the Russian
idea goes back to medieval times and
was
religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev.
life
consensus should
and that unity should be the
later
taken up by the Slavophiles
40
DEATH OF A POET IT
WAS solzhenitsyn's
fate to
launch
all
his
major books
after Ivan Denisov-
and Cancer Ward had leaked out in fits and starts to Russian readers through samizdat and then through foreign editions. There never w as a "publication date" \\ ith readers' and critics' responses flowing in as a natural consequence and in an even tempo. .
ich
into a critical
vacuum. The
First Circle
Instead, the responses arrived piecemeal, usuallv distorted
by
political pres-
sures of one kind or another, and the mass of Russian readers remained ignorant of his works. In the case of August 1914, there had at least been a
publication date in Paris, but apart from the responses of a small emigre readers (and critics in emigre journals)
once, there was again an unnatural silence.
would have
number
w ho w ere able to absorb it at Western reactions to the book
to wait until the translations appeared,
and Soviet Russian
responses until sufficient copies had trickled back to the homeland to find an
informed readership there. In the official Soviet press throughout 1971 there were not only no re\iews
but no responses of anv kind. Such silences
in the past
had usually been
short-lived, indicating a period of indecision until the Central Committee's
ideological department had determined what the official line should be, but on this occasion the silence stretched right through the summer and autumn and into winter. It began to seem that the authorities had grow n w iser and were going to try the more intelligent tactic of simply ignoring Solzhenitsyn's manoeuvre and waiting for the memorv of it to fade. But a disquieting incident in the summer indicated that this was probably not the case, and that something threatening was being prepared. As so often happens, the revelation of w hat w as afoot w as the result of a series of accidents. Deprived of the opportunitv of living at Rozhdestvo
737
SOLZHENITSYN
[738]
summer
that
(he had agreed to
let
NataHa have the use of
their cottage
and
because of the extreme tension betw een them was unwilhng to risk a meeting
and disoriented. At the same time, he childhood and youth and gather more material. The writing of August 1914 had returned his thoughts to this period with particular force, and even more to the years preceding his birth. As he mulled over his plans for the following novels in his series, dealing with the years of the Revolution and Civil War, he must have recalled the stories told him bv his mother and aunts and have tried to reconstruct their lives in Rostov, Armavir, and Kislovodsk, both before and after the Revolution. The stories that had awed and terrified him as a child, that had subsequentlv been dismissed as exaggerated old wives' tales and counterrevolutionary propaganda during the years of his confident orthodoxy, and that had returned to haunt and fuel his rage in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago, now awaited the direct efforts of his pen in his chronicle of the times. He felt a need for greater detail about the early experiences of his famih', and had accordingly written to Aunt Irina in Georgievsk now eightytwo and more eccentric than ever, but still vigorous and lucid to ask her to write down her memories for him. In August 1971 he set off for the south to visit her. He was travelling with a friend in the friend's car, and they had got as far as 1 ikhoretsk within spitting distance of his grandfather's old estate and half a day's drive from Georgievsk w hen the car heater came on and jammed. The two men tried to carry on \\ ith the windows open, but the heat in the North Caucasus in August is intense, and it was impossible to conwith felt
her), Soltzhenitsvn felt restless
an urge to travel south and
revisit the scenes of his
— —
—
—
Ihey got out of the car and attempted to disconnect the hoses. It was midday. Solzhenitsyn uas wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else. As the sun blazed down out of a clear blue sky, the temperature went up into the nineties, and Solzhenitsyn was smitten with sunstroke.* Well before evening his arms, legs, chest, and back had swelled up and become covered with huge blisters, and he w as vomiting. Kverv movement caused him intense pain. For the "walrus," heat was the deadliest enemy.' Frightened by the idea of booking Solzhenitsyn into a local hospital, the friend managed to get him to the nearest railw ay station and put him in a sleeper for Moscow. He then telegraphed Fkaterina Svetlova to meet the train, w arning her that she would have to take someone along to help carry tinue.
or support the stricken Solzhenitsyn. Fkaterina asked a league, Alexander Gorlov, to go with her to the
Kursk
young engineer colstation, w here they
found the swollen Solzhenitsyn prostrate in his bunk, barely able to move or walk. With difficulty they got him back to Rostropovich's. A doctor diagnosed an extreme form of heat allergy and commenced a course of treatment that had to be continued for four months before Solzhenitsyn was able to walk and move w ithout pain." It
w as now
that the accident led to unforeseen consequences.
*It appears that Solzhenitsvn's sensitixitv to heat and the sun
he had contracted
\\
hile
on
his
honeymoon
in 1940.
was
a
Once
the
consequence of the malaria
Death
of a Poet
[739]
swelling was down, Solzhenitsyn was able to turn his mind to evervdav domestic matters and asked Ciorlov to go to Rozhdestvo to pick up a spare part for his car
new
— he was planning
clutch plate at the cottage.
to repair the clutch
Armed w ith
key and a note ot explanation for Natalia set off
on the afternoon of
12
and there was
instructions on
in case
how
a
nearlv
to find the
she sh(juld be there, Ciorlov
August, planning to be back bv earlv evening.
When he reached the cottage, he w as surprised to find the outer door open and the inner one latched from inside, and to hear voices within. Suspecting nothing, he knocked loudlv once or tw ice, opened the inner door, and w alked in.
Almost
at
once two
men
ran
dow n
the stairs from the attic
room and
asked him roughlv what he w as doing there. Gorlov asked them the same question but was suddenlv seized from behind and hustled out of the door.
His arms were twisted behind his back, he was struck a heavy blow on the head that knocked him out for a few seconds, and when he recovered consciousness, he was being dragged face down in the direction of the surrounding woods. Convinced that he had stumbled across a gang of burglars and
was about to be killed as the only eyewitness, Gorlov shouted the onlv thing might give them pause for thought: "You'll answer for this! I'm a for-
that
eigner!"^
The ruse worked. The two men dragging him relaxed their grip, and Gorlov broke awav. He did not get far, however, before another group of men pounced on him. 1 here w as a fierce struggle, during w hich the corners of Gorlov's mouth were torn; he was repeatedlv punched in the face and was kicked and pummelled about the bodv. All this time he was veiling at the top of his voice for help (his m(^uth had been torn w hen the men tried to shut him up), and soon a crowd formed as people came running from the neighbouring cottages. The men were told to release Gorlo\ w hen their leader was threatened by one of the locals w ith a big stick. 1 he leader attempted to pass the whole thing off by pretending that Gorlov w as drunk; w hen this failed, he produced a red pass from his pocket and waved it under the nose of the man w ith the stick. He was a captain in the KGB; the "gang" w ere his men. In no time the crowd melted aw a\ and Gorlov w as taken to the Naro-Fominsk police station, where the captain gave his name as "Ivanov." Gorlov was ordered bv the police to w rite an explanation of his presence at the cottage, and Captain "Ivanov" demanded that he sign a statement swearing himself to secrecv. Gorlov refused. On their wav back to Moscow in Gorlov's car, "Ivanov" questioned Gorlov thoroughh" on his famih' and career, learning that he w as a doctoral candidate in engineering and had a wife and a tw elve-vear-old son. "I must tell vou this," said the captain. "If the owner of the cottage or indeed anvone else gets to know about w hat happened today, you will lose evervthing vou have. Not onlv w ill vou be putting your entire career at risk, and never get to defend vour doctoral dissertation, but your son and wife w ill suffer too. And if we consider it necessary, we'll send vou to jail."
SOLZHENITSYN
[740]
Gorlov got back to his home, shaken and weak, between nine and ten and told his worried wife he had been attacked bv some drunks. The following morning, he informed Ekaterina Svetlova of exactly what had happened, and she left the office where thev both worked to tell Solzhenitsyn. Later that dav, Gorlov was summoned to the personnel department, where he found Captain "Ivanov," in uniform this time, and a man in civilian clothes, who proceeded to "explain" to him the reasons for the incident at Rozhdestvo. The Naro-Fominsk police, they said, had been tipped off that a local burglar was planning to raid Solzhenitsvn's cottage, and had set an ambush for him. It was unfortunate that thev had not secured the owner's permission first, but since he was away, they had let themselves in and lain in wait. When Gorlov arrived, thev had mistaken him for the burglar and tried to arrest him, and it was only his violent resistance that had forced them to beat him. Having now investigated the matter and learned that Gorlov was an exemplary Soviet citizen, thev wished him to know that no charges would be pressed. It was transparently dishonest, but Gorlov was satisfied to have his honour vindicated and relieved to hear that the police had no intention of taking any further action. Solzhenitsvn, however, was far from relieved. The raid on the cottage showed that the official silence over August 1914 was only a tactical measure and that behind the scenes the authorities were looking for evidence to discredit him. Gorlov had told of seeing several men make off from the cottage with folders and boxes. It was possible that the boxes contained electronic equipment intended for eavesdropping, and the folders could have contained letters or manuscripts. He thought he had been careful to remove everything that could be incriminating before Natalia moved in for the summer, but it was alw ays possible that he had overlooked something (the follow ing year he discovered a full set of carbons of The Oak and the Calf in the cottage, and a similar set from The Tanks Know the Truth; they must have been there at the time of the raid he had meant to burn them and had forgotten; fortunately, the KCiB had overlooked them too). A Rozhdestvo neighbour later informed him that a group of policemen had returned at four the next morning either to finish the job or simply to tidy up the mess. Solzhenitsyn was still in bed and swathed in bandages w hen the news came, but he at once recognized the raid as a dangerous escalation of hostilities. The 1965 raid, resulting in the capture of his archive, had been accidental, as it were, and directed to other purposes, but this was a deliberate trawl for incriminating material, and the physical violence inflicted on Ciorlov contained a menace that had largely been absent till now. Following his old precept that attack was the best form of defence, Solzhenitsyn drafted and released into samizdat a furious open letter to Yuri Andropov, chairman of that night
—
—
the
Committee
for State Security
and head of the
KGB.
"P'or
many
years,"
the letter began, "I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees: the inspection of tracking
dow n of
all
my
correspondence, the confiscation of half of
it,
the
m\' correspondents, their persecution at work and by state
-
Death
of a Poet
agencies, the spying around niv house, the
174']
shadowing of visitors, the tapping
of telephone conversations, the drilhng of holes in ceihngs.
.
.
.
But after the
no longer be silent." Solzhenitsyn went on to give a summary of the Gorlov incident and concluded, "1 demand from you, citizen minister,* the public exposure of all the intruders, their punishment as crimcan only coninals, and a public explanation of this incident. Otherw ise raid yesterday
I
will
I
clude that they were sent by
yo//.""^
An open attack on the K(IB was something that Solzhenitsyn had not contemplated before, but on this occasion he was so enraged and upset that it came naturally to him. He capped it by sending a copy of the letter to the chairman of the (Council of Ministers, A. N. Kosygin, demanding that the government investigate Andropov if the latter refused to respond. He had contemplated demanding Andropox's dismissal, but friends talked him out of it, saying that he could only harm himself and make himself look ridiculous
if
he overplayed his hand. great interest for his psychology
Of
at this
time
is
the letter he sent to
Gorlov to explain his motives in making the incident public. Ciorlov w as in the country w hen the open letter v\as released, and returned to find himself a household name to readers of the w orld press and among Soviet listeners to foreign radio stations. It was a great shock, particularly because he had hoped, after his last meeting with "Ivanov," that he would be left in peace and the whole episode forgotten. Solzhenitsvn's open letter, howexer, ensured that this was not to be. (iorlo\- was caught in the cross-fire, and it was with mixed feelings that he read the copy of the open letter, which Solzhenitsyn forwarded to him via Ekaterina Svetloxa, and the accompanying letter of explanation.
Dear Sasha, I
am overv\helmed bv your
them
new
a sign of the
boldness, bravery, and firmness of purpose
times and a
new
your scratches and bruises, but
suffer for
generation. I
I
embrace you
hope that they
will pass
—
I
see in
sincerely!
I
—unlike your
action. I want you to understand and believe and trust me: only maximum publicity and noise can offer you any reliable defence \ou w ill stand in the world's spotlight and no one will dare touch you! That is w hy I took it upon myself to decide today I am u riting an open letter to Andropox- and will give the matter for vou
—
—
it
to samizdat.
Try
to believe
me
matter up and conceal
even
and convince your family that any attempt to hush the it x\ ill simply help them to smother you silently. I xxould
xour address and telephone number in the samizdat copies, so know who vou are and can telephone and xxritc to you. given to a man in a single day (after a sleepless night itself the
like to give
that people It is
x\ ill
rarely
—
good deed) to test and prove both his physical and moral courage, and not to be found wanting in either one. Once more I embrace you! Get better and be strong! result of a
* Solzhenitsvn's use of the
Soviet term
is
term "citizen" to address
''comrade minister."
a minister v\as a calculated
snub. The usual
SOLZHENITSYN
[742]
Solzhenitsvn's judgement on the benefits of publicitx'
undoubtedly weapon, and he had become a virtuoso in its deployment. But it is questionable whether it was of similar utility to an otherwise loyal and conforming Soviet citizen like Gorlov, whose ambition in life was not to oppose the political system or become a dissident but to defend his dissertation and flourish as an engineer. In the course of the next few weeks, his life was turned upside down. The foreign radio broadcasts (which nobody was supposed to listen to, but which everyone in Moscow knew about) had made him a celebrity. He was an intimate and confidant of Solzhenitsvn. Friend and family rallied round, but an increasing number of colleagues at work refused to speak to him or even acknowledge his presence. Anonymous letters began arriving at the office and at the institute, some supporting and some attacking him. He was summoned to the Lubyanka to give an explanation and told that Solzhenitsyn was wrong: the whole affair was the work of the Naro-F"ominsk police and had nothing to do \\ ith the KGB. When Gorlov decided to write an official complaint to thtTpolice and demand an apology and compensation, he was summoned to Naro-Fominsk and offered the same explanation as at the Lubyanka (and by "Ivanov" at his office before that): the police had been w aiting for burglars and had mistaken him for a criminal. Despite these persistent explanations that it was only the police, Gorlov invariably found someone present at these meetings who was dressed in civilian clothes and refused to give his name or rank and it was usually the same correct insofar as
it
\\
concerned himself. Publicity w as \irtualK'
as
his onl\'
—
person. Nevertheless, he was finally offered an apology by the Naro-Fo-
minsk police and decided too, received
to accept
an apology of
pov, someone from the
sorts.
KGB
it.
A
Somewhat
few days
surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn,
after his
open
letter to
rang Rostropovich's dacha and
left a
Andromessage
KGB but to the wrote to the Ministry of the Interior and about six received an official reph', w hich ended as follows:
that Solzhenitsyn should address his protests not to the police. Solzhenitsyn then
weeks
later
The
events you refer to
\\
ere the result of a misunderstanding and of the person-
nel in question exceeding their responsibilities.
The
punished for their misdemeanours. This incident that, as ist
you know great
legality,
,
efforts are being
made bv
reduce the incidence of violations of
w ill be severely more unpleasant in
guiltv parties is all
the
the police to strengthen social-
citizens' lawful rights,
and
raise
the cultural level of our employees.
We regret It
what has
occurred.*^
was the usual bureaucratic
culpability had been accepted, and
waffle, but at least the principle of police it
seemed
might well be and informed the
that the incident
regarded as closed. Gorlov was anxious to consider
it
so
Only in the months and years ahead was he to discover was not so easy after all and that, w hereas the police were w illing to police of this.
that
it
settle,
the gentlemen in civilian clothes had other opinions. Captain "Ivanov" had
Death
ok a Poet
not been joking
when he warned
innocent victim
in a larger struggle.*
(iorlox' to
[743]
hold his tongue. (iorlo\ was the
summer and autumn of September he recei\ed another
Solzhenitsvn's dealings with the police in the 1971 were not confined to the Gorlov
affair. In
from Anosov of the passport office and another man in plain clothes. Anosov wanted to know whether Solzhenitsyn had done an\ thing about registering his residence. Si.x months had passed since his last \isit, and the visit
Solzhenits\n was itching to cause had even laid his statement about not being a serf on the desk between them, but Anosov's tone was so mild and apologetic that it did not seem the right occasion. All he wanted was an assurance that Solzhenitsyn would at least go through the motions. Seeing what seemed like situation could not continue indefiniteK
a scene
and on
.
this occasion
an opportunity to exploit Anosov's concern, Solzhenitsyn brought up the subject of his new family and his desire to join them in Moscow. "Even when I'm legally married, they
still
won't give
me
a
Moscow
permit, will they?"
"What do you mean?" replied .Anosov. "They're obliged to by law ." The two policemen prepared to depart amicably, and Solzhenitsyn was not forced to make his public declaration, but he did decide to remind them of his intransigence just in case.
He
would, he
said, see to
it
that
any attempt
to
remove him from Rostropovich's received the maximum publicity: "I shall refuse to leave if the police order me to, and I shall refuse to attend the court, so you'll have to sentence
After this
little
able to turn his
again
—the
me
to internal exile."
incident Solzhenitsvn's excitement subsided, and he
mind
aw ard of
was
had suddenly become topical For nine months nothing had hap-
to another question that his
Nobel
Prize.
move had been made to arrange for the presentation of the the first week of September 1971, Per Hegge published a book
pened, and no prize, but in
in Oslo, called
Middleman in Moscoiv, in w hich he gave a detailed account ot go-between in the preceding year between Solzhenitsyn
his activities as a
and the Swedish embassy and of the abortive negotiations for the delivery of the prize. Hegge strongly criticized the Swedish diplomatic staff in Moscow and by implication the Swedish government, for refusing to accede to Solzhenitsyn's request for a presentation ceremony at the embassy. The Swedes had told him, he said, that they were aware that the refusal to present the prize "didn't look very heroic" but that the embassy's duty w as to "maintain good relations with the Soviet authorities, and a ceremony for the sharpl\ criticized author Solzhenitsyn might pro\e embarrassing." The Swedes had asked Hegge not to write anything about the negotiations, but Hegge had refused, saying that the embassy's servile attitude to the So\ iet Union deser\'ed ,
to be exposed.*^
Publication of the book provoked a stormy debate in the Sw edish parliament. Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, declared that Solzhenitsyn would have been w elcome to receive the prize at the Sw edish embassy it he *
Gorlov was subsequently dismissed from his institute and prevented from defending Me emigrated to the United States in August 1975.
toral dissertation.
his doc-
SOLZHENITSYN
[744]
had consented to do it without a ceremonv. But a ceremony "might have been interpreted as a poHtical manifestation against the Soviet Union." Subsequentlv, Palme was obliged to expand his remarks in a letter to the New York Times (after the Times had published an editorial critical of his position), and he repeated his view that presentation of the prize in the embassy, with any sort of audience present, was bound to have political repercussions.^ The timing of Hegge's book and the ensuing controversy struck Solzhenitsyn as particularly apposite. The United Nations was about to begin a new session and elect a new secretary-general: Gunnar Jarring, whom Hegge criticized, was known to covet the job, and his chances would be greatly reduced. Another advantage was that the announcement of the 1971 prize winners was only three weeks away, so that again the Nobel Foundation
would be in the public eye. And despite the extra work that this circumstance must have been causing him, the secretary of the Nobel Foundation, Karl Ragnar Gierow, chose this moment to announce that he was writing to Solzhenitsyn once more to see whether arrangements might still be made for him to present the prize in the Swedish embassy in Moscow. Solzhenitsvn replied to Gierow instantly on hearing news of the announcement on the radio (Gierow 's letter did not arrive until three weeks later).
In order to conceal this embarrassing discrepancy, Solzhenitsyn
left
West for forwarding at the appropriate time. In it he informed Gierow that he was still willing to accept the prize at the embassy, but not without a small ceremony. Ambasthe date open and dispatched his letter to a friend in the
sador Jarring had insisted on
could not see the point:
"Fo
a
purely private transaction, but Solzhenitsyn
agree to such a proposal seemed to
me
an insult
Nobel Prize itself. It would be as though it were something to be ashamed of, something to be concealed from people. As I understand it, Nobel Prizes are conferred publicly because the ceremony has a public significance."'" To ram home his point, Solzhenitsyn wrote separately to Per Hegge in similar, but blunter, terms, asking Hegge to make his letter public. "Palme's answer in parliament," wrote Solzhenitsyn, "is very surprising. Is the Nobel Prize actually stolen property that must be handed over behind to the
closed doors and without witnesses?""
Solzhenitsyn was anxious not only to have a ceremony but also to find
an opportunity to read his newly completed Nobel lecture. Having aban-
doned the original version at the beginning of the year, he had recently returned to it and rewritten it. " Ihis time I somehow succeeded in ridding the lecture of any otiose propaganda or political content, drawing it more tightly together round the theme of art." He still expected it to make a splash and wanted to ensure the best conditions for it. 1 hat was why, he wrote to Hegge, "the delivery of the insignia must be done in public and on condition that I am allowed to give my Nobel lecture."'" Gierow wrote to Solzhenitsyn again in November explaining that he had had a meeting with Gunnar Jarring, and that Jarring had told him that the embassy in Moscow had no room suitable for a public lecture. 1 here
I
Df.ath OF
A
Poet
1
745
J
could thus be no ceremony. "But," he added, ahnost as an afterthought, "I am naturallv always ready to come to Mosccm to hand over the Nobel diploma
and medal,
if
some
fitting form can be found, either any other place conyenient to you."
as possible, in
embassy
in the
or, as far
This gaye SolzhenitSN n the idea of holding the ceremonx not in
but
official institution
Lane
in a priyate flat
— and on 4 December he wrote
gratitude for the latter's generositv of
strewn situation
like a shaft
a
in Natalia Syetlova's flat in
some
Kozitsky
long letter to (lierow, expressing his
spirit,
"which shines through
this obstacle-
of light," and outlining his plan. After making
—
Ambassador Jarring "The whole yexing situation has apparonly because the Swedish embassy in Moscow simpl\- does not
sarcastic fun of
ently arisen
—
haye the accommodation for any other procedure (does this unfortunate circumstance mean that it neyer holds receptions?)" and suggesting that the whole thing may ha\e been the result of a "semantic misunderstanding" ("Do Mr Jarring and his superiors perhaps think that a 'public' or 'open' procedure necessarily implies a mass audience?"), Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the
—
real objection to his original proposal.
Alas,
I
fear that
it is
not superficial semantics that separates us from the tenants
of those premises but an unexpected discrepancy frontiers oi culture run.
and no doubt has within
and events
—
(regrettably,
but,
on
The Swedish embassy has purview
its
we may
all
ask, does
this occasion, to
draw our peoples together?
our views as to where the
a cultural
attache on
whole
its staft,
sorts of cultural questions, transactions,
regard the presentation of a Nobel Prize
myself) as an event in cultural
If not, if
that threatens to blight the
it
in
it is
life
that helps to
seen, rather, as an incriminating shadow-
activity of the
embassy, then, however spa-
cious the accommodation, no place can ever be found for the procedure that you
and
I,
Mr
Gierow, have
in
mind.
a ceremony in Svetlova's flat. no more spacious than the Swedish embassy, but forty or fifty people can be fitted in quite comfortably by Russian standards." What the ceremony lost in formality it would gain in warmth and cosiness. Besides, "can you imagine, Mr Gierow w hat a load we shall be taking off the mind of the Sw edish ambassador and indeed of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs?" If this plan failed, the insignia could remain in
Solzhenitsyn proposed his alternative of
"This
flat, it is
true,
is
certainly
,
Stockholm. "They day, eyen
if it is
will lose
only
after
none of
my
their value for that.
sense of the occasion, present the insignia to
The
And
death, your successors w
my
ill,
perhaps some
w
ith a
proper
son."
was again deliberately made public by Solzhenitsyn (thus Dr Gierow replied that he accepted the It remained only to fix a date, and after further correspondence in prithe first day of the they agreed to set the ceremony for 9 April 1972 letter
circulating around the globe) and idea.
vate,
—
Orthodox
Faster.
'-
In the midst of these negotiations
Tvardovskv had
died. In
November
came
the not unexpected
new s
that
1971 his condition had deteriorated so
SOLZHENITSYN
[746]
Kremhn Hospital, and his death December. Tvardovskv's status as one of the outstanding literary figures of his time was unassailable. News of his death was prominently featured in all the main Soyiet new spapers, and the official obituary listed nearly all his achieyements as a poet, public figure, and editor. In the many separate articles written in his memory, howeyer, yirtually no mention w as made of his triumphant editorship of \ovy Mir or of his more controyersial poems, "Tyorkin in the Next World" and "By Right of Memory."'"^ Nor would Soyiet readers haye learned from these obituaries of Tyardoysky's discoyery of the greatest Russian w titer of modern times, or of his many battles on Solzhenits\n's behalf w ith the Central Committee, the U titers' Union, and the censors. In death, as in life, he was pursued by the hostility and yindictiyeness of the \\ titers' Union and its satraps. It was thus a bitter and disgraceful irony that in death, according to immutable Soyiet custom, his body, too, w as giyen oyer to his enemies. In the USSR, where absolutely nothing that impinges on official life can be seriously that he had been readmitted to the
came on the night of
18
—
priyate or spontaneous, important people are inyariably giyen state funerals.
A "funeral committee" is formed by colleagues and functionaries, and this committee organizes the entire ceremon\- and pays the expenses. In Tyardoysky's case, it was a group of bigw igs from the \\ titers' Union, and the funeral ceremony was arranged for 21 December. The leaye-taking was to be held at the Central House of W titers, on Herzen Street, starting at noon, and the interment w ould be at the Noyodeyichy Conyent, on the banks of the Moscow Riyer, where many prominent Soyiet figures were buried. Zhores Medyedey has proyided us w ith a graphic description of the day of the funeral itself." Only members of the Writers' Union were supposed to be admitted to the ceremony, and the six hundred scats ayailable were filled up w ell before midday. But in addition to official yisitors, thousands of unofficial ones had come to pay their last respects, and the hall w here the funeral was to take place was jammed w ith people filing past the flowerstrewn coffin
in a
music playing
mony
The
itself.
ne\er-ending
in the
line.
This continued
all
morning, w
ith funeral
background, until the doors were closed for the cere-
speeches were lacklustre and perfunctory, deliyered
b\' third-
rate writers \yho o\yed their presence in the hall to their role as functionaries
Union
of the Writers' a close friend
of Tyardoysky,* and again
ten years of Tyardoysky's
mony was
Not one of them was no mention was made of the last
rather than to any literary merit.
life
or his achieyements at
Sergei Naroychato\-, asked e\er\one except the to leaye the hall.
Why
are
say that
*On
A
young woman
cere-
w titer's family and
close friends
rose to her feet:
you closing the meeting so
we are burying our civic
sf)onr Is
it
possible that no one
conscience here? That Ivardovskv
\\
is
going to
as forcibly
the contrary, the Tvardovskv family had specialh asked the Writers' Lniim not to inckide
in their delegation alive.
\ovy Mir. The
very short, and the union secretar\' in charge of the proceedings,
The union
Mikhail Suslov, one of Tvardovskv's bitterest enemies while the
ignored their plea and included Suslov just the same.
latter
was
Death OF removed from
poem was
his
work, that he
v\as
A
Poet
l"47l
compelled to leave Sozy Mit\ that
not published? That they shut his
mouth
before he shut
it
his last
of his o\\ n
accord? this point the official ushers on duty began to con\ erge on her and shout her down, but she quickl\- gathered up her things, pushed her w a\- tow ards
At
the exit, and was lost in the general crowd.
to
At the interment it was a similar storv. Medvedev boarded a trolleybus make his wav to the Novodevichy Convent, but although most passengers
rose from their seats as thev approached the cemetery, the bus drove straight past and did not stop for another mile or so.
The
had thought of
authorities
everything. Bus drivers had been told that the cemetery stop was "out of
use" that day and ordered not to halt there. the cemetery
(it
was
a bitterly cold
When Medvedev
day, with a heavy
frost),
arrived back at
he found
all
the
approaches cordoned off by phalanxes of policemen, while the main entrance, opposite the underground station, was barred by a row of soldiers. When he
he was grabbed and frog-marched back again, and from the Writers' and Journalists' unions were to be admitted. He eventually got in by tagging on to a group of schoolchildren and pretending to be one of the teachers (a school class is an obliga-
w
tried to
alk through,
told that only people with cards
tory part of the
window -dressing provided
for such occasions);
that about 250 people had got in to attend the interment.
ordinary-looking
man
One
he estimated of them, an
carrying a plastic bag, tried to push his w ay through
w hen earth w as sprinkled over the coffin. He said he had brought some of "Tvardovskv's native soil, earth from Smolensk, from the mound over the communal grave of the men w ho fell in the liberation of Smolensk. to the front
They
call
it
the
'hill
of heroes.'
"
Solzhenitsvn also attended the funeral, arriving very earlw Although no longer a
member of the
Writers' Union, he did not bother to
show
a pass
and
the ushers dared not keep him out. Throughout the ceremony he sat in the front row with Tvardovskv's w idow and children, and only at the end did he go over to Tvardovskv's open coffin and make the sign of the cross over
accompanied the family to the cemetery (on the insistence of Mrs Tvardovskv the ushers w anted to stop him), w here he stood bareheaded in the freezing wind, publicly kissed Tvardovsky before the coffin was nailed up, and joined in tossing some soil into the grave when the ceremony was him.
He
—
concluded.
His presence created in public these days
among
a sensation in its
—and was
other things, the entire
innumerable photographers,
own
—
right
so rarely did he appear
clearly recognized as symbolic.
It
attracted,
Moscow corps of foreign correspondents, and who captured Solzhenitsyn's expression and
at every significant stage of the ceremony. Solzhenitsyn was nataware of the stir he w ould cause and was later accused by Madimir urally having of exploited the funeral for his ow n ends: Lakshin
movements
It is now obvious means of making
that to Solzhenitsyn the death of a public
Tvardovsky was primarily
a
appearance and of show ing off under the arc-lights.
SOLZHENITSYN
[748]
we
Stricken bv our loss,
failed to realize this at the time.
1 he only thing that
odd w as Solzhenitsvn's reply to Tvardovsky's younger daughter, w ho inyited him to make his last farew ell to her late father in the small mortuary at Kuntseyo, w here only close friends were to assemble on the eye of the funeral and where there w ould be no pomp and no crow ds. "No," replied Solzhenitsyn, "my vyhole day is already planned out. I'll come to the lying-in-state at the Central House of Writers tomorrow, as I have already noted in my diary." And he struck us as
arrived, having skilfully stage-managed his entrance and attracted a horde of
photographers
—
w
insolent, sweating
with their backs to the casket and
ith zeal,
behaving offensively by standing
firing off flashbulbs point-blank at Solzheni-
tsyn as he sat in the front row beside the w idow sions of the
ceremony
gesture
ith a kiss
—w
in a
,
notebook and preparing
and the sign of the cross
—
hastily scribbling his impresto
make
to the
his theatrical farewell
man w ho
could no longer
answer him back.'^*
Despite the excessive bitterness, there
undoubtedK' an element of truth
is
Solzhenitsyn needed the publicity
in this accusation.
almost certainly calculated his egocentricitv. Solzhenitsyn
Tvardovsky's funeral into
juncture and
at this
But there was more
effects.
to
it
than cold
was well aw are of the authorities' efforts to turn what they feared above all was a a non-event
—
public demonstration, such as had taken place at Pasternak's funeral. Solzhe-
nitsyn was determined to thwart them and do just that
He owed
—turn
it
into a
dem-
Tvardovsky's memory, and to Russian literature, and he succeeded. Novy Mir had been cut down almost without a whisper.
onstration.
Its
it
to
had gone quietly; Tvardovsky had been shunted into retirement
staff
without the slightest hitch. His death was the
home
occasion, to bring
to those Russians
last
who
opportunity to mark the
cared, and to people in the
meaning of what had happened. Solzhenitsyn had a and exploiting publicity, but on this occasion it served not only his ow n cause but also a larger one, as he made clear in his farew ell eleg\' to Tvardovsk\', which he released nine days after the death (the traditional day of the memorial service in Russian custom). rest of the world, the
unique
flair,
it
is
true, for attracting
killing a poet. The method chosen for Tvardovsky was aw ay his offspring, his passion, his journal. 1 he sixteen years of insults meekly endured by this hero were as nothing so long as his journal survived, so long as literature was not stopped, so long as people could be published in it, so
There are many ways of to take
long as people could go on reading
it.
.
.
.
... In the guard of honour we see the same seedy dead-beats who hunted him down with unholy shrieks and cries. Yes, it's an old, old custom of ours, dating back to Pushkin's time: dead poets must
body
They
it.
Madmen! When *
According
to
it.
into the
1
hands of their enemies. The
w ith
glib speeches.
plant themselves round the coffin like a circle of stones and think they
have isolated
them ha\e
fall
speedily disposed of, and the situation saved
is
They break up our
only journal and think they have won.
the harsh voices of the
one source, Solzhenits\n
is
young
supposed
to
ring out,
how you
will
have said after the funeral,
e\en made the sign of the cross oxer him."
.
.
.
yearn for
"I
realK
let
Death this patient critic,
be
will
fit
bv then
A
it
u hose
gentle,
to tear at the earth
w
be
ill
\v
of a Poet
admonitory voice w
ith
your hands
Stirring elegv like this
made
as
heeded bv all! Then vou back again. But
to bring Irifonich
far too late.'^
and the dramatic appearance
things that onl)' Sol/.henitsvn could bring the\'
[749]
off.
at
the funeral
w ere
The\' w ere theatrical, \es, but
the historical point with unmatchable emphasis. \\ ithin hours
press photographs of the funeral had been Hashed round the globe, and Sol-
zhenits\n's words,
when
released a few
da\s
later,
traxelled abroad with
equal speed. Lakshin and 1 vardovsky's other lo\al friends were obliged to
mourn in private, at informal gatherings such as that described bv Zhores Medvedev after a \isit to his grave on the fortieth dav after T\ardo\skv's death. Most of those present were writers, and amid the eloquent tributes to Tvardo\ sky one w riter reminisced about Tvardovskv's foresight: "Do vou remember that meeting of the editorial board w hen it w as clear alreadx that the storm-clouds
But
it's
to put
w ere gathering and he said, 'Thev w ant to put out our hre. blown out or quenched with water. If thev are going
too bright to be
it
out, the\'ll ha\ e to scatter
four winds.
Then
it
will
all
the smouldering, red-hot pieces to the
be extinguished.'
"'^
Those present ma\" well have
entertained feelings for Tvardovsky stronger than Solzhenitsvn's, and certainl\- their
truth
was
sadness was keenl\- sensed (and shared) bv Medvedev. But the
had indeed been scattered and their fire extinguished, fire burned brighter than ever and w as intense enough up that melancholv landscape sufficientK- clearlv for evervone else to that they
whereas Solzhenitsvn's to light
see
it.
—
41
WHOSE IS
IT
SOLZHENiTSYN HAD GOOD
LIFE
ANYWAY?
rcason to prize the publicity that Tvardovsky's
him that winter, for he was beset with personal and political problems more serious and more numerous than ever. They were converging in a most alarming manner and threatened to become totally unmanageable unless he could do something to resolve them. funeral brought
*
In his personal
They had
life,
he continued to experience
difficulties
with Natalia.
not seen each other throughout the summer. After spending some
time in Rozhdestvo, Natalia had travelled south to the Crimea for her sum-
mer
holiday.
There she had struck up
ower, u'ho subsequently met her escorted her about
town
at
a friendship
the station in
with
a
middle-aged wid-
Moscow with
flowers and
for a while,* but although his attentions soothed her
battered pride, she did not take
him
as a serious alternative to
Solzhenitsyn
opposed to a divorce. When they met in Kuntsevo in October as formerly agreed on the first anniversary of her suicide attempt Solzhenitsyn offered her an ultimatum: either divorce amicably and remain friends, or he would take her to court. She countered with a reminder that he had said she could return to Zhukovka after a year, but Solzhenitsyn informed her it was too late: Natalia Svetlova had moved in with their baby, and he had no intention of turning her out.' About a week later, on 25 October 1971, Solzhenitsyn submitted a formal divorce claim to the district court in Ryazan on the grounds that his and was
still
—
—
* Solzhenitsyn seems to have suspected that Natalia's new friend was connected with the KGB and had been assigned bv them to court her, but Reshetovskava savs that this was not so and that her friend never asked her anv questions about Solzhenitsvn. On the contrary, he left when
the divorce proceedings started
up again because he
750
feared the publicity.
— WhoseLifeIsIt Anyway?
[7 5']
marriage to Natalia had irretrievably broken dow n, and that it could not be restored again. He had recently had a child (his first) by another woman Natalia Syetloya
—and
since his
first
reason w hy he should not be granted
He
of his child.
had
tried,
marriage was childless, there was no a
divorce in order to marry the mother
he said, to secure
a
divorce by mutual consent
over the past year, but Natalia had consistently refused. He also listed their joint property: his ancient Moskvich, bought with the royalties from Ivan Denisovich; a
new Moskvich
in a co-operative garage in
furniture.
that he had just
Ryazan;
a
bought
for Natalia's use; a share
grand piano; and various items of domestic
Apart from the ancient Mosk\ich, he was prepared to grant Natalia all these goods and of all the money in their savings account
possession of
and
to
renounce
The
his share of their flat in
hearing took place on 29
Ryazan.*
November
1971. Natalia did not oppose
Solzhenitsvn's application outright, but asked for a postponement on the
—
grounds that there were problems over the division of property namely, their cottage at Rozhdestvo, which could not be decided by the court in Ryazan but had to be resolved elsewhere. She delivered a long speech in w hich she described the history of their first marriage, separation, second marriage, life in Ryazan, and joint work on his literary projects. Quoting liberally from his letters to her, she tried to show that their love for one another was extraordinary and eternal, that their childlessness was his fault rather than hers, and that he had never wanted children anyway. As a climax she quoted the letter in w hich he had confessed to her his love for Svetlova and offered her the choice of what to do about it. This choice had apparently
been removed from her now because of her suicide attempt. "I have reconmyself to many things that are unavoidable, but I w ill never be reconand w ill alw ays ciled to the fact that the man w ho had been closest to me be closest in my life is now abandoning me. Abandoning me when I am past fifty and on the brink of old age. Leaving me alone with three old ladies, ranging from eighty-one to ninety-three years old. When my health has been ciled
—
—
completely undermined by our tragedy. Throwing me into a void." She expressed her conviction that this w as out of character for him, the result of a "temporary delusion" that could not last long, and that he would soon come to his senses.
Natalia concluded by asking for a six-month adjournment, which the court granted. Solzhenitsyn suspected that the authorities might have seized
on
his divorce case as an opportunity to harass
this delay,
but
it
seems
him, and might be behind
judge was influenced by the distraught was literally on the verge of hysteria. Solzheni-
likely that the
and w eeping Natalia, who tsyn was furious and informed Natalia that she had won "six dead months." During that time he would neither see her nor answer her letters, except on strictly business matters.^ *
According to Reshetovskava, Solzhenitsvn
up his petition. number of leading
tova in drawing in court
of a
Kaliistratova dissidents.
help of the advocate Sophia Kallistra-
fiad
had
tfie
w as
v\ell
known
in
Moscow
for her spirited defence
SOLZHENITSYN
[752]
He
attempted to
fulfil
his
vows, but Natalia seemed to
feel that
she
could use this six-month reprieve to get her husband back again. She resumed visiting their joint friends, to
tsyn's letters that she
whom
she quoted the passages from Solzheni-
had copied out
for the court.
She complained of
his
cruelty and despotism, of the fact that he had always overshadowed her,
exploited her, and sacrificed her to his work. She was indeed a pitiful figure,
and there was fitted.
An
sufficient truth in her accusations for the friends to
older
woman abandoned
for a
be discom-
younger, prettier one (whatever the
other reasons for the change) will always be an object of compassion, and a
number
of friends took her side, including Panin and the Etkinds. Natalia on trying to arrange meetings w ith Solzhenitsyn against his will, and put pressure on their friends to force him to see her.' In January 1972 Solzhenitsyn tried to gain a respite by writing to Natalia's mother, Maria, in response to her reproach that he was showing "unbelievable cruelty" by refusing to open Natalia's letters. All he wanted, he wrote, was "six months of peace," before the next court hearing, in order to get on with his work. Meeting Natalia literally made him ill for days afterwards and simply gave her an excuse to indulge in the pipe-dream that he would return to her. But that v\'ould never happen. Before the divorce hearing he had told her that after the divorce the way would be open for them to have human relations, but Natalia had preferred "a dead piece of paper," so insisted
let
her enjoy
it.'^
Just as Natalia delved ever deeper into the past to find signs of his love
more recent
one and differences to prove the opposite. Perhaps he should never have married her at all, he suggested. And how coolly Natalia had taken his departure for the front. And later divorced him and married another man when he was in the camps. And for her (and
had burnt
his letters of
years, according to
report), so did Solzhenitsyn drag out their past quarrels
when he had believed himselt to be and had wanted her to come and visit him. In short, he had reached the point where all he could think of was how to wound her. And yet, even now, Natalia clung to her marriage with a desperate tenacity that would have been pitiful, had not her abjection alternated with bouts of fierce
then spurned his frantic cry for help
dying
in exile
hatred.
Perhaps the nadir w as reached when Natalia passed on to Solzhenitsyn, through the medium of Panin, what she called her ultimatum: "If he doesn't save me from the humiliation of a divorce, I shall take my revenge on him." Solzhenitsyn was furious and answered her in
a postscript to his letter to
Maria. Natalia, he wrote, was possessed of an insatiable vanity, which dis-
She knew that he no longer loved her, but she insisted on clinging to the empty shell of their marriage long after its essence had disappeared. All she wanted was her "position" as his wife, and if she couldn't have that, she was obviously determined to revenge herself on him in any way she could. That was why she insisted on telling all their former friends that he was a despot and had mistreated her. Unfortunately, many torted her view of the world.
— WHO ot thcni
had hclicxcd her,
giving his side of the
S
F.
aiul
storx'.
L
I
F F.
1
S
I
A NYWAY ?
T
[753]
he sinipl\ did not ha\c the time to go around
Besides,
it
w
as
demeaning
man
tor a
time complaining to others about his suffering. The point was that riage to Natalia
was dead, and the reason she could not
simpiv did not understand him. In
fact,
see
it
was
to
\\
his
aste
mar-
that she
she had ne\er understooil him; she
had been too preoccupied with herself and her ow n affairs. le now Io\ ed woman; he had no doubts w hate\er about this new relationship and would not enter into negotiations ot any kind on the subject ot his dixorce I
another
from Natalia.'
To
the So\
iet
authorities, the divorce
w rangle must have seemed
a
god-
send, particularK' as Solzhenitsxn had appeared to hold the initiati\e in his
them with the surprise publication otWiignst 1914. It was months since the novel's appearance in Paris, and there had been not a word on the subject in the So\iet press. Nor had there been an\' other overt moves against him since the KGB agents' ill-fated encounter w ith Gorlov in Rozhdestvo the preceding August. It seemed almost as if the\' were preparing to leave him in peace. But the calm was, as usual, illusorv. In realitv, the struggle was about to shift and embrace another aspect of his private life his biographw It was here that the public and pri\ate counts against him fused, and in Januar\- the\ burst into the open. struggle against
now
over
six
—
On
januarv 1972 the Literatuniaya
(kizcta appeared with a banner Magazine on Solzhenits\n's Family." It turned out that in November the Hamburg illustrated weekK' had run a big stor\' on SoIzhenits\ n's ancestry, announcing that he had come from a wealth\- family, whose dispossession by the Revolution w as the reason for Solzhenitsyn's hostility to the Soviet regim.e. 1 he magazine's Moscow correspondent, Dieter Steiner, described how he had tra\ elled south to Georgievsk to locate and inter\iew Solzhenitsyn's aunt Irina. Accompan\ing the article was a picture of her, w rinkled and bent, standing in the doorw av of the ramshackle clay hovel that she had occupied for thirty \ears. Other photographs, some of them proxided b\' Irina, showed the big house in Kislovodsk where Solzhenitsvn had been born, Uncle Roman's Rolls-Royce, Irina in boarding-school uniform, and Solzhenits\'n as a student and on his first visit to Irina in 1956, after his return from exile. 1 he gist of the Stem article w as that Steiner, having recognized the autobiographical element in August 1914, had set out, like any good investigative Western journalist, to follow up an interesting storw He had discovered that the Irina lomchak of the novel was in fact Irina Ivanovna Shcherbak, a resident of Georgievsk, and had interview ed her there. Here is how Steiner 12
headline on one of
its
inside pages: "'Stem
describes their meeting.
1 he old
lad\
lives in the
—bowed and almost
blind, but vigorous
annexe of an old farmhouse. Her room
ith a
framed icon and
a
wooden
crucifix
still
complctch' lucid
bv nine, has an She sits on an iron bed, overhead. Her dog Druzhok ("Friend"),
earthen floor, a sloping ceiling, and whitew ashed w \\
and is
alls.
six feet
— SOLZHENITSYN
[754] a decrepit,
taken
shaggy mongrel
up by
bag of
flour.
As
I
teen.
From I
am
asleep under the bed.
down on
sat
yourself what sort of a sars.
is
A
quarter of the
room
is
oven, on top of which are a saucepan, two tin plates, and a
a brick
the state
I
life
I
a rickety
have now
,
bench, Irina said, "You can see for
after fiftv-three years
under the commis-
get ten rubles a month, and Sanva sends
me
another
fif-
his only living relative."^*
According to Steiner, Irina told him some of the history of the Shcherbak family and gave or lent him the account of her memories that she had written down at Solzhenitsyn's request. She seemed irritated that Solzhenitsvn had never
come
to pick
Solzhenitsyn's mishap on his
The
them up, and was apparently unaware of
way
to see her.
bulk of the article consisted of Steiner's
accompanied by juicy and damaging
titbits
summary
of her remarks,
from the "memoirs."
Irina appears
have spoken with some asperity of her in-laws, referring to them as "a family of boors" and describing the south Russian landowners of the time in general as "living like swine," with thought only for wine, women, and cards. She was sharply critical of Solzhenitsyn's mother, Taissia, and contempto
whom she called "the daughter of a Jewish businessman" and denounced as a loose woman for having left Solzhenitsyn temporarily for another man. Such opinions are compatible with what one knows of this cranky, short-tempered, and indomitable little old lady, but at the age of eighty-two, despite Steiner's praise of her lucidity, her mind was clearly wandering, and her rambling narrative was a mishmash of truth and imagination. Steiner was content to take most of what she said at face value, and by judiciously quoting from August 1914 to fill the gaps, he managed to paint a picture of Solzhenitsyn and his family that w as simultaneously patronizing and damaging. In this version of events the Shcherbaks had been reactionary barbarians, vulgarly squandering their ill-gotten wealth until it was removed from them by the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn's mother had been a haughty tuous of Natalia,
provincial
who
put on
airs, his father a tsarist officer
could not face the victory of the Reds. explanation
—probably
it
was suicide,"
who
died because he
"A hunting accident w as the official commented Steiner maliciously. Sol-
zhenitsxn himself, in Steiner's portrait, was heartless, ungrateful, grasping, bourgeois in his tastes and habits, and
a secret counter-revolutionary,
inside pages
w
bile
—
was frivolous and unfaithful and a Jew. This was the article that the Literatunmya Gazeta now splashed
his wife
—with
certain modifications. Irina's
boors" was used to introduce the
article,
comment about
and most of her
—and
in its
"a family of Steiner's
derogatory remarks were faithfully reproduced. But there was no reference
comment on the fiftv-three-year rule of the "commissars," economic achievements visible in her pension of ten rubles a month and miserable living conditions, or to the quotation from August 1914 with which Steiner opened his article: "Russia must now be governed by idiots;
to Irina's scathing to their
*This was not
correct. Solzhenitsyn hat! cousins living in
Moscow and an
uncle in Siberia.
— Whose
Life
Russia can never be any different." Steiner's Hmitation to only
It
Is
On
Anyw
ay?
("551
the other hand, not satisfied v\ith
one side of the family, the
Literatitrnaya Gazeta
had despatched a correspondent to the \illage of Sablia to gather incriminating material on Solzhenitsyn's father's side of the famil\' as well. "We are, of course, far from anv idea of making a direct, \ uigarlv sociological connectif)n between a man's origins, upbringing, and the circumstances of his \'outh, on the one hand, and his activities as a mature adult on the other," began the second article sanctimoniously and went on to assert that Solzhenitsvn's grandfather Semvon Solzhenitsxn had once owned five thousand acres and twenty thousand sheep, emploxed over fifty labourers, possessed, besides a couple of farmsteads, two big "manor houses" in the village of Sablia, and been a leading member of the board of a Rostov bank. Solzhenitsvn w as alleged to have been wealthy on both sides of the family, and therefore vulgar sociological considerations apart doubly damned. The writer of the second article had also come up w ith a potential "find" another relative of Solzhenitsyn's b\' the name of Xenia Zagorika, the daughter of his long-dead uncle Vasilv and hence his cousin. Perhaps disappointingly for the Literaturnaya Gazeta, Xenia had been only six months old w hen \ asily died, in 1919, and had been brought up bv foster parents. She knew
—
nothing of her celebrated cousin or his family. But because she w
as a
country
a
girl,
she did enable the Literaturnaya Gazeta to introduce
simple
touching
digression on the subject of the flourishing collective farm where she worked,
which now occupied the former land of the Solzhenitsvns, and
to underline
the high standards of living of contemporar\' \illagers ("every house has piped
water, 640 out of 800 houses have television
sets,
600 have gas, 1,112 news-
papers and journals are delivered per 1,000 of population"), w hile upbraiding Steiner for ignoring this It
modern miracle
might have seemed from
reprinting the Stern story in
all
this
in his story.
rebuke that the Literaturnaya Gazeta w as
innocence, as
it
were, and simph taking issue
bias. But it was more competent foreign correspondent of
with the Stern reporter over his alleged ideological complicated than that. Dieter Steiner,
a
wide experience, had little Russian and scant know ledge of Soviet society and literature. It is most improbable that he had spotted the autobiographical element in August 1914 himself; and he certainh- did not go to Georgievsk on his own initiative, if only because Georgievsk belongs to that three-quarters of the Soviet Union that is totally closed to foreigners. In fact, as Solzhenitsyn later discovered, three men had visited Aunt Irina in her hovel and had made a total of five calls. The notes she had given them to read were supposed to be given back, but they had been taken aw aw together with the photographs, and were never returned. From the fact that all three men were have spoken excellent Russian, Solzhenitsvn concluded that Steiner had not been there at all, but that was wrong. Steiner was there and had his photograph taken with Irina, although the photo was not published. Steiner was also briefly in Sablia, but despite the Literaturnaya Gazeta's mock indignation, he was not allowed to leave his car, and the only photographs he said to
SOLZHENITSYN
[756]
obtained were taken through the It
w as another example
car's windscreen.**
of the Soviet technique of sponsoring, or even
writing, an article for publication in a foreign newspaper and translating
back for Russian readers
as
an example of what "The
\\ est" thinks
it
about a
The Literaturnaya Gazetd's main feature \\ as full of inaccuracies and distortions, but these could be conveniently blamed on Steiner, and he in turn could blame them on the faulty memor\' of an eightv-two-year-old woman. What the Literaturnaya Gazeta added on its own initiative was equally egregious. In its early editions, the photograph of Irina's ornate villa in Kislovodsk was described as Semvon's village house in the Stavropol steppes, and Solzhenitsyn's father's name was rendered as "Isai" (a mistaken deduction from Solzhenitsyn's patronymic "Isavevich"), undermining the Gazeta's claim that its information had been gathered from eyewitnesses in Sablia certain topic.
itself.
According pro\oked
much
to
Zhores Medvedev, the
mirth in
Moscow
articles in the Literaturnaya Gazeta
Two
literar\' circles.
of Solzhenitsyn's chief
adversaries in the literary establishment, Alexander Chakovsky, the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and Sergei Mikhalkov, the
nitsyn,
him
and Mikhalkov's grandfather
still
— Mikhalkovo. Clearly, the "vulgar
with
first
secretary of the Russian
much grander
Writers' Union, were descended from
had
a
families than Solzhe-
whole
village
sociological line"
named
after
had to be handled
care.'^
Solzhenitsvn, however, w as not amused.
had issued the
"official" version of his
Only
biography
a
few months earlier he form of an autobio-
in the
graphical sketch for the Nobel Foundation, to be printed in
its
year-book.
He
had mentioned the fact that his father had served as a volunteer officer in the First World War and had died in the summer of 1918, before his son was born, but had said nothing of the circumstances of his father's death or his origins. Similarly, he had written nothing more of his mother than that she had been a shorthand typist in Rostov-on-Don, had remained alone and in poor health, and had brought him up in modest circumstances somewhat fewer facts than he had conveyed to Pavel Licko in 1967. He w as exceedingly alarmed and annoyed by the Stern article and its sequel in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, w hich took him completely by surprise. Having disguised the surnames and changed the first names of many of the relatives described in the novel (was it significant that he could not bring himself to change just two: Isaaki, his father's name, and that of Aunt Irina?), he had felt sure that they would not be recognized and that no attempt would be made to track down the one important survivor.'" Up till now he had been able to exercise some sort of control over information about his former (and private) life, but things were beginning to get out of hand. First his divorce and now his origins were being turned against him, and he knew that the Soviet authorities would use any weapon they could to discredit him. Soon afterwards he learned that a Major Blagovidov of the KGB had been dispatched to check the files of Moscow University for 1914 and investigate
—
Whose
Life
Is
Anyuav?
It
[757]
the Isaaki's there, in the hope of proving that Solzhenits\ n was a Jew after
all all.
Once
name had misled
again his father's strange (christian
the investiga-
tors (and the\' evidentlv forgot to inform the Literal iirnaya Gazeta of their
w here the name appeared
inquiries,
drew
as Isai); and, of course, the\'
a
blank." Solzhenitsvn was equallv worried
another problem. C)\er the past
b\-
W estern authors to w rite whole he did not disapprove. Though he was On the b\preparation, of unwilling to participate directh' in their one the projects an American journalist, George Feifer, and an emigre journalist, David Burg (co-translator oi Cancer Ward) had received his tacit approval in the summer of the preceding year.'- Since then, Feifer had had manv conversations with Veronica Stein and other friends of Solzhenitsvn, but in July 1971 he had been detained at Sheremetyevo Airport, questioned, searched, and relieved year or two, he had become aware of projects b\
biographies of him.*
—
—
of his detailed notes.
much
contained too
A
draft text that he then sent to \'eronica for checking
speculation
—mixed w
information
ith accurate
—
for Sol-
more
zhenitsyn's comfort, vet to refute the speculative parts required
disclo-
sure than he was ready for. Solzhenits\n seems to have concluded that a
biography would cause more trouble than
KGB's
of the
stick to literar\- matters
to
go further and issue
tial
and leave
w as worth,
it
especialh in the light
Having already warned
fishing expeditions.
his private life alone,
a generalized
Feifer in Jul\- to
he now
felt
w arning, through Dr Heeb,
to
impelled all
poten-
biographers. understand that certain "biographies" of
I
me
are
due
to
appear shortlv
in the
West, including some that will contain information of a mainlv non-literar\ character. This information is being collected bv the authors without m\' know ledge or
my
agreement, often
w ho knew me
at
in
dark and roundabout wavs bv interviewing people
who are often not informed at all. Ihe supplemented with imaginary facts and moti-
one time or another, but
material collected in this
manner
is
which must be invented, since the true circumstances and motives of mv work cannot be known to anvone, ow ing to the isolation in which I live. The collection of "information" in this w av is no different from police sp\ing. I regard vations
the publication of such biographies during an author's lifetime as ill-mannered
and immoral, especially since thev are bound to involve living people who are exposed and have much to lose from such publicitv. I can defend m\self against such publications in no other w av than bv asking authors, editors, and publishers to respect
my
right to privacy."
At the same time Solzhenitsvn sought licly cles.
a
convenient means to refute pub-
the half-truths and distortions in the Stern and Literal iirnaya Gazeta arti-
His
first
reply was given to the
German new spaper *I, too,
writing
had visited Moscow a
Moscow correspondent
Die Welt, but for some reason in
June 1970 and had talked
to
it
of the \\ est
got lost in transmission.
Kopelev about the possibility of
biograph\ ot Solzhenits\n. Kopele\ and others con\ inced me, however, that
not the best
moment and
that Solzhenitsvn
w as unlikeK'
to co-operate
on such
a
\
enture.
it
was
SOLZHENITSYN
[758]
Solzhenitsvn then asked Zhores Medvedev to arrange an interview w ith the correspondents of the Neiv York Times and the Washington Post in Moscow (then Hedrick Smith and Robert Kaiser). The interview was shrouded in secrecv.
Medvedev put Smith and Kaiser through an elaborate series of prepcommunicated with them and Solzhenitsvn in mys-
aratorv manoeuvres and
The interview was originally set for 4 April 1972, but was moved forward bv Solzhenitsvn to 30 March, and took place in Svetlo-
terious codes.
then
va's flat in
A
Kozitskv Lane.
few davs beforehand, under the cover of dark-
final
Medvedev showed the correspondents the way and gave them their instructions. Thev were to bring tape recorders and cameras so that
the\'
could record and photograph Solzhenitsyn, but
ness,
at
the same time should
This they did by putting on old clothes and, in Kaiser s case, bv w rapping his modern equipment in old copies o( Pravda and carrving them in a typically Muscovite string bag.'"^ What followed was a memorable confrontation between Western and trv to look as inconspicuous as possible.
Eastern notions of news gathering, interview techniques, and the management of publicitv. Smith and Kaiser had prepared their questions in advance
while ice-skating
at
an outdoor rink
in
Moscow
(to
avoid the possibility of
KGB microphones).
They were fairly fresh to the Soviet Union, having been there but seven months, and had only a sketchy knowledge of the Russian language and of the darker reaches of Soviet societv. On the other hand, the\- were experienced newspapermen, well trained in the hard-nosed tradition of American investigative reporting, observant, adaptable, and well able, as thev thought, to tackle any assignment with confidence. Thev had not then encountered Solzhenitsyn's imperious will and steelv resolve, or imagined to themselves the full danger of the kniteedge upon which he w as living. The\- arrived at the flat shortlv after noon Solzhenitsyn himself unbolted and the encounter began affably enough. Solzhethe door and let them in nitsvn shook hands, introduced them to Svetlova and their son, Ermolai, now fifteen months old and babbling in baby language, and ushered them into his study, in w hich all the curtains were draw n. Smith later wrote that the easv informalitv of those first few minutes disarmed him, for he had being eavesdropped on bv
—
—
expected to be "over-awed bv this living classic of Russian literature." Sol-
arm and engaging. He was also physically more had expected, bounding out of chairs, moving with athletic ease across the room. His enormous energy was palpable. For a man who had suffered so much, he looked well." Smith noted that Solzhenitsyn's steel molars flashed w hen he smiled and that a dark tobacco stain on his index zhenitsvn, in fact, was "w
dvnamic than
finger
1
marked him
as a heav\'
smoker.
l^his accord quicklv \anished inal intention
had been
for the tw
once they got
o reporters
but thev had been prevented from doing
down
to business.
The
orig-
to send their questions in ad\ance,
this
w hen Solzhenitsyn brought the
interview forward. After apologizing for the sudden haste (but without explaining
it),
Solzhenitsvn took from his desk two copies of
a thickish
man-
I
Whose uscript and placed
L
i
Is
fk
I
i
.
\
n y vv ay?
I
them before the two correspondents.
I
his
w as
7 5
V
his "inter-
view," complete with questions as well as extensive answers. Soi/.henitsvn
wanted
it
published
Smith, who had been determined in adxance not bv Solzhenitsvn, was thrown completcK off balance.
in full.
to let himself be "used"
I
was stunned.
and here
W hat
against censorship, a
had dared
How
is
man
outrageous,"
thought. This
I
\\
ho
in
is
the
\\a\'
I
\
b\-
it
is
done
ith his
at I'ravda
furious battle
the great tradition of Pushkin ami Dostovevskv
ain?
I
producing
a
pre-packaged interx iew
.
thought of w alking out.
muttered to Kaiser.''
did not occur to Smith or Kaiser that a
being w atched a
,
to assert the writer's indepence,
could he be so blind or
"This
It
an ironx
SolzhenitsN n, w hose entire being reverberates w
is
man w ith
his
back to the wall,
all-pow erful enemies for the slightest slip, might ha\ c had
more than common
interest in an accurate portra\'al of his thoughts
views. Solzhenitsvn did not help, of course.
persuade or explain. His situation, he
felt,
It
w as
w as beneath
and
his dignit\- to
self-evident. .And despite his
extensive exploitation of the Western press in his struggles against the authorities, he hadn't the remotest idea
only previous interview had been w
ith
how
that press reallv worked. His
the obedient Japanese correspondent
Komoto
Sedze, and before that w ith Soviet correspondents in Rvazan. But Western reporters this w as a breach of journalistic ethics, a plant, a fake interview. The\' demanded the right to put their own questions (the\' had come with ten) and to select and edit the answ ers. There followed several hours of intensive bargaining. First, the two Americans read the "inter\iew " through painfulK slow l\ w ith assistance from Svetlova. Both were impressed w ith parts of it, but the long explanations of Solzhenits\'n's ancestr\' in answ er to the Stern allegations struck them as long-w inded and irrelevant. Both declared that no more than half could be used bv their respective new spapers ("Not even the American President gets more" w hich w as perfectlv true). Since the document w as oxer seven thousand words long, this w as eminenth' fair, particularh' for a dailv paper (even of the gargantuan proportions of American new spapers), but Solzhenitsvn wouki not budge: all or nothing. Later he offered a compromise. I he two reporters could use w hat thev liked if they promised to get the rest of the interview printed in other publications. The reporters said thev had no pow er to do that, and Solzhenits\n left the room. .\ moment later he returned and asked whether a Swedish correspondent could take the rest of the interview and print the parts the Americans omitted. 1 he two .Americans objected that there was no such Swede, at w hich Solzhenitsvn disappeared and returned w ith a blond voung man in his wake. Ibis was Stig Frederikson, the correspondent of the Scandinavian New s .\gencv in Moscow and he w as w illing to print the w hole of for
—
,
—
,
Solzhenitsyn's interview a da\' after
it
appeared
The two Americans were dumbfounded.
in .\merica.
IhcN' had had
no idea there
SOLZHENITSYN
[760]
was another correspondent concealed
in the flat,
though they concluded that
he had not come for an interview but was somehow involved in the negotiations that \\ ere then in full swing to hold a Nobel Prize ceremony. Solzhe-
way out of the impasse. The Americans quicklv agreed to this new suggestion, and the young Swede was hustled out again. The two correspondents still insisted nitsyn had simplv seized on his presence as offering a
And
it
did.
on putting some questions of
their
own, however.
A
few meshed more or
with Solzhenitsyn's text and were substituted for the novelist's simplistic and sometimes naive original proposals. Others were ruled out by Solzhenitsyn as being too broad or too political. "In general," he explained, less easilv
he agreed to let them why he could not which he explained tape one of his negative answers, in question, and after this he allowed them to repeat the proanswer a certain every answer with Natalia before cess question b\' question. "He discussed extensive meeting. "She offered Kaiser in his account of the giving it," writes him, The of it seemed to please which he accepted. sport advice, some of though he was obviously nervous about a situation he could not fully control. (We learned later that when he plaved back his tape, he was disappointed that his language wasn't more polished.)"''^ Kaiser offers one or two other interesting details about the photographic session pictures were taken of Solzhenitsvn, Natalia, and Krmolai separately and then together as a group. In posing with the family, Solzhenitsyn was all smiles, but when his own picture came to be taken he absolutely refused to smile: "It's time to be serious," he said, composing his face into a solemn mask for posterity. At one point he searched for a red pencil to underline something he thought important and would not accept Kaiser's offer of his blue pen for the purpose: it had to be red. At another he expressed conApril lest people think it was a cern that his interview not be published on hoax. Kaiser also noted the now bulging belly, pushing at his loose pullover, and the stubby, powerful, worker's hands with their scarred right thumb, but was overw helmed by Solzhenitsyn's "radiant smile" and the intense concentration of his bright blue eyes. Indeed, both correspondents were deeply affected bv Solzhenitsyn's dominating personality and steely will (and correspcjndinglv grateful for Natalia's diplomatic tact and sense of humour in the negotiations) and left with a sense that the afternoon had lasted far longer "a writer decides
w hat he
will talk about." Eventually,
—
1
than four hours.
The interview appeared full it
in
two separate versions on
3
April.
As the
first
interview that Solzhenitsyn had ever given to Western correspondents,
received front-page billing in both the Washington Post and the
Times,
and
in the
many
New
York
other nev\ spapers around the world that reprinted
one or the other version. Kaiser's article as it appeared in the Post was fairly short (the (iiiardicin in England ran it at considerably greater length) and was presented as a straight story, without the question-and-answ er format (except in the
Guardian again), whereas the
New
In addition to an introductor\ article
by
York Times story was I
ledrick Smith, there
much
longer.
was almost
a
— Whose
Life
Is
It
Anyway?
It'^iI
page of questions and answers. Both papers carried photographs of Sol-
full
zhenitsvn and his family.
The
printed stories concentrated on Solzhenits\n's current difficulties
with the authorities and on the campaign then being waged in the Soviet press against August 1914. Solzhenits\n, as usual, had been scathingl\' eloquent about the situation he found himself in. "A kind of forbidden, contam-
me and my
family," he was quoted as R\azan who have been dismissed from work for visiting mv home a few years ago."'' He went on to describe the cowardlv and illegal wa\' in which Svetlova had been dismissed from her job w hen it w as learned that she had borne Solzhenitsyn's son, the punishment meted out to Moscow housing officials for having allowed Svetlova and her parents to exchange their tw o former flats for the more spacious one in Kozitskv Lane, and the everlasting problem of surveillance. If he met anyone to work on his book, he said, that person would come under suspiinated zone has been created round
saving.
"10
verv dav there are people
this
mv house, he will be as closelv follow ed as if he and thev will investigate his background. And they find out w ho this man meets and then, in turn, w ho that man
cion.
"As soon
were
a state criminal,
then go on to is
in
he leaves
as
meeting." Solzhenitsvn told them
in detail
about the campaign of harassment and
threats he had been subjected to, starting with the confiscation of his archive in 1965,
and the
meetings.
mans
w hispering campaign conducted
official
"Thev
sa\-,
—no, he surrendered —
occupied territorv
that
is,
a
whole
for the
batter\'.
And
he served as
Germans. Or even
Vlasov. Even better, he worked right in the Gestapo. thing
is
no defamation, but under the crust
quiet,
against
him
at
Party
'Solzhenitsvn voluntariK ga\ e himself up to the Ger-
is
better,
On
a
policeman
in
he fought with
the surface, every-
the cancer of slander."
Solzhenitsvn also talked about the difficulties he had experienced over the award of the Nobel Prize, the publication oi August 1914, and in carrying October 1916. The fuss over the Nobel it w as an insult to all former w inners, including the Communist poet Pablo Neruda. In the case oi' August 1914, he had been accused of smuggling the manuscript abroad w ithout informing the Soviet authorities of its existence, whereas the truth w as that he had offered it to seven Soviet publishers without receiving a single response. As for researching and w riting
out his work for the sequel to Prize, he said,
October 1916, his status as a pariah and a "non-person" put unusual difficulties in his
as
wav.
hard for
"I live in
me
mv ow n
countrv,
to gather material as
I
it
w rite a novel about Russia, but it is w ould be if I were w riting about
Polynesia."
And what was real
it
all
out of the countrv, throw
me
for?
"The
reason for giving the interview, dissolved
The
'in
"is either to
drive
into a ditch or send
an alien fog' as thev w
me
me
out of
my
life
to Siberia, or to
or
have
rite."
huge success and attracted w orld-w ide attention to he had privatelv predicted. Readers in the West recognized
interview
Solzhenitsvn, as
me
plan," said Solzhenitsvn, revealing the
was
a
SOLZHEMTSVX
[762J this as
an unprecedented step, indicating a new threshold of desperation in and a need for even greater public support than before.
SoIzhenits\'n's situation
Solzhenits\n was not
1 he Washington Post editors had shrunk and Solzhenitsvn resented Hedrick Smith's presentation of their meeting as too novelettish.'^ True to his desire for journalistic autonomv. Smith had begun his storv with the questions and answ ers that he had insisted on recording from Solzhenitsvn at the end of their meeting, thus leaving less space for Solzhenitsvn's ow n questions and answ ers and framing them in (from Solzhenitsvn's point of view) "extraneous" material. Worst of all, there had been almost no room for Solzhenitsvn's detailed exposition of his ancestry. The Post had ignored this part of the interview w hile the Times had confined itself to some comments about his parents and childhood. Solzhenitsvn's feelings on this matter w ere conveved to Smith in a tart little note some davs later, '^ and the whole text But
still
satisfied.
Kaiser's article to a fraction of
its
original length,
,
was released text
into samizdat to rectifv the omissions. Shortlv thereafter, the
appeared
One interview
in
of the
was
Russian
manv
timing.
its
in the \\ est
It
nitsvn's pri\ ateh' arranged
been
set for
and w
as later translated in its entiretv.
things that had puzzled Smith and Kaiser about the
w as common know ledge ceremon\
Sundav, 9 April,
in
Moscow
just ten
da\s after
his
correspondents. Solzhenitsxn had insisted on talking about view
.
Dr Gierow he ,
said,
had agreed
close friends, Solzhenitsvn
w as
nent representatives of our
artistic
that Solzhe-
Nobel Prize had meeting with the two
for the deliverx of the
to
come on
inviting those
and
it
in his inter-
the ninth. In addition to
w horn he
called "the
scientific intelligentsia
most emi-
—some
writers,
the chief producers at our leading theatres, important musicians, actors, and
name them for fear of causthem unnecessarx" difficulties if the ceremonv failed to take place, but we know from his memoir that there w ere to be about sixtN altogether and that the selection criteria w ere as follow s: "We had to draw up the guest list so as to invite no one w hose civic behaviour w as in anv w a\ questionable, to omit no one w hose standing in the artistic or scientific w orld entitled him to an invitation, and at the same time to invite guests w ho reallv would come and not funk it." The list had been drawn up and the invitations prepared with Solzhenitsvn's usual attention to detail and regard for secrecy. Each invitation was handw ritten b\ Solzhenitsvn and included a detailed plan show ing exactlv how to get to Svetlova's flat (the block had about twentv entrances), w here the ceremonv was to be held. Ihe ceremon\ w as set for a Sunday so that it could take place in davlight (it w as due to start at noon), w hen the K(iB w ould be prevented from harassing the guests under the cover ot darkness, and even then some "fearless door-keepers" were appointed to keep certain academicians."-" Solzhenitsvn declined to
ing
overzealous
KGB
agents at ba\' (and to take care of stone throwing, the cut-
ting off of the electricit\-, or an\ thing else that might be
dreamed up and
attributed to "hooligans" or technical "accidents"). Deliverv of the invitations
had commenced on "I he
number
of
I
April, and Solzhenitsvn
w riters, producers, and
was gratified by the response. w ho accepted surprised me:
actors
Whose
Likf.
Is
It
Anyway?
[763]
to think that such courage, such a longing to stand upright, such a fecHng of to be slaves forever, still sur\i\ed in so man\ people." But "there were, of course, refusals too, sickeninglv in character, from people of inter-
shame
who had nothing to fear"-' (hut Zhores Medvedev writes one or two people w ho declined had entirely valid reasons tor doing so")." On the day when Solzhenitsvn met the two American correspondents, the arrangements were all complete and only the invitations remained to be delivered, so w hv did he choose this moment to speak out? Was it not national reputation
that "the
a deliberate
provocation to the authorities,
a
challenge to
—
them
just
when
ceremony was over? And w hv did he advance the interview at the last moment, as if to ensure that whatever the\ w rote w as printed before the ceremony was due Solzhenitsvn needed to keep quiet for
a
while
at least until
the
to take place?
no immediate was he who invited the correspondents in the first place (as if they themselves had asked to come) and makes no mention of the last-minute advancement of the interview. The answer is probablv to be found, however, in certain other aspects of the Soviet pres* campaign that was unleashed against him in the first three hi his
answer
ow n version of these events, Solzhenitsxn conundrum. He brushes over the fact
to this
months of
One
offers
that
it
1972.
of the most disturbing features of the original Stern
article, apart
from its biographical "revelations," had been a passage suggesting that August 1914 was not reallv a historical novel, but a thinly disguised allegory describing the Soviet armv as Solzhenitsyn had known it in the Second World War. "Cunninglv exploiting a w ell-tried method that has shielded him in the past from going to jail for treason, he has placed the action in pre-revolutionar\ times. Whoever reads August 1914, how ever, is at once aware that in depicting events from the past, the author is dealing with the problems of the present."-' The vulgar c\ nicism and stupidity of this remark suggest that it ma\- have been KGB inspired. Whatever the case, the Literaturnaya Gazeta inevitablv reproduced it, commenting that "many Western new spapers and magazines emphasize the anti-Soviet tendency of this novel" and quoting a review by Anatole Shub in the Washington Post to bolster this conclusion.-"^ On 23 Februarx', the Literaturnaya Gazeta had followed up with two
more
articles allegedlv
republished from foreign new spapers. One, by
Ma-
West German Deutsche Volkszeitung (the organ of the West German Communist Party), simply dismissed the novel as a "banal apologia for the theory of convergence," but the other, by a Finnish journalist called Martti Larni, was a far more poisonous affair. Picking up where Stern and Literaturnaya Gazeta had left off, Larni underlined rina Stiitz, said to have appeared in the
the "anti-Soviet" message of the novel, repeated Stern's allegation of allegor-
and carried the argument a stage further. Solzhenitsyn's sympaand discipline of the German army in the First World War vxith the inefficiencv, corruption, and disorganization of the Russians was intended as a barely disguised parallel w ith the Second World
ical intent,
thetic contrasting of the efficiencv
SOLZHENITSYN
[764]
War. In the Second rialist
aims as
\\ orld \A ar
in the first,
Germans
the
\\
onlv this time thev
same impebv Hitler and the
ere pursuing the \\
ere led
Nazis. Ergo (though Larni refrained from spelling this out) Solzhenitsvn
sympathized
\\
ith the
Nazis. In conclusion Larni reverted to the comparison
of Solzhenitsvn w ith another "denatured intellectual" w ho had abandoned his
the
homeland and "dissolved in a London fog" name was superstitiouslv omitted).
The
—Anatoli Kuznetsov (though
interesting thing about the Larni article
\\
although billed
as that,
Swedish newspaper called iSorrskensflamman (published b\- a faction of the Swedish Communist party in the provincial tow n of Lulea), it was nothing of the sort. In an interview given to the Finnish new spaper Lusi Suomi three da\s after his article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, Larni re\ealed that he had never heard of Norrskeiisflamma)! and that his article had been commissioned directly bv the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Moreover, he had not read August 1914 himself but was as the translation of
an
article that
had appeared
in a
simply replying to the Anatole Shub review that the Russians sent to him. This information reached Solzhenitsvn too late for inclusion in his interview (though he w as able to get off a gibe
at the "alien fog"),
but
it
made no
difference to the gravity of the inference. Solzhenitsvn also had v\'hat he
regarded as reliable evidence that
a definite decision
had been taken
at
the
highest level to arrest and expel him. Chakovskv, the editor of the Literatur-
naya Gazeta, was reported to ha\e said as
much
at
an editorial meeting;-' the
operation was apparenth' intended to take place sometime in mid- April. it
Ihis,
seems, had been the real reason for Solzhenitsvn's sudden decision to advance
his
new spaper interxiew and make
a
the Nobel ceremony. Other factors Soviet pers),
pre-emptive
strike,
may have been
e\en
if it
did threaten
the impending visit to the
Union of President Nixon (hence the choice of American new spathe Soviet authorities w ould not w ant an international incident,
when
and Solzhenitsvn's developing theory of verbal guerrilla warfare. One of the best tactics, he had discovered, was to string a series of statements and moves together into a "cascade" in rapid succession to one another: "Events crowd in thick and fast at moments of crisis but you can also increase their density deliberately by exploiting the unique characteristics of our Soviet bigwigs: their obtuseness, their slow-w ittedness, their inability to keep two .
concerns in mind
The
.
.
at once."-*^
interview and the forthcoming Nobel ceremony constituted two
elements in the cascade; Patriarch,"
w hich
just
was Solzhenitsvn's "Lenten Letter to the a stir. Solzhenitsvn had con-
a third
then was also creating
ceived the idea of writing to the patriarch the preceding (Christmas Eve, after listening to the Christmas service
on
pastoral letter addressed to Russian
Patriarch
Western radio station and hearing a Orthodox Christians in the West bv
a
Pimen of Moscow Among other .
to parents to foster a love of the
church
things, the patriarch had appealed
in their children
and
to set
them
personal example. Solzhenitsvn, perhaps with the cares of fatherhood at
the forefront of his mind, was
moved bv
this appeal,
a
now
but also stung by the
Whose
Life
Is
Anyway?
It
[7^>5]
hypocrisy of a church that could address such words to emigres, ing completely silent in
its
own countrw Again
there
was
\\
hile
remain-
that stab of indig-
was fired to write to him! I had no choice but to write! "rhe task proyed a difficult one. Solzhenitsyn had to inform himself on the policies and possibilities of the ()rth(xlox hierarchy in Russia before he could write conyincingly, and then adopt the correct forms and tone in w hich a loyal subject of the church should address so august a personage. The latter was particularh hard for a man used to speaking out in Solzhenits\n's peremptory manner, but he had finally managed it and had sent his letter to the patriarch on 17 March. At the same time, he gaye it to one or two friends in the church to read, thinking that it would not become public before Easter and before his newspaper interyiew, but he had miscalculated. A copy quickly made its way abroad and was published there, whence it was broadcast back into the Soyiet Union b\ Western radio stations. To Solzhenitsyn's eyident surprise, it created something of a furore.-** The gist of the "Letter" was that it was hypocritical for the Russian Orthodox church to preach a course of behayiour abroad that it w as unw illing to embrace at home. "Why is your honest appeal directed only to Russian emigres? Why do you call only for those children to be brought up in the Christian faith? Why do you admonish only the distant flock to 'discern slander and falsehood' and be strong in truth and justice? And we what should we discern? Should we or should we not foster in our ow n children a loye of The Russian church has its indignant opinion on eyery eyil the church? eyer." Solzheniin distant Asia or Africa, yet on internal ills it has none tsyn's principal criticism w as that the church had sold out to the state, that it existed in a condition of abject subjugation to the secular authorities and had needlessly forfeited the right to propagate the faith. Solzhenitsyn comnant rage. "At once
I
—
.
.
.
—
pared the past half century of religious neglect with Russia's glorious reliand also w ith the yery different state of affairs in Poland. He
gious past
—
drew- attention to the wholesale destruction and despoliation of Russia's
churches, the material and spiritual poyerty of the Russian people depriyed of
all
beauty,
all
faith,
and
all
transcendence
strophic consequences for their future. the
first
w arning.
courageous
and the
cata-
priests.
he pointed out that his was not Father Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb
w arning seyen years earlier to Patriarch Pimen's and Archbishop Ermogen of Kaluga w as still sequestered in a
Yakunin, had w predecessor,
monastery
Two
in their liyes,
And
ritten a similar
for haying dared to forbid the closing of churches
and the burning
of icons and church books. Yet no action had been taken, and the Orthodox
church was
still
gious affairs.
secretly
"A church
managed by
a
quasi-goyernmental council for
dictatorially ruled
by
atheists
is
a sight
reli-
not seen in
two thousand years," commented Solzhenitsyn acidl) The consequences were that the church's mone\- was giyen aw ay for non-religious purposes, while there were no funds for the repair of churches; priests were powerless .
in their
own
parishes and had to seek special permission just to yisit the sick
or attend a ceremony.
SOLZHENITSYN
[766J
What
sort of reasoning can convince
spirit
and body of the church by
Preservation for
whom?
one that the consistent destruction of the
atheists
is
the best
means
for
its
preservation?
Certainlv not for Christ. Preservation bv v\hat means?
Falsehood? But after falsehood,
\\
hat sort of hands should perform the Eucha-
rist?
\ our Eminence! abl\'
Do
not hear one like
my unworthy cry. You will probDo not allow us to suppose, do not
not disdain completely it
every seven vears.
force us to think that for the bishops of the Russian church, earthlv authority
is
higher than heavenly authority, earthly responsibility more terrifying than responsibility to God.^*^
The "Lenten
Letter"
statement since his
\\
most eloquent and moving public Fourth Writers' Congress. In tone and form
as Solzhenitsyn's
letter to the
it was of a piece with his elegy for Tvardovsky, written shortly beforehand, and his recently completed Nobel lecture, \\ hich he planned to deliver on 9 April. And vet the responses to the "Lenten Letter," not only by government officials but also by some fellow Christians and dissidents, \\ ere more hostile than Solzhenitsyn could have imagined. On the government side, the hostility was clearly due to the fact that Solzhenitsyn had touched a sensitive nerve. Atheism is a corner-stone of the Soviet state (it is the "state religion") so that his attack on it was tantamount to heresy. By appealing to the Orthodox church to repeal or renegotiate its lopsided concordat w ith the state, Solzhenitsyn appeared to be attacking one of the sacred foundations of the Soviet system and attempting to turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary (and possibly even pre-Petrine) times. It \\ as, in conventional parlance, a counter-revolutionary proposal, though it could not be assailed as such, because it w as cloaked in ecclesiastical terminology. The hostility of fellow Christians and fellow dissidents was somewhat more surprising. 1 he attitude of the dissidents, most of \\ hom were liberals, seems to have been that the \\ hole appeal v\ as irrelevant. What was the point of the Orthodox church anyway, emasculated and muzzled as it had been for decades? And many seem to have been misled by the tone and language of the "Letter" into dismissing its concerns as a storm in an ecclesiastical teacup,
completely overlooking the
letter's far-reaching, political implications.
fellow Christians (and Christian dissidents), they were
split.
As
for
Some approved
a timely reminder of the church's present subjugation and duty to release itself in the future, but others saw in it only a gratuitous and self-serving attack on a patriarch and clergy who were doing their best under impossible conditions and were in no position to answer back. The weightiest exponent of this second view was Father Sergei Zheludkov, of Pskov, a leading Christian dissident w ho had lent his support in the past to "liberals" like Pavel Litvinov and Anatoli Marchenko but who had not hesitated to criticize Sakharov's ideas when he disagreed with them. Zheludkov had recentl)- \\ ritten a book on church reform* that ma\- have aroused Sol-
of the "Letter" as its
*The Church of People of (ioodivill, in which Zheludk()\- argued \\ ho did not belong to the church but u ho should be counted
that there as
were man\- Christians
members anyway. Zheludkov
Whose
Life
It
Is
zhcnitsvn's interest in the subject in the
Anyway?
first
ij^^']
place, but he certainly did not
share Solzhenitsyn's views. Solzhenitsyn had told the truth, said Zheludkov in an open letter to Solzhenitsvn, but not the whole truth, for the whole
was that it w as impossible for the Orthodox church in the So\ iet L nion become an island of freedom in a sea of unfreedom. It w as a miracle that
truth to
the church existed at
terms.
but
all,
did so only because
it
"What would you have
us do? Insist on
all
it
accepted the
or nothing?
state's
Try to go
underground, w hich is unthinkable given the present system? Or try to fit into the svstem and exploit those possibilities that are allowed? The Russian hierarchy took the second decision." According to Zheludkov, the patriarch w as powerless either to answer Solzhenitsvn or to act on his proposals, other than b\' abdicating. Solzhenitsyn w as further damaging the church b\' attacking it and w ould onl\ make its w ork more difficult and give comfort to its enemies. Solzhenitsyn had no right to trv to
compel people
to accept suffering
And
and martyrdom.
he
included tw o accusations that must have been particularly upsetting to Solzhenitsyn: that the "Lenten Letter" consisted of "talented half-truths that
could prove to be more harmful to
w
many
than outright
lies";
"The problem
and that Solzhe-
of providing children
nitsyn
w as out
with
Christian education arises today only in those few families w ho are
a
of touch
ith the people:
part of the rebirth of the Christian intelligentsia."^" In short,
it
was an argument
and modesty
for "realism," humility,
demands and martyrdom. As such, it was
in
seemed, heroism, a kind of recapitulation, on self-sacrifice, different territory, of Solzhenitsyn's former polemics w ith Tvardovsk) and Novy Mir. Solzhenitsvn, however, had come a long v\ay since his Novy Mir days, aided immeasurably by his work on The Gulag Archipelago and August the face of Solzhenitsvn's maximalist
1914 (not to speak of
and
for, as
it
his self-discovery in the writing of his
the Calf), as well as
by the experience gained
memoir. The Oak
in his struggle
with the
answ er to Father Zheludkov. Zheludkov had pointed out that, in times gone by, he and others had defended Solzhenitsyn when he was under attack and that Solzhenitsyn should not
authorities,
and he referred
to this in his brief
therefore attack the defenceless patriarch, particularly
when
now
the author
was
protected by his fame. "Are you saying that 'no one can act alone'?" wrote Solzhenitsyn. "Everyone can, and one person can so it's not true.
—
Had you even other extreme
heard of
—
me
that everything
about? Doesn't that
mean
And are you now going to the for me now? How did this come
nine years ago?
there
is
is
a
'safe'
way?""
For Solzhenitsyn there certainly had been
a
way
—
this
was
his
unique
w riting The Gulag Archipelago, and then the history of his rise to fame in The Oak and the Calf, he had perceived a pattern and a plot. The stories of Gleb Nerzhin,
achievement. Recapitulating his early
life's
history in the course of
Oleg Kostoglotov, and even Ivan Denisovich had been fragments of also published a religious journal in samizdat,
church and religious matters.
V puti (On
the Path), and
was
a larger
a prolific writer
on
SOLZHENITSYN
[768]
at the time to discern the grand design that behind those fragments or at best had glimpsed it only momentarily. In each of those fictional works the hero had struggled for moral selfhood, inner freedom, and spiritual understanding. 1 hey had been voyages of self-discovery, and at the same time searches for the holy grail. Now, in his mature years, he had himself become the searcher for the holy grail. His life was the storv, the work of art, and he was simultaneously its hero and its maker. But this wasn't sufficient for Solzhenitsyn. Every storv had to have a moral and
whole, but he had been unable
—
lav
and his life, too, bore a lesson if vou looked closely enough at its was the storv of a voyage from innocence to experience, from ignorance to knowledge, from sinfulness to moral improvement if not to moral perfection. And this was a lesson that should and could be brought to the notice of others and that others could learn from. The dawning of such a realization must naturally have been a slow process lasting over many years, but it seems that Solzhenitsyn's open letter to Father Zheludkov, written on 28 April 1972, was the first occasion on which he openly alluded to it in print. The "Lenten Letter" was imbued with the spirit of this discovery from beginning to end, which was presumably why Father Zheludkov had found it "pretentious" and why many other intellectuals took a dislike to its tone uithout quite knowing why. The faint whiff of an odour of sanctity had begun to rise from Solzhenitsyn's pages. Interestingly enough, this new note of exaltation was recognized by another of Solzhenitsyn's ecclesiastical admirers. Father Alexander Schmemann, dean of St \ ladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York a lesson, details.
It
—
State and a regular broadcaster of religious
over Radio Liberty.
It
may even have been
inspired Solzhenitsyn to
admired Schmemann over a year before, in the
YMCA
Solzhenitsyn that he
compose
his
at a distance,
Schmemann had
Vestnik in Paris, in
v\'as
the
first
major
was overwhelmingly
a
programmes a
to the Soviet
Union
broadcast of Schmemann's that
"Lenten Letter." Solzhenitsyn had long and the admiration was mutual. Well published
a
long article on Solzhenitsyn
which he had
natiotial
tried to
demonstrate that
writer to appear in the Soviet period,
Christian writer
w ho could not be understood
without reference to the philosophical and theological
beliefs of the
Russian
Orthodox church, and that Solzhenitsyn was in the great line of Russian classics stemming from Pushkin.'- Solzhenitsyn had read the article and liked it. "It gave me a lot," he later v\ rote to a friend in Western Europe, "and told me a lot about myself and Pushkin that I didn't know, explaining v\ hy I always felt such an affinity for his sense of the world and the key in which he writes. The article also formulated some important aspects of Christianity that I was unable to put into words.'"' Father it
Schmemann had
read Solzhenitsyn's "Lenten Letter" as soon as
reached the West and been deeply impressed with
its
his
elevated style and biblical rhythms, as
words not
just to
if
mere mortals but to all Old Testament,
identified the tone: "In the
it.
Above
all
he noted
the author had been addressing eternity,
and he immediately
in the history
of the ancient
Whose
Life
Is
Anyway?
It
chosen people, there was the astonishing phenomenon
and extraordinary men
who swam,
opening words to
draw the
ot
all
man
going on
\\
I.aster
proclaimed the heav-
in the heart
ho has
political
and he \\ ent proph-
radio,
this forgotten spirit of
of Christianity. \Ve hear the ringing
said in the hearing of
—concessions, submission, the
mising with the world and
sermon oyer the
"And now
comparison:
ecy has suddenly awakened yoice of a lone
tide, told the truth,
seit-satistaction,
untruth, weakness, and hypocrisy." These were the
Schmemann's
logical
Strange
of the prophets.
ho could not experience peace and
thev sav, against the
as
enly judgement oyer
on
\\
[7halidze, Shafarevich, Galich, and many others. At one time, w hile still a member of the Writers' Union, he had emploxed Bukovskv as his secretary to protect the latter from charges of parasitism, and it had been then that he and Bukovskv had discussed their plan for a new samizdat journal. After his expulsion in Juh Maximov wrote an angry letter to Solzhe-
close to dissident circles, tests
on human
rights,
,
,
* Solzhenitsyn
the cottage
w
was unable
ith
resolve this difficulty transfer
to
spend more than
Reshetovskaya and did not
by having an extra cabin
ow nership of the cottage
itself to
a part
like to
of his time there, because he
be there w hen she
\\
built in the grounds, after
as.
still
He w as
shared
hoping
to
which he proposed to
Reshetovskava. Late that summer, ho\\e\er, thev
quarrelled o\er a letter Reshetovskava had w ritten him, and Solzhenitsvn changed his mind.
SOLZHEMTSYN
[8o2]
nitsvn quoting Solzhenitsvn's \\
\\
ords in his Nobel lecture about the
ide solidarity of writers" and asking
one direction
—from other
\\
riters to
w hv
it
"\\
orld-
alw avs seemed to flow in onlv
Solzhenitsvn, but never from Solzhe-
nitsvn to other writers. If Solzhenits\ n's voice had been joined to the voices
of others protesting his expulsion, and
demanded from
if
Solzhenitsxn had manifested the
would have been immeasmore hampered in applving sanctions against him.-*^ In its wav it was a repeat of some of the charges made against Solzhenitsvn for refusing to join the protest over Daniel and Sinvavskv, but this time it carried more w eight, for Solzhenitsvn w as much more famous now and his immunity all the greater. It mav have been that he also sensed an implicit (negative) comparison w ith Sakharov, because on this occasion he answered the charge, although his resulting letter was evasive. solidaritv he
others, the impact
urablv greater and the authorities would have
He
Maximov
had, he wrote, interceded for
felt
though not
in private,
in public
(in his interview
with the two American correspondents, he had usedMaxi-
mov's
over The Seven Days of Creation to make
difficulties
literature's
a
general point about
Maximov himself), w ould devalue the impact of his
being above criminal sanctions, but not about
because he
felt
that public interventions
a further gloss on his posisame reason that I had not defended anv of the others: licensing mvself to w ork on the history of the Revolution, I had absolved mvself of all other duties. An artist has no other recourse if he does not want to overheat himself with ephemeral concerns and boil drv."""' Nevertheless, at his next interview w ith Western correspondents (for which, as before, he wrote both the questions and the answers), Solzhenitsvn made a point of mentioning Maximov h\ name: "He is an honest, courageous writer with a disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion to truth, and he has had great successes in his quest for it. So his expulsion from the King \\ titers' Union is perfectly normal."'" Another writer who briefly made Solzhenitsvn's acquaintance that summer was Andrei Sinvavskv. Sinyavsk\- had been quietly released from the labour camps two \ears earlier and was inevitabK w ithout a job. He was given to understand, however, that although neither he nor his wife was a Jew if the\- applied for exit visas to go to the West, the\- would not be refused. Accordingly, they were preparing to move to Paris. Sin\ avskv's
Oak and
protests. Later, in the tion. "I did not
the Calf,
defend him," he w
he offered
rote, "for the
.
.
.
,
wife,
Maria Rozanoxa, had been introduced to Natalia Svetloxa b\ their mutual was in the camps,* but their
friend Irina Zholkovskava while Sinvavskv
husbaneis had not met until Solzhenits\ n invited the Sinvavskvs to Kirsa-
novka
in the
summer
of 1973.
* Solzhenitsvn
and Svetlova's
he began to
at
ail
about
six
first
I
heir meeting
cordial.
1
he two
son, Krmolai, had been born slightly prematurely, and
months, Maria Rozanov
did not fear for his reputation u
was
a
ith the authorities in the light
.Moscow, and Natalia Svetlova helped organize
a
when
introduced Svetlova to a paediatrician
who
of Solzhenitsyn's notoriety. The
Sinvavskvs and the Solzhenitsvns subsequentiv sent their children to the same nursery in
men
summer camp
in
Koktebel. to which
of the dissidents, includint; the Sinvavskvs, sent their children in the holidavs.
sch(X)l
many
Coming into the Open strolled in the
woods
(to
evade
[803]
microphones), u here thev discussed
an\'
lit-
erature and related matters. Solzhenits\'n voiced his well-known sentiments
about the importance of history to Soviet writers and asked Sinyavsky whether
he contemplated w
on
riting
historical subjects
w hen he got to the West. So\iet burden for Russian v\ Tit-
distortions of history, he said, had created a heav\
and he implied that
ers,
to his
men
own
writers ought to share
all
account, replied evasively, but
that their attitudes to literature
so fundamentally that there
when
a
couple of months
was
later
and
little
to
it.^"
Sinyavsky, according
must have been clear to both the tasks of the w riter diverged
it
to discuss.
hardly surprising that
It is
Solzhenits\n came to
the contemporary
list
Russian writers he admired and to name those w ho constituted, the mainstream of Russian literature, Sinyavsky was not
among
in his view,
them.^^
Solzhenitsyn also had mixed feelings about Sinvavskv's decision to go
Ca/fht writes that he was "chilled and sadwere w illing to "endure Russia's desit might lead," and that he himself would have cut a poor joined those w ho emigrated after receiving the Nobel Prize. kinds of sentiments he had come to regard as correct of late, partially, it seems, under the influence of his second w ife and Shafarevich. But the very mention of the subject in those terms indicates a doubt, or an element of posturing. Elsewhere he reveals that about a month later, in a moment ot sudden candour when walking with Shafarevich, he had commented on the beauty of the Russian countryside and added, "How vividly West. In dened" to think tiny, wherever figure if he had These were the to the
we
shall
The Oak and
the
that ever-fewer people
remember
all
this if
.
.
.
ever
we
are
somewhere
else,
aw
a\'
from
Russia! "^'^ Shafarevich had reacted with predictable horror and reproached
Solzhenitsyn for such sacrilege, but the thought w as clearh' in Solzhenitsxn's mind and could not so easily be dismissed. Solzhenitsyn would have continued to keep a low profile that summer had events not conspired to alter his plans and to sw eep him aw ay on their current. The initial impetus came from Sakharov. At some point in June
OUe Stenholm,
1973 he gave a wide-ranging interview to
a
correspondent of
the Swedish radio and television network, it,
Sakharov revealed himself to be
far
w hich w as broadcast on 2 July. In more pessimistic about Soviet society
than ever before. "I'm sceptical about socialism socialism offers us anything
new on
in general.
organizing society." And: "There's nothing new it's
simply capitalism developed to
don't find that
I
the theoretical level, or a better
its
extremes.
.
.
.
.
.
.
about
We
.
.
wav
of
this socialism, .
have the same
kind of problems as the capitalist world, the same criminality, the same alienation of the individual.
The
difference
is
that our society
is
an extreme case,
maximum lack of freedom, maximum ideological rigidity, and, most typical of all, maximum pretensions about being the best society, though it is far from that." Sakharov admitted that there was not much anyone like with
himself could accomplish, but "one always needs to create ideals for oneself, even when one can see no direct w ay of realizing them," and he described himself in political terms as "a liberal, a gradualist if you like."'''
SOLZHENITSYN
[804]
Within two weeks Sakharov was violentK' attacked b\- Tass and accused a criminal charge. To underline its gravity, he was summoned on 16 August to the office of the deputy prosecutor general, M. P. Malyarov, and warned that he was giving comfort to the enemies of the Soviet state and being used bv foreign intelligence services. "Any state has the right to defend itself," said Malyarov repeatedly. "There are appropriate articles in the criminal code, and no one w ill be permitted to of "slandering the Soviet Union"
—
violate them."'''^
Sakharov denied having broken the law and, when he returned home, wrote out a transcript of the interview from memory and had it typed in multiple copies. Following Pavel Litvinov's earlier example, he released this document to foreign correspondents but w ent a step further than Litvinov by holding an impromptu press conference to denounce the government's tactics of harassment and intimidation. In his answers to journalists' questions, Sakharov touched on the intimidation of other dissidents, the harassment of his and Elena Bonner's children from their former marriages, his own professional and financial problems, and the larger political situation, but the most controversial statement he made was in connection with detente. w
Detente
ithout democratization, detente in
w hich the
W est
in effect accepts the
game would be dangerous, it would not reallv solve anv of problems. ... It would mean trading with the Soviet Union, buving
Soviet rules of the the world's its
gas and
oil,
while ignoring other aspects of the problem.
opment would be dangerous because
I
think such a devel-
w ould contaminate the w hole v\ orld w ith the anti-democratic peculiarities of Soviet societv; it would enable the Soviet Union to bypass problems it can't soh e on its ow n and to concentrate on accumulating still further strength. ... It would mean cultivating a closed country where anything that happens ma\' be shielded from outside eves, a country w earing a mask that hides its true face.'"
For
his press conference
it
Sakharov had deliberately chosen the
versary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 21 August, and
fifth it
anni-
was on
this symbolic date that Solzhenitsvn also entered the arena. Having recently completed a fresh version of his letter to the Soviet passport authorities, he
X. \. Shchelokov. It was a prohim a permit to reside in Moscow and a declaration that Solzhenitsvn would ignore the ruling. In it he got off, at last, his bitter words on serfdom: "The demeaning, compulsory 'passport' system, in which his place of residence may not be chosen by the individual but is chosen for him by the authorities probably does not exist even in colonial countries today. However, take this opportunit\' to remind you that serfdom in our country was abolished 112 years ago, and we are told that the October Revolution w iped out its last remnants. Presumably, I addressed
it
test against
to the minister of the interior,
the April refusal to grant
.
.
.
.
.
am
.
.
.
.
I
neither a serf nor a slave and should be free to live wherever
I
find
it
necessary."'^ It is
typical of Solzhenitsyn's caution that, having
composed
this fiery
n
(]OMIN(; INTO THF. OpF.N
Statement and dated until he
it
21
had given another
August, he nonetheless held it haek for two dass interviev\ to Western correspondents. 1 le did not
care for these interviews very
you fall
He
f^*)5l
much, finding them
"a
poor genre for writers:
vour pen, the shape of vour sentences, your diction; you into the hands of reporters w ith no feel for the things that move you." considered that the two American correspondents Smith and Kaiser had lose control of
"made a hash" of his earlier interview, and this time he chose a different American and a Frenchman. Ihe results were no better: '"Le Monde shredded and even secreted the full text in the French But he was again able to release his ow version into samizdat, and that was sufficient to make the effort w orthw hile. 1 he interview marked an extension of and an advance on the previous one of eighteen months ago. Listing the various threats and harassments he had recentlv endured, including ancjnvmous letters and phone calls and threats and garbled
this interview, too,
Foreign Ministrv," he
to have
him
later wrote.^'''
killed in a car accident,
Solzhenitsyn
commented
sardonically
view of the round-the-clock surveillance he w as subjected to, it any harm came to him or he w ere killed, "vou can infalliblv conclude, with one hundred per cent certaintv, that I have been killed bv or w ith the approval
that in
of the
KGB." He
alluded brieflv to his difficulties in getting a residence
permit, to his progress on the sequels to August 1914, to the recent Soviet signing of the Universal Copvright Convention, and to other literary matters,
but the bulk of the interview, perhaps
in
response to Maximo\'s reproaches
(and the example of Sakharov), was devoted to social and political problems, the current state of the human-rights movement, and a spirited defence,
name
by name, of the individual victims of Soviet persecution. Maximov himself was mentioned again, together with Zhores Medvedev (who had just been deprived of his Soviet passport in London), Igor Shafarevich, Andrei Amalrik, General Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovskv, Anatoli Marchenko, and well over a dozen others, including the most prominent members of the Ukrainian dissident movement. Solzhenits\ n showed himself to be a close reader of the Chronicle and took the opportunitv to defend that publication, too, and to deny persistent rumours that the authorities had succeeded in closing it down.
Among
other things Solzhenitsvn expressed his conviction that the
sit-
uation of Soviet human-rights campaigners and political prisoners was far
worse than that of similar victims in right-wing countries then in the humanrights spotlight Greece, 1 urkev, Portugal, and Spain and that many in the West were guiltv of hvpocrisy in equating the two sides. There had never been an amnestv for political prisoners in the Soviet Union in all its fifty vears of existence, and access for the press and outside observers was nonexistent, whereas all these things existed under right-wing regimes. In the light of the debate then in progress on the subject of jamming, he pointed
—
—
out that "the jamming of Western radio broadcasts in the Fast national agreements and guarantees of exist in the
minds of
.
.
.
robs inter-
meaning, because they cease to
mankind." And on Western attitudes to humanUnion, he stated, "It is important to understand
half of
rights abuses in the Soviet
all
SOLZHENITSYN
[8o6]
from public opinion in the and them alone but onlv when it is a matter of the united, mighty voice of hundreds of prominent personalities, the opinion of a whole continent. Our prisons retreat and ""^*' hide from the light of world publicity. that the East
On
West.
is
not
at all indifferent to protests
the contrary,
it
goes in deadly fear of them
.
.
—
—
.
Some
of these ideas were an elaboration of what Solzhenitsyn had writmore Delphic form, in his Nobel lecture, but at the end of his statement he offered a newly matured thought on the relative psychologies of those who lived in the West and those human-rights activists who lived in ten, in
the Soviet Union.
There is one psvchological peculiarity in human beings that al\\ avs surprises me. hi times of prosperity and ease, a man will shy away from the least little worrv at the periphery of his existence, try not to know about the sufferings of others (and his own in the future), make many concessions even in matters of central, of intimate
Vet
a
man w ho
is
importance to him,
approaching the
depriyed of everything that
may
just to
life
Because of the
We
all
quality,
first
and refuse
life,
a
naked beggar
can suddenly hnd
to take the final step, can
must not accept if it
man
has never been able to hold on to one single
Ihanks to the second quality, mankind has pulled
kinds of bottomless
that the Spirit,
already
is
but not his principles!
plateau he has attained.
out of
who
be thought to beautify
in himself the strength to dig in his heels
surrender his
prolong his present well-being.
last frontier,
pits.
.
.
itself
.
that the disastrous course of history cannot be corrected,
has confidence in
itself,
cannot influence the mightiest Pov\er
in the world.^'
A
sign of Solzhenitsyn's continuing caution
was
his request to the cor-
respondents of Le Monde and the Associated Press (the other new tion involved) to hold
up publication of his
s
organiza-
interview for one week.
He could
not have known, of course, that before the week had elapsed the authorities
would
stage the long-delayed
of the renowned Soviet
and shot by Stalin
trial
of Krasin and Yakir. Piotr Yakir, the son
army commander lona
in 1937,
and
Yakir,
his friend Victor
who had been purged
krasin had now been under
months in a case specifically intended to break the Both men had spent man\' years in prisons and camps and both confessed to underground activities both real and talse, including links they had had with Western f';w/^n' organizations. During the course of the investigation, over two hundred dissidents were questioned and in many cases obliged to undergo wrenching personal confrontations w ith Yakir and Krasin under the eyes of the KGB interrogators; some of them capitulated and gave evidence against the Chronicle. At the instigation of the KGB, Yakir wrote a letter to Sakharov urging him not to allow his name to interrogation for fourteen
Chronicle of Current Events.
be used "for purposes of propaganda against our homeland." Sakharov had not referred to this letter in his press conference but had foreseen that the
coming
trial
w ould undoubtedly be used
to link the dissident
movement with
"anti-Soviet organizations abroad," and he had publicized the
KGB
w arning
Coming into the Open that for each
new
L^oy]
issue of the Chronicle that appeared, a given
number of
and exeryone inxoKed gi\en punitive sentences/' Solzhenitsv n, too, had indicated his concern over the trial and had attempted to defuse its impact b\ rithculing it in adxance. It was "just a dismal repetition of the clums\' Stalin-\'\ shinsk\- farces," he told the Le Monde
would be
dissidents
arrested,
correspondent. "In the thirties
.
.
.
these farces, despite the primitive stage-
smeared grease-paint, the loudness of the prompter, were still a But if great success w ith 'thinking people' among Western intellectuals. no correspondents are to be admitted to the trial, it means that it has been craft, the
.
pitched two grades lower I
he
trial
.
.
""^'
still.
opened on 27 August,
less
Solzhenitsvn's interviews, and was gi\en
than
a
week
maximum
after Sakharov's
and
publicity in the Scniet
No
Western correspondents were admitted. 1 hev were, however, by the KGB and show n in part o\ er Soviet television. Yakir and Krasin repeated the charges thev had made against the Chronicle in their confessions, including the allegation that Solzhenitsxn had been a regular reader of the Chronicle and that "copies had been svstematicalK passed to him for evaluation.""^ A big campaign w as simultaneoush- opened in the Soviet press against Sakharov and Solzhenitsxn. The initial stroke was a letter in Pravda on 29 press.
invited to an extraordinarx press conference staged tor Vakir and Krasin
August signed bv fort\' members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, denouncing Sakharov for his "anti-patriotic" utterances and accusing him of jeopardizing detente. Two da\s later another letter appeared, w hich linked Solzhenitsyn's name with Sakharov's and accused the tw o of them of "slandering our social and state order" and summoning the West to return to the cold
w ar.
This letter
w as signed bv
thirtv-one
members
of the Writers' Union,
including such comparative moderates as Chingiz Aitmatov, \ asyl Bykov, Sergei Zalvgin, and Konstantin Simonov, in addition to predictable hardliners like Fedin,
Surkov, Chakovsky, and Sholokhov. During the next week mushroomed and spread from Pravda to Izvestia and the
or so, the campaign
On
September, Sakharov was attacked b\- members of the Agricultural Academy, on the second by members of the Medical Academy, on the third by composers and musicians (including Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Oistrakh), on the sixth by artists, economists, and tech-
Literatiirnayci Gcizeta.
1
nologists.
Every
effort
the entire nation
w as made
—
to suggest that the entire intelligentsia
tioned less often) as a renegade and
As
—indeed
loathed and detested Sakharov (Solzhenitsxn was traitor, sabotaging detente
men-
and the Heltold Hedrick
on the Literaturnaya Gazeta later Smith, "we had lists of people to call some of them very important w Titand we would simplx' tell them what the Party expected them to say."^' ers Letters in support of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, were simply ignored and handed over to the KGB (its officials made monthly inspection visits). But on this occasion the picture w as more complicated than sinki accords.
—
usual.
a staff writer
—
Perhaps because the public's hopes for
detente
had been raised unusually
— SOLZHENITSYN
[8o8]
high or because the authorities were more than customarily adept
in manipemerge a ground s\\ ell of popular opinion against him. Smith quotes a young and by no means blinkered Soyiet economist w ho explained to him during the campaign that it \\ as "quite natural for people to consider men like Sakharoy and Solzhenits\'n as traitors. It is yerv simple: Sakharoy and Solzhenitsyn are turning to foreigners for help. 1 he imperialists are using these two, and imperialism is our main enemy. So if our enemy is using these people, then naturally it must mean that they are traitors. Sakharoy called for the West to punish our country, to keep us from getting most-fa\()ured-nation tariffs from the United States. So of course he is considered a traitor and it is a normal duty for people to join a campaign to denounce him."'^'^ Curiously enough, Sakharoy receiyed painful proof of this attitude in a most roundabout \v ay. Immediately after giying his press conference, he had left for a holiday on the Black Sea. While lying on the beach near Sochi, he heard transistor radios pouring out a stream of inyectiye against him and had the uncomfortable experience of listening to people around him discuss the broadcasts and denounce the "traitor" for his oppositions to detente. At one point Sakharoy asked his neighbours whether anyone had actualh' read \\ hat this Sakharoy had said, and suggested that it might be worth finding out "perhaps he has good intentions after all" but nobody seemed interested, antl his vyife hustled him away. If the sunbathcrs discoyered his true identity, they might be tempted to assault him."^ The campaign was also successful in driying a wedge into the intellectual community tc> separate the sheep from the goats. Ineyitably there turned out to be yery few goats, either in the \\ titers' community or among scientists. The yast majority of those approached were dragooned into signing critical statements of one kind or another, making them accomplices in the repression. In this \\a\ they were compromised, and guilty consciences droye them to be eyen more critical of the outspoken few whom they blamed for haying forced them into making such painful choices. "1 he honest man makes the silent ones feel guilty for not haying spoken out," said \ alentin I urchin to Hedrick Smith w hen the campaign was oyer. "I hey cannot understand how he had the courage to do what they could not bring themselyes to do. So they feel impelled to speak out against him to protect their own consciences.""^^ Turchin spoke w ith some authority in the matter, haying been one of the few to defend Sakharoy publicly. As a result, he had been the object of unanimous condemnation at a mass meeting called by his computer institute, but open supporters could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Fortunately for Sakharoy and Solzhenitsyn, the world-wide interest in detente at that moment and the focusing of W estern attention on the Soyiet Union were to prove their salvation. In Britain, France, Germany, and the United States a growing body of public opinion began to (juestion w hether detente was worth the price, or indeed possible with "a dictatorial regime" and a "tyrannx ." V\\c non-persecution of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn was
ulating Sakharov's
\\
ords, there really did
.
.
.
—
,
Coming into
thf. Opf.n
[809]
it w as emphasized at all levels them would put an end to detente. Perhaps the most influential intervention was that of the president of the American Acadenu" of Sciences, \\ ho deplored the attack on Sakharov by fortv Soviet academicians and sent his opposite number at the Soviet Academv a succinct telegram: "Harassment or detention of Sakharov w ill have severe effects upon relationships between the scientific communities ot the USA and USSR and could vitiate our recent efforts tow ard increasing interchange and cooperation.""^^ This was (^n 9 September 1973. A da\- later. Senator Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means (committee in Washington, remarked that he w as against increased trade w ith the Soviet Union until the persecution of people like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn ceased. Almost at once the Soviet press campaign against Sakharo\ and Solzhethe W estern threats seemed to be taking effect. The U.S. nitsvn was halted Congress w as just then debating the .Mills and Jackson amendments,* and the Soviet government w as reluctant to worsen its image still further. But Sakharov and Solzhenitsvn did not fall silent. Sakharov, as before, was the more outspoken and pugnacious of the two. Having returned from his holiday, he gave a press conference on 8 September on the Soviet abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. On the ninth he followed this up with an interview w ith a Dutch radio station on the same subject. On the twelfth he issued a statement refuting the main accusations made against him in the Soviet press, asserting that he w as not a w armonger and not against detente, but simph" for a genuine detente in w hich human rights would be respected and internal tensions relaxed. Finally, on the fourteenth he sent an open
made
in the
a
touchstone of further co-operation, and
West
that an\- sanctions against
—
letter to the
and a
to insist
U.S. Congress appealing to it to support the Jackson amendment on the Soviet Union's acknow ledging the right of emigration as
condition of receiving most-favoured-nation status.
capital letters in the Washington Post
and appears
to
The
have had
letter
w as
a decisive
set in
impact
on American congressmen, for the amendment was passed in the teeth of opposition from President Xixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger."'* Solzhenitsxn, meanwhile, was concentrating his attention on the two important, programmatic essays that he had begun that summer: ""Peace and X'iolence" and Letter to the Leaders. "Peace and X'iolence" was an amplification of some of the ideas he had advanced in his Nobel lecture ideas, he now felt, that had been missed or misunderstood because of the indirect w ay in which they were expressed. He thought the time had come to make them more explicit and to link them to the theme of peace and detente, much as Sakharov was doing in his public statements. He appears to have been much preoccupied w ith Sakharov and Sakharov's view s that summer and autumn.
—
* These v\ere
amendments to a bill proposed bv President Nixon to ease trade with the Soviet Union bv granting the latter "most favoured nation" status, a device to give the Soviet Lnion access to credits and to reduce tariffs on its exports to the United States. The amendments were intended to make this status dependent on the So\ iet Union granting freer emigration to the Soviet Jews.
SOLZHENITSYN
[8io]
In his interview with Le Motide and the Associated Press, he had discussed and defended Sakharov at some length, offering his o\\ n idiosyncratic interpretation of Sakharov's importance: "There is in his behaviour a profound significance, a loftv sxmbol, a logical working-out of his own destinv: the inventor of the most destructive weapon of our age has submitted to the overpowering pull of the World's Conscience, and the eternally afflicted conscience of Russia. Weighed down by our common sins, and the sins of each and every one of us, he has abandoned the abundantly good life of which he was assured and which destroys so many people in the world today, and has
stepped out in front of the jaw
s
of all-powerful violence."
The
Soviet govern-
ment's charges against Sakharox he called "absurd" and "shameless" and pointed
out that in his suggestions for reform Sakharov invariably showed himself to
be well informed and constructive. Nevertheless, said Solzhenitsvn, there
were many things he could not support in Sakharov's concrete proposals, and it appears that his tw o essays were an attempt to formulate these differences and offer alternatives." "Peace and \ iolence" was completed in August 1973 and was first offered to Le Aloude, but the French new spaper rejected it, and Solzhenitsvn was obliged to seek another publisher (a new experience for him). On 3 August he heard that the Nobel Prize committee in Oslo had short-listed forty-seven candidates, including Presidents Nixon and Tito, for the Peace Prize, which struck him as ridiculous (he had not then heard of the even more surrealistic nomination of the eventual w inners, Kissinger and Le Due Tho). He decided to adapt his essay into a proposal of Sakharov for the prize and sent it off to Per Hegge at Aftenposten in Oslo (showing Sakharov a copy to warn him). 1
Ihe essay appeared (m
1
1
September. Sakharox immediately signified
acceptance of the nomination, but there xxere procedural
his
The
difficulties.
late for 1973 and was rejected. The idea appealed and Danish parliamentarians, hoxxever, and to some people
nomination had come too to
some
British
in other countries,
1974
if
who
pressed for Sakharov's candidacy to be switched to
1973 was out of the question, and this \xas eventually done.
Almost simultaneously, Solzhenitsvn completed and sent off his Letter The idea for it had come to him while he xx as finishing the first draft of "Peace and \ iolence," but w hereas the latter xxas concerned xxith to the Leaders.
"foreign policy," Letter
to the
Leaders contained a set of proposals for the alter-
ation of Soviet policy in domestic matters as it
in a
such
mood
a pull
of high excitement.
on me,
I
w
as so
The
Letter
xxell.
Solzhenitsvn had
xx
ritten
"had suddenlx' begun to exercise
overw helmed bx the crush of ideas and phrases, August 1 had to abandon mx' main
that for txxo days at the beginning of
work,
doxx n, and order it in sections." ork on the Letter throughout August and completed it on the last dax of the month. His initial plan xxas to release it to the press at the same time as "Peace and \ iolence" and double their impact, but let
the spate expend
Solzhenitsxn continued to
itself, xx rite it all xx
Natalia Svetlova dissuaded him:
let
and have time
before
to think about
it,
the Soviet leaders receive the Letter it
became public knoxx
first
ledge. Other-
Coming into the Open
[8ii]
would l)c tempted to dismiss it as propaganda. 'Since most attention w as paid to the fact of Sol/.henitsyn's nomination for the Peace Prize, the ideas propounded in his essa\- were Sakharov of generally ()verlcK)ked, though one or two correspondents in Moscow to whom Solzhenitsvn had given the Russian text, did note that it w as Solzhenitsx n's most outspoken attack to date on Western liberals and what he called their wise, thev
,
polic\-
of "appeasement" towards the Soviet aggressor.
The correspondents
U.S. Senate and the British Labour party Harold Wilson) for "hypocrisy," and his bew il-
also noted his criticisms of the
Prime xVlinister derment over the burgeoning of the Watergate (especially
affair,
which,
in
common
with the vast majority of the Soviet population, he regarded as an incomprehensible self-inflicted wound. The essa\- was not widely translated or discussed, h()we\er, and
it
disappeared from the international press betorc
its
contents could become w idely known.
Throughout the
rest of
September, Western publicity
in
favour of Sol-
zhenitsvn and Sakharov continued to mount. Thousands of prominent scientists, w Titers, artists, and other intellectuals signed petitions and telegrams
The U.S. House of Representatives heard a motion proposing two men be made honorary citizens of the United States. A leading newspaper commented that "the Solzhenitsyn-Sakharov affair ... is fast
of support. that the
escalating into a major international incident.
And
.
.
.
[It] is
swiftly reaching into
seemed that the campaign was for once American 1973 the Soviet Union ceased jamming September On 13 having results. for the first time since the Second World broadcasts foreign radio certain War. In the same week General Grigorenko w as transferred from a mental hospital to a normal hospital, and Evgeni Barabanov, one of the participants in From under the Rubble, emerged unscathed from a press conference at Svetlova's Moscow flat, w here he had announced his refusal to respond to a KGB political life."'-
it
summons.
On
September the Soviet Union took another step tow ards co-oper2 West by signing the Universal Copyright (Convention and with the ation establishing its ow n special agency for handling copyright matters (\'AAP).* 1
Since the exact wording of the relevant legislation was kept secret, there w ere persistent rumours that the new Soviet agency would use its pow ers to cut off samizdat or blackmail
Western publishers
into renouncing unofficial Soviet
manuscripts. But Solzhenitsyn found an ingenious notion. For
some
way
of challenging this
time he had been trying to think of a wa\- to publish The First Circle that he had cut
when preparing
some
the novel
from Sovy Mir. Accordingh', he announced that he was nowreleasing tw o chapters (chapters 44 and S8) into samizdat. If the Soviet Union was serious about preserving the rights of Soviet authors, it would protect these chapters from "arbitrary publication in the West."^"* No action w as in
extra chapters
for publication in
fact taken
by
VAAP
or by the Soviet government, either to defend or to
* Vsesoyuziioye agentstvo avtonk'ih prav (All-union .\genc\- for Authors' Rights).
SOLZHENITSYN
[8i2]
encroach upon Solzhenitsvn's copyright, and subsequent events show ed that the fears of a censorship role for the new cop\ right agencx had been some-
what exaggerated.
I
he chapters were pubHshed
in the \\ est
without hin-
drance.
Bv mid-September 1973 the storm of publicity raging in both East and West around the figures of Solzhenitsvn and Sakharov w as beginning to die down. Their positions looked stronger than ever. Iw o lone individuals had severely shaken the monolithic Soviet government's policy on detente, had its pow erful adversarx the United and vet seemed immune from reprisals by virtue of their w orld-w ide fame and reputations, in The First Circle Solzhenits\n had written, "For a country to have a great writer don't be shocked, I'll lower mv voice is like having a second government."'"* Could it be that the prophec\' was coming
exerted a direct influence on the policies of
,
States,
—
—
true? *
An
interesting extension of the nineteenth-centur\- critic \'issarion Belinsk\"s
are Russia's parliament."
dictum that
"\\ titers
44 THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Solzhenitsyn's mood was buoyant
in the
summer
of 1973, yet
at
the
back of his mind one unresolved problem continued to nag him: what to do about The Gulag Archipelago. 1 he original plan had been to publish in 1969, shortly after he completed it. The chance of receiving the Nobel Prize had caused him to put the matter off, and after the award was made know n, he had more than half expected to go to the West, where he could publish
had changed his mind about that too. The year 1970 had gone by, and 1971, and at the end of 1972, after much agonizing, he had decided to postpone the moment once again. His conscience was not he felt he had a duty to the millions of dead entirely easy with that decision the book at his leisure.
He
—
Gulag victims to publish at once. On the other hand, he could rationalize the postponement by envisaging the reprisals to which he (above all, he) and others of his two hundred witnesses would be subjected once the book appeared. But the determining factor was his desire to continue work on the and access to sources sequels to August 1914. For these he needed more time Archipelago at least The Gulag and he resolved to delay in the Soviet Union
—
—
until
Lenin began to play
a
major role
in the series.
Lenin had already appeared
one chapter of August 1914, but Solzhenitsyn had suppressed that from the published version and could easily do the same with the next two volumes. Only in volume 4 would Lenin play such a prominent role that it would be impossible to conceal the author's attitude to him, and that would come out, according to Solzhenitsyn's calculations, sometime in 1975.' It is possible that this decision was influenced by certain difficulties Solzhenitsyn was experiencing in arranging for foreign translations of The Gulag Archipelago. In October 1972 Solzhenitsyn had written to Olga Carlisle that in
813
-
SOLZHENITSYN
[814]
Harper & Row were to have the rights onlv to the Enghsh-language edition and that he was very concerned about the quality of the translation.
am
I
especially sensitive about the English translations
estlv,
am
I
not pleased with anv of the big translations.
.
.
.
and
to speak
Some of them
hon-
reduce
me
Meanwhile, a lot more will depend on how the translations of August, [Gulag] are understood and received. This is not simplv October, March, and my author's sensitivity, on this the whole solidity of mv legs depends, and I cannot vield to anyone out of goodwill. to despair.
.
He
did, he wrote,
He
.
.
still \\
ish
Olga
Carlisle to
be responsible for the English
and that he owed her a debt of gratitude for her work on The First Circle and her help with Gulag. But Carlisle was still dissatisfied and in Januarv 1973 had sent him an ultimatum: either she should have full control over the world rights or she would withtranslation.
felt
that she
wanted
this
altogether. It had taken two months for her letter to arrive, and he had answered her immediately: "Your letter has greatly saddened me, especially for its lack of keeping with the spirit of the book we are now talking about." He dealt with her objections to the new arrangement one by one and begged her to reconsider. "I w ill be sincerely happv if you keep the right of translation [into English] for yourself, to be ready at the agreed date and without going beyond the limitations of my conditions for all translators and publish-
draw
ers."
These "conditions" appear
to
have been arrived
at
by Solzhenitsyn only
slowly, in the course of thinking about Western publication, and he
knew
Western publishers would probably "cringe" when they learned about
that
them. "Under these conditions, the publishing house
\\ ill have extremely small This must be so, so that this book does not become a commercial commodity and will not be sold at demented Western prices ($10! This is 60 rubles. This cannot even be conceived of by our compatriots!)"' At the same time, Solzhenitsyn concluded that it would be helpful if the foreign translations appeared more or less simultaneously with the publication in Russian: the publicity would be much greater, and his own position thereby strengthened. But he was beginning to have serious misgivings about the American translation. According to his memoir, Carlisle had informed him in 1970 that the translation was "ready. ""^ Yet in her 1973 letter she had
profits.
uritten that only a in "a
more
was complete, while
"first draft"
"a substantial part" existed
and
finished style." For Solzhenitsyn (after four
a half years) this
was not enough. If
.
.
.
your decision
minating the
affair,
[to
withdraw] should be
just for
unfinished work (because
beginning of
a translation,
I
it
all
cannot consider being
a stage
I see one way of terno one: FIRE. Your greatly literal translation to be even the
irreversible,
and offensive a
to
which
is
usually completely unneces-
sary for translators) cannot be considered the "property of (as
vou write) since and
insofar as the
work
is
paid
for.
.
.
.
[Thomas Whitney]" Thus, upon comple-
GLi.\(i ARCiiir'F.i.xGO
I'ln:
tion of the
pavmcnt ...
the materials of the translation must he, hv vou
all
personally or hv xour representative,
of I)r
I
and
I|eeh|
HLRNKD,
left to
Knghsh bitter,
Olga
us sa\ inside the fireplace
let
presence.
in his
Whether the Russian manuscript tsvn
[Hi 5]
and
(>arlisle
I)r
I
Sol/hcni-
shotiltl l)c hiirncti as well,
lech to decide and suggested that a
new
translation be started "from zero." But he cotild not help feeling
he
\\
some completclv secondary, imnamed reasons vou
rote, "that tor
have determined to stain the mo\ ement of
this
book,
\\
hich
is
not
a literary
commodit\' but a link in Russian historx ."' It was as well he had decided to postpone publication for two more \ears, and perhaps it was a relief w hen he heard that the
had decided to withdraw from the project altohands of the man w ho had done the donke\ work homas \\ hitnew
(^arlisles
gether and to leave
it
so far, the translator
in the I
This was the rather unsatisfactory position in September 1973
Solzhenitsvn received electrifying news from Leningrad: the
down and
confiscated a cop\- of The Gulag Archipelago.
him on
September and was confirmed on the
1
The
first
when
tracked
message reached
His devoted tvpist,
third.
Elizaveta \'oron\anska\'a, had been interrogated b\- the
KCiB had
KGB and
had di\ulged
the whereabouts of one of the copies. \ oronvanskaxa herself was dead, prob-
ably a suicide.
was
in the
There w as
\'iolence" and Letter that the
game w as
onh' thing
little
he could do on the spur of the moment.
midst of completing and dispatching
left to
to the Leaders,
up:
do w
w
ith his
as to
but
a
its
in the
He
copies of "Peace and
few davs' thought con\inced
magiuiw opus
order
final
hands of the
KGB,
speed\' publication in the V\ est.
him the
The
Russian text was ready, and there was hope that the translations, if rushed, would not be too far behind. He sent word secretlv to Dr Heeb at once and on 5 September announced the existence of the book, and his decision to publish it, to \\ estern correspondents in Moscow He described the book as a history of the labour camps that contained "only real facts, places, and the names of more than two hundred persons w ho are still alive," but w as careful .
to specif\- that
it
covered the years "1918 to 1956" (that
is,
stopping short of
Brezhnev period).^ Ironically, although it was Solzhenitsyn's most important new s of the month, it was almost completely overlooked in the
the
flood ot indignant publicity about the press
campaign against him and the
merits and demerits of detente.
Solzhenitsvn did not dare go personally to Leningrad to investigate Voronyanskaya's death for fear of stepping into a trap, and it took him several weeks to piece together a haz\' picture of what must have happened. The sixtv-seven-vear-old typist, lame and in poor health, had been arrested in the first half of August. Her modest room in a communal flat had been ransacked, and she was taken to the "Big House" (the KGB headquarters in Leningrad), where she w as unremittingh" interrogated for five da\"s and nights. Eyentuallv, she cracked and revealed that a copy of the book w as buried in the garden of a dacha at Luga, not far from Leningrad. The dacha belonged
SOLZHENITSYN
[8i6]
Leonid Samutin, the former labour-camp prisoner and X'lasovite who had Ryazan (it was he w hom Solzhenitsyn had questioned in his car) and been one of his 227 informants for the book. The KGB had released \'oronvanskava but had kept her under some sort of house arrest to prevent her informing Solzhenits\'n, or anyone else, of what had happened.
to
visited Solzhenitsvn in
But
its
agents had not gone to collect the book.
They w ere
in^ for Samutin to leave his dacha, so that they could go
w
apparently w hile
ait-
he was aw ay
and keep their possession of the book a secret. Their plans had been upset by the unexpected death of Voronyanskaya some two w eeks after the interrogation. It is still not clear on which day she died. The bodv w as taken to the Leningrad morgue in strictest secrecy and
was not shown even
to the family before being sealed into a coffin for burial.
—
Voronyanskaya was said to have hanged herself. The funeral took place on 28 August 1973 and w as attended bv Samutin. The following day, Samutin telephoned Efim Etkind in Leningrad to inform him of Voronyanskaya's death, and the two of them arranged to meet at the cemeter\', w here Samutin informed Ftkind of the search of Voronvanskava's flat, the interrogation, and the confiscation of her "private archive." Etkind deduced from this that Samutin meant The Gulag Archipelago and telephoned Solzhenitsyn in Moscow to give him the
The
cause of death was given as "death by asphyxiation"
news. According to Solzhenitsyn's later reconstruction of events, however, Etkind had made a mistake. The manuscript had not yet been taken, and it w as Etkind's telephone call that triggered the search (both Solzhenitsyn's and Etkind's telephones were being tapped at this time). ()nl\ three days later was the loss of the manuscript finally confirmed.'* The most galling aspect of this tragic affair w as that Solzhenitsyn had thrice asked Voronyanskaya to burn her copy of the manuscript, and at the third time of asking she had assured him it was done. But, fearing that other copies might be lost, she had secreted her copy in Samutin's garden "just in case" (burial, burning, or confiscation seem to have been the fate of most of Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts at one time or another). The only source of information about \'oron\anska\a's last da\ s and hours was another w oman living in the same communal flat, who told lurid and contradictory stories of a hanging body w ith bloodstains and even knife wounds on it. It later emerged that this w oman w as the niece of one of Leningrad's senior prosecutors and
had only recently moved out of the flat to make way moved out again very soon after X'oronyanskaya's death, and Voronvanskava's room was sealed.^ SolzhenitsN n had no doubt that the KGB's capture of the book was a
that a family of workers for her. She, too,
*1 have tried to reconstruct the chronology of events surrounding \'oronyanskaya's death from
Solzhenitsyn's htcrarv
pubhshed in Efim Ktkind's
oir,
in
this
memoir (The Oak and the Calf), from his "sixth su]-)plement" to the memRKhD, no. 137 (1982), and from the fev\ fragments about it that appear
Vestnik .\'otes
of a Son-conspirator (Oxford
episode remain to be clarified.
That the
and
New
KCJB found
a
York, 1978), but man\- aspects of
copy of The Gulag Archipelago at is beyond dispute, how ever.
Samutin's dacha after interrogating X'oronvanskaya for several days
— Tin: (JLLAG
moment
decisive easily
in his life.
I
outdoing the notorious
lis
[Si-]
:\R(:iiii'i:i..\(,()
most outspoken work on the camps of the (J)ii(/itcrors in its excoriation
h'cast
—
e\ er
of Soxiet
it was hountl to bring retrii)Ution on his head. At first sight it seemed a greater disaster than the seizure of his archive in 196.^. .\nd vet his mood was tjuite different. "Not for a single hour, not for a minute, was down-hearted on this occasion," he later w rote.'^ he difference was that in 196.^ he had been taken completeK b\ surprise and had b\ no means hardened in his opposition to the So\ iet regime. On the contrarw it was the K(iB strike against him that had reawakened his worst fears and proxoked a re\er-
excesses
I
1
sion to the convict's paranoia that he hat! been slow
1\
he had conscioush embraced the role that the K(il5
casting off. Since then hatl, as
upon him, and had come successfulK" through a himdred stronger and more battle-hardened trom each one. H\ now
were, thrust
it
crises,
emerging
his fears, thoutih
ineradicable, w ere considerabh less than before, and he had acquired a faith in di\ ine
guidance: "I had enough experience ... to know from the prickling
of m\' scalp that God's hand was in
ne\er have mustered the strength, he while he w as unharmed and just as before, the all
at the
still
KCiB had taken
The
It
felt,
is
Th\- w
ill!"
Fa en so, he might
to publish Gulag \oluntaril\
had work to do
merc\' of a mightier force.
est thou, idle servant?
it!
,
not
in the Soviet
Union. But
the matter out of his hands.
Ihev were
"I
had glimpsed the finger of (iod: Sleep-
time has long since come and gone. Re\eal
it
to
the world!'""
When
the unthinkable happened, Solzhenits\n was
still
under the
ence ot the euphoria engendered bv his and Sakharov's successes
influ-
in their
a moment it seemed that the two Davids might succeed in thwarting (ioliath. Fhe entire U estern world appeared to be on their side. In his Rozhdestvo hide-out, Solzhenits\ n kept his ear glued to his short-wave radio for news of the battle. One more heave, it seemed to him, and some real changes might be on the w a\ Not so long ago he had w ritten of a ke\' character in August 1914: "Fver since his \ outh, \'orot\ ntsev had been obsessed b\' a profound desire to be a good influence on the history ot his countrv, b\' either pushing it or pulling it b\ the roots of the hair, if necessarv in the right direction." Fhat passage had ended w irh a rueful admission: "But in Russia that kind of pow er and influence w asn't granted to anyone who w asn't fortunate enough to be close to the throne; at whatever point \ orotvntsev attempted to exert pressure and however much he exhausted himself tr\ing, the effort was alwavs in vain."" Now, at last, \ orotvntsev-Solzhenits\ n must have felt that his hour had come. Towards the end of October, he drew up a list of possible courses of action the authorities might take. Gulag, he felt sure, w as being passed "directhtrom the experts to the top bosses, right up to Andropov himself," and its effect would be devastating: "The blood must have turned to ice in their
unequal struggle w th the Soviet authorities. For
.
—
its publication might be fatal to the s\stem."'So what would thev do? Solzhenitsvn foresaw half a dozen options. Ihe was to kidnap his children as hostages, but he w as readv for that. "We
veins;
first
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[8i8]
had the
.
.
made
.
memorv
a
superhuman
decision: our children
were no dearer
of the miUions done to death, and nothing coukl
to us than
make us stop the West bv
Thev might trv to intercept the manuscripts in and steaHng them, or bring legal pressures to bear, perhaps under the new copyright law Or simplv intensitx their efforts to blacken and intimidate him. For all these he w as equally prepared. But there was one last option that he secretly hoped they would choose to negotiate. "Against this that book."'
breaking
in
.
—
last
put
I
a large
question mark," he writes in The Oak and
remark of Demichey's that had once been passed along \\ ith
SolzhenitsNn?
adds defensiyely,
them
He
won't
liye to see the
"I didn't really belieye in
for myself, couldn't yisualize
the Calf,
quoting
day!" After w hich Solzhenitsyn
them
[negotiations], didn't
The
had been
latter
set
w
ant
them." But he had done eyerything he
could to prepare for them and make them possible. His foreign and policies
a
to him: "Negotiate?
out in "Peace and \ iolence" and Letter
home
to the Leaders.
had deepened and expanded upon the anti-Western sentiments
in
the former, and The Gulag Archipelago had been equipped with a deceptiye
chronological indicator,
"From 1918
to 1956."
It
appears likely that part
7,
would haye been held back bv Solzhenitsyn if Brezhney had really entered into negotiations (which was why Solzhenitsyn had announced the same chronology to the press). On the day he posted his Letter, Solzhenitsyn had felt that it "couldn't be more timely: they had realized at last that we were a force to be reckoned with." And he had
dealing with the
acceded to
camps
after 1956,
his wife's request that the existence of the Letter
be kept
hope that thev would read it."'' answer to his pravers, the day after he had draw n up
a secret
"in the infinitesimal
As
if in
of options, Solzhenitsyn did get a kind of offer to negotiate
his table
—not from the
government or the Central Committee but from Natalia Reshetovskava. He had seen her two davs beforehand at Rozhdestvo. Thev had had a furious row, and he w as not anxious to see her again so soon. But Natalia was insistent, and he deduced from the meaningful tone of her voice that it w as not just a personal matter but had some sort of political dimension as well. Thev met at the Kazan Station (the terminus for R\azan) later that same day, 24 September 1973. According to Solzhenitsyn, Natalia said that she had been speaking to "certain people" and had come to discuss the possible publication of some of Solzhenitsvn's suppressed works. Ihe prime candidate was Cancer Ward. Was Solzhenitsyn, she wanted to know prepared to negotiate for the publication of Cancer Ward? Would he sign a publisher's contract and keep quiet about the fact that she had come here to offer him this concession? After all, it had been his refusal in 1967 to go to Navy Mir and sign a "mild" letter on \\ estern publication that had led to the ban in the ,
first
place.
She told him he was wrong to keep attacking the security organs. It w as Ontral Committee that w as persecuting him, not the KCiB. "It w as the\" w ho published Feast of the Conquerors, and w hat a mistake that was!" She said she had recenth' made many new and influential friends in high places, and
the
The Gli.ag Archipelago
[Hk;]
thev were far cleverer than Solzhenitsyn gave them credit for being.
thev
If
had been searching for his manuscripts, it was Solzhenitsvn's fault: "\'ou tell the world that vour most important works are still to come, that the flow \\ ill continue even if you die, and that w av vou force them to come looking." Evidentlv with The Gulag Archipelago in mind, she asked him, "W'hv don't vou just make a declaration that all your works are in vour exclusive possession and that vou won't publish anvthing for twenty vears?"'"^ Solzhenitsvn writes that the bargain did not strike him as
a ver\'
good
one, though he plaved along with the conversation for the sake of appear-
ances and genuinelv wavered over Cancer Ward. Politicallv,
important to him, but the prospect of publication
He
—
it
was no longer Union w as
in the Soviet
would agree to publication in w ould agree to keep quiet about
and with nothing and her offer (though it appears he didn't intend to for one moment). The irritating thing from his point of view was that he was being obliged to conduct these negotiations on such a low level with his ex-w ife. On the other hand, he was exultant that "thev" had chosen to negotiate with him at all and w as sure that she had been dispatched bv someone in an official position. 1 his seemed to be confirmed when she cautiouslv asked him w hether he would agree to talk to somebodv "a bit higher up," and explained that her aim was to help him: "I believe that in the discussions I have had, and in particular chapters of mv memoirs which I have sent to certain people, I have succeeded in explaining vour character, defending vou, and making vour lot easier." Solzhenitsvn, she said, was surrounded bv fools: "Somebod\' is deceiving you, inflaming vour suspicions, practicing some terrible emotional blackmail on vou, inventing imaginarv threats." She said it was time for him alluring.
cut.
He
said he
also said he
full
their conversation
—
come
and talk, but Solzhenitsvn was not prepared to negotiand unsatisfactory wav, and told her that he would speak "only to the Politburo" and onh' "about the nation's destinv, not m\' own." The conversation then degenerated into another personal w rangle, and thev parted with nothing resolved." In his dramatic account of this meeting in The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsvn expresses his conviction that Natalia was acting under orders from the KGB (with whom she must have been put in touch bv Novosti) and that the two of them were being watched, photographed, and recorded by secret policemen in plain clothes on parallel platforms. Indeed, this scene forms one of the high points of his book and was the reason, he w rites, w hv he broke to
to his senses
ate in this indirect
off relations with her afterwards. Reshetovska\a, howexer, in a separate account
of this meeting, has thrown considerable doubt on Solzhenitsvn's interpretation.
The
entirely her
meeting, and the suggestion for negotiations, she writes, were
own
as a last feverish
*See note
idea, conceived in desperation after their
attempt to avert
a
row
at
Rozhdestvo
permanent rupture.*
to p. 801. After their quarrel over the
Rozhdestvo cottage
in the late
zhenits\ n had informed Natalia Reshetovskaya that he did not wish to see her or v\
ith
her again.
summer, Solcommunicate
SOLZHENITSYN
[82o]
She had begun by using her contacts
at
Novosti to approach someone
probably in the ideological department of the Central Committee, since that w as where most of Solzhenitsyn's problems had arisen. This person, whom Natalia promised not to name (and has still not named), was in the Party,
extremely cautious, and or
make
felt
that Solzhenitsyn
would not agree
to negotiate
concessions, but said that he would certainly agree to talk to Solzhe-
nitsN'n if the latter
chance of doing
came
a deal
that her sole contact
w
to the (Central
Committee and
oyer Cancer Ward. As for the ith that
that there
KGB,
might be
a
Natalia writes
organization had been shortly beforehand,
about The Gulag Archipelago and to w hether she knew of any further copies. As Solzhenitsyn's former wife, she w as an obvious target for questioning, especially since she was mentioned in V'oronyanskaya's diary as one of the typists. The diary had contained one or two other names as well, about which the KGB had also questioned her, and that was w hy she in turn was to mention these names during her meeting w ith Solzhenitsyn (leading him to accuse her ot haying given them away herself). This, then, w as the background to Natalia's meeting with Solzhenitsyn, and she had fixed it up in the fantastic and forlorn hope that if she could somehow be the instrument of his reconciliation w ith the government, she w ould earn his undying gratitude and thereby salvage their relationship. It was a pathetic enterprise, and she was hopelessly out of her depth, arousing his suspicions all the more and ruining their relations forever. But her assertion that she w as not the cat's-paw of the KGB rings true, and her belief that Solzhenitsyn later exaggerated his suspicions is supported by two further
when
its
agents had
come
to question her
try to discoyer
She had set their rendezvous, she writes, inside the stawas Solzhenitsyn w ho had insisted that they w alk to the far end of one of the platforms, from where he could see everyone for yards around and make sure that there were no microphones or eavesdroppers. If they were spied upon, it was not pre-arranged w ith her. In her view, Solzhenits\n arrived at the opinion that she was being pieces of evidence. tion building,
and
it
manipulated by the
KGB only much later,
his total rupture of relations.
The
probably as
a
way
of rationalizing
point was that she had written
him
a "ner-
about their differences over the Rozhdestvo cottage, in which she had taunted him w ith being a puppet of Svetlova. This letter she handed to him at the station. Three weeks later she recei\ed a bitter reply, breaking
vous
letter"
off relations
and informing her that he had withdraw n w as no mention
the cottage transferred to her. But there
Kazan Station meeting or of any suspicions
that Natalia
the KCjB.'^ This accusation did not arise until
his request to at that
have
time of their
had been acting for
later.
Solzhenitsyn could not go back to Rozhdest\o in these circumstances, running into Natalia (it was in any case the end of the season), nor
for fear of
Moscow without a residence permit, and he had promised Zhukovka for good. Fortunately, the Chukovskys came to the rescue
could he stay to leave
again. Lvdia
in
Chukovskava had followed the Sakharov-Solzhenitsyn
battle
Till
against in earlv
(iii.\(.
1^2
:\iross," a description that puzzled observers until Ciinzburg himself clarified the matter with a separate statement saving that he had taken charge of a fund to help the families of pc^litical prisoners and that the main source of money for the fund was Solzhenitsvn.'"^ In tact, the status of political prisoner no longer existed in the Soviet Union. It had been abolished by Stalin in 1937, and w ith it the (Committee to Aid Political Prisoners (headed in those days b\' (iorky's former wife, Lkaterina Peshkova), popularly known then as the "Political Red Cross." Aid to the victims ot political persecution had always been a Russian tradition, however, and it was revived again in the mid-sixties by members of the Democratic Alovement. In 1970 an attempt had been made to organize this aid on a more regular basis, and it was at around this time that Solzhenitsvn had begun donating a part of his royalties. He had alw ays intended the royalties from The Gulag Arcbipehigo to go to such a cause as well, and in Zurich he lost no time in setting up the Russian Social Fund to Aid Political Prisoners and Their Families, which was properly constituted as a charitable foundation under Sw iss law. Theoretically, other people were invited to contribute to the fund too, but in practice the overw helming bulk of the money consisted ot the proceeds from The Gulag Archipelago. Ihe fund was officialK' launched in April 1974, and (jinzburg was put in charge of collecting names and distributing aid within the Soviet Union. It was for this reason (not formally, but in fact) that he had been expelled from Moscow and obliged to leave his family and reside in Tarusa, a small town about eighty miles to the south, *
There were
several counts against Etkind, including his earlier defence of losif Brodsky, but
the Solzhenitsvn connection seems to have been the decidiny factor.
Taking Positions
[^75]
and placed under administratixc surxcillancc, hut it did not stop him from announcing the existence ot the tund and inxiting appHcations. The president of the fund, he said, would he not Sol/.hcnitsx n hut his w ife, NataHa Svetioxa. Solzhenits\n, nieanw hile, niatle a similar announcement in Zurich. Just as, since the heginning of the \ ear, Sol/.henits\ n had rexersed his former policx- and l)egun to speak out on hehalf of indi\idual dissidents, so he now hegan to speak openl\- and acti\el\' on the suhject of detente, hi a letter to the U.S. congressmen Donald Fraser and Benjamin Rosenthal, w ho had solicited his \iew s on detente, SoIzhenits\ n w rote that w hile true detente was "not only necessary hut mankind's only saKation," the "pseudo-rA'/f;;/f" being negotiated b\ Nixon and Brezhne\ w as a fraud, since onh' the United States was making concessions. The So\ iet Union was bound to cheat, just as North \ ietnam w as cheating on the truce arranged b\' Kissinger, since there w ere no guarantees built into it. Solzhenitsyn criticized not onh Kissinger but also Willy Brandt and his recent statement that he would haye attempted detente eyen w ith Stalin. Did that mean, asked Solzhenits\n, that Brandt would haye adyocated detente with Hitler as well?'' Tow ards the end of June, Solzhenitsyn repeated these yiew s directly to the American people in a lengthy teleyision inter\iew w ith Walter Cronkite. He had been bombarded w ith requests to appear on tele\ ision eyer since his arriyal in the West and had steadfastly refused. But the painful work of reyising the .American translation of The Gulag Archipelago w as now hnished, the book was timed for publication in the last week of June, and Solzhenits\n apparently w anted to erase from American minds the bad impression left b\his earlier criticisms of the American media. 1 he choice of Cronkite to do the inter\iew was presumabK dictated b\' Cronkites audience ratings in the United States, but in other respects it was unfortunate. Cronkite did not appear to be well briefed on life in the Soyiet Union and had little grasp of SolzhenitsN n's career and writings, so that the interyiew was rambling and unfocused and the questions yague, w ith no attempt made to follow up the answers or press for clarifications. Apart from detente, he again talked about his attitude to the press and explained why he had been shocked by the journalists' behayiour. But this time he was more conciliatory. He w as fully aw are, he said, that the \\ estern press had helped him to suryiye, for which he was "yery grateful." And he explained his position more precisely. "Not only
am
I
not
critical
of the
system of freedom of the press but, on the contrary, I consider it a great blessing that the West has a free press. But I feel that not only the press but eyery profession and every indiyidual must know how to use freedom, and
know where
to call a halt
and
set a
moral limit."
He
also pointed out, like
Amalrik before him, that the aggressive, inyestigatiye instincts of W estern journalists somehovy seemed to evaporate when the\' reached Moscow or at least underwent a rapid cooling: the press w as quite capable of applying dou,
its w ork. Another topic he returned
ble standards in
to
was
Letter to the Leaders, again insisting that
SOLZHENITSYN
[876]
he had been misunderstood. He had not said that he preferred an authoritarian system of rule, or that it was better than democracy, but simplv that under present Soviet conditions, he did not see a way of bringing democracy to Russia without a new revolution, and he w as against revolutions in principle. It was true he had criticized Western democratic methods, and to a large extent he stuck by that, but that had been written in the Soviet Union; having
now
seen the S\\
at least for
iss
system
Switzerland.
It
at
work, he
felt
he had to make an exception
did not mean, however, that the Swiss system
could be exported to England, France, or America,
Union. Every country was different and had
its
own
still
less to the
traditions
Soviet
and possibil-
ities.
Similarly, he did not erally.
He
make
liked to
whereas he was very
want
America to be taken too litbetween peoples and governments, and the American government's foreign policy, he the American people. his criticism of
a distinction
hostile to
did not extend this hostility to Please believe me, and
I
w ant
to sav this to
vou here todav,
that independently
among the Russian people a steadfast w hich has come into being despite the lies
of your government's policies, there exists
sympathy
first
kind of inner compatibility between the Russian and American
Your
generosity, for instance, and your magnanimity are very well
is
understood by our people, probably because also generous
The
we
are alike in this
— Russians
are
and magnanimous."^'
interview was
a great
success in America
other countries as well. Television, the
man
one thing and then another), and
a
that there
peoples.
American people, new spapers have written
for the
in the press (our
medium
—and was shown
in
many
of the masses, the eve of the
had been allowed into the mysterious Russian's home, and seen him revealed as a human being like the rest of us. Passionate, yes; vehement, yes, but also likeable and manageable, and very charming in close up. This was not the impression created by volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago, which had appeared in French a few weeks earlier and now came out in England and America. A dawning sense that this was possibly one of the great books of the twentieth century, fed in the first instance by reports of the Russian and German editions, now received massive confirmation as hundreds of thousands of copies of the book (soon to be followed by millions of paperbacks in America alone over two million) rolled out into the bookshops and thence into the hands of incredulous readers. Starting with its slitheringly evocative title (Arkhipelag Gulag sounds even more reptilian in the original Russian) and puzzling subtitle, .4/7 Experiment in Literary Investigation, it was perceived as strange and unique, a conducted tour of a chamber of horrors almost without parallel in modern literature. It was, of course, the contents that attracted most attention and comment. In principle, the story that SolzhenitsN n had to tell was not new to well-intormed Western intellectuals. \\ hat was undoubtedly new however. in the street,
shown
into his living-room,
—
,
Taking Positions
[877]
was the comprehensiveness of Solzhenitsyn's compilation, the intensits' and passion ot his formulation, and the devastating judgement he pronounced on These things were uttered with the unique fift\- years of Soviet history. authoritv of someone w ho had li\ed through and survived the sxstem (and even been a part of it for a while), who had seen it from the inside not bv one of the dozens of W esterners, or even emigres or refugees, w ho had chronicled these monstrosities from a greater distance. Ihe immediate comparison that sprang to reviewers' minds was the
—
similaritx', the I lolocaust had made minds than the Gulag because it was closer and had destroved millions of Westerners and people w ith connections to the \\ est, and also because Westerners were conscious of a certain complicitv. Solzhenitsvn's achievement was to impress on Western minds the horror of the Gulag w ith almost the intensitv that earlier discoveries had done for the Holocaust. A large part of his success was due to sheer literarv power. Critics agreed that it w as one of Solzhenitsvn's verv best books, citing the extraordinarv richness and complexitv of his central metaphor: an archipelago that stretched for thousands of miles, made up of islands, bavs, peninsulas, capes, promontories, and an ocean into w hich flowed hundreds of rivers, streams, and ri\ulets. To an English commentator, the sensation of reading Solzhenitsyn's prose was that of being "disconcerted by the shriek and roar of the high wind, the sustained passion of the ironv, the violence of apostrophe and in\ousins
not in the tradition of Milton, Paine, Mill, Jefferson, and "not exen" of I'dmund
Burke.* Similar misgivings were being voiced in Washington, to w hich Solzhenitsvn was due to return from
New
York. Oitics wondered whether the
Soviet government hadn't been exceptionally clever in allow ing Sol/.henits\n
come to the West. Speaking and w riting from inside the Soviet Union, he had possessed an unchallenged (and \ irtuallv unchallengeable) authorit\-, but his words now, coming from a free man in no immediate danger, seemed to have lost much of their pow er. He was percei\ed bv man\' as a "cold war-
to
rior," a stick-in-the-mud conservative
Meany and
with mvstical leanings, a cronx' of Cieorge
the conservative hardhats of organized labour, and no different
opinions from the hundreds of thousands of other embittered exiles from Eastern Europe whom many Americans regarded as defenders of obscurantism and reaction. These critics might have damaged Solzhenitsvn's reputation irrex ersibh in the political circles he hoped to influence, had he not been inadvertenth' saved by the blunderings of President Gerald Eord. Eord had informalK indicated, soon after Solzhenitsvn's arrival in the United States, that he would be amenable to a meeting with him if Solzhenitsvn should go to Washington. But on 2 July he had announced that he would not meet Solzhenitsvn, "on in his
the advice of the National Security Council."
some
When
pressed to elaborate,
aides of the president disclosed that questions had been raised about
Solzhenitsvn's mental stability, and someone had suggested that since Sol-
zhenitsvn was in the United States "to promote his books," the president
should not get mixed up
in
such commercial enterprises-'^ (having posed with
"the cotton queen" on the White
House
the Brazilian soccer player, a few days invitation to the
retary of State
AFL-CIO
Henry
law n the
later).
week before and w
The
ith Pele,
president had declined an
banquet, as had \ ice-President Rockefeller, Sec-
Kissinger, and the leaders of both the Senate and the
House of Representatives (Secretary of Defense Schlesinger and Secretary of Labor Dunlop had gone in the end, along with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan). It was Solzhenitsvn's views on detente that made him so unpopular w ith the Ford administration. In the very week that Solzhenits\n returned to Washington, American and Soviet astronauts w ere due to link up in space, symbolizing what was to be a the *
new
era of friendship and co-operation
two superpowers. The U.S. government was anxious not
Among
foreign critics of the
zhenitsvn,
between
to spoil the
American speeches were two former staunch supporters of
Raymond Aron and Milovan
Djilas.
Sol-
SOLZHENITSYN
[9i8]
atmosphere, which was
Some of Ford's Henrv Jackson
political
whv
Solzhenitsvn's presence was so inopportune.
opponents, however, notably Senators Jesse Helms,
(co-author of the Jackson amendment), and Clifford Case,
seized on this opportunity to embarrass the president
tsvn to Washington to address a group of
by
inviting Solzheni-
members from both houses
of
Almost immediately, on the eve of Solzhenitsyn's television appearance, Ford back-pedalled and let it be kno\\'n that if Solzhenitsyn was to seek a meeting with him, he would be happy to see him. But now Solzhenitsyn had the satisfaction of declining in his turn. "I am not here as the guest of the American government," he told his television audience, "but of the AFL-CIO. Mv purpose is to appeal not to the government but to the
Congress.
American people as a whole. "-^ It was a fitting response, but there can be little doubt that Solzhenitsyn was disappointed. Nor could he miss the irony that after having failed to meet (as he had hoped) the Soviet leaders in Moscow, he had now been spurned bv the American leaders in Washington as well. Perhaps for this reason he was at pains to emphasize, in his remarks to the congressmen, how pleased he was to be speaking for the first time to "participants in your country's legislative process, v\'hose influence in recent
years has spread well beyond the limits of American history alone," and he
was
particularly corrosive in his denunciation of the "loathsome and repul-
system with which America was hoping to come to terms. He equated with "diplomatic shovels" ready to "bury and pack down bodies still breathing in a common grave" and described himself as a messenger from the voiceless millions of the Soviet camps, sent to break through "that calamitous \\ all of ignorance or of unconcerned arrogance" that he had found in America. He appealed to the members present to rise above the narrow concerns of party and state and see themselves as leaders "on whom depends whether sive"
detente
w ill tend to tragedy or salvation." He had done warn and prepare them but was unsure whether he had succeeded. "I have done what I was bound to do, and what I could. So much the worse "-^ if the justice of my warning becomes evident only some years hence. The pantomime of the presidential invitation, however, was not over yet. In the course of the two w eeks since President Ford's original refusal to meet Solzhenitsyn, White House spokesmen had twice changed the official reason for the snub. First it was said that the president's timetable was too crowded for him to fit Solzhenitsyn in, and then that the president, not knowing \\ hat he v\ as supposed to discuss w ith Solzhenitsyn, had seen no point in a meeting "without substance." Most commentators concluded, even when they disagreed w ith Solzhenitsyn's views, that it had been a crass blunder on Pres-
the course of w orld history his best to
ident Ford's part not to see him, and a political and personal gaffe that reflected
more on President Ford than on the author (the president's mail on the subject was said to be unusually voluminous and unusually hostile). The debate rumbled on for the rest of the month, during w hich it emerged that Henry Kissinger was the person responsible for having advised the president against the meeting. In a speech defending his position, Kissinger declared that there
On the Move
(9 19]
was a great uas eonvinced that if Solzhenitsvn's views were adopted as the American national fK)licy, "we would be confronting a considerable threat of military conflict."-''' It was also suggested in the press that after changing his original decision. President Ford had sent numerous messages to Solzhenitsyn via Senators I lelms and Jackson to visit him, but that Solzhenitsyn had insisted on a w ritten invitation before was "no alternative" to writer whose suffering
and
detente
entitled
he would accept. Solzhenitsvn that
what he had wanted w
block.
From Alexandra
to be heard, he
denied this story but did make
later
the president
ith
but a discussion of the issue oi
said that while Sol/.henitsyn
him
detente,
and
was not
this
Tolstox's farm in upstate
a
it
clear
"svmbolic" meeting
had been the hnal stumbling-
New
York, w here he released
he denounced President Ford for agreeing to journey to Europe to sign the Helsinki Final Act, which had just been concluded by the thirtv-five nations participating in the European Security Conference in Fin-
this information,
Ford was going, said Solzhenitsvn, "to sign
land.
Europe, to acknowledge In the final analvsis
odds. Just as in
.
.
.
the betrayal of Eastern
officiallv its slavery forever."'" it
w as
Moscow he had
a
moral victorv for Solzhenitsyn against the meet the "leaders" but had broadcast
failed to
views to the world through the w orld's press, so now in Washington he had profited from the American government's blunders to get double the publicitv and attention his visit might otherw ise have merited. His charisma and his single-mindedness had again proved spectacularly (if misleadingly) effective, and Solzhenitsvn could be forgiven for thinking that his mission to the West had not been undertaken in vain. Solzhenitsvn's last port of call in the United States was Vermont. After his
spending three davs state,
in seclusion in a quiet inn in the
he travelled to Northfield to spend
western part of the
a further three
days
at
Norwich
Uni\ersitv, at the invitation of the Russian department there, headed by
Nikolai Pervushin. While on campus, he took the opportunity to play a rare
game of
tennis,
and
the end of his stay he complimented
at
"efforts to preserve Russian culture
Norwich on its He was
without the Soviet imprint."
reported to be impressed with both the climate and the countryside of \'er-
mont, and news that he had retained a prominent \'ermont lawyer to act for him provoked speculation that he was thinking of settling there." Certainly, Vermont had all the advantages of Canada, in addition to belonging to a political superpow er. It would be possible to be both physicall\- isolated and yet close to the centres of real influence
if
the need arose.
Vermont, Solzhenitsyn spent a part of his time writing a long article about his impressions of the two American branches of the Russian Orthodox church,* which was to involve him in yet another controDuring
his stav in
versv with his fellow Russians, a controversv that threw a
*The Orthodox Church church
in Moscov\-,
v\
in
America (OCA)
is
autocephalous but maintains relations with the
hereas the Russian Orthodox
Church Abroad does not recognize any other
Russian church. In Paris the Russian Orthodox church of Constantinople.
It
recognizes both
tireat deal of litjht
Moscow and
the
is
under the authority of the patriarchate
OCA.
SOLZHENITSYN
[92o]
The article appeared from America," and in it Solzhenitsvn criticized the two branches for their mutual hostility and for their inability to unite with the Ukrainian Orthodox church. Among other things, he reversed his position on the Orthodox Church in America and now berated it for having established relations with the Moscow^ patriarchate, for accepting orders from it, and, in effect, for making a deal with the Soviet Communist regime. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, on the other hand, \\ hich was separate from the Orthodox Church in America, was noteworthy for its "implacable hatred of Bolshevism" and its attachment to pre-revolutionarv Russian traditions, a stand that Solzhenitsvn now found infinitely
on
assumptions and intellectual processes.
his current
in no.
1
16 of the Paris Vestnik as "Letter
preferable to the posture of the other church.
Solzhenitsvn did not stop there, however. According to him,
"all
three"
branches of the Russian Orthodox church outside the Soviet Union (the two in America and the church based in Paris)* were guiltv of gradually moving aw ay from and forgetting the Orthodox population of Russia, and
churches
the resulting
split, if it
took place, could be catastrophic not just for Russia
but for the w hole w orld.
mv
have become more convinced than ever that
In the year
and
sufficiently
powerful hands and sufficiently stout hearts simply do not exist in
a half
of
the West: everyone here
increasing \\ ill
it
be found only
century, Russia sian
It
is
that either the
problems
is
is
in the
exile,
I
so enfeebled by prosperity and so preoccupied with
w orld
soon perish or else the hands to battle
\\ ill
enslaved East. For the w orld history of the
the key country.
.
.
.
That
not so very narrow after
all,
is
w hv
a
t\\
preoccupation u
hell
entieth
ith
Rus-
but of universal significance.
w as the duty of the Russian churches abroad
to preserve their links
with Russia and to carry the message of Russian Orthodoxy to the rest of the world. But to do that they had to be worthy of Russia, to sacrifice, to
atone for the sins of the past.
The
make
a spiritual
primal sin of the Orthodox
church was the great schism of the seventeenth centur\', when the Old Believers
He himself had visited the America and had been overwhelmed by
had been driven from the church and persecuted.
Old
Believers in their settlements in
their piety, their courage, their stamina, their fierce devotion to the old tra-
and their Russianness. Similarh', in Alaska he had been astonished by the tenacity of the faithful: "One has got to admit that the culture brought to them from 'backw ard' Russia has proved to be spiritually superior to that 'better' televisio-technico-consumer culture offered them bv today's United States." It was the duty of the Russian churches in exile to repent and take two major steps: one, to refuse to have any dealings v\ ith the satanic Communist regime and, two, to heal the schism with the Old Believers and welcome them back into the fold. For the Old Believers had much to teach the ditions,
*Technically speaking, there are not "three branches." See note
p. 919.
On the Move
[9^
•
]
other churches, and "in the Russia of the Old Believers the Leninist revolution
would have been impossible. "'It may seem that this obscure debate
assertions of
its
(if
we do
not take Solzhenitsyn's
global significance at their face value) about the fate of the
Russian Orthodox church abroad would not be of responses showed,
it
much
revealed, in a particularly clear
interest,
but as the
way, some of the preoc-
cupations and methods that Solzhenitsyn was bringing to his polemical declarations on both politics and religion, as well as some of the problems those
preoccupations and methods posed. Solzhenitsyn's apocalyptic view that the world was on the brink of a major crisis, for instance, had been voiced in
both Washington (we face "a threat to the w orld") and New York ("We are approaching a major turning-point in world history, in the history at civilization"), and in the latter he had repeated his view that the world faced a turning-point similar to that dividing the Middle Ages from the
modern
era.
In his speech to the congressmen, he had elaborated on this in speaking about
oncoming combination of a world political crisis w ith a shift in the spirvalues of a humanity exhausted and choked by the existing false hierarchv of values," and in his television remarks he had hinted at what was now fulh' spelled out namely, that it was the mission of Russia, which "has "the
itual
—
been forced to undergo such spiritual experiences, such spiritual burdens, and has had to undergo such growth that it has now, I think, more experience than any other countrv in the world" to speak to the West as "a voice from the future" and ultimately to save it from perdition. Responses to Solzhenitsyn's letter came from his tw o most faithful and fervent supporters in the West, Nikita Struve, editor of the Vestnik (and a director of the
YMCA
Press, Solzhenitsyn's Russian-language publisher),
and Father Alexander Schmemann, Solzhenitsyn's favourite preacher in America and the man who had once pronounced him a living literary classic and a prophet. Both men asserted that Solzhenitsyn had got many of his facts w rong, had exaggerated the seriousness of the squabbles between the churches, and had overestimated the virtue of the Old Believers. Struve pointed out that the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad had much in common w ith the
Old
Believers, for in both, hostility to evil tended to turn into intolerance of
fellow believers and steadfastness into bitterness, while a total rejection of the
modern world had
led to an
immoderate
idealization of the past,
and
especially of tsarist Russia (the fact that this also described Solzhenitsyn's
was not spelled out by Struve). Father Schmemann put his finger even more fearlessly on w hat was wrong w ith Solzhenitsyn's letter in the eyes of a convinced admirer. What saddened and perplexed him, he wrote, position
was Solzhenitsyn's
failure to
check his
facts, his willingness to repeat mali-
cious gossip, the unfoundedness of his accusations, and above inexplicable tone of exasperation. ity to
Schmemann
some delusion on Solzhenitsyn's
He
the letter's
part and to his having inadvertently
adopted the usual, condescending tone of Russian discussed church matters.
all
charitably ascribed this asper-
intellectuals
whenever they
could not refrain from pointing out, however,
SOLZHENITSYN
[922]
was comfrom the Solzhenitsyn of the letter. In the former he had done his homev\ork, mastered the facts, and written \\ ith a "creative conscience," none of which was in evidence in the letter. This increasingly common view of Solzhenitsyn's strengths and weaknesses carried all the more \\ eight in coming from one of his most dedicated champions, but Schmcmann went much further than that. It was clear, he wrote, that Solzhenitsyn's obsession with the Old Believers and their schism from the main church v\ as not fortuitous, but occupied a key position in his thinking, and this was because Solzhenitsyn was convinced that the great schism of the seventeenth century had been the reason for Russia's downfall and had led inexorably to the disaster (and second great schism) of the Revthat the Solzhenits\'n of The Gulag Archipelago and August 1914 pletely' different
olution.
Schmemann
\\
as inclined to agree
the opposite reasons. Solzhenitsyn's
Schmemann, could be divided ance for place
with Solzhenitsyn, but for quite
call for
repentance and reunion, wrote
—
two parts. With one of the parts repentthe harsh persecution of the Old Believers once the split had taken
—everyone could
agree,
into
and Schmemann pointed out
that, contrary to
Solzhenitsyn's self-righteous assumption that he was preaching something
new, it \\ as the consensus among Orthodox believers and had become official church policy. The second part of Solzhenitsyn's appeal, calling for repentance because the Old Believers had been right and were closer to the true faith, \\ as unacceptable to Schmemann, and in his view turned the truth on its head. I he Old Believers had not been the innocent victims of revolutionary zeal on the part of the main church. On the contrary, it was they who were the revolutionaries, \\ ho had rebelled against the church in the name of a false Utopia, and who had been the first in Russian history to succumb to the temptation of ideology. It was the first time that the Russian consciousness had given in to certain characteristic temptations a love of false absolutisms, a tendency to splits and alienation, an inclination to "escape" from history into apocalyptic fears and Utopias. For Schmemann, "ideologism," as he called it, was the chief fruit of the great schism, and ideologism inexorably led to "the absolutization of a single historiosophical schema, which, taken as an absolute truth, is no longer subject to verification by reality, but on the contrary, itself becomes the sole criterion for reality's understanding and evaluation." It was obsession with ideolog\- that had captured and torn Russia apart, and this was the result of the psychological temptations and "ambiguous maximalism" spawned by the schism. 1 his explained the attraction of the Old Believers for radicals of both the right and the left. "One day it will finally be admitted as a self-evident truth that all ideologies, w hether they be of the 'left' or the 'right,' directed tow ards either the past or the future, give birth to the same type of person: someone w ho is above all blind to reality, although he appears to be addressing it, tor the sake of radically changing it, with all his will and with the
—
totality of his ideological faith.
Schmemann stopped
"^^
there.
As he pointed out
at the
end of
his article,
On the Move
ly2
3]
Russian literature had generall)' avoided the temptations of ideologi/.ation, and that was one of the keys to its greatness. Solzhenitsyn was a part of Russian literature (indeed, Solzhenits\n's was the loudest contemporary voice
warning against the dangers of ideolog\). But although Schmemann drew no it was hard not to find certain parallels between the vehement ecclesiastical maximalist blinded by his Utopian visions and the thundering political prophet of the Washington and New York speeches, or not to see a SolzhenitsN-n who was both a part of Russian literature and a roistering preacher w ho quoted his opponents out of context and spoke with an accumulation of rancour and resentment that did not appear justified by the facts. The second Solzhenitsyn was not against ideology as such, but only against one type of
conclusions,
ideologN'.
some
"Those who do not have
a full
democracy,"
as
he delicateh' described
right-w ing regimes in his Washington speech, "should be protected by
USA from Marxism," humanitv." In other words,
the
for "that
"Mv
which
is
enemv's enemy
against is
my
communism is Was this
friend."
for
not
Marxist ideologv turned inside out, and equally an ideology ot its ow n? Simultaneously with this seemingly esoteric dispute, Solzhenitsyn w as
enveloped
in a
controversv of
a
more personal and
literary nature.
His
liter-
some mcmths now, had been read bv almost the entire emigre community, and, more importantlx', had had time to filter back to the Soviet Union and be read there. On one plane the book w as an intensely personal memoir ot Solzhenitsyn's literary career in his homeland and a blow-by-blow account of his ary memoir. The Oak and the Calf, had been in circulation for
epic struggle against the authorities, ending with his expulsion in 1974.
I
he
book gained enormously from being in a quasi-diary form, from the freshness with which Solzhenitsyn had been able to set down his impressions, and from the zest and gusto with which he had confided his thoughts, prejudices, hopes, and fears to paper, apparenth for himself alone (although, as emerged later, he had always had eventual publication in mind). The high points in the book described the climaxes of Solzhenitsyn's career: the publication oi Ivan Denisovich, his letter to the Writers' Congress,
the award of the Nobel Prize, and his expulsion, but there were other notable features as well, above
his portrayal of the Novy Mir editor, Alexander stormy friendship. There was also the question of all
Tvardovsky, and style. In its mixture of high-flown literary rhetoric, cool analysis, colloquial asides, and salty comment, it came closest to some of the racier parts of The Gulag Archipelago in the rest of Solzhenitsyn's oeiwre, but was unique in terms of its personal and autobiographical content and its certain element of gossipy immediacy. It was stimulating and exciting to read and must be accounted their
one of Solzhenitsyn's very best books. However, from the beginning there w as also a persistent note of unease in Russian readers' responses to the book, a substratum of discomfort that was expressed only verbally to begin with but that eventually surfaced in print. The grounds for the criticisms naturally varied, but they can be summarized more or less as follows. First, there was Solzhenitsyn's bv now
SOLZHENITSYN
[924]
it. Characteristic was his where he managed both to disparage the whole idea of literary memoirs, which he called "secondary" literature of little moment (perhaps \\ ith his o\\ n earlier detraction of Ehrenburg and Paustovskv in mind) and to pave the way for five hundred pages of explanation of his motives and actions from 1962 to 1974. Secondly, there uas the outsize egotism of the
ingrained propensity to have his cake and to eat introduction,
narrative. Solzhenitsyn
had placed himself squarely
at the centre
of the
lit-
erary and political universe of the sixties and seventies, and the entire world
was described
as rotating
this defiant fidelity to
around
what w ere
his axis.
There was
a certain
grandeur
in
clearly Solzhenitsyn's true feelings about
himself, but it lent itself too easily to hypocrisy and bathos to sit comfortably on the autobiographical narrator throughout 500 pages. Passages like the ones in \\ hich he solemnly described himself, without irony, as "a sword in Ciod's hand" sent to smite His enemies, and numerous other sentiments of that nature, \\ ere difficult to bring off in the mid-twentieth century. There were also the all-per\ading military metaphors. "I hey w ere lined up in battle array, but before they could sound the charge, I gave them a 144-gun salvo and meekly resumed my seat in the hanging smoke, "'"^ was how he described his initial
statement
Ward.
If
at the Writers'
Union
he could not be Samsonov in
Samsonov of the
secretariat
meeting to discuss Cancer
real life,
seemed, he would be the
it
Writers' Union.
But the aspect of the book that provoked most criticism was the consequent disparagement of almost everyone else w ith whom Solzhenitsyn came into contact, and above all of Tvardovsky. Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Tvardovsky \\ ill remain one of the finest things in Russian memoir literature ("I raised a monument to him," he protested as the tide of criticism began to rise),'' but it is also a prejudiced portrait in which Tvardovsky's weaknesses are exaggerated at the expense of his strengths, while Solzhenitsyn's picture of himself is exactly the reverse. Thus, in many parts of the narrative a drunken, unstable, erratic Tvardovsky, by turns arrogant and submissive, a Party grandee at the mercy of his political masters and without the courage of his convictions, is contrasted with a heroic, all-seeing, all-knowing (but cunning) Solzhenitsyn, hampered by the weaknesses of his friend and ally. This tone was carried over into most of the other portraits in the book. Friends were for the most part referred to neutrally or in words of faint praise, whereas enemies v\ ere pinioned and dispatched with merciless vigour. Among former friends and allies to suffer retrospective condemnation were Zhores Medvedev and, of course, his former wife Natalia Reshetovskaya, whose role last few years in the Soviet Union w as depicted as part of a sinister manoeuvre rather than the desperate flailings of an abandoned woman. Others to come under the lash were Valeri (>halidze, who v\'as accused, in so many words, of making a deal with the KCiB; Veniamin Teush and Ilya
during his political
Zilberberg, for criminal negligence in mishandling his literary archive; Vla-
dimir Lakshin, for influencing Tvardovsky
doxy; and most of the
rest of
Novy Mir\
in the direction
of Party ortho-
editorial staff, for putting their
C)
MOVE
N THK
I
9
2 5
I
magazine before Sol/.henitsyn's contributions to it. Kven Sakharov, whom Solzhenitsyn handled, on the whole, with kid gloves, was condescended to and
allotted a peripheral role in the struggle for
human
rights.
in a pained and not very coherent letter trom Tvar-
The responses came dovsky's daughter, Valentina Tvardovskaya, a much sharper and more penetrating article bv Rov .Medvedev, a long and detailed rebuttal by Vladimir Lakshin of Solzhenitsyn's description of Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, and eventually a whole book bv Ilya Zilberberg chronicling the events surrounding the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn's papers in 1965. The first three maintained that Solzhenitsvn's portrait of Tvardovsky
was
a travesty.
\o the extent
that some of their indignation was provoked by the "naturalism" of Solzhenitsvn's portraval, particularlv in the now-notorious scene of I vardovsky's
drunken reading of The
First Circle in
Rvazan,
it
can perhaps be ascribed to
the overall prudishness of Russian literarv taste. Nadezhda Mandelstam had provoked similar outrage with the frankness of some of her descriptions ot Russians like their \\ riters on writers in the second volume of her memoirs
—
But the weightier objections were to Solzhenitsyn's depiction of Tvardovskv as a powerless lightweight, and of Novy Mir as a Party journal a pedestal.
much
from the reactionary Oktyabr. Tvardovskava pointed out that in Solzhenitsyn's memoirs, he and Tvardovsky were made to represent opposed principles: Solzhenitsyn was the wise, far-seeing hero who understood everything, while Tvardovsky was blinded bv his Partv membership and doomed to vacillate. But in reality, she wrote, the opposition was of a different nature. It was Solzhenitsyn who was doctrinaire, who "craved simple solutions and unambiguous formulae," for whom a negation of the entire Soviet system was sufficient, w hereas Tvardovskv was a complex thinker, highly dissatisfied v\ith the life he saw around him, but not content just to dismiss it and throw out the baby with not
different, in principle,
the bath-water. Tvardovsky had been aware of Solzhenitsyn's simplistic notions
and extreme nationalism and had often had to exercise great self-discipline not to quarrel with him, wrote Tvardovskaya. She made many other points about her father and Novy Mir, but her most telling accusation was that of hypocrisv. "While asserting the supremacy of morality over politics," she wrote, "vou deem it possible ... to overstep all rightful limits. You allow yourself the unscrupulous use of things you have heard or seen through keyWhile inviting people to 'live not by holes and of third-hand rumours. lies,' you relate with unbridled cynicism, though not without a certain coquetry, how you made deceit a rule in your dealings not only with those you considered your enemies but also with those who held out a helping hand to vou, who trusted vou and supported you when times were hard."^*^ Rov Medvedev took a similar line but concentrated, in his article, on Novy Mirs political position. It was a travesty, he wrote, to describe Novy Mir as akin to conservative journals like Oktyabr or Ogonyok. It was never "on .
its
.
.
knees," as Solzhenitsyn had alleged, nor did
line.
On
the contrary,
it
persistently
it
blindly follow the Party
pushed against the
limits
and was
fre-
SOLZHENITSYN
[9^6]
quentlv successful, as
in the case
dovsky's had been the leading
role.
of Solzhenitsyn himself. In
"From
my
all
this
Tvar-
conversations with Tvardovsky,"
Medvedev, "I gathered that bv defending Solzhenitsyn before the highest was exposing himself to danger, but he also liked Solzhenitsyn and felt hurt when he was unjustly attacked by critics or his behaviour was worrisome." Medvedev pointed out, as had Tvardovskaya, how anxious Solzhenitsyn had been to receive the Lenin Prize, despite his protestations in The Oak and the Calf to the contrary, and how in conversation with other writers he had praised Lenin and the early days of the October Revolution.''^ Of a rather different order of authority was Vladimir Lakshin's extended essay "Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and Novy Mir.'' If Solzhenitsyn's memoir was in part the case for the prosecution against Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, Lakshin's was the case for the defence. He had been impelled to pick up his pen, he wrote, because he had been one of the main actors in the drama unfolded by Solzhenitsyn, and the closest witness to Tvardovsky's motives and actions. In his book Solzhenitsyn had "insulted the memory of a man who was very dear to me, whom I regarded as a second father," he had "offended" many of Lakshin's colleagues, but above all he had "poured arrogant sc(jrn on the journal \\ hich was the verv cradle of his own literary career" and had "besmirched the cause of that journal which, in the eyes of millions of people was a worthwhile and honourable cause."'** Lakshin's defence of Tvardovsky was more or less along the lines of those mounted by Tvardovsky's daughter and Medvedev, but he was able to furnish it with a wealth of illustration and of inside knowledge about the relations between Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn that were beyond the reach of the others, and, by analysing many of the episodes in Solzhenitsyn's book in minute detail, he was able to demonstrate quite convincingly the ways in w hich Solzhenitsyn had misunderstood the editor's character or misread simple gestures and phrases. But unlike his predecessors, Lakshin also went over to the attack. He had once considered, he wrote, that what Solzhenitsyn had said as a writer was far more important to men of goodwill than his "ill-considered interviews and improvised tirades on some burning political topic of the moment," and he had therefore thought it w rong to criticize him, but now it was time to speak out frankly and without restraint. The Oak and the Calf was "neither memoir nor history," because Solzhenitsyn preferred not to mention a great many things that had occurred, and described others in misleading terms. Many of the personages in his book were nothing more than "lampoons bearing the names of real people." As for Solzhenitsyn's three main charges against 1 \ardovsky of cow ardice, drunkenness, and pride Lakshin w rote, "I declare that everything said about Tvardovsky in this vein is either a blatant untruth, rooted in Solzhenitsyn's hopelessly obtuse incomprehension of Tvardovsky's \v
rote
authorities, he
.
.
.
—
nature and character, or
—
is
that nasty, slimy, slanderous kind of half-truth
worse than a conscious lie." Solzhenitsyn had violated all the canons of decency and good taste in his portrait of I'vardovskv. Therefore, wrote that
is
On the Move
[927]
Lakshin, "I shall be rude, too: supposing someone,
w ere
virtuous
in the role ot
and outs of the personal life of the 'calf himself and to expose what is known alx>ut him from hearsa\ ? Or started collecting stories of his meanness and ingratitude from people w ho ha\ e helped moralist,
him or It
to start discussing the ins
are close to his family?"
should not be ignored that Lakshin, too, had been criticized
Oak and the ow n scores in detail
Calf, albeit less harshl)'
in
The
than man\- others, and therefore had his
For the most part he declined to discuss these criticisms
to settle.
but maintained that man\- of them stemmed from
a failure
of ps\-
chological insight on Solzhenits\n's part and from Solzhenits\n's insinceritx'
Whereas Tvardovsky, according to Lakshin, had been and sincere, Solzhenits\n w as devious and cunning. "For a long time,
in personal relations.
direct in
mv
heart of hearts,
I
discounted the nagging feelings of distaste w hich
Solzhenitsvn's behaviour evoked in me, and
I
tried to explain
lessness as 'the foibles of genius,' eccentricities
aw av
w hose meaning
I
his tact-
preferred
not to examine too closelv in order not to be disillusioned." Solzhenits\ n,
how ever, brooked no half-measures: either one agreed with him and follow ed him unquestioninglv or else one was bevond the pale. "That is whv I think that, with all his tremendous gifts of artistic insight, he is doomed to be perpetually disappointed in other people, to live in a world of illusions and
phantoms, and
to be hopelesslv
political perspectives,
prone to error
in his
judgement of broader
because his criteria derive only from himself and his
immediate circumstances."* What Lakshin was describing was the classical disposition of the creative writer guided above all bv his intuition. In that sense, perhaps, this last criticism w as not necessarily so grave, though it did have a bearing on Solzhenitsyn's claims to political insight, and it identified a point of political
w as not irrelevant to the larger debate about Solzhenitsvn's memoir. For Tvardovskaya, Medvedev, and Lakshin could all be identified as belonging to a particular "partv" the "partv," if one mav put it that wa\', of the loyal opposition and of Sovy Mir. Whatever the merits of their criticisms of Solzhenitsyn's behaviour and his handling of the facts (and ihex were not all tair), there stood behind these criticisms the larger issue of political belief, t A clue to their attitude could be found in Lakshin's charge that Solzhenitsvn had besmirched "the cause" of Novy Mir the cause, in brief, of democratic scxrialism. What Lakshin, Medvedev, and Tvardovskv's daughter (and Tvardovskv himself) had in common w as that "we believed in socialism as a noble ideal of justice, we believed in a socialism that was human through difference that
—
—
* Solzhenitsvn replied to the
Calf" published
many
in Vestnik
of Lakshin's criticisms in his "Sixth Supplement to The Oak and
RKhD,
no. 137 (1982),
where he accused Lakshin of quoting him the Calf, and of being too bound
out of context, of not understanding the point of The Oak and
by his loyalty to socialism to be honest and open in his criticisms. t Other tormer friends of Solzhenitsvn u ho more or less shared these \ie\\s and had begun to move away from him included Boris Mozhayev, Efim Etkind, and, most notablv, Lev Kopelev, \\ ho had taken great exception to Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Leaders and also found fault \\ ith The Gulag Archipelago.
SOLZHENITSYN
[928]
and through, and not
human
had once believed had indeed once shared them), his "apostasv" in their eyes w as all the greater and more painful, especially since his authority v\'as so high. And now their differences with him about his interpretations of the past were also part of a debate about what Russia's just
\\
ith a
face." Since thev
that Solzhenitsvn shared these views (he
future should be.
Somew hat
apart from these responses to The Oak and the Calf stood Ilya
Zilberberg's book
mer
A
Necessary Conversation with Solzhenitsyn. Zilberberg, a for-
Zionist activist in the Soviet Union, had emigrated to Israel in 1971 and
moved
then
to England,
where he found work
Zilberberg was
as a lecturer.
impelled to write his book by a sense of outrage over Solzhenitsyn's dis-
saw
torted, as he
it,
account of the confiscation of his papers and over his
Veniamin Teush. The book and w hat made it especially interesting was the yiev\of Solzhenitsyn it offered from the vantage point of a younger generation of human-rights activists. Starting from Solzhenitsyn's own comment to Tvardovksy that, as a writer, he owed "as much to the Russian forced-labour system as to Russian literature," Zilberberg pointed out how important a role the psychology of a son of Gulag had played in the memoirs of the "calf": "extreme caution, secretiveness, distrust of others self-camouflage, timeserving, a willingness and ability to dissimulate and lie, to be cunning and brazen, constant fear, an exaggerated sense of danger and belief in the worst slighting of his friend (and Zilberberg's mentor)
w as
far
from
a diatribe,
.
.
.
.
fear of
making mistakes," and so on. All
this,
.
.
wrote Zilberberg, was the
poison with which Solzhenitsyn had been infected in Stalin's camps and which
he had involuntarily brought back
w
ith others in the
sixties.
mould allies
It
was
this
\\
ith
"normal" world of
camp psychology
in his thinking
and
him and imported
Moscow and Ryazan that had forced
his obsession
v\
ith
him
into his relations in the fifties
and
into the military
dividing everyone he met into
or enemies, helpers or wreckers, fellow spirits or traitors.
Of course,
Solzhenitsyn had laboured mightily in his
life
to find an anti-
dote to these poisons, and his book was the story of his search for such an antidote, yet the poison
younger human-rights
was
still
activists
there,
and
it
was
just
such
a
poison that the
had been able to eliminate and transcend thanks
to their youth. In this sense, Solzhenitsyn
was an anachronism, not because
he had nothing to teach the younger generation, but because he had taught
them only too
well, while remaining incapable of assimilating his
own
teach-
ing.
You, an old camp hand who had waited for years for a final struggle with the system of tyranny that vou had written an encyclopaedia about and condemned to death when it came, at last, to the final clinch, before the eyes of the whole world and having the support of millions of living and dead allies, you proved so helpless and hew ildered that vou stood up at the first command of a representative of the prison system that vou had damned. Yet a totally unknown Jew who was struggling for his right to go to Israel veiled down the telephone to a representative of the same system summoning him to the KGB: "To see you? Vol-
—
On the Move untarilv? Never!
What
.
.
Onlv when vou
.
has happened
is
this:
deliver
I929I
me
handeuffs!"
in
both personally and as
a representative of the "ter-
bv vour life, your torments, your inexpressible agonies, and then b\ your works, you have liberated us representati\es ot "the present" more ijuickly and suecessfully than you have liberated yourself. rible past,"
This "failure"
\\
as a tragic personal failure
but Aso the price of Solzhe-
had demonstrated were sketches of such, "a searing exposure
nitsyn's success, the price of his survival, as Solzhenitsyn in
The Oak and
"normal"
Vov these "sketches of literary
the Calf.
literary life in the Soviet
Union and,
as
life"
and merciless condemnation of those forces of evil that ha\'e seized your country and threaten the world. Thev are a condemnation of the state order, political system, and ideology that proclaim a conspiratorial activity
to dissemble, intriijue,
crime, turn
artistic creation a
riting into
\v
and the writer into an underground plotter, obliged lie, tjo into hiding, fight and almost commit sui.
.
.
cide.""^
Zilberberg's point about the damage to Solzhenitsyn's psychology had been made by Lakshin: he uas "the offspring of our terrible century, the As well prodigy who has absorbed all its inspiration and its degradation. .
as the best
and
loftiest
of
human
qualities, his
.
.
psychology also bears the
stamp of the concentration camp, of war, of totalitarianism and the atom
—the chief
bomb
features of this age.""^"
Although they came near to
—
to
it
in
some of their comments, none of
— supporters,
Sol-
for that matter)
seems
have grasped the essentially didactic purpose behind Solzhenitsyn's
mem-
zhenitsyn's critics (nor his
oir,
which was
to
less
voluble
demonstrate to the whole world, but particularly to his
how it was possible in practice to "live not by lies."* In a was making the supreme sacrifice. In his book he had wholly renounced his own ego, the personal Solzhenitsyn, w ith w ives, friends, fellow Russians,
sense, Solzhenitsyn
and
relatives,
with private hopes,
and
griefs,
Solzhenitsyn as exemplar, as the knight on the holy grail.
Hence
his ability to write
a
fears, in
favour of the public
white charger, the searcher after
about himself virtually
in the third
person, to describe himself, without blushing, as God's instrument. indeed, in his
own
He was
eyes, only an instrument, and he seems to have taken
what Lakshin wrote of him in anger: "He is leading us towards the and no one is supposed to ask questions we must believe in him. If Solzhenitsyn summons us to humility and repentance, then naturally everyone must repent. ..." Lakshin added, "except him," and asserted that in literally
—
light,
spiritual matters, "Solzhenitsyn
does not recognize equality, ""^^ but the essential
point remained. Solzhenitsyn had been writing in the tradition of the old
*Ilva Ziiberberg perhaps came closest: "Your book is about hov\ at a certain stage in your life, you were able to struggle free, and therein lies its unique value. Rising from your knees v\'as not easy for you at times it was sheer agony, for vou were whipped to your feet. After each blow you winced \\ ith pain and groaned, but vou slowly stood up, and after each blow you felt yourself freer, bolder, and stronger. ..." ,
—
SOLZHENITSYN
[930] saints' lives, life
was
his
but he had taken on more than mere hagiographv: the exemplary
own.* And the
result
personal of his books, with
its
was
a final irony: this in
vivid colloquial style
expression of his emotions and prejudices, was trolled in the service of a practical
that extra twist of tension that
and
made
it,
at the
same time
spiritual message.
from the
many ways most
and seemingly
free
rigidly con-
Perhaps here lav
literary point of view,
one
of his best.
*One
reminded of a seventeenth-century predecessor and Russia's first "modern" Avvakum, whose Life Written by Himself has more than a feu similarities with Solzhenitsyn's memoir. Grigori Pomerants, a historian who has circulated many essays in is
irresistibly
writer, the archpriest
samizdat, has also pointed out in his samidat essay
"A Dream
of Just Retribution" (later pub-
lished in Syntax [Paris], no. 6 [1980] that for a million people Christianity
'.Matryona's Place.' .\ million people
(if
not more) took the
Solzhenitsyn (and not with Tvardoxsky or Novy Mir).
we
It is
first
began with reading
step tov\ards the light with
not for Solzhenitsyn to say so, but
can and must: Gulag alone means more for the moral development of our country than the
whole of Novy Mir." Lakshin, writes Pomerants, was more or less correct in his appraisal of Solzhenitsyn the man, and fair to his talent as a writer, but he failed to appreciate the spirit that had spoken through Solzhenitsyn. .'\n American critic, Maurice Friedberg, has indicated another apt parallel with Solzhenitsyn's book: the
memoirs of Russian revolutionaries of the turn of the saints' lives in form and intention).
century (which Friedberg compares to medieval
'
50
TALKING TO
THE EUROPEANS OCTOBER 1975 volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in translation into a number of languages, including English. After the sensation caused by volume 1, it was inevitablv something of an anticlimax, especiallv since volume 2 was longer than the first volume (in English, 712 pages as opposed to 660) and contained more analysis and less description, with a consequent
IN .
loss of its
immediacy. Understandably,
it
sold considerably fewer copies than
predecessor and suffered, in market terms, from having the same
volume
title as
1.
its publication was an event, and it held a particular interAmerican readers, so recently exposed to the force of Solzhenitsyn's personality and rhetoric. Professor Leonard Schapiro in The New York Review of Rooks remarked that an "intellectual era" had elapsed since the publication of volume 1, just over a year before. Solzhenitsyn had then been a mystery to Western readers, an enigma wrapped in the aura of martyrdom created by his expulsion, and for many months after that a silent hermit in the heart of Switzerland. But now he had begun to travel and to reveal himself to reporters and the television cameras, had voiced and published a great many opinions, and had become the subject of a vast literature of comment and criticism. Me had also become known as the most vocal, controversial, and perhaps influential opponent oi detente, all of which had created a new climate for the appearance of volume 2 of his master-work. For some the publication came as a welcome antidote to the dismay and doubt sown by Solzhenitsyn's American speeches among many of his admirers. As Patricia Blake (a long-time admirer) put it in Time, "The passage from inquiry to advocacy, from exposition to exhortation, from literature to poli-
Nevertheless,
est for
93'
SOLZHENITSVX
[932]
proselvtism) has disabled man\" a Russian \\ ritcr, including Gogol and Tolstov. Gulag Tn'o comes to us as a reminder of Solzhenitsvn's immutable achievements."- For others it was an opportunity to look for clues that would throw light on Solzhenitsvn's present attitudes. 1 he subject matter ot volume 2 was, above all, the pervasive network of labour camps created bv Stalin as the basis of a vast and elaborate system of slave labour, intended to hasten the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsvn's exhaustive anatomy of this system, resting parth on oral accounts bv ex-prisoners and partly on obscure and hard-to-obtain archival material, w as difficult going in parts, but the bill of indictment was formitics (or
dable.
From
start to finish the
Gulag had claimed 66 million
lives,
according
to Solzhenitsvn's calculations (25,0()0 perished in the construction of the \^hite
Sea— Baltic Canal alone), and in its hevdav there w ere never few er than 10 to 15 million men, women, and children behind barbed wire. W hile these figures were high, thev did not provoke much dissent among commentators, and most of Solzhenitsvn's documentation w as confirmed as generally accurate. But considerable controversy was caused bv his underlying thesis that the camps were by no means solely a phenomenon of Stalinism but were implicit (and, in a small w aw explicit) in Lenin's political philosophy as well. Stalin w as but a blind follow er and executor of Lenin's w ill (who in turn was carrying out Marx's prescriptions) and not at all an originator in this field. Furthermore, those who defended Lenin and heaped all the blame on Stalin were guilty of bad faith, and did so only to save their beloved Marxism from disrepute.
These views had already caused something of
a furore
among
dissident
Union, especially among those who took the "loyal oppositionist" view of Roy Medvedev and his sympathizers and still spoke of a possible return to "Leninist norms" (Medvedev had already written a wellpublicized rebuttal in a review of the Russian edition), and thev now provoked further debate in the U'est. Thev certainly went a long wav towards explaining the vehemence of Solzhenitsvn's present animus against all forces of Marxism and communism and provided a theoretical framework for what had formerly seemed like arbitrary and provocative statements. Equally revealing were Solzhenitsvn's account of how these view s had been formed in (and by) the camps, the description of his rites of passage as a loyalist trust\ at Xovv lerusalim and Kaluga Gate, the stunning admission of his brief enlistment as an informer at the peak of his conformist period, and the unfolding of his long, slow path to enlightenment in the Marfino sharashka and at Ekibastuz. The picture of Solzhenitsvn that emerged was of an inciividual w ho had heard, seen, and suffered much but w ho had been saved bv his religious faith and a return to traditional Russian Christian values. First had come his discovery that "the line separating good from evil passes not through states or between political parties, but through each human heart." then the conviction that the struggle with evil must therefore take place "w ithin each circles in the Soviet
.
.
.
'
Talking to the Furopfans
human
being," and Hnalh an implacable
for their falsification of these truths
not in individuals but in societw offering The
(jiihig .Archipelago
[933]
hostilitx- to all
forms of materialism
and their location of the moral battleheld
It v\
as for this reason that
Solzhenitsyn was
not onlx as an act of national repentance and
contrition but also as a personal confession of guilt and complicity in the larger crime.
As
in
The Oak and
the (aiI{\
he called on others to emulate this
and contrition. Gulag 'Ttvo \\ ent a long w av towards rehabilitating Sol/.henitsyn's reputation with English and American readers, but there were still problems. Even Professor Schapiro, a profoimd admirer, was obliged to concede that feat of "self-limitation"
Solzhenitsvn's counsel of "uncompromising perfection" held difhculties for most normal mortals (though he absolved Solzhenitsyn of the charge of hvpocrisv). He conceded that Solzhenits\n's "fanaticism" often led him to exaggeration, especiallv in the political sphere, that his "extreme intolerance"
towards dissidents (not to speak of others) with opinions at variance with his calculated to make him more enemies than friends, and that Solzhenitsyn was "not entirely free from the irritating tendency of so many Russian
own was
emigres to dismiss
all
the
w ork of Western
historians of Soviet Russia ... as
—
as one of the better Western historians. Professor Schapiro was sensitive to (and resented) this charge. So long as the debate was restricted to Russian subject matter, however, and to a discussion of Soviet policies and Soviet societw dialogue w as possible, for Solzhenitsyn had thought profoundly about these questions and was writing from long and bitter experience."* As if to confute the apologies and exegeses of his admirers, Solzhenitsyn immediately jumped back into the w hirlpool of American politics. From his home in Zurich he sent the Neiv York Times an article on the dismissal, in November, of the American secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, by December and blamed Henry President Ford. The article appeared on Kissinger for Schlesinger's downfall, alleging that the defense secretary had little
more than
a regurgitation
of Soviet propaganda"
1
been sacrificed on the
altar of a false detente.
Solzhenitsyn accused Kissinger
of being ignorant of Soviet psychology, of presiding over
a
policy of "unend-
ing concessions," of bringing about the West's "worst diplomatic defeat" in
and of arranging at best only a shaky peace in the Middle East. Kissinger was a "capitulator," a loser, a diplomatic simpleton, who was turning the West's "surrender of world positions" into "an avalanche." As for President Ford, he had acted without decency or foresight and should at least have consulted his allies first, for Schlesinger, "a man of steadfast, perceptive, and brilliant mind," had been responsible for the defence of the entire free world. His dismissal, though an event of a different order of magnitude, had caused in America's friends feelings of "pain, bewilderment, and disillusionment" akin to those produced by the assassination of President Kennedy and by the "inability or lack of desire of the American judicial authorities to uncover the assassins and clean up the crime." The bathos, lack of proportion, and clumsiness of Solzhenitsyn's analogy with thirty years (in X'ietnam),
SOLZHENITSYN
[934]
the Kenned\' assassination and the tone of contemptuous dismissal
\\
ith
w hich
Solzhenitsvn discussed the failings of the not necessarily popular Kissinger
were resented by most Americans, who found his remarks "naive," "clumsy," "outrageous," "interfering," and "self-destructiye." They consoled themsehes with the thought that Russian novelists \\ ere not the only ones with a penchant for making crass political statements. Mark Twain, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck (to name only three) had been equally silly in their time,' and they were perhaps relieved that the proposal to grant Solzhenitsvn honorary American citizenship had been allowed to lapse by Congress. In the course of the
autumn of 1975 Solzhenitsvn made
several state-
ments denying new spaper reports about one or another aspect of his private life, congratulated Sakharov on the award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize, expressed public support for X'ladimir Osipov and Igor Shafarevich, and in early December issued an appeal to Russian emigres who were "older than the Revolution" to write to him with their reminiscences of the period 1917-22.
Also in December he gave
a long and interesting interview on mainly literary and autobiographical topics to Georges Suffert, editor of the Paris-based magazine Le Point, which had just made him "man of the year." And in February 1976 he was off on his travels again, first to England, then France, and then Spain. Solzhenitsyn arri\ed in England on 19 February and stayed for ten days. His visit was in most respects a rerun of his earlier forays to France and the United States: a prime-time television interview a radio broadcast, visits to one or two universities, a talk with his publishers, and the rest of his movements shrouded in secrecy. In contrast to his stay in America and Canada, however, there was no travelling, apart from a visit to Oxford and Stratfordupon-Avon, and Solzhenitsyn showed remarkably little curiosity about the country he was visiting. For most of the time, he and his wife staved in their small hotel in Windsor under false names (later they moved to London for a few days), and except for early morning walks by the Thames, they spent most of their days, when not occupied with official duties, in their room. Indeed, they virtually camped there, refusing to go down to the dining-room for meals, consuming bread and salami that Solzhenitsyn bought in nearby shops, and drinking glasses of tea made with a portable electric element. This element caused a minor crisis at the beginning of their stay, because it was French and wouldn't plug into English sockets; the manager offered to send to Solzhenitsyn's room as much tea as he desired, but Solzhenitsxn would not hear of it: he sometimes drank tea in the middle of the night, he said, and would not dream of troubling the maid (in similar fashion he had insisted on carrying his own suitcases on arrival at Victoria Station)."^ ,
The
English countryside,
it
appears, did not impress Solzhenitsyn, nor
did Stratford-upon-Avon. In Oxford he declined to tour the colleges and
spent most of the day closeted with his
latest
(and best) English translator,
Harry VV'illetts. In Windsor he seemed equally unimpressed with Eton, and in London, v\hen taken to the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square to do
Talking to the Europeans some
location shots for his television
gallery's pictures.
falgar tal.
I
le
His
summoned
gallery's steps,
proclaimed
it fit
the gallerv led to an incident that also
to a side door
Solzhenitsvn
programme, had no time
is
to inspect the
did like Windsor (>astle, however, and surveying Tra-
Square from the visit to
[9351
and informed
for an imperial capi-
amused him.
in re\ erential
On
here," the gallery's caretaker responded curtly that
Sundav, adding, "I don't care
if it's
God
being
tones that "Alexander
himself, he's not
coming
it
was
in."
a
The
v\ as w rong, of course: telexision can accomplish many things beyond power of God, and one of them was to open the National Gallery on a the
caretaker
Sunday.^ Solzhenitsyn found time to
visit
the
House of Commons during ques-
tion time, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Tory party leader Margaret Thatcher were debating the best means to help people emigrate from Eastern Europe, and to visit the BBC's Television Centre and Russian Service. At the Television Centre he scandalized the top brass by preferring to watch the end of a videotaped film on Eastern Europe to lunching \\ ith them in the executive dining-room upstairs, and at the Russian Service startled the staff by declining wine and requesting Coca-Cola, which no one had thought to provide. At the Russian Service he produced from his pocket a detailed list of criticisms of the w ay the service was run, together with a correspondingly long list of suggestions for improvement, and read them to
the assembled
The
*^
staff.
high point of his stay was undoubtedly the hour-long television
interview broadcast by the BBC's top news and current affairs programme,
"Panorama." Solzhenitsyn repeated his conviction that Russia was about "seventy to eighty years" in advance of the West, spiritually speaking, that the West had declined more rapidly and catastrophically in the two years since he had arrived than before, but that he was not "a critic of the West," simply a critic of the West's weaknesses. The West had given up not just "four, five, six countries" in the last two years but "all its world positions" and had done a great deal to strengthen Soviet tyranny. "At the moment the question
is
not
how
the Soviet
Union
will find a
way
out of totalitarianism
be able to avoid the same fate." The nuclear-disarmament debate v\'as a side-issue, he said, irrelevant to the main threat. "Nuclear war is not necessary to the Soviet Union. You can be taken simply \\ ith bare but
how
hands."
the
And
West
detente
will
was meaningless without an
Union could reverse left
change, which
made
policy of detente overnight, and the
its
floundering, for the
ideological detente.
West required a
it
at least a
year or
t\\
The
Soviet
West would be
o to make the same
very dangerous path to enter upon. Solzhenitsyn
more for trivializing and misrepresenting what he had had to say earlier, and in some interesting comments on The Gulag Archipelago, he reaffirmed his belief in the power of the seriously written word to attacked the press once
today the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were widely published in the Soviet Union and u ere freely available to all, then in a very affect history. "If
short space of time no
Communist
ideology would be
left.
For people
who
SOLZHENITSYN
[936]
would simplv have no more room in their He added that, in his view, the Soviet authorities had expelled him out of weakness but that whereas, two years ago, he had hoped to return home "verv soon," the Soviet Union had since grown so strong that it \\ ould take longer if thev did not assassinate him had read and understood
minds
Communist
for
this
all
ideology."
—
"^
first.
The
response to Solzhenitsvn's
in the Times printed a breathless
\\
Bernard Levin
as astonishing.
partv ("There was no need to ask him where he gets such inner
at a cocktail
strength and integritv; this
understand
inter\'ie\\
account of a prior meeting with Solzhenitsvn
\\
a
is
man who
walks with
hat 'Holv Russia' once meant") and
God and makes one
went on
to
compare
Sol-
zhenitsvn's television performance with Martin Luther nailing his manifesto to the doors at
Wittenberg (with references to Thor, Dostoyevsky, and Soc-
rates along the wav).
You could
an angel.
seem
to
hover
The
Guardian
hear the great
a foot or
two
perhaps with tongue slightlv
s
television critic wrote,
whoosh of w
ings that
"He
talked like
makes great orators
off the floor." Michael Davie in the Observer, in
cheek, likened Solzhenitsvn to Charlton Hes-
ton playing Moses, and the Sunday Telegraph wrote that Solzhenitsvn's
appearance was an event
who had
w hose magnitude
heard him would never forget
it
it.'*^
—
was impossible to grasp those The BBC's weeklv magazine,
the Listener, containing extracts from Solzhenitsvn's interview, sold out first time in its historv.* But the improbablv theatrical climax was undoubtedlv the public resignation from the Labour partv of Lord George Brown, formerlv foreign secretarv and once one of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's closest confidants. For long a sharp critic of the direction his partv was moving in, Lord (ieorge Brown quoted Solzhenitsvn's interview as the reason for his decision and said he
immediatelv and had to be reprinted for the
was now readv
to join "Solzhenitsvn's
army."
In this orgv of masochistic euphoria, state of British
which
said as
much
half a century of decline as
it
insight, a cialists
low
did for the truth of Solzhenitsyn's assertions,
w ere slow to make themselves heard. But after the novelist's power as an artist and to the keenness of
dissenting voices
ances to
for the
morale and the multiple inferiority complexes engendered by
number
on Russian
ritual obeis-
his spiritual
of critics did indeed begin to question his diagnosis. Speaffairs like
Edward Crankshaw
in the Observer
and Profes-
sor Richard Peace in a letter to the Times pointed out that Solzhenitsyn's
knowledge of historv was weak and that his disillusionment with the West and apocalvptic warnings of doom were in a ver\' Russian tradition that encompassed Herzen, Dostoyevsky, and many other thinkers in the not too distant past. Others pointed out that Solzhenitsyn was essentially in the same millenarian tradition as the hated Marx himself and that his vision of an allconquering Soviet Union and the onward march of its armies owed more to Soviet propaganda than to Western perceptions of the world. His under*The
interview
was
later
shown on
television in
America,
albeit
w
ith rather less success.
TALK
I
NG TO THE EUROPEANS
[93?]
Standing of the West, and of such concepts as democracy and of freedom
under democracy, seemed sketchy at best, though this w as hardly surprising giyen vyhat was know n of Solzhenitsyn's Hfe and habits in the West. "A man now committed to working 16-18 hours a day on his historical noyel series about Russia, who speaks Cierman but Httle Knglish or French, and who relies on Russian sources, emigre or otherw ise, for his information is not going to be in the best position to pronounce on the fate of the West."" Opinion was thus diyided betw een those who yalued his moral and spiritual ical
message and his appeal accuracy and the daily
to higher yalues
aboye
all
quibbles about histor-
detail of politics, and those
who
that his
felt
inadequacies in these spheres inyalidated the main message. But
w
hat
was
incontestable was the impact of Solzhenitsyn's personality and the indubitable charisma he possessed.
He
had become the yery thing he claimed
to
and his Garbo-like games of hide-and-seek with the press
abhor: a media star, only intensified this quality. As the debate about his interview
roomed
—and
w
mush-
—the BB(^
capinewspapers filled "Panorama" devoting the next talized on the interest it had created by programme to a discussion of Solzhenitsyn's ideas on detente between a foras the
ith readers' letters
Dutch secretary-general of NATO, Dr. Joseph Luns, an American presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, and the former defense secretary whom Solzhenitsyn had praised, James Schlesinger. On 24 March the BBC broadcast a radio talk by Solzhenitsyn hastily commissioned during his stay at Windsor (he had sat down in his hotel room and written it), then a radio discussion of the talk by two English professors and a French radio journalist, then the original interview on television again, and finally another television discussion between two journalists (including Bernard Levin), a historian, and the chairman of Amnesty Inter-
mer prime
minister,
Edward Heath,
the
national.
None main
lines
of this added very
much
to
what had gone before or
of the debate, but Solzhenitsyn did introduce
a
altered the
new dimension
of
invective into his radio broadcast, which was cijnsiderably shriller than his television interview.
He
elaborated on his charge that Britain had "treacher-
ously disarmed and bound" those w ho had fled Soviet oppression and "had
who on seventy-year-olds were being hastily handed over to be murdered."* He excoriated "your free, independent, incorruptible press" and its conspiracy of silence, charged that the democracies were fully capable of using "Fascist techniques" to promote
not shrunk from using the butts of your
rifles
.
.
.
same breath accused Britain of being unfair to Franco's Fascist Spain. Twice the Russians had helped to save the freedom of Western Europe, "and twice you repaid us bv abandoning us to our slavery." Europe was "nothing but a collection of cardboard stage sets, all bargaining with one another to see how little can be spent on defence in order to leave more for
their ends,
and
the comforts of *
A
in the
life."
And
there
reference to the Russian emigres
v\
was more
in a similar vein.'-
ho were forcibly repatriated
after the
Second World
W ar.
SOLZHENITSYN
[938] It is difficult
to account for the high-pitched tone of Solzhenitsyn's radio
outburst, rising as
it
did in places to a veritable scream of rage and frustra-
set himself, he must Washington he had failed to alter the course o{ detente. He must have seen and felt himself to be a prophet crving in the wilderness each time he preached his message of repentance, regeneration, and rearmament to apparentlv deaf ears. The talk had not been his idea anywav; it had been pressed upon him bv the BBC; perhaps he had not expected it to come out the way it did. Was it the solitude of his hotel room, the solitude of the studio, and the consequent sense of isolation from his audience, that had
tion. It
have
is
understandable that, given the high goals he
felt frustrated.
In
Or could there have been another psychological work? The British, after all, had received him with more and with more modestv and humilitv than any other nation.
caused him to be so extreme?
mechanism enthusiasm
Had
at
—
—
this national self-abasement
produced the opposite
effect to that intended?
In the Soviet Union, and often in Russia beforehand, sweet reasonableness
and self-effacement have
Had
all
too frequently invited bullving and humiliation.
Solzhenitsvn, almost without realizing
it,
vielded to the temptation to
kick the up-ended bottoms of his prostrate hosts?
One
distinguished profes-
contempt was
sor in a letter to the Times, suggested that Solzhenitsvn's realitv a sign of the special favour
and therefore
a
with which he had
earlier
in
regarded Britain
token of his special disappointment." National masochism
could hardly go further. Solzhenitsvn, meanwhile, had moved on well before his talk was broadand well before the debate about his ideas was even half over. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he had slipped unnoticed into France, and on 9 March he appeared in another television marathon in the series "Les Dossiers de I'Ecran," in which he answered viewers' questions. The programme proper was preceded bv a showing of Caspar Wrede's film of .4 Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Solzhenitsvn was seeing for the second time. The interview part of the programme was not as exclusivelv political as most of Solzhenitsvn's previous interviews had been, and perhaps because the questions came directly from the public (though transmitted and translated via intermediaries in the studio), both they and Solzhenitsvn's answers had a directness and freshness that had been lacking in his earlier performances. A great many of the questions were biographical or related to Solzhenitsyn's works, and he was able to answer unaffectedly about the experiences that had inspired him and his intentions in writing this or that particular book. In discussing the political context oi Ivan Denisovich, he made the somew hat startling claim that Khrushchev had authorized publication as part of his campaign against China (instead of against his opponents in the Party), and added that whereas Khrushchev had been oblivious of the danger the book posed, others in the Politburo had seen it clearly but been powerless to stop it. Another answer dealt w ith the alleged contradiction between the labour-camp system of slave cast
labour and the Soviet Union's status as an industrialized nation. There was
no contradiction,
said Solzhenitsvn.
"The
existence of the
Gulag
is
contrary
Talking to the Europeans to ethics
and humanitv,
it
[9391
affronts the soul and the heart, but
it
not in
is
opposition to industrial might." The reason the Soviet authorities had eventualK dissolved most of it had nothing to do with ethics; rather, it was the
had outlived its usefulness. Slave labour West and by the import of Western
result of a rational calculation that
it
had been replaced bv commerce w
ith the
technology as the engine of industrial progress. The rational and relativelv unemotional tone of these early exchanges
in
programme eventualK had a l)enehcial effect on the more pt^litical discussion that came later. In answer to a question about Leonid Flyushch, the the
iet dissident w ho had announced on French television w as still a Marxist (w hile detesting the Soviet regime),* Solzhenitsyn was eminenth fair. He pointed to certain contradictions between Plyushch's view of Marxism and his negative assessment of the Soviet variety, reminded
recenth- arri\ed So\ that he
Plvushch himself had said he still needed time for study and and hinted (not without foundation) that Plyushch was being manipulated bv the French Left for domestic political purposes. Another subject of dispute w as Chile. Le Monde, among others, had recently printed a storv saving that Solzhenitsyn had either visited or was about to visit Chile listeners that
reflection,
the invitation of General Pinochet, and a view er
at
Solzhenitsvn w as aw are that Chile had
its
own
w anted
to
know w hether
concentration camps. Solzhe-
n replied that the story was false. He had never been to Chile and had never been invited. Unfortunatelv, the question provoked him to mount one of his favourite hobbv-horses, and from there on the temperature rose to nits\
Not onh was
the storv wrong, exclaimed Solzhenitsyn, it from beginning to end ... a journalistic invention." He attacked Le Monde for having misrepresented him, and the Western press in familiar levels.
was
"a complete
general for
lie
knowing how
to
lie
subject of Chile in general he
Chile that had offered to free
"just as skilfullv as the So\iet press."
w as reasonably all its
On
sober, pointing out that
it
the
w
as
Union did mentioned the little-
political prisoners if the Soviet
same and that the Soviet Union had refused. He also know n and little-discussed fact that a number of Chilean exiles had emigrated to Rumania, had been appalled by what they found there, and had experienced the greatest difficultv in getting out again and moving to West Berlin.
the
But he could not
resist
remarking provocatively that he kept hearing the
often than he heard references to the Berlin Wall or the
word Chile more
occupation of Czechoslovakia and that
"if
Chile hadn't existed,
it
would have
been necessary to invent it." After that, the questions reverted to detente, the future of the Soviet Union, the alleged decline of the West, and subjects on which Solzhenitsvn had already voiced his well-known opinions.'"^
The curious *
Plvushch,
hospital,
who
was
result of
all
this
w as
that, despite the vast difference in tone,
arrived in France in 1976, after having been incarcerated in a Soviet psychiatric
at that
time very popular with the French Lett as
Marxist; since then he has Carnival (London and
New
moved somewhat away from York, 1979)
is
a dissident
his earlier views.
who was
His book
also a
History's
one of the more interesting and original autobiogra-
phies to have been published by a dissident.
SOLZHENITSYN
[94o]
and
for the
most part
between
in substance,
this
and Solzhenitsyn's
earlier
interviews in England and America, the public response was almost identi-
—
Again there were the hxperbolic headlines "One Man against an Empire"; "Solzhenitsvn, a Saint of Olden Times"; "Is God Russian?" the extravagant comparisons to Joan of Arc, to David against Goliath and the grancal.
— —
—
Once again there was a between the Left and liberals, on one side, and his conservative supporters on the other. And almost the entire attention of the press was concentrated on the last "political" quarter of Solzhenits^n's remarks, at the expense of his more ruminative statements earlier in the programme. Matters were made worse, in this respect, bv accusations against the Erench television network (which is fairlv closelv controlled bv the French government) of having chosen the programme date w ith an eye to the P rench cantonal elections and bv charges made in the course of the programme itself that the whole thing was part of an orchestrated compaign against the Left. The editors of Le Monde were infuriated b\- Solzhenits\n's public attack on their newspaper. Thev had printed a retraction of the Ghile story that (contrar)' to Solzhenitsvn's claim) w as longer and more prominently positioned than the original storv, thev asserted that the other misrepresentation he complained of had not been nearlv so bad as alleged and had also been follow ed diose claims for his powers of prophecv and vision. split
bv
a clarification,
and
the\' revealed that
Was
proceedings against them.
legal
Solzhenitsvn had recently instituted
this
not an attempt at censorship, asked
former Moscow correspondent oi Le Monde who had written favourabh' about Solzhenitsvn in the past, and was it not a relic of bad old "Soviet" habits? Elsewhere in the same issue Le Monde indicated its views on Michel Tatu,
a
the matter in the headline to a
commentary by Bernard Feron
—"Erom
—
Intransigence to Intolerance" and later lodged a formal protest with the Erench Television Service, demanding the right of reply to Solzhenitsyn's "prejudicial" presentation of the case.
One
was w av he w as inevitably draw n into local political squabbles. Solzhenitsvn had repeatedlv emphasized in his interviews and speeches that he w as not a politician and not a political thinker. He was an artist and a moralist, he said, appealing to a higher sphere of action, and in a separate interview in Paris, given to Nikita Struve, the editor of the Vestnik, he repeated his astonishment that "everybody who talks to me pushes me in the direction of politics and wants to hear my political opinions.
made out
I
find
place
it
is
tempted
of his
very
to pitv Solzhenitsvn for the political capital that
visit
irritating,
and
but
for the
it's
so."
"almost accidentallv."'''
I'Ecran," in explaining
w
h\ the
He claimed
But
his
that his press interview
television
host on
programme had not been intended
ence the cantonal election, revealed that the date had been
set
s
took
"Dossiers de to infiu-
by Solzheni-
tsvn three months in advance; and Solzhenitsyn himself, in yet another interxiew (with Jean-Claude
Lamy
oi Le Soir) disclosed that one of his prin-
aims in agreeing to do the television programme had been to express his views on the new relations recently established betw een Moscow and foreign
cipal
Talking to the Kuropkans Communist
parties (including the I'Ycnch party).
intended to inter\ene
French poMrics,
in
anti
[941]
In other
words, he had
he was disappointed, according
programme had gone. He had been softened up, "The memories of my imprisonment came surging back to me. Soon found m\seH in a lyrical mood; my soul was vibrating." lie hatl been disoriented by the multiplicity of microto
Lamv, bv
he said,
the
b\' his
way
the
view ing of Ivan Denisovich. I
phones and blinded
was
properly.'''' it
tone of
many
1)\
arc lights
and had not been able
to marshal his thoughts
accounted for the unusually
this that
of his remarks, which Solzhenitsyn
now
soft antl meditative
regretted; in discount-
ing them, the French press had correctK' divined the author's true intentions.
A
w as given
last political t\\ ist
who
Paris,
lodged
a
to the affair
by the Soviet ambassador
in
formal protest with the French authorities against Sol-
zhenitsyn's television appearance. Solzhenitsyn's views, the note said, "confirm that he to the cold
is
an
enemy
oi detente
to spread his "hate-filled
who
declares himself in favour of a return
French television had given him a chance slander" w as incompatible w ith France's promise to
war," and the
fact that
promote mutual understanding. The French government rejected the protest its internal affairs and revealed that the Soxiet embassy had interxened with the telexision authorities to get the programme banned before it even took place.'' When news of the Soviet demarche was released, it naturalh had the opposite effect of that intended and increased sympathy for Solzhenitsyn's case, even among those w ho basically disagreed with him. as interference in
A
contributory reason for Solzhenits\n's choice of early March as the
date of his Paris
visit
was the publication there of the
third
and
final
volume
of The Gulag Archipelago in Russian. His vast chronicle of the "Soviet holo-
was at last before readers in its entirety, although it would be many months before enough people had read it to debate its merits, and w ell over a year before its appearance in translation into other languages. Another reason was the publication in French, F.nglish, and Cierman oi Lenin in 'Zurich,
caust"
an extract from his series of historical novels. In his interview with Struve, Solzhenitsyn explained ist
ot the
camp world
how to
he had involuntarily become "the trusted annal-
whom
everyone brought their truth"
atter the
appearance oi Ivan Denisovich and how he had evolved his method of "literary investigation" to deal with the material. I
had never thought about the form of
me by
a litcrarv investigation;
the material in The Gulag Archipelago.
A
literar\'
it
was dictated
investigation
is
to
the han-
dling of factual (not transformed) real-life material in such a w av that the separate facts
and fragments, linked bv artistic means, yield a general idea that is totally in no wav inferior to that produced bv a scientific investigation.'*
convincing and
Work on
camp no\els and on The Gulag Archipelago had postponed his "main theme," the history of the Revolution, but when he eventually got there, he found that the methods evolved for Gulag w ere suitable for his historical novels too, and this had been one of his guiding principles in w riting the chapters that made up Lenin in VAirich. his
arrival at his
SOLZHENITSYN
[942]
In an interview already recorded for the Zurich, Solzhenitsvn I
should sav
its
it is
a
expanded on
BBC
on the subject of Lenin
form of creative research.
fullness, in its authenticity, in
its
Mv
aim
is
to reconstruct historv in
complexity, but for this
have to use the
I
much of which from witnesses, most of whom are no can see farther and deeper, thanks to the force
artist's vision,
because a historian uses only documentary material,
has been
The
lost.
longer alive
.
.
.
\\
historian uses evidence
hereas the artist
of perception in the artistic
means
in
his approach.
artist's vision.
available to
me
I
am
not writing
a novel.
I
am
using
all
the
to penetrate as deeply as possible into historical
events."
The
use of the word "novel" here was in response to
not describe the form of Lenin
in Zurich.
a
question and did
Solzhenitsvn shared the traditional
Russian reluctance to be bound by West European concepts of genre (the a novel was The First Circle), as was show n by his invention of the term "knot" to describe August 1914 and the volumes planned to follow it. Lenin in Zurich was not a "knot" but "fragments of an epic," unified only by its subject the personality of Lenin and by its
only one of his works he described as
place
—
—
— Zurich.
Solzhenitsvn's fragments dealt with Lenin's
life
in
Zurich during the
World War and on the eve of the Revolution. It was in most respects a peculiarly empty and frustrating period for Lenin. The war had cut him off from direct communication \\ ith Russia, and there was little he could do to exert any influence anywhere. Indeed, according to Solzhenitsvn, Lenin was on the verge of giving up his revolutionary hopes entirely and retiring to America \\ hen the opportunity arose for him to return home. Solzhenitsyn described what that life had been like, with its frustrated hopes and extravagant dreams. Lenin was shown experiencing emotional difficulties with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskava, and longing for the company of his former mistress, Inessa Armand. He was shown as short-tempered with his Swiss and First
Russian Social Democratic colleagues, intolerant of the opinions of others, incapable of friendship, and addicted to plotting and scheming.
came
The
climax
meeting betw een Lenin and another notable revolutionary (more famous than Lenin at the time), Alexander Helphand, alias Parvus, a \\ ealthv Jew who was said to have played a major role (along with
of the action
Trotsky)
\\
ith a
in the abortive revolution of 1905
and
who had
subsequently gone
abroad and made his fortune. Helphand was depicted by Solzhenitsyn as Lenin's evil genius, his satanic tempter, and his superior in cunning and
Karamazov's vision of the Grand Helphand offers to help Lenin get to Petrograd by persuading the Germans to give him safe passage in a sealed compartment of a train and to supply him with money. Lenin remains non-committal when the offer is foresight. In a scene reminiscent of Ivan
Inquisitor,
made but later capitulates and accepts it.-'' As fiction Lenin in Zurich showed Solzhenitsyn returning to top form. The best chapters were up to the best in August 1914, and if there were
— Talking to the Europeans longueurs,
due
these were
names and mass of
to the welter of untaniiliar
felt
bv most
he
critics to
I943] historieal detail,
hiemish that would fade when the
a
Ihe book had,
chapters took their place in the complete epic.
in addition,
some
intriguing features. Solzhenitsxn's portrait of Lenin was highl\' per-
sonal,
w
autobiographical overtones.
ith
he picture of
I
a loneK'
prophet, self-centered, short-tempered, mi.serlv with his time
and unheeded
("a single
wasted
hour made Lenin ill"), suspicious of others, virtualK friendless, cut off from his homeland, and dreaming of leaving his w ife for another woman seemed uncannily close to certain biographical details in the life of the author breathtakingK so to those who knew him well and there was much comment among Russian readers about Solzhenitsvn's psxchological identification with his revolutionarv predecessor and ideological opponent. Solzhenitsvn seems not to have been undulv upset bv these speculations, but he xigorousK' rejected them w henever thev were put to him directlv. To the BB(> interviewer he said he had invented nothing in his portrait of Lenin, had endowed him \\ ith no characteristic that Lenin had not possessed in real lite. "Mv aim is to give as little plav to the imagination as possible and
—
to re-create as closelv as possible
w
hat he
w as
reallv like.
Ihe w Titer's imagwhole and, bv
ination onlv helps to forge the separate elements into one
how these elements intersame occasion, Solzhenitsvn declined to answer the question of whether he admired Lenin or not ("Read the book" w as his classic author's answer to the challenge), but the fact of his long preoccupation w ith Lenin was no secret, and in speaking to Struve he was more explicit about the form penetrating into the character, to trv to explain
act."-'
On
the
his fascination
Lenin I
is
had taken.
one ot the central figures
in
mv
epic and a central figure in our historv.
moment
have been thinking of Lenin from the verv
I
conceived the idea of
mv
and have collected everv crumb and fragment that
epic, for forty years already,
know n about him, absolutelv evervthing. Throughout the years I gradualK- came to understand him; even compiled catalogues listing his actions throughout his life according to w hich characteristics they illustrated. Evervthing I learned about him I read in his books and in memoirs. ... I don't use this directlv at the moment of w riting, but it is all systematized and sorted in my head. Now w hen I regard mvself as ha\ ing matured to the point where can write about Lenin, am describing his concrete vears in Zurich, while retrospectivelv including events from his private and political life. I have no other task than to describe the living Lenin exactlv as he was, is
.
.
.
I
,
I
abjuring
all
official
I
embellishments and
superficial to sav that I'm writing
of his
ow n
reached
characteristics
a certain level
understand another
man
.
.
.
official
legends. .\nd
him out of mvself.
[but]
I
I
it's
absolutelv
am w riting him
onlv out
cannot describe him w ithout mvself having
of psvchologv and experience, w ithout being able to in his particular
circumstances and w
ith his particular
aims.'-
Lenin, of course, was his old hero. Long after his
with Stalin, Lenin had remained
total
disillusionment
his idol, the shining knight of the
Revolu-
SOLZHENITSYN
[944] tion,
tear
and
had taken him
it
him from
had been the
a
long time before he plucked up the courage to
his pedestal. Stalin
first
was torn down
in 777^ First Circle. Stalin
father-figure to go (other writers, like
Mandelstam, Pasterwas a
nak, Bulgakov, and Grossman, had tackled Stalin as well), but Lenin
bigger challenge, and Solzhenitsvn had few predecessors in this particular act of literary regicide.
He was
quite explicit, however, about his intentions.
down from his mythic dimencounter-mvth to the official Soviet legend of the avuncular idealist with the heart of gold and the cares of mankind on his shoulders. He had once thought, he told Struve, of waiting until his entire epic was complete before publishing any part of it, but he couldn't His aim was
sions to
to
human
resist starting
demystify Lenin, to cut him
size
and
to create a
now, because
it
was "impossible not
to try to influence the
thinking of one's contemporaries."-^
Not
surprisingly, Solzhenitsvn's iconoclastic treatment of
one of the great
new point of controversy. The principal objections were set out at great length in the French magazine Est et Quest by Boris Souvarine, a founder member of the French Communist party and leading member of the Comintern who later broke with both, became a distinguished historian, wrote a critical biography of Stalin, and eventually came to oppose Leninism as well. Souvarine had known Lenin (and some of heroes of twentieth-century history became
a
the other individuals described in Solzhenitsvn's book) personally, and insisted
had misrepresented Lenin's character and actions. While acknowledging Solzhenitsvn's enormous merits as a novelist, moralist, and chronicler of Gulag, and admitting that "Solzhenitsvn's sincerity was beyond question," Souvarine advanced a variety of charges against him. Solzhenitsyn, he wrote, had been misled by over-exposure to tendentious Communist historiography. As an example, he quote Solzhenitsvn's authorial note on "events which have been carefully concealed from history and which, because of the development of the West, have received little attention." On the contrar\', wrote Souvarine, they were the subject of a vast and still-growing literature, w ith only a part of which Solzhenitsyn had familiarized himself before w riting his book. This must have been why Solzhenitsyn had accepted and was promulgating two pernicious myths: that Helphand was a friend and helper of Lenin's (on the contrary, wrote Souvarine, Lenin detested him and repeatedly rejected his help) and that Lenin had accepted German money and had travelled through Germany in a "sealed carriage" in order to return to Russia. There was no evidence at all, according to Souvarine, that Lenin had ever accepted a penny of German money, and the journey by train had been perfectly open and legal, and conducted in such a way that Lenin's compartment (and those of his companions) w ere officially regarded as "extraterritorial" formalh' speaking, Lenin never set foot on enemy territory. Souvarine deploxed a wealth of references and invoked an array of scholars to support his point of view and accused Solzhenitsyn of over-reliance on tainted and discredited sources. Solzhenitsyn was said to be guilty of selective quotation and distortion, and Souxarine drew attention to a passage about that Solzhenitsvn
.
.
.
—
Talking
to th k
I
uropkan
',
s
f
among Russian
94
5
1
Lenin that had
ahx-atlv acc]uirctl a certain notorietx'
"just because
quarter oliiis blood was Russian, fate had hitched him to the
a
ramshackle Russian rattletrap.
A
readers:
cjuarter of his blood, but nothing in his
w ill, his inclinations, made him kin to that slovenK slapdash, eternalK drunken people." Ditl this mean, asked Souxarine, that the whole of Russian historv should be examined to determine w hat its chief characters' racial origins were and how much Russian blood ran in their \eins? hi that case, things would go badlv with the entire Russian ro\al famih', not to character, his
,
speak of writers
Pushkin (part Ethiopian), Lermonto\-
like
(of Scottish descent),
Karamzin (of Tartar stock), and dozens of others.-"^ It was to be three years betore Solzhenitsvn got around to repKing to Souvarine, but it is worth mentioning the main lines of his "defence" here. Souxarine was guilt\' of forgetting that Leniii in Zurich was first of all a work of literature, although Solzhenitsvn w rote that he had endeavoured to make it "historically irreproachable," and Souvarine had not found anv factual distortions. Secondh', the book "stood or fell" bv its characterization of Lenin as a psychological type, and again Souvarine had not questioned this. As for research and sources, in the end it came dow n to w hom vou believed, and he preferred
ones Souvarine had cited, just as he firmlv
his authorities to the
believed that
I
German monex'
lelphand had channelled
had thereby helped
to bring
and had not himself
to the Bolsheviks
about the October putsch.
He
used the xxord "sealed" xxith reference to the train Lenin had travelled but
how
in,
Germany as "legal" Germany had permitted
could Souvarine describe the journey through
and legitimate? Germany and Russia
\x
ere at war;
the journey precisely to bring about subversion and collapse in Russia and
forward her war aims. Lenin's acceptance of the guarantee of safe passage was treachery (Solzhenitsvn later amended this to "high treason").^' Finally:
You can let slip
scarcely conceal your admiration for this great villain. Sexeral times
vou
such expressions as "Lenin-denigrators," "Leninophobes," "slanderers,"
And how can anyone blacken What can anyone sav about Lenin
but only virtue can be slandered or denigrated.
name more than he
Lenin's
and Trotsky
did himself?
.
.
.
that x\()uld be xxorse than simply recalling h()x\ thev created and greatest totalitarianism the xxorld has seen and hox\- thev dexised their methods of mass terror. Your article is morally dangerous in that it
the
.
.
.
first
.
.
.
seeks to whitewash the crimes of this pair
tem
As
—w
itself
in
hile laving the xvhole
most such disputes, the
past one another. Souvarine (and
—and w
blame on tvxo sides
many
ith
them the Communist
svs-
their disciple [Stalin].-'^
other
were
to a certain extent talking
critics,
including, in the Soviet
Union, Roy Medvedev) was accusing Solzhenitsvn of manipulating the facts and distorting history in the service of a tendentious interpretation of it, while Solzhenitsvn maintained, on the one hand, that he xxas straightening out an already tendentious version of historx' and, on the other, that his ics
were raising quibbles that did not detract from
central interpretation.
The
crit-
his essentially correct
dispute continued in the pages of the French and
SOLZHENITSYN
[946]
emigre press (and in samizdat) for
new was added by Long on again
many months more,
but nothing essentially
either side.
moyed
before this debate had got truly under way, Solzhenitsyn had
—
time to Spain. After ten days of travelling around the country
this
came the usual prepared television interview and, later that same March 1976, a press conference, at which he spontaneously answered journalists' questions. Both were extremely interesting and among his better performances. In the interview he explained how important a place the Spanincognito
day, 20
war had occupied in Soviet mythology during his youth. "We were caught up in your civil war. Names like Toledo, the university campus in Madrid, the Ebro, Teruel, and Ciuadalajara were totally familiar to my generation, and if anyone had summoned us and allowed us to go, we would have dropped everything to go and fight for the Republicans." However, that had been long ago. He now realized that, compared with the Russian Civil War, the Spanish war had cost far fewer lives. More importantly, the outcome had been completely different. In Spain "the ish civil
passionately
.
.
.
Christian world view" had triumphed, leading to peace and reconciliation,
whereas the triumph of communism in Russia had meant the start of a longer and more bloody \\ ar the war of the state against the population and this had cost, according to statistics he trusted, sixty-six million lives* (against "a
—
—
half-million" for Spain).
Solzhenitsyn went on to say that he had heard
porary Spain as
a "dictatorship"
and
critics
describe contem-
"totalitarian" but that after travelling
around the country, he could say that these critics did not know what the words meant. No Spaniard was tied to his place of residence. Spaniards could travel abroad freely, newspapers and magazines from all over the world were on sale in the kiosks, everyone had free access to photocopying machines, even strikes (with some exceptions) were permitted, and there had recently been a limited amnesty for political prisoners. "If we had such conditions in the Soviet Union today, we would be thunderstruck, we would say this was unprecedented freedom, the sort of freedom we haven't seen in sixty years." It w as natural, he said, that progressive circles in Spain should want to have as much freedom as possible and to give their country the status of the other countries of Western Europe, but he wanted to too cjuickly.
The democracies were on
Spain could avoid the danger of
warn them
the retreat, and
it
against
moving
wasn't certain that
falling into a true totalitarianism in the not
too distant future.
He
also clarified his view of the
a lesson for the
way
in
which Russia's experience held
West.
Russia's social experience has placed her ahead of the rest of the world.
saving she has become
a
leader of nations.
*'rhe figure was provided bv an migre calculate Soviet losses
pro\ided
statistics.
from the
No, she has become
statistician. Professor
terror, purges,
I.
a
I
am
not
nation ot slaves
A. Kurganov, w ho has tried to
and other repressions by analyzing the
officially
Talking to the Europeans that calls itself the Soviet Lnion. But
we have gone through an
experience that
West has gone through. And v\e now lf)()k w ith pit\ on the W est. strange feehng, as if we were looking back on the past. And in relation to
nobodv It is a
[947]
in the
the V\ est one can sav
v\
e are looking at
happening here now happened
He wanted
vou from vour
future. Evervthing that
is
to us along ago."'
from the txrannv of "left" and "right." .Manwas not political but spiritual, and the opposition "East-\\ est" was relative. Both communities suffered from the same disease: "the ailment of materialism, the ailment of inadequate moral standards. It was precisely to escape, he said,
kind's crisis
the absence of moral standards that led to the appearance of such a horrible dictatorship as the Soviet one, and of such a greedv
West's.
On
the one hand
we
consumer society
as the
get totalitarian socialism, and on the other,
indifference to the unhappiness and suffering of others."
He
traced the origin of mankind's malaise back to the great leap that
man had made from
the .Middle .Ages to the Renaissance. .Man had done so
as a protest against the
impoverishment of
his material nature
and the exag-
grown more and more materialistic, more and more neglecting his spirituality, ending w ith the universal triumph of materiality, together with a decline in spiritual life. "The picture today's world presents to the eye strikes me as appalling. think that if mankind is not doomed to die, it must restore a proper appreciation of \ alues. In other
geration of the spiritual. But then he had
I
words, spiritual values must again predominate over material \alues. This does not is
mean
that
we
enriched by time.
The
I
should return to the Middle .Ages. F.verv development
am
speaking of new horizons, or so
it
seems to
me."-*^
thoughtful tone of these and other answ ers bv Solzhenitsxn was
greatly at variance with the stridency of the thunderbolts hurled in \\ ashington, Paris,
and London, perhaps because he
away from
the centres of
felt
he had to shout
less
loudly
pow er or perhaps because Spain had evoked in him a genuine spontaneity and warmth that informed his w hole attitude. .At all events his sincerity, his sense of commitment, and his social ease w ere w ideiy commented on bv Spanish journalists w ho attended the press conference. But it was tactless, to say the least, to lecture the Spaniards so directK' on the nature ot true dictatorship and to admonish a nation just emerging from a dictatorship
know
(however mild
nearly enough to
Soviet standards
b\'
make
a
—and Solzhenitsvn did not
true comparison) on the failings and dangers
of democracy. Solzhenitsvn was
w
and
idely perceived as interfering again;
while a few commentators concentrated on the apocahptic nature of his vision (one newspaper likened
were
political.
him
to a
mixture of Job and
Isaiah),
most responses
Solzhenitsyn's views were said to have been "gleefulh" recei\ed"
by the Spanish Right, up
to
and including the neo-Nazis, and
to
rassed Spain's conservative prime minister, Carlos Arias, w ho
seeking a commercial agreement with the Soviet Union. Left alleged that Solzhenitsvn
must "be suffering from
.A
have embar-
w as
just
then
spokesman of the
a serious
ness" that had destroyed his political judgement and caused
mental
him
ill-
to allow
SOLZHENITSYN
[94«]
himself to be "exploited as a figure-head and used by right-w ing extremists
democracy, human rights, and workers' freewords on dictatorship were widely misLe Monde (still smarting, it seems, from flagrantly bv quoted, most Solzhenitsvn's Paris attack), which carried the headline "Solzhenitsyn Thinks to attack the cause of social
dom."-*^ Perhaps predictably, his
That the Spaniards Live sels,
in
'Absolute Freedom.' "
A
few days later, in Brus-
the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (to
w hich the
AFL-CIO
belonged) issued a "strong protest" against Solzhenitsyn's statements on tele\ision and announced that in his "exaltation of the Franco regime" he w as "abandoning his ow n cause" of respect for human beings and their
right to
freedom and democracy.'" Few commentators had the perspicacity, if anything, endorsed the
or temerity, to point out that Solzhenitsyn had,
Spanish reforms and had merely cautioned against going too fast. Interestingly enough, Solzhenitsyn had foreseen some of these reactions in his press conference. One of his questioners had asked w hether he did not fear that his attacks
on
left
totalitarianism
w ould
give encouragement to sup-
porters of right-wing totalitarianism. After repeating his conviction that there
was totalitarianism onh of the Left (in his view the dictatorship of rightwing regimes w as less than total), Solzhenitsyn replied that a w riter could not worry about whether his words pleased someone or not, and emphasized that his allegiance w as only to Russia. "I never intended to become a Western w riter. I came to the West against my w ill. I write only for my homeland. ... cannot w orrv about w hat someone somew here makes of what I write and if he uses it in his own way." At another point, when asked why he lived in Sw itzerland, he replied, "I do not live in Sw itzerland, I live in Russia. All mv interests, all the things I care about, are in Russia."" Earlier, on television, he had been more explicit about his teelings. I
...
in the
prosperous countries of the West
we
live like captives.
possible for us tomorrow to return to our starving, beggarh- countr\all
go back
like a shot.
The Communist
press
is
If
were
it
we
\\
ould
very fond of speculating about
w ho went to the West and became a millionaire. When I w as home, thev didn't w rite a w ord. \\ hen we w ere all starving there (and thev still are todav), thev lied that we had full bellies. Yes, of course, I get big rovalties here, but the major part of them goes to the Russian Social Fund to help the persecuted in the Soviet Union and their families, and we send this aid
that Solzhenitsvn
starving at
h\-
various channels into the Soviet Union.
'-
end of his press conference, Solzhenitsyn asked to make and pleaded w ith reporters either to use his answers in full that experience or to omit certain topics altogether. "I know from newspapers usually take onh w hat they need. I hey tear some phrase out of Leave the scissors context, destrox all proportion, and distort my ideas. Just before the
a little digression
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
do you understand w hat I mean?'"' His plea was in vain, of course, w ith the result that his Spanish visit and Spanish speeches caused, if anxthing, more scandal than his earlier state-
alone,
his
.
.
Talking to the Europeans merits and certainlv did
more
to discredit
him with the "established Lett"
than anything that had gone before, lie hardiv deserved
make
[949]
it,
but few eared to
the effort to find out what he had realK said. Unfortunately, this
all
too predictable reaction to his words served onl\ to strengthen Solzhenitsvn's
prejudices as well. Both sides of the ideological divide were becoming locked into stereotypical attitudes that not onlv misrepresented their true positions
but were increasintjK
difficult to
break out
of.
51
THE SAGE OF VERMONT AMONG THE VARIOUS explanations that Solzhenitsyn had given for living L in Zurich, the latest (mentioned by
w as
that he
had wanted
him
in
both Paris and Madrid)
on Lenin for on the quesgood friends. In
to stay there while writing his chapters
his series of historical novels. Lenin in Zurich
tion of his future plans Solzhenitsyn
was
was now
out, but
evasive, even to
Paris he had admitted that he did not like Zurich and told Jean-Claude that he
w ould probablv
retire to the countrvside,
Lamy
while "definitely remaining
Switzerland." But in early May 1976 he surfaced unexpectedly in the United States, and it w as announced that he would spend some weeks at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, to carry out historical research. In Spain he in
—
had disclosed that the next two novels in the sequence begun by August 1914 were already complete, but it seems there October 1916 and March 1917 were archives at Hoover that he needed to consult before he could consider
—
\\ orks ready for publication. For three weeks he worked quietly, but on 20
these
May
he suddenly called
a
denounce a new Soviet campaign of denigration against him. 1 he Soviet press, under orders, had been more or less silent about him since the propaganda outburst accompanying his expulsion two years beforehand. It appears, however, that his speeches in America, and his latest round of appearances in Britain, France, and Spain, with his persistent attacks on detente, had had some effect in Moscow. In mid-March the Soviet press had broken its silence w ith a series of attacks on Solzhenitsyn's remarks in Spain. Tass and Pravda had quoted left-w ing circles to the effect that Solzhenitsyn was a total reactionary, and had joyfully picked up the allegation, cited in the English Guardian, that Solzhenitsvn was "mentally unbalanced." A week press conference to
950
The Sage Pravda had carried
later
a
oe \
'
erm
ont
[
round-up of the left-wing Spanish press
in
9
5
i I
which
Solzhenitsyn's speeches were inchgnanth rejected as interfering and Sol/henitsyn himself was denounced as opposed e\erv form of progress.'
A
completely different tack
Danilov
a
bourgeois chau\
hatl
been taken, also
in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Sol/.henitsvn
w
and
inist
in
a
nn
stic
w ho
March, b\ Boris
as alleged to
ha\e paid
a
Madrid, to Grand Duke Vladimir Romanox the senior surviving male of the Russian roval famil\ and thus heir presumptixe to the Russian throne. Nothing is known of what passed between them, and visit,
while
in
,
Solzhenitsyn's
visit is easily
teratttnuiya (lazeta
restore tsarism,
from
explained
1)\'
chose to portray him as
and
as
hoping
his grandparents.-
It
his historical interests, but the Lia
con\ inced monarchist anxious to
to recover the estates
was pathetic
and propertv confiscated on a regurgitation of
stuff, rel\ ing
the IJteratunuiya Gazeta\ earlier rehash of the Stern article, but
approach, and
a side reference to the origin
that the "biographical line" of attack a fact that
emerged even more
its
general
of Solzhenitsvn's scar, indicated
on Solzhenitsyn was far from exhausted, from Solzhenitsyn's Stanford press
clearlv
conference.
He
had decided to
call
it,
he
said, after learning that the
KGB
had forged
show that he had been an active informer in the camps and had betrayed his friends. Ihe allegation w as not entirelv new. A vear earlier, the Novosti press agency had prepared a filmed interview w ith one of Solzhenitsyn's informants for The Gulag Archipelago, Mikhail Vakubovich, called "Postscript to the Archipelago," in which Vakubovich had accused Solzhenitsyn of being a "religious hypocrite" for marr\'ing "his ow n god-daughter" (a reference to Natalia Svetlova)* and of having been an active informer. Vakubovich, an elderly ex-Menshevik and ex-Bolshevik in infirm health, w as one of dozens of Solzhenitsyn's sources w ho had been tracked down, interrogated by the KGB, and subjected to threats, but he was the onlv one to co-operate, partly as a result of his advanced age and partlv because he felt Solzhenitsyn had slighted him.t Vakubovich's allegation was founded on Solzhenitsyn's admission in volume 2 of llje Gulag Archipelago that he had agreed to become an informer w hile at Kaluga CJate and on the supposition that this was the reason he had been sent to the sharashka. "It is absolutelv unlikely that a man \\ ho agreed to inform on his fellow prisoners and did not produce any information should be sent to such a special camp. It is out of a letter trying to
the question."''
tion,
Vakubovich's accusation had obvioush' given the KGB some inspirabut it had not followed his suggestion slavishlv. The forgerv was dated
*It
not clear
is
Moscow
how or with
whom
this
w
rumour
originated, but
it
gained
a certain
currenc\ in
no truth in it. t Apparently, Novosti made another "documentary" film about Solzhenitsyn containing allegations of anti-Semitism and a false version of how he sustained the scar on his forehead. This would suggest that it contained an interview w ith Simon\an, and perhaps others, but the confor a while, although there
tents are not clear
as
from the information
availal)le to
me.
SOLZHENITSYN
[952]
20 January 1952, that tsyn was
was
rebe^llion that
in
volume
advance.
is,
from the period
3
to break out there
when
after the sharashka
show him betraying
Ekibastuz, and purported to
at
Solzheni-
the prisoners'
on 22 January (which Solzhenitsyn
extols
of The Gulag Archipelago) b\ informing the security officer in
The
\\
way
ords were phrased in such a
as to suggest prejudice
on
Solzhenitsvn's part against the Ukrainian Banderites involved in the uprising,
and
also against a Polish colonel, while the proof of his complicity
alleged to be his
immediate transfer
request that the
camp
criminals
who
camp
me
authorities "protect
me
recentlv troubled
ws signed "Vetrov"
to the
was
hospital (in response to a
against the outrages of the
with suspicious questions").
The
—the Kaluga Gate pseudonym Solzhenitsyn had
letter
cited in
The Gulag Archipelago."^ Solzhenitsyn did not quote from the
among
lated
him
photocopv.
a
was being
circu-
agents must have used the collection of his
Natalia Reshetovskaya (which they had tried to
sell
West), including letters from Ekibastuz, as a model for their forgery,
in the it
KGB
The
letters to his first wife,
but
letter directly. It
foreign correspondents, he said, and a Swiss journalist had sent
did not stand up to close analvsis, neither reproducing his phraseology
accurately nor reflecting his mental
make-up
the rebellion in l^he Gulag Archipelago.
among Ukrainians and
The
as
it
appeared
in his
account of
attempt to sow suspicion of him
Poles was a crude failure.
What more
pathetic confes-
weakness could there be, he added sarcastically, than "this accusation against their mortal enemv that he had collaborated with themselves"? In short, the Soviet authorities would stoop none other than to an\thing to discredit 77je Gulag Archipelago but had nothing to answer it sion of their ridiculous
.
.
.
with, "no facts or arguments
Pour days
.
.
.
only
lies."'
after his press conference, the Fioover Institution
vate dinner in Solzhenits\'n's
honour
at
gave
w hich he spoke on the
a pri-
subject of
Russian and Soviet studies. He did not, as might have been expected, speak about his ow n research at all, but used the occasion to criticize the work of Western, and above all American, scholars working in the field and to correct w hat he saw as their misconceptions and historical research in the field of
errors.
The
source of man\ of these errors, he said, lay in the very abnor-
malitv of contemporarv Russian historv. Although the country was very real
and existed
in the present, to
history: "the spine of
its
studv
it
w as
like
studying archaeological pre-
history has been fractured,
its
memory
has failed,
it
pow er of speech." The truth was obscured by a torrent of "programmed lies." Even this might have been surmountable but for two further obstacles. One was that the historian was disoriented by "a hurricane" of propaganda about the Soviet Union whipped up by "committed socialist cirhas lost the
cles,"
and the other that revolutionary and opposition-minded emigres from
an earlier era had unfairly blackened pre-revolutionary Russia. As "tendentious generalization" had
Revolution was
a logical
come
into being, according to
continuation of Russian history and
to "perennial Russian slavery"
owed
and "the Asiatic tradition." As
a
a result, a
which the its
origins
prime exam-
TH
F.
V
SAGE OF
F.
RMONT
[953]
to "an
American scholar, for " w ho had pub-
pie of
what he meant, S()l/hcnits\n referred
many
years the director of one of your 'Russian (>entres,'
"pseudo-academic book" that w as full of "mistakes, exaggerations, and perhaps premeditated distortions" premeditated, said Solzhenitsyn, because the book's illustrations included cartoons, although it w as supposed to be scholarly.* Solzhenitsxn's objection to the book w as that it postulated a natural con-
lished a
—
tinuit\- between Old Russia and the Soyiet Union that w as not present. "Soviet deyelopment is not an extension of Russian development, but its diversion in a completely new and unnatural direction w hich is inimical to her people. Not only are the terms 'Russian' and 'Soviet' not interchangeable, not they are irreconcilably contradictor) and equivalent, and not unilinear completely exclude each other." To think otherwise was a "gross mistake" and "scholarly slovenliness" and was disastrous for Western understanding .
.
.
—
As antidotes to this kind of misunderstanding, Solrecommended two samizdat works: What Is Socialism? by his old friend Igor Shafarevich, to w hich he had just w ritten a preface for the Russian-language edition and w hich he hoped to persuade one of his American publishers to bring out,t and a new work by the jailed physicist Yuri Orlov that had just arrived in the West. Shafarevich, said Solzhenitsyn, had demonstrated that socialism w as an ancient and supranational system of beliefs
of historical perspective.^
zhenitsyn
that had always existed independently of
any one country, and both Shafa-
shown
that consistent socialism could not
revich and Orlov had convincingly
be anything else than totalitarian and inevitably led to "the total suppression of individuality and the
human spirit." many onlookers
Solzhenitsyn seemed to
to
be
tilting at
w
indmills,
w hile
the American historian at the centre of his attack went on to become a personal adviser on Soviet affairs to President Reagan, not generally known for his softness It is
on communism or a tendency to bow to the "socialist hurricane." were (and are) many historians of Russian and Soviet
true that there
society
who
tsyn would
hold views more favourable to the Soviet Union than Solzheni(or than is perhaps compatible w ith a sober appreciation of
w ish
the facts) and that some are sympathetic to socialism (the one position does in all the millions of words that have been West on the subject of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet Communist Party, one would be hard put to it to discern a prevailing distortion of the sort espied by Solzhenitsyn.
not always entail the other), but spilled in the
In a sense, of course,
it
hardly mattered, for the nature of Solzhenitsyn's
dyspepsia was not such as to be dispelled by a mere recital of facts and statistics (he had specifically rejected "meaningless statistics" early on in his address),
*The
and he had neither the time nor the inclination
reference was to Russia under the Old Regime,
a.
formerly director of the Russian Research Center
to subject
Western
work of historical inquiry by Richard Pipes, Harvard, in which Pipes sought to define
at
some enduring characteristics of Russian history. tThe book was eventually published by Harper & Row
in
1980 as The
Socialist
Phenomenon.
SOLZHENITSYN
[954]
and Western codes to anything like the intense scrutiny he was used on his o\\ n country. This became clear at a second address delivHoo\ er Institution a w eek later, in response to the award to him the ered at Friendship Medal from the Freedoms Foundation of Valley American the of Forge, PennsvKania. Haying stated his admirable belief that the aim of life was "not to take boundless pleasure in material goods" but for men to leave "better than our inherited the world as "better persons" than they entered it for w hich freedom was a necessary, but not instincts would have made us" a sufficient, condition, Solzhenitsyn w ent on to draw a startling picture of how Western freedom looked to him. society
to training
—
—
To
Freedom!
people's mailboxes, eves, ears, and brains \\ith commercial
fill
rubbish against their
with
account of their right not to accept
To
programmes
will, television
watch
that are impossible to
sense of coherence. Freedom! Fo force information on people, taking no
a
spit in the
it
or their right to peace of mind. Freedom!
eves and souls of passersbv w
ith
advertisements. Freedom! For
publishers and film producers to poison the younger generations
w
ith
corrupting
Freedom! For adolescents of fourteen to eighteen to immerse themselves in Freeidleness and pleasure instead of intensive study and spiritual growth. Freedom! to deprive all other citizens of a normal life. dom! For strikers FOr speeches of exoneration w hen the law ver himelf is aw are of the guilt ot the Freedom! For vulgar, casual pens to slide irresponsibly over the accused. Freedom! To divulge the defence secrets ot one's surface of an\ problem. filth.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
as
.
.
.
.
country for personal
It \\
.
.
.
political gain.
.** .
.
at his demagogic \\ orst again, passing off a bar-room w ent into bars himself) as profound comment worthy of attention. At the root of all this evil, as he saw it, was America's
Solzhenitsyn
tirade (not that he
respectful
and the elevation of juridical rights over moral and to the "empty," external freedoms he had he inxoked the "inner freedom" granted by God, and implied
devotion to the rule of law
,
rights. In opposition to these,
in\eighed against, that the
two w ere incompatible.
After this his
it
may have come
as
audience to learn, three months
settle
permanently
ceding year. In leaving the
June he w
in
fact,
Hoover
as at
America
—
in \
something of
a surprise to
later, that Solzhenits\'n
ermont,
as
members of
had decided to
had been rumoured the pre-
he seems hardly to have returned to Switzerland after Institution (except for a brief formal visit), for in mid-
Vale University to stud\- the historical archives there, before
returning to California, and in mid-July he w as booked for speeding (Natalia Svetlova w as drixing) in Kansas on his
way
east.
We
told the patrolman that
he and Natalia w ere on their w ay to see "Natalia's brother" in Vermont, and
was eventually paid from Vermont (though not by Natalia's "brother"). 8 September from the United States immigration authorities. I \ picalK', Solzhenitsyn was already in residence, having quietly moved in on 30 July w ith no fanfare. Ihe house found for him had been the summer residence of an American businessman (recently
the fine
The official announcement came on
The Sage deceased);
it
was
of N'ermont
situated outside the sleepy small
New
south-eastern corner of \ ermont, near the architect
named
w
ith tiftx
and
a
autumn
(the sale
was completed on
31
programme estimated
thousand
the propertv
of barbed w
\
October
dollars).
UndoubtedK
,
have cost
to
quarter of a million dollars (the house and land had cost
tift\'
in the
A oung
acres of land surrounding it,* and since then had
supervised a renovation and rebuilding
about
town of C^avendish,
lampshire border.
Alexis Vinogradov had purchased the house on Solzheni-
tsyn's behalf the preceding 1975), together
I
[955]
a
hundred
the most controversial feature of
w as the ire that
eight-foot chain-link fence topped with a single strand surrounded the entire propertv. Fences are unusual in
\ ermont, and usuallv unw elcome, for the\' obstruct hunters, used to ranging more or less where they wish, and get in the w a\' of the snow mobiles that have become the almost universal mode of cross-countr\ transport in snowbound \ ermont in w inter. The accepted explanation for the fence was that it was part of Solzhenitsvn's securitv arrangements against incursions bv the KGB. Some Sw iss newspapers w riting about his departure reported that Solzhenitsyn had been
increasinglv concerned about
KGB spving and harassment in Zurich and had He had allegWhatever the true proved its worth in
recentlv received another threatening letter posted from Bern. edl\-
asked for police protection, but not been granted
reason, or combination of reasons, the fence quickl\-
another direction.
The announcement
brought crow ds of reporters
it.
of Solzhenitsyn's
to the picturesquely
named
move immediatel) \\
indy Hill Road,
where the house was situated. Alexis \ inogradov, inveigled reluctantly to the main gate, denied all know ledge of Solzhenitsxn's w hereabouts, and insisted that the house belonged to him. He had no plans to transfer the house to Solzhenits\n, he said, and e\ en if he had, "I would give you the same answer." Since the main gate w as about half a mile from the house dow n a w inding drive, and since bulldozers had pushed up high mounds behind the fence to block anv view of the house from open ground, the reporters w ere totally frustrated and had to content themselves w ith the cr\ptic descriptions of the few locals w ho had been inside.^ That security against reporters w as more or less the true purpose of the fence w as admitted bv Solzhenitsvn w hen he attended the annual Cavendish town meeting the follow ing Februarv to explain himself and confirm for the first time that he w as actuallv living there. B\' now his main gate had been equipped w ith an electric-e\e alarm device and closed-circuit television cameras that could be monitored in the main house, and he w as aw are that these Citizen Kane-tvpe precautions had caused some concern to his tight-lipped but free-spirited neighbours. Revealing that death threats had already been slipped under his gate since his arrival in Vermont, he conceded that there was "no doubt the fence cannot protect me against Soviet agents," and added, "but it keeps away people who just want to see me." In Zurich he had been *It appears that Solzhenitsvn did not even bother to look at
it
before buving
photographs to Sw itzerland, and Solzhenitsvn said yes from there.
it.
\'inogradov sent
SOLZHENITSYN
[956]
inundated with unwanted
from Soviet agents, journalists, and sightthere. ... In those two years there was a real procession: hundreds of people came, people I didn't know, people of different nations. They came without invitations and without w arning. And so for hundreds of hours I talked to hundreds of people, and my work was ruined." His only interest, he said, was work, and the character of his work did not permit interruptions. "Sometimes there is a five-minute interruption, and the whole day is lost." Solzhenitsyn apologized for any inconvenience he was causing his neighbours. He had chosen to live in Cavendish, he said, because of "the simple way of life of the people, the countryside, and the long winters with the snow which remind me of Russia." He liked it there, and he did not want his presence to upset others. "Mv fence prevents your snowmobiles and hunters from going on their way I am sorry for that and ask you to forgive me, but I had to protect myself from certain types of disturbances." He also invited their sympathy w ith an account of his difficulties in the Soviet Union, saying that "I shall soon be sixty, but in all my life before, I have never had a permanent home." The Soviet authorities had chased him from one place to another until they threw him out. "God has determined that \s a growing everyone should live in the country where his roots are sometimes dies when transplanted, the spirit of a human being is also tree stunted when it is removed from the place of its roots. It is a very bitter fate to think and look back at one's own country. What is perfectly normal for those who live there is strange for one who is exiled." seers.
visits
"Anybodv and everybody could come
.
.
.
,
—
Solzhenitsyn did not
once more and repeated
let this
his
opportunity
admonition
at
the
slip to attack the
Hoover
Soviet
Union
Institution not to con-
fuse "Russian" with "Soviet," and his warning that the "sickness" of
com-
munism might spread to America. "The Russian people dream of the day when they can be liberated from the Soviet system," he said, "and when that day comes, I will thank you very much for being good friends and neighbours and will go home."'"
words were translated was greeted with loud applause. His eloquence had been more than enough to win over the dour Vermont townsfolk, even those who had grumbled about the fence and Solzhenitsyn spoke for about twenty minutes
by
his
newly acquired
threatened to
make
(his
secretary, Irina Alberti) and
holes in
it.
After shaking a few hands, he
left
the meeting,
Cavendish was well known for its spirit of local independence. Its annual town meeting w as an excellent example of traditional, grass-roots American democracy in action, and as in Switzerland, all business was transacted by voice vote from the floor. Had Solzhenitsyn stayed, he would have seen something to remind him of Appenzell, would have increased his understanding of the land he had come to and perhaps modified his gloomy, media-fed view of America's stumbling democracy. y\s it was, his visit to the meeting v\as not as spontaneous as the rest of the proceedings, or as improvised as it had seemed. It had been arranged in advance by the
w hich w
as
perhaps
a pity:
,
The Sage
of
Vermont
195 7)
governor of Vermont, Richard Snclling, and the town manager, Quentin Phelan. Once Sol/.henits\ n had stated his case, he was too busy to sta\' on
and
listen to the rest of the
meeting.
people of (>avendish were pleased that he had come, however, and with their conservative w avs and belief in each man's minding his ow n business, were quite happv to have this ultra-recluse as a neighbour. In the ne.xt
The
were no complaints of substance against him. Solzhenitsyn had chosen the perfect place in w hich to disappear into the landscape. But if he w as invisible iocallv, Solzhenitsyn was still highly visible in international affairs, and the peace of Vermont was not matched by any lessening in the intensit\- w ith which the Soviet authorities continued to tollow his activities. At the beginning of February 1977 the Literaturnaya Gazeta few- vears there
article bv a known prison-camp informer, Alexander Petro\ some of the better-know n dissidents, including Yuri Orlov and
published a long attacking
Sakharov's wife, Elena Bonner, and in particular accusing Alexander Ginzillegal currencv transactions. Ciinzburg had been singled out because
burg of
of his work for the Russian Social Fund, which Solzhenitsyn was supporting with the rovalties from The Gulag Archipelago, and the article revealed that
had been raided and 5,000 rubles confiscated, along with lists, and allegedly some foreign currency." (iinzburg responded bv calling an impromptu new s conference in his flat, at w hich he revealed, for the first time, the dimensions of the fund. Since April 1974, when Solzhenitsyn had set it up in its new form, the fund had helped 120 political prisoners or their families in the first vear, 720 in the second year, and 630 in the third. About 270,000 rubles (equivalent to $360,000) had been expended during that time, of which just over a quarter had been raised
Ginzburg's
flat
various documents and
inside the Soviet
Union and the
rest supplied
bv Solzhenitsyn. The Solzhew ith the Soviet govern-
nitsyn funds had been sent legallv in the beginning,
ment siphoning
w hen the authorities had discovered monev, thev had blocked further payments, and atter that
off a third in taxes, but
the purpose of the
'had been sent in through unofficial channels. The raid on Ginzburg's flat w as obviously an attempt to prevent the fund from continuing its work. This w as confirmed by other prominent dissidents who attended the Ginzburg press conference, such as General Grigorenko and \'alentin Turchin, chairman of the unofficial Moscow group of Amnesty International. They revealed that there had been growing police pressure on the families of political prisoners not to accept aid from the fund,
it
and Turchin
said that he himself
following day. Later that dav, nitsyn, as a
who
3
had been summoned
for interrogation the
February, Ginzburg was arrested. Solzhe-
kept in close touch with Ginzburg and the activities of the tund
matter of course (Natalia Svetlova w as the fund's president),
issued a protest and characteristically
with the
fate of the
—
if
exaggeratedly
at
— linked the
once arrest
West. "This act of violence concerns Western people
more than can be imagined
at first glance.
unflinching total preparation of the Soviet
It
home
is
an essential link in the it should not
front so that
SOLZHENITSYN
[95H] in
any w av hinder the external offensive conducted so successfully during
these vears, and which will yet be broadened, against the strength, the spirit,
and the very existence of the West."'^ A week or two later he announced that he was retaining the prominent American lawyer Edward Bennett Williams to take on the legal defence of Ginzburg, and declared that he was in a position to affirm that Ginzburg had had no dealings \\ ith foreign currency and that the currency allegedly found in Ginzburg's flat had been planted there by KGB agents. "I belieye that legal counselling in the Ginzburg case will open up a new world even to a lawyer with your yast experience and world prestige," he vyrote to Williams, and expressed himself ready to supply the lawyer with all the facts necessary for undertaking the case.'^ Unfortunately, sanctions against the fund continued throughout the spring
and summer of 1976. Ginzburg's place as administrator of the fund in Moscow was taken partly by his wife, Irina Zholkovskaya, and partly by two less prominent dissidents, latyana Khodoroyich and Malya Landa, to whom Solzhenitsyn sent a message of support in Maw In June, Khodoroyich revealed in an interview that the campaign against supporters of the fund was unprecedented and that she was appealing to President Carter to save the fund from "annihilation." Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn himself was not neglected. At the beginning of April the Supreme Soviet of the USSR announced that Natalia Svctlova had been stripped of her Soviet citizenship by a decree passed the preceding October, and new s came of a new attack on Solzhenitsyn by his old school friend Kirill Simonvan. It
appears that, having escaped V'itkevich's fate of being obliged to give
interviews and appear on television after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion in 1974,
Simonyan had nonetheless agreed
now
to co-operate
keeping his side of the bargain.
The
w
ith
the authorities and
w as
co-operation took the form of a
twenty-three-page pamphlet published, for some unfathomable reason,
in
Danish by an obscure left-wing publishing house called Melbyhus in the small provincial town of Skaerbaek. Its title was Who Is Solzhenitsyn? and in it Simon)'an concentrated on what he regarded as three crucial incidents in Solzhenitsyn's life. One was the episode of the scar acquired at school, which Simonyan described as a consequence of Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitism. The second was Solzhenitsyn's arrest, w hich according to Simonyan had been engineered by Solzhenitsyn himself out of cowardice to avoid further fighting at the front. And the third w as the incident of 1952, when Simonyan had been called in for questioning by the KGB and show n Solzhenitsyn's interrogation record. There was also a reference to Solzhenitsyn's later letter to him and the futile attempt to renew their friendship in 1967, and an allegation that Solzhenitsyn's mother had once told him that her husband, Isaaki, had committed suicide in 1918 in a funk over the victory of the Reds.''' Ihe story of how the pamphlet got to Denmark is a mystery, and the director of the publishing house refused to divulge his source when questioned on the subject. 1 he fact that it was nexer translated into any other language
may
indeed indicate that not even the
KGB
felt
comfortable with
The Sage of
\
ermont somew
these charges, although thev were to surface in a in later "exposures" of Solzhenitsyn's earl\
Simons in the
I959]
an, he did not live to see his essa\' in print.
summer
of 1976, shortly before
hat
modihed guise
Perhaps fortunately for
life.
I
le
died of
a heart attack
publication.
its
Attacks on Solzhenitsyn by the Soviet authorities or their surrogates
were not surprising, nor were the objections raised to some ot his political views bv prominent dissidents such as Roy Medvedev, Sakharov, Litvinov, and others, or the criticisms of his handling of history in August 1914 and Leni)7 in lAirich. But in the summer of 1977 fresh currency was gi\en to a disquieting question that had hrst been raised in 1972 and that had been discussed on and off ever since: \\ as Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite? The immediate occasion this time \\ as the publication of volume 2 (A The Gulag Archipelago, in which Solzhenitsyn had included si.x photographs of six notable scoundrels responsible for some of the worst excesses of the Gulag administration. Illustrations in The Gulag Archipelago were very rare, so that the photographs stood out starkly in that vast expanse of text, but what particucaught the eve of Russian readers (ever sensitive to such niceties)
larly
that
all six
villains
happened
be Jew
to
s.
\\
as
Solzhenitsyn later explained that
these were the only photographs available and that these bloodthirst) Jewish
executioners really had existed.
He was
only telling the truth. Sceptical read-
were many more purely Russian administrators in Gulag than Jewish ones, that they w ere not a w hit less cruel or sadistic
ers pointed out that there
the
than their Jewish colleagues, and that
it
could hardly be
a
coincidence that
much emphasis on the Jews, not onl\' in his phototext. The question w as, Did Solzhenitsyn do it delib-
Solzhenitsyn had laid so graphs, but also in his erately,
and
had
it
come about
unconsciously, or had he been "fed" this information
fallen into a trap?
1 he question was naturalh bound up w tsyn's
known
ith
other aspects of Solzheni-
views. His nationalism, for instance, was obviously founded
deep and passionate love of the Russian people. But did not this passion, its logical conclusion (as Solzhenitsyn was all too prone to do), imply either exclusion or at least second-class status for non-Russians in the
on
a
carried to
Russian state? Solzhenitsyn had repeatedly expressed his support for the right of Jew
s
to emigrate to the
Jewish
state
and seemed
to
gration (as opposed to the emigration of Russians), but tionist
wish
Jews who
felt
Then
w hat about
assimila-
themselves to be more Russian than Jewish and did not
to emigrate, not to speak of the
assimilated?
approve of such emi-
there
was the
Russian Orthodoxy guided
all
Jew
s
w ho w
ished to stay
w
ithout being
religious question. In a country in
moral and spiritual
life
than that, for moral and spiritual questions transcended political ones
what was
to be the status of the
which
(and perhaps more in Sol-
Jews? In the pre-revolutionary Russia that Solzhenitsyn admired, their status had been difficult and in many respects pitiful. Solzhenitsyn had rarely mentioned this, or the existence of pogroms, in his literary works and statements. These and similar concerns led critics back to Solzhenitsyn's w orks. and zhenitsyn's view),
SOLZHENITSYN
[960] in the
summer him
against
of 1977 a translation appeared in the United States of the case
b\' a
jew
ish scientist
who had
recently emigrated
from the Soviet
named Mark Perakh.* Perakh analysed Solzhenitsyn's entire output from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich up to and including Lenin in Zurich, and came to some negative conclusions. In Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Union
to Israel
Ward, there were no Jewish characters of note and the Jewish question was w rote, but that yer\ omission, in a w riter as uncompro-
entirely missing, he
mising in his search for truth
mon know ledge w ord "Yid" was and that such
a
a
w as surprising. It w as comw as rife in the camps, that the
as Solzhenitsvn,
that eyervda\" anti-Semitism
universal term of abuse not reserved exclusively for Jews,
word would have sounded
Ivan Denisovich, particularly obscenities. In Central Asia,
when
entirely natural in the
mouth of
Solzhenitsvn had allowed him to use
where Cancer Ward was
set,
there had been a
big purge of Jew ish doctors just two years before the time of the novel's action, life
and again
it
was inconceivable
had not
that this
left its
of the hospital, vet there was only one fleeting reference to
it
mark on the in the entire
book.
As
for the rest of Solzhenitsvn's works,
w here
either
Jews or the Jewish
question appeared in some form or other, Perakh w rote that Solzhenitsyn's
Jews were generally fair and that in describing them, all his great powers of observation and his ability to depict character into play, for the\' w ere vi\id and lifelike. How ever, w hen one scrutinized their role in Solzhenitsyn's works, no matter how sympathetic they seemed individually, it w as alw avs negative. In The First Circle, for instance, there w ere three main Jew ish characters: Lev Rubin and Isaak Kagan among the prisoners, and Adam Roitman among the administrators, and all three w ere in one w av or another the defenders of evil. The larger phenomenon of anti-Semitism w as certainh' discussed and denounced at some length in The First Circle, but it was also treated as a purely Stalinist manifestation, hence as a product of the Communist system and not linked to deeper portraits of individual
Solzhenitsvn had brought
Russian attitudes. It w as in certain of Solzhenitsyn's other works, however, that Perakh found the most to criticize, notably in Solzhenitsyn's early pla\' The TenderArnold Gurvich, Boris foot and the Tart. Again the three Jew s in the plav Khomich, and the bookkeeper named Solomon were all representatives of evil, but this time grossly and disgustingly so, and Solomon was the very
—
*The
—
debate about Solzhenitsvn's alleged anti-Semitism had begun with an
salem Post in 1972
h\ the newK' arri\ed So\iet
were answered
three prominent Jew ish dissidents
b\'
Mikhail Agurskv), and
at greater
length
b\-
emigre Mikhail still
in the
Roman Rutman
article in \\\e Jeru-
Grobman. Grobman's charges Soviet Union (one of them was
in Soviet Jen-ish Affairs
(London)
in
same magazine published another defence of Solzhenits\ n by the .\merican scholar Edith Rogovin Frankel, and in 1977 more allegations of anti-Semitism by the Soviet emigre critic Simon Markish. .\11 these articles, except Frankel's, had appeared in Russian first. Perakh's article, a kind of stimma of those that had gone before, had appeared in Russian in the f>«/^/Y magazine Vremia i My (Time and We) in February 1976 before being published in English 1974. In 1976 the
in
M
ills t
ream.
— The Sage
of
Vermont
[9^)1]
incarnation of the greedv, craftv, influential "court Jew," manipulating the
"simple" Russian camp commandant and oozing guile and c(jrruption. As it happened, Solomon was modelled on the real-life prototype of Isaak Bershader, whom Solzhenitsvn had met at Kaluga Gate and later described at length in xolume 3 of The (iiilag Archipelago, and Ferakh dwelt on this description too. It w as not that the facts w ere necessarily false (though Perakh found the lip-smacking portrait of the dirtv, fat, and greedy Bershader definitely excessive), but that the naming of onlv Bershader among the numerous members of the camp elite w ho were allowed to choose mistresses from among the prisoners made it seem like a generalization and certainly left the reader with that impression. It w as noteworthy that both in Solzhenitsyn's play and in The Gulag Archipelago, "most" of the Jews portrayed were negative characters and "most" of the heroes were Russians, w hich certainly did not match realitv, and Perakh made a damning comparison of Gulag w ith Robert (con-
which dealt with much of the same material. Though behind Solzhenits\n's book in artistic forcefulness, wrote Perakh, Conquest's w as inhnitelv more impartial in its dealings w ith Russians and Jew s
quest's The Great Terror, far
and made no attempt to single out one nation at the expense of the other. Finallv, Perakh turned his attention to August 1914 and Lenin in Zurich. August was notable for avoiding the Jew ish theme altogether, although it also had a "completely positive" portrait of the Jewish engineer, Ilya Arkhangorodskv, the onlv one of its kind in Solzhenitsyn's entire oeuvre. Perakh hazarded a guess (correctlv) that this character must have been based on someone Solzhenitsvn knew. In Lenin in VAirich, on the other hand, he tound that Bershader-Solomon had surfaced again in the person of the fat Jew ish businessman and Lenin's evil genius, Israil Lazarevich Helphand (Parvus): "There he stood such as he w as, in his flesh and blood: w ith an immense gut, an extended dome-shaped head, flesh\' bulldog-like phxsiognomy, w ith a wedged
—
beard
.
.
Aryans).
.
,"
with
Not onlv
a taste for
Bershader and "Solomon," but
him
to bring
"openlv cavorting with plump blondes"
did Helphand manipulate others from the shadow it
w as he who
about his main goal
(i.e.,
s,
like
stood behind Lenin and exploited
—the collapse of the Russia he hated.
'^
Perakh did not deny that Solzhenitsyn w as the "greatest contemporary Russian writer" and that The Gulag Archipelago was "a superb book," an felt far be)ond Russia, and he conceded that Solzhenitsvn might have selected his heroes and villains "subconsciouslv," w ith no overt intention to distort reality. He also conceded that there w ere problems with what some might call a "percentual approach"
impressive work whose "enormous impact" w ould be
simplv adding up the positive and negative Jews portrayed in Solzhenitsyn's works and draw ing crude conclusions. Nevertheless, he felt that his analysis had gone beyond percentages and that it w as possible to express "enthusiasm
and respect
and as a champion of truth and encouragement (perhaps unconscious) ot anti-
for Solzhenitsyn both as a creator
justice," while regretting the
Semitic attitudes generated bv
Perakh was not alone
in
many
of his works.
harbouring such sentiments, nor was he the
SOLZHENITSYN
[962]
voice them in print, but he was the most thorough, and was followed bv other commentators. But Solzhenitsvn also had his defenders, not least among the Jews, and allegations of anti-Semitism were met with counterarguments. Representative of these was an article by Roman Rutman, a Jewish phvsicist then living in Israel. Rutman wrote some three years before Perakh and was taking issue with some rather crude articles accusing Solzhe-
first to
nitsvn of anti-Semitism that had appeared in the Jerusalem Post as early as
1972 and 1973* (he also revealed that he had been asked
same subject when lecturing
the
to Soviet
Jewish emigres
many in the
questions on United States
in 1972).
Unfortunately, Rutman's article w as not as detailed as that of Perakh
and notablv axoided dealing
volume
1
made out
at
anv length with The Gulag
was out by then. Rutman's case to
be an anti-Semite onlv
if
Archipelago, although
v\as that Solzhenitsvn could
one took
be
as one's starting point the
uniqueness of the suffering of the Jew s (especiallv in the twentieth centurv) and the necessity of stressing this fact and demonstrating one's desire for atonement at every possible opportunitv. In the Russian context this meant accepting three propositions: that the extraordinarv fate of the Jewish people had made them the svmbol of the suffering of mankind, that the Jew s in Russia had always been the victims of one-sided persecution, and that Russian societv was in debt to the Jewish people. Rutman had little difficult\' in demonstrating that Solzhenitsvn accepted none of these propositions. Solzhenitsvn had written of the Second World War in The Gulag Archipelago that "in general, this war had revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian." In his Letter to the Leaders, he had written of "the incomparable sufferings of our people," and elsewhere in Gulag he had described the horrors of collectivization as a precedent for Hitler and the Holocaust. In other words, Solzhenitsvn did not accept that anv one people had a monopoly of suffering; he maintained that in the twentieth century Russians had suffered as
Jews
in
much
as
Jews. With regard to the second proposition, that the Rutman found that
Russia had endured extraordinarv persecution,
Solzhenitsvn had resolved the problem bv concentrating on the sufferings of all
the people in the Soviet Union, absorbing the trials of Soviet
the greater ordeal of the entire population.
And on
Jewrv
into
the question of whether
owed a debt to the Jew s, Rutman concluded that the proposiwas too shallow and that those Russians w ho had publiclv embraced this position (such as Gorkv or Evtushenko) were guiltv of hypocrisy. Rutman's essential argument was that Solzhenitsyn was too "big" to be encompassed bv the pro- or anti-Jewish label and that to take the statistical approach to the Jewish characters in his works w as to adopt a new "party line" and show how influenced Russian readers had been by the official and censored Soviet press. This, wrote Rutman, made all allegations based on the virtual absence of Jewish characters and the Jew ish theme Irom Ivan the Russians tion
*See note
to p. 960.
The Sage
of
Vermont
[9*^3]
and Cancer Ward meaningless. Nevertheless, he did agree to play by dwelling on the glow ing portrait of Arkhangorodsky in and praising the characterizations of Lev Rubin and Adam RoitAugust 19 man in The First Circle. The portrait of Roitman was particularly important for Rutman because it was sympathetic to one of Solzhenitsvn's natural enemies, yet did not hesitate to condemn Roitman for being misled by his Party loyalties. It was a complex and true-to-life picture, whereas an author guided by "the Jewish question" w ould have been less objective and thereb\ have
Denisovich
the
game
in part
M
falsified reality.
In conclusion
Rutman
dealt with the
argument that the
"logical exten-
sion" of Solzhenitsyn's Russian patriotism and love of patriarchal custom was
He quoted the example of the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to show that a deep and almost mystical love of Orthodoxy and Russia was not incompatible with love of the Jews, and he referred to recent statements in support of Solzhenitsyn by the Jewish samizdat writer Mikhail Agurskv and the Jewish literary critic Grigori Svirski, both of whom felt that to draw such conclusions was unw arranted. '^ Svirski, indeed, later elaborated his views on this point (and criticized anti-Semitism.
Rutman
inadequacy of
for the
his defence) in his History of Post-ivar Soviet
Writing, published in Russian in 1979 (and in English in 1981). that Solzhenitsyn
had been
silent,
he wrote, on
many
It
was true
outstanding Soviet acts
of persecution of the Jews. But Tolstoy had w ritten that "every writer has his sore point," and Solzhenitsyn's sore point was the sufferings of the Russian people,
which hurt him more than the
sufferings of the
Jew
s.
It
w as
a
question of selection and personal preference, and perhaps the main problem was that there was "only one Solzhenitsyn." Everybody wanted to have him their side and have him write about their sufferings with the same eloquence and vividness that he had brought to the sufferings of the Russians.
on
'**
Vermont, Solzhenitsyn was gradually getting his new newspaper speculation about the kind of luxury that could be bought for a quarter of a million dollars (a modest enough sum, in truth, by American standards), a very large part of the money had been spent not on the house but on the construction of a modern and w ell-equipped Meanwhile,
in
estate in order. Despite
annex to house Solzhenitsyn's personal papers and literary archive as w ell as an independent library. In September 1977 Solzhenitsyn announced the establishment of the All-Russian Memoir Library, to be financed by him and
on his estate. It was to be an extension of the Russian Social Fund and would have as its aim the collection of all possible material, but mainly personal memoirs, pertaining to Russian history of the twentieth century. It was another reflection of Solzhenitsyn's desire to rescue the national memory of the Russian people before it w as too late. He appealed to those w ho had situated
written their memoirs, no matter be, to send
him
copies.
The
how
library
brief,
w ould
modest, or unliterarx' they might
accept
all materials,
even those of
two to three pages, and would attempt to publish some of the longer and more interesting ones (Solzhenitsyn already had a functioning type-setting
SOLZHEXITSVX
[964]
machine on the premises, so he \\ as in an excellent position to fulfil his promise). He w ould ensure that all materials w ere catalogued and filed s\ stematicallv and in time made available to scholars \\ ho desired to consult them, and he emphasized that photographs, letters, and other memorabilia were equalh' of interest to him. "I call upon mv fellow countrymen to sit down at once and w rite their recollections and send them to me so that our grief does not vanish w ith them, leaving no trace, but is preserved for Russia's memorv as a warning to the future." He solemnlv promised that his heirs would take over the dutv of preservation even after he w as gone and that as soon as a favourable moment arrived, the entire contents of the library would be transferred to "one of the cities of central Russia," where it would be merged w ith similar archives written bv people still inside the Soviet Union to form "a concentrate of our national memorv and experience."''^ Curiouslv enough, Solzhenitsyn's obsession w ith national historv and his emphasis on the need for everv nation to examine its past and repent of its misdeeds was just about to find another echo in England. Of all the countries he had visited in the past vear and a half. England had greeted him w ith the greatest enthusiasm and had responded the most generouslv to his calls for self-examination and contrition. Alreadv in 1974 Nicholas Bethell had published a short book. The Last Secret (w hose title was taken from a phrase
—
in
The Gulag Archipelago), about the British role in the forced repatriation to
the Soviet
gees from
Union after the Second W orld \\ ar of innocent emigres and refucommunism, along with Russian troops w ho had fought for the
Germans.-" BethelTs book had sparked off a debate about both the ethics and the politics of British policv at the time (Bethell had suggested that the principal villain of the piece w as Britain's then-foreign secretar\ Anthonx" Eden, and stressed the realpolitik behind the minister's actions), w hich had later died dow n, but it was revived all the more fiercelv in the first months of 1978 bv the publication of a second and much longer book. Victims of Yalta, bv Nikolai Tolstov (a distant descendant of the great novelist but born and bred in Britain). Tolstov demonstrated at great length the full consequences for hundreds of thousands of Russian emigres and refugees of the agreement reached at Yalta to repatriate them to the Soviet Union, and he described in harrowing detail the violence inflicted on them bv Allied (primarih- British) troops.-' Publication of his book led to calls for a public inquirv, and for a whole week the Times carried out its ow n investigation, w hile its correspondence columns w ere filled w ith anguished letters for or against. .
Solzhenits\n's
and above set the
all
his
tone for
name
rarelv figured in this second debate, vet his figure,
monumental book, loomed
manv
in the
background and clearlv
of the participants. Nicholas Bethell
summed up
the
case for an inquirv in almost Solzhenitsvnian terms. "In 1944 the British
government took a decision which cost manv lives. It killed not onlv war criminals and traitors, but also innocent prisoners-of-w ar, displaced persons, torced labourers, women and children. W as it reallv necessary "Perhaps a fuller and franker account from those personally involved .-
The Sage
OF \'ermont
[y'^.^l
a grow ing sense of collective guilt. accomplices in a massive crime. were we
would convince the nation and quieten might show that
Alternatively,
it
... In either
case, the nation
.
.
.
now needs
all
the available evidence."'^
Washington. in 1976, award at Stanford When he had received the Freedoms Foundation Washington snub for his President Ford had sought to make slight amends on congratulating it its foundation bv sending a personal telegram to the Solzhenitsvn had likewise been
an invisible presence in
w as an open struggle at the Republican National Convention in Kansas between the pro-Reagan faction and the pro-Ford faction over whether to endorse Solzhenitsvn's view s as part of the Party's official election platform. In the end, the pro-Reagan faction won, and Sol/.henitsyn was extolled as a "great beacon of human courage and morality,"-^ though decision. Later that vear, there
not before
Henrv
Kissinger had reputedly threatened to resign.
was won by Carter, and
a
few months
later,
The
electi(jn
ex-President Ford publiclx
admitted that he had made a mistake in refusing to see Solzhenitsyn. "It is regrettable that the meeting did not take place," he told a gathering of history students and professors at Yale University in February 1977. "It history were
would take place. "-"^ The new ly victorious President Carter had had no mention of Solzhenitsyn in his platform at all, but after his election he had been pressed bv Malcolm Mabry, a Mississippi state representative, to sav whether he w ould meet the Russian novelist or not, and in a note
ever rewritten,
it
had written that he would. More than that, the president had said it was his "intention" to meet Solzhenitsyn, and in the course ot 1977 was publiclv pressed to do so bv journalists and political figures, just as his pre-
to Mabr\'
decessor had been.
Like President Ford, however, Carter was quickl) caught up in the conand never got around to issuing an invitation. But in
tradictions of detente
1978 the opportunitv arose for Solzhenitsyn himself to take the initiative not by securing an invitation to the \\ hite House but by putting his
again
—
views before the American nation from a nationally respected platform. He was asked whether he would accept an honorary degree from Harvard Lniversitv and make the annual commencement address in early June. I he com-
mencement address was
traditionally used as the occasion for important
first time was to be carried on nation-w ide telewas Solzhenitsyn's first opportunity to address, in effect, the entire American nation since his AFL-CIO speeches three years earlier and since becoming an American resident. In conditions of the usual secrecy he accepted the invitation, and the announcement of his participation was not made public until tw o davs before the speech was scheduled to take place. This secretiveness about the speaker, though not unusual for Harvard
speeches, and not for the vision. It
commencement
addresses, naturally created an air of expectancy, and the
announcement of Solzhenitsvn's name guaranteed assemble to
listen to his
speech
(it
that a large
turned out to be
W'ith television carrying the entire address
live,
it is
a
crowd w ould
record 22,000 people).
fair to
say that the atmo-
sphere was one of considerable excitement. Solzhenitsyn could hardly have
— SOLZHENITSYN
[966]
had more favourable circumstances in \\ hich to express his ideas. The speech he dehvered proved to be a kind of summation of the things he had been saving virtually since the day of his arrival in the West. Entitled "A World Split Apart," it consisted of an introduction and fifteen short sections whose headings summarized his main themes: (>ontemporarv Worlds; Convergence; The Collapse of Courage; Prosperity; Juridical Life; The Direction of Freedom; The Direction of the Press; Fashions in Thought; Socialism; Not a Model; Short-sightedness; Loss of Will; Humanism and Its Consequences; Unlikelv Bedfellows; At the Turning-point. An interesting aspect of the title, which did not emerge from the official English translation, \\
as that
schism.
it
expressed Solzhenitsvn's preoccupation w
The Russian word
from the Russian word have been "The World
for "split apart" (raskohty)
for "schism" (raskol), in
Schism."* In
and
ith the is
phenomenon
of
the adjective derived
would whole speech could be
a better translation
a sense, the
read as an impassioned plea against schism of anv kind, an appeal for unity,
and Solzhenitsvn began and ended \\ ith this idea, although it was not carried through v\ith any consistency indeed, many of the ideas contained in the body of the speech could just as easily be interpreted as serving to widen
—
splits instead
of to heal them. Nevertheless, some sort of vision of unity
undoubtedly underlay Solzhenitsyn's often harsh and wounding formulations, and his intention (or his hope) was clearly to foster the elimination of schisms of one kind or another. The speech contained few surprises. Again it consisted of variations on the Spenglerian
world was
split
theme of the decline of the West. He pointed out
that the
not just into East and West but into multiple, self-sufficient
"worlds" or civilizations, such as China, India, Africa, and the Islamic world.
He
added that
Western "specialists," its own, separate and different from the West. The West had once been monolithic and allconquering, and in the period of colonization had seemed about to take over the entire world, but now the tide had receded and the West was in retreat. Therefore, it was an illusion that w here the West led, all other countries had to follow, and that the Western way of doing things was best. That was why the theory of "convergence," among others, was a false one. to these, despite the misconceptions of
belonged Russia, which possessed a cultural identity of
ern
From there Solzhenitsvn proceeded to his familiar litany of the West's The "collapse of courage" was particularly noticeable among Westintellectuals and the ruling circles. The preoccupation with prosperity
was
a result
tailings.
of the fact that the "modern" states of the
included Prance, England, Germany,
way
Italy,
West
and Spain,
(these apparently
all
of which in one
or another were considerably older than Russia, but Solzhenitsvn did
not specify) had been founded on the principle of the government's serving the people and had set the pursuit of happiness as one of their goals
example, the American Declaration of Independence). But * In his /,
Russian text Solzhenitsvn
since in the
v\
rote the
modern orthography mir
also
\\
ord tor "peace"
means "peace."
mir
this
(in, for
happiness
—with an old-style Russian
The Sage
Vermont
of
[967]
was deceptive, for the faces of many people in the West showed how worried and oppressed they were by the herce struggle to possess more goods, "even though it was considered proper to try to conceal these expressions." "Juridical life" in the West was a cold and formal system that could not satisfy people's deeper desires or prove strong enough to \\ ithstand the strains that lay ahead. By placing law above all other values, this system was actively w ill say that a detrimental. "Having passed all my life under communism, society in which there are no impartial judicial scales is abominable. But a society in which there are no scales other than the judicial is also little worthy 1
of man."* In his section on freedom Sol/.henitsyn expressed the exact nature of his
charge against the West with his first sentence: "In today's Western society there has opened up a disequilibrium between the freedom to do good deeds
and the freedom
do bad." One consequence of
to
this
was
that "a truly out-
with extraordinary, surprising policies cannot make his influence felt he will be tripped up a dozen times before he can even get started," while statesmen were hamstrung by "thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics and the constant intervention of press and parliament." standing, great
—
man
Another consequence was the corruption of youth by pornographic an inevitable growth
in crime. "It
is
a strange thing,
the very best social conditions have been created, there
crime than press, this
films
and
but in the West, where is
.
.
much more
.
impoverished and lawless Soviet Union." In the case of the freedom had simply degenerated into licence. The press had the in the
chance to "simulate" public opinion and corrupt it, and was a product of the main "mental illness of the twentieth century haste and superficiality." It was indicative that the longest of all Solzhenitsyn's sections w as devoted to
—
and
his old bete noire, the press,
has
become the
strongest of
all
this
because of his conviction that "the press
forces in
Western
states,
of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
them and
to
From
whom
here
it
exceeding the powers
And
yet
.
.
.
who
elects
are they responsible?"
was
a short step to a
consideration ot the dominance of
fashion in intellectual matters and the tyranny of the consensus.
And
this
consensus, according to Solzhenitsyn, was far too favourable to socialism, which the academician Shafarevich had already exposed in his "brilliantly argued
book." There was also the West's "short-sightedness," demonstrated by
its
and disarmament as instanced in the writings "loss of will," demonstrated by the American
attraction to the ideas of detente
of George Kennan, and
its
profitable to turn man's intellectual and moral and use them to produce well-being, it you think that reason is more use to men than genius, if your object is not to create heroic virtues but rather tranquil habits, if vou would rather contemplate vices than crimes and prefer fewer transgressions at the cost of fewer splendid deeds, if in place of a brilliant society you are content to live in one that is prosperous, and finally, if in your view the main object of government is *
Compare
Tocqueville: "But
if
vou think
it
activity tov\ ards the necessities of physical life
not to achieve the greatest strength or glory for the nation as a whole but to provide tor every individual therein the utmost well-being, protecting
then
it is
good
to
make conditions
him
as far as possible
from
all
equal and to establish a democratic government."
afflictions,
SOLZHENITSYN
[968] capitulation in neereti
Vietnam and the diplomatic manoeuvres of those who
swipe
it (a
at Kissinger,
engi-
although the former secretary of state was
The West had become conservative and wedded to no matter how well armed it might be, it could never
not mentioned by name). the status quo, but prevail status
For
mend
ithout
\\
quo was
its
people's
\\
illingness to die for a cause. Preference for the
a sure sign of decline
and impending collapse.
those reasons Solzhenitsvn declared that he "could not recom-
all
todav's
spirituallv far
West as a model" for his countrvmen. Eastern Europe was ahead of the West. "The complex and deadly pressures bearing
lives have developed characters that are stronger and more profound and interesting than those developed by the prosperous, ordered life of the West." For the East to become like the West would be for it to lose
upon our
more than
it
gained.
Solzhenitsvn did not say what he stop there.
The whole
crisis
i^^o;//^
recommend, but neither did he
of mankind, he said, could be traced back to the
heritage of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
had led man and this was
to reject
why
God and
The
spirit of rationalism
place himself at the centre of the universe,
he no longer understood the nature of good and
evil. In
were communism and capitalism, for thev \\ ere both logical products of the development of humanism and materialism. But since it seemed to be a social law that the radical always won out over the liberal and that political movement was alwavs to the left, communism was in the ascendant. But this was not necessarilv the end of the storv. Whether a militarv catastrophe was imminent Solzhenitsvn could not say, but the demise of irreligious, humanist consciousness was already at hand, and mankind was at a turning-point. Both East and West were sick of the same disease, and the values of the Renaissance no longer had anv efficacy. We were at a "turning-point" analogous to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. There was no question of going back to the Middle Ages, but we should seek to unite the best that the Middle Ages had given us in the spiritual sphere with the best that the Renaissance had brought in the human and phvsical sphere and rise to a higher plane. There was nowhere else to go but up."^ Solzhenitsvn's speech was greeted, as on so many occasions in the past, by a standing ovation. Not evervone in the audience applauded, and it is not clear how much the ardour of the general response had to do with Solzhenitsvn's personal magnetism and the passion with which he spoke (which, as usual, passed the barrier of simultaneous translation). But it was in a sense a sort of apotheosis. Harvard was a more distinguished and more elevated forum than the Hilton Hotel in Washington, the audience was more influential, more representative, and less partisan than that provided by the AFL-CIO, and television carried the speech to all sections of the population who cared to watch, on a scale vaster than anything since the Cronkite interview. Whatever his difficulties with the political establishment, Solzhenitsvn had succeeded in getting his message across to the American people as never before. this context, the "unlikelv bedfellows"
The
He would
much
have
Sagf. of
Vermont
ly'^n;]
own
preferred, of course, to he speaking to his
people,
was poorh understood for a while that his words had indeed been directed as much to them as to his listeners in America. But he had done his best, as he saw it, for both, and was able to retire in triimiph to Vermont to and
it
savour the impact ot his words. That he was not indifferent to that impact visited lic
is
attested
him soon afterwards and found him "intenselv
Of
reactions to his speech.
by
a friend
w ho
interested" in the pub-
the thousands of letters he
was
said to ha\e
received, the majoritv v\ere said to be "o\ erw helmingly favourable;" but that
the newspapers and magazines to
still left
w
hich, despite his professed con-
tempt, Solzhenitsvn as usual paid close attention. 1 he consensus here was not favourable
The
ervation.
at all,
though some endorsed
his
speech almost w ithout res-
conservative National Revieic perceived that the true drift ot
Solzhenitsvn's message was "antimodern" but found in
who was
hostile to the
West but
him not someone
rather "the greatest living representative of
the West, an avatar of the West's most ancient and honourable principles,"
because he was appealing for
a return to the
modernity: classical and early Christian lic
magazine Commouiveal found more
exposition of his views but
and morality
spirituality
still
"almost forgotten alternative to
political philosophy."-"^
to quarrel
with
The Catho-
in Solzhenitsyn's detailed
supported his overall plea for more room for
in daily life
and rejected the idea (put forw ard by political system and cen-
some) that Solzhenitsyn favoured an authoritarian sorship of the press.-'
balance of press and published opinion, however, w as decidedly
The
against Solzhenitsyn.
The
Neiv York Times saw Solzhenitsyn participating in
an argument that w as as old as the American Republic
— between
itself
gious enthusiasts sure of their interpretation of the divine will and
reli-
men
ot
the Enlightenment trusting in the rationality of mankind. Solzhenitsyn's role in forcing the
been that
West
to
understand the
full brutalit\-
beneficial, but his crusade against
we
happy
are
of the Soviet regime had
communism bespoke
to forgo in this nation's leaders."
"an obsession
James Reston,
in the
same newspaper, wondered whether Solzhenitsyn's exaltation ot Russian spirituality as being far in advance of the West did not indicate the wanderings of "a mind split apart," despite the many brilliant passages elsewhere in his speech.
The
Washington Post explained his view as "very Russian," arising
remote from modern Western summoning Americrusade and speaking on behalf of a "boundless cold war." The
from "particular
religious
and
political strains
experience." Solzhenitsyn, wrote the Post, was bent on
cans to a
Christian Science Monitor, spirituality,
w
hile praising Solzhenitsyn's call for a return to
his claims for
Russian spiritual superiority preposterous
ignorance of America and American ways deplorable, and a columnin the same newspaper found him squarely in the tradition of earlier for-
and ist
found
his
eign visitors
who had come and denounced what
they ft)und in America,
such as Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville.-'^ It
was the more
serious
commentators who had the most
to say,
how-
SOLZHENITSYN
[970]
Arthur Schlesinger, the Hberal historian once associated with President Kennedy, Hkened Solzhenitsyn to early generations of Harvard men, whose fundamentaHst Christianity had led them to thunder from the Harvard rostrum in tones, and even in words, remarkably similar to Solzhenitsyn's (Schlesinger quoted a few to drive his point home). Solzhenitsyn's charges against America were familiar, many would have no difficulty in agreeing with his strictures against American excesses, and his "challenge to American smugness and hedonism, to the mediocrity of our mass culture, to the decline of self-discipline and civic spirit," was "bracing and valuable." To this extent Solzhenitsyn was at one with America's Puritan founding fathers. But Solzhenitsyn's faith was suffused by the "other-worldly mysticism of the Russian church" and by a strain of quietism and passivity that was entirely alien to America. "Even the New England ministry had to temper its conviction of divine sovereignty with concessions to the rough democracy of a nonprescriptive society where men made their way in life through their own labor." The two traditions were divergent and alien to one another. Solzhenitsyn had remarked at Harvard that the West has "never understood Russia." One could respond that Solzhenitsyn had never understood America. All he knew was what he had learned from television, the newspapers, and gazing through a car window; he did not know enough to recognize television's "depressing parody of American life" for what it was. If prophecy was one human virtue, humility was another. "Knowing the crimes committed in the name of a single Truth, Americans prefer to keep their ears open to a multitude of competing lower-case truths." While they welcomed Solzhenitsyn in their midst and honoured his presence, the message of his Harvard address was ever.
irrelevant to them.^*^
Notable among the many other critics of Solzhenitsyn's speech was the once iMarxist and now right-wing political philosopher Sidney Hook, a professor emeritus of New York University and research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hook found far more in Solzhenitsyn's speech to agree with than
had the
liberal Schlesinger but, he, too, felt that the
"profound truths" Sol-
zhenitsyn had uttered were likely to be cancelled out by his equally profound errors.
Hook
erful East
agreed with Solzhenitsyn's warnings against an ever more pow-
and the
vacillating
the degradation of Western
weakness of the West and with
scx:ietv.
He
also agreed
his analysis of
with Solzhenitsyn's notions
of the importance of morality and the need to balance various freedoms, but that Solzhenitsyn was "profoundly wrong" to identify the sickness of West with the heritage of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and a loss of belief in God. Belief in a Supreme Being was entirely compatible with the worst excesses and atrocities the history of organized religion was too full of examples for there to be a need to enumerate them. Nor was such a belief a necessary foundation of morality. It was Dostoyevsky who had propagated that idea, but more eminent thinkers such as St Augustine, Kierkegaard, and the unknown authors of the Book of Job had shown that morality was logically independent of religion. Solzhenitsyn also misunderstood the
he
felt
the
—
Thk Sage
of
Vermont
[97']
nature of freedom, for freedom of ehoice meant the freedom to err, yet Solzhenitsvn could not bear the eon.stH|uences of error.
Hook made one further point in his capacity as one of those "who have manv decades beeen fighting the monstrous evil of totalitarianism, even
for
before Solzhenitsvn himself discovered
true nature," and that
its
potential divisiveness of Solzhenitsyn's attempt to lay
dow n
a
was the
"party line"
engaged in this fight. "There are legitimate grounds for fear that anv attempt to base the broad struggle against the grow ing menace ot (Communism on one special doctrine or premise w ill result in demoralizing the common effort. It ma\' convert the contenders into w arring, ineffectual sects. The principles of moralitx are more trulv universal and more generally for those
.
.
.
considered valid than anv religious principle. ilv
.
.
.
They can
as a unifving bond than any parochial conceit about
Hook,
manv
like
before and after him, cited Sakharov as
figure than Solzhenitsvn in the opposition to
Hook
first
serve
and
more read-
last
things."
more unifying
a
communism.^"
was accusing Solzhenits\n of doing, in effect, the opposite of
w hat
he had set out to do, of being responsible for splits and causing his ow n particular schism in the ranks of dissidents and others opposed to Soviet
communism, and
his
words were prophetic.
Letter to the Leaders, The
Oak and
the Calf, From under the Ruhh/e, and Solzhenitsyn's speeches in the West had alreadv created the beginnings of a schism, which until now had remained
muted sal
or indirect, out of respect for Solzhenitsyn's reputation and his colos-
From now
achievements.
on, however, dissent from his views was des-
grow louder and stronger, until it broke out into charges that Solzhenitsvn w ished to become "the Russian AyatoUah" and to impose his
tined to
own form both
of theocracy on a future Russia.* Meanwhile, his
oi'
attacks,
and public, on other members up since the early seventies ensured w ould w iden and deepen until it w as virtually unbridgeable, new version of the philosophy that "he w ho is not w ith us is
in private
varietv
own
of the emigration and on a
emigre journals that had sprung
that the split
resulting in a against us."
There were manv precedents tude to the West.
The
in
Russian history for Solzhenitsyn's
superioritv of Russian over
atti-
Western ways had been
a
theme in Russian thought ever since Peter the Great's forcible Westernization of Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and an essential strand of the Slavophiles' thinking in the nineteenth century had been the view that the West was *The comparison
in decline.
in
it
with
first
occurred in a
New York new spaper Sozvye Riisskoye Sloiv (New
October 1979. In the body of the
the newspaper provided
—
Slavophiles, while aware of the
of Solzhenitsyn's views with those of Ayatollah Khomeini
long article by \alery Chalidze in the
Word)
Some
article,
a sensational
Russian
Chalidze w as reasonably circumspect, but
headline
—"Khomeinism or
National
Commu-
was reprinted in Koiitineiit no. 10 (under a different title) and answered by Bukovsky in Kontinent no. 11. Meanwhile, Efim Etkind entered the argument on Chalidze's side, in an article that was published in UExpress and Die nism"
Zeit,
that stirred
up
a lot of
bad
and Solzhenitsvn published
Slovo in
November
1979.
feeling. Chalidze's article
his rebuttal of these charges in UExpress
and Sovoye
Riisskoye
SOLZHEMTSYN
[972]
pow er and vigour of the United
rising
States,
had nonetheless assimilated and had unfavourably
that country to the general decline of western Europe,
contrasted American materialism and legalism w ith the higher spiritual qualities
allegedly to be found in Russia.* But distaste for the coldness and
emp-
European life had not been limited to the Slavophiles. Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy had all been repelled in differing degrees by western Europe, and even such a pronounced W esternizer as the socialist Alexander Herzen had been reduced to despair by his experiences there. Indeed, Herzen's responses had been strikingly similar to Solzhenitsvn's a hundred tiness of
years later.
do not know w ho could
I
find in
Europe
sadness expressed in every line of malignitx mingles
ith love, bile
\\
my
toda\' happiness or rest.
letters; life
with
here
is
.
.
.
You saw
very hard, venomous
tears, feverish anxiety infects the
organism, the time of former illusions and hopes has passed.
I
w hole
believe in nothing
here, except in a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest the for
movement.
I
anything that now
And
I
sta\"
.
.
.
sta\-
that of this world;
see the inevitable
exists, neither the
to suffer doubly, to suffer
w hich w
destruction towards which
Some
ill
it is
b\'
tion to the parallels fully share the
of old Europe and feel no pitv its
culture nor
m\ ow n
perish, perhaps, to the
racing at
of this was pointed out in
Harvard speech
doom
peaks of
a
full
ith
institutions.
sound of thunder and
steam."
perceptive essay on Solzhenitsyn's
the French w riter Alain Besan^on,
w
its
personal anguish and
Herzen. But Solzhenitsvn,
who
felt
also
drew atten-
Besangon, did not
pessimism about the West of Herzen and other nineteenthstill had some hope, as was evidenced by his very
century thinkers, for he
illingness to make such speeches and to continue to exhort the West to improve itself. Solzhenitsyn's essential intention was not to construct a theory about Russia and the W est he was more practical than that but to warn the West of the unprecedented dangers of communism. In Solzhenitsyn's view, communism was not something particularh' Russian, nor w as it external to the \\ est: it was inherent in the cixilization common to both Russia and the West. Solzhenitsyn's message, according to Besangon, was that communism had triumphed in Russia because Russia was more vulnerable, but that it had not been born in Russia. The forces that had brought communism to power there were the same ones that had racked Europe in the nineteenth century and that were still at work all over the world. If the West did not heed the w arnings of Solzhenitsvn and others, it, too, would be devoured by this anti-life and change its very nature. The decision as to whether this would happen or not lay in the West's own hands. 'The debate about Solzhenits\n's Harvard address continued for a long time, both in America and in Europe (and, most interestingly, in Japan). As
w
—
—
*
There
is
an interesting discussion of the history of
son, "Solzhenitsvn's Revieii-
(S>pnng 1978).
this
Image of America: The Survival of
concept
in
an article by Dale E. Peter-
a Slavophile idea," in the Massachusetts
The Sage late as the
of
Vermont
[97 31
winter of IVSO, an entire book was published on the subject,'' and
the speech has continued to be regarded as Solzhenitsyn's most authoritative
word on
these matters and as a major contribution to the debate about
Amer-
ican foreign policN' and detente*
Whatever the individual \ iew s expressed about the speech (an enormous emerged in the usual flood of comment and letters to the press), one thing was undeniable: Solzhenitsyn had again fulfilled his selfchosen function of draw ing attention to the subjects and ideas that preoccupied him and putting them on the public agenda. Since the day when Ivan Denisovich was published, that agenda had steadily widened: Stalin's labour camps, the So\ iet labour-camp system in general, Soviet history, the history varietv of opinion
of the Revolution, Russian histor\' before the Revolution, the nature of Soviet societv, and now the nature of Western society and the conflict (and also the similarities)
voice his
mav
between the two.
He ma\
have been overreaching himself, his
ha\ e been growing shriller and less convincing as he tried to extend
range further, but the sheer nerve, the sheer courage, and the sheer ambiman commanded attention and admiration. They had made him
tion of the
what he was. There was to be no changing him, and no going back. He would continue to proclaim his vision from the roof-tops come what may, and because of his fanatical dedication, the immense strength of his w ill, and, above all, the magnitude of his past achievements, the world would continue to listen.
*One consequence of the address was House. Tv\o weeks (barter
ardly,
The
v\
later, in a
ent out of her
and
way
that
it
ruined Solzhenitsyn's chances of visiting the White
speech to the National Press Club
in
Washington, Rosalynn
to reject Solzhenitsyn's allegations that .\merica
spiritually exhausted"
and gave
a
long
"intention" to invite Solzhenitsyn to a talk
w
list
ith
of reasons
why
was "weak, cow-
she regarded him as wrong.
President Carter was quietly forgotten.
—
52
EPILOGUE
THERE CAN BE no end to the biography of chronicle of an extraordinary and unfinished missing, and that
is
a
in their nev\ habitat;
Hving man.
a
moment
address would seem an appropriate sense of the domestic
life.
life
at
which
Yet there
The Harvard
to interrupt this
is still
something
of Solzhenitsyn and his family
and certain loose ends should perhaps be secured before
letting the story go.
One might
start
with Vermont.
The
journey up to Solzhenitsyn's house
how sucEngland is through a Leaving Boston, the road passes chosen. cessfully the spot was shopping freeways, American landscape that is characteristically urban plazas, filling stations, motels, a riot of billboards and shrieking neon signs not the sort of thing to appeal to Solzhenitsyn (or anyone in his right mind). But after a while the asphalt and concrete begin to thin out, green v\oods and fields appear, and the countryside gets hillier. Wisps of cloud cling to the one can see why it highest hills, and the light grows soft and luminous through
New
yery beautiful and gives one a sense of
—
—
reminded the early settlers Along the striking valley of the Connecticut River, the changes grow more pronounced. The houses are poorer and smaller, the filling stations are down to two pumps standing in the open air, and the farms behind them are fewer and farther apart. The hills get higher, until they turn into thickly wooded mountains with swift, rocky rivers rushing between them. After the ugly regional centre of Ludlow comes Cavendish, which seems idyllic by comparison a modest village of neat clapboard houses, some white and some of England.
—
in soft
hues of red and green, scattered along the shallow valley of the Black
River.
974
F.PII.OGUE
Solzhcnits\n's house
is
[975]
situated about four miles past (Cavendish,
up
a
mountain stream. I he road is paved at first but soon gives wav to gravel. Ihere are a few scattered houses and farms, a gravexard chngs to a hill above the road to the left, a few local narrow, w inding road that runs beside
a s\\ itt
people wave w hen the Solzhenits\n family car drives past. Then the road narrows and runs through dense, darkening woods. The undergrow th is tangled; dead trees lie where thev have fallen. At the top of the rise, one comes to a single steel gate covered in wire mesh, with a modest sign that says "No Trespassing." Awav to either side stretches the chain-link fence about six to a real barrier, but hardlv formidable. I ligh above the gate is eight feet high a tele\ision monitor, and just in front of it an electronic box mounted on a pillar, as at the entrance to car-parks. One inserts a card into the box, and
—
w ith a loud buzzing sound. Inside there is another mechanism the gate has already shut itself auto-
the gate opens automaticalbelectronic box to reset the
—
matically again.
A a
narrow dirt track winds up betw een denselv crowded trees and round Down to the left is a small stream dammed to form a large
sharp bend.
pond and a waterfall, and beside it is a kind of rustic summer-house. At last one comes to the main house, a two-storev, smoothlv boarded rectangular structure w ith modern w indows somew hat in the Swiss or German st\ le, w ith two w ings added in the same material. Inside, the house is as simple as it looks from outside. The entire shell and some of the rooms have been lined with foot-w ide cedar boards polished to a taw n\' reddish brow n. The floors are covered w ith w orsted cord carpet in plain solid colours, and the furniture unobtrusivelv modern.
is
Having been completeh' remodelled, the house has a feeling of light and it. The centre-piece is an enormous lounge from which the ceiling has been removed to allow the room to rise to the roof the former upstairs landing has been turned into an open gallery that links the two new wings. At one end of this lounge is a w ide brick chimney running its full height, w ith an open hearth facing into the room, and a picture window gives spaciousness about
—
a
view of the N'ermont mountains. The simple furnishings include a couple modern couches, a piano in one corner, a photocopier in another, and
of
some bookshelves containing, among other nitsvn's
works
the gallerv.
nor
in Russian.
From
The only problem w ith
feels lived in.
It is a
visitors, rather like the
things, foreign editions ot Solzhe-
vet another corner this spacious
a spiral staircase rises to
room
is
that
it
neither looks
space, comfortable but impersonal, for receiving
one the Solzhenitsyns had
in
Zurich, but more ele-
gant and spacious than the rented accommodation there. In 1977,
when
I
paid
mv
one and onlv
the house proceeded elsewhere, and
first
of
visit to all
\'ermont, the
real life ot
modern American long table w ith a view ot the
in the big,
kitchen, w here the famih' meals w ere taken at a garden through the picture w indow Then there were the study of Solzhenitsyn's secretarv and the children's class-room, where they were taught variously by a Russian tutor, bv Solzhenitsvn himself, and by his w ife, Natalia. .
SOLZHENITSYN
[976]
Natalia also had, her work-room in the house, and there
room near
the secretary's study
\\
\\
as a separate Httle
here the television monitor and intercom
situated. Every time it buzzed or crackled, someone (usually the secrehad to go and answer it. This was about a year before the Harvard speech, when nine people were lixing permanently in the house. The noisiest and most visible were Solzhenitsyn's three young children: Ermolai, Ignat, and Stepan (Ermosha, Igonya, and Styopa, to the family). Ermolai was then seven, Ignat five, and Stepan only three. The day for them began with breakfast with their grandmother at seven-thirty, which was preceded by a long Orthodox prayer, recited in unison to the accompaniment of much fervent crossing of the heart and ending w ith a plea for Russia to be saved from her oppressors. To a nonRussian the prayer had a slightly archaic flavour; given the unchanging (and unchanged) nature of Orthodox ritual, it was probably the same prayer that Solzhenits\n himself had recited as a child in Kislovodsk. From eight-thirty to ten-thirty for the tw o younger boys, and for Ermolai during the holidays, there w ere lessons with a young Russian tutor in the schoolroom (Ermolai had already started at the local school, and since then the other two have
were tary)
started as well).
W ith
the tutor thev studied reading, writing, arithmetic,
and geography. As they grew older, Solzhenitsyn himself began giving lessons in elementary mathematics and physics (he remains an excellent teacher), and Natalia taught them Russian literature. The aim was to keep them in a purely Russian atmosphere for as long as possible and to give them a thorough grounding in Russian culture before they started attending American schools to prepare them, as Natalia put it, for an eventual return to Russia. The children also had a spacious nursery downstairs, a sand-pit, swings, and a heap of rocks to pla\' on outside and fifty acres of woodland to roam through when they felt like it. During the holidays a fourth child w as in the house Natalia's son by her first marriage, Dmitri Tiurin. By 1977, when he was fifteen, Dmitri history,
—
—
—
had grow n into a broad-shouldered, dark, and handsome boy about six feet with his mother's prominent Russian cheek-bones and broad forehead. During the school year he was away at boarding-school, as a result of which his English w as fluent and idiomatic. When at home, he liked to spend most of his days dow n the road, driving tractors, diggers, and bulldozers for the neighbouring contractor who had done much of the w ork on Solzhenitsyn's estate (as is the way in Vermont, the contractor w as also a farmer and supplied the Solzhenitsyns daily with fresh milk from his small herd of cows). In addition to Natalia and the children's tutor, two other women were in the house. Solzhenitsyn's secretary (Solzhenitsyn had conceded the need tall,
for a secretary onh' after his
because he
felt less
move
a reliable interpreter)
was
a
America
—
to a large extent, ith
it
seems,
German and needed
Irina Alberti, a middle-aged Russian lady, the
daughter of Russian emigres of the
Cossack and
to
comfortable with English than w
first
emigration (her father had been a
lawyer, her mother the daughter of
a
Don
Russian general), and
.
Epilogue
[977]
widow of an Italian diplomat. As a result ot her diplomatic peregrinations Mrs Alberti was reputetl to speak nine languages, a tremendous help for
the
Solzhenits\ n w ith his world-w ide contacts and correspondence, and she had
considerable experience as patriot, deeplx
and to SolzhenitsN n himselt. The fourth woman w as taken charge, as
a
dexout Russian
all
and genius
English, learned the
in ik'lgrade)
F.katerina S\etlo\a, Natalia's mother,
Moscow, of most of
in
the linchpin that held intelligence
She w as, moreoxer,
a journalist.
dexoted to her natixe land (though born herselt
its
disparate elements together.
for practical matters, Kkaterina
wa\s of American
w ho had was
the domestic arrangements and
life,
her cjuick
\\ ith
had soon picked up
and got the household tunction-
ing efhcientlw She did most of the dri\ ing and shopping, the fetching and
and saw
carr\'ing,
out w orr\"ing too
As
to
it
that the others
much about
w ere able
to
go about their
j(jbs
w
ith-
dailv details.
had the most difficult job of all. .Apart from her and mother, w hich she took verv seriousK she acted as a confidential secretar\- to her husband. She w as (and is) the onl\' person in the world he trusts completelv, and for that reason w as constanth on call for consultations, reading and w riting letters, or simph' seeing to his ph\ sical well-being. Natalia also carried an enormous burden as chairman ot the Russian Social Fund, particularh after the arrest of Ginzburg. w hen she initiated and carried through an international campaign for his release, travelling to a variet\ of countries and appearing on public plattorms in his detence. On for Natalia, she
normal duties
these and
as
manv
sentative and
w
ife
,
other occasions, she acted as Solzhenitsx n's personal repre-
ambassador and often attended hearings and committees
tifv on dissident matters that Solzhenits\n considered important.
to tes-
Not
least
among her duties that of literarv assistant and adviser. She w as personw ith setting and proof-reading the entire nine-volume etiition ot alh' chargecl w as
Solzhenits\n's Collected \\ orks that he had begun to prepare soon after arrix ing in
\ ermont, and she performed similar duties on
much
else that
he wrote."^
Finalh', she had to deal w ith Solzhenitsvn's social engagements and visitors,
manv
work programme ran smoothly and was not
and ensure that his b\" unw elcome intrusions.
interrupted
At the centre of this professional and domestic web w as Solzhenitsvn, vet there was a svmbolic appropriateness in the fact that for two-thirds of the vear he was phvsicallv removed from the house and spent most of his waking hours in the little summer-house beside the pond. It was an exceedingh" prettv spot. A footpath wound down from the main house through a dense coppice of birch, svcamore, and pine trees. In the summer, w ild flowers grew on the edges of the coppice, and the scent of the blossoms, mingled *The works ha\e
since
grown
to twelve
volumes, with more to come. Meanwhile, since the
children ha\e grow n older, thev too have begun to assist
w ith
Solzhenitsvn's literary chores. In
1983, at the age of twelve, Ermolai began using Solzhenitsvn's IB.\I composer and set the type for a
volume of memoirs
Librar\
that
w as due
to appear as part of Solzhenitsvn's .\11-Russian
.Memoir
SOLZHENITSYN
[978]
with that of the pine needles, \\as overpowering, particularly towards evening. A wooden foot-bridge traversed the rushing stream that fed the pond.
The
waterfall
was never
still,
in contrast to the stillness of the
pond, whose
mirrorlike surface reflected the trees that crow ded to the shore on three of
four sides.
On
the fourth side was the summer-house,
wooden cabin with
it,
two windows overlooking the pond, and a on which stood a rustic w ooden bench and table.
a small landing-stage jutting into the
and
summer
abilitv to
withstand
the children
It is
amusing
swam
that
much
it,
pond, Solzhenitsyn liked to swim
autumn. His love of the remained undiminished by the years. In the
everv morning, even in earlv spring and cold,
its
simple creosoted
a tin roof,
small terrace in front of
From
a
in the
pond
late into the
too.
plav has been
made
in the press
about the alleged
luxurv of Solzhenitsvn's surroundings and the extravagance of his domestic arrangements, such as the supposed existence of a secret tunnel from the
house to his studv. Such speculation was fed bv Solzhenitsyn's reclusiveness and inaccessibilitv, but it also rested on a total misunderstanding ot his character. Solzhenitsvn detests formality, luxury, elaborateness of any kind. He genuinelv prefers the simple life not only on principle but also as a matter of practical comfort and convenience. It is w hat he has always been accustomed to. There were (and probably still are) no servants in the house, not even a
woman. The four women* did evervthing themselves in addition to As for Solzhenitsyn, he was perfectly capable of taking of his o\\ n domestic needs, and actively preferred to do so. The sum-
cleaning
their other duties.
care
mer-house was equipped with an ancient refrigerator and
a hotplate.
He
had
the food for most of his meals brought to him, so that he could prepare
it
bed and a modest bathroom, making it convenient for him to stay the night in his summer-house. In short, he retained manv of his bachelor ways, and his style of life \\ as hardly different from what it once had been in Kok Terek, and then again in his various hide-outs in Solotcha, Rozhdestvo, Rostropovich's and Chukovsky's dachas, himself.
There was
also a high old-fashioned
mountain retreat in Sternenberg. There \\ as one sense, however, in which the popular myth was accurate. The picture of the former Gulag prisoner surrounding himself with a fence of his own making and shutting himself in behind tight security expressed and
his
an essential psychological truth. In his interview with Nikita Struve in 1976, Solzhenitsvn had attributed his choice of closed institutions for the action of
most of
his no\els
—the labour camp
for Ivan Denisovich, the sharashka for The
First Circle, the cancer clinic for the Cancer
—
Ward not only to a psychological much of his life in confinement
quirk but also to the fact that he had spent so himself.
Whatever the primal source of
his behaviour, his retreat to the tin\'
cabin by the lake inside his stockade only confirmed this deep-seated ten-
dency. Wherever he found himself, safe
from intruders, he
*Irina Albert!
left
felt
it
seems, even in the
obliged to retreat
still
bosom of his family
further to peace and soli-
Solzhenitsvn's service in 1980. Since then his secretaries have been men.
RPILOGUE tude.
The
on the
spacious house
floors,
up the
hill,
with
its
[979]
comfortable armchairs, carpets
an ultra-modern kitchen stocked with e\er\ kind ot food, and
well-appointed bedrooms and bathrooms, was as nothing to him compared
with floor,
this
draughty summer-house without curtains, with bare
an oilcloth-covered table to eat from, and
a
tiles
on the
chipped enamel basin and
shower cubicle for his ablutions. These monkish conditions enabled him to concentrate to the fullest on his work and to stick to his preferred routine. Rising between five and six, he would take a dip in the pond, eat breakfast alone, and do domestic chores or read until eight o'clock, when his w riting da\ began. He would then \\ ork uninterrupted!}' until five,* except for short breaks for lunch and to give the children their lesson, after which another break was taken for dinner. If guests were present, Solzhenitsvn would often go up to the house for the evening meal, but not invariably. The evenings would be given over to correspondence, consultations with Natalia and w ith guests if their business could be put off until that time, and to extra background reading. If he needed to do research that could be carried out at home, he could repair to the modern annex beside the house that held his papers and library and the beginnings of the Russian Memoir Library. This modernist structure, consisting of a cluster of cubes of unequal height and featuring ingenioush' angled sk\ lights and an air-conditioned interior, was at the opposite pole from the cabin in its conveniences and was intended to provide space for one or two permanent archivists, as well as for visiting scholars. But whatever his evening occupation, Solzhenitsvn strove to be in bed b\- ten o'clock. He w as a man of strict and rigid habits, and hated disrupting his timetable. There were, however, one or two physical relaxations (besides sw imming) he indulged in occasionally. One of these was tennis, and the one luxury he had permitted himself w as the construction of a tennis court in a clearing in the pine woods. It had been an old childhood dream of his to play, vet he had never found an opportunity until his arrival in \ ermont. He acknowledged that it was something of an absurdity to start learning at the age of sixty, but he was determined to try. The problem w as that he had no regular partners. Ekaterina, his mother-in-law would pla\ occasionally, and he tried to press Xatalia to do the same. In her youth she had represented the Soviet Union in sculling and had been a talented basketball plaver, but now she practised no sports and would rarely play. Occasionally, she teased her husband that it was "a bourgeois game" that he had no business playing, but mainly she w as simply too loaded dow n w ith w ork. 'it's not that I don't want to play," she said one day; "I just don't have the time. He doesn't realize how franticalh- busy I am, and when I have a bit of time to spare, especially with him, I don't w ant to spend it pla\'ing tennis." Solzhenitsvn w as graceful on the tennis court but slow and inexpert. He had put on some weight over ,
*
Owing
to
doing
to the sciatica
much
for himself
from which he had suffered since the mid-sixties, Solzhenitsvn had taken
of his writing standing up
—
at a
kind of lectern he had had specially constructed
—which made the long hours he v\orked an even more impressive
feat of
endurance.
SOLZHENITSYX
[980]
the vears and this impeded him.
He \\ as also
impatient, considering a quarter
of an hour plenty of time for practice.
He
also continued to enjov certain kinds of ph\sical labour.
The one
was sawing
that he invariably permitted himself to be photographed at
logs,
sometimes with the children, but he also persisted with the scything that he had learnt at Rozhdestyo. A stainless-steel sc\the leaned against the rear \\ all of his cabin not for Solzhenitsyn were the nois\', stinking motor mowers of his \ ermont neighbours. For almost all the rest of the time Solzhenitsyn worked, as did everyone
—
else in the house,
\\
hich gave an aura of seriousness to the
\\
hole establish-
ment. There was no solemnity. Indeed, the atmosphere was an appealing blend of the informal and the formal. Meals and mealtimes, except for the
evening meal, w ere entirely informal. Each person pursued his or her time-
was preferred, ate w henever necessary, and washed At the same time, great punctiliousness and formality w ere observed in arranging meetings or consultations between an\" tw o or more people, and punctualit\ was obligatory. Everyone knocked on doors before entering (except the communal rooms, of course) and w aited to be invited in. The central purpose of these arrangements w as clearly to protect Solzhenitsvn's w orking hours as much as possible and to see that not a minute of his time w as wasted, and it seemed to work surprisingly well. It also table at whatever pace
the dishes afterw ards.
lent a sense of purposefulness
and order
to the entire household,
w hich had
the cohesiveness of a kind of informal monastery, each individual working tor the common good approved of and encouraged.
away
—
situation that Solzhenitsyn emphatically
a
At the same time there w as a It w as not
myster\" about the place. secrecx" it
ot
and conspiratorial
relations
slight
but noticeable
that Solzhenitsxn's
made
limits.
of suppressed
ell-known love of
the atmosphere oppressive (though
ma\- have had this effect in the long run), but there
boundaries and
air
\\
For instance, nearly
w as
a general
to the
all visits
awareness
house had to
be made in secret, and extensive precautions were taken to see that each visitor
concealed from the outside world the very fact of his having been
w ere clamw ho w ere refused or to fortunate friends and admirers. There
there. Solzhenits\ n's rationale for this
ouring to
visit
him
that he didn't
cause undue jealousy
w as
among
a certain sense in this,
w
his less
but the
w as
that so man\' people
ish to upset those
real
reason seems to have been Solzheni-
tsvn's twin obsessions of maintaining absolute prixacv
everything that had to do with his ot exercising that control
w
as to
life
and
career.
One
and of controlling
of the simplest
ways
ensure that his various friends, helpers, and
know who the others were. Another feature was that certain conversations on Russian themes would suddenly run into an evasion or a silence, and it would be suggested that further discussion of that theme was unwise or unwelcome. Then there were the comings and goings of members of the household, especially Natalia, leading to w hispered huddles and sometimes the sudden breaking off of one activit)' to deal w ith some urgent matter that had just arisen elsewhere. Finall\', advisers never got together, since the\ did not
Kpilogue
[9H1]
humming of the elosed-cireuit television monitor in room, the periodie explosions ot the loud buzzer announeing that someone was at the gate, and the crackling ot the intercom as the visitor was interrogated. All this created a certain air of excitement that enhanced one's sense of participating in an enterprise ot great moment, something that was purposeful, relevant, and perhaps of great importance to the outside world. there were the robot-like its
Httle
The main
w as (and
point of that enterprise
still is)
Solzhenitsvn's series
of novels. August 1914 had been completed in 1970 and published in 1971.
From under
In the six years since then, apart from the essays in
the Rubble, his
Calf {most of which had been written bv 1973), and
memoir, The Oak and
the
Leuiii in Zurich (also
parth written before Solzhenitsxn's expulsion), there
had been onlv speeches and interviews. It was not a great deal in terms of literature, and Solzhenitsvn w as aw are of it, for he had not forgotten where his true vocation law He had felt drawn in the other direction by duty, but his real work w as still literature, as he made clear in 1977. an interest in [politics] owing to the appalling circumstances Whenever I am attacked, m\ would much prefer not to. opponents alwavs insist on regarding me in political terms, under this or that \\
I
as obliged to take
of our
But
life.
I
.
mv
terms.
A
task,
such and such that
is,
a
mv
and not
A
partv"
And
tradition of his people.
.
.
.
When
it is
I
It's
the
call
to his tradition
simplv impossible to cast
or there.
And
sav this, thc\'
bound
necessarilv
language
is,
svstem for himself
is
such
a
\\
—
all
mv
frame-
in political
politician or "I
w
ill
accept
his language,
mightv, living thing that
a
through language the writer
There cannot be
nationalitv or to his countrv.
is
from that of the
differs in kind
—and off he goes. A writer chooses above
his people's language.
not
is
cannot be regarded
I
politician chooses a political
subjugates one even more. That
tradition.
dimension.
view of the w orld
\\ Titer's
the philosopher.
.
completelv missing the point that this
political classification,
work, not
.
riter
\\
ho
is
is
bound
it
to the
indifferent to his
there cannot be a writer indifferent to his
me
and
a reactionar\-
and
his nation;
terms
a writer in political
wrong wav of going about
a nationalist.
A
writer
cannot be otherwise.
it
—
to sav
And
he belongs here
things, a pointless occupation
and
a
waste of time.
Solzhenits\n elaborated on this theme on the same occasion as tollow
My my
W est
critics in the
exchange?" Well, job.
people.
.
Is
.
.
I
The w riter's
that not
what
are constantlv saving, "But
could offer plentv
if
ultimate task
enough
for a single
I
is
w
is
s:
he offering us
wanted, but I'm not obliged
to. It's
in
not
memory of his murdered Thev murdered mv people
to restore the riter?
.
.
.
and destroved its memorv. And I'm dragging it into the light of dav all on mv own. Of course, there are hundreds like me back there w ho could drag it out too. Well, it didn't fall to them; it fell to me. And I'm doing the w ork of a hundred men, and that's all there is to it. I'm no philosopher, I'm no politi.' cian, I get mixed up in this politics, but I loathe it. .
.
.
.
.
There was an element of disingenuousness in these protestations. Solriijht about himself insofar as he w as describing the Solzheni-
zhenitsvn was
SOLZHEMTSVN
[982]
tsvn of the novels, of The Gulag Archipelago, and even of his memoir, but the ven' genre of the press conference, the new spaper
article,
the polemical
essa\',
and the public speech seemed to preclude, in his case, the sensitivitv that informed his literary works and to bring out the w orst in him. It w as not that there w ere "two Solzhenitsvns" w ith tw o different philosophies but that the crudit\' and coarseness of his journalism failed to convince because it lacked the complexity and integrity of his literary prose. These statements w ere "political" in the sense that was ascribed to them, and Solzhenitsyn could have avoided them had he so wished, and chosen to appear before his public onh' as a "w riter." He did not, howe\er, and perhaps could not, for he returned to the genre of the polemical article again and again, and alw avs w ith the same dismal results. It w as like an addiction that he could not throw off and that w as slowly killing not him but his reputation. It is
possible that Solzhenitsyn had got
his expulsion not
only out of
a
more mixed up
in politics since
sense of compulsion but also as a subconscious
escape from some of the problems he w as encountering in his historical nov-
The
like a
flood of
godsend
new information
him
had seemed w ritten volumes 2 and ? of his scries w as proving to be ver\' difficult, and new light had been thrown on the events depicted in volume 1, August 1914. A further problem was connected w ith the development of one of his principal fictional personels.
ages, Lenartovich. to
available to
but integrating
at first,
The
it
in the U'est
into the largely
figure of this Marxist pro-Bolshevik, once intended
be the hero of the epic (identified with Solzhenitsyn himself) and now cast
as a negative character,
was destined
to plav a
major role
in
volume
3,
1917, and Solzhenitsyn was w restling w ith the task of depicting him pathetically
enough
to
make him convincing, w
March s\
m-
hile not concealing his nega-
and actions. In doing so, he was engaged in a kind of re-e\aluation of his ow n youth, a process that appears to have caused Solzhenits\ n considerable difficulties. There was also perhaps the larger question, which Solzhenitsxn has nowhere touched on, of the appropriateness of the whole enterprise. Solzhenits\ n has freeh- admitted that the example of Tolstoy w as decisive in leading him to undertake his historical epic. "This is the meaning of literary tradition," he said in 19~~, but he implied that he would have come to this tive exaluation of Lenarto\ ich's opinions
form in
scx^ner or later e\"en
without Tolsto\' and
e\"en
it
he had been
less
steeped
purely Russian literature (and correspondingh better versed in foreign
literatures).
But the question remains whether the genre of the
historical epic
has the same meaning and the same validity in the second half of the tw en-
—
century that it had in the nineteenth and w hether Solzhenitsyn has been w ise to cling so faithfulh" to a concept first evolved in the thirties, w hen he w as still voung. Apart from the century that has elapsed since War and Peace, the nearh" fifty \ears since 1936 have been among the most turbulent and exigent of modern times. Solzhenitsyn has rarely admitted to w riting
tieth
difficulties, its
but
it
w ould seem
that the transition
from East
to
West, w
ith all
attendant complexities, caused him more problems of this kind than he
had ever experienced before.
Kpiloguf.
One and
sign of
it
was
his decision to
add
[9H3]
second volume to August 1914
a
to rewrite parts of the existing xolume.
the domestic details of the
Tomchak
I
le
had learned that certain of
family (based on his mother's family)
were wrong, owing to his too ready acceptance of certain family legends; and he also wished to incorporate many of the criticisms that discerning readers had made of the first yolume and passed on to him in letters. It seems that by 1978 the task was finished and that he was also well advanced on the revision of October 1916 and March 1917, regarding parts of them as complete, for in that year he started publishing individual chapters of historical analysis
from the former (which he be
known
that the overall
called "survey chapters") in the Vestnik
title
Wheel.* In the same year, he began to publish, through the collected edition of his
works
and
of the series of novels was now to be to date, beginning
chapter version of the The First
Circle,
the text of
YMCA
w ith the full w hich he had
let it
I'he
Red
Press, a
ninety-six-
personally
checked and revised.
One
should not, perhaps, make too
much
of Solzhenitsyn's delay in
publishing the succeeding volumes to August 1914, for there were practical difficulties in the
the chaotic
way
way
in
of bringing out more books very quickly.
which the
texts of The First Circle
Owing
to
and Cancer Ward had
many errors and deviations from the origiwas anxious to have accurate texts on record. He also wanted to have a complete and accurate text of The Gulag Archipelago in print (when the new edition came out, he had added some new notes based on fresh information, and it was copyrighted to the Russian Social Fund instead of to Solzhenitsyn personally). Finally, he was anxious to publish his early plays and screenplay, written while in exile, and accurate versions of Candle in the Wind and The Tenderfoot and the Tart. All this constituted a backlog that he felt he had to clear before publishing his new er works (even if they v\ ere ready), and the position was complicated by an additional backlog in the reached the West, incorporating
nals, Solzhenitsyn
translations into other languages.
Volume
3
of The Gulag Archipelago, for
June 1978, just after the Harvard be 1980 before the Fnglish and American publication
instance, did not appear in Fnglish until
address, and
it
was
to
of The Oak and the Calf.
There were no financial pressures on Solzhenitsyn to publish. He was one of the world's best-selling authors, and his income was commensurate. In 1976, when Publishers Weekly published an informal investigation into Solzhenitsyn's sales, it found that approximately thirty million copies of his books has been sold throughout the w orld in upwards of thirty languages. The first volume of l^he Gulag Archipelago alone had sold eight to ten million copies, and the three volumes were expected to sell in the region of fifteen million altogether. Volume had sold about two and a half million copies in the United States alone, just over a million in Germany, and just under a million each in Britain, France, and Japan. Sales of the early novels were 1
*The
was taken from one of the cinematic scenes
title
portrayed
a
detached carriage v\heel revolving
control and on the path to destruction.
in
in flames, a
August 1914 in which Solzhenitsyn
symbol of
a collapsing
Russia out of
-
SOLZHENITSYN
[984]
almost impossible to compute because of their piecemeal publication, but there had been a distinct drop in Solzhenitsyn's sales after volume
X'olume
2
had sold about
quarter as rnzny as volume
a
1,
1
of Gulag.
and volume
3
fewer
than that. August 1914 and The Oak and the Calf hid both achieved best-seller status on the continent of Europe, but August 1914 had done less well in Britain and America, and The Oak and the Calf was destined to do likewise.
Meanwhile, according to UNESCO's 1976 guide Translationum (which was four years behind with
to translations, the Index its
figures),
Solzhenitsyn
had "tied w ith Shakespeare" in 1972 for the number of languages into which his v\orks had been translated, which means that by 1976 the number was probablv higher. Solzhenitsyn was outperformed in the matter of translations onlv by Marx, Engels, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Gorky, Pearl Buck, and Balzac.^ When one stops to consider that the figures for the t\\ o classics of Marxism and the Russians on the list were certainly inflated bv the inclusion of figures for translations into and betw een the various languages of the USSR (which may well have accounted for the high positions of Jules Verne, Pearl Buck, and Balzac too), and that Solzhenitsyn, on the contrary (unlike Shakespeare), suffered from an absolute absence of such
was
a remarkable tribute to his popularity. consequences were obvious, but since Solzhenitsyn was generally as guarded about his financial affairs as about other aspects of his private life, the figures could only be guessed at. One of the penalties of life
translations,
The
it
financial
West, however, was that income-tax statements were open to public June 1977 a Zurich newspaper "insulted," it claimed, by Solzhenitsyn's "arrogant" description of Switzerland in Lenin in Zurich as a
in the
—
scrutiny, and in
—revealed
"republic of lackeys" (these words were Lenin's, not the narrator's)
had declared earnings of $3 20, 000 and savings of $1.8 million.* Two years later his income was said to have halved to $155,000 and his savings gone down slightly to $1.4 milthat in 1974, the year of his exile, Solzhenitsyn
lion,
but they were
still
very substantial."^
The reason for these disclosures became apparent a few months later, w hen it \\ as reported that the Swiss tax authorities were investigating Solzhenitsyn's wealth with a view to claiming a large sum in back taxes. The sum mentioned varied from $1.8 million to $2.5 million according to which source one consulted, and word got out because someone in the Swiss Central Taxation Office had leaked confidential documents to the left-wing Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger.The sum at issue related to money deposited by Solzhenitsyn in the Russian Social Eund and consisted mainly of royalties from the sale of l^he Gulag Archipelago. Since the fund was charitable, Solzhenitsyn and his lawyers maintained that no income tax w as payable on it, whereas the Swiss tax authorities were questioning this fact. The Tages-Anzeiger, which had long been hostile to Solzhenitsyn, exploited the leak to run a whole campaign on *The
Neil'
York Times put
uncertainty indicates how
it
at
$401,000 and $2-$3 million, respectively, but the margin of known about Solzhenitsyn's real income and financial w orth.
little is
Fpilogue some
the issue, leading
critics
[985]
of the paper's conduct to conclude that the
KGB was
behind the leak and that it was all part ot that same Moscow campaign to crush the Social lund w hich had led to the arrest of Ciinzburg. There were suggestions that a host of KGB agents were operating in Sw itzerland to unearth details about the w orkings of the fund and the names of the beneficiaries, and one of Solzhenitsyn's Swiss lawyers, Hans-Rudolf
demanding to w as helping.*^ It is not clear whether the KGB was trul\ in\ oK ed (though it could only have been pleased bv the outcrv, and there w as some publicity about it in the Soviet press). According to Mavor W'idmer, there w as no investigation. The Swiss authorities had simply reacted to a request from the American tax w as
Staiger,
know
said to have received threatening telephone calls
whom
the fund
authorities for clarification of the fund's status
block on anv
w ithdraw al
determined.
The
ited the
'
of
monev from
other point was that, unlike American law,
amount of donations
that could be considered tax free,
that Solzhenitsvn, or his advisers, his
income.
and had automatically put a its status had been
the fund until
When
had overlooked
this fact
Sw iss
law lim-
and
appeared
when
it
calculating
the dust finallv settled, Solzhenitsyn was found to
owe
back taxes and was cleared of anv imputation of bad faith.** Meanwhile, the editor and five reporters of the Tages-Anzeiger were charged bv the Zurich cantonal authorities with "aiding and abetting the prevention
about $90,000
in
of criminal proceedings" bv refusing to hand over the leaked documents, and
were subjected to modest fines when tound guilt). Monev had a lot to do w ith the next controversv to burst over Solzhenitsyn's head as well. In June 1978 Olga Carlisle published a short book detailing her relations w ith Solzhenitsyn and her efforts to ensure the publication of The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago in the West. It w as a defence against his charge, made w ithout naming names, in The Oak and the "^
and her husband had been responsible for delaying the publiAmerica and thereby, indirectly, for his expulsion ("two or three soulless, mercenary products of a Western upbringing made a mess of everything that I had sent out at the Feast of Trinity in 1968. The American edition would be six months late and would not help me to hoist myself over the abyss"). "^ The wording, as usual in Solzhenitsyn's memoir, was gratuitously sharp, and the generalization about a "Western education" simply shallow (it w as a gibe at Olga Carlisle as a Westernized Russian, implying an unfavourable contrast with her Russian parents), nor was it self-evident that his fate would have been different had the American Calf, that she
cation of The Gulag Archipelago in
edition of The Gulag Archipelago appeared on time. Nevertheless, his basic
charge of procrastination seemed unassailable: he (or in
had not received it
for translation.
a
this case his
lawyer)
publishable text of Gulag five years after having delivered
Olga
Carlisle's
answer
to this
was
that she (and to a lesser
extent her husband) had spent seven years working selflessly on Solzheni-
had cut herself off from "the land of her parentage" as and that her marriage had been "strained by the pressure." Solzhe-
tsyn's behalf, that she a result,
SOLZHENITSYN
[986] nitsvn's charge
w as therefore black
ingratitude.
As
to
whether the work of
editing The Gulag Archipelago had been done or not, she maintained that she
had offered Dr Heeb
of volume
a finished version
Thomas
ferred to take
W hitnev's
1
but that
Heeb had
pre-
unpolished rough translation instead.
good deal of svmpathv from the fact of Solzhenitsyn's and unpredictabilit\',* and this was strengthened when Solzhenitsvn added a footnote to the English-language edition of The Oak and the Calf, adducing an additional reason for his criticism. For her "services, expenses, sacrifices, losses, sleepless nights, and those of her husband and their lawver" described in her book, w rote Solzhenitsvn, Carlisle had taken pavments equal to "about half the rovalties from the world-wide sale" of The First Circle A "That's the way it alw ays happens: those w ho perform the main task are not the ones w ho seek glorv. The selfless Western people who aided Carlisle derived a
well-known
me
irascibilit)'
ways in West
in substantial
publications in the
The (for
Carlisles
.
mv .
.
who
struggle,
are
responded to
all
modestlv
assured the steady flow of silent to this
this footnote
by
filing a
my
day.""
$2 million lawsuit
"exemplar)- and punitive damages") against Solzhenitsyn, charging him
American publishers (Harper & Row) with libel and invasion of prithat the pavments made to them had been "entirely reasonable," that thev had "worked expeditiously" in preparing The Gulag Archipelago for publication, and that Solzhenitsyn's description of them had "injured their good names and employment prospects and caused them humiliation and anguish." It seemed to confirm Solzhenitsyn's worst suspicions about Westerners and their obsession w ith invoking the law, but the law in fact vindicated itself. The action was dismissed by a San Francisco judge on the grounds that, even if what Solzhenitsyn had written about the Carlisles had been false, the matter was not actionable because the material and
his
vacy.
They maintained
complained of constituted an expression of opinion and not allegations of misconduct.'"
Long before the law suit had run its full course, Solzhenitsyn was obliged w ith some new sallies from his old friends at the KGB. Least disturbing w as the publication by the small Hamburg journal Neue Politik in Feb-
to deal
ruary 1978 of the allegations that he had been an informer in Ekibastuz,
complete with
a
photocopy of the
signed as "Vetrov."
The
he was supposed to have written and
letter
publication was accompanied by a circumstantial
account of the supposed investigation of
this
matter in
deceased Swiss journalist called Walter Arnau.
The
Moscow by
w as so swathed in mystery and ambiguity what Solzhenitsxn had alreadx' divulged himself, and
sational" discoveries little
to
a recently
account of Arnau's "senthat it
it
added
sank with
hardly a ripple.'^ * \\
Some
of this
svmpathv
ho had "risked her
lite
v\
as oxerdone.
Advance
publicitv described Olga Carlisle as
smuggling Solzhenits\n's works out of the So\
iet
Lnion."
someone It is
true
that (Carlisle herself did not urite this in her book, but out of an understandable concern tor her father,
w ho w as
might, and
many
still
alive at the time, she did not describe his role in the affair as fully as she
readers were
tThe amount charyed
left
with the impression that the danger to herself had been great.
to Solzhenitsvn
was $169, OOO, of which $50,000 was
for lawvers' fees.
Epilogue Potentialh'
Tomas Rezac
more damaging w
into
Zurich, Rezac had
tiic
rc-emergence of the
C//.cch
\\
riter
public c\c. After returning to O.echoslox akia from
made
then been taken up
as the
[9^7]
b\"
a
pubHc recantation on O.ech
telex ision.
Novosti and "encouraged" to write
biograph\' of Solzhenitsvn.
The book appeared
first in Italian,
a
He
hatl
So\iet-st\le
published In
Teti (the specialists in anti-Solzhenitsvn literature), and soon thereafter in Russian, entitled Ihe Spiral of Solzhenitsyiis Betrayal.
the Novosti press agenc\' to
^^
Rezac had been afforded
the So\ iet Union, tra\ el and schooldavs, and inter\ iew fcjrmer friends and acquaintances. Judging bv the list of people mentioned in the book, the overw helming majorit\ must have refused to ha\ e an\ thing to do u'ith Rezac. He did, however, manage to get a few words w ith Alexander Kagan, the bo\- Solzhenitsxn had tussled w ith at school, and pretlictabK met the thoroughh' frightened \ itkevich and Simon\ an, although the\ added little to w hat the\- had said already. Rezac had also called on Natalia Reshetovskaxa under the pretext of being the Czech translator of her book, later passing oti his question-and-answer session with her (on the subject of her book) as an independent interview and claimed to have interview ed a friend of Solzhenitsvn's referred to as "L.K." a transparent reference to Le\- Kopelev. Kopelev categoricallv denied ever having spoken to Rezac and affirmed in an '" open letter that everv word attributed to him in the book was a fabrication. The book w as published in Russian in the spring of 1978 (on 1 April, to be precise, an appropriate date) bv the Progress publishing house in Moscow and was billed as a translation from the original Czech. The publisher claimed in a foreword that Rezac had belonged to the "inner circle of Solzhenitsxn's
every assistance
b\'
visit
to the places of Solzhenitsvn's birth
,
—
,
book w as
friends" while in Zurich, that his
the image of Solzhenitsyn
.
.
.
ith Solzhenitsvn's
it
"exposed
assiduouslv propagated bv contemporary
bourgeois propaganda" and constituted,
polemic w
"strictlv objective," that
among
other things, "a powerful
most feted publication
in the
W est,
The Gulag
Archipelago.''^^
Rezac's bf)ok
w as
a predictable tissue
of innuendoes, quotations out of
w hose tone can be gauged from the author's opening statement that he had w ritten "not the biography of a vxriter but an autopsy of the corpse of a traitor." Rezac's "case" against Solzhenitsyn was a shakily cobbled together patchwork of earlier statements bv \ itkevich and Simonvan, the shadier parts of Reshetovskaxa's memoirs (mostly interpolations bv Novosti), some new allegations bv Burkovsky (the prototype of Buinovskv in Ivan Denisovich), the resentful Yakubovich, and the terrified Samutin, and a mass of fantastic speculation and invention presumably bv Rezac himself. According to this picture, Solzhenits\'n had been a cunning dodger at school, a cow ard in the arm\', an informer in the camps, a lecher in exile, a thief after his rehabilitation, a betrayer of his friends, a committer of incest w ith his second w ife, a talentless hack w ho had not even mastered the Russian language, a traitor to his country, and a context, invented dialogue, and unfounded speculation
warmonger It
in the
seems not
West. to
have occurred to Rezac that
this "portrait"
may have
SOLZHENITSYN
[988]
readers as a shade exaggerated.
struck
its
to sav
who
its
On
the other hand,
was
it
difficult
readers were, for the Progress edition was very small, being
given onlv a restricted circulation
among
senior Partv
members
(even such a
relentlesslv black picture of Solzhenitsyn as this could be trusted only to a
and there were no translations into languages other than it seems to have touched a sensitive nerve in Solzhenitsvn. Just before the book's appearance, Natalia Svetlova gave an interview to the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag in which she denied
handful of
lovalists),
the Italian.
Nevertheless,
met Rezac. She also claimed that the Holub couho had been Rezac's friends, had soon been exposed to Solzhenitsyn Soviet agents, but Solzhenitsyn, "at the request of the Swiss police," had
that Solzhenitsvn had ever ple,
as
\\
concealed his knowledge of the fact and fed tiem disinformation.'' In early
1979 Solzhenitsvn published an entire booklet, Skvoz' chad (Through the
Fumes), about Rezac's book, having spoken to him.
The and
in
which
booklet was described as a sequel
the Calf.
met Rezac or
he, too, denied having
'**
Solzhenitsvn had subtitled
it
to, or
continuation
of.
The Oak
"the sixth supplement" (the
fifth
few months in the West and Svetlo\ a's feat in smuggling out his archi\es under the noses of the KGB), and it marked a departure from his former practice of not answering attacks.
supplement evidentiv described Solzhenitsvn's
He
first
explained his reasons for this as follows.
Goodness know s how nian\ have w ritten against me all these years, but I never replied; I kept doing mv ow n work. And that same Novosti agency distributed two collections of slanders against me free of charge in a variety of languages, and I didn't reply. But put yourself in the place of our countrymen now anyone who wants to find out the truth about me in the Soviet Union can't lay his hands on either Gulag or the Calf, but onlv the Progress publication. And when I die, lots more will sink without a trace or simply die away, and [the slander] w ill stick all the more. And w ho is behind the slanders? The mightiest power in the modern world, with excellent chances of expanding further.'*^ :
Solzhenitsvn appears to have been particularly stung by the fact that Rezac was slandering not onlv himself but also his parents and family and that, unlike most of the other attacks on him, this one was intended for circulation inside the Soviet Union (and perhaps among Russian emigres). He was ultrasensitive to his reputation with the Russian people.
was to be two vears before another major attack on Solzhenitsyn was launched bv the Soviet authorities; it is \\ orth mentioning, however, not only It
for the indication of a
consequence.
complete change of tack but also
The change
political scurrility.
for
one unexpected
of tack was simplv from personal to
Whereas Rezac's muck-raking
depicting Solzhenitsyn as a moral degenerate, a
effort
new
had concentrated on
book, published
beginning of 1980, tried to show that Solzhenitsyn had been agent since before the publication of his
first
story.
more general
The
at
an active
the
CIA
subject of the book
was indeed the wider one of the insidious influence of the
CIA on
the Soviet
Epilogue
[989]
movement. Written hv Solzhenitsvn's old adversary Professor Nikolai Yakovlex and entitled The CIA against the i'SSRr" the hook was a cold-war manual purporting to show that all the unrest in the So\ iet L nion since 1957 and all the unofficial art and literature produced during that time were the fruit of CIA infiltration and manipulation, .\hout tift\ pages of the b(jok were devoted to Solzhenitsx n, and the tract was meant to serve as a warning to Soviet citiz.ens not to get invoked in protest or the reading and distribution of samizdat. Those w ho did so were the w illing (or unw illing) dupes of the dissident
CIA
and
traitors to their country.
One
seemingh- unlikelv outcome of the book's publicaticjn was the reappearance on the public scene in Moscow of Natalia Resheto\ska\a. Since Solzhenitsvn's expulsion she had dropped out of sight; the publication of her
book and the threatened publication of Solzhenitsx n's letters tf) her had been handled mostly bv Novosti, without her direct participation. But in April 1980 she released a blistering attack on ^'akovlev (a friend passed it to the Los Angeles Times, explaining that Resheto\ skava w as afraid to meet Western corresondents herself), accusing him of having produced "a pack of lies" that travestied Solzhenitsvn's life and career, completely distorted the meaning of Solzhenitsvn's works, and hopelesslv misjudged Solzhenitsyn's character. Her detailed refutation of some of Yakovlev's cruder arguments could not affect the Soviet publishers, since the purpose of the book w as not truth but propaganda, and Reshetovskava's unfeigned indignation merely demonstrated vet again her naivety in the face of the cvnical manoeux ring of the Soviet authorities (according to the Los Angeles Times, Reshetovska\a had personally
and embarrassed Yakovlev at his home). The letter also demonstrated her deep and continuing interest in the affairs of her ex-husband, and a surprising willingness to defend him in view of the damaging nature of her ow n earlier book and the harsh delivered a copv of her nine-page letter to
a startled
things Solzhenitsyn had had to sav about her since.-' In fact, her attitude had for
some time been ambiguous. She had begun
rewriting and expanding her memoirs, and the ver\" process of rereading Solzhenitsvn's earlv letters to her and of recalling their
have somewhat softened her bitterness.
On
deeplv upset bv his comments about her
in
life
together seem to
the other hand, she had been
The Oak and
the G///' (particularly
him at the Kazan Station by the KGB and that she had published her memoirs with KGB help) and even more bv his remarks in Through the Fumes, w here Solzhenitsyn had again
the allegation that she had been sent to meet
accused her of aiding and abetting the
As
KGB
and of helping
its
agents to fake
had sent Solzhenitsyn a letter in 1979 in the form of a chapter from her new memoirs, in which she denied any connection with the KGB and described some of the problems that she herself had had w ith Novosti over the preparation and publication of her book. This
the "Vetrov" letter.
a result, she
had been given to an American new spaper correspondent in the spring of 198(J and was apparentlv sent on to Solzhenitsyn via New York.-According to what Reshetovskaya wrote there and elsewhere, she had letter
SOLZHENITSYN
[99o]
refrained from protesting about her problems with Novosti out of regard for
her friend Konstantin
Semyonov and because
of her depressed condition in
the aftermath of the divorce and Solzhenitsyn's expulsion. She had not real-
how badly her book was being mutilated and manipulated by the Novosti copy of the Teti edition in Italian, published in Milan in 1974 (predating the Russian edition). When she saw that her manuscript had been cut bv a quarter and its sense distorted in many places, she had written Teti a complaint (in November 1974), and six months later had followed it with an even stronger letter to Novosti. She revealed that she had been prevented from reading either the final typescript sent to Teti or the proofs of the Russian-language edition, on the preposterous grounds that the\' were "secret," and accused the agency of a varietv of sharp practices, ranging from handing out the foreign rights to her book without consulting ized
editors until she received a
her to pocketing the royalties and failing to furnish her with accounts. After a
considerable struggle she had,
it
seems, succeeded in getting some of the
distortions eliminated and had been able to introduce a
number
ments into the American and French editions of her book. She
of improvealso asserted
had been Semyonov's, not Father Shpiller's, as Solzhenitsyn had alleged, but that she herself had refused. Finally, she disclosed that Tomas Rezac had been to see and that they her only once instead of many times, as he had insinuated had discussed only the contents of her book, nothing more. When she had read Rezac's final text, she had been absolutely disgusted and had protested energetically to Progress Publishers, demanding that it be withdrawn from
that the idea of publishing a collection of Solzhenitsyn's letters
—
—
circulation. It is
not clear whether Solzhenitsyn received Reshetovskaya's chapter.
came
too late to modify the harsh remarks published in Through seems unlikely that Solzhenitsyn would have withdrawn them publicly, in the light of his previous comments in The Oak and the Calf (and of his known reluctance to recant or apologize). Reshetovskaya suggested another reason why that was unlikely: Solzhenitsyn needed to paint In any case,
the
it
Fumes, and
it
her in black colours and to assign her a negative political role, in order to justify his
the
name
behaviour towards her and assuage
a
bad conscience.
If
it
was
in
of the "cause," his conduct was easier to justify.
wide of the mark. on her summer visits to the cabin recalled the past and grieved over the irre\'ocable wrong turns at Rozhdest\o and mistakes, so did Solzhenitsyn, in his Vermont seclusion, meditate on that same past and regret the painful dissolution of his marriage. As he remarked in 1977:
There
are indications that she
Just as she, alone in
—
Moscow
As always, every family
—or
story
is
was
not, perhaps, too
especially
incredibly complicated and confused. Each side
can marshal a thousand arguments, and each person
always that vvav. That's vvhv
it is
is
unavoidably guilty
—
it's
the sort of thing that doesn't allow of a simple
solution or a simple paraphrase. All that can be said in the most general terms,
Epilogue when vou
take a bird's-eye view of
But of course, so manv
And
.
.
and
.
the last five vears.
wouldn't have
we would
And w hen
we
it,
that
is
we were both wrong
should never have done
and memories are invested
Yes ...
to get
twice.
.
.
.
in an\ joint life together.
.
.
.
I
never
split
up.
he w as obliged to give reasons, his words more or
Reshetovskav
it
w hen it breaks up. w ould never have parted if we hadn't had such an aw tul lite ... I w as readv for any sort of peaceful coexistence, but she she couldn't imagine the seriousness ot the danger, she was
terribly painful
it's
Natalia
sure
feelings
...
it
married, espeeialh the seeond time;
[991]
less
confirmed
a's fears.
it
is
a great pitv
she took the line she did.
It
only she had taken up
position of non-resistance in the course of our family breakdown,
w e'll
a
only she had
if
would never have done it. But she immediately wage war against me in almost the same w av I w aged w ar against the state, the w av I describe it in the Calf, is sent word that she w ould get her also prettv hopeless. You see, she literally revenge, that she would find Solzhenitsvn's enemies, and it's well known who said,
right,
all
live apart,
I
declared war on me, and in a big way. Well, to
.
Solzhenitsvn's enemies are.
And
it's
.
true that
would have simplv staved on good terms, and
.
if
possible
separated. But she immediatelv started that wa\", grabbed
using them against me, using m\'
letters
and
we
she hadn't chosen that path,
it's
we w ould
mv
never have
papers, and started
in general entering into battle against
me. Well, doing battle against me is a waste of time; it's bound to end badl\ But if she had simplv said, if she had behaved, so to speak, like a wounded bird, I would never have throw n her over; it w ould have been impossible. I understand .
that
it's
wrong
terrible. It's a
to
abandon
weight that
women will
at that age,
be w
ith
vou
till
I
know
It's
it.
terrible, absolutely
the end of your days; you'll never
and it's very conscience again. It will always be here inside But it's easier, too, because she went to the KGB when she cooperates with the KGB and publishes her book, it makes it easier tor me. .-' Then I no longer feel that remorse, that aw tul remorse. have
hard.
a clear .
.
.
.
.
—
.
.
.
At times world
like these
with Reshe-
tovskaya and the breakdow n of their marriage, he remarked on the the old
men
ith
him
as
\\
ith
way
a
he grows older: "In our Orthodox religion
are always furiously trying to pray
age has caught up
.
Solzhenitsvn was apt to grow gloomy and view the
in dark colours. After discussing his difficult relationship
man's sins catch up w
.
.
them and
is
away
their sins, because old
beginning to strangle them. There
wonderful Russian proverb: You are born
in a clear field, but
you die
is
a
in a
dark wood."-"^
were
For Solzhenitsyn, both the Orthodox religion and the Russian proverbs a form of consolation, and it would be difficult to say that one was more
important than the other. Religion w
as certainly
important to him. Everyone
house in Vermont wore a cross. Lent was rigorously observed, Easter was more important than Christmas, and the children's saints' day w ere celin the
ebrated as enthusiastically as their birthdays. There was also an Orthodox
SOLZHENITSYN
[992]
chapel in the library annex, and services were said there whenever a priest
came to the house. But, according to a priest who knew Solzhenitsyn well, it w ould be a mistake to call him devout. The nearest Orthodox church was onlv titteen miles aw av, in nearby Claremont, and was in the charge of an acquaintance of Solzhenitsvn's (Father Tregubov), vet Solzhenitsyn never
w ent there and would w Religion for him,
members
of
God
is false.
seems,
it
gent tool and even
is
come
house to see him
to the
of the family attended church regularly).
not an essential part of his being, but a contin-
weapon.
a
the priest to
ait for
(despite the fact that other
he sentimental picture of him as
1
Solzhenits\n certainh' belie\'es in God, though
pious
a
man
not alw
it is
a\'s
whether it is a Christian God, but he experiences insuperable difficulin humbling himself. He is a deist and does not understand mysticism
clear ties
or the
of the church.*
life
There
is
also a sense in
which the Orthodox church appears
to Solzhe-
nits\n as just another attribute of Russia, (^n one occasion he informed an
American
priest of Russian origin that he should stop his pastoral
serve Russia, and was taken aback w hen the priest replied that
w ork and was his
it
duty to serve God, not Russia.-' Solzhenitsvn's love of Russia is passionate and profound, the deepest emotion of his life, and \ ermont, if anything, given its superficial resemblances to his homeland, only intensifies his nostalgia. W hat he misses most is the enveloping w armth of human relations in
badh
Russia. "Absoluteh" everybody lives
occasion, "but vou only have to
call for
was helped by dozens of people absolutely to ask myself;
Can
w hy Russians
back?
I
here are
atmosphere, and sphere
if
It is
uncomfortable here.
feel
it.
I,
for
And
I
when
you're
w
ith
example, never had feels that
which do we all strain to go very good. But it's a different
a different style of relations,
"W hy
of other countries- that are
lots
you need
disinterestedly.
pay?" In the West, on the other hand, he
I
everything has to be done for money. is
our country," he said on one
in
help
else
Nour ow n kind,
that's a different
atmo-
again."-'''
So strong is his yearning that at one point he suggested he would have a deal w ith the Soviet authorities in order to be able to stay. All he w anted w as to live peacefully in his ow n country. "I would have come to an agreement w ith them you don't touch me and I won't touch you. Just let me work. But they wouldn't let me go anywhere not to the library, not
made
.
.
.
—
to the reading-room. The\' stole
How
arrested m\' friends. that?
It's
A
impossible,
consolation
my
papers, followed
me
everywhere, and
can you come to an agreement with people
like
isn't it?"-'
is
his relationship
with Natalia Svetlova. Whate\er the
true nature of his marriage to Reshetovskava, this second marriage has every
appearance of being *This reading of
a
love-match. Svetlova has
S()lzhenits\n's attitude to religion
levelled at Solzhenitsyn
bv Panin
in the sixties.
all
the qualities he
was look-
close to some of the reproaches Another well-placed source assures me that
comes extremely
Solzhenits\n has taken the criticisms of certain Orthodox friends to heart and has wrestled miyhtih' to bend his will to that of the church.
Epilogue ing for in a helpmate. She
[993]
intelMgent, c|uick-\\itted, energetic, ph\ sicailv
is
enormous work-load. She is dexotetl hodv and she is warm and ph\sicallv attractive, capable of pro\iding a solace that was bexond the powers of the elderK, and now ailing, Reshetox skava. But be\ ond that she seems trul\' in lo\e w ith her husband, and he w ith her. He is inevitabh strict and demanding, but he also shows her great tenderness, calling her b\- her pet name of "Al\a," or "m\little girl," w hen called upon to offer s\ mpath\' and consolation. She also shares his patriotism and his \earning for Russia. 1 heir entire life in \ ermont has been organized with a view to getting the maximum amount of work done, but also in such a w av that the\- are readv to abandon everything and return to Russia at a moment's notice. Thev regard themselves as onl\ temporary visitors to the West. Solzhenits\n is even sure that strong, and capable of carrying an
and soul
this
is
I
to her husband's cause,
so.
am
firmly convinced
business. a
You know
few years before
premonition, will turn out,
w hen
and
still
.
.
I
And
I
a
I
I will be in time for this seems to me it is only a matter of have no proof of it, but I have a
will return, that
optimistic that
know
that's the
have
that
return to Russia. ...
I
a feeling.
phetic feelings,
Russia and
.
feel so
I
,
it 1
have very often had these accurate feelings, proin
way
chance to
advance w hat it is.
I
think
—
is I
going to happen,
am
sure
—
that
I
w
how ill
things
return to
live there.-**
Meanwhile he watches and waits
—and
still watching and waiting. impending publication of the second volume of August 1914 was announced,* to be followed fairly soon by October 1916 and March 1917, with further volumes in the pipeline. When they appear, they w ill mark a new period in Solzhenits\n's long and productive career, a period that in a sense is onh' just beginning. Readers are w aiting to know whether this w ill represent a falling off from the achievements of the past or, as everyone hopes, a step farther and higher. He regards it as his last and most important task in life. "I am writing a kind of 'Gulag Archipelago' ot 1917. If I can do it, I require no more of life. And nothing more can be demanded of a w riter.""*^ One thing seems reasonably certain. If he himself does not return to Russia, his books undoubtedly will.
And working on
*It
was published
is
his great epic. In 1982 the
in 1983,
together with a revised version of volume
1.
NOTES
These notes sition of this
mind by
are intended as a guide to the sources
employed
in the
readers using them.
The
first is
that certain individuals,
outside the Soviet Union, provided
some of
me
whom
are inside
and some
with information on the express
understanding that their names not be revealed. In such instances, listed the tity
compo-
biography, and there are three points that should be borne in
source as "private information," but in every case
I
I
have
know the iden-
of the person concerned.
The second
point concerns translations. In quoting from Russian origi-
some may regard as idiosyncratic. Where I have simplv made mv own. Where the translations into English exist and are accurate (e.g., in the Nobel lecture, The Oak and the Calf, and a few other items), I have quoted them verbatim. In most other cases I have made mv ow n translations from the Russian but have nals,
I
have adopted
no translation
a policy that
into English exists,
referred to existing English-language versions for the convenience ot readers.
There
is,
however,
a
category of translations in which the English version
is
word or phrase has been rendered in such a way as to obscure its precise meaning or nuance for the biographer. In these cases I have taken the liberty of amending the relevant words or phrases to bring out the point that needed making (specialists may easily check this procedure by comparing the text with the original Russian). Thirdly, I should point out that whereas in some notes a reference is
generally accurate but in which a key
made I
am
to
page numbers,
in others the reference
is
to a chapter.
This
is
because
often dealing with a text that exists in several versions, and in particular
because these notes are meant to serve both English and American readers.
995
Notes
[996]
Since the paginations in British and U.S. editions of the books in question rarely coincide,
seemed more
it
satisfactory to indicate chapters than to give
preference to a particular set of editions.
Chapter
1
chap.
August,
Solzhenitsvn
has
12.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
confirmed to the author that the opening
13.
Shkuro, 55, 67-77.
chapters of the novel (and other chapters deal-
14.
Information on the
1.
ing with the
2.
Tomchak
family) contain a true
Some
account of his ancestry.
of this infor-
mation was repeated and enlarged upon
in his
itary situation in the
and mil-
political
North Caucasus
incor-
porated into the remainder of this chapter and into
Chapter
drawn from
2 is
the following
Mar. 1972 interview with the two American
sources (in addition to Zernov and Shkuro):
correspondents Robert Kaiser and Hedrick
J.
Smith. For the
1920 (London, 1975); David Footman, Civil
appendix 22 2.
fullest text
of the interview see
War
to Oak.
Leo Tolstoy, The
and Aylmer Maude,
Cossacks, trans.
Louise
is
recorded in N. N. Gusev,
tvorchestva
Uva Nikolaevicha
of the Life and
4
in Collected Works, vol.
(Oxford, 1932), 281. Tolstoy's journey this
Works
way
Letopis' zhizni
i
Tolstogo (Chronicle
of Lev Nikolavevich
Tolstoy) (Moscow, 1958), 45. 3.
of Solzhenitsyn's grandparents and aunts and uncles in this and the next paragraph
author in Vermont
in
in
v\
as pro-
an interview uith the
June 1977 (hereafter
War
(New York, 1961); M. Philips War and Revolution in Asiatic Russia London 9 8 and My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London, 1921); W. H. Chamin Russia
(
)
The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921
berlin. vols.
1
1
,
(New
shevik Revolution,
V
.
1917-1923,
1918 godu (Soviet Republics casus) (Rostov,
New
1969).
7.
Solzhenitsvn referred to the manner of
15.
Zernov, 289-90.
death in his interview with Smith
16.
Shkuro, 192.
it
of other interviews.
account given here
nitsyn's description of
Bori-
let
osvohozh-
it
obliquely in
The circum-
based on Solzhe-
is
Chapter
2
to the author. 1.
Zernov, 322.
geln" (A Family of Boors), Stern, 21 Nov. 1971,
2.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
pp. 105-10. This tendentious article, based in
memoirs,
is
not very reliable on
the v\hole, but does contain
some accurate
information on Solzhenitsyn's mother's side of the family (see
mv
discussion of the circum-
stances in uhich the article
uas written,
in
chap. 41. 9.
I.
York, 1969).
Dieter Steiner, "Eine Familie von Fle-
Irina's
Dona (A
Belykh (The Twentieth
denia StavropoFia ot
(London and
on
(London,
North Cau-
in the
1930); Dvadtsat'
Ibid.
and Kaiser and has mentioned
part
2
senko, Sovetskie respubliki na severnom Kavkaze v
Ibid.
8.
1
Istoria
History of the Don) (Rostov, 1967);
5.
number
vol.
Kuznetsov, ed.,
I.
6.
stantial
,
York, 1965); E. H. Carr, The Bol-
the Whites); Philip Longworth, The Cossacks
4. Ibid.
his father's
1917-
in Russia,
Anniversary of the Liberation of Stavropol from
referred to as Solzhenitsvn interview).
a
Civil
Price,
1950);
Information about the names and ages
vided by Solzhenitsvn
N. Bradley,
F.
Nikolai Zernov,
Na
perelome (At the
(Memoirs of
250.
6. Ibid. 7.
Georges
An
Suffert,
a
White
Partisan)
(Buenos Aires, 1961), 62, 64, 66, 71, 74,
76.
"Solzhenitsyn
in
Interview," Encounter, Apr. 1976,
pp. 9-15.
Information for
ceding paragraphs
and A. D. Shkuro, Zapiski
to the
Solzhenitsvn interview.
5.
8.
286-88.
11. Ibid., 289;
belogo partizana
4. Ibid.,
Zurich:
Breaking-point) (Paris, 1970), 286. 10. Ibid.,
H. N. H. Williamson, Farewell Don (London, 1971), 166. 3.
is
this
and the two pre-
taken from
my
with Solzhenitsyn. 9. Ibid. 10.
Gulag, vol.
3, pt. 5,
chap.
2.
interview
.
.
.
.
.
Notes 11. Stephen Graham, (London, 1915), 25-26.
Rhoda Power, Lnikr
12.
and
(Cossack
Hol-
shevik {Loniion, 1919), 19. 13. 7"Ae \\V/v
poem
know n b\
also
is
(unpublished), chap. original
its
This
1.
Vol-
title,
Skvoz chad, 29-3f).
11.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
12.
Ibid.
13.
This story of Zakhar's
me bv
death was told to
The Way, chap.
14.
August, chap. 59.
14.
15.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
15. Gulag, vol. 1, pt.
16.
August, chap. 59.
16. Encounter, .\pr.
Information on Taissia's situation
17.
Rostov
is
mv
taken from
in
18.
Conversation with Anna \ Oloshina,
davs and It
is
1.
chap.
1,
1.
1976, pp. 9-15; and
17.
The Way, chap.
18.
Gulag, vol.
19.
Solzhenitsyn interview
chap.
Apr. 1983.
3.
1, pt.
chap.
1,
;
1.
and The W'ay,
3.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
19.
"Jedneho
20. Pavel Licko,
u .\le\an-
diia
dra Isajevica Solzenicyna" (One Da\
with
Alexander Isavevich Solzhenitsvn),
Kiil-
turni Zlzot
1967.
last
Solzhenitsvn.
Solzhenitsvn interview
interview with Sol-
zhenitsvn.
A
(Cukunl partial
Labedz, ed.,
in
Life) (Bratislava), 31 .Mar.
translation
A
Solzhenitsyn:
Chapter 4
21. Solzhenitsvn interview.
Encounter, Apr. 1976, pp. 9-15.
2.
Robert Conquest, The Great (London, 1968), 22. 4. 7'/;«f.f (London), 21 Peb. 1976. 3.
Conversation
5.
23. August, chap.
the Shcherbak family
The
3.
is
description of
based on chaps.
3
nova,
and
with
25. The W'ay, chap.
and Solzhenitsvn
1;
interview.
.\routu-
June 1977.
Solzhenits\n interview
7
Skvoz'
Solzhenitsvn
41;
chad,
inter-
pt.
1,
chap.
June 1977; and unpublished letter to the author from Natalia Reshetovskava, 16 Mav 1982. Skvoz' chad, 41-42.
8.
5.
27. Solzhenitsyn interview.
9. First Circle,
28. Ibid.
10.
chap. 24.
Natalia Reshetovskava, Sanyo:
My Life
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, trans. Elena Iva-
ii-ith
noff (Indianapolis, 1975), 11. Skvoz' chad.
Chapter
Bavara
Terror
view; conversation with Natalia Svetlova, 17
24. Ibid., chap. 9.
1,
1 1
6.
(one-volume edition).
26. Gulag, vol.
15
19-0.
22. Ibid.
this novel
Conversation with Lev Kopelev,
1.
May
Leopold
in
is
Documentary Record,
(Bloomington, Ind., 1973), 32-38.
enl. ed.
9 of
10.
also briefly referred to in I'he Way.
unteers' Highivay.
17
Solzhenitsvn interview.
9.
Russia
Chuni^'ini/
.997
3
Unpublished
12.
19.
42-43. letter to the
May
Natalia Reshetovskava, 16
author from
1982.
1.
Gulag, vol.
2.
Solzhenitsvn interview; private infor-
13.
Skvoz' chad, 42-43.
mation; and Solzhenitsyn's extract from the
14.
This discussion of Solzhenitsvn's earlv
1,
pt.
1,
"sixth supplement to The
published in Russian as Skvoz' chad 3.
chap.
5.
Oak and
a separate
(Through the Fumes)
the Calf,''
pamphlet,
(Paris, 1979).
5.
6.
Vladimir Bukovskv, To Build a
Castle,
Skvoz' chad, 22.
7. Ibid., 29. 8. First Circle, all
15.
Solzhenitsyn interview Sights,
quest (London and
Michael Scammell (London, 1978), 95.
indicated,
based on the author's examination of June 1977.
is
in
16. Prussian
Solzhenitsvn interview.
4. Ibid.
trans.
works
them
chap. 68. Unless otherwise
references to First Circle are to
the shorter, 87-chapter version, which translated into English.
v\'as
New
trans.
Robert Con-
York, 1977), 16-11
This long poem originallv formed chap. 9 of The Way. chap.
17.
Gulag, vol.
18.
Solzhenitsvn interview
19.
Unpublished
1,
pt.
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
conversation
w ith
1,
31
5.
author from
Oct.
.\nna \ oloshina.
20. Solzhenitsvn intervievw
1982;
and
.
. .
..
..
Notes
[998j
The Way, chap.
21. Ibid.
31.
22. Encounter, .\pr. 1976, pp. 9-15.
32. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 5, chap.
23. Ibid.
33. Ibid.;
24. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 6, chap. 7.
34.
2. 1.
and Reshetovskaya, 36-37, 40.
Reshetovskava, 21.
25. Solzhenitsvn interview 26. Ibid.;
chap.
and
Gulag,
vol.
1,
pt.
1,
Chapter 6
2.
27. Ibid.
1.
28. Encounter, .\pr. 1976, pp. 9-15.
2.
29. First Circle, chap. 34. 30. Gulag, vol.
1,
pt. 1,
The
Reshetovskava, 23. contains
lation
chap.
First Circle, chap. 61.
mistake:
a
English trans-
"inappropriate"
should read "appropriate."
4.
31. Ibid.
3.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
4.
"Incident at Krechetovka Station," in
.\lexander Solzhenits\n, Stones and Prose Poems,
Chapter
Glennv (London and New York,
trans. .Michael 5
1971), 171-73. 1.
The Way, chap.
2.
/^/m
3.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
4. T/^e
Circle,
Way, chap.
Ibid., 173.
5.
1.
chap. 61.
6.
Solzhenitsvn interview
7.
Gulag, vol.
5.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
9.
6.
Reshetovskaya,
10. Ibid.,
7. Ibid.,
1.
5-6.
pt. 1,
chap.
4.
Reshetovskava,
34.
33-34.
11. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 7.
9.
1,
8. Ibid.
1
Natalia Reshetovskava, Russian edi-
12.
Unpublished
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16 .\lav 1982.
tion, 26.
This phrase does not appear
in
the
English translation.
10. Ibid.
36-37.
Reshetovskava,
13.
.\dditional
11.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
information from Reshetovskaya, Russian edi-
12.
Reshetovskava,
tion,
6.
13. Ibid., 8.
14.
Solzhenits\n interview
15.
Reshetovskava,
8-9; and
Solzheni-
tsyn interview.
27-29; and Solzhenitsvn interview
Reshetovskava, Russian edition, 26.
15.
The Way, chap.
16. Ibid.,
chap.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
17.
Solzhenitsvn interviev\
18.
Reshetovskava,
17.
Reshetovskava,
19.
Quoted
18.
Conversation with \ eronica Stein,
11
Sept. 1976. 19.
War: 1941-1945
37.
in .\lexander \\ erth, Russia at
(New
York, 1964), 682.
Solzhenitsyn interview
20.
The Way, chap.
5.
8.
16.
9.
.
14.
21. Reshetovskaya, 55-56.
2.
20. Ibid. 21. Solzhenitsvn interview;
and Reshe-
Chapter
tovskava, 10. 22. The
Way, chap.
23. Reshetovskava,
1.
of the quo-
2.
Ibid., 45.
V
3.
Ibid.,
Dispute with Time)
4.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
5.
Reshetovskaya, 50.
11; part
tation appears only in the Russian edition, spore so
iremenem (In
(.Moscow, 1975),
15.
24. Solzhenitsvn interview 25.
45-46.
and Russian edition, p. 39. 24-25; Solzhenitsyn interview; and unpublished letter to the author from 6. Ibid., 50;
Reshetovskaya, 59; and Solzhenitsvn
interview. 26. Reshetovskava, 12.
7. Skvoz''
chad,
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16
27. Solzhenitsvn interview 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Gulag, vol.
7
Reshetovskaya, 26, 44, 53, 96.
2.
May
8.
Solzhenitsvn interview
9.
Unpublished
1982.
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 31 Oct. 1982. 1,
pt. 1,
chap.
5.
10.
Solzhenits\n interview
.
.
.
Notes Reshetovskaya, 56; and uiijiublishcd
1 1
author from Nataha Kcslietov-
letter to the
skaya, 16
May
1982.
Reshetovskaya, 55.
13.
Gulag, vol.
14.
The Way, chap.
chap.
1.
chap.
6.
23.
chap.
1,
4.
Reshetovskaya, 59-60.
is
60-61.
in the
chap. 83.
(London,
Citation
11.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
12.
Gulag, vol.
chap.
pt. 1,
1,
The entire
5.
first cell
taken from that chapter. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 61.
Unpublished footnote
made
days
following description of Solzhenitsyn's
20. Ibid.,
1,
his descrip-
first
1955).
18. ibid.
22.
own
James Allan, No
10. 1,
17. Gulag, vol. 1, pt.
19.
have therefore utilized
9. Ibid.
5.
Labedz,
in
I
tion in chronicling his
8. First Circle,
3, pt. 5,
15. (itilag, vol. 1, pt.
Quoted
to him.
prison.
12.
16.
19991
to Gulag, vol.
available to the author
by Solzheni-
Chapter 9
tsyn. 23. Solzhenitsyn interview.
1.
24. Reshetovskaya, 58-59.
2. Ibid.
Quoted by Solzhenitsyn
25.
chap.
The Way,
in
3.
26. Ibid.
5.
27. Reshetovskaya,
The comment
62.
about the listening-posts appears only
pt.
chap.
1,
5.
Ibid.
in the
28. Ibid., 63.
This
adventure
account
of
Solzhenitsyn's
in East Prussia is taken
31. Gulag, vol.
1,
chap.
Solzhenitsyn interview. Gulag, vol.
9.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
6.
Werth, 969. Gulag, vol.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
16. Ibid.
Reshetovskaya, 64.
35.
This account of Solzhenitsyn's
17. Ibid.,
chap.
and
famous, Solzhenitsyn had with Travkin,
who was by
a
1,
chap.
3.
6.
20. Ibid., chap. 7.
made him
a cordial
then
chap.
pt.
19. Ibid.
the author's interview with Solzhenitsyn. After the publication of Ivan Denisovich had
1,
3.
18. Ibid.
arrest 1,
3.
chap.
14.
34.
1,
1,
13.
33.
pt.
1, pt.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
15. Ibid^
1,
chap.
1,
12.
Reshetovskaya, 63-64.
vol.
pt.
Reshetovskaya, 84.
32.
based on Gulag,
1,
11. Gulag, vol.
22-11
pt.
1,
7.
8.
10.
from Skvoz'
chad, 34-39. 30. Prussian Nights,
Ibid.
6. Ibid.
Russian edition, 47.
is
I,
4. Ibid.
8.
29.
Gulag, vol.
reunion
Chapter 10
general in
retirement.
1
The
Special Board
was evidently abol-
ished in 1953, soon after Stalin's death, but is
Chapter 1.
2.
chap. 3.
8
Kulturni Zivot
31
,
Mar. 1967.
Solzhenitsyn interview, and The Way,
characteristic that the
news of
its
my
emerged only three years
later.
of the Special Board,
have drawn on Con-
I
For
Gulag, vol.
1,
pt.
1,
chap.
1;
and Sol-
zhenitsyn interview. 4.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
5.
The Way, chap.
(London and Chester Springs, Pa., 1968); Uavid Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, 1947); and
6.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
7.
I
have
it
Gulag, vol.
11.
on Solzhenitsyn's authority
that
1.
chap.
2.
Gulag, vol.
3.
Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 4.
1,
pt. 1,
4. Ibid.
the description of Volodin's induction into the
5.
Ibid.
Lubyanka
6.
Reshetovskaya, 65-66.
is
based
literally
on what happened
account
quest, Great Terror; Ivo Lapenna, Soviet Penal Policy
10.
it
abolition
7.
I
ooo] 7. Ibid., 66. 8.
Ibid., 68.
Notes
.
Notes 7.
Reshetovskaya, 116-17, 124-29.
88-89; and conversation with Peretz
8.
Ibid., 131, 133.
berg.
9.
Ibid.,
116-17.
1
14. Ibid.
1
13.
Kopelev, 72-76.
Kopelev, 93-94.
14.
Panin, 270-73.
17.
Panin, 284.
15.
Kopelev, 59.
Kopelev,
chap. 53. 12,
3,
16. Ibid.,
18-19; and First Cir-
39.
90-92.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
17.
chaps. 24, 61, 62.
18. First Circle,
chap. 26.
20. Reshetovskaya, 107.
19.
21. Ibid.
20. First Circle, chap. 5.
Kopelev, 16-17.
Reshetovskaya, 116.
21. Reshetovskaya, 148. 22. Ibid.
26. First Circle, chap. 5.
23. This detailed account is largely based on information provided by Lev Kopelev in Ease My Sorrows, 88-92, and on a conversation
27. Reshetovskaya, 114-15.
with Kopelev.
24. Ibid.
Kopelev, 24.
25.
28. Kopelev, 23.
24. Kopelev, 91.
Reshetovskaya, 132.
30.
Circle,
The two
32. First Circle, chap. 42.
tences beginning with
"What did
sen-
the state ..."
and ending with "matter" were omitted from
Chapter 16
the shorter version of the novel that circulated
They appear
in
published
in
that
was
Russian in Paris in 1978 (chap.
in Sobranie sochinenii, vol.
as yet
—
no English
1,
p. 362).
pt. 2,
Gulag, vol.
5.
6. Ibid.;
Reshetovskaya, 132-33.
3, pt. 5,
Gulag, vol.
7.
3, pt. 5,
9. Ibid., vol. 1, pt. 2,
10.
Quoted
A
toevsky:
in
(Indianapolis and
Kopelev, 34-35; and conversation with
11.
New
Gulag, vol.
Kopelev, 37-38.
13.
Panin, 293.
3.
First Circle, chap. 14.
14.
Gulag, vol.
4.
Kopelev,
and conversation with
Peretz Hertzenberg.
Kopelev, 59, 83-84; and conversation
with Peretz Hertzenberg. Kopelev, 47-49, 67-68.
7. First Circle,
chap.
chap.
2.
2.
Mary
trans.
.\lackler
York, 1975), 173.
3, pt. 5,
chap.
2.
12. Ibid.
2.
6.
2.
Leonid Cirossman, Dos-
Biography,
15
Peretz Hertzenberg.
chap.
and Panin, 290-91.
35. Ibid., 136.
5.
Testimony,
chap. 85.
4. First Circle,
translation of the full ver-
38;
My
16.
There
8. Ibid.
1.
4.
Michael Scammell (London, 1969), 15-
34. Ibid., 134.
Chapter
chap.
chap. 85.
Marchenko,
Anatoly
3.
trans.
sion of the novel. 33.
1,
2. First Circle,
the longer ver-
chapters instead of 87
Gulag, vol.
1.
samizdat and was translated into foreign
—96
First
chap. 87; and conversation with Peretz
Hertzenberg.
31. Ibid., 136.
languages.
273-74; Kopelev, 90-92;
25. Panin,
29. First Circle, chap. 37.
is
1
12. Ibid., 143.
23. Solzhenitsvn interview.
46
Reshetovskaya,
1
16.
18. First Circle,
sion
Veronica Stein; and
ith
Conversation with Peretz Hertzen-
berg.
in
v\
15.
22.
lertzen-
Reshetovskaya, 137.
13. Ibid.
cle,
I
39-45; and conversation with
Conversation
10.
12. Ibid.
19.
I
Peretz Hertzenberg.
Solzhenit.svn interview.
1.
I
()()
Kopelev, 44.
8.
9. Ibid.,
10. Ibid., 117.
1
[
chaps. 43 and 74; Kopelev,
3,
pt.
5,
chap.
2.
The
description of Ekibastuz and of Solzhenitsyn's first
days there
of vol.
is
taken from chaps.
2
and
3
3, pt. 5.
15. Ibid.,
chap.
3.
16. Ibid, (the translation
adjusted).
has been slightly
.
[
I
Notes
002] 17.
Reshetovskava, 150.
18.
Gulag, vol.
28. Reshetovskava, 160.
chap.
2, pt. 3,
19. Ibid., vol.
.3,
chap.
pt. 5,
Ata, 1982), 41. 2
talia's
Reshetovskava,
1
30. Ibid.
22. Gulag, vol.
chap
3, pt. 5,
May
is
letter to the
based partly on her author of 16
May
1982
and partly on her memoirs.
23. Ibid. 24. Ibid.
31.
Reshetovskaya, 169.
25. Ibid.
32.
Unpublished
letter to the
May
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16
26. Ibid.
33.
28. Panin, 296.
34. Ibid., 167.
Conversation with Dimitri Panin, 10
Notably
35.
a
former friend and col-
who
league of Simonyan's
Dec. 1980. 30. Gulag, vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 5.
author from
1982.
Reshetovskaya, 161.
27. Ibid.
29.
Na-
relationship with Vsevolod and of their
unpublished
5.
1982.
following account of
subsequent marriage
54.
1
The
the author from
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16
3.
Shevchenko, Ekibastuz (Alma-
20. S. P.
Unpublished
29.
9.
prefers not to be
identified at present.
Both the poem and the extract from
36.
The
Chapter 17
Way
are in Vestnik
RKhD,
no. 117 (1976).
37. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 6, chap. 7.
Gulag, vol.
1.
3, pt. 5,
chap.
5.
2. Ibid.
Chapter 18 3.
Ibid.
4.
The
storv of Tenno's escapes
is
found
ibid.
and Panin, 297-317.
5.
Ibid.;
6.
Panin, 310-11.
7.
Gulag, vol.
8.
Panin, 314.
Gulag, vol. Ibid^
3.
Ibid.
3, pt. 6,
chap.
3, pt. 5,
chap. 11.
Cancer Ward, chap. 20.
5.
6.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
7.
Leninskaya Smena, 10 Jan. 1965.
8.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
11. Ibid^
9.
Gulag, vol.
12. Ibid.
10. Leninskaya
10.
13.
Gulag, vol.
3, pt. 5,
chap.
II.
Panin, 315-17; and conversation with
Dimitri Panin. 14.
Ward, chap.
2, pt. 4,
chap.
1;
2, pt. 4,
chap.
1.
16.
Reshetovskava,
150
and
letter to the author, 16
Gulag, vol.
2, pt. 4,
chap.
May
and 1982.
1.
Solzhenitsvn interview. chap.
5.
Unpublished
17. Ibid. 18.
Dimitri Panin, Zapiski Sologdina (The
19. Index letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskava,
16Mav
author from
1982.
21. Gulag, vol. 2, pt. 4, chap.
1.
22. Ibid.
Reshetovskava, 166.
and
Anna Akhmatova,
English translation,
156-57, and unpub-
lished letter to the author, 16
Mav
1982.
Victory Cele-
Helen Rapp and Nancy Thomas
(London, 1983),
31.
24. Ibid., 79. 25. Solzhenitsvn interview;
1969), 23. 27. Reshetovskaya,
Sochineniia (Works),
(Munich, 1968), 343.
23. In
the Innocent, trans.
no. 2
21. Solzhenitsvn interview.
brations, trans.
Nicholas Bethell and David Burg (London,
1,
20. Oak, 66.
vol. 2
25. Ibid., 167.
(Frankfurt, 1973), 479.
on Censorship (London),
(1972), 149-51.
22.
23. Ibid.
26. The Love-Girl
Solzhenitsvn interview.
16. Ibid.
Memoirs of Sologdin)
19. Ibid.
24.
6.
13. Ibid^
15.
152,
18. Ibid^
20.
chap.
Smena, 10 Jan. 1965.
14. Ibid.
Gulag, vol.
17.
and Can-
6.
15.
unpublished
11.
3, pt. 6,
12. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 6,
Gulag, vol.
5.
4. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
cer
1.
2.
lished letter to the author
tovskava,
1
Dec. 1982.
and unpub-
from Natalia Reshe-
.
.
..
. .
s
.
Notes 26. Part of the
poem's preface was quoted
by V'eniamin Teush
"A. Solzhe-
in his article
nitsvn and the Writer's Spiritual Mission."
The
translation appeared in Index on (Censorship,
1,
[1003]
Reshetovskava's original draft of her memoirs before thev v\ere edited by the Novosti new
They
agency.
are
much
Arkhiv
Russian,
in
27. Reshetovskaya, 175.
Archive),
Document
28. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 6, chap. 6.
1973), distributed
29. Solzhenitsvn interview.
nich.
no. 2 (1972), 149-51.
than the pub-
fuller
lished version. Veche, no. 5, can be found, in
(Samizdat
Samizdata
.\S1230 (18
no.
bv Radio Liberty
30.
Reshetovska\a, 176-77.
31. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 5, chap.
31.
Shown
32.
tsvn.
Its
by Solzheniaccuracv has been confirmed by to the author
Unpublished
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskava,
1
May .Mu-
1.
author from
Jan. 1983.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
33.
Natalia Reshetovskava.
1
in
34. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 6, chap. 6.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
35.
Chapter 19
and unpublished
36. Ibid.;
Solzhenitsvn interview. Solzhenitsyn
1.
later
introduced the root and the story of his
excursion into the plot of Cancer Ward. 2.
Gulag, vol.
3.
Unpublished
chap.
2, pt. 4,
May
4.
Cancer Ward, chap.
5.
Unpublished
Reshetovska\a, 185.
38.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
Chapter 20
1983.
author from
May
1983.
and conversaand w ith Lev Kope-
Solzhenitsvn interviev\
1.
3.
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
37.
3.
the author from
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
tions with Dimitri Panin
;
lev.
and Prose Poems,
6.
Oak, 3-4.
2. Stories
7.
Solzhenits\n interview
3.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
8.
Cancer Ward, chap.
.\.
4.
Gulag, vol.
^'ork,
5.
Unpublished
Knaus,
and William
6;
Medicine
Russian
Inside
(New
Reshetovskaya, 179. Cancer Ward, chap.
6.
1.
"The Right Hand,"
in Stories
7.
and Prose
Poems.
Cancer Ward, chap. 22.
13. Ibid.,
chap.
14. Ibid.,
chap. 35.
Reshetovskaya, 186. Solzhenitsvn interview
11. Ibid.;
Nekrasova,
Oak.
16.
Solzhenitsvn interview
7
author from
10. Ibid.
11.
15.
1
6.
8. Ibid., 187.
9.
12.
chap.
letter to the
6. Ibid.
10. 1
3, pt. 6,
4.
Natalia Reshetovskava, 16 .\Iav 1982.
1981), chap. 14. 9.
letter to the
author from Natalia Reshetovskaya.
12.
4.
Leninskaya Smena
,
1
Jan
11
and conversation with Galina Dec. 1980.
Solzhenitsvn interview; and unpub-
lished letter to the author .
tovskaya,
1965.
13.
18. Ibid.
1
from Natalia Reshe-
Dec. 1982.
Solzhenitsvn interview; private inforauthor
19. Ibid.
mation; and unpublished
20. Oak, 4.
22. Ibid.
from Natalia Reshetovskava, 16 .May 1982. 14. This account of Solzhenitsyn's arrival is based on his fictional reworking ot it in
23. Ibid.
"Matrvona's Place."
21. Solzhenitsvn interview.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.; 26.
15.
and Reshetovskava,
16.
183.
Conversation with Lev Kopelev.
1
w
ith
Veronica Stein.
29. Oak, 29. 30.
Quoted
unpublished samizdat
magazine Veche (Assemblv), no. 1972).
Veche
published
Reshetovskaya, 188.
Unpublished
letter to
5
(25
May
two chapters from
1
the author from
Jan. 1983.
18. Ibid.
19.
in the
Solzhenitsvn interview.
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
27. Solzhenitsvn interview
28. Conversation
7
letter to the
Reshetovskaya, 192.
20. Solzhenitsvn interview. 2
1
Unpublished
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskava, 31 Oct. 1982.
1
..
Notes
[1004]
33. Ibid.,
22. Ibid. 23.
Labedz,
24.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
35. Ibid., 226.
25. Reshetovskaya, 193-94, 198.
36. Oak, 12.
26.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
27.
Reshetovskaya, 196.
28. Stones
224-25.
34. Ibid.
22.
Chapter 22
and Prose Poems, 243.
1.
Reshetovskava, 222.
2.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
3.
Reshetovskava, 222.
Chapter 21
1
1.
Gulag, vol.
2.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
3.
Uchitel'skaya Gazeta (Teachers' Gazette),
2, pt. 3,
chap.
11.
5.
Reshetovskaya, 199-200.
6.
Unpublished
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 7.
Panin, 285.
8.
Oak,
9.
7. 8.
Oak, 12-13.
9.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
3
Gulag, vol.
1
author from
Licko.
10.
Reshetovskaya, 232-33.
1
Conversation with Ilva Zilberberg,
1
12. Ilva s 3, pt. 6,
chap.
Zilberberg, Neobkhodimy razgovor
Solzhenitsynym (A Necessarv Talk with Sol-
zhenitsyn) (Susse.x, Eng., 1976), 50.
7.
and conversation with \ eron-
ica Stein. 11. Gulag, vol. 2, pt. 3, 12. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 6,
Reshetovskava,
lished letter to the author
chap. chap.
9.
13.
Oak, 10.
14.
Quoted
207-8; and unpub-
15.
The
15.
One Day
in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich,
Hingley
16.
York, 1963), 98.
in
manv
other Soviet news-
Robert Conquest, Courage of Genius
17. Ibid., 42.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
17.
Reshetovskava, 225.
19. Ibid.,
18.
Oak,
20.
19.
Reshetovskava, 225.
18. Ibid., 160.
6.
2
"Panorama" interview with AlexanBBC Television, London,
der Solzhenitsvn,
1
1
WII
vetskogo Soyuza nist
in
Labedz, 28.
s'ezd kommunisticheskoi partii So-
(22nd Congress of the
2, p.
transcript,
Commu-
Party of the Soviet Union) (17-31 Oct.
1961), stenographic record
p. 5.
22. Licko.
interview
133-35, 164, 169.
Autobiographical note to the Nobel
committee, quoted
20. Ibid., 211.
"Panorama"
York,
(London, 1961), 138.
16.
23.
Soviet Rus-
(New
papers.
Max Hayward and Ronald
Mar. 1976, transcript,
and Problems
speech was printed in Pravda, 28
Aug. 1957, and
Reshetovskaya, 209-10.
Marc Slonim,
1964), 299.
from Natalia Reshe-
14.
in
sian Literature: Writers
7.
tovskava.
.
7
Mar. 1976.
Dec. 1982.
6.
10. Ibid.;
1
and Prose
and
Jan. 1963.
2
Stories
1963; and
Sovetskaya Kirgizia (Soviet Kirgizia), 30
(New
"Matrvona's House," in
6. Ibid.
4. Literatuniaya Rossia, 25 Jan.
trans.
Ibid.
5.
Poems.
Dec. 1962.
13.
4.
(Moscow,
1962), vol.
584. 22. Ibid.,
531-32.
23. Oak, 14.
p. 8.
24. Ibid.
24.
25.
Reshetovskaya, 211-12.
26.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
27. Veche, no. 5, p. 81. 28. Reshetovskaya, 213. 29. Ibid., 219. 30. Ibid.,
220-22, 224.
31. Ibid., 224.
32. Ibid., 226.
Conversation with Lev Kopelev, 22
June 1982. 25. Unpublished
Lev Kopelev,
letter to the
author from
Aug. 1981. Kopelev's wife, Raisa Orlova, has since confirmed most of these details in her book Vospominania neproshedshem 31
vremeni (Recollection of
Arbor, 1983), chap. 21. 26. Oak, 16-17.
Time Not
Past)
(Ann
.
Notes Chapter 23
on
account given
in this
chapter draws
the well-known published sources, on
all
conversations
ith
v\
the Kopelexs, Victor
Ne-
krasov, 11 Dec. 1980., and Veronica Stein, and
especially
Ibid., 101.
3.
The
1
[1005]
on
Reshetovskaya's
two unpub-
4.
Ibid.
5.
Oak, 38.
6.
Veche, no. 5, p. 102.
7.
Oak, 38.
8.
Veche, no. 5, p. 102..
9. Ibid.
lished chapters that appeared in Russian in
10. Ibid., 103.
Veche, no. 5. 1
2.
Details are given
by
P'.fim
Etkind
1.
12.
introduction to the Russian edition of the novel
published
in
Conversation with Victor Nekrasov.
in his
Veche, no. 5, p. 106.
13. Ibid.
Switzerland some twenty years
14. Ibid. later.
See Vasily (Jrossman, Zhizn
i
sttdlm {\J\ie 15. Ibid., 108.
and Fate) ([.ausanne, 1980), v. 3. Conversation with Lev Kopelev.
16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 110.
4.
Oak, 20.
5.
Veche, no. 5, p. 85.
Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, Helen Katel (New York, 1967), 248. 19. Peter Benno, "The Political Aspect," 18.
6.
Conversation with Victor Nekrasov.
7.
Veche, no. 5, p. 97.
8.
Victor
Nekrasov,
Isaichu
.
.
.
(To
trans.
Max Havward and Edward
L.
Crowley,
eds., Soviet Literature in the Sixties
(London,
in
Isaich), in Kontinent, no. 18 (1978), SpetsiaPmye
prilozheuiye (Special Supplement), 3-5.
1965), 191. 20.
9.
Oak,4\.
Veche, no. 5, p. 97.
10. Ibid.,
21. Time, 27 Sept. 1968.
85-86.
22.
Benno,
191.
11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid.,
23. Veche, no. 5, p.
87-88.
S9-ind Oak,
22.
25. 14.
10.
1
24. Oak, 42.
Zhores A. Medvedev, Ten Years
Veche, no. 5, p. 87.
after
Ivan Denisovich, trans. Hilary Sternberg (Lon-
15.
Oak, 26.
16.
Veche, no. 5, pp.
90-92.
don, 1973),
17.
26. Ibid. 17.
Oak, 35. 27. Veche, no. 5, p.
18. Ibid.
HI.
28. Ibid. 19.
Veche, no. 5, p. 93.
29. Ibid., 113. 20. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 111.
21. Oak, 30. 31. Ibid.
22. Ibid. 32.
Chukovskaya,
Zapiski,
449-54.
An
23. Ibid.
English translation can be found in Solzheni24. Veche, no. 5, p. 95. tsyn Studies
1
25. Ibid., 96.
(1980), 177-78.
33. Gulag, vol.
1,
pt.
1,
chap.
7.
26. Ibid. 27.
34.
Reshetovskaya, 232.
28. Veche, no.
Chukovskava,
5,
36.
Akhmatove (Notes
115-16.
Veche, no. 5, pp.
37. Ibid.
(Paris, 1980), vol. 2, pp.
38. Ibid.
608-9. 29. Veche, no. 5, pp. 30. Ibid.,
9.
35. Ibid., lln.
pp. 97-99; and Lydia
Zapiski oh Aiiiie
on Anna Akhmatova)
Oak,
39. Ibid.,
97-99.
1
18-19; and Oak, 44-45.
40. Veche, no. 5, pp.
95-97.
1
19-20; and Oak, 45-
46. 31. Ibid. 32.
41. Oak, 46.
Oak, 34.
33. Veche, no. 5, p. 98.
42. Veche, no. 5, pp. 121-22. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.
Chapter 24 1.
Veche, no. 5,
2.
Ibid.
45. Ibid., 117-18. 100.
46. Gulag, vol.
sian edition only.
3, pt. 7,
chap.
3, in
Rus-
[
I
Notes
006] 47. Reshetovskava, 255-56.
9. Stories
48. Ibid.
10. Gulag, vol. 1, pt. 1,
Chukovskava,
49.
zhenitsyn Studies
Zapiski,
474n; and
Sol-
11. Ibid.,
(1980), 178.
1
50. Oak, 46. 51.
Labedz,
38.
chap.
chap.
7.
4.
12.
Oak, 58.
13.
Conversation with Andrei
14.
The
Sinyav-
skv.
41-42.
52. Ibid.,
and Prose Poems, 114.
author of this appreciation
lives in the Soviet
53. Ibid.
Union and
still
prefers not to be
identified.
Oak,
15.
Chapter 25
-[9.
16. Ibid. 1.
These and the other Soviet reviews
quoted
in this
17. Ibid.,
chapter have been collected in a
66-67.
18. Ibid., 68.
samizdat anthologv devoted to Solzhenitsyn's
19.
Conversation with Victor Nekrasov.
career and entitled Slovo probivaet sebe dorogu
20.
Johnson, 240-71.
(The Word Hews
21. Oak,
in
Russian oniv.
a Path for Itself), .\11
which
exists
quotations are from Slovo
68-69.
22. Slovo, 192.
unless otherwise indicated.
23.
Johnson, 71.
2.
Benno, 192.
24.
.Medvedev, Ten Years, 20-21; and
3.
Priscilla
Johnson, Khrushchev and
the
Arts
Lit-
eraturnaya Gazeta, 26 Dec. 1963.
(Cambridge, .Mass., 1965), 102-3. 4.
Feifer,
Quoted
David Burg and George
in
(London, 1972), 195-96.
5'o/2;?)ew//.fyw
Chapter 27
5. Oak, 53."
1.
6. Ibid.
2.
Reshetovskaya, 256.
3.
Oak, 70.
4.
Johnson, 75.
5.
Slovo,
6.
Sovy Mir, 40, no.
7.
Conversation w
8.
Oak, 53.
9.
Ibid.,
ith
\ ictor Xekrasov.
50-51.
10. Ibid., 52. 11. Literaturnaya Rossia, 25 Jan. 1963;
and
Conversation with .\ndrei
Sinvav-
skv, 8 Dec. 1980.
1
(Jan. 1964).
226-28.
8.
Labedz, 79.
9.
D. Blagov (pseudonym of Veniamin
Teush),
.4.
sat ely a (.\.
13. Ibid.
225-26.
7. Slovo,
Sovetskaya Kirgizia, 30 and 31 Jan. 1963. 12.
Oak, 69.
Solzhenitsyn
i
dukhovnaya missia pi-
Solzhenitsyn and the Writer's Spir-
14.
Both
15.
Oak, 61.
Sobranie sochinenii (Collected
16.
Johnson, 102-3.
furt,
articles are
reproduced
in Slovo.
17. Ibid., 117.
in
Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
Works) (Frank-
1969-70), vol. 6, pp. 483-551
(in
Rus-
sian).
18. Ibid., 121. 19.
.Mission),
itual
10. Ibid.
Conversation
with
Evgenia
Ginz-
burg, 15 .May 1970.
11.
Gulag, vol.
3, pt. 7,
chap.
2.
12. Ibid^
13. Ibid. 14.
Chapter 26
Solzhenitsyn interview.
15. Index on Censorship, 1, no. 2 (1972). 1.
2. Ibid.,
36-37.
3.
Oak, 62.
4.
Johnson,
.March meeting 5.
Quoted
is
in
of the 1962-1963
Crowley,
140.
This account of the
based on Johnson, 140-81.
8. Ibid.,
64.
poem
did not find
For its
and Prose Poems, but appears
(in
Sobranie sochinenii (Collected
Works)
1978-83), vol.
3, p.
Russian) in (Paris,
174.
Burton Rubin, "Highlights
16.
Reshetovskava, 261-62.
Hayward and
17.
Conversation with Efim Etkind, 10
Thaw,"
153-54.
Oak, 60.
this prose
v\av into the standard English edition. Stories
in
Soviet Literature in the Sixties,
6. Slovo, 7.
some reason
Slovo, 36.
94-95.
Dec. 1980. 18.
Reshetovskaya, 251-52.
19. Ibid., 250.
20. Ibid., 268.
.
.
1
.
.
.
Notes 21. Ibid., 268-74.
[1007] This passage does not appear
6.
shorter, 87-chapter version that
22. Ibid.
in the
translated
Russian, in
23. Ibid., 276.
into Knglish.
24. Ibid., 278.
chap. 60 of the longer version, published in
Medvedev, Ten
25.
the Collected
Years, 25.
26. Oak, 11. .
28. .\Ied\ede\
on Medvedev
Ten
,
Years, 26.
have relied
I
account of the
for the rest of this
Lenin Prize committee's meeting.
1.
Oak, 72.
2.
Reshetovskava, 259-60; and unpub-
Solzhenitsyn interview Collected
from Raisa Orlova,
Aug. 1981. 3.
Reshetovskava, 259-60.
This unpubHshed
letter
to
Panin,
and
274;
12.
Conversation with llva Zilberberg. Oak, 97-99.
Oak, 73-79.
7.
Conversation
8.
Oak, 80-84.
\\
Zilberberg.
86-87.
10. Literaturnaya
Gazeta,
Mav
Ma\' 1964;
12
1964; Literatur-
juW
naya Gazeta, 4 June 1964; and Moskva,
Medvedev, Ten
Pictorial Record
(Lon-
Oak, 105-6.
and conversation with \'eron-
18. Ibid.;
1964
1.
Oak, 103-4.
2.
Gulag, vol.
3.
Oak, 104-5.
5.
Ibid., 108-9.
6.
This account
Conversation with \ eronica Stein.
7.
12.
Oak, 73.
8. Ibid.
Conversation
56 (Oct. 1964).
with
Zhores
.Med-
vedev, 2 Dec. 1981. 15. Private
information.
Carlisle, Solzhenitsyn
and
the Secret
chap.
is
taken from Medvedev,
9.
Private information.
Conversation w
Conversation w
11.
Oak, 111-12.
12.
This
told to
is
Zhores .Med\edev.
ith
Ehm
Etkind.
the version that Solzhenitsyn
Zhores Medvedev and that Medvedev
Ten Years
1.
ith
10.
incorporated into the
York, 1978), 23-24.
17. Gulag, vol. 3, pt. 7,
1.
Ten Years, 39-42.
}'ears, 30).
13. Gra;;7 (Facets), no.
chap.
2, pt. 4,
4. Ibid., 110.
11.
(Sew
A
16. Solzhenitsyn:
with
conversation
ith llva
Literaturnaya Rossia, 29
Circle
99-102.
Conversation with \ eronica Stein.
15.
Chapter 30
6.
Olga
chap. 55.
Oak, 1-2.
ica Stein.
Dimitri Panin.
16.
chap.
11.
17.
show n
as
\\
the author b\ Lev Kopele\
14.
(Paris), vol. 2,
61 (in Russian).
don, 1974), 60.
4.
(cited in
Works
73-74.
55
8.
14. Ibid.,
lished letter to the author
in
(Paris), vol. 2, pp.
chap
9.
13.
9. Ibid.,
Works
10. First Circle,
Chapter 28
5.
It
First Circle,
7
11 Johnson, 76.
31
can be found,
w as
after
initial text
of his book
Iian Denisovich. .\fter meeting
London
Medvedev
18.
Reshetovskava, 247.
Zilberberg in
19.
Medvedev, Ten
slightK modified his text and added a caution-
Years, 2-3.
orv to stand.
21. Oak, 59.
Conversation
with
vedev. 23.
Oak,9\.
Zhores
.Med-
13.
Oak, 101-2.
14.
Zilberberg.
15. Ibid., 75.
24. Ibid., 95. 25. Ibid.,
16. Ibid., 80.
96-97.
17.
Oak, 101-2.
18.
Conversation with \ eronica Stein.
19. Private information.
Chapter 29
20. Oak, 118. 1.
Oak, 202.
2.
Solzhenitsvn interview
3.
Ibid.
4. First Circle, 5.
Ibid.
1973,
arv footnote but allowed Solzhenitsyn's the-
20. Ibid., 5.
22.
in
chap. 5S.
Chapter
3
1.
Oak, 114.
2.
Blagov. 511.
.
.
Notes
[ioo8] Oak, 113-14.
3.
Chapter 32
4 Nov. 1965.
4. Literatiirnaya Gazeta.
1.
Oak, 135.
until 1978,
2.
Ibid., 137.
his
3.
Ibid., 139.
Scjlzhenitsvn did not publish this storv
5.
when it was included in vol. 3 of Collected Works (Paris). It has not so far
been translated into English. 6.
Oak, 122.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Private information.
9.
Oak, 126-27.
4. Sloiv, 297; 5.
lation of the proceedings 6. .\.
Quoted in Bukovskv. 192-9.V Quoted in Russia's Other Poets, ed. Janis Sapiets (London, 1969), xx. 12. These events are described in Bukov10. 1
1.
\
13. .\ detailed
trial
trans. .Max
On
Conversation
with
Carter, of Collins in London, 17 June 1982.
w
as
Bonham
Carter
w ho
flew to
.Medvedev,
Ten
Years,
\oz-y Zhurnal
in
359-67;
and
Labedz,
366-67.
Oak, 146-49.
12.
Conversation with \ eronica Stein.
13.
Oak, 142-45.
14. Ibid..
It
Stockholm.
144-45.
15. Ibid.
and
16.
Solzhenits\'n interview.
17.
Reshetovskaya,
memoirs made
tsyn:
available to the author.
16.
Solzhenitsvn interview
17.
Hans Bjorkegren,
A
60-61;
18. Pavel Litvinov, ed..
Eneberg (New
8
in
18.
On
19.
Conversation with .Maria Rozanova,
290-91.
don, 1969), 1-7, 13-49. For an account of the
Hilary
19.
and Simonede Beauvoir,
All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O'Brian
(New
".\'(k;v
BBC
Oak, 151.
and Licko inter\iew with
Licko affidavit to the Bodley Head,
5
Sept. 1968. 25. Carlisle, 18-19.
and ed. Robert Dessaix and .Michael Ulman (.\nn Arbor. 1981), 172,
Saiiet Writing, trans,
175.
W'eissbort
Television, 14 .Mar. 1969.
24.
History of Post-ii-ar
Daniel
York, 1972).
23. KulturniZivot, 31 .Mar. 1967.
.Mass., 1980), 51-52.
A
Litvinov,
el
21. Ibid., 156-58.
Mir," trans, and ed. .Michael
23. Grigori S\irski,
26. Reshetovskaya,
unpublished
chap-
ters.
24. Gulag, vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 25.
"Panorama"
inter\iew
27. Ibid.
3.
26.
28. Oak,
transcript,
164-65, and notes; and Reshe-
tovskava, unpublished chapters.
p. 14.
a
New
22. Ibid., 155;
22. \'ladimir Lakshin, Solzhenttsyn, Tzar-
and
see Pa\
20. Ibid., 156.
York, 1974), 321.
Glennv (Cambridge,
trial,
and
Sternberg,
(London and
20. Oak, 98, 128.
dovsky,
The Demonstration
ed.. The Trial of the Four, trans. Janis Sapiets,
Dec. 1980. 21. Ibid., 119n;
chap-
Pushkin Square, trans. .Manya Harari (Lon-
Galanskov-Ginzburg
York, 1972), 80-81. Trial,
unpublished
ters.
Aleksandr Solzheni-
Biography, trans. Kaarina
102
text).
unpublished chapters from Reshetovska\ as
15.
(New
11. Ibid., 458.
Bonham
.Mark
from
Labedz, 104.
10.
Havv\ard (New York
details
York), no. 93 (1968).
Shrco,
9. Slovo,
and Lxjndon, 1967). 14.
(New
(abridged
and of
.\ trans-
Labedz, 83-105.
Belinkov, "Delo Solzhenitsyna" (The
Solzhenitsvn Case),
7.
in
is
labedz, 98—101; additional
8.
account of the
the defendants' speeches can be found in
and
.
Journal)
skv, 160-63, 234-41, 249-56.
Trial, ed.
and Oak, 141n.
Oak, 306; and Labedz, 87-90.
Quoted by Natalia Reshetovskava
in
statement to the press, 9 .\pr. 1980. Parts of
Chapter 33
Reshetovskaya's statement appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 22 .Ma\ 1980.
appears
in Russia
(New
.\ full
York),
1,
translation
no. 2 (1981).
27. Ibid. in
1
.Medvedev, Ten
2.
Pravda, 26 .May 1967.
3.
The
full text
Years,
68-69.
of the letter can be found
Oak, 458-62, and in Labedz, 106-12. 4.
Reshetovska\
a,
unpublished chapters.
.
Notes The
41.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Mcd\tdc\
Ten
,
)'cars,
70;
and (Jxlverty
vse-soyuzny s'ezd sovetskikh pisaleki (Fourth All-
Union Congress of Soviet Writers), stenographic record (Moscow 1968), 197-98.
full
text of
I
009]
Tvardovskv's
letter
appears in Labedz, 155-67. 42. Oak, 203;
and Reshetovskava, unpub-
lished chapters.
,
7.
Labedz, 112-13.
8.
Oak, 164.
9.
Conversation with Efini F.tkind.
10. Private
Chapter 34
information.
11.
Reshetovska\a,
12.
Oak, 164.
1.3.
Ibid.,
unpublished
chap-
ters.
1.
Oak,
2.
Letter
Praeger, date
and Reshetovskaya,
16.S-66;
14.
Oak, 169-74.
l.i.
Ibid., 174-76.
16.
Reshetovskava,
4.
Litxinov, Trial, 219-20.
5.
Ibid., 227.
7. Ibid.,
unpublished
chap-
from
289.
302-3.
8.
Ibid.,
9.
Conversation with Pavel Litvinov, 10
Dec. 1981.
17. Ibid. 18. Ibid.
Gulag, \ol.
pt.
1,
Simonyan,
1,
14-1.>;
chap.
note;
^S'^io;:'
and private
infor-
3
mation.
10.
Oak, 405-6.
11.
A
translation
The
the secretariat meeting tsvn's transcript of
a\ ailable in
Labedz,
482.
13. Ibid., 206.
21. Oak,'\6l. 22. Ibid., 181.
is
44-62. 12. Otf/^,
20. Carlisle, 72.
it,
following account of
is based on Solzheniwhich appears in the
appendix to Oak, 463-80. 183-85.
Resheto\ska\a,
14. Ibid.,
206-9,483.
15. Ibid.,
483-84.
Time, 11 Sept. 1968.
16.
17. Private
information.
Oak, 204.
18.
19. x\
copy of this
letter
was show n
to the
author in 1968.
24. Ibid., 186. 25.
.\Iede\edev
n.
6. Ibid.
ters.
23. Ibid.,
Zhores
don), 29 .Mar. 1970.
unpublished chapters.
chad, 50;
to
unknou
Karei van het Reve in Observer (Lon-
3.
19.
7, 196.
unpublished
chap-
20. Oak,
213-16.
21. Ibid., 214, 218.
ters.
26. Oak, 186,
27.
475-76.
22. Ibid., 219.
Labedz, 152-53.
28. Litvinov, Demonstration, 125, 127.
Chapter 35 29. Ibid., 137-38. 30.
Reshetovskaya,
unpublished
chap-
ters.
31. Ibid. 32.
Labedz, 151.
33. Oak, 186.
34. ters;
Reshetovskava,
unpublished
chap-
1.
Labedz, 189-92.
2.
Ibid., 192-96.
3.
Ibid., 199.
4.
.\ledvedev. Ten Years, 94.
5.
Quoted
6.
Oak, 227.
and Solzhenitsvn interview
7. Ibid.,
35. Ibid.
8.
36.
Conversation with X'ictor Nekrasov.
37.
Reshetovskaya,
unpublished
chap-
in Slovo,
443-44.
239.
Chronicle of Current Events, no.
3
(30
.\ug. 1968). 9.
The
full
storv
is
given in Natalia Gor-
banevskava. Red Square at Soon, trans. .\Iex-
ters.
38. Ibid. 39.
This account of Solzhenitsvn's move-
ments and decisions during this crucial episode is based on Reshetovska\a's description in her
unpublished chapters.
40. Oak, 200-201.
ander Lieven (New York and London, 1972). 10.
Oak, 220.
11. Ibid., 222. 12. Ibid., 370. 13.
Unpublished
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskava, undated [Feb. 1983].
.
[ I
O
Notes
o]
I
Medvedev, Ten
14.
15. International
Alexander Solzhenitsvn
Years, 97.
Herald Tribune, 17 Mar.
supervision
1969; reprinted in Labedz, 181. 16.
Oak, 240.
17.
The
Works vet
appears in the Collected
text
519-89. There
19.
Oak, 223.
18-19.
3
and 9
(1968).
29. Ibid., 406.
Andrei .\malrik, ".\n Open Letter
30.
20. Carlisle, 126.
Medvedev, Ten
Kuznetsov,"
Years, 98.
in
Andrei Amalrik, Will
Union Survive until 1984? rev. and
22. Oak, 224-25.
Veronica Stein.
23. Conversation with
Medvedev, Ten
US,
the Rubble, \, 12,
28. Oak, 294.
'
25. Oak,
the
under the
26. Oak, 111.
27. Molodaya Gvardia, nos.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
24.
al.
Scammell (Boston,
of .Michael
From under
25.
as
is
translation.
18.
21.
From under
1975), vi.
(Paris), vol. 8, pp.
no English
et al..
Rubble, trans. A. Al. Brock et
trans. Peter
enl.
ed.,
Reddav\av, ed. Hilarv Sternberg
(London, 1980), 64-74.
112-16.
Years,
to
the Soviet
31. Oak, 294.
484.
293-94.
26. Ibid., 272.
32. Ibid., 273,
27. Vozrozhdenie (Rebirth), no. 205 (Jan.
33.
-Medvedev, Ten Years, 110.
34.
Quoted
1969).
from
Solzhenitsyn's
A
script of the meeting.
tran-
translation appears in
the appendix to Oak, 484-93, from which the
Chapter 36
follow ing account
is
taken.
Medvedev, Ten
107.
1.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
35.
2.
Reshetovskava,
36. Chronicle of Current Events, no. 12 (28
3.
Licko interview,
p. 251.
BBC
Television, 14
Feb. 1970). 37. Oak,
Mar. 1969.
493-94.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
4. 5.
Private information.
6.
Conversation
7.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
8.
Private information.
9.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
v\
ith
Chapter 37
Dimitri Panin.
Unpublished
1
letter to the
2.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
3.
Unpublished
Conversation w
11.
Reshetovskava,
4.
Oak, 269.
12.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
5.
Quoted
13.
Conversation with Natalia Svetlova.
6.
Oak, 494.
14.
Abraham Brumberg,
7.
Medvedev, Ten
8.
Oak, 267.
ith
Veronica Stein.
unpublished
chap-
ed.. In Quest of
(London, 1970), 137-38.
17.
in
Years,
Conversations with Lev Kopelev and
Current Events, no.
10.
12.
Medvedev, Ten
13.
Labedz, 11\-U.
(formerly Solzhenitsyn's secretary), 25 Oct.
14.
.Medvedev, Ten
1978.
15.
Labedz, 225.
Grigorenko,
toFko krys
.
.
.
(In the
V podpoVye mozhno
16. Ibid.,
Underground You
17.
Meet Only Rats .) (New York, 1981). 21. Medvedev, Ten Years, 100-101. .
22. Ibid.,
99-100.
introd.
Quoted bv Max to
the
I
lay ward
in
Years,
}'ears,
his
English-language edition of
109-10.
109.
225-26.
Quoted
in
.Medvedev, Ten
ll.
.
23. Ibid., 102. 24.
(31
Oak, 111.
author from Irina Alberti
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
20. Petro
11
11. Ibid.
19. Letter to the
vstretit'
107-8.
Dec. 1969).
information.
Veronica Stein. 18.
author from
Labedz, 217-18.
9. Chronicle of
Solzhenitsvn interview.
16. Private
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 31 Oct. 1982.
ters.
15.
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 31 Oct. 1982.
10.
Justice
}'ears,
124-25.
18.
Ibid.,
19.
Oak, 175.
20. Ibid.,
275-77.
21. Ibid.,
278-89.
22. Ibid., 121-22, 282.
Years,
Mi-
Notes 23. Chronicle of Current Events, no. \S
Aug.
20. Ibid.,
(.^I
22. Conversation with X'eronica Stein.
24. Ibid.
Medvedev, Ten Years, 130. 27. The whole affair was later described in great detail b\- the Medvedev brothers. See Rov Medvedev and Zhores .Medvedev, A Question of Madness, trans. Ellen de Kadt (Lon26.
25. Ibid.;
26. Ibid.
494-95. Question of
29.
Conversation w
30.
Unpublished
n.
Ten Years, 128.
York Times Magazine,
12
.\pr.
Unpublished
33. \\
ith
Per Hegge, June
the author from
Jan. 1983.
1970.
1970.
Conversation
1
Conversation with Veronica Stein. Daily Telegraph (London), 12 Oct.
31.
32. .\led\edev.
ith \'eronica Stein.
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
31. Oak, 325.
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
1
author from
Jan. 1983; and con-
versations with \eronica Stein and Lev Kope-
1976.
155-56.
35. Carlisle,
lev.
36. Oak, 324.
37. Times
Unpublished
34.
the authf)r from
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
36. Ibid.;
Chapter 38
and unpublished
letter to the
author from Natalia Reshetovskaya,
1.
.\malrik, 91-92.
2.
Andrei Sakharo\-,
1
Jan.
1983. Sakharoi- Speaks
(New
York, 1974), 116-34. 3.
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya, Jan. 1983.
(London). 14 .\pr. 1970.
35.
June
Veronica Stein.
28. Solzhenitsyn interview.
Madness, 30,43-49, 155-57.
34.
and conversation with \ eron-
ica Stein.
27. Conversation with
Medvedev and Medvedev,
.Vfci'
the author from
Jan. 1983.
1
24. Ibid.
28. Oak, 298.
33.
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
don, 1971).
30.
Unpublished
23.
25. Ibid.
29. Ibid.,
495-96.
21. Ibid., 303.
1970).
37. Oak, 293. 38. Ibid.,
Chronicle of Current Events, no.
14 (30
295-96.
39. Ibid., 304.
w ith Per Hegge. and Labedz, 301. 42. Conversation with Per Hegge.
40. Conversation
1970). 4.
Oak, 298-99.
41. Ibid.;
5.
\evc York Times Magazine
6.
Oak, 290-92.
43. Oak, 306.
7.
Labedz, 141.
44. Ibid., 496.
8.
Oak, 285.
45. Ibid., 497.
,
12 .\pr. 1970.
Medvedev. Ten Years, 131. 10. Per Egil Hegge, Mellommann i Moskva
9.
(Middleman
in
Moscow)
(Oslo,
1971).
.\n
extract appears in Labedz, 298-99. 11.
Oak, 300.
12.
Labedz, 299.
Chapter 39 1.
New
2.
Conversation with \ictor Sparre, 6
York Times,
1
1
Dec. 1970.
June 1979. Observer (London), 13 Dec. 1970.
13. Ibid., 240.
3.
14. Ibid., 241.
4.
Times (London), 13 Nov. 1970.
15. Ibid., 242.
5.
Neiv York Times, 10 Dec. 1970.
136-38; L/Vera-
6.
Conversation with Zhores .Medvedev.
1970; and
7.
Conversation with Natalia Svetlova.
16.
.Medvedev, Ten
tumaya Gazeta,
14,
21,
Years,
28 Oct.
Medvedev sums up the arguments of the Soviet press very w ell but slightly confuses the dates on w hich the var-
8.
Oak, 305; and .Medvedev. Ten Years, 138.
9.
Oak, 285.
ious articles appeared.
11. Ibid., 311.
Pravda, 21 Oct. 1970.
17.
.Medvedev, Ten Years, 135.
18.
Labdedz, 244.
19.
Oak, 307.
10. Ibid., 317.
12. International
1971. 13.
Oak, 338.
Herald Tribune, 27 .Mar.
Notes
[lOI2] Unpublished
14.
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
author from
4. Ibid.
Jan. 1983.
1
Ibid.
5.
Nov.
1971.
15. Ibid.
6. Stern, 21
16. Ibid.
7.
Literaturnaya Gazeta, 12 Jan. 1972.
8.
Conversation with Dieter Steiner, 18
Oak, 310-11.
17.
May
18. Ibid., 321. 19. Ibid.,
313-14.
20. Ibid.,
320,
1977; and Steiner letter to Die Zeit,
Sept.
1
1972.
and note;
Carlisle,
159-
Medvedev, Ten
9.
Years, 173.
10.
Conversation with Solzhenitsyn.
Alberti, 25 Oct. 1978.
11.
Oak, 508.
21.
New
12.
Zhores Medvedev
22.
"Panorama" interview
23.
Conversation with Maria Rozanova.
60, 164-67;
and
letter to the
author from Irina
York Times, 14 Apr. 1971. transcript.
25. Newsweek, 19 July 197 6;
and Die
Zeit,
and
29 Oct. 1971.
'f/we.f
Conversation with Per Hegge; and
27.
Conversation with Michael Gienny.
(New
28.
Neue
Times,
Zilrcher Zeitung, 22 Sept. 1971.
29. August, afterword to the
in
The
An
Russian edi-
3
15.
18.
3.
Conversation with Veronica Stein.
Gorlov,
Apr. 1972; and Washington
Gorlov's adventures
152;
The is
New
Post, 3
York
Apr.
Smith, 421. excerpts from the interview are
New
York Times,
Apr. 1972.
3
Smith, 424.
19. Kaiser, 435.
Sluchai na dache
20. Oak, 513. 21. Ibid., 332.
(Paris, 1977), 9. 12.
(Sew
16. Kaiser, 432.
Chapter 40
(Dacha Incident)
based on Oak,
York, 1976 and 1977), 428-33;
quoted from the
and A. M. Gorlov,
is
1972.
English translation can
Labedz, 260-61.
2. Ibid.;
also
418-24; Robert Kaiser, Russia
1976),
17. All
1.
following account
331, 503-14; Hedrick Smith, The Russians
York,
(London), 13 Oct. 1971.
be found
is
9-10.
Feifer, 14.
tion (Paris, 1971).
It
York
quoted, in English, in the introduction to Burg
24. Oak, 315.
26.
New
in the
Review of Books, 19 July 1973. 1971. 13. Die Zeit, 24 Dec.
following story of
22.
based on his book.
Medvedev, Ten Years, Nov. 1971.
179.
23. Stern, 21
4.
Oak, 497-98.
24. Literaturnaya Gazeta, 12 Jan. 1972.
5.
Gorlov, 24-25.
25. Ibid., 23 Feb. 1972.
6.
Ibid., 43.
26. Oak, 329.
7.
Oak, 339.
8.
Labedz, 300-302; Medvedev, Ten
27. Ibid., 327. 28. Ibid.,
Years,
and conversation with Per Hegge. 9.
New
10.
York Times, 17 Sept. 1971.
"To
(London), 20 Oct. 1971.
mentaiy Materials (Belmont, Mass., 1973), 47278.
13.
and Oak, 328. Oak, 500-502.
14.
.VIedvedev, Ten Years, 161-63.
no. 103 (1972).
15. Ibid.,
Pimen of Russia," trans. Dunlop et al., eds.,
Alexis Klimoff, in John
Ibid.;
12.
329-30.
Patriarch
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Docu-
Oak, 500.
11. r/wfj-
29.
30. Vestnik
163-66.
RSKhD (YMCA
Herald)
(Paris),
31. Ibid.
16.
Lakshin, 84-85.
32. Ibid., no.
17.
Oak, 499.
33. "Letter to a Friend," in
18.
Medvedev, Ten
Years, 169.
skoye Slovo
(New
98(1970).
Russian Word)
Novoye Rus-
(New
York),
9 Aug. 1972. 34. Vestnik
Chapter 41 1.
Unpublished
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskava,
I
author from
Jan. 1983.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Solzhenitsvn inter\iew.
RSKhD,
no. 103(1972), 150.
35.
Novoye Russkoye Slovo, 9 Aug. 1972.
36.
Oak,H9,
356, 367, 379.
.
.
Notes
lonl
I
33. Ibid.
Chapter 42
34. Ibid.
1.
Oak, 330, 334.
2.
"Nohel Lecture,"
Alexis
trans.
Kli-
Chapter 43
nioff, in Aleksandr Solzhetiilsyii: (j-itkal Essays,
483-97.
4. Ibid., 515. 5.
Ibid., 333.
6.
TrW
2. Ibid.,
(Labour), 7 Apr. 1972; and
I.ite-
7.
Medvedev, Ten
Literaturnaya Gazeta, 12 Apr. 1972.
Years,
5.
"Panorama" interview
Medvedev, Ten
Apr. 1972.
10.
Medvedev, Ten
11.
Veche,
no.
Years,
in Samizdat Archive,
transcript, p. 12.
Years, 156.
7.
Oak, 111.
8.
Michael Glennv quoted
187-88.
May 1971), reprono. AS 1020 (12 Jan.
(19
2
Years, 157.
6.
9.
Bernard Williams
13.
1971), in Samizdat
(Jan.
1
AS1013 (11 Sept. 1972). Quoted in .Mikhail Heifetz, Vremia
10.
(A Time and
a Place),
i
unpublished chap-
14. Ibid.
Veche, no.
15.
dat Archive, no.
4 (31 Jan. 1972), in Samiz-
ASl
140 (28 .Mar. 1973).
ries,
World (yiew York), 26 Sept. 1972.
12.
Saturday Reviev:, 16 Sept. 1972.
13.
Conversation
May 1972), in SamizASI230(18 May 1973).
18. Veche, no. 5 (25
19.
14.
Oak, 371-73.
15.
See Edward Kuznetsov, Prison Dia-
Howard
trans.
Spier (London and
a detailed
ingrad "hijacking" and
17. Heifetz.
Smith and Kaiser did not reproduce in their newspaper articles or
comment
own
X'ladimir Maxi-
v\ith
16 Dec. 1980.
York, 1975), for
16. Ibid.
dat Archive, no.
Nev: York Times, 6 Sept. 1972.
11.
mov,
ters.
16.
its
consequences.
Joshua Rubenstein,
Soviet Dissidents
(Boston, 1980), 174. 17.
New
York Times, 9 Feb.
18.
Rubenstein, 187-88.
19.
The Press on
in the
appendix to Oak, 512. Conversation
Medvedev
\\
Veronica Stein; and
ith
(Paris), 3
in Nev: York Revieiv of Books, 17
20. Chronicle of Current Events, no. 29 (31
May
21. Oak, 373.
22. Ibid., 373-75.
MysF
Aug. 1972.
was published
in
Thought)
23. Ibid., 335.
abridged translation
24. Ibid., 336,
(Russian
An
26. Kaiser, 426.
23. Xeii- York Times,
Apr. 1972.
3
27. Oak, 515.
24. Ibid., 11
Dec. 1972.
25. Ibid., 21
Dec. 1972.
26. Ibid., 18
Dec. 1972.
lished. It
27. Ibid., 21
Dec. 1972.
mov
28. Kaiser, 437. 29.
32.
32.
Mar. 1973.
Unpublished
letter to the
Natalia Reshetovskaya,
1
text of the letter
was shown
was never pubby Maxi-
to the author
Dec. 1980.
31. Ibid., 521.
9 Mar. 1973.
31. Ibid., 28
in
The
30. Oak, 343.
8Jan. 1973.
29. Ibid., 26 Feb. 1973. 30. Ibid.,
339-40.
25. Ibid., 340-41.
the Sev: York Times Book
Reviev:, 17 Sept. 1972.
28. Ibid.,
(.Moscow,
July 1973).
and 19 July 1973. 22. Russkaya
Solzhenitsyn
1972).
20. Conversation with Dimitri Panin. 1
1972; and
.Medvedev, Ten Years, 170.
text of
books, but Solzhenitsyn sent his
New
account of the Len-
the interview to the West and later reprinted
2
Guardian (Lon-
in
don), 21 Sept. 1972.
12. Veche, no.
it
in the Sev: York
Times Book Reviev:, 24 Sept. 1972.
Archive, no.
this
(Paris,
43-48.
.Medvedev, Ten
3.
182-89.
1972).
mesto
na rodine
4. Ibid.
8.
9. Ibid., 19
chit ay ut
Homeland)
in the
1973), 8.
raturnaya Rossia, 7 Apr. 1972.
duced
Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo
1
(Reading August 191-i
Oak, 332.
3.
Con\ersation
with
Andrei
Sinvav-
sky.
author from
Dec. 1982.
33. Interview
with
AP
and Le Monde, 23
.\ug. 1973. Reprinted in Oak, 521.
.
Notes
[IOI4] 34. Ibid., 342, 406. 35. SikhsLTOv, Sakharo-i Speaks,
166-78.
386-87.
26. Ibid.,
530-31.
27. Times (London), 29
36. Ibid., 191.
204-5.
37. Ibid.,
25. Ibid.,
Quoted
28.
38. Oak. 515.
29. r/we.f (London),
39. Ibid., 345.
30.
40. Ibid., 517-27.
31. Ibid..
41. Ibid., 529.
32. Ibid., 170.
42. Rubenstein, 142-45.
33.
Chukovskava,
and 4 Jan. 1974.
3
Protsess, 140.
141-43.
York Times,
.\>'^-
Dec. 1973.
in Oak, 389.
and 14 Jan. 1974.
11
43. Oak, 522.
Chapter 45
44. Xezi- York Times, 31 .\ug. 1973. 45. Smith, 3^2.
Literatumaya Gazeta, 16 Jan. 1974.
1.
46. Ibid., 309-10. 2.
Washington Post, 16 Jan. 1974.
3.
Oak, 390-91.
47. Ibid., 451. 48. Ibid., 452.
Times (London); and Sen- York Times,
5.
and Index on
50. Oak, 354;
Censorship,
1,
25 Jan. 1974.
no. 4 (Winter 1973).
Times (London), 25 Jan. and 10 Feb.
6.
51. Oak, 524.
1974; and Oa/t, 535.
52. Ibid., 342. 7.
Private information.
8.
Unpublished
53. Christian Science Monitor, 13 Sept. 1973.
7/w« (London),
54.
532-34.
4. Ibid.,
49. Ibid., 451.
22 Sept. 1973.
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16 .May 1982.
55. First Circle, chap. 57. 9.
Seii York Times, 4 Feb. 1974.
10. Christian Scietice
Chapter 44
1
Unpublished
1
Monitor. 31 Jan. 1974.
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16 .May 1982. 1.
Oak, 312-14.
2.
Carlisle, 173.
3.
Ibid.,
Oak, 320n.
5.
CarHsle, 179.
6.
Oak, 530.
7. Ibid..
348;
Skvoz' chad,
Skz-ozchad, 59-60.
9.
59-60; and
Oak, 349.
Feb. 1974.
unpublished
chap-
537-38.
Times {London), 13 Feb. 1974.
17.
unaltered text
is
Hilary
A copy of the orig-
in the author's posses-
sion.
August, chap. 25.
19.
Oak, 409. This account of Solzheni-
tsvn's arrest follows the
360-61.
14. Ibid.,
363-66.
self ibid.,
one he has given him-
409-43.
20. Pravda, 14 Feb. 1974.
Reshetovskaya,
and unpublished
unpublished
chap-
letter to the author, 16
.May 1982.
21. Oak, 538. 22. Seii- York Times, 14 Feb. 1974.
23. Washington Post, 14 Feb. 1974.
Unpublished
letter to the
author from
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 16 .May 1982. 17.
Oak, 396.
inal,
13. Ibid.,
f/?>f«w
15.
5
18. Letter to the So-iiet Leaders, trans.
12. Oa):, 360.
16.
Reshetovskava,
Sternberg (London, 1975).
10. Ibid.
ters,
14.
16. Ibid.,
8.
15.
Le Figaro,
ters.
conversation with Efim Etkind.
1.
Oak, 536.
13.
176-78.
4.
1
12.
Lvdia Chukovskava.
Protsess
isklyii-
(Process of Exclusion) (Paris, 1979), 133.
18. Ibid., 134. 19. Private
24. Ibid.;
and
\ezi-
25.
.\>-^-
26.
Der
York Times, 14 Feb. 1974.
Spiegel, 12
Feb. 1974; and conver-
sation with Heinrich Boll
information.
York Times, 14 Feb.
1974.
11
.
La Fiera
3
Letteraria,
Jan. 1976.
24 Feb. 1974.
20. Oak, 403. 21. Ibid.. 530.
Chapter 46
22. Ibid., 375-77. 23.
Chukovskava,
24. Oak,
383-84.
Protsess, 135.
1.
\eii'
Feb. 1974.
York Times And Washington Post, 14
.
.
Notes
[1015]
2.
Conversation with Heinrich
3.
(conversation with Per Flcgge.
4.
New
4.
Conversation with Janis Sapicts, 26
5.
Solzhenitsyn's preface was restored
Biill.
Nov. 1982.
York Times, 4 Mar. 1974.
5.
Kaiser, 434.
6.
Washington Post,
6.
Oak, 45
7.
Available
7.
Conversation with
8.
Press conference in Stockholm, 12 Dec.
1
[)r
\
kch.
3
June 7Vwe.f
9.
New
8.
Apr. 1974. P.nglish-language
York Times, 15 Mar. 1974.
New
10.
1975).
York Times, 15 Mar. 1974.
195-97.
11. Carlisle,
Solzhenitsvn interview with Walter
12.
Sun, 19 Feb. 1974; and Rus-
skayaMysV, 28 Feb. 1974.
Monitor, 8 Mar. 1974.
9. (Christian Science
(London), 17 Feb. 1974.
10. Baltimore
2
the
in
anthology Kontinent (Garden (jty, N.Y., 1976).
Olgin (Radio Liberty Research Supple-
ment,
"CBS News
Cronkite,
Special Report: Sol-
zhenitsvn," 24 June 1974.
11.
Reuter dispatch, 19 Feb. 1974.
13.
Times (London), 6 Apr. 1974.
12.
Conversation with Nikita Struve, 9
14.
Baltimore Sun, 27 Apr. 1974.
Dec. 1980.
15.
Washington Post, 28 Apr. 1974.
13.
Conversation with \ ictor Sparre.
16.
Oonkite
14.
Victor Sparre, The Flame
17.
See Stephen
ness, trans.
Alwvn and Dermot
in the
Dark-
.VlcKav (Lon-
Times Book Review
don, 1979), 36-37. 15.
in
later editions of the Letter.
1974, trans. Christopher Barnes and Constantin
Letter to the Soviet Leaders.
3
,
16
F.
Cohen
in
New
York
June 1974.
Fdward Oankshaw
18.
Conversations with Per Hegge and
interview.
in Observer
(Yon-
don), 30 June 1974.
with Victor Sparre.
19.
New
Sparre, 42.
20.
17.
Press conference in Stockholm.
2
Sunday Times (hondon), 17 Feb. 1974. Conversation with Nikita Struve.
18.
Conversation with Victor Sparre.
22. Sparre,
19.
Conversation
16.
mer,
2
May
20.
Sigmund Wid-
with
York Times, 28 Mar. 1974.
21. Ibid., 30
24.
La Fiera
23. Washington Post
author's
and Baltimore Sun,
15
MysF
25. Golos rodiny (Voice of the
are based on the
the Stapferstrasse, in Sept.
1974.
Conversation with Natalia Svetlova.
13 (Feb.
1974).
Motherland)
An
abridged
Chapter 48
version appeared in the Literaturnaya (iazeta,
1.
20 Feb. 1974.
2.
Unpublished
3.
Oonkite
26. Krokodil (Crr)Codiie)
(Moscow ),
7 .Mar.
1974. 27. Baltimore Sun, 15 Feb. 1974. 28.
Chukovskaya,
29.
New
ProZ-Vdw,
Not bv
Conversation with Sigmund Widmer.
Lies) (Paris, 1974),
160-
65.
(Youth) (.Moscow),
18
Levy, 12-13.
5.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Otryvki
(F.xtracts
7Mt' nepo
Izhi, 103.
iz
literatumoi zhizni'
iz "
from the Second Volume of ".Mem-
oirs of Literary Life"), in Vestnik RKhl), no.
Feb.
1974.
32. Ibid.,
by Alan Levy.
4.
137 (1982), 120-30. 30. Yunost
article
interview.
vtorogo toma 'Ocherkov
170.
York Times, 18 Feb. 1974; and Zhit'
Izhi (Live
31.
24 Feb. 1974.
18 Apr. 1974.
,
York Times, 16 ^'eb. 1974.
(Moscow), no.
nepo
Feb. 1974.
Letteraria,
first visit to
27.
New
41-42.
Spiegel, 12
These impressions
26.
Mar. 1974.
Feb. 1974. 24.
Der
25. Russkaya
Mar. 1974.
22. Times (hondon), 30
.
23.
1980.
^ew
1
York Review of Books, 21 .Mar. 1974.
I.e., a
continuation oi Oak.
Sigmund U'idmer.
6.
Conversation
7.
Conversation with Petr Pasek, 28 ,\pr.
v\
ith
1980.
194-98.
8.
New
9.
Conversation with Oskar Krause, 26
York Times, 17 Feb. 1974.
Apr. 1980. 10. Ibid.
Chapter 47 11. 1.
7Mt" ne poVzhi, 174 and 192.
on
2.
Sparre, 49.
de plume.
a
A. Lidin, Trpaslik na
Swing) (Cologne,
hotipacce
1973). Lidin
(Dwarf a nom
was
..
..
Notes
[ioi6] 12.
Conversation with Oskar Krause.
13.
Conversation with Petr Pasek.
14.
Conversations with Oskar Krause and
with Petr Pasek. 15.
Cronkite interviev\
16.
Time, 11
17.
New
May
Alexander
5.
34
(.31
,\.
Solzhenitsvn,
"Iz
32-
1974),
I.
Sol-
Conference with Madrid
Press
Correspondents) (20 Mar. 1976),
19. Heifetz.
press-
Solzhenitsvna korrespon-
I.
dentam .Madridskikh gazet" (From A. zhenitsvn's
(Mar. 1975).
20. The Last Circle (.Moscow,
in Kontinent,
no. 11 (1976). 6.
Conversation
v\ith Natalia Svetlova.
21. Reshetovskava, 84.
7.
Unpublished
article
22. Ibid.
8.
Le Monde, 12 Apr. 1975.
34.
9. Chronicle of
23. Solzhenitsvn interview.
Mar. 1975),
24. Cronkite interview 25.
Vladimir .Maxi-
Conversation with
mo v. 27. Vest II ik
RKhD,
28.
Conversation
29.
Conversation
1
Current Events, no. 35 (35
Med-
Zhores
Mysl\ 26 Sept. 1974.
Conversation with Natalia Svetlova.
32.
Roy Medvedev, quoted
in Washington
Abram
Tertz, "Literaturny protsess
"The
1
Trans-
(1974).
Literar\' Process in Russia," in
the English-language anthology Kontinent. 34.
incomplete in
RKhD, no. 114 (1974). An summary of these letters appeared
Le Monde, 12 Apr. 1975.
Dve press-konferentsii
(Two
:
k sbornikii ''Iz-pod
Press (Conferences:
ogv From under
The
.\nthol-
36. Gulag, vol.
1,
pt.
Sapiets,
1,
chap.
"Conversation
with
November 1974," BBC CARIS Report, no. 16/74;
External Services,
reprinted in Encounter, .Mar. 1975, pp. 67-72.
"Does Russia Have
39. Igor Shafarevich, in
Washington Post, 7 June 1975.
16. Ibid.
New
17.
York Times, 17 June 1975.
Shragin
18. Boris
of Books, 26
.\FL-CIO
19.
in .Alexander
(New AFL-CIO
New
tsvn's
From under
the Rubble, 294. Sol-
Reprinted in
transcript
New
York Times,
24.
NBC
1
transcript of
"Meet the Press"
Stockholm Press Conference.
York Times,
16july 1975,
sess.,
New
Aug. 1975.
July 1975. transcript.
Chapter 49 3
Times,
p.
1
1st
July 1975.
Christian Science Monitor
1
Cong.,
22959.
York Times, 17 July 1975.
30. Ibid., 22
.\lexander Solzhenitsvn, "Interviu na
3
28. Congressional Record, 94th
29.
1.
"Meet the Press,"
vol. 19, no. 28.
27.
42.
July 1975.
1
lOJuly 1975.
New
Dec. 1974.
1975.
Conversation with Raissa Scriabine.
1
22.
26. 1
Solzheni-
of
York speech, 9 July Warning to the West.
25. Saturday Review, 23
1
1975.
York, 1976).
ing directly.
41. Solzhenitsvn interview.
Solzheni-
30 June
Solzhenitsyn, Warn-
zhenitsvn was paraphrasing rather than quot-
40. Washington Post,
York Review
of
transcript
Washington speech,
tsvn's
2
New
in the
June 1975.
23. Ibid.,
38. Ibid.
5
8 Feb. 1980.
20.
2.
Solzhenitsyn on 17
Future?"
Conversation with Raissa Scriabine,
ing to the West
35. Ibid.
37. Janis
Montreal Gazette,
14.
Reprinted
the Rubble) (Paris, 1975).
.May 1975.
13.
15.
24 Sept. 1974.
v Rossii," in Kontinent, no.
glyb"
in
Vestnik
11.
v\ith Dimitri Panin.
31.
lated as
appeared
12. Encounter, Sept. 1975.
30. Russkaya
33.
letter
York Times, 6 .Mar. 1975.
(1974).
vedev.
Post,
An New
Novoye Russkoye Slovo, 6 Mar. 1975.
10.
nos. 112-3(1974).
with
by Alan Levy.
p. 150.
abridged version of the 26. Kontinent (Pins), no.
a
Ibid.
Conversation with Dr Heeb, 29 Apr.
konferentsii
18. Chronicle of Current Events, nos. 3.5
3.
4.
1980.
1974.
York Times, 17 Mar. 1974.
Dec. 1974) and
Conversation with Paul Fritz, 30 Apr.
2.
1980.
and New York
.\ug. 1975.
literaturniye temy s N. A. Struve" (Interviewon Literary Topics with N. A. Struve) (Mar.
32. Vestnik
1976), in VeslnikRKhD, no. 120(1977).
34.
RKhD,
no. 116(1975).
33. Ibid., no. 117(1976).
Oak, 182.
,
.
!
..
1
Notes 36. \ alentina
Tvardovskava, "Open Let-
ter to Solzhenitsvn," printed in cast
/-'oreiirn
liroad-
Borisu Suvarinu"
Rov Medvedev,
(Not-
,
and^'SovyMir"
Tvardovsky,
rechi" (Spanish Speeches), Kontinent, no.
plement), 19-28.
165-83.
29. Guardian, 21 .Mar. 1976.
40. Lakshin, 75.
(Confederation of Free
30. International
41. Ibid., 58.
Trade Unions, press
release, 25 .Mar. 1976.
31. Kontinent, no. 11 (1976),
Chapter 50
32. Ibid., no. 8 (1976),
Leonard Schapiro Nov. 1975.
1
1
Sup-
(1977), Spetsial'noye prilozheniye (Speciil
15, 20, 27, 58, 66.
39. Zilberberg,
"Ispanskoye
Kontinent. no.
),
28. .\lexander Solzhenitsyn, "Ispanskiye
Lakshin quotations are from Lak-
shin, Solzhenitsyn
10-11,
interv'iu" (Spanish Interview
8(1976), 429-40.
tingham, 1976), 110-20. 38. All
Letter to Boris Souva-
27. .Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
Political Essays
"Pis'mo
Solzhenitsyn, (.\
i(»i 7]
RKhl), no. 131 (1980).
rine), Vestntk
Information Service, 16 July 1975. 37.
.Mexander
26.
Solzhenitsvn interview.
35.
I
in
New
19-28.
33. Ibid., no. 11 (1976),
York Review
19-28.
429-40.
of Books, 13
2. Patricia
Blake in Time, 26 Oct. 1975. chap.
3.
Gulag, vol.
4.
Schapiro.
5.
Washington Post, 6 Dec. 1975; and
2, pt. 4,
Chapter
Sew
York Times, 10 Dec. 1975. 6.
Conversation
and
7. Ibid.;
\\
5
1.
1.
Pravda, 24 and 30 .Mar. 1976.
2.
Literaturnaya Gazeta, 17 .Mar. 1976.
3.
International Herald Tribune,
Observer, 29 Feb. 1976.
photocopv of
4. .\
8.
Conversation with Janis Sapiets.
published in facsimile
9.
"Panorama" interview transcript. Times and Guardian, 2 Mar. 1976;
burg), 15 Feb. 1978.
10.
Observer, 29 Feb. 1976; Sunday Telegraph, 7
Mar.
this letter
May
12.
Untitled speech,
Mar. 1976; reprinted 13. Times, 14.
in
BBC
Radio
Warning
3,
24
to the West.
29 Mar. 1976.
Mar. 1976, transcript; and
Z.f
ORTF,
J/oWf,
9
11 .Mar.
had
and
Hoover
2
(Apr. 1977).
w hich book Solzhenitsyn was probably Orlov's essay
not clear
7.
It is
in
mind. li
It
netotalitarny sotsializm? (Is a
15.
VestnikRKhD, no. 120(1977).
totalitarian Socialism Possible?)
16.
LeSoir, 12 .Mar. 1976.
1976).
17. Baltimore
Sun, 12 Mar. 1976.
18.
VestnikRKhD, no. 120(1977).
19.
"The Book Programme," BBC
Solzhenitsyn Speaks at the Hoover Institu-
TX
9.
Washington Post, 18 Sept. 1976.
Rutland Herald,
transcript.
1 1
Reported
H. T. Willets
(London, 1976), 178-85. tran-
VestnikRKhD, no. 120(1977).
24. Est et Ouest, no. 570 (Apr. 1976). .\n
25.
Alexander g.
York Times,
in
3
Feb.
Solzhenitsvn,
Mr
1
1
Feb. 1977.
.Mar. 1977.
er Solsjenitsyn ?
Midstream (New York), no. 6 (June-
July 1977). 17.
Roman Rutman,
"Solzhenitsyn and
the Jewish Question," in Soviet Jewish Affairs
1977).
Suvarina" (On
Monitor,
Washington Post,
Hvem
5
16.
abridged version was published in English
mentakh
13. Christian Science
1
23. Ibid.
(Summer
Mar. 1977.
1
New
1977.
14.
Dissent, no. 108
in the
12. Ibid.
"Book Programme" interxieu
script.
22.
NonYork,
8.
10.
21.
(New
tion.
"Interview with Solzhenitsvn," 27 Apr. 1976,
20. Lenin in Zurich, trans.
Institu-
1
Review 36, no.
Vozmozhen
1976.
and
1976;
June 1976) (brochure published bv the Hoover Institution, Stanford, 1976). The first speech was published in Rus-
sian
"Les Dossiers de I'Ecran,"
May
tion (24
Society, 11 .Vlar. 1976.
later
(Ham-
1976.
6. Solzhenitsyn Speaks at the
New
was
Politik
20 .May
Washington Post,
5.
Neue
in
Novoye Russkoye Slovo, 23
1976. 11.
8-9 Mar.
1975.
ith Janis Sapiets.
"O
trag-
Souvarine's
Fragments), VestnikRKhD, no. 132 (1980).
4, no.
2(1974).
18. Svirski,
19.
New
180-81.
York Times, 23 Jan. 1977.
.
Notes
[ioi8] 20.
Nicholas
Victims
(London, 1977). Published
{New
Secret Betrayal
Last
3.
New
4.
Ibid.,4june 1977.
Yalta
5.
Conversation with Sigmund Widmer.
as The
6.
Times (London), 22 Feb. 1978.
7.
Conversation with Sigmund Widmer.
Secret
1974).
Tolstoy,
21. Nikolai
The
Bethell,
New York,
(Lxjndon and
in
of
America
York, 1978).
22. Times (London), 19
Mar. 1978.
23. Washington Post, 2 Sept. 1976. 24.
New
25.
Alexander Solzhenitsvn,
Apart, trans. Irina Alberti
(New
World
27.
Commonweal,
28.
New
1
10.
Washington Post,
1
1
1 1
and
June 1978;
13
29. Washington Post, 25
12.
1
14.
15.
June 1978.
the
Moura Budberg (London,
Quoted by
.\lain
Tomas
Feb. 1978.
Rezac, Spiral' izmeny Solzheni-
Other
Russkaya Mysl\ 26 Oct. 1978.
16.
Rezac, 3-4.
17.
Bildam Sonntag,
18.
Skvoz' chad.
2
Apr. 1978.
19. Ibid.
1956).
20.
Besangon in Commentaire (Paris), no. 4 (Winter 1978-79); reprinted as "Solzhenitsyn at Harvard," in Survey, no. 106
(The
(Winter 1979), 133-44.
tracts);
N. N. Yakovlev, TsRU
CIA
33. Solzhenitsyn at
Harvard: The Address,
Responses,
and
Six
Reflections
21. Los Angeles
reprinted in
full in Russia, 1,
22.
Unpublished
letter to
Natalia Reshetovskaya, 19
SSSR
no. 2 (1981).
the author from
May
23. Solzhenitsyn interview.
(Washington, D.C., 1980).
24. Ibid. 25. Private information.
Chapter 52 1.
Solzhenitsyn interview.
2.
Conversation with Claude Durand,
Dec. 1980.
protiv
USSR) (xMoscow, 1980). Times, 22 May 1980 (ex-
against the
(1981).
32. Ibid.
Early
1980; and
Nov. 1980.
tsyna (The Spiral of Solzhenitsyn's Betrayal) (Moscow, 1978).
Humanist (Schenectady), Nov. -Dec.
Shore, trans.
Twelve
320n.
York Times, 25 Oct.
13. NeuePolitik, 15
June 1978;
Christian Science
Alexander Herzen, From
New
Publishers Weekly, 21
1978. 3
Oak, 394.
11. Ibid.,
York, 1978).
Monitor, 12 June and 25 July 1978.
30.
Washington Post, 19 Sept. 1978. .^P news agency dispatch.
Sept. 1978.
York Times,
Mar. 1976.
8.
Split
26. National Review, 15 Sept. 1978.
5
9.
York Daily News, 8 Feb. 1977. ^4
York Times,
26. Solzhenitsyn interview. 27. Ibid. 15
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
1982.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY No
attempt has been made here to be comprehensive. Apart from Solzheniworks in Russian, all the books listed are in English. For
tsyn's collected
fuller information, including a listing of articles and of sources in other languages, readers should consult Donald Fiene's Alexander Solzhenitsyn: An International Bibliography of Writings by and about Him (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1973).
An
update of
zhenitsyn in 1976:
this material
A
can be found in Michael Nicholson's "Sol-
Bibliographical Reorientation," in the Russian Literature
Triquarterly, no. 143 (Winter 1976),
bringing out
zhenitsyn Studies, ter,
462-82. Since 1980, Nicholson has been
survey of literature by and about Solzhenitsyn, Solwhich is currently published by the University of Lancas-
a quarterly
England.
Works Sobranie sochinenii (Collected
Works)
most up-to-date and complete
bv the author.
A
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Russian). 11 vols. Paris:
YMCA
works
in print,
(in
collection of Solzhenits\n's
Girou.x, 1972. This
reissued
it
The new
in
is
a translation
in the
York: Farrar, Straus
Russian in two volumes instead of one
(vols. 10
and
1 1
of the Collected Works).
version has not yet appeared in English.
New
York: Farrar, Straus
&
2 vols.
London: Bodley Head,
Giroux, 1969.
The Cancer Ward. Translated bv Rebecca Frank. Candle
New
of the original text of the novel. In 1983 Solzhenitsyn
Cancer Ward. Translated bv Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.
1968-69;
The
further four volumes have been announced for 1985-86.
August 1914. Translated by Michael Glennv. London: Bodley Head;
&
Press, 1978-83.
checked and approved
New
York: Dial Press, 1968.
Wind. Translated bv Keith .\rmes, with .\rthur Hudgins. .Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota; London: Bodlev Head, 1973. Decembrists without December. Translated
by Helen Rapp and Nancy 1 homas. London: Bodley
Head, 1983.
1019
Select Bibliography
[io2o] The First
Translated by
Circle.
Thomas Whitney. New
A
of the original, 87-chapter version of the novel. is
&
York: Harper
Rou', 1968.
Translated by Michael Guvbon. London: Collins/Harvill, 1968. Both translations are
.
translation of the longer, 96-chapter version
said to be in preparation.
The Gulag Archipelago. Vol.
Thomas Whitney. New
Translated by
1.
York: Harper
&
Row;
London: Collins, 1974. Vol.
.
Translated by
2.
Thomas Whitney. New
& Row
York: Harper
London: Collins,
;
1975.
Vol.
-.
Translated by Harry Willetts.
3.
New
York: Harper
&
Row; London:
Collins,
1978.
Lenin in Zurich. Translated by H. T. Willetts. London: Bodlev Head; ik
A
New
York: Farrar, Straus
Giroux, 1976.
Lenten Letter
Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia. Translated bv Keith Armes. Minneapolis: Bur-
to
gess, 1972. Letter to
Soviet
the
The Love-Girl and
Translated by Hilary Sternberg.
Leaders.
New
ship/Fontana;
York: Index on Censorship/Harper
the Innocent.
& Row
London: Index on Censor1975.
,
Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. London: Bodley
Head; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. This book as The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
is
the play referred to throughout this
The Mortal Danger: tloiv Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America. Translated
and Michael Nicholson.
New
York: Harper
& Row
b\'
Alexis Klimoff
1980. Contains Solzhenitsyn's article in
,
the spring 1980 issue oi Foreign Affairs and his reply to critics of that article.
The Oak and
Row, One Day
Translated by Harry Willetts. London: Collins;
the Calf.
New
York: Harper
&
1979. in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich. Translated by
Max Hay ward and Ronald
Hingley. New-
York: Praeger, 1963.
New York: Dutton, 1963. These are two others have been made since. Translated by Robert Conquest. London: Collins/Harvill; New York: Farrar,
Translated by Ralph Parker. London: GoUancz;
.
the
two
and best-known
first
Prussian Nights.
At
translations.
least
Straus Sc'Giroux, 1977. Stories rar,
and Prose Poems. Translated by Michael Glenny. London: Bodley Head; Straus
&
Giroux, 1971. Contains
two prose poems. There
at least
one alternative for each of the other
1983. Better
York: Far-
alternative translations of "Matryona's Place"
and
stories.
1 ranslated by Helen Rapp and Nancy Thomas. London: Bodley Head,
Victory Celebrations.
known under
New
Warning
to the West.
to the
AFL-CIO
World
Split Apart.
A
many
tion of
are
New
Solzhenitsyn's shorter prose works with the excep-
all
in
its
alternative title oi Feast of the Conquerors.
York: Farrar, Straus
Washington and
New
&
Giroux, 1976. Includes Solzhenitsyn's speeches
York
Translated by Irina Alberti.
in 1975.
New
York: Harper
& Row,
1978.
The
text of
Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address.
(With Mikhail Agursky, A.B., Evgeny Barabanov, Vadim Borisov, farevich).
From under
the Rubble.
Translated by A.
M. Brock,
F.
Korsakov, and Igor Sha-
Vlilada Haigh, Marita Sapiets,
Hilary Sternberg, and Harry Willetts, under the direction of Michael Scammell. Boston: Little,
Brown; London:
Collins, 1975.
Biographical Works Bjorkegren, Hans. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Eneberg.
New
A
York: Third Press, 1972.
while Solzhenitsyn was
still
Biography. Translated
A
in the Soviet
from the Swedish by Kaarina
slender and not very informative essay published
Union. Quite good on the
literary politics of the
period.
Burg, David, and George Feifer. Solzhenitsyn. London: Hodder
&
Day, 1972. The
first
&
full-length biography of Solzhenitsyn
Stoughton;
New
and the best so
York: Stein far.
Because
Select Bibliography Solzhenitsvn was
Union when
in the Soviet
still
able shortage of facts but Carlisle, Olga. Solzhenitsyn
accurate as far as
is
and
the Secret (jrcle.
essav about the author's involvement
u
ith
it
[io2i|
was written,
suffers
it
from an understand-
goes.
it
New
York: Holt, Rinehart
&
V\ inston, 1978. .\n
Solzhenitsvn and intended to refute Solzhenitsyn's
charges of incompetence and material greed.
Good on
the conspiratorial side of Solzhenitsyn's
character.
Grazzini, Giovanni. Solzheiiitsyn. Translated from the Italian by Fxic .\losbacher. London: .Michael
A
Joseph, 1973.
biographical sketch.
My Sorroivs.
Kopelev, Lev. Ease 1983.
Vdume
sharashka
Translated by Antonina
W.
New York: Random House,
Bouis.
of Kopelev's memoirs, dealing mainlv with his imprisonment in the .\Iarfino
3
and containing much valuable information about Solzhenitsyn's stay there and
his
friendship with kopelev.
and ".Vovy .!/;>." Translated and edited by .Michael .MIT Press, 1980. .\ translation of Lakshin's critique of Oa^, with some additional information on Tvardovsky and Sovy Mir by Linda .\ld\\ inckle and .Mary Chafhn. .Medvedev, Zhores. Ten Years after Ivan Denisovkh. Translated by Hilary Sternberg. London: Lakshin, Vladimir.
Soizheiiitsyn, Tvardoi'sky,
Glennv. Cambridge,
Macmillan, 1973;
and tribulations
.Mass.:
New
York: Knopf, 1974.
in the Soviet
A
sympathetic account of Solzhenitsyn's
Union from 1963
to 1973
bv an
trials
insider personally acquainted
with most of the protagonists. Panin, Dimitri. TheSotebooksofSologdin. Translated bv John .Moore. London: Hutchinson; New-
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Panin's reminiscences of his
and camps, including the time he spent w Reshetovska\
a,
My Life
Natalia. Sanya:
ivith
ith
memoirs of Solzhenitsyn's
Soviet prisons
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Translated by Elena hanoff.
The
Indianapolis: Bobbs-.Merrill, 1975; London: Hart-Davis, 1977. tiously edited
lite in
Solzhenits\ n in the sharashka and at Ekibastuz.
first \\ ife,
w hich
heavily cut and tenden-
nevertheless contain a lot of inter-
esting detail about Solzhenitsyn's domestic and personal affairs. Solzhenitsyn:
phy.
New
A
Pictorial Record.
York:
from childhood
P'arrar,
to the
London: Bodley Head, 1974.
Straus
&
A
Solzhenitsyn:
Pictorial Autobiogra-
Giroux, 1974. \x\ album of photographs of Solzhenitsyn
time of his second marriage, selected bv the author.
Literary .and Specialist Studies Barker, Francis. Solzhenitsyn:
New
and Form. London: .Macmillan;
Politics
^'ork:
Barnes
& Noble,
1977.
Carter, Stephen. The Politics of Solzhenitsyn.
New
York:
Holmes
&
.Meier;
London: .Macmillan,
1977.
Dunlop, John, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff, eds. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary .Materials. 2d ed. New York: .Macmillan; London: Collier .Macmillan, 19"5. Ericson, Edward E. Solzhenitsyn: The .Moral Vision. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. Feuer, Kathrvn, ed. Solzhenitsyn:
A
Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood
Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1976'
Kodjak, Andrej. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Boston: Twayne, 1978. nitsyn's
main
literary
Krasnov, Vladislav. Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: sity
.\
short critical study of Solzhe-
works.
A
Study
in the
Polyphonic \o-vel. Athens: Lniver-
of Georgia Press, 1980.
Labedz, Leopold, ed. Solzhenitsyn:
A
Documentaiy Record. Enl. ed. Bloomington: Indiana Lni-
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
versitv Press, 1973;
Lukacs, Georg. Solzhenitsyn. Translated from the .Merlin Press, 1970;
Cambridge,
.Mass.:
.MIT
1974.
German by William David
Press, 1971.
Two
critical
Grat. London:
essays on Solzheni-
tsyn's relation to socialist realism.
Moody, Christopher. Noble, 1976. best to date.
A
Solzhenitsyn.
2d ed.
rev. Exiinburgh: Oliver
&
Boyd; New York: Barnes & up to August 1914, the
short critical study of Solzhenitsyn's literary works
,
Select Bibliography
[io22]
Thomas Nelson,
Nielsen, Niels Christian. Soizhenitsyns Religion. Nashville:
Mowbray, 1976. Rothberg, Abraham. 1971.
A
1975; London:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Xovels. Ithaca: Cornell Lniversit\' Press,
superficial examination of Ivan Denisozich, Cancer
Ward, and
First Circle.
Rzhevskv, Leonid. Solzhenitsyn: Creator and Heroic Deed. Translated by Sonja Miller. University: University of Alabama Press, 1978. An interesting study of Solzhenitsyn's literary works by a
Russian
critic living in
the United States.
Berman, Ronald, et al. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Tv:elve Early Reflections. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980.
Responses,
and Six Later
General Background .\llan,
James. So Citation. London: .\ngus
man's incarceration
&
Robertson,
19.>5.
Absorbing account of an English-
Lubvanka during the Second World
in the
on suspicion of being
\\ ar
a
spy.
Amalrik, Andrei. Sotes of a Revolutionary. Translated by don: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982.
Guy
Daniels.
New
York: Knopf; Lon-
Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? Rev. and enl. ed. Translated by Peter Redda-
.
way, edited by Hilary Sternberg. London: Pelican Books, 1980;
New
York: Harper
& Row
1981.
Brumberg, Abraham, ed. In Quest ofJustice. New York: Praeger; London: Pall .Mall, 1970. Bukovskv, \ ladimir. To Build a Castle. Translated b\' .Michael Scammell. London: Deutsch;
New
York: \'iking Press, 1978.
Chamberlin,
W. H.
New
The Russian Revolution. 2 vols.
York: Grossett
Conquest, Robert. Courage of Genius. London: Collins/Harvill, 1961.
A
&
Dunlap, 1965.
history of the "Pasternak
affair."
The Great Terror. London and
.
Dallin, David,
New
York: Macmillan, 1968.
and Boris Nicolae\skv. Forced Labor
in Soviet Russia.
New
Haven: Yale University
Press, 1947.
Etkind, Efim.
New
York:
Press, 1978.
Gorbanevskaya, Natalia. Red Square
New
Translated by Peter France. O.xford and
.\otes of a Son-conspirator.
Oxford University
York: Holt, Rinehart
&
at Soon. Translated
by Alexander Lieven. London: Deutsch;
Winston, 1972.
Grigorenko, Petr. The Grigorenko Papers. Translated by A. Knight, .Marita Sapiets, and Peter
Reddaway. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976. Hayward, .Max, ed. and trans. On Trial. London: Harvill; New York: Harper & Row 1967. A translation of .\lexander Ginzburg's "White Book" on the 1966 trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky. Hayward, Max, and Edward L. Crowley, eds. Soviet Literature in the Sixties. New York: Praeger, ,
1964;
London; .Methuen, 1965. Priscilla. Khrushchev and
Johnson,
Kaiser, Robert. Russia.
New
Kuznetsov, Edward. Prison
New
York: Stein
Lapenna,
&
the Arts.
Cambridge, Mass.: .MIT Press, 1965. & Warburg, 1977.
York: Atheneum, 1976; London: Seeker
Diaries.
Translated by
Howard
Spier.
London: Vallentine,
.Mitchell;
Day, 1975.
Ivo. Soviet Penal Policy.
London: Bodlev Head; Chester Springs,
Pa.:
Dufour, 1968.
Litvinov, Pavel, ed. The Demonstration in Pushkin Square. Translated by .Manva Harari. London: Harvill; Boston: ,
Gambit, 1969.
ed. The Trial of the Four. Translated b\' Janis Sapiets, Hilary Sternberg,
Weissbort. [London]: Longman;
New
and Daniel
York: \ iking Press, 1972. .Mall;
New
.Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. Translated by Colleen Taylor. London: .Macmillan; "
New
.Marchenko, .\natoly. .My Testimony. Translated by .Michael Scammell. London: Pall
York: Dutton, 1969. York: Knopf, 1971.
.Medvedev, Roy, and Zhores Medvedev.
London: .Macmillan;
New
A
Question of .Madness. Translated b\ Ellen de Kadt.
York: Knopf, 1971.
Sklect Hibliographv
[1023]
Medvedev, Zhores. The Medvedev Papers. Translated by Vera Rich, l^uiidun: Macniillan, 1971. Reddaway, Peter, ed. and trans. Uncensored Russia. London: Cape; New York: American Heritage Press, 1972. Based on nos. 1-11 of the Chronicle of Current Events. Rubenstein, Joshua. Soviet
Sakharo\ Times. .
,
Dissidents.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.
.\ndrei D. Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.
London: Deutsch;
New
Translated b\ (iuy Daniels et
Sakharov Speaks.
by the
.Xeiv
York
York: Knopf; London:
(Jol-
I'ransiated
York: Norton, 1968. al.
New
lins/Harviil, 1974.
Smith, Hedrick.
'The Russians.
Svirski, Grigori.
A
New
York: Quadrangle Books; London: Times Books, 1976.
History of Post-war Soviet Writing.
Translated and edited by Robert Dessai.x
and .Michael Ulman. .\nn Arbor: Ardis, 1981. 'Tatu, .Michel. Power in the Kremlin. Translated from the French by Llelen Katel.
New
^ork:
censorship has been exercised and
how
Viking Press, 1969.
For civil
a detailed
and human
account of
how
rights have been suppressed
to the present dav, readers
mav
like to
Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh
in the Soviet
Union from 1968
consult the incomparable Chronicle of 1-11 (covering the years
sobvtii). Issues
1968-69) form the substance of Peter Reddaway's book Uncensored Russia (see above). Issues 12-64 (the latest to appear to date) have been published in full in
an English translation by Amnesty International, London
(1
t^ston Street,
London WC1X8DJ). Other publications used the
numbered notes
as sources for this
to each chapter.
biography w
ill
be found in
1
INDEX
Abakumov,
Andreyev, Daniil, 246, 509 Andreyev, Leonid, 509, 582 Andreyev, Nikolai, 45 Andreyev, \'adim, 509-10, 582-83, 629 Andreveva, Alexandra Fvodorovna, 45-47,
\'ictor, 274, 473, 497, 501;;
Abashidze, Irakly, 597 Abdumomunov, Toktobolot, 597 Academv of Fine Arts, Soviet, 453, 461 Academy of Sciences, Soviet, 646, 807 Adamova-Sliozberg, Olga, 41 "Adenauer amnesty" (1^55), 351-52 Adzhubei, Alexei, 441
Andreveva Gymnasium, Rostov-on-Don, 30, 39, 45-47 Andropov, Yuri, 530, 740-41, 817 Andzieuski (Polish Bolshevik), 37 Anosov (passport official), 724-25, 743, 800 anti-Semitism, 28, 46, 669-70, 778, 795, 958-63 in slander campaign against Solzhenitsyn, 65-66, 958-59
"A.E.,"625
AFL-CIO, 871-72, 911-15,
918, 948
Aftetwosten (Oslo), 810, 896 Agafva's cottage, Solotcha, 488, 510, 612 Agitator s Sotehouk, An, 373 Agurskv, Mikhail, 793-94, 797, 871, 896, 960«,
963 aircraft industry, Soviet, 225
Aitmatov, Chingiz, 578, 807 Akhmadulina, Bella, 405, 556 Akhmatova, Anna, 326, 401, 440-41, 447-48, 484, 559 expulsion of, from Writers' Union, 403, 664 Akimov (prisoner), 195-96, 348 Alaskan Orthodox church, 91 1, 920 Alberti, Irina, 956, 976-77, 978« "Alexandrov, I.," 722 Alexei, Father (priest at St. Panteleimon's), 39 "Alien Hands" (Stein), 781-83 Allan, James, 152
Jorge, 404
Amalrik, Andrei, 619, 672, 697-98, 721-22, 798, 875 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 663 American Academy of Sciences, 809 Amnesty International, 900, 937, 957
Anand.'Mulk
Raj,
404
anarchists, 29
Stalinist, 361, 368, 473n Antokolsky, Pavel, 618 Appenzell, Switzerland, election at, 884 Arias, Carlos, 947 Arkhangorodskaya, Lyuba, 47 Arkhangorodsky, Alexander, 47-48, 57 ArmanJ, Inessa, 942 Armavir, 40, 43, 53, 68-69 Bolshevik fighting at, 32, 35, 36, 41 Solzhenitsvn's research trip to, 520-21 Arnau, Walter, 986 Aron, Raymond, 909-10, 917;; Arsenveva, Irina, 335 "As Breathing and Consciousness Return" (Solzhenitsyn). 667-68, "94, 798 "\. Solzhenitsyn and the Writer's Spiritual Mission" (Teiish), 483-85, 535-36, 538, 552, 621.
Aliiluyeva, Svetlana, 597, 624, 631 All-Russian Congress of Soviets (1917), 31 All-Russian Memoir Library, Cavendish, Vt., 96364, 977«, 979 All-Russian Writers' Association, 403 "Along the Oka" (Solzhenitsyn), 381 "alphaoet articles" (categories of crime), 177, 183
Amado,
56, 71,
731
22
Associated Press, 806, 810,851 atom-spy project (Ivanov spy case), 262-63, 265, 496-97, 499 August 1914 (Solzhenitsyn), 27-29, 85, 195, 67677, 729-36, 787-93 allegorical content ascribed to, 763-64 battle scenes in, 139, 730-31, 791 Jewish character in, 961, 963 language and literary devices in, 789-90, 792 Lenin portrayed in, 682, 813 as literary "knot," 7 30, 942
Andersen, Erik Arvid, 273-75
patriotism
1025
theme
in, 713,
792
1
Index
[I026] August 1914 (continued) Rostov depicted in, 45, 731 second volume of, 983, 993 Solzhenitsvn's appeal to emigres in, 735-37 Solzhenitsyn's assistants on, 655, 662 Solzhenitsvn's family portrayed in, 16, 28-29,
50,53-54,478,731 Solzhenitsyn's friends portrayed in, 45-47, 57, 731 Solzhenitsyn's hopes for Soviet publication of, 688-89,' 704-5, 729
Solzhenitsyn's past inferred from, 753, 754—55 Solzhenitsvn's research for, 592, 601, 665-66,
731-32 Soviet response to, 737, 753-57, 761, 763-64, 774-75, 787-88, 797, 858 translations of, 732-35 unofficial criticisms of, 787-91,
959 War and Peace compared to, 731, 788 Western publication of, 693, 729-36, 791 Western reaction to, 732, 791-93 writer's block in completion of, 612 Augustine, Saint, 970 Avtonomov (Bolshevik commander), 35, 36
Avvakum
(archpriest and writer), 930;; Axyonov, Vasilv, 405, 462, 466, 468, 470
dissidents defended by, 615-16, 618
Babayevskv, Semyon, 469 Babitsk\', Ronstantin, 641 "Babi Var" (Evtushenko), 461-62 Bahi }'(//• (Kuznetsov), 672 Babvonishexa, Sara, 827 Baklanov, Grigori, 451-53, 470, 610 Banderites (Ukrainian nationalists), 273, 294, 296-
97, 350,
429-30
(Solzhenitsvn), 81 Banquet, Barabanov, Evgeni, 795', 811, 896 Barabash, Yuri, 478, 506 Baranov, Alexander, 91 77)f
Barinov (prisoner), 196-98, 214 Baruzdin, Sergei, 597 Battleship Potemkin, 379,
429
BBC,
228, 258, 351-53, 575, 589-90, 635 dissidents' trials covered by, 550-51
Gulag Archipelago broadcast on, 831 Nobel Prize announcement, 724 publication ot Gulai{ Archipelago announced on,
824
programmes on, 848 Solzhenitsyn interviev\ed on, 935-38, 942-43 Solzhenitsyn's conflict with Writers' Union covered by,' 599, 622, 676 religious
Beame, Abraham, 916 Beauvoir, Simone de, 558 Beckett, Samuel, 699 Beethoven, Ludvvig van, 584 Bek, Alexander, 567, 569 Belgorodtseva, Elena, 62 Behavcv, Alexander, 204-6, 208, 215 Belinkov, Arkadi, 569-70, 571, 572« Belinskv, V'issarion, 414«, 812« Belov, Victor Alexeyevich ("Emperor Mikhail"), 164-65, 190 Benckendorff, Alexander, 530 Berd\ave\', Nikolai, 666, 736«, 823« Berezko, C, 568-69 Beria, Lavrenty, 350 Berlik, 319, 321 Berlin, Soviet blockade of (1948-49), 275 Bershader, Isaak, 213-14, 347-48, 961
Bershadskv, Alexander, 66, 891 Berzer, Anna, 410-15, 421, 425, 429-32, 434-35, 555, 566 Besan(;on, Alain, 972 Bethell, Nicholas, 626, 643, 693, 699, 899«, 964-65
"Big House," Leningrad (KGB headquarters), 815 "Big Losers in the Third World War, The" (Solzhenitsyn), 912 Bild am Sonntag, 988 Biolofjical Science and the Personality Cult (Medvedev), ^5 13- 14, 691 Biorkegren, Hans, 848 "Black Hundreds," 669-70 black market, samizdat manuscripts on, 613 Blagovidov, Major, 756-57 Blake, Patricia, 626,
"Blue Arrow "Bluebottle,
931-32
The" (Solzhenitsyn), 80-81 The" (Tarsis), 549' ,
BIyukher, Marshal, 164 Bobrov, peasant colony at, 25 Bodley Head, 625-26,' 642-43, 733-34 Bogatyrev, Konstantin, 861 Bogor'az, Larisa, 615-16, 618-19, 636, 641, 660 Bogorodskoye, Solzhenitsyn's reading at, 587 Botl, Heinn'ch, 842-45, 847-49, 851, 879 Bolshevik Revolution, 30-31, 45«, 48, 74, 156-58 Jews in, 47-48, 237-38 reactionary view of, 669-70 in Solzhenitsyn's fiction, 84-85, 94-95, 108-10, 235-36, 329-30, 393, 505, 518, 941 see also Russian Civil War Bolsheviks, 29, 31,943-45 in Civil War, 25, 3 3-37 economic policies of, 41, 43-44 Jews favoured by, 47-48, 64-65
Stalinist persecution of, 89, 156 Bolshoi Theatre, Rostov-on-Don, 79-80 Bondarev, Yuri, 470 Bonner, Elena, 796, 804, 823, 957
Book-of-the-Month Club, 642 Borisoglebsky (Judicial Councillor), 366 Borisov, \adim, 795, 890, 896 Borodino, Battle of (1812), 598 Boroniuk, Pavel, 272-73, 281, 286, 295-96, 300, 304 Borovikov, Nikolai, 289 Borshch, Captain, 172-73 "Borzovka," see Rozhdestvo, Solzhenitsyn's summer
house
at
Both Sides of the Ocean (Nekrasov), 462-63 "bourgeois specialists," 56-58, 70-71, 224, 229 "box" cells, 149, 151-52, 157, 161, 174 Brandt, Willy, 843-45, 875 Bratislava, Cancer Wa/v/ published in, 580-83, 627, 637 "Breathing" (Solzhenitsyn), 371, 383 Breslavskava, Anya, 217, 348 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 31 Brezhnev, Leonid, 503, 556, 605, 611, 861, 871, 875 liberalization ended by, 636, 639 Solzhenitsvn's protest letters to, 530, 561, 590-91 "Bricklayer, The'* (Solzhenitsyn), 281, 285-86 Brigade Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies, 30 British Expeditionary Force, 41 Brodnitz, Solzhenitsyn imprisoned at, 146-47, 171, 285, 311, 328 Brodsk\ losif, 456, 484, 664, 845, 890 Brogher, Raymond, 884-85 Bronevitsky (former prisoner), 110-11, 131 Brothers Ershov, The (Kochetov), 402 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 942 Brovman, Ci., 506 ,
Brow n, Cieorge, 936 "Buddha's Smile" (Solzhenitsyn and Semyonov), 234;;, 375
Budenny, Semyon, 40, 318, 360 Bukhanov, Victor, 457-58 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 89, 353, 403, 423 Bukovskv, Vladimir, 550-52, 600, 615, 664, 72122, 775, 845,971;; samizdat journal proposed by, 793, 801
1
Index Solzhenits\n linked to, 797 in Soviet mental hospitals, 552, 6H')-90, Bulashevich, Kirill, 910 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 54«, 605, 660
BulgakoN Sergei, 666 Bulganin, Nikolai A., 35 3 Bulgarian FKN Centre, 700 Bunin, Ivan, 4()l,46H-69 Burg, David (Alexander Dolberg),
Civil
Ml
16, 643, 757,
780-83 Burkovskv, Boris, 384-85, 482, 987 Butvrki Prison, Moscow, 148, 171-84, 220-25, '227, 259, 269, 284 at,
l"2-74, 178-
80, 223
Solzhenits\n's sentencing at, 174-78, 187 Solzhenitsvn's visit to, 378 "special-assignment prisoners" at, 221-25, 514 Buzuluk, Solzfienitsvn s militarv service at, 12-13, 1
120-21 Bvkov, Vasvl, 807
"By Right of Memory" Tvardovsky), 684-87, 764 (
Calendario del Popolo, ll-\-lS Camus, Albert, 581 Canada, Solzhenitsvn's visit to, 910-1 Cancer IVa/v/ (Solzhenitsvn), 97, 316-17, 344-45, 422, 562-72, 576-82 aesthetic criticism of, 566-67, 570-71, 597 attempts at publishing of in Soviet Union, 326, 480-81, 556, 566-67, 576-80, 594-95, 598,
603-5 cancer clinic as microcosm in, 563, 570-71 Cf)pvri2ht disputes over, 625-27, 643, 648, 695 de-Stalinization theme of, 565 ideological criticism of, 579-80, 597, 600, 633, 889« ideohtgical debates in, 330, 563-64 intellectuals caricatured in, 564, 569 Jew ish characters absent from, 960, 963 Natalia in negotiations over, 818-20 public readings and discussion of, 562, 568-74, 581
samizdat circulation of, 567-68, 571-72, 598, 601, 610 sexual longing expressed in, 345, 569«, 577 Slovak publication of, 578-83 Solzhenitsvn's appearance described in, 340 Solzhenitsvn's cancer treatment described in, 301, 304, 333«, 335-39 Solzhenits\n's research on, 491-92 Soviet's writers' praise of, 569-70 translations of, 643-44, 700, 73 3 Western publication of, 610, 622-29, 645, 733, 781 Western reception of, 642-43, 663 Writers' Union debate over, 591-92, 594-99, 602-11, 622-24, 632, 924 Candle in the VV/W (Solzhenits\n), 104, 506-7, 543,
573,581,983 Captives, T/if (Solzhenitsvn), 311w, 328
Henrv, 594, 6r3-14, 630, 647-48, 985-86 582-83, 594, 626, 630, 985-86 publication oi Gulag Archipelago entrusted to, 613-14, 647-48, 694, 728-29, 813-15, 872 Solzhenitsvn's distrust of, 693-94, 728 Solzhenits\n sued bv, 985 Carter, J imniy, 958, 965, 973« Carter, Rosahnn, 973« Case, Clifford, 918 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, 26, 44, Carlisle,
Carlisle, Olga,'
176,
Cato
276
79 cattle-cars, prisoners transported in, 270-71 Caucasus: Bolshevik rule in, 34-37, 41-42 (local poet),
War
in, 3
country estates
3-41 in, 5
Cierman inxasion
,
prisoners' defiance at, 272 Solzhenits\n's fellow prisoners
11027] 3-54
118-19, 123 Solzhenitsyn's bicycle tour of (1937), 82-84, 98 C^avendish, \'t,, Solzhenitsvn's residence at, 95457, 963, 974-83. 991-92 securitv precautions at, 955-56, 975, 978-79 censorship, 412, 435-36, 452-53, 461, 508 Solzhenits\n's public denunciation of, 574, 58384,
of,
586-87
Central Archive of \lilitar\ Elistorw Moscow, 487 Central Asia, prisoners deported to, 224 Central Committee, Communist Fart\ of the Soviet Union, 466, 470, 553, 585, 615, 631 Natalia's contact with, 818-20 publication oi Cancer HV/r^ blocked bv, 591-92, 604, 608 in publication oi Ivan Denisovich, 433-34, 446,
448
Tvardovsky persecuted by, 679, 681, 684-87 Tvardovskv's membership in, 407, 41 1, 423, 556 Writers' Union statement on Solzhenitsyn submitted to, 590-92 Central Writers Club, Moscow, 543, 562, 568-72, 581 CES (cultural and educational section), 215, 290-92
Chaadavev, Piotr, 52 3 Chadova's hut, Kok Terek, 317 chai^a (cancer remedv ), 379, 422 Chagall, Marc, 883' Chaikovskava, Olga, 446 Chakovskv,' Alexander, 462, 481, 617, 756, 764, 807 Chalidze, \alery, 698, 795-96, 823, 924, 97 In
Chalmavev,
\'ictor,
669-70
Chasovo!, 703
Chefranov, Nikolai, 62, 88 Cheka (Extraordinary Commission
for
Combating
Counter-revolutifjn, Sabotage, and Specula-" tion), 61, 91«, 394 Chekhov, Anton, 347, 50 1«
Cherednichenko, Major (camp commandant), 300 Chernousova, Frieda, 341 Chernov, \ictor, 582 Chicago Tribune, 642 Chicherov, I, 452, 483 Chile,
939-40
China, People's Republic Christian Science Monitor,
of,
865, 868, 913
969
Chronicle of Current Events, 619, 636, 660, 684, 796.
889n suppression of, 689, 797-98, 805-7 Chu-Ili Mountains, Solzhenitsvn's excursion into,
334
Chukovskava, Elena, 555, 653-57, 661, 665, 672 Chukovskava, Lvdia, 413, 440, 448, 555, 576, 624, 680, 820-24 birthdav message sent bv, 649 Solzheiiitsvn defended bv, 633, 681, 820-21, 832, 86() Writers' Union expulsion of, 827-28, 830 Writers' Union investigation of, 674 Chukovskv Kornei, 405, 510, 532-33, 553-55, 648, 654, 783 dissidents supported bv, 556, 618 funeral of, 673 Ivan Denisovich supported bv, 424-25, 432. 451, ,
482 Solzhenitsv n's open letter and, 583, 587 Churchill, Winston, 912
Church of People of Good Will, T/'e (Zheludkov 6'n ("hurch of the Holv Trinitv (proposed), 641 CIA against the L'SSR, The (^'akov lev ), 989
"66«-
),
—
1-2
"Cit\ on the Neva, The" (Solzhenitsvn), 381 Club of Rome, 870
Collected
Works
(Solzhenitsvn), 587, 977, 983
Index
[I028] Cologne, Solzhenitsyn's visit Columbia University, 915
to,
849-50
COMES (Community of European 76, 579, 628,
Committee
Writers),
475-
686
for Cultural Links v\ith Compatriots,
Soviet, 858
Committee Committee
for
to
Human
Aid
Rights, 795-97
Political Prisoners ("Political
Red
Cross"), 874 Communii'eal 969 ,
Communist Communist
European, 873, 877n, 941 Party, Soviet Union, 61, 70-72, 32324, 353, 618 artists and writers distrusted by, 403, 467 parties,
bureaucratic aristocracy created by, 48, 76, 91,
Daily World, 703 Daniel, Jean, 909 Daniel, Vuli, 526, 530, 538-39, 549, 842
emigration defended b\', 908 Danilov, Boris, 951 Dark Side of the Moon, 7 he, 271 "Darling, The" (Chekhov), 347, 358, 365, 374 Davie, .Michael, 936 Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, A (Solzhenitsvn), 196, 215;;, 282, 326, 408-95 aesthetic expressed in, 379 camp survivors' response to, 479, 482-83, 485,
510 early versions of,
678
of,
Central Committee, Communist Part\' of the Sox iet Union factional struggles within, 406, 42 3, 464-66,
Central Committee
88h-89;/,
in
tenm
in, 248-49, 383, 424, 429-30, 457 Prize controversy, 481-83, 485-86,
493-96, 506 428 Party promotion of, 448-50, 462-63, 861, 938 peasant protagonist of, 384, 413, 416, 424-26,
450
2,
464-65, 468-69, 482-83, 494, 506, 515, 889n readers' letters in response to, 456, 483-86, 489, 510, 542-43, 579, 621-22 real people portrayed in, 290, 296, 384-85 removal of, from Soviet libraries, 590, 594, 596 reprints of, 463 ro\alties earned from, 471, 650, 683, 783 Sfilzhenitsvn's reaction to publication of, 416-17,
political objections to, 452, let-
Solzheni-
tsyn's lecture at, 377-78 Cossacks, 26, 29, 36-37, 53-54, 99, 120, 236
Don, 34, 99, 112-13, 120, 236, 901 Kuban, 26, 36-37, 53, 74 Terek, 26 Council of Ministers of the USSR, 532 Council of People's Commissars, 31 Court of Memory (Isavev), 481
Cousins, Norman, 916-17
Edward, 936 Crepeau, Frank, 851-52
Crankshaw
854
of,
obstacles to publication of, 417-18, 421, 422-23,
Komsomol
Congress, U.S., 871 Congress of Soviet Writers, Solzhenitsyn's open ter to, 576, 580, 582-91 appeal to Writers' Union in, 586-87 censorship attacked in, 583-84, 586-87 letters in support of, 588-89, 614, 618-19 Solzhenits\n attacked in response to, 631-33 Western reports of, 589-90, 596, 632 Writers" Union reaction to, 589-91, 594, 596, 610, 632 Conquest, Robert, 74, 179;;, 961 Constituent .\ssembl\', Russian (1917), 31, 40 Constitution, Soviet, 586, 600 Corrective Labour Colony Camp No.
reviews
language
—
of, see
for publication
287-88
internationalism of, 237-38 pervasive influence of, 64, 85 puritanical spirit in, 93-94 Solzhenitsvn praised by, 448 1-9 Solzhenits\n's deportation considered by, 699 Solzhenits\n's early involvement with, 64, 72, 86-94, i04-8, 180, 182 written laus interpreted by, 550-51
youth mo\ ement
demanded
444, 446, 448, 450-53, 458, 610 Jev\ ish characters absent from, 960, 963 labour camp as microcosm in, 431-32, 452, 563, 651 labour-camp brigade-leader's job described in, first
507-8 b\-, 75,
Shch-8S4
429-32, 437, 439-40, 463
film adaptations of, 471, 719, 733,
of, see
information sources controlled 110
see
editorial concessions
,
Oimea,
Solzhenitsyn's visit to, 386-87 Crime and Punishment (Dostove\sk\), 168
Criminal Code, Soviet, 153-55, 176-77, 822 anti-Soviet propaganda (.\rticle 58), statutes in, 153-55, 165, 170-71, 205, 208, 267, 318, 445 treason (.\rticle 64), statutes in, 839-40 "critical realism," 421, 468-69 Cronkite, Walter, 875-76, 878, 907, 915-16 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 439, 464, 466, 508 Current of "The Quiet Don," A (13.), 837, 901-2 Cvt7;;;4/.Vo/« (Solzhenitsvn), 82-84, 127
Czaps^i,Jozef, 893 Czechoslovakia, 582, 619, 626, 886 Soviet invasion of (1968), 635-40, 680, 713, 795
Dahl, \ladimir, 52, 227, 233, 383, 391-93, 545 Russian proverbs collected by, 52, 227, 392-93, 542 Dahl's dictionary of the Russian language, 227, 248, 266, 269, 290, 391-92 Solzhenitsyn's linguistic exercises based on, 227, 231. 391'
425, 432, 434-37 Soviet writers' support of, 424-25, 428-32, 482, 532 translations of, 467-68, 625, 644, 733-75 Txardovskv's preface to, 423-24, 432, 448, 45051 thrilled with, 413-18, 442 unofficial copies of, 425, 428, 434, 440, 444, 507
Tvardovskv
Western reception Day in the Life of Ivan
of,
468
Denisovich,
A
(film), 719, 854,
938 "Death of Ivan Ilyich" (Tolstoy), 565, 569, 571 Decembrist conspiracy (1825), 147, 172, 275-76, 530;;, 856 Decembrists icithout December (Solzhenitsvn), 311, 328-30, 347, 349, 404 Declaration of independence, U.S., 966 Delaunav, \adim, 600, 641 Dementvev, .Alexander, 412-413, 455, 505, 547, 578', 623 Chalma\ev articles attacked by, 670 firing of, 578, 669, 685 SolzWnitsyn's dislike of, 415, 503, 669 Solzhenits\n's works opposed
b\',
417, 421, 429-
566-67 Demichev, Piotr, 514-16, 543, 585, 818 30,
Solzhenitsyn's protest letter to, 526, 529, 543,
590 Solzhenits\n's relations with, 515-16, 591-92 Democratic .Vlovement (Human Rights .Movement), 549_51, 619-20, 636-638, 663-64, 697, 79596, 798 aid to political prisoners organized by, 874
(Czechoslovakia invasion protested bv, 636-38 Demonstration in Pushkin Square, 7"Af (Litvinov), 601,
616-17 1., 40 "Denis" (Solzhenitsyn's automobile), 488, 592, 645
Denikin, .\nton
Index DeProfundis(StTU\e. et al.), 667, 670-71, 794 Descartes, Rene, 157 Deserted House, '/"iit' (Chukovskava), 41 3«, 557» de-Stalinization. 321, 350-54, '356-60, 400-408, 448-53, 516, 861 censorship under, 435-36, 452-53, 461, 467-68 conservative opposition to, 402-3, 405-6, 423, 453, 456, 464-68, 470, 483, 508 end of, 523-24, 556, 635-36, 675 Khrushchev's retreat from, 465-68 labour camps under. 350-51, 427-28. 485-87, 510-11 p)litical prisoners rehabilitated under, 357-60, 367, 4f/a^o completed at, 517, 547, 612-13 journalist's visit to, 645 KGB awareness of, 531, 614, 628, 645 KGB break-in at, 739-42, 753
Rozhdesrv'o. Solzhenitsvn's 17,
,
Solzhenitsvn's divorce settlement, 75], 785, 801n, 821 Rozsas, Janos, 290 /?-/ 7 (Solzhenitsvn), 517-18, 728, 791-92, 993 in
'
aims
84-85, 108, 735-36, 792-93, 942 sought in research of, 735-36, 934 ideological transformation of, 518, 982 Lenin'^in, 728, 813, 904-5. 950 "nodal points" in history examined in, 730 Solzhenitsvn's father recreated in, 478, 522 Solzhenitsyn's research on, 478, 487, 904-5, 91 of,
emigres'' aid
writing difficulties in. 982-83 Rudchuli. Vladimir. 291. 296
Rumvantsev, Alexei. 525. 529, 530, 553 Russell. Bertrand. 404 "Russia?" (Solzhenitsyn), 311-12
Russia, Stalinist:
anti-Semitism artistic purges
in, 361, 368, in, 80, 368.
473n
562
annexed bv, 273
Baltic states
British return of emigres to, 899, 937,
964-65
class liquidations in, 62, 67, 74 collectivization in, 67, 74-75, 89, 97, 134, 68, 177, 224, 318, 353,403
engineers persecuted extortion in, 68
in,
167-
70-71. 90, 111, 224, 229
industrialization in, 74, 89, 224, 363, 403 judicial svstem in, 154-55, 170, 174-77 man-made famine in, 74-75, 134, 167, 910-11 police terror in. 61. 68-71. 88-92, 111. M2-?3, 176-77, 179n, 353
postwar atmosphere 308
show
240-41. 260,
war persecuted
prisoners of
purges 806
of, 182, 238,
in, 115. 132,
trials in,
in, 141, 146, 163, 171 156«, 177, 179. 190, 35^
70-71. 89-90, 94, 224, 615, 807
Russia, tsarist, 25-30, 161, 278
anti-Semitism intellectual
669-70, 959 99 in, 28-29, 39, 666-67 25-27
in. 28.
Cossack societv
in, 26, 53,
movements
land ownership in, secret police repression
in,
61, 176, 271
Russian calendar, 27n, 31» Russian Civil War. 25, 32-41, 99 emigres from 172-73 political executions in, 34-35, 37, 40, 41, 394 political freedom in wake of, 58 spiritual renaissance engendered by. 39 "Russian messianism." 794 Russian National Association. 889 Russian Orthodox Church, 38-39, 55, 105, 124, 764-69, 894 Jews and, 959, 963 Soviet suppression of, 42, 43. 68. 339, 360, 380, 765 ,
,
.
Index Russian Orthod.ix Church Abroad. 894, 919-21 Russian Orthodox Church ol America, X94, 919-21 Russian Social Fund to Aid Political Prisoners and Their Famihes, 727, 874-75, 905, 948, 963, 977, 983 Soviet actions ayainst, 874-75, 957-58, 984-85 Russia under ihe ()l(l Rtxime (Pipes), 953/; Russkaya .\i\sH\iuss\An Thoutiht), 664, 898
Rutman, Roman,
960//,
962-64
684, 761 Natalia's isolation in, 374, 387, 488, 554, reporters' visits to, 457-59, 580-81, 834
656-58
secret psharashka, 243-46. 254, 259w, 512 political interest lost l)\ 244-45. 379, 385-86 political involvement (if, 79, 94-95, 107-8. 12223. 130. 136-3". 166 .
rehabilitation teared b\ 359-60 return from prison of. 352. 354 in Rvazan. 422, 511-12 Solzhenitsvn denounced bv. 15, 832-34, 892. .
987 Solzhenitsvn's arrest and. 142-43, 153, 155. 165 66. 188,'370. 833 Solzhenitsvn's correspondence with, 121, 126, 136-37.' 153, 155, 165-66. 366-67, 398 Solzhenitsvn's estrangement from, 244, 385-86, 422. 511-12. 555 Solzhenitsvn's literar\ treatment of, 246, 259«,
\'ache. Jacques, 9
\alentin (prisoner). 173-74, 178, 186-87 \'asilenko. \. I., 320 \'asiliev. Anton, 255-57. 263. 268, 497 Vastly rvor/t;« (Tvardovskv), 125, 250. 285, 324, '408.413 Veche, 775-80. 786-88, 793, 797-98, 891 Vermont. Solzhenitsvn's residence at. see Cavendish. \'t.. Solzhenitsvn's residence at
1932-36 (Solzhenitsvn),
81
Vestmk RSKhD, 768, 794, '873, 920, 983 "N'etrov" (Solzhenitsvn's pseudonvm), 211, 952,
989
Solzhenitsvn's wartime reunion with. 121-23, 136 \ itko\sky. Dimitri, 411, 548 \ ladimirescu. Lieutenant (prisoner). 190 \ ladimir High Road. 250-51 \'ladimiro\ SeniNon, 784. 786 .
\ladimov. Ceorg'i. 588-89 X'lasov. Leonid. '136. 167w. 398. 433.
437
\lasov. \asilv. 290 X'lasovites. 132-33. 139, 146-4", 163-64. l"l-"2, 327-29, 351 \ oice of America. 6"6, " 3 Voice of the Motherland, 858 \oinovich, \ladimir, 431, 445«, 468. 556, 842 Writers' Union fought by, 827-28, 860-61 \ olga. Solzhenitsvn vo\age along (1939), 96-97, '105. 108, 354 X'oloshina. Anna. 86 Volunteer s Highi:: ay (So\z\\tin\ls\x\), 250-51 X'orkuta, labour camp at, 350 Voronezh, peasant rebellions at, 25 Voronezh \otebooks (Mandelstam), 660 Voronkov (Writers' Union official), 590. 596. 6057, 622, 681 Voronvanskava, Elizaveta, 490-93, 654, 657, 8151
16,
820
V'oroshilov amnestv (1953), 351 V'oznesenskv, Andrei, 405, 466, 472, 557 Vozrozhdeniye, 651 V puti, 767"
Vremia i My, 960/; "V v." (Solzhenitsyn), 80-81 V'vatka. renaming of, 363 V'\ shinsky. Andrei, 274. 689 .
for Authors' Rights),
811-12.824
Verse
579, 686
,
Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 910, 920 Undset, Hans, 853 L'nita, L\ 625. 627-28, 675 United Nations. 619, "16, 744, 772 United States, 808-12. 857, 870-74, 917-19 Orthodox church in, 894, 919-21 Solzhenitsvn's first visit to, 91 1-19
\"AAP
official),
396,512
T'j:entieth Century, 81
Twentieth Congress of the CJommunist Part\(1956). 353". 401-2, 404, 40"-8, 42i, 448, 466 1\\ entv-first Congress of the Communist Fart\ (1959), 404 Tiveniy Letters to a Friend Alliluvex a), 597«, 624 Twentv-second (Congress of the Communist Part\ (1961), 406-7, 408, 418, 423, 448, 466 Twentv-third Congress of the Communist Fart\ 556-57, 576, 639 Tvnanov, Yuri. 179, 195 "Tvorkin in the Next World" Tvardovskv). 4".
97, 350,
(COMKS
inogradov. Alexis, 955 inogradov, Igor, 567. 637, 685 inogradov, \ ictor. 544 ishnevskaNa, (ialina. 706. 800, 908 itkevich. \ntonina, 78. 181, 243. 254 itkevich. Nikolai, 76, 78-79, 82, 87, 94-9H, 102
Tverdokhlebo\-, Andrei, 795
L'chitelskaya Gazeta,
049
Victims ofValta (Tohluy), 899h, 964 I ictory Celehnitions {Solzhenitsvn), see Feast of the ('.(inquerors (Solzhenits\ n)
401,
405-8 Shch-HS4 manuscript subniittt-d to, 4(IS-1 ? Solzhenitsvn ad\iscd b\ 441-44, 456-57, 4"
I
"w agonettes" (labour camp bunks). 193-94, 198 Wallenberg, Raoul, 900 wall new spapers, 88-89, 94, 106-7 Walter. Otto. 732-33, 883 War and Peace {Tolswv), 52, 85, 104, 125. 382. 501«. 598n Auirust 1914 compared to, 731, 788 Solzhenitsvn's annotated copv of, 249, 308, 369
War Communism,
41. 44. 58
War Diaries (S'lmonoy), 567 "Ward 7" (Tarsis). 549. 689 Warren. Robert Penn, 784 Washington. O.C., Solzhenitsvn's sp)eech 91
2'-
14
in,
91
1,
—
1
Index
[1050] Post, 758-63, 782, 809, 844 Solznenitsvn's Harvard address criticized
Washwaton
in,
969
Watergate affair, 8 Way, f,b? (Solzhenitsvn), 44-45, 57, 96, 324-26 composition of, 250-51, 283, 285. 311, 324 1
patriotic feelings depicted in, 121, 312 Solzhenitsvn's arrest described in, 147-48 Solzhenitsvn's Marxist faith recalled in, 104-5
Solzhenitsvn's w artime experiences depicted in, 121, 132, 134, 138 writer's mission stated in, 325-26, 3 30 "Wav We Live Now, The" (Solzhenitsvn), 690-91
(Zamyatin), 4()3h, 789 W'egierski, Jerzy, 299 "Weightlessness" (Markin), 674«
690
Welt, Die, 757-58 Willi, 847
Wever,
a Pity" (Solzhenitsyn), Is
545-46
Justice?" (Barabash), 478
What is Socialism? (Shafarevich), 95 3 When They Lose Track of the Years (Solzhenitsyn), 330
"W
695-96,713 Solzhenitsvn's membership in, 456, 511, 512, 540, 62 3 SolzhenitsN n's open letter against, 676, 679-82,
We
"What "What
Nobel Prize decision attacked bv, 702-3 nonconformist writers expelled from, 403 \, 552, 618, 664, 801-2, 827-28, 860-61 publication of Cancer WWr;/ debated in, 591-92, 594-99, 602-1 1, 622-24, 632, 924 Solzhenitsvn's complaints to, 561-62, 586-87, 594-98," 605, 675, 827 Solzhenits\n's deportation urged by, 699 Solzhenitsvn's expulsion considered bv, 599-600, 646 Solzhenitsvn's expulsion from, 673-77, 680-83,
is Solzhenits\ n (>\ ini; For?" (Frok774 "white books," 576, 600-601, 616, 618-19 "White Buov, The" (Markin), 674w White Sea— Baltic Canal, 560, 932 White Volunteer Armv, 33, 36-37, 39-41, 47, 99,
hich Russia sha),
Solzhenitsvn's open letter to Congress of Soxiet Writers and, 586-87, 589-91, 594, 596, 610, 632 Solzhenitsx n's publication of dealings uith, 622-
23,628' Fvardovskx
's
funeral arranged by, 746-47
criticized b\', 470 Wrocluivski Tygodnik Katolikoiv, 774
younger generation
\enia (commissar's wile),
35, 37
172
Whitlam, Gouijh, 898 Whitnev, Thomas, 594, 630, 644, 815, 831, 872 "Who Calls the Tune?" (Ferrari), 774-75 Who Is Solzhenitsyn? (Simon\an), 958-59
Who Lives Happily in Russia? (Nekrasox 250;/ "Whose Side are ^ ou On?" (Mikhalkov), 698 Widmer, Sigmund, 851, 854-55, 882, 885, 906, 985 ),
Wild Honey (Pervomaiskv), 481 Harrv, 889;;, 934 Williams, Edward Bennett, 958 Williams, Ravmond, 643 Williamson, H. N. H, 41 Will the Soviet Union Survive until 19S4? (Amalrik),
Willetts,
672, 697-98
Wilson, Harold, 811, 898, 935 "Without a Righteous Person No Village Can Stand" (Solzhenitsvn), see "Matrvona's Place" Woe from UVMGriboyedov), 83;;, 215-16, 326, 378 Tale, A" (Solzhenitsyn), 126 Workers' Educational Ontre, Stockholm, 719-20 "World Split Apart, A" (Solzhenitsvn), 965-73
"Woman's
World War World War
29-31, 84, 138, 666-67 II, 109-25, 169 collaborators in, 131-33, 146-47, 163-64, 17172, 182, 327-29, 351 German retreat in, 120-21, 123-25, 129, 138 looting in, 137-41, 230-31 prisonersof war in, 141, 163, 171-72, 182,247, I,
351
propaganda in, Russian retreat
110, 115, 123-24, 132, 134-35 in. 111, 114-15, 118-19
World War
III, Solzhenitsvn's conception of, 912 Wrangel, P\otr N., 40 "wrecker-engineer" trials (1928-30), 70-71, 90, 224 Wrede, Caspar, 854, 938 Writers' Oingress, see Congress of Soviet Writers,
Solzhenitsvn's open letter to Writers' Union, Czech, 886 Writers' Union, Soviet, 179, 326, 390;;, 405, 455, 580, 807 anti-Western letter demanded of Solzhenitsvn bv,
597,605,608-10,623-25,632-33 Cx)ngress of Soviet Writers organized by, 583 Feast of the Conquerors read bv, 592, 595^ 597-98,
604 international protest over Solzhenitss n's expulsion from, 682-83, 686, 700 liberalism in, 401, 461 literarv prizes and, 481-82
V, Yuri, 163-64, 171-72, 223 Yablochkov Passage, Ryazan, Solzhenitsvn's flat on, 553, 555-56, 580
new
Yakhimovich, Ivan, 689 Yakir, lona, 806 Yakir, Py(>tr, 618, 797-98, 806-7 Yakobson, Anatoli, 637 Yakovlev, Nikolai N., 858-59, 989 Yakubovich, Mikhail, 951-52, 987 ^'akunin, (ileb, 765 Yalta t:onferencc (1945), 912 \'anchenko (camp surgeon), 301 Yasevich, Colonel, 17'2-73
Yashin (w riter), 468 Yasnava Polana, Solzhenitsvn's visit to, 478, 645 Yeisk, Shcherbak residence at, 51-55, 66
YMCA
Press, 667, 693, 730, 734, 794, 869n, 873,
983
Young
Pioneers, 64-65, 68, 87 Yudina, Maria, 659, 726 ]unost, 684, 685, 861
Z, Leonid, 158-59, 161-62, 165 Zagorika, Xenia, 755 Zagorsk, sharashka in, 226-27 Zakharova, Matrvona, 362-65, 367-68, 386, 393-
94 "Zakhar the Pouch" (Solzhenitsvn), 478, 545-47 Zamvatin, F.vgeny, 381, 403, 789 Zava'dskv, Yuri, 80, 455 Zeit,Die, 692, 695,971;; Zernov, Nikolai, 34-35, 37, 39 Zernov, Sophia, 36
Zhdanok, Kolva, 292-93 Zhdanov, Andrei, 473;;, 524 Zheludkov, Sergei, 766-68 Zhiobin, Solzhenitsvn stationed at, 125-31 Zholkovskava, Irina, 660, 661, 802, 958 Zhukov, Yuri, 828 Zhukova, Rostropoxich dacha at, 678-79, 681, 701, 706, 799-800, 820 police harassment of Solzhenitsvn at, 724-25, 743 Zilberberg, Ellva, 522 Zilberberg, Ilya, 522, 534-39, 924-25, 928-29 "Zima Station" (F.vtushenko), 405 Zimvanin, Mikhail, 529, 599-601
Index Zinoviev, Grieorv, 61, 89 Zinoviev, Pavel, 204-6, 215 Zionists, Russian, 793n, 795-97, 909 Znamya, 128, 135, 166, 402, 412, 468 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 277, 401, 4(J3, 664 Zubov, Nikolai and Elena, 343-44, 349, 354, 358, 386, 522 fictional treatment of, 344, 564 Solzhenits\n's correspondence with, 371, 376, 418, 422, 427-28, 430, 436-37
[
I
< )
s
I
Zurich, 849-52. 854-55, 879-91, 955-56 Elastern Eurofjean emigres in, 885-88, 893-95 KGB plots in, 885-90, 910, 955, 985, 988 Solzhenitsvn's daily routine resumed in, 879-82 Solzhenitsyn's Lenin research in, 904—5, 950 Solzhenitsvn's press conference in, 897-98
Zvedra, Olsja, 593 Zvenigoro