Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  At school, he was an exceptional pupil, excelling in both the arts and the sciences, encouraged by his mother, who, like her gifted son, had been top of the class as a child. The precocious schoolboy became close friends with two other gifted pupils in his class. His friendship with Nikolai Vitkevich and Kirill Simonyan was to last through the rest of their school years and through their years at Rostov University. Soon they were so inseparable that they referred to themselves jokingly as “The Three Musketeers”. Their other close friend, admitted as an honorary fourth member of the intimate circle, was Lydia Ezherets, known to her friends as Lida. The four were drawn together principally by their love of literature. They wrote essays on Shakespeare, Byron, and Pushkin, each trying to outdo the other in friendly competitiveness; and they wrote “very bad, very imitative poetry”.9 Encouraged by their literature teacher, Anastasia Grunau, they collaborated on the writing of a novel, which was dubbed “the novel of the three madmen”, and started producing a satirical magazine in which they wrote poems and epigrams on each other and on the teachers. Later, they developed an infatuation with the theater, organizing a drama club and rehearsing plays by Ostrovsky, Chekhov, and Rostand.

  Aside from literature, Solzhenitsyn’s other great love during these years was cycling, having obtained a bicycle in 1936 in somewhat unorthodox circumstances. During his last year at school, he had been nominated by the headmaster for a civic prize for outstanding pupils. Normally, the award of the prize was a mere formality once the nominations were made, but Solzhenitsyn’s nomination was blocked on account of his social background. The headmaster was incensed and demanded that the injustice be rectified. Reluctantly, the officials consented to award Solzhenitsyn a bicycle as an extraordinary consolation prize.

  Solzhenitsyn was more than happy with his “consolation”. Bicycles were a rare luxury in those days, and neither he nor his mother would ever have been able to afford one. His other friends also owned bicycles, and thereafter cycling became a favorite hobby. The next three summers were devoted to touring holidays, and the first, in 1937 when Solzhenitsyn was eighteen years old, took the friends, five boys and two girls, to Tbilisi via the most scenic and spectacular passes of the Caucasus Mountains.

  Inspired by his new-found love of cycling, Solzhenitsyn indulged his other love for literature in what he called his Cycling Notes. These were composed in the autumn, shortly after his return from the tour of the Caucasus in July and August, and were contained in three school exercise books labeled “My Travels, Volume IV, Books 1, 2, and 3”. The Notes, written in naive schoolboy prose, were nonetheless full of high spirits and infectious humor, notably in a description of a series of punctures and other mishaps in the pouring rain when the group was en route to Stalin’s birthplace at Gori. In an unintentionally amusing display of post-pubescent indignation, Solzhenitsyn waxed lyrical on the arrogant sex discrimination of Georgian men while simultaneously displaying jealousy of their easy southern charm. The Georgian men, he complained, exhibited an insufferably patronizing attitude toward Russian women, regarding them as easy conquests and therefore of easy virtue.

  More disturbingly, the Notes displayed a political naïveté that illustrated the extent to which Solzhenitsyn’s generation had soaked up Soviet propaganda. Their very thoughts, it seemed, were saturated with communist slogans and jargon. “Two things cause tuberculosis—poverty and the impotence of medicine”, he stated glibly, referring to the TB sanatorium that the cyclists had come across on their travels. “The Revolution has liquidated poverty. Medicine, why are you lacking behind? Tear these unfortunates from death’s grasping paws!”

  These and similarly trite declarations throughout the Notes confirmed that Solzhenitsyn and his friends were now utterly convinced of the correctness of Stalinism. Their pilgrimage to the place of Stalin’s birth, achieved in spite of the combined endeavors of the elements and sundry protesting bicycle tires to prevent their arrival, was an act of homage befitting true and trusted—and trusting—children of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s own devotion to the father of the nation was confirmed by the motto he selected to adorn the cover of one of the exercise books in which he had written his Cycling Notes: “We shall have excellent and numerous cadres in industry, agriculture, transport, and the army—our country will be invincible (Stalin).” It was almost as though only the immortal words of Stalin himself deserved place of honor on the cover of any of Solzhenitsyn’s literary works. The Soviet education system had triumphed indeed.

  There was, however, one notable redeeming passage in the Notes, inspired by a visit to the grave of Alexander Griboyedov, described by Solzhenitsyn as “that radiant genius, that pride of the Russian nation”. Woe from Wit, Griboyedov’s masterpiece, a verse comedy in the manner of Moliere written in 1822-1823, was one of Solzhenitsyn’s favorite plays, and he often declaimed passages from it when, as a student, he took part in readings. While in Tbilisi, he had taken the opportunity to visit Griboyedov’s resting place, and the poignancy of the occasion inspired thoughts more worthy of the selfless and incisively introspective writer who was to emerge triumphant from the Gulag Archipelago almost twenty years later:

  I love graveyards!. . . Sitting in a graveyard you involuntarily cast your mind back over all your past life, your past actions, and your plans for the future. And here you do not lie to yourself as you do so often in life, because you feel as if all those people sleeping the sleep of peace around you were somehow still present, and you were conversing with them. Sitting in a graveyard you momentarily rise above your daily ambitions, cares and emotions—you rise for an instant even above yourself. And then, when you leave the graveyard, you become yourself again and subside into the morass of daily trivia, and only the rarest of individuals is able to leap from that morass onto the firm ground of immortality.10

  In 1937, there were early signs that Solzhenitsyn was destined to become one of these “rarest of individuals”. It was at this time that he conceived the idea for an epic work which, more than sixty years later, he was to consider “the most important book of my life”.11 Eventually, under the collective title of The Red Wheel, this would run to several volumes, the fruit of a lifetime’s labor:

  I conceived it when I was eighteen years old and in sum, including thinking it through, collecting materials, writing, I worked on The Red Wheel for a total of fifty-four years. I finished The Red Wheel when I was seventy-two years old. The subject is the history of our Revolution. Initially, I had assumed that its centre would be the October events of 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, but in the course of immersing myself deeper in the material in studying these events I realized that the main event was in fact the February revolution of 1917.12

  When he first conceived it, the eighteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn did not have the benefit of the wisdom his seventy-nine-year-old counterpart had accrued. Nevertheless, when, on November 18, 1936, he first resolved to write “a big novel about the Revolution”, he envisaged it on the grandest of scales, modeled in scope on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It would be not merely a novel but a true epic, in multiple volumes and parts. It would be his masterpiece. What a tribute it is to Solzhenitsyn’s vision, his determination, and, indeed, his genius that this wildest and most arrogantly ambitious of teenage dreams was brought to fruition through half a century of careful and considered reflection, coupled with superhuman endeavor.

  Provisionally labeled R-17, its principal focus being the Revolution of 1917, the young Solzhenitsyn’s epic had originally been planned to reflect the orthodox communist point of view. “From childhood on, I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and that nothing else concerned me. To understand the Revolution I had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it.”13 The novel’s hero, Olkhovsky, who was to become Lenartovich in August 1914, was intended to be an idealistic communist; according to Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, the purpose o
f the novel was to show “the complete triumph of the Revolution on a global scale”.14

  Solzhenitsyn soon realized, however, that it was impossible to understand or do justice to the Revolution without appreciating fully the huge significance of the First World War. He started to study some of the war’s military campaigns and became increasingly fascinated by the defeat of General Samsonov at the Battle of Tannenberg, in East Prussia. For the first three months of 1937, Solzhenitsyn spent hours in Rostov’s libraries studying this particular campaign, an experience he was later to evoke in his poem Prussian Nights.

  His labors bore fruit in 1937 and 1938 when he drafted the first few chapters of part one of his novel under the provisional title “Russians in the Advance Guard”. He also sketched in a scene between Olkhovsky and Severtsev (later Vorotyntsev) for a chapter entitled “Black on Red”. When writing August 1914 thirty years later, he was able to draw heavily from these initial drafts, taking not only source material but in some cases whole scenes that barely needed any amendment at all.

  Solzhenitsyn had now entered the local university where, surprisingly, he elected to take a degree in physics and mathematics rather than in literature. At Rostov University, literature was not taught at the faculty level but only at the teacher training college level, where students were prepared for teaching in secondary schools. This was not a prospect that Solzhenitsyn found attractive.

  I had no desire to become a teacher of literature, because I had too many complex ideas of my own, and I simply wasn’t interested in retailing crude, simplified nuggets of information to children in school. Teaching mathematics, however, was much more interesting. I didn’t have any particular ambitions in the field of science, but I found it came easy to me, very easy, so I decided it would be better for me to become a mathematician and keep literature as a consolation of the spirit. And it was the right thing to do.15

  It was usual at this time for students to sit an entrance examination before being accepted to a university and to submit their social credentials for scrutiny, but Solzhenitsyn’s superlative record of straight 5s in school meant that he was accepted without an examination. This in turn averted too close a scrutiny of his class origins. In any case, he was now becoming adept at avoiding the awkward parts of the endless questionnaires that had become such a feature of Soviet life. He invariably wrote “office worker” when describing his father’s former occupation: “I could never tell anyone that he had been an officer in the Russian army, because that was considered a disgrace.”16

  Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant academic career continued at university where he received top marks in all his examinations. Simultaneously, finding his course very easy, he found time to develop a new love that was soon vying with literature for his extracurricular attention. This was the study of Marxism-Leninism. Along with his friends, he had passed with unquestioning ease from the Young Pioneers to the Komsomol in his tenth and final year at school. Then, from the age of seventeen onward, he threw himself into the study of Party doctrine with an almost religious zeal: “[D]uring my years at the university, I spent a lot of time studying dialectical materialism, not only as part of my courses but in my spare time as well. Then and later . . . I read an enormous amount about it and got completely carried away. I was absolutely sincerely enthralled by it over a period of several years.”17

  As Solzhenitsyn reached manhood, it seemed that he was determined to leave his childhood behind in every conceivable sense. He had come to the conclusion that the doubts, fears, and confusion of his childhood years were caused by the reactionary errors of his elders, who were unfortunately handicapped by their emotional attachment to old and discredited beliefs. With the self-assured audacity of youth, he had rejected old traditions and superstitions in favor of the brave new world presented by the Revolution. He had solved the psychological schism of his boyhood by rejecting the heresies of Russian Orthodoxy and embracing the orthodoxy of communism. It was all so easy: “The Party had become our father and we, the children, obeyed. So when I was leaving school and embarking on my time at university, I made a choice: I banished all my memories, all my childhood misgivings. I was a Communist. The world would be what we made it.”18

  The banishment of memories must have been made difficult by the occasional reminders that dogged his years at university. In 1937, during his first year, some senior students were arrested and disappeared, and some of the professors were said to have disappeared as well. When Solzhenitsyn heard about this, it is hard to believe that the painful vision of Vladimir Fedorovsky’s arrest would not have returned to haunt him. Similarly, the wretched figure of Professor Trifonov scurrying nervously down the corridors and flinching whenever his name was called must have resurrected unwelcome childhood misgivings. “We learned later that he had been inside and if anybody called out his name in the corridor he thought perhaps the security officers had sent for him.”19 Is it feasible that the young communist student could have seen this broken wretch of a man without visions of his grandfather, half-maddened by constant persecution, walking the streets with a wooden cross hanging from his neck?

  One suspects that the born-again communist nurtured a sneaking admiration for the celebrated mathematician Professor Mordukhai-Boltovskoi in spite of his anti-Marxist heresies, or perhaps even because of them. On one occasion, according to Solzhenitsyn, the elderly professor was lecturing on Newton when one of the students sent up a note which said, “Marx wrote that Newton was a materialist, yet you say he was an idealist. To which the professor replied, “I can only say that Marx was wrong. Newton believed in God, like every other great scientist.” On another occasion, when his students told him that there was an attack on him in one of the newspapers pasted to the walls of the university, he replied with weighted indifference, “My nanny told me never to read what was written on walls.”20 Not surprisingly, Mordukhai-Boltovskoi was purged from the university, but he was saved from prison by his age, his reputation as a famous mathematician, and allegedly by the personal intervention of Kalinin, chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, to whom the professor had turned for help. As a result, he was reprieved and was merely “relegated” by being transferred to the teacher training college.

  The professor was one of a small and very fortunate minority in being the recipient of state-sponsored leniency at this time. During the 1930s, Stalin had instituted a new reign of terror designed principally to eliminate all actual or potential rivals. At the Seventeenth Party Congress, “the Congress of Victors”, in 1934, Stalin had declared that the Party had triumphed over all opposition, promising the Party faithful a glorious and joyful future: “Life has become better, Comrades. Life has become gayer.” Of the two thousand delegates who applauded on that day, two-thirds were arrested in the course of the next five years. In 1934, Sergei Kirov was murdered in Leningrad, and a wave of show trials followed: the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1935, the Old Bolsheviks trial in 1936, the trial of Pyatakov and Radek in 1937, the trial of Rykov and Bukharin in 1938, and a host of lesser trials. In 1940, having been sentenced to death in his absence, Trotsky was murdered in exile. Yet the new reign of terror was not restricted to the higher echelons of Soviet power. It permeated downward, contaminating every stratum of society with an atmosphere of fear. In Leningrad alone, during the spring of 1935, between thirty and forty thousand people were arrested. Over the following three years, the total number arrested across the Soviet Union as a whole ran into millions. The purpose of Stalin’s murderous Machiavellianism was summed up succinctly by Michael Scammell: “Soviet society was turned upside down and remade in Stalin’s image.”21

  At the height of the Terror, it seemed that almost anyone could be arrested at any time. This was illustrated by a grimly absurd episode in Solzhenitsyn’s own life. In the mid-1930s, he narrowly escaped arrest when standing in a bread queue. The people in the queue were accused of being “saboteurs” who were “sowing panic” among the public by suggesting there was a bread short
age. Fortunately for the young and enthusiastic communist, someone interceded on his behalf, and he was released without being charged.

  There was also a grim irony in the way that socialist intellectuals in the West continued their love affair with the Soviet Union in general and Stalin in particular. When H. G. Wells was granted an audience with Stalin in the autumn of 1934, he told the Soviet leader that “at the present time there are in the world only two persons to whose opinion, to whose every word, millions are listening—you and Roosevelt.” The incredible gullibility that Wells displayed regularly throughout his life was evident when he told his mentor, “I have already seen the happy faces of healthy men and women and I know that something very considerable is being done here. The contrast with 1920 is astounding.”22

  “Much more could have been done had we Bolsheviks been cleverer”, Stalin replied in mock humility. Yet Wells, dazzled by the brilliance of his hero, would accept no weakness in the Soviet system. If perfection had not been achieved in the socialist utopia, he reasoned, people and not the Party were to blame. “No,” Wells responded, “if human beings were cleverer. It would be a good thing to invent a Five Year Plan for the reconstruction of the human brain, which obviously lacks many things needed for a perfect social order.”23 This riposte met with the Leader’s approval, and Wells recorded that both men burst out laughing at the wit of his reply.

  Wells concluded his meeting with Stalin by mentioning the “free expression of opinion—even of opposition opinion”, adding apologetically, “I do not know if you are prepared yet for that much freedom.” Stalin was quick to reassure him: “We Bolsheviks call it ‘self-criticism’. It is widely used in the USSR.”24 Wells did not record any laughter at this point, and Stalin may have managed to keep a straight face, but his own reply, amidst his plans for mass arrests and murder, far exceeded in wit anything Wells had said.