Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  Following Wells’ return to England, the transcript of his interview with the Soviet leader was published in The New Statesman and Nation on October 27, 1934, under the heading “A Conversation between Stalin and Wells.” It was criticized heavily in the subsequent issue, not, as one might expect, for its naïveté, but for being too harsh on Stalin. George Bernard Shaw complained, “Stalin listens attentively and seriously to Wells, taking in his pleadings exactly, and always hitting the nail precisely on the head in his reply. Wells does not listen to Stalin: he only waits with suffering patience to begin again when Stalin stops. He has not come to be instructed by Stalin, but to instruct him.” Another writer eager to spring to Stalin’s defense in the wake of Wells’ interview was the German expressionist playwright and poet Ernst Toller, who insisted that, compared with fascist countries, intellectual freedom in the USSR was growing.25

  Within a few years, both Wells and Toller had become disillusioned with events in the Soviet Union. Toller committed suicide in New York in 1939, and Wells ended his literary career with the desolate thoughts of The Mind at the End of its Tether. Only Shaw remained blissfully oblivious to the many contradictions at the heart of his thinking.

  Perhaps one should not be too harsh on those Western intellectuals who had fallen under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda machine, especially as many citizens of the Soviet Union were similarly beguiled. During the show trials, Soviet newspapers were full of gloating accounts of the defendants’ confessions and sycophantic praise of the secret police for their “eternal vigilance”. The press was full of vituperative rhetoric against the “enemies of the people” and their constant plots to undermine the good work of the Party through “ideological and economic sabotage”. Pavlik Morozov became an overnight hero for denouncing his own father to the secret police and was held up as a model for Soviet youth to emulate. All over the country, armies of Party spokesmen were mobilized to lecture the nation’s students on why the purges were necessary and to brainwash them into acceptance.

  In spite of his near arrest for daring to queue for bread in a public place, and in spite of the arrests he knew about both in the past and present, Solzhenitsyn accepted the situation as a temporary but necessary phenomenon, crucial to the success of the Revolution. The purges were exactly that, a thorough cleansing of the Party machine so that it could continue the revolutionary struggle in a spirit of purity. Years later, looking back at this period in a spirit of self-critical contrition, Solzhenitsyn grieved over “the astonishing swinishness of egotistical youth. . . . We had no sense of living in the midst of a plague, that people were dropping all around us, that a plague was in progress. It’s amazing, but we didn’t realize it.”26

  In autumn 1938, during his third year at university and shortly before his twentieth birthday, Solzhenitsyn faced a test, a temptation which, had he succumbed, could have changed his life irrevocably. He was summoned before the District Komsomol Committee and given an application form for entry into one of the training colleges of the NKVD, the government department responsible for the recruitment and training of the secret police. The prospect of joining the secret police must have been tempting. After all, was he not a committed Marxist? A loyal child of the Revolution? Hadn’t he learned from all those lectures on historical materialism that the purges were necessary, that “the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honourable task”?27 Then, of course, apart from such ideological grounds for joining the ranks of the secret police, there were very good material considerations to take into account. Could the provincial university at which he was studying offer him the same opportunities as a career in the NKVD? No, it couldn’t. The best he could hope for after graduating was a teaching post at some remote rural school where the pay would be paltry. In comparison, the NKVD training college offered the prospect of double or triple pay and the lure of special rations. On the face of it, there was no competition. He should join the secret police where he could serve the Party and be relatively rich into the bargain. For some reason, however, he hesitated—hesitated and then refused: “People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.”28 It was a defining moment and one which would cause Solzhenitsyn much painful heart searching in years to come: “If, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become?. . . If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”29 For one so ruthlessly introspective as Solzhenitsyn, the issue could not be shirked and the ramifications were chilling: “It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.”30

  These, however, were the questions of an old man looking back over a lifetime’s suffering. The insight was not available to the young, carefree Solzhenitsyn, who was soon able to put the NKVD episode out of his idealistic mind. By day, he and his young communist friends paraded with banners through the streets of Rostov proclaiming the Revolution while, by night, the Black Marias passed unnoticed through the same streets. Ignorance indeed was bliss. “We twenty-year-olds marched in the column of the October children, and as the Revolution’s children, we looked forward to a glittering future.”31

  The aging sage saw things differently: “I was brought up in a Christian spirit but youth in the Soviet period took me away from religion entirely. I now read through some of my letters and my efforts at literature from that period of my youth and I am grasped by a horror of what kind of emptiness awaited me.”32

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAN AND WIFE

  The enormous energy Solzhenitsyn exuded throughout his life was already evident in his youth. Besides his university studies, his dabblings with literature, his extracurricular sorties into the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, and his recreational activities with the close circle of friends with whom he went cycling, he also found time for his first serious romance. Natalya Reshetovskaya records in her memoirs that she first met Solzhenitsyn in 1936, near the beginning of their first year at university. It was during the lunch break, and she looked up from the sandwich she was consuming to see “a tall, lean youth with thick, light hair . . . bounding up the stairs two steps at a time”.1 He spotted two friends and explained in “a rapid-fire speech” that he was attending some lectures in the chemistry department where Reshetovskaya was studying. “Everything about him seemed rapid, headlong”, she remembered, adding that he had “very mobile features”. At the time of his arrival, Natalya was having lunch with Nikolai Vitkevich and Kirill Simonyan, who along with Solzhenitsyn had formed the “Three Musketeers” at high school. His two friends had both enrolled in the chemistry department, and Natalya recalled that Solzhenitsyn’s eyes “darted from one person to the other or focused on me with interest”. The first time his eyes had rested on her, the lower part of her face was masked by “an enormous apple”, which she was munching between bites of her sandwich. When the apple was lowered, he saw a full-lipped, chestnut-haired girl who had an air of extrovert exuberance. The three boys began to talk animatedly about their schooldays together, and Natalya observed that Solzhenitsyn’s energetic mannerisms were merely an outward expression of a lively intellect: “Their conversation was studded with references to heroic figures from the most varied literary sources imaginable; there were ancient gods, of course, and historical personages galore. They knew everything under the sun, all three of them: that was the way I saw them.”2

  Little did Natalya realize, as these first impressions sank in, that she and the lively seventeen-year-old had much in common in their family and social backgrounds. Her father had served as a Cossack officer in the First World War and had fought on the side of the Whites in the civil war that followed. In November 1919, with Bolshevik victory imminent, he went into exile with the remnants of the vol
unteer army. Natalya was only ten months old at the time so, like Solzhenitsyn, had never known her father. Another similarity with Solzhenitsyn was the fact that she was de facto an only child. Before her, there had been twins, but they had been born prematurely and had died in infancy. Her mother had been joined in Rostov by her exiled husband’s three unmarried sisters, so that, when Solzhenitsyn first set eyes on Natalya, she was living in a flat with four middle-aged ladies, three of them maiden aunts.

  Solzhenitsyn’s first contact with Natalya’s family came on November 7, 1936, when he and the other two “Musketeers”, along with three female students, were invited by Natalya’s mother to visit them. During the course of the evening, the group amused themselves by playing forfeits, and Natalya, a gifted pianist, entertained her guests with a rendition of Chopin’s “Fourteenth Etude”. Her musicianship impressed Solzhenitsyn immensely, and he told her as they were preparing for supper how beautifully she played.3 Ten days later there was another party, organized by the biology students for the birthday of Liulya Oster, another of Solzhenitsyn’s high-school classmates. Solzhenitsyn and Natalya were both present, and on this occasion, he seems to have been impressed by more than her prowess at the piano. “Today is exactly twenty years from the day when I considered myself utterly and irrevocably in love with you”, he wrote in a letter to her on November 17, 1956. “The party at Liulya’s; you in a white silk dress and I (playing games, joking, but taking it all quite seriously) on my knees before you. The next day was a holiday—I wandered along Pushkin Boulevard and was out of my mind with love for you.”4

  If this was indeed the day that Solzhenitsyn fell in love with his future wife, he kept the fact carefully concealed for many months afterward. One wonders, in fact, whether his letter of twenty years later can be taken as a reliable account of his feelings. It was written at a time when he was once again courting his wife following many years of enforced separation, and one cannot discount the possibility that the words were selected, the memory selective, with this latter-day courtship in mind. Such a view appears to be vindicated by Natalya herself in her observation that Solzhenitsyn conceived his idea for the epic historical novel on the “very same evening” that he was purportedly out of his mind with love for her. Certainly it appears incongruous that a seventeen-year-old, purportedly in the throes of first love, should spend his evenings mulling over ideas for a literary epic about the Revolution, rather than moping over his new love.

  The letter’s reliability is further thrown into question by the fact that Solzhenitsyn appears to have shown no outward sign of his love. Perhaps this was mere youthful bashfulness or else the result of loyalty to his friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was closer to Natalya than he was. “That year”, Natalya wrote, she was more Nikolai’s friend “than anyone else’s”.5 It was Nikolai who sat next to Natalya during chemistry lectures and who shared notes with her. It was Nikolai who had taught her to play chess during the winter holidays, and it was Nikolai in the summer who had shown her how to ride a bicycle. When Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai, and several other friends had embarked on their cycling tour of the Georgian Highway, it was Nikolai and not Solzhenitsyn who had written to her.

  It is of course possible that Solzhenitsyn had concealed his feelings as a selfless act of chivalry or in a touching display of loyalty to his old schoolfriend. Yet it is certain that he was outwardly happy during 1937 and that his friendship with Nikolai Vitkevich was as close and as apparently untroubled as ever. Furthermore, he had a whole host of other interests that absorbed both his time and attention, and Natalya remained apparently oblivious of any amorous feelings on his part.

  It is tempting to conclude that Solzhenitsyn’s feelings were not quite as deep in the early days of their friendship as his letter of twenty years later suggested. Far from being “out of his mind” with love for her, perhaps he felt a mere physical attraction to her in the same way he may have found attractive other young girls of his acquaintance. Possibly she was only one of several for whom his young eyes yearned.

  It was not until the winter of 1937, a year after they had first met, that their relationship developed the depth that enabled a full-blown love affair to flourish. Toward the end of the year, a course of dancing classes was started at the university, and of their closely knit group of friends only Natalya and Solzhenitsyn attended. Predictably enough, they became dancing partners and were soon partnering each other beyond the confines of the classes. “We also started going out together to university parties,” Natalya remembered, “and we danced only with each other.”6 Soon they were also going to the theater and the cinema together. Solzhenitsyn would pick her up at home, and, before leaving, she would play the piano for him. Theirs seemed the ideal student relationship; they were enjoying all the fun and frivolity of undergraduate life without the sacrifice and commitment of a married couple. “I was happy with things as they were,” wrote Natalya in her memoirs, “and I did not want any changes at all.” Then, on July 2, 1938, as they sat together in Rostov’s Theatrical Park, Solzhenitsyn declared his love for her, explained that he visualized her always at his side, and asked whether she was able to give him the same commitment. It was a proposal of marriage, and Natalya realized that he was expecting an answer. She was thrown into confusion. What exactly did she feel toward this lively, energetic young man who was seated beside her in the park, waiting expectantly for her reply? “Was it love—that love for whose sake one is ready to forget everything and everyone and plunge headlong into its abyss? At that time this was the only way I could understand the meaning of true love (I got it out of books, of course). Today, with a lifetime of experience behind me, it is still the only way I know how to understand true love.”7

  Looking into that abyss, she found herself terrified at the prospect of what true love entailed. She was living such a full and varied life, with many different friends and interests. Solzhenitsyn simply could not take the place of everything, even though he already meant a great deal to her: “For me the world did not consist of him alone. Nevertheless, it seemed that something had to be decided, something had to be said at once. I turned away, laid my head on the back of the park bench, and began to cry.”8

  However, it is doubtful whether Solzhenitsyn had reached the position of “true love” himself when he made his proposal to Natalya. At the time, or at least very shortly beforehand, he was seeing another girl, nicknamed “Little Gipsy”, to whom he wrote poems and about whom he later wrote a short story, also called “Little Gipsy”. Forty years later, he still kept photographs of her in his family album. They show a pretty girl with a smiling face; dark, brushed-back hair; and brooding eyes. One of the photographs shows him dancing with her at a student picnic to music from a hand-wound gramophone nestling in the grass. This was in April 1938, well after the date when he is supposed to have fallen in love with Natalya. Another shows him with his arm around her as they pose with others for a group picture. It is difficult to discern exactly how serious was Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with “Little Gipsy”, but the fact that she inspired him to both poetry and prose suggests something deeper than a mere casual acquaintance. Either way, it does illustrate an ambivalence in his feelings toward Natalya that falls far short of true love.

  On July 5, 1938, three days after the failure to receive the desired reply to his proposal, he accompanied Natalya to a concert performance by Tamara Tseretelli, a well-known singer. To her dismay, Natalya felt that his attitude to her had cooled. He was “reserved, overpolite, taciturn”. Distraught, she feared the worst: “Did that mean everything was over? Suddenly my full life lost its attractiveness. If only what used to be could have remained that way forever! I could not bear to give up the way things were before. I wanted everything to stay just as it was. Could this be what love was all about?” Many complications, many questions, but precious few answers loomed in front of the naïve nineteen-year-old. Describing herself as “hitherto always reserved in word and deed”,9 a few days later she wrote Solzhenitsyn a
note to say that she loved him. Far from being given freely, her hand had been forced.

  Following her surrender, Natalya recalled that “everything did remain as I wanted it to—though not altogether the way it was before. Gradually a great tenderness and affection flowed into our relationship. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate after an evening together, more and more painful not to give in to our desires.”10 Once again, one suspects that these memories, written more than thirty years afterward, put a rose-tinted gloss on the reality. Whereas they may have been true for Natalya, it is less likely that Solzhenitsyn’s feelings were quite so intense. During 1938, he was still working on the historical epic, still finding time to write poetry and short stories, and in between was still working diligently at his university studies. In the summer of 1938, he took an extended holiday with Nikolai, cycling through the Ukraine and the Crimea, and at the beginning of 1939, he suggested to Nikolai that they enroll as correspondence students at the MIFLI—the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History, the foremost institution in the country for the study of the humanities. Nikolai accepted with enthusiasm, and, along with their respective university courses, they embarked on serious study of the “Oldsters”, their nickname for the celebrated philosophers of the past. Solzhenitsyn chose to study literature, Nikolai opted for philosophy, and Kirill, the third “Musketeer”, decided on comparative literature. As external students, they would receive their instruction by post, send in their answers to questions also by post, and twice a year, during the winter and summer vacations, were required to travel to Moscow to attend a special course of lectures and be examined on the work of the preceding six months. The content of the courses and the examinations was identical to that for students in residence, and the diploma they received would be of equal academic value. In essence, therefore, the three friends were now embarked on two simultaneous degree courses, one in the sciences and one in the humanities.