Obviously, this entailed a considerable extra workload, encroaching still further on the time Solzhenitsyn had available to spend with Natalya. She recalled that his studies had become almost obsessive. Even while waiting for a trolleybus, he would flip through a set of small homemade cards on one side of which he had inscribed some historical event or personage and on the other the corresponding dates. Often, before a concert or a film began, she would be called upon to test his memory “using the same endless cards: When did Marcus Aurelius reign? When was the Edict of Karakol promulgated?” Another set of homemade cards neatly recorded Latin words and phrases. On the days when the courting couple was not planning to go to the cinema or to a concert, Solzhenitsyn would insist that they didn’t meet until ten o’clock at night when the reading room closed. He was “more willing to sacrifice sleep than study time for the sake of his beloved”, Natalya complained.11
Under these circumstances, it was scarcely surprising that Natalya now sought some assurance of her lover’s commitment. “To merge our beings or to part—that was how I began to see our situation.” Increasingly frustrated at Solzhenitsyn’s apparent unwillingness to merge his being with hers, she wrote to him suggesting that they take the alternative course. His reply, as uncompromising as ever, could hardly have been what she desired. Although he could not conceive of her as anything but his wife, he feared that marriage might interfere with his main goal in life. For the time being, his priority was to complete his course at the MIFLI as quickly as possible after graduating from university. He reminded her that she too was committed to her studies at the conservatory and that this in itself would make rigorous demands on their time. If they were not careful, “time could be placed in jeopardy” by the relative trivia of family life, which might ruin their hopes and aspirations. After listing everything else that could possibly rob them of “the time to spread our wings”, he named the final “pleasant-unpleasant consequence”—a child.12
In spite of these reservations, and perhaps rashly, given their attitudes, the couple still decided to marry, coming to the decision in early 1939 but agreeing to postpone the event until spring of the following year. “It was”, writes Michael Scammell, “as if marriage, for the young Solzhenitsyn, was almost a chore, an inevitable hurdle that somehow had to be taken in one’s stride, without causing too much distraction, before resuming one’s momentum.”13
In the summer of 1939, at the age of twenty, Solzhenitsyn made his first-ever visit to Moscow to register at the MIFLI. He and Nikolai had already resolved to take advantage of the journey north to explore uncharted territory and, after registering and attending some introductory lectures, they made their way to Kazan on the river Volga. For the sum of 225 roubles, they purchased an ancient baidarka, a type of primitive dug-out with high boarded gunwales peculiar to that river and region, and proceeded in this cumbersome boat along the Volga on a three-week camping trip. They traveled light, sleeping by night on straw in the bottom of the boat, and rowing or drifting downstream by day, stopping occasionally to cook a meal on a camp-fire or to visit places of interest. The bulk of their luggage consisted of books, and they spent the time either reading these or else locked in passionate discussions about the future prospects of communism, to which both of them remained wholeheartedly committed. Solzhenitsyn was also deeply impressed with the beautiful scenery embracing the banks of the Volga, comparing it favorably with the drab and dusty flatness of his native south. This was Russia’s heart, the real Russia, which resonated in Russian literature and folklore.
The primeval beauty of the countryside contrasted starkly with the dilapidated state of many of the villages they passed en route. The Russian village, romanticized in many of the classics the two travelers knew so well, had changed beyond recognition, bearing little resemblance to the healthy, self-sufficient communities described by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Instead, as Solzhenitsyn later described in his autobiographical poem The Way, the two friends found only decay, desolation, and neglect. Loudspeakers blared trite propaganda jingles informing the villagers how good life was under communism, while the village consumer cooperative displayed only row upon row of empty shelves. They had arrived in one village looking for food to augment their basic supply of dry biscuits and potatoes, but there was none to be found, except for a bucketful of apples, which they purchased for a few kopecks. The village, like thousands of others throughout Russia, had been devastated by collectivization, yet the two young communists, returning disappointed to their boat, were too naïve to understand how the reality before their eyes belied their idealistic discussions of Marxist dogma, the futility of their utopian theorizing.
As the idealists drifted downstream, there were other grim reminders that Soviet life was not all that it was purported to be. One evening, while moored by the bank for the night at a place called Krasnaya Glinka, they were suddenly surrounded by a platoon of armed guards and tracker dogs. The guards were searching for a pair of escapees and had evidently mistaken the two terrified students for their quarry. Realizing their error, they hurled a string of curses at them, ordered them to move on, and dashed away in pursuit of their prey. On another occasion, they passed an open launch crammed with prisoners handcuffed to one another, and near Zhiguli, they saw gangs of ragged men with picks and shovels digging foundations for a power station. Later Solzhenitsyn came to understand the significance of these sightings, but only after he had become one of the ragged men himself. For the time being, the bewildering visions were cast aside, exorcised from his untroubled mind.
In Kuibyshev, at the end of their voyage, the friends sold their dug-out for 200 roubles, only twenty-five fewer than they had paid for it. Congratulating themselves on a bargain break, they returned by train to Rostov.
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1939, Solzhenitsyn buried himself once more in his studies. Physics and mathematics vied with literature, philosophy, and history for his attention, and, somewhere in the midst, the courtship with Natalya continued. The spring of 1940 arrived, and, as prearranged, they went ahead with the marriage. The date they chose for the wedding ceremony was April 27, although as a ceremony, it was decidedly unceremonious. It was a warm, windy day, and the couple, now both twenty-one, simply went to the city registry office and registered their marriage as the law dictated. They informed no one of the step they were taking, not even their parents. There was only one moment of drama in the otherwise drab affair, and even that was unintended. During the signing of the register, Natalya dipped the ancient quill into the inkwell with a vigorous flourish. As she withdrew it, she caught the nib on the side, and the pen flew out of her hand, somersaulted in mid-air and landed on Solzhenitsyn’s forehead, depositing a large blot. “It was an omen”, he said, not altogether jokingly, when describing the incident many years later.14
In this inauspicious setting, the young couple was registered as man and wife. The secular solemnizing of their love seemed to have little in common with the sacramental sacrifice and lavish surroundings of the Russian Orthodox weddings their parents had known. Times had changed, and for richer or poorer, better or worse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Natalya Reshetovskaya had decided to face the Soviet future together. Yet the doubts remained; as they left the registry office, Solzhenitsyn gave his legally registered wife a photograph of himself with a niggling question inscribed on the back, intended as a plea for the reassurance that even marriage could not give: “Will you under all circumstances love the man with whom you once united your life?”15
CHAPTER FOUR
MAN OF WAR
A few days after their marriage, the newlyweds were separated by Natalya’s departure for Moscow. She, together with Nikolai and some of the other chemistry students, was to spend the remainder of the academic year at the National Institute for Science and Research. The pair was reunited seven weeks later when Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow on June 18 to take his half-yearly MIFLI examinations. Upon his arrival, Natalya rushed to meet him, and they spent the da
y strolling through the Park of Rest and Culture and wandering into the Neskuchny Gardens. “Of course,” Natalya wrote in her memoirs, “we could not suspect that we would be here again, five years later, and under quite different circumstances. Then we would be separated by barbed wire and would be communicating by sign language, he perched on the third-storey window sill of a house in Kaluzhkaya Plaza, where he was laying parquet floors, and I gazing up at him from these very same Neskuchny Gardens.”1
It was from Moscow that Solzhenitsyn finally wrote to his mother, informing her of the marriage. She relayed the news to Solzhenitsyn’s two aunts, Irina and Maria, who were shocked at the secrecy surrounding the wedding and, since it had not taken place in church, flatly refused to recognize its validity. Many years later, in an interview with Stern magazine in 1971, the aging Irina still referred to Natalya dismissively as a “mistress”. Their attitude must have served to alienate Solzhenitsyn still further from his reactionary relatives.
At the end of July, their respective studies completed, the couple rented a modest cabin in the district of Tarusa, a popular country resort about seventy miles south of Moscow. Here, on the very edge of a forest, they spent their honeymoon. In spite of the idyllic surroundings, they spent little time exploring the local terrain. Instead, they preferred to stretch out comfortably in the shade of the birch trees, while Solzhenitsyn read aloud to his wife from Sergei Esenin’s poems or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Then, of course, there was the mandatory studying, sometimes together but often separately. Solzhenitsyn was already preparing for the following term’s work at the MIFLI, leaving his wife to “fill up the gaps” in her own education.2
One of Solzhenitsyn’s principal preoccupations at the time was history, especially the reforms of Peter the Great. Surprisingly perhaps, considering his Marxist education, he found himself vehemently opposed to the “progress” engendered by Peter’s reforms. In his opposition to the former tsar, Solzhenitsyn was aware that he was out of step with the official Party line, which fully endorsed Peter’s “progressive” policies. He admitted this in his autobiographical poem The Way, when he confessed that his antipathy to Peter meant that “I’m a heretic.”3 Perhaps his “heretical” antipathy was a lasting legacy of his religious childhood; lovers of the old Russian way of life and the traditional forms of the Russian church, such as his own mother and his Aunt Irina, had never forgiven Peter for his brutal persecution of traditionalists.
Apart from this one minor heresy, Solzhenitsyn still prided himself on his orthodox Marxism. As Michael Scammell remarks, Solzhenitsyn “must be one of the few bridegrooms in history to have taken Das Kapital on his honeymoon (and to have read it)”.4 Awaking in the morning, Natalya would find the space in the bed beside her empty and would discover her husband on the veranda, his head buried in an annotated copy of Marx’s masterpiece. In The Way, Solzhenitsyn evoked his bride’s understandable perplexity at his neglect of her, but explained that he was powerless to resist Marx’s advances. He was a man possessed. He and his friends were “apostles . . . Bolsheviks. . . . And I? I believe to the marrow of my bones. I suffer no doubts, no hesitations—life is crystal clear to me.”5
Solzhenitsyn and Natalya stayed longer in Tarusa than they had originally intended, extending their honeymoon into the early autumn, when the forest was changing color. The beauty of their holiday hideaway had served to confirm Solzhenitsyn’s preference for the landscapes of central Russia over the drabness of the south, first awoken by the journey down the Volga the previous summer. He now felt that he had been born in the wrong place, but had found himself.
On the rail journey back to Rostov, he was confronted with an uncomfortable reminder of the less savory parts of the previous year’s trip down the Volga. Their train halted in a siding next to another that looked somehow odd. It was neither a passenger train like theirs nor a freight train. Peering through the window, Solzhenitsyn caught a glimpse of compartments crowded with shaven-headed troglodytes who looked as if they had come from a different planet. With deep-sunken eyes, distorted faces, and sub-human features, the alien creatures gazed back at him. The twenty-one-year-old looked away. A minute or so later, the train started again, and the aliens disappeared as silently as they had emerged. Little did the naive newlywed know it, but the trainload of convicts being transported from one labor camp to another were the ghosts of his own future.
Neither did he realize that the grim reality he had glimpsed so fleetingly from a train in the wilderness was also a lot closer to home, if only he had eyes to see. One fellow student called Tanya, with whom he had studied side by side at Rostov University for five years, kept hidden the tragedy in her own life at the time. Only fifty years later, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Rostov after his years in exile, did she reveal it to him. He had asked her nostalgically whether she remembered a particular class photograph being taken. “How could I not remember?” the old woman replied. “Just twenty days later, my father was arrested; and three days after that, my uncle.”6
The grim reality confronting many of his colleagues had no place in Solzhenitsyn’s own cosseted life during the autumn of 1940. As he began his last year at university, he found himself considerably better off than in previous years and much more prosperous than the vast majority of his fellow students. This was due to his being awarded one of the newly instituted Stalin scholarships for outstanding achievement. Only three of these were granted to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and only four more in the entire university. They carried a stipend two and a halftimes greater than the usual grant and were awarded not only for academic performance but also for social and political activism in the Komsomol. Solzhenitsyn qualified on both counts. He had straight 5s and continued to excel in his studies, but he was also a valued and trusted member of the Komsomol. He was, in fact, a model Soviet citizen.
His most notable achievement as a true son of the Revolution during his last year at university was his editorship of the students’ newspaper, which he transformed from a dull unread propaganda sheet, published only twice a year, into a vibrant and widely read weekly journal. This latest success ensured him a place of honor in the local party Komsomol, assuring him an easy transition to full Party membership, with all the privileges that went with it. In every respect, he appeared to be on the threshold of a brilliant career.
The improved financial situation meant that Solzhenitsyn and Natalya could afford to take up residence on their own, away from their families. They found a room on Chekhov Lane, which Natalya described as “small but comfortable, even though we had to put up with a cantankerous landlady”.7 Their new home was conveniently placed with respect to their families and, crucially, to Solzhenitsyn’s two favorite reading rooms. Natalya remembered that their first year of married life together, which was also destined to be their last for many years, was “busy beyond measure”. After an early breakfast, they would both depart for the university, or, if there were no classes, Solzhenitsyn would leave for the library while Natalya studied at home. They would meet for lunch at three o’clock at the home of one of Natalya’s relatives. At Solzhenitsyn’s insistence, lunch was served punctually so that he would not lose any study time, but if for any reason it was delayed, he would remove the homemade cards from his pocket and get his wife to test him. Then, lunch consumed, he would hurry off back to the library, where he would often stay until it closed at ten o’clock. Returning home, he frequently continued to study until two o’clock in the morning before finally collapsing into bed.
Only on Sundays did the couple allow themselves to lie in before going to the home of Solzhenitsyn’s mother for lunch. “She put all her talents, all her love into serving us the most delicious meals possible”, wrote Natalya. “The energy, the deftness, the speed with which she did everything, despite her illness (she had active tuberculosis), were amazing. Her speech was rapid-fire, just like her son’s, only interrupted by brief coughing spells; and she had the same mobile features.”8
Somewhere
amidst the hectic schedule of his life, Solzhenitsyn managed to continue with his writing. During this period, he wrote a politically correct tale entitled “Mission Abroad”, completed in February 1941, whose hero was a Soviet diplomat cunningly outwitting bourgeois statesmen in Western Europe. He continued to write poetry, which found its way into the exercise books containing his Juvenile Verse. The fruits of his studies at the MIFLI found their way into another exercise book entitled Remarks on Dialectical Materialism and Art, and all the while he continued to plan his historical epic depicting the glorious triumph of the Revolution.
In spring 1941, he gained a first-class degree in mathematics and physics. In June, he traveled to Moscow to take his second-year examinations at the MIFLI, nurturing a desire to move permanently to Russia’s capital, where he imagined all sorts of opportunities would present themselves. Events in the world at large, however, were destined to lay waste the young man’s schemes. On June 22, 1941, the very day he arrived in Moscow, war was declared between the Soviet Union and Germany. Hitler, too, nurtured a desire for the Russian capital and had launched the might of the Third Reich against his communist foe, unleashing the Wehrmacht across the Soviet border along a two-thousand-mile front.
“What an appalling moment in time this is!” wrote Alan Clark in Barbarossa. “The head-on crash of the two greatest armies, the two most absolute systems, in the world. No battle in history compares with it. Not even that first ponderous heave of August 1914, when all the railway engines in Europe sped the mobilization. . . . In terms of numbers of men, weight of ammunition, length of front, the desperate crescendo of the fighting, there will never be another day like 22nd June, 1941.”9
Solzhenitsyn Page 6