Solzhenitsyn
Page 13
A month after Panin’s arrival at Marfino, another prisoner appeared on the scene who, in many respects, was the diametrical and dialectical opposite of Panin. This was Lev Kopelev, who, as a deeply committed Marxist, loyal Party member, and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime, seemed to represent everything that Panin despised. Surprisingly, however, the two men were best of friends as well as best of enemies, having met previously in Butyrki before their respective transfers reunited them at the sharashka.
In spite of their differences, Panin had befriended Kopelev in Butyrki. Unlike Panin, Kopelev was still a relative novice in the camps, still receiving food parcels from his family. To Panin’s great surprise, Kopelev broke a loaf of white bread in two and handed him half. After seven years in the labor camps of the Arctic, Panin had forgotten how white bread tasted. “If Lev had given me only a tiny bit of it, I would have been rapturously happy. But here was halfa loaf! His grand gesture affected me. . . . A generous nature and a nobility of spirit distinguished Lev from ordinary men.”31
In fact, Kopelev’s generous nature and nobility of spirit, both dangerous virtues in communist Russia, had eventually caused his imprisonment. During the latter stages of the war, he had reached the rank of major and, being fluent in German, was responsible for organizing anti-Nazi propaganda behind the enemy lines. His downfall came when he opposed the looting, rape, and terror carried out by the advancing Soviet army under the slogan “Blood for blood, death for death”. Accused of being “soft on the Germans”, he was arrested in the same area of the Prussian front as Solzhenitsyn and narrowly escaped a charge of treason.
Solzhenitsyn’s friendship with Kopelev, like that of Panin, was to be hugely influential and was also immortalized in The First Circle, where Kopelev became the inspiration for the character of Lev Rubin. Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev, reinvented in The First Circle as, respectively, Nerzhin, Sologdin, and Rubin, formed a triumvirate of truth-seekers whose interminable arguments never became quarrels. For Solzhenitsyn, positioned midway between the two dialectically opposed combatants, the experience was pivotal to his own development, enabling him to weigh up each thesis and antithesis carefully before forming a new synthesis of his own from the clash of ideas. The benefits accrued were considerable and came to creative fruition in one of his finest novels, which at its highest level is a hymn of praise to the pursuit of philosophical truth in the midst of tribulation. “Time to sort yourself out”, Sologdin tells Nerzhin, “to understand the part of good and evil in human life. Where could you do this better than in prison?” Nerzhin sighs, caught between a scepticism he is uncomfortable with and a faith beyond his reach. “All we know is that we don’t know anything”, he replies dejectedly. Yet to himself, Nerzhin ponders with gratitude the insight his friendship with this believing Christian has conferred on him: “[I]t was Sologdin who had first prompted him to reflect that prison was not only a curse but also a blessing”.32
“Thank God for prison!” Nerzhin exclaims to Rubin on another occasion. “It has given me the chance to think things out. To understand the nature of happiness we first have to know what it means to eat one’s fill.” He reminds Rubin of the foul prison food they had been given during their interrogation at the Lubyanka:
Can you say you ate it? No. It was like Holy Communion, you took it like the sacraments, like the prana of the yogis. You ate it slowly, from the tip of a wooden spoon, entirely absorbed in the process of eating, in thinking about eating—and it spread through your body like nectar. You quivered from the exquisite feeling you got from those sodden little grains and the muddy slops in which they floated. . . . Can you compare that with the way people wolf down steaks?. . . So miserable wretches like ourselves really do know from bitter experience what it means to eat one’s fill. It’s not a matter of how much you eat, but of the way you eat. It’s the same with happiness—it doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to snatch from life, but only on our attitude towards them.
“You’ve certainly worked it all out”, Rubin replies sceptically, asking with suspicion whether Sologdin had put Nerzhin up to it.33
“Perhaps he has”, Nerzhin concedes. “For you I suppose it’s just idealism and metaphysics. But listen! The happiness that comes from easy victories, from the total fulfilment of desire, from success, from feeling completely gorged—that is suffering! That is spiritual death, a kind of unending moral indigestion . . . people don’t know what they are striving for. They exhaust themselves in the senseless pursuit of material things and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.”34
Looking back over the spiritual wealth he has accrued in the half-century since he first received these revelations, Solzhenitsyn states with simplicity, “I am deeply convinced that God participates in every life.”35 Similarly, in his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf, he hints at the role of providence in his life and work. In 1948, however, Solzhenitsyn did not have this spiritual wealth to draw on. Nor did he know that providence was about to offer further opportunities to make spiritual profit from material loss.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LIFE AND DEATH
The depth of the spiritual and intellectual discussions held between Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev at Marfino contrasted starkly with the vacuity of the books in the prison library. Through the character of Khorobrov in The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn expressed his contempt for the state of Soviet literature in 1948. He poured scorn on one book in particular, a hack novel called Far from Moscow by Vasiley Azhayev, which topped the bestseller lists in 1948. It describes in glowingly romantic terms the heroic feat of building an oil pipeline in Siberia without ever mentioning that the back-breaking work was done by prison labor. Instead, Azhayev’s novel portrayed the workers as “happy young members of the Komsomol, well-fed, well-shod and bursting with enthusiasm”. There was no mention of half-starved skeletal shadows being literally worked to death. Khorobrov had tried reading the novel but found that it “turned his stomach”. He could sense that the author knew the truth. Perhaps he had even been a security officer in one of the Siberian death camps. He knew, but he “was cold-bloodedly lying”.1
Khorobrov had then tried a volume of the selected writings of Galakhov, whose literary reputation was at its height. Again he was disappointed and put the book down without finishing it. “Even Galakhov, who could write so prettily about love, had been stricken with mental paralysis and was going down the drain with the ever-swelling crowd of writers who wrote, if not for children, then for morons who had seen and known nothing of life and were only too delighted to be amused with any rubbish.” Soviet literature was truly in a sorry state, Khorobrov mused.
“Everything that really moves the human heart was absent. . . . There was nothing to read.”2
Pondering the state of Soviet literature during the idle hours on his prison bunk in Marfino, Solzhenitsyn’s own literary vocation began to take shape. With an iron determination, he was resolved to tell the truth—the full, unexpurgated truth—about life in Stalin’s camps. He would, single-handedly if necessary, break the conspiracy of silence.
Even as he pondered dejectedly in his prison cell, several key literary figures in England were speaking out against the evils of communism in the forthright terms that Solzhenitsyn was to use himself in later years. In early June 1948, during a radio broadcast for the BBC, Malcolm Muggeridge criticized the dynamic duo of Fabian socialism, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for their naive eulogizing of the Soviet regime. Muggeridge attributed to Beatrice Webb the statement “Old people take to pets, and mine is the USSR.” With the sardonic humor for which he was famous, Muggeridge added that a tabby or a pekinese “might have been easier to handle and certainly better house-trained”. He concluded his talk by comparing Beatrice Webb to Don Quixote: “[S]he finished up enmeshed in her own self-deception, adulating a regime which bore as little relation to the Fabian Good Life as Dulcinea del Toboso to the Mistress of Don Quixote’s dreams.”3
Having witness
ed the horrors of communism as a correspondent in Moscow before the war, Muggeridge was appalled by the continuing gullibility of Western intellectuals. He could not understand the obstinate support for Stalin of Shaw and the Webbs and was amazed at the sermons in support of the “glorious social experiment taking place in the Soviet Union” given by leading Christians such as the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean of Canterbury”. “As a symbol, from the Communists’ point of view, the Dean is incomparable”, Muggeridge wrote. “All their ridicule of Christianity, all their confidence that its day is done, seems to come true in his very person. Moscow newspapers, in their cartoons, present the Christian Church in just such a guise: gaiters, cross, white locks, and seeming venerability, adorning absurdity.”4
As he witnessed the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe, Muggeridge considered with dismay the Soviet policy of Clement Attlee’s government. Labor policy toward the Soviet Union was based on the belief that Britain would benefit because “Left would speak to Left”. Such a view, Muggeridge claimed, was the epitome of self-delusion: “As far as Stalin was concerned, the Leftism of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues was about as congenial as ginger beer to a congenital drunkard.”5
Such comments, had he been able to read them, would have warmed the prisoner’s heart as he lay in Marfino lamenting the state of affairs in his own country. Doubtless also, his heart would have leapt and his despondency would have been dispersed somewhat, had he known that George Orwell was in the midst of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel which, perhaps, would be more important than any other in turning people away from totalitarianism. Still less could the prisoner have guessed that he was destined as a writer to become more influential even than Orwell in the fight against political dictatorships. Orwell’s classic was published the following year, 1949, complementing Animal Farm, his earlier satirical fable attacking communism, which had been published in 1945.
Years later, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged the importance of both Muggeridge and Orwell in heightening awareness of the dangers of communism in the West. Orwell’s books, he believed, had come as a shock to certain intellectuals: “In the west of course many stubbornly resisted and did not want to understand. Understanding, comprehension, tends to project emotion ahead so that some did not want to know. Bernard Shaw for instance did not want to know, and so Orwell was received with difficulty.”6 In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, although “it was difficult to get hold of”, Nineteen Eighty-Four was greeted with “admiration” by those who managed, illegally, to obtain a copy because it was “precisely accurate”.7 Meanwhile, Muggeridge was worthy of respect because “he was able to travel that difficult path of freeing himself from socialist lies and attaining spiritual heights”.8
Solzhenitsyn, of course, was traveling the same path as Muggeridge but in more difficult circumstances. One particular difficulty, coming to crisis point during his time at Marfino, was the state of his marriage. Again, the autobiographical elements in The First Circle shed some light on his own feelings as he sensed the tension in his precarious relationship with Natalya. In the novel, Gleb Nerzhin mulls over the words of Nadya, his wife, who has written “when you come back. . .” in a letter to him. “But the horror was that there was no going back. To return was impossible. After four years in the army and a ten-year prison sentence, there would probably not be a single cell of his body which was the same. Although the man who came back would have the same surname as her husband, he would be a different person, and she would realize that her one and only, for whom she had waited fourteen lonely years, was not this man at all—he no longer existed.”9
Ironically, the result of Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual development, the fruit of his endless discussions with Panin and Kopelev, was that he was growing ever more divorced from the aspirations he had once nurtured and those his wife continued to nurture in his absence. He was trapped by circumstances. If other married couples sometimes grew apart even when they had lived together for years, what hope had he and Natalya after all the years of enforced separation? Yet however hopeless the situation seemed, he still nurtured the belief that perhaps, in spite of all the odds, they might still survive the experience. Again, Solzhenitsyn uses the character of Gleb Nerzhin to express the emotions he was feeling in 1948:
He could not understand how Nadya could have waited so long for him. How could she move among those bustling, insatiable crowds, constantly feeling men’s eyes on her—and not waver in her love for him? Gleb imagined that if it had been the other way round—if she were imprisoned and he were free—he would not have held out for as much as a year. Before, he would never have believed his frail little wife to be capable of such rocklike constancy and for a long time he had doubted her, but now he had a feeling that Nadya did not find waiting too difficult.10
Then, on December 19, 1948, during a rare prison visit, Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she would have to obtain a formal divorce from him or she would lose her job. She told him that security was being tightened at the laboratory where she worked and that if she declared her marriage to a political prisoner on the forms she was required to fill in, she would certainly not be retained as an employee. Outwardly, Solzhenitsyn put on a brave face and agreed that, under the circumstances, Natalya had no choice but to divorce him. In a letter to Natalya’s mother a couple of weeks later, he wrote that her decision was “correct, the sober thing to do; it should have been done three years ago”.11 Inwardly, however, he was devastated, shaken to the core, and confessed later that after the visit he was left in the darkest despair.12 In reality, Natalya had already filed court papers declaring the dissolution of their marriage a couple of months before she informed her husband of the fact. As a result, she was able to declare him as a former husband on the form she had to fill out for her job, an act made all the easier by her decision to retain her own surname, rather than take Solzhenitsyn’s, at the time of their marriage eight years earlier.
Although Natalya had assured him during the visit that the divorce was a mere formality and that she would still wait for him, he found himself troubled by doubts. If the divorce was not the end of their marriage, surely it was the beginning of the end:
What a pity that he had not made up his mind to kiss her at the very beginning of the visit. Now, that kiss was gone for ever. His wife’s lips had looked different, they seemed to have weakened and forgotten how to kiss. How weary she had been, what a hunted look there had been in her eyes when she had talked of divorce. . . . [S]he would get a divorce in order to avoid the persecution inseparable from being a political prisoner’s wife and having done so, before she knew where she was, she would have married again. Somehow, as he had watched her give a last wave of her ringless hand he had felt a stab of premonition that they were saying goodbye to each other for the last time.13
Throughout 1949, there was a slow but discernible estrangement between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, a creeping paralysis in their relations with each other. Toward the end of the year, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natalya urging her to complete the severance between them and give up writing to him. Her own well-being was more important to him than “this illusion of family relations that long ago ceased to exist”.14 He was aware that she was becoming more and more involved in her busy new life as a lecturer and that in the evenings she was kept fully occupied playing the piano at various concerts. On the one hand, he saw more clearly than ever that he was casting an unwelcome shadow on her life, while on the other, he was developing a stoic calmness about his own fate. He was also beginning to suspect that his prison term would be followed by a period in “perpetual exile”, effectively ending all hope that he and Natalya would ever be reunited. Natalya ignored Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion, and the couple continued to correspond, though not on the same terms as before. As they were supposed to be no longer married, the tone of the correspondence, particularly on Natalya’s part, was more circumspect, dampening any expressions of affection in their letters. Meanwhile, in her professional life, Natalya
continued to prosper, and in March 1950 she was appointed head of the chemistry department at the research institute. In the same month, there was another of the rare visits to Solzhenitsyn. Their meeting, though subdued, was touched by genuine warmth. Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she still loved him and had no intention of leaving him. For his part, Solzhenitsyn confessed that his advice that she end their relationship had come from his head but his heart “had shrunk from fear” that it could possibly come to pass.15 Solzhenitsyn also confessed that he now regretted they had never had children, a reversal of his pre-prison view that children would merely interfere with his literary aspirations. In those days, it was Natalya, not Solzhenitsyn, who had wanted desperately to start a family, but now she was not so sure. In any case, she told him, it was probably too late to think of such things now.
According to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn was very pensive throughout the meeting. He had much to be pensive about. Their relationship, it seemed, was held together by a thread.
A couple of months later, on May 19, 1950, Solzhenitsyn was transferred, along with several other prisoners, from the relative “luxury” of Marfino to an unknown destination. His feelings, and those of his fellow prisoners, were described at the conclusion of The First Circle:
They all knew well enough that what awaited them was incomparably worse than Mavrino. They all knew that when they were in their labour camps they would dream nostalgically of Mavrino as of a golden age. For the moment, however, to bolster their morale they felt a need to curse the special prison so that none of them might actually feel any regrets about it or blame himself for whatever action had led to his transfer. . . . The prospects that awaited them were the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at Oi-Myakoi and the copper mines of Jezkazgan, kicking and shoving, starvation rations, soggy bread, hospital, death. No fate on earth could possibly be worse. Yet they were at peace within themselves. They were as fearless as men are who have lost everything they ever had—a fearlessness hard to attain but enduring once it is reached.16