After yet another short spell at Butyrki, Solzhenitsyn began a long and insufferable journey across the Soviet Union, which took two exhausting months to complete. He eventually arrived at his destination, Ekibastuz labor camp, deep in the semi-arid steppes of Kazakhstan in Soviet central Asia, in the third week of August. The first sight of his new “home” confirmed that Solzhenitsyn was now more securely clasped within the jaws of the Soviet prison system than ever before. The “special camp” in which he found himself was enclosed by double fences of barbed wire, between which Alsatian dogs prowled menacingly, overlooked by armed guards. A strip of ploughed land encircled the perimeter to reveal the footprints of anyone attempting to escape, and sharp-pointed stakes were set in the ground at forty-five-degree angles, designed to impale would-be escapees before they had the opportunity to leave their footprints on the ploughed strip beyond. Thoughts of escape were futile, and, beyond the perimeter, hundreds upon hundreds of miles separated the new arrival from the world he had once known. The thin thread between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, his only remaining link with his old life, was about to snap.
For Natalya, who had lived a life of heroic exile from her husband for almost a decade, it was too much to bear. Until his transfer to the labor camp, she had still clung to the last lingering hopes that some day she and Solzhenitsyn would embrace again in freedom. “But when the first letter came from faraway Ekibastuz, I learned that now we were not to see each other at all. Now there would be no meetings, and letters would arrive only twice a year. Now we were separated not only by time but by distance.”17
The distance separating them went beyond the merely geographical. Gradually, to her dismay—or perhaps, if she was looking for an excuse to escape, to her relief—she sensed another remoteness. In his infrequent letters, he was “expressing moods entirely different from those I had known”. They appeared to be written by a Solzhenitsyn who was completely new to her. Instead of his impetuous and impatient will and his worldly ambition, there was now a “passive waiting . . . resignation . . . submission to destiny”. “Perhaps,” he wrote in one of the rare letters he was permitted to send, “this faith in destiny is the beginning of religiosity? I don’t know. It seems to me I’m still far from having reached the point of believing in a god.” Such a discussion of “god” was itself an example of the remoteness that so alienated Natalya. Neither of them had ever taken religion seriously, both having absorbed the atheism of the Soviet education system, so Natalya viewed this rising religiosity with an element of alarm. “Although the word ‘god’ was still not capitalized,” she wrote, “it nevertheless began to crop up with increasing frequency.” She then quotes a letter of December 1950, in which reference to the divine is indeed frequently made: “Haven’t been ill here yet, thank god, and may god grant that no illness befall me in the future.” Natalya’s memoirs display her continuing irritation with this further example of what she calls one of Solzhenitsyn’s “precious ideas”.18
During 1951, Natalya no longer perceived Solzhenitsyn “as a living person, in flesh and blood. He was an illusion.”19 The end was nigh and was hastened by the arrival of a new admirer in Natalya’s life, the flesh and blood she needed to exorcise Solzhenitsyn’s ghost. This was Vsevolod Somov, a scientific colleague, who began courting her in earnest in the spring, encouraged by Natalya’s mother, who was understandably anxious about her daughter’s uncertain future.
Natalya was still going through the motions of corresponding with Solzhenitsyn, but by July he detected from the tone of her letters that something was amiss. “It seems as though you had to force yourself to begin the letter”, he wrote. “A kind of reticence fettered your tongue, and after a few lines you broke off.”20 Soon she stopped writing altogether, except for a solitary birthday greeting in December wishing him happiness in life.
In the spring of 1952, Natalya decided to restructure her life in its entirety. She moved in with Vsevolod Somov without any formal marriage ceremony, declaring to her friends that they should now be considered man and wife. “I shall neither justify nor blame myself”. Natalya wrote in her memoirs. “After all the years of trials, I could no longer sustain my ‘saintliness’. I began to live a real life.”21
Natalya admitted that she lacked the courage to write to her former husband, and Solzhenitsyn was forced to write repeatedly to Natalya’s Aunt Nina requesting that she clear up the uncertainty. Feeling that she could say nothing without her niece’s consent, she did not reply until, at Natalya’s request, she finally wrote a short note in September 1952: “Natasha has asked me to tell you that you may arrange your life independently of her.”22 Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn was more confused than ever by the vagueness and terseness of the note and wrote to Natalya directly, urging a full explanation of “such an insignificant, enigmatic phrase”.
No matter what you’ve done during the past two years, you will not be guilty in my eyes. I shall not criticize or reproach you either in my thoughts or my words. Neither by my former behaviour nor my luckless life, which has ruined and withered your 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 guilty one is me. I have brought you so little joy, I shall be forever in your debt.23
Natalya responded by informing him of her “marriage” to another man, ending their careworn, sixteen-year relationship with a finality that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s fears.
However, Solzhenitsyn had other fears to contend with during this period of uncertainty. In December 1951, at around the time Natalya had sent him the birthday card wishing him happiness in life, his own luckless life was thrown into further anxiety by the discovery of a small swelling on his right groin. At first he tried to ignore it, but gradually it grew to the size of a lemon and was becoming increasingly painful. On January 30, 1952, he was diagnosed as having cancer and was admitted to the camp hospital. Having survived the first grueling winter at Ekibastuz, the sufferings of which became the inspiration for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he had been struck down with a potentially fatal disease. He had survived all the cruelty and bullying, the starvation rations, the manual labor in icy winds that slashed knife-like across the flat defenseless steppe at forty below zero, only to succumb to something worse. He had passed from the desperation of the labor camp to the desolation of his deathbed, from bare existence on the edge of death to the final triumph of death itself. Such must have been the thoughts whirling endlessly through Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he waited two long weeks in the camp hospital for an operation that the doctors had recommended should be carried out at once. It was eventually performed on February 12, under a local anaesthetic. For a while after the operation, he ran a high fever and was in considerable pain.
But he was soon making a good recovery. Once more he had proved to be a survivor, and once more he would profit from the threat of loss. In facing death, he had gained an immeasurably greater understanding of life. It was the eternal paradox, at the very heart of life and death, which is encapsulated in the Gospels: he who loses his life shall find it.24
As he recovered physically in the camp hospital, his spirits were simultaneously being healed. The spiritual healing could not be seen as readily as the scar on his right groin, but it was as real—more real, in fact. The former atheist had ceased seeing life in terms of dialectical materialism and was beginning to perceive it in the light of theological mysticism. This was the change, accelerated by his arrival at Ekibastuz, that had so alienated his wife. In one of his letters to her, he had described the change at the very core of his being: “Years go by, yes, but if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain.”25 This, which to Solzhenitsyn was the source of his inner strength, was to Natalya a sign of outward weakness. For her, but not for him, resignation was merely the absence of determination, a failure of the will; for her, but not for him, inner peace was really only an abject surrender to circumstanc
e. They were no longer speaking the same language.
At this time, however, Solzhenitsyn’s experience of strength through suffering was not seen in specifically Christian terms. The way of mortification was not necessarily the way of the Cross; or, returning to his letters to Natalya, God was still “god” and not “God”. All this was to change in the days following his operation, as he lay in the surgical ward of the camp hospital. He was hot and feverish, unable to move, but his thoughts were alive and not prone to dissolve into delirium. In his incapacitated condition, he was grateful for the company of Doctor Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who sat beside his bed talking to him. Alone in the ward together in the evening, with the light turned out so as not to hurt the patient’s eyes, Kornfeld told Solzhenitsyn the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. As he listened, Solzhenitsyn was astonished at the conviction of the new convert, the ardor of his words: “And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”26 Thus Kornfeld ended the account of his conversion experience, and Solzhenitsyn shuddered at the mystical knowledge in his voice. Solzhenitsyn must have shuddered again the following morning when he was awoken by the sound of running about and tramping in the corridor. The orderlies were carrying Kornfeld’s body to the operating room. He had been dealt eight blows to the skull with a plasterer’s mallet while he slept, and died on the operating table without regaining consciousness: “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.”27
Many commentators have suggested that this poignant meeting with Kornfeld, on the eve of his death, was pivotal to Solzhenitsyn’s final embrace of Christianity. This may be so, but its importance should not be overstated. The war, the camps, the cancer, had all prepared the ground before they met. By February 1952, Solzhenitsyn was ripe for conversion. After all, had he not just looked death squarely in the face and lived? The story of Kornfeld’s conversion may perhaps have been the final catalyst, but when the light came on Solzhenitsyn’s own road to Damascus, it was at least half-expected. As Solzhenitsyn remarked concerning his fateful meeting with Kornfeld: “[B]y that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts”.28
In fact, he had matured sufficiently to see through and beyond Kornfeld’s “universal law of life”. The truth, Solzhenitsyn reasoned, went deeper than Kornfeld realized. To accept Kornfeld’s thesis at face value, one would have to admit that those who suffer most are in some way more evil than those who are relatively free from pain. Did that mean that he and the millions of other prisoners in Stalin’s camps were more evil than those who had escaped their miserable fate? Did it mean that those who suffered an even worse fate, such as tortuously slow death, were the most evil people of all? Worse, did it mean that those who committed the torture were less evil than their victims? And what of those who prospered rather than suffered? What of the malicious criminals he had met in various camps over the years? What of the camp guards? Worst of all, what of Stalin himself? Did it mean that Stalin was less evil than the millions of innocents he had slaughtered? Surely not. What of the torturers? Solzhenitsyn asked:
Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?. . . And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but . . . in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development . . . holds out hope.29
Having passed beyond Kornfeld’s theory, Solzhenitsyn could look back at it from the other side. From this new angle, he saw that for individuals in their one-to-one relationship with the Creator, the theory actually held true: “But there was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.”30
All alone in the recovery room in the camp hospital from which Kornfeld had gone to his death, Solzhenitsyn passed long sleepless nights, pondering with astonishment his own life and the turns it had taken. For the first time, he seemed fully awake, fully alive, to the sublime realities at the root of his personal experiences. At last, all the doubts, all the shadows, seemed to disappear and everything appeared resolved, crystal clear. Slowly, as the interminable minutes passed, he set down his thoughts in rhymed verses:
When did I so utterly, totally,
Strew the good grain like chaff to the winds
And shun those same temples where all through my youth
I was lulled by Your radiant hymns?
My dazzling book-garnered wisdom proved more than
This arrogant brain could withstand.
The world with its secrets spread open before me
And Fate was but wax in my hands.
Each new surge of blood as it pounded within me
Lured me on with its shimmering hues,
While the faith in my heart, like a building deserted,
Crumbled, soundless, and slipped into ruin.
But picking my way between life and extinction,
Now falling, now scrambling back,
I gaze through new eyes at the life I once followed
And gazing, I shudder with thanks.
It was not my own intellect, not my desiring
That illumined each twist in my path
But the still, even light of a Higher design,
That only with time I could grasp.
And now, as I sip with new-found moderation
From the lifegiving waters—I see
That my faith is restored, O Lord of Creation!
I renounced You, but You stood by me.31
CHAPTER NINE
BEAUTIFUL EXILE
Solzhenitsyn would always consider his close encounter with death at the Ekibastuz labor camp as the third and final of the “most important and defining moments” in his life, following his experiences as a front-line soldier and his subsequent arrest. “When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer, then I was fully cleansed and came back to a deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life. From that time, I was formed essentially into who I am now. After that it was mostly evolution, there were no abrupt turns, no breaking directions.”1 The process, culminating in religious conversion, was summed up succinctly in an interview Solzhenitsyn gave to Georges Suffert in 1976: “First comes the fight for survival, then the discovery of life, then God.”2
One is drawn to parallels between Solzhenitsyn’s experience and those of his great literary predecessor Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who also felt that his life had been transformed by his sufferings as a prisoner in Siberia. “It was a good school”, Dostoyevsky wrote. “It strengthened my faith and awakened my love for those who bear all their suffering with patience. It also strengthened my love for Russia and opened my eyes to the great qualities of the Russian people.” The kinship is further illustrated in Dostoyevsky’s appraisal of the importance of suffering to his development as a writer: “I have been through a lot and will see and experience even more—you shall see how much I will have to write about.”3
Having embraced Christianity, Solzhenitsyn began to sympathize more than ever with those who had been persecuted for their religious faith. At Ekibastuz, he rubbed shoulders with many devout men who had been imprisoned for their beliefs and began to feel a deep affinity with them. The Old Believers, the traditionalist recusants of the Orthodox Church, were no longer the strange anachronism they had seemed to Solzheni
tsyn in his days as a Marxist. Now they were the “eternally persecuted, eternal exiles”, the ones who three centuries earlier had “divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority”.4 He heard with a sense of growing admiration about the struggle of these Old Believers to retain their faith and way of life in the hostile environment of Stalin’s Russia. In The Gulag Archipelago, he recounts the story of the Yaruyevo Old Believers who had fled from the oppression of Soviet collectivization. A whole village had literally uprooted itself and disappeared deep into the remoteness of the Russian wilderness. For twenty years, these uncompromising Christians had lived a self-sufficient existence in the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, living in secluded isolation from the prying eyes of the outside world. The end came in 1950 when the previously unknown settlement was spotted from a plane and its position reported to the authorities. When Soviet troops arrived, they found a small but thriving community that had enjoyed “twenty years of life as free human beings among the wild beasts, instead of twenty years of . . . misery”. They were all wearing homespun garments and homemade knee boots, and they were all “exceptionally sturdy”.5 The whole village was arrested on a charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” and for constituting a hostile organization and found themselves in the same labor camps as Solzhenitsyn.
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