Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  In 1946, four years before the Yaruyevo Old Believers were discovered, another group of Old Believers was arrested in a forgotten monastery somewhere in the backwoods. They were then floated on rafts down the Yenisei River bound for the camps. “Prisoners still, and still indomitable—the same under Stalin as they had been under Peter!—they jumped from the rafts into the waters of the Yenisei, where our Tommy-gunners finished them off.”6

  Solzhenitsyn heard these stories and consigned them carefully to memory. He was determined that one day the world should know the full truth, the ugly secrets lurking in the murky depths of Soviet society. In order to do this, he had his own secrets to keep. He was now writing more than ever before, scrawling lines of verse on scraps of paper, which were burnt as soon as he had memorized the words. If his thoughts were discovered on paper, he would certainly receive a further sentence of imprisonment, and he was determined not to make the same naive mistakes that had led to his initial arrest more than seven years earlier. At Ekibastuz, his writing became almost obsessive, pressing on his consciousness at all hours of the day. “In the interval between two barrowloads of mortar I would put my bit of paper on the bricks and (without letting my neighbours see what I was doing) write down with a pencil stub the verses which had rushed into my head while I was slapping on the last hodful.” According to his own account of this period of intensive writing at Ekibastuz in 1952, he lived in a dream for much of the time and sat in the mess hall over the ritual gruel “deaf to those around me—feeling my way about my verses and trimming them to fit like bricks in a wall”.7

  I realized that I was not the only one, that I was party to a great secret, a secret maturing in other lonely breasts like mine on the scattered islands of the Archipelago, to reveal itself in years to come, perhaps when we were dead, and to merge into the Russian literature of the future. . . .

  How many of us were there? Many more, I think, than have come to the surface in the intervening years. Not all of them were to survive. Some buried manuscripts in bottles, without telling anyone where. Some put their work in careless or, on the contrary, in excessively cautious hands for safekeeping. Some could not write their work down in time.

  Even on the isle of Ekibastuz, could we really get to know each other? encourage each other? support each other? Like wolves, we hid from everyone, and that meant from each other, too. Yet even so I was to discover a few others in Ekibastuz.8

  The most important of Solzhenitsyn’s fellow literary conspirators at Ekibastuz was the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin. Solzhenitsyn had met him initially through their mutual friendship with the Baptist prisoners at the camp. He was over forty, about ten years Solzhenitsyn’s senior, and Solzhenitsyn described him as “meek and gentle with everyone, but reserved”. During their long conversations, strolling round the camp on their Sundays off, the younger prisoner discovered in the older man a kindred spirit. Silin had been a homeless child, brought up as an atheist in a children’s home, but had come across some religious books in a German prisoner-of-war camp and been totally carried away by them. From that time, he had become not only a fervent believer but also a gifted philosopher and theologian. Since he had spent the entire period since his conversion in prisons of one sort or another, he had never had the benefit of further spiritual reading. Instead, he gleaned the truth through his own perceptions, expressed in verse. According to Solzhenitsyn, Silin knew some twenty thousand lines of verse by heart at the time they met, reciting many of them to his younger fellow poet. Like Solzhenitsyn, Silin looked upon his verse as “a way of remembering and of transmitting thoughts”.9

  For The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gleaned a few precious memories of their time together in the camp. He recalled Silin bending over one of the rare blades of grass growing in the barren camp. “How beautiful are the grasses of the earth”, he exclaimed. “But even these the Creator has given to man for a carpet under his feet. How much more beautiful, then, must we be than they!” Silin’s theological mysticism was distinctly unpuritanical, and he asserted to Solzhenitsyn that “even earthly, carnal love is a manifestation of a lofty aspiration to Union”. On another occasion, he had answered the refusal of atheists to believe that spirit could beget matter: “Why don’t they ask themselves how crude matter could beget spirit? That way round, it would surely be a miracle. Yes, a still greater miracle!” Yet it was in his belief in the necessity of suffering that he had most in common with Solzhenitsyn. Silin declared that the soul must suffer before it was able to know the “perfect bliss of paradise”, and that “by grief alone is love perfected”. This law, though harsh, was the only way that weak men could “win eternal peace”.10

  Solzhenitsyn wrote of Silin that this “doomed and exhausted slave, with four number patches on his clothes . . . had more in his heart to say to living human beings than the whole tribe of hacks firmly established in journals, in publishing houses, in radio—and of no use to anyone except themselves”.11

  If the twenty thousand lines of poetry Silin had memorized was an awesome achievement, Solzhenitsyn’s own powers of retention were scarcely less remarkable. By the time he was released, he had consigned twelve thousand lines of his own work to memory. He had been helped in this by the use of a rosary, which had been made for him by some Catholic Lithuanian prisoners. Each bead, made of small pieces of wet bread, represented a line of verse, and Solzhenitsyn could often be seen fingering the beads, apparently in prayer, but actually memorizing his poetry.

  Most of the poetry Solzhenitsyn wrote at Ekibastuz, collectively entitled The Way, was broadly autobiographical. He later rejected much of it as unworthy of publication, but Prussian Nights, the epic poem based on his experiences in Prussia in January 1945, was an exception, being born from The Way but taking on a full and vibrant life of its own. Also composed at Ekibastuz were A Feast of Conquerors (published in English in 1981 under the title Victory Celebrations), which was a play written entirely in rhymed verse, and a longer play entitled Prisoners.

  Many critics have highlighted the flaws in these plays, and Solzhenitsyn concedes that “they are inferior to my other work in the sense that I was using them for the expression of ideas and I was not as demanding perhaps in terms of dramaturgical requirements.”12

  In A Feast of Conquerors, the idea Solzhenitsyn was seeking to convey found expression in the contrasting characters of Gridnev and Galina. In many respects, these two characters are an incarnation of the warring spirits at the core of all Solzhenitsyn’s art. Gridnev takes the path of least resistance, becoming utterly corrupted by his desire to find the most comfortable route through life; Galina, on the other hand, takes the path of sacrifice, embodying the alternative vision of nobility and heroism in the face of adversity, the way of the Cross. Yet the eternal verities incarnated in these two characters are also rooted in a specific historical context. A Feast of Conquerors is set in an East Prussian country house and depicts a scene similar to one experienced by Solzhenitsyn himself during the Soviet advance in January 1945. Like Prussian Nights, it is infused with autobiographical detail. For this reason, Solzhenitsyn insists that the conflict between Galina and Gridnev should be seen on several different levels, physical as well as metaphysical:

  This conflict represents not even their personal tragedy but the tragedy of the Russian people as a whole under the oppression of the communists, the Bolsheviks. The people wanted to be free but it was impossible until the war. They believed that the Germans were bringing freedom to us and looked toward the Germans believing that they would help, or at least would not hinder, the liberation from communism. But the world powers were already aligned in such a way that the Allies—the US, the UK—did not want to tolerate any more fighting against the communists because the communists were their allies. And so these people were trapped between the Russian Soviets, the Germans, and the Americans and English, all of whom considered them as traitors. This affected many millions. Millions. Several millions retreated with the Germans.13


  Prisoners shares many of the themes which were at the center of A Feast of Conquerors. The moral dilemma of those fighting in the anti-communist Russian Liberation Army is addressed. Having signed up with the Nazi devil, these “liberators” were swallowed up by the deep red sea of the Soviet advance. The other leitmotif in Prisoners resonant of A Feast of Conquerors is that depicting the triumph of unconquerable spirit over physical adversity. Throughout both plays, there is a recurrent anger at the injustice at the heart of the Soviet regime, an anger that became the energy, the motive force, behind Solzhenitsyn’s future work. The quiet prisoner saying his “prayers” with the crude rosary at Ekibastuz was preparing a literary time bomb, primed to explode at an unknown date in the future.

  As the months of 1952 passed slowly away, another future date was pressing ever more insistently on Solzhenitsyn’s mind: the date of his release. Officially, his sentence was to end on February 9, 1953, and as the golden day approached, he dreamed of the exile that awaited him. He knew that he would not be allowed to return to normal life and that, in all probability, perpetual exile was all he could expect, but, after the ordeal of the camps, even “exile” sounded like Eden or Paradise to his freedom-starved heart. “The dream of exile burns like a secret light in the prisoner’s mind”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “a flickering iridescent mirage, and the wasted breasts of prisoners on their dark bunks heave in sighs of longing: ‘If only they would sentence me to exile!’ ”14 Solzhenitsyn was not immune to such longing. As long ago as the infernal clay-pits at New Jerusalem, which had killed his friend Boris Gammerov, he had listened to the cocks crowing in the nearby village and had dreamed of exile.

  His dream came true on February 13, 1953, when, four days after the official end of his sentence, he was led out of the main camp gates with a group of other released prisoners and marched under armed guard to the railway station. Almost exactly a year earlier, he had been operated on for cancer, yet now, fit and well, he was finally on the verge of freedom. Perhaps, at long last, his luckless life was about to change for the better. There followed one of the customary interminable journeys to an unknown destination and an unknown future. Several days later, Solzhenitsyn and the other prisoners arrived in Dzhambul, midway between Alma-Ata and Tashkent in Kazakhstan, where they were informed that they were being exiled “in perpetuity” to the district of Kok-Terek, on the southern fringe of Kazakhstan’s vast desert of Bet-Pak-Dala. He finally arrived at his new home on the edge of the arid wastelands of Kazakhstan on March 3, 1953, eighteen days after leaving Ekibastuz. His eight-year sentence of imprisonment had ended; his perpetual sentence of exile had begun.

  For the first few days of his new life, Solzhenitsyn was drunk with freedom. On the first night, he was unable to sleep and walked and walked in the moonlight. “The donkeys sing their song. The camels sing. Every fibre in me sings: I am free! I am free!” In the end, overtaken by tiredness, he spread out on a bed of hay in a barn, listening to the horses a few yards away, standing at their mangers munching hay. He could imagine “no sweeter, no more friendly sound” on this his first night of freedom: “Champ away, you mild, inoffensive creatures!” The following day he managed to find private lodgings in a tiny hut, with a single window and a roof so low that it was impossible to stand upright. The floor was earthen, but he managed to obtain two wooden boxes, which served as a makeshift bed. He didn’t own the hut and even the boxes were borrowed, but he felt richer than he had ever been in his life. “What more could I desire?”15

  Then, on March 6, as he woke on his third morning of freedom, he heard the news that surpassed all his desires. His elderly landlady, herself an exile from Novgorod, whispered that he should go to the town square and listen to the announcements on the radio. She dared not repeat the news she had just heard. Intrigued, he made his way to the square where a crowd of about two hundred people had gathered round the loudspeaker. For the most part, the crowd was clearly grief-stricken. Even before he heard the news confirmed by the announcer on the radio, he had guessed what had happened. Stalin was dead.

  Throughout the Soviet Union, there was a phenomenal outpouring of largely genuine grief. In the days that followed, countless mourners would be crushed to death outside the House of Unions, where the body of the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” lay in state, in the very Columned Hall where he had ordered the infamous show trials in the 1930s that had consigned so many thousands of his countrymen to the labor camps.

  In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn allowed himselfthe liberty of imagining Stalin’s last days, locked up in his room, distrustful of everyone he knew, fearing assassination. Stalin, the great dictator who had exiled millions of Russians to the far-flung corners of the Soviet empire, was himself an exile in his own palace, an exile of his own paranoia. The irony was not lost on the happy exile in Kok-Terek.

  They were all like that, in all the ministries—every one of them was trying to hoodwink their Leader. How could he possibly trust them. He had no choice but to work at nights.

  He suddenly staggered into a chair. . . . He felt as though some weight was forcing the left half of his head downwards. He lost hold of his train of thought and stared with blurred gaze round the room, unable to make out whether the walls were near or far.

  He was an old man without any friends. Nobody loved him, he believed in nothing and he wanted nothing. He no longer even had any need of his daughter, once his favourite but now only admitted on rare holidays. Helpless fear overcame him as he sensed the dwindling memory, the failing mind. Loneliness crept over him like a paralysis.

  Death had already laid its hand on him, but he would not believe it.16

  Needless to say, Solzhenitsyn’s feelings as he heard the news of Stalin’s death were anything but grief-stricken:

  This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to. . . . The moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox communists) had prayed! He’s dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died! What unconcealed rejoicing there would be back home in the Special Camp! But where I was, Russian girls, schoolteachers, stood sobbing their hearts out. . . . They had lost a beloved parent. . . . I could have howled with joy there by the loudspeaker; I could even have danced a wild jig! But alas, the rivers of history flow slowly. My face, trained to meet all occasions, assumed a frown of mournful attention. For the present I must pretend, go on pretending as before.17

  He returned to his hut to spend the remainder of the day writing a poem, “The Fifth of March”, to commemorate the occasion. Certainly his life in exile had begun magnificently.

  In April, Solzhenitsyn was finally accepted as a teacher of maths and physics in a local school, having been rejected when he had initially applied a month earlier. He was overjoyed. “Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? This was really the day of my release, the restoration of my citizenship.”18

  At last, or so it must have seemed as he began life as a village schoolteacher, Solzhenitsyn’s future could be faced with optimism. His circumstances, which had already improved beyond measure since the misery of the camps, could only get better. He was still only thirty-four years old. He had many good years of life ahead of him. Then, like a death knell tolling his doom across the barren steppe, the specter of his cancer returned. As the year rolled on, the deadly disease tormented him more and more, “as though it was in league with my jailers”.19 Intermittently, but with ever greater frequency, he was struck by excruciating pains in the abdominal area. During the day, he could barely stand up in front of his class, and at night he slept very little. He had no appetite for food and was visibly weakening with every week that passed. At first, he had not wanted to believe that the cause of his illness was a return of the cancer that had nearly claimed his life in Ekibastuz. His hopes were raised, albeit falsely, by the inability of the medical authorities in Kok-Terek to diagnose his condition. They thought it might be an ulcer, or perhaps gastritis. Yet as the year dr
ew to a close, Solzhenitsyn began to fear the worst. Perhaps his own life was also drawing to a close. Hurriedly, he wrote down all that he had previously written in the camp and stored in his memory, and all that he had composed in exile since his release, and buried it in the ground in the forlorn hope that someone, some day, might dig it up by accident and read it.

  Since his condition continued to baffle the local doctors, it was decided that he needed the attention of specialists. He was granted permission to leave for Dzhambul, the administrative center of the region, for further tests on his abdomen. An X-ray revealed exactly what Solzhenitsyn had feared. The cause of his pain was not an ulcer, but a tumor the size of a big fist, which had grown from the back wall of the abdominal cavity. It was entirely possible, he was informed, that the tumor was malignant.

  Solzhenitsyn returned to Kok-Terek in early December, knowing he would have to report to the Oncological Health Center in Tashkent a few weeks later. Once again, he was staring death in the face, gaining a few priceless morsels of consolation from the belief that death would not be the end of life. Yet even his faith could not totally eclipse the bitterness he felt at what appeared to be the futility of his life. “I remember clearly that night before I left for Tashkent, the last night of 1953: it seemed as though for me life, and literature, was ending right there. I felt cheated.”20

  Solzhenitsyn was admitted to Ward 13 of the Tashkent Medical Institute on January 4, 1954. The following day, a drawing was made on his stomach, dividing it into four squares, and each square was irradiated in turn. Over the next month and a half, he had fifty-five sessions of radiotherapy, during which the tumor was bombarded with 12,000 roentgens of radiation.

  Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in the Tashkent Medical Institute during January and February 1954 became the background to, and the inspiration for, his novel Cancer Ward. This novel, like The First Circle and so much of his other work, is infused throughout with autobiographical fragments. In the character of Kostoglotov, the most autobiographically sketched of the characters in Cancer Ward, there is much to be gleaned about Solzhenitsyn’s own feelings as a cancer patient. Kostoglotov tells Zoya, one of the nurses, that during the last month he hasn’t been able to lie down, sit down, or stand without it hurting and has been sleeping only a few minutes a day. As a result he has done plenty of thinking: