Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death—and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you.21

  This transcendental approach to life’s ultimate realities is contrasted with the inability of other characters in the novel to come to terms with their terminal illness. For these people, corrupted by the transient material comforts of life, the prospect of death is unthinkable, unmentionable. “Modern man is helpless when confronted with death”, another character muses; “he has no weapon to meet it with.”22 The angst at the very core of modern man is analyzed in the relationships of the various cancer patients in the novel, not only with each other but with themselves as they struggle to deal with the abyss lying before them. In one particularly poignant passage, Kostoglotov, in the midst of an argument on the validity of Marxism, suddenly perceives the pettiness and futility of politics in the face of higher truths: “Was it weariness or illness that gave him this urge to yawn? Or was it because these arguments, counter-arguments, technical terms, bitter, angry glances suddenly seemed so much squelching in a swamp? None of this was to be compared with the disease that afflicted them or with death, which loomed before them. He yearned for the touch of something different, something pure and unshakable. But where he would find that Oleg had no idea.”23

  This passage from Cancer Ward encapsulates much of Solzhenitsyn’s central message to the modern world—the ultimate subsistence of politics within a higher moral and ultimately religious truth; the transcendent nature of pain and death and the immensity of both in relation to transient circumstantial comforts; and, perhaps most important of all, the inarticulate yearning of agnostic man for the sublime depths of theological truth, a return to religious faith. Commenting on this particular passage, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was attempting to grapple with the way people struggled with eternal verities in the absence of religion: “I am describing Soviet people who are devoid of religion. Therefore there’s a feeling for some sort of other form, some ersatz. They’re groping, they’re trying to clamber upwards.”24

  There were, however, other motivations behind the writing of Cancer Ward. One was the desire to explore “the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual aspects of love”.

  Then we have the theme of life and death. And it is not by accident that the teaching of Bacon on idols is resurrected to show that several centuries back people used to worship the same idols. And of course there were the undercurrents of the current political events of spring 1955. I was depicting them. I cannot do without doing that, precisely what was going on in those days, during those weeks. It was the first beginnings, hints of freedom from Stalin’s claw. And this political theme is also linked with the image at the end of the book with the mangled monkey, where they threw the tobacco in the monkey’s eyes, a metaphor for what was done to the people.25

  Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the cancer ward in Tashkent in mid-March. When he arrived two months earlier, he had been given only a one-in-three chance of survival. He had responded well to treatment and had made a remarkable recovery. The tumor had shrunk to only half its previous size. But he was still not out of danger and was told that he would have to return in June for a further course of treatment.

  Before returning to exile at Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to wander round the city and was astonished to find a church that was actually open. For the first time since attending requiem Mass as a child with his mother, he entered a real, living church and gave thanks for having survived to see another spring.

  In June, he returned to Tashkent, where radiotherapy was resumed. As he lay once more in the cancer ward, with thoughts of the future novel floating in his head, the horrors of the Gulag he had left less than eighteen months earlier were carrying on without him. During that same June, at Kengir Camp in Kazakhstan, eight thousand political prisoners had staged a mutiny and taken over the camp. Religious services were held, and men and women who had previously corresponded secretly from their separate stockades met and consummated their love. Then, on June 25, the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everyone in their way. One prisoner remembered the corner of a hut collapsing “as if in a nightmare”, and the tank rolling over the wreckage and over living bodies. Prisoners were bayoneted in cold blood; women, desperately trying to shield their men from the cold steel, were bayoneted first. One young couple, unprepared to be separated again so soon after they had been united, threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms, choosing to die together rather than live apart. By the time the rebellion was crushed, some three hundred prisoners had been killed.26

  Almost simultaneously, Jean-Paul Sartre, in an act of willful ignorance reminiscent of that shown by Wells, Shaw, and the Webbs in the thirties, was eulogizing the Soviet regime in the pages of Liberation. Having recently visited the Soviet Union, he assured his interviewer that “Soviet citizens criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do. There is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.”27 Furthermore, Sartre assured Liberation’s readers, the only reason that Soviet citizens did not travel abroad was not that they were in any way prevented from doing so but that they had no desire to leave their marvelous country.

  Meanwhile, in his marvelous country, Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the hospital, totally cured of the cancer, and returned to the tiny village on the edge of the desert where he was condemned to live in perpetuity, prevented even from traveling to other parts of the Soviet Union, let alone abroad.

  Back in Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn threw himself into his writing. He wrote another play, initially called The Republic of Labor but eventually published under the title The Love Girl and the Innocent, and in the following year, 1955, he began work on his first novel. This was The First Circle, based on his experiences at the Marfino sharashka. He must have been helped in this by a renewal of his acquaintance with Dimitri Panin and Lev Kopelev, his old intellectual sparring partners at Marfino. Of course, they couldn’t possibly meet in the flesh—Panin, like Solzhenitsyn, was still in exile, while Kopelev was living in Moscow—but, after Panin’s wife had succeeded in tracking her husband’s friends down, they began to correspond regularly.

  In many respects, Solzhenitsyn later looked on these months in Kok-Terek as among the happiest in his life. In The Gulag Archipelago, he referred to the period as “my two years of truly Beautiful Exile”, evoking with delight the contentment that reigned within him: “[A]ll my days were lived in a state of constant blissfully heightened awareness, and I felt no constraint on my freedom. At school I could give as many lessons as I wanted, in both shifts—and every lesson brought a throbbing happiness, never weariness or boredom. And every day I had a little time left for writing—and there was never any need for me to attune my thoughts: as soon as I sat down the lines raced from under my pen.”28 Regular employment as a schoolteacher had improved his financial circumstances. He bought a little clay house and a firm table to write on but still eschewed other material comforts, choosing to continue sleeping on the same bare wooden boxes. He did, however, invest in a short-wave radio set, listening surreptitiously for any forbidden news from the West, holding his ear close to the speaker in an effort to make out what he could through “the cascading crash of jamming”. Yet for all his efforts, he heard little to inspire him: “We were so worn out by decades of lying nonsense, we yearned for any scrap of truth, however tattered—and yet this work was not worth the time I wasted on it: the infantile West had no riches of wisdom or courage to bestow on those of us who were nurtured by the Archipelago.”29

  As with his time in the Archipelago, So
lzhenitsyn “was fully conscious that exile was a blessing”, cherishing the “purer vision” it gave. He was utterly content and fully resigned to living in Kok-Terek if not in perpetuity, then at least for twenty years or so. Events in the Soviet Union were on the move, however, even if the isolated exile was not fully aware of the changes afoot. Soon, much sooner than he expected, he would be catapulted back into the center of the storm.

  Following Stalin’s death, a power struggle had ensued within the Soviet leadership as warring factions fought for supremacy. The first victim was Lavrenty Beria, the hated chief of the secret police, who was arrested and executed in July 1953. Georgi Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin in 1953, was forced from office in February 1955 and in July 1957 was accused with Molotov and Kaganovich of setting up an “anti-party group”. In one of the many ironies of fate in the twisted history of the Soviet Union, Malenkov was dismissed from all senior party positions and exiled to Kazakhstan as manager of a hydroelectric plant. Molotov, meanwhile, was exiled to Outer Mongolia, where he served as ambassador until 1960. Kaganovich would soon disappear without trace but was last heard of in August 1957, in “a position of considerable responsibility” in a Siberian cement works. One doubts whether these erstwhile heroes of the Soviet Union would have agreed with Solzhenitsyn that exile could be a blessing.

  The man who emerged triumphant from this bout of internecine feuding and bloodletting was Nikita Khrushchev, who, in 1956, broke the taboo by giving a “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress in which Stalin was criticized openly for the first time. Khrushchev officially implicated the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” in Kirov’s murder and held him responsible for the sufferings of millions during the Terror. The unspeakable had been uttered, and many delegates to the Congress were said to have been traumatized by the revelations—not that Khrushchev was himself blameless. During the Terror, he had been so ruthless in the execution of Stalin’s orders that he had earned the nickname “Butcher of the Ukraine”. Indeed, in the very year in which he made the Secret Speech, he earned another nickname as the “Butcher of Budapest”, ordering Soviet tanks into Hungary to put down brutally the anti-communist uprising there. Later he was to oversee the building of the Berlin Wall and take the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nonetheless, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization came as a great relief to millions of persecuted Soviet citizens. During 1956, thousands of political prisoners were rehabilitated and returned from the camps or from exile, and Solzhenitsyn was destined to be one tiny but scarcely insignificant drop in that returning ocean.

  Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation came following a session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1956. During the course of the session, the Chief Military Prosecutor called for all charges against Solzhenitsyn to be dropped on the grounds that there was an “absence of proof of a crime”. The reasons given were as follows:

  It is clear from the evidence in this case that Solzhenitsyn, in his diary and letters to a friend, N. D. Vitkevich, although speaking of the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, the progressiveness of the socialist revolution in our country and the inevitability of its victory throughout the world, also spoke out against the personality of Stalin and wrote of the artistic and ideological shortcomings of the works of many Soviet authors and the air of unreality that pervades many of them. He also wrote that our works of art fail to give readers of the bourgeois world a sufficiently comprehensive and versatile explanation of the inevitability of the victory of the Soviet army and people, and that our literary works are no match for the adroitly fashioned slanders of the bourgeois world against our country.

  “These statements by Solzhenitsyn”, the Chief Military Prosecutor asserted, “do not constitute proof of a crime.”30

  The Collegium then questioned a number of people, including Natalya, to whom Solzhenitsyn was alleged to have made anti-Soviet allegations, all of whom “characterized Solzhenitsyn as a Soviet patriot and denied that he had conducted anti-Soviet conversations”. The Collegium also examined Solzhenitsyn’s military record and a report by Captain Melnikov with whom he had served. From these, the Collegium concluded that Solzhenitsyn had “fought courageously for his homeland, more than once displayed personal heroism and inspired the devotion of the section he commanded”. Furthermore, “Solzhenitsyn’s section was the best in the unit for discipline and battle effectiveness.”

  Having examined all the evidence, the Collegium ruled that “Solzhenitsyn’s actions do not constitute a crime and his case should be closed for lack of proof.”31

  The decision to drop all charges had come a decade too late, after the man who was now declared innocent had already served eight years in prison and three in exile. One wonders whether Solzhenitsyn still managed to raise a wry smile when reading the Supreme Court document. He had, almost overnight, been transformed from a hated enemy of the people, a pariah, to a war hero and wise critic of Stalin’s deficiencies. Now, presumably, he was supposed to go home quietly, like a good and loyal Soviet citizen, and say nothing of the horrors he had seen and experienced.

  Little did the Chief Military Prosecutor know it, but he had plucked this ticking time bomb from the relative safety of a village in Kazakhstan and placed it carefully at the heart of Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn, strengthened and purified by his time in prison and exile, was primed and ready to explode on an unsuspecting literary world.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE

  In April 1956, several weeks after learning of his rehabilitation, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natalya, informing her that he had been freed from exile and that his previous convictions had been officially expunged from the record. He now wished to settle in some relatively remote region and hoped that Natalya could make inquiries in the Ryazan Region, where she was currently living, to see whether there were any vacancies in the field of physics or mathematics. At the same time, he sought to assure her that, should he take up residence in Ryazan, there would be “no shadow cast upon your life”. In reply, Natalya informed him that there was a surplus of mathematicians and physicists in the Ryazan area and that he should try to settle in a city.1

  Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn remained at Kok-Terek until he had fulfilled his obligations as a schoolteacher. It was not until he had marked the final examinations at the end of the school year that he was finally free to leave. On June 20, 1956, he caught the train to Moscow, a journey taking four days. For the first two days, the train traveled through the hot, dusty steppes of central Asia, his home as prisoner and exile for the previous six years. On the third day, the train crossed the Volga, and, as it did so, Solzhenitsyn found himself overwhelmed emotionally by the sense of return to the central Russian heartland. He walked along the corridor until he found a platform where the upper half of the door was open, and stood there seemingly for an eternity, staring out at the Russian countryside. The wind rushed into his face and the tears streamed from his eyes.2 He was coming home.

  On June 24, Solzhenitsyn was met at the Kazan station in Moscow by both Panin and Kopelev, the former having been released from exile in January. Paradoxically, Solzhenitsyn’s arrival home had found him with nowhere to live, and he moved in with the Kopelevs for a while. Shortly afterward, he resided for a time with some cousins whom he had not seen since childhood, before finding temporary accommodation with the Panins.

  It was while staying with the Panins that Solzhenitsyn had a wholly unexpected meeting with Natalya. She was on a trip to Moscow and decided to call on Panin’s wife. When she arrived, she found Solzhenitsyn and Panin seated at a table drinking tea. The Panins contrived to leave Solzhenitsyn and Natalya alone together, and Solzhenitsyn told her of his plans for the future. He hated the hustle and bustle of the city, the noise, the hurry, the crowds, and was determined to escape to a quieter existence in the provinces. He hoped to settle in Vladimir Region, about a hundred miles from Moscow.

  Eventually, the subject of their own
troubled relationship was broached, and Solzhenitsyn questioned her earnestly, endeavoring to understand how Natalya’s final separation from him had come about. “I was created to love you alone,” she replied, “but fate decreed otherwise.”3 When they parted, Solzhenitsyn handed her a sheaf of poems he had written to or about her throughout the years of separation. That night she read them and discovered that they had “opened up old scars in my soul”. Returning to Ryazan, Natalya found herself continually reading and rereading the poems, turning them over and over in her mind, twisting a knife in the old wound. It was not long before Somov, her second “husband”, began to detect that something was wrong. Although Natalya had told him of her meeting with Solzhenitsyn, she had assured him that “nothing had changed as a result—everything would remain as it was.” He could see, however, that everything was not as it had been, and he did everything in his power to win her back from the ghost of her past. He took her on a boat trip along the Oka in their own motorboat and on a holiday to Solotcha during August. It was a difficult and painful time; Somov was distressed to find that nothing he did could amuse his “wife” or distract her from her thoughts about the other man. Then the other man sent a letter: “If you have the inclination and should you find it possible—you can write me. My address, as of 21 August, is . . . Vladimir Region.”4

  Correspondence commenced, and Solzhenitsyn wrote that he believed a new happiness was possible for them. He suggested they meet, and Natalya agreed, waiting for the opportunity to escape from her “husband”. That opportunity arose in October when Somov went to Odessa to attend a celebration in honor of a scientific colleague. While he was away, Natalya informed her mother that she had been summoned to Moscow in connection with Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation. In fact, she had no intention of going to Moscow but, on October 19, bought a ticket to Torfprodukt, Vladimir Region.