Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  The next three days were like a second honeymoon, exorcising any remaining doubts Natalya may have had about where her future lay. For his part, Solzhenitsyn felt compelled to inform her that he was still gravely ill and was doomed to a short life, possibly only another year or two. “I need you in every way,” Natalya replied, “alive or dying.”5

  “As we discussed our joint plans,” Natalya wrote, “. . . I was quite aware even then that I was causing enormous sorrow to good people, but only now, looking back, do I comprehend the enormity of it. Was there anything that could have stopped me? Probably not.” Among her friends and colleagues, as well as among friends of her second husband, “there were many, very many, who censured me.”6

  In November, Natalya and Somov separated.

  Solzhenitsyn made his first visit to Ryazan on December 30, 1956, and on the following day, they went to the Registry Office to register their marriage for a second time. No complications were caused by Natalya’s former “marriage” to Somov because they had never been officially wed, merely cohabiting as man and wife, but the re-registry was frustrated by the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s passport contained no record of a divorce. This necessitated a trip to Moscow, which the couple undertook a few days later, to retrieve Solzhenitsyn’s notification of divorce from the archives at the City Court. Now that they could prove to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats that they had been legitimately divorced, they would be allowed to remarry.

  Throughout the following months, it gradually became apparent that the chasm that existed between them in the months before their separation had not been bridged by their physical reunion. Solzhenitsyn now preached a gospel of self-limitation, seeking to live as simply as possible without the glitter and glamor of modern diversions. He insisted that they should not visit the cinema more than twice a month, nor go to concerts or the theater more than once every two months. This conscious rationing scarcely constituted a monastic existence, but the restrictions proved irksome to Natalya, who had grown accustomed to a life of relative opulence with her second husband. For Solzhenitsyn, their lifestyle was one of voluntary poverty leading to an improved quality of life freed from the clutter of needlessly created wants; for Natalya, it amounted to the imposition of involuntary poverty, the denial of her right to legitimate pleasures, “about going or not going to the movies; about buying or not buying books; about winning or not winning a bond on a lottery ticket”.7

  The intensity and depth of Solzhenitsyn’s own views at the time can be gauged from the fact that this was the period during which he was most deeply involved in the writing of The First Circle. From the summer of 1957 through to the spring of 1958, his life and Natalya’s were spent in the shadow of the sharashka as he relived the long discussions with Panin and Kopelev in Marfino, charting its importance to his own spiritual and intellectual development. “It’s not a matter of how much you eat,” Nerzhin had told Rubin, “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.” One can imagine Solzhenitsyn repeating such sermons to his wife whenever she complained about the relative austerity of their life together: “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. . .”8

  Unfortunately, this perception of the eternal conflict between the material and spiritual aspects of life, gained by Solzhenitsyn in the passion and crucifixion of the camps, was seemingly unattainable to Natalya, who continued to resent her husband’s strictures and restrictions. Their own marriage was becoming a physical incarnation of the metaphysical struggle Solzhenitsyn was attempting to explore in The First Circle. This can be seen in Natalya’s incomprehension of her husband’s words. Solzhenitsyn had written to her from prison that “if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain”. In her memoirs, Natalya immediately followed this quote with another from her husband’s letters: “Perhaps, if it should happen some day that I start living happily, I will become heartless again? Although it’s hard to believe, still, anything can happen.” She then appends her own comments: “How I wish that Solzhenitsyn’s own apprehensions had never been confirmed! That he had not also turned in for incineration, along with his prison garb, the highest, noblest impulses of his soul!”9 Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of Natalya’s own version of events, Solzhenitsyn was clearly concerned never to lose sight of the truths he had learned in the camps, never to allow the comforts of life to corrupt him from the purity of the vision he believed he had acquired there. It was precisely “the highest, noblest impulses of the soul” that he felt he had discovered in prison and precisely those impulses that he was determined the material pleasures of life should not obscure. Natalya’s failure to grasp this central aspect of her husband’s psyche illustrates the absence of empathy in their relationship.

  Similar conflicts were apparent in Dimitri Panin’s marriage. Panin had found his Christian faith intensified by the experience of prison with the result that, following his release, he had found his wife’s lack of faith difficult to cope with. She in turn had found her husband’s intense Christianity an insurmountable obstacle to their satisfactory reconciliation. By the time Panin came to stay with the Solzhenitsyns at the beginning of 1958, he and his wife had separated. Natalya found herself in complete sympathy with Panin’s wife, possibly sensing parallels with her own situation: “A sinful man had returned to a sinless wife. But he made up for it by becoming a believer. Now both she and her son were supposed to become believers too. There followed persuasions, attempts to convince, demands, ultimatums.”10

  During his stay, Panin read through the manuscript of The First Circle. He informed Solzhenitsyn of his utmost approval of the novel, and the two friends discussed the means by which the philosophical dimension could best be expressed.

  In the spring Natalya departed for Moscow for several days to attend a scientific conference on catalysis, rejoicing in the realization that her own work had not been forgotten by her former colleagues. Several eminent contributors to the conference referred to her research, and she was pleased to see that the title page of her own dissertation was displayed prominently at the Kobozev Laboratory. “Perhaps everything could have been different”, she pondered wistfully.11 At around the same time, her husband suffered a relapse and was admitted to the hospital for a course of chemotherapy. Natalya and Solzhenitsyn were both gravely concerned. The previous year, he had urged her to go to the Lenin Library to read everything she could about cancer and malignant tumors, with the result that they both believed he had only about four years to live. As Solzhenitsyn entered the hospital, the thought must have crossed their minds that they had miscalculated and the end was coming sooner. In the event, the chemotherapy proved successful, and he was discharged after only two weeks, continuing his treatment as an outpatient. By the end of the treatment, the tumor had subsided and was no longer causing discomfort. He felt fitter than he had for years and threw himself with added gusto into his work.

  “The favorite work is always the one on which you are currently working”, Solzhenitsyn stated forty years later. “When I wrote The First Circle it was alive with intrigue, with philosophical underpinnings, and I was absorbed in it.”12 Much of the rest of the year was taken up with completing a third draft of his novel, and only when he was satisfied with it, for the time being at least, could he put his mind to other projects.

  The next major project was born on May 18, 1959, with the idea that he should write a novel about one day in the life of a labor camp prisoner in Ekibastuz. This would come to fruition as one of the most influential books ever written in terms of its socio-political impact on the world. In its power to undermine the very foundations of the Soviet system, Ivan Denisovich would become a literary Ivan the Terrible.<
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  Although the book owed its portentous birth to that moment of inspiration in May 1959, its gestation period in the womb of Solzhenitsyn’s imagination stretched back seven years. It had first been conceived while he was working as a bricklayer at Ekibastuz in 1952:

  It was an ordinary camp day—hard, as usual, and I was working. I was helping to carry a hand-barrow full of mortar, and I thought that this was the way to describe the whole world of the camps. Of course, I could have described my whole ten years there, I could have done the whole history of the camps that way, but it was sufficient to gather everything into one day, all the different fragments . . . and to describe just one day in the life of an average and in no way remarkable prisoner from morning till night.13

  Once Solzhenitsyn had found the inspiration to put the longstanding idea into practice, it was probably, of all his vast output, one of the easiest books to write. Looking back on its creation, his words interspersed with infectious chuckling and his eyes aglint with pleasure at the memory, Solzhenitsyn recounted with amusement the easy flow of the creative process:

  The book by which most people came to know of me, both in the Soviet Union and in America, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, came out of me in one breath, in one flow. I wrote it in forty days. In fact, I was surrounded by so much material, so much material surrounded me at that moment, that I was not in a position of a writer wondering what to put in. There was so much material that, on the contrary, I was saying I won’t take this, I won’t take that, I don’t really need this, I won’t take that. It was like the whole life of the camps fitted into one day of one person’s life.14

  One of the principal reasons for the surge of creativity was the choice of subject matter. The overriding desire to tell the world the full and horrific truth about life in the camps was the passionate pulse at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s literary vocation. More than anything else, he desired to tell this truth to anyone who would listen. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he had done this in a condensed and concentrated form with potentially explosive results. “It seemed to me that the most interesting and important thing to do was to depict the fate of Russia. Of all the drama that Russia has lived through, the deepest was the tragedy of the Ivan Denisoviches. I wanted to set the record straight concerning the false rumours about the camps.”15

  In spite of its relative brevity compared with the weighty volumes on the subject that Solzhenitsyn was to write in later years, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich contains many of the leitmotifs which recur throughout his work. All the poignant features of camp life discussed in great detail in the three volumes ofThe Gulag Archipelago found expression with microscopic intensity in One Day in the Life: the loss and recovery of human dignity; the injustice at the heart of Soviet “justice”; ennoblement versus decay; self-limitation versus selfishness; hints of divine providence; hunger and the description of meals as a pseudo-religious ritual; and, last but not least, the Christian response to the prisoner’s sense of hopelessness and the temptation to despair.

  Apart from Ivan Denisovich himself, the principal hero to emerge from the pages of One Day in the Life is Alyosha the Baptist. He is principal because he is principled, rising above the horror of daily life in the camps through the triumph of belief over adversity. Toward the end of the novel, Solzhenitsyn puts into the words of Alyosha the core of his own belief in self-limitation: “Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels or for extra skilly, not for that. Things that man puts a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit—that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from our hearts.”16

  Having written One Day in the Life in a flood of inspiration in May and June 1959, Solzhenitsyn consigned it to his growing pile of unpublished manuscripts, doubting whether it would ever see the light of day. He wrote later that he was convinced he would never see a single line of his work in print in his own lifetime. Such was his fear of Soviet persecution that he scarcely dared allow any of his close acquaintances to read anything he had written for fear that it would become known.17

  In the summer of 1959, during a visit to Rostov, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to meet up with some old friends, most notably Nikolai Vitkevich, the closest friend of his school and university years, who had been his partner in crime in the criticism of Stalin during the war. Like Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai had been sentenced to forced labor for his part in the correspondence and the drafting of “Resolution No. 1”. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, the experience had crushed him emotionally and spiritually. They had met briefly at Marfino during their term of imprisonment, where Solzhenitsyn had been disappointed to find his friend broken in spirit and uninterested in philosophical or ideological debate. Whereas Solzhenitsyn was finding himself in vigorous, furious, but ultimately friendly arguments with Panin and Kopelev, Nikolai had not wished to join in and desired only to forget about the past and lead an untroubled life in the future. His response to the struggle for survival in the camps had been psychological surrender.

  Any hopes nurtured by Solzhenitsyn that his friend would have regained his old fighting spirit along with his freedom were soon to be dashed. By the summer of 1959, Nikolai had married and was busy completing his Ph.D. dissertation. He was entirely concerned with his own life and career and had lost all interest in wider issues. This became apparent when Solzhenitsyn sought to discuss the Pasternak case. Boris Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago the previous October, causing a storm of controversy in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn sought Nikolai’s opinions but was surprised to find him totally indifferent, being more concerned about the internal politics of the chemistry department at Rostov University, where he now worked, and about his prospects of promotion. The two friends, so inseparable in their youth, had become strangers.

  In contrast to Nikolai’s agnostic indifference and apathy, Solzhenitsyn shared Pasternak’s passion for the higher purpose of both life and literature. In an interview with a Swedish critic the previous year, Pasternak had decoded the meaning of Doctor Zhivago as a novel-parable concerned with the need of the human soul to strive for higher sources of spiritual wealth. “During the short period of time that we live in this world,” Pasternak explained, “we have to understand our attitude toward existence, our place in the universe. Otherwise, life is meaningless. This, as I understand it, means a rejection of the nineteenth century materialistic world view, means a resurrection of our interior life, a resurrection of religion.”18 This was a view with which Solzhenitsyn concurred completely and, furthermore, was one of the main motive forces behind many of his own literary endeavors.

  In the autumn of 1960, Solzhenitsyn returned to a story he had started some time earlier about an elderly woman, Matryona Zakharova, with whom he had lodged four years earlier during his first weeks of freedom at Torfprodukt in the Vladimir Region. “Matryona’s House was something that was very, very emotional for me”, Solzhenitsyn recalls, “and was dedicated to the memory of a holy Russian woman.”19

  She was a poor housekeeper. In other words she refused to strain herself to buy gadgets and possessions and then to guard them and care for them more than for her own life.

  She never cared for smart clothes, the garments that embellish the ugly and disguise the wicked.

  Misunderstood and rejected by her husband, a stranger to her own family despite her happy, amiable temperament, comical, so foolish that she worked for others for no reward, this woman . . . had stored up no earthly goods. Nothing but a dirty white goat, a lame cat and a row of fig-plants.

  None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand.

  Nor the world.20

  A few weeks after the completion of Matryona’s House, Solzhenitsyn started work on Candle in the Wind, arguably his best play. Also known as The Light within You, the play’s central theme, as both titles suggest, is the need to protect on
e’s soul, the light of life which burns within everyone, from the worldly winds which threaten to snub it out. The extent to which the various characters in the play succeed or fail in salvaging the light within is explored as the plot unfolds.

  In the character of Aunt Christine, the ghost of Matryona is resurrected as the one righteous person in the midst of the ethical confusion that permeates the rest of the play. In her extreme poverty and contented unworldliness is encapsulated the profound relationship between asceticism and spirituality. Although her physical presence does not play a major role in the dramatic development of the plot, her spiritual presence is crucial. At one key moment, impelled it seems by nothing but mystical intuition, the significantly named Christine appears at Maurice’s deathbed, carrying a candle and invoking the Christian moral that was Solzhenitsyn’s overriding theme: “Take heed therefore that the light which is within thee be not darkness.”21

  Taking this theme as his motivation for writing Candle in the Wind, Solzhenitsyn explored its relevance to the play’s protagonists. As always, and as in the character of Aunt Christine, Solzhenitsyn drew heavily from autobiographical experience in delineating his characters. There is little doubt that the character of Philip is a loosely sketched pen portrait of Nikolai Vitkevich. Like Alex, the character in the play most closely based on Solzhenitsyn himself, Philip was sentenced to ten years imprisonment as the result of a legal error. Now, however, he has concealed his past and, as a respected scientist, has become a career-oriented opportunist, hell-bent on success in his chosen field of bio-cybernetics. Perhaps the parallel was a little unfair, or at least uncharitable, but the fact that Philip is a caricature of Nikolai is beyond doubt. Natalya confirmed that her husband had “Nikolai Vitkevich in mind when he created the character of Philip”, but stressed that the character was “enormously exaggerated”. In another example of the lack of empathy between husband and wife, Natalya appeared to prefer the character of Philip to that of Alex—Vitkevich to Solzhenitsyn. If Philip’s purpose in life was misguided, Natalya complained, “that of his antipode Alex—the ‘positive hero’—was wholly negative: I reject this, I don’t want that!”22