November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  The wind, noticeably chillier here, crinkled the waters in a frown. He put his bag down by the embankment railings, raised his collar, and stood there peering down at the lake. It was already quite cold. Even according to the stupid Russian calendar it was 25 October, which meant 7 November European style. And Inessa was still freezing at her Sörenberg villa, doing her best to catch a chill. Or to make him angry.

  Or to punish him.

  She made him wait for her letters. She was denying him news of herself. Either she didn’t answer at all or else she wrote late. So that you had to choose your words carefully: of course, if you don’t feel like answering … or if you feel like not answering … I won’t pester you with questions …

  In all his personal relationships Lenin was careful to assert his superiority, was always on his dignity. But here it was impossible: he could find no vantage point. He could only hide his embarrassment in jokes. Only beg.

  He must learn to meet silence with silence. To wait for her answer. But nothing could be more difficult: it was when you didn’t see each other that you needed most of all to write, to share your thoughts! And anyway, there was business which could not wait.

  It would be quite simple, here and now, without waiting for her answer, to write a few affectionate and unresentful lines. (No, they mustn’t be affectionate, there must not be the slightest breath of affection; all letters in wartime were subject to censorship, and you had to write as though you were making a statement in a police station. Mustn’t give them a weapon against yourself.)

  Yes, he was at her mercy if she chose to punish him. He acknowledged dependence on no one in the world except Inessa. He felt it least when he was smarting from one of their fights. Most of all when they were together.

  No, when they were not …

  Everything he had ever had in life—food, drink, clothes, house and home—had been not for him, indeed he had wanted nothing of all this except as a means of keeping himself going for the sake of the Cause. His month off in summer, his mountain walks in the Carpathians, or from Sörenberg up the Rothorn, the Alpine view before his eyes, the slab of chocolate eaten while stretched out on the slopes of the Zürichberg, the smoked Volga sturgeon sent by his mother—none of this was self-indulgence, mere gratification of the flesh, it was a way of making himself mentally fit for his work. Good health was a revolutionary’s main asset.

  Only his meetings with Inessa, even their business meetings, were just for himself, for the sake of the foolishly happy, free and easy, lighthearted state of animal contentment in which they left him, although they could be a time-wasting and debilitating distraction.

  All the men and women Lenin had ever met in his life he had valued only if, and as long as, they were useful to the Cause. Only Inessa, although she had entered his life through the Cause—and there was no other way, no outsider could have gotten near him—existed as if for him alone, complementing his existence with her own.

  Inessa revealed to him things he would never have thought of, never imagined, and might have lived his life without discovering. In their arguments about free love he had an unbreakable net of logic for her vague ideas. Slip through it if you can! But it was hopeless. The dark water from the depths of the lake runs unhindered through the fisherman’s net, and Inessa with her concept of free love was not to be caught in the net of class analysis. Slowed down for a moment, she slipped easily through the mesh. Her arguments were defeated but she was invincible.

  Long ago, when the whole world was carefully measured, appraised, and regulated, she had shaken his certainties, bidding him to break bounds and follow her through a world which was the same yet unlike anything he had imagined, and he had gone with her, like a timid but delighted schoolboy, anxiously clinging to her guiding hand, full of childlike, doglike gratitude toward her, worshipping her right down to the blue veins of her slender foot for all that she had revealed to him, and made to last as long as her love for him.

  From where she was, from Sörenberg in the southwest, over the frowning autumn waters, even in the whistling November wind, he felt her love calling to him. He remembered the flutter of eyelids over half-closed eyes, the quick gleam of her white teeth.

  Why was she punishing him? Why hadn’t she come down to Clarens, where it was warmer? Last year the first snow had fallen on Sörenberg at the beginning of October. It had been very cold.

  Over the roof of the theater, which was dotted with mythological winged trumpeters, the sun suddenly shone out full strength. The sunlight was cold here, and orange-colored where it had encroached on the heights of the Uetliberg, but the lower slopes, where buildings towered around a gray-green dome with a belfry, were still in gloom.

  Those were happy days—in Longjumeau, Brussels, Copenhagen, Cracow. In Bern too. Happy years. Seven of them.

  He, who was incapable of wasting five minutes without finding idleness an exasperating burden, had spent hours on end with Inessa. He had not despised himself for it, not been in any hurry to pull himself together, but had abandoned himself completely to his weakness. It had reached the point where he had confided everything to her, wanted to tell her everything—much more than he would tell any man. How quick and fresh was her response and her advice! And how he had missed them in the last six months! Since April. Since Kienthal.

  Had something snapped at Kienthal? He hadn’t felt it at the time.

  He had been forced to leave Bern: Grimm was the dominant influence there and he would never have been able to get together a circle of sympathizers. He had been right to go away. But how could he have imagined when he left that they would never meet again?

  In Kienthal he had noticed nothing. In the thick of that wonderful six-day battle.

  The one person whose feelings he could not afford to hurt: he might lose her forever. This fear of upsetting a delicate equilibrium which he had experienced with no one else sometimes put him in a comic position. He had to humor her unfortunate passion for writing theoretical articles. Frank criticism was impossible, and he had to choose his words carefully or sometimes simply lie. “What could I possibly have against publishing your article? Of course I’m for it.” Then, afterward, he would pretend that unforeseen circumstances prevented it. Rebukes, and even political correction, had to be softened until they almost became praise. He had to endure her arbitrariness as a translator: at times, instead of translating his text, she would amend the sense, or even censor it, rejecting ideas which were not to her liking. No one could be allowed to do that! But to Inessa his reproaches were mild and courteous. His courtesy was a way of ingratiating himself. If he wrote a longer letter than usual, he would immediately apologize: “I shouldn’t be rambling on like this.”

  But even his eagerness to please did not make him feel small. With Inessa, nothing was humiliating.

  This was her way of punishing him, not writing. Not answering his letters.

  Once she dug her heels in there was no persuading her. A white steamer moved away from the landing stage, sending waves toward him. Two white swans, immune to the cold, their necks gracefully arched, apparently set in their pose forever, were rocked by the waves.

  He felt cold. He took his bag and walked on along the railings.

  With Inessa beside him he had painfully bent his will to hers, but now that she was far away he could attain almost complete freedom from her.

  Here in the severe light of an autumn morning, with sunshine chasing shadow over the cold lake.

  For as long as he could remember he had been aware of a safety device in himself. Any setback, any waste of time, any display of weakness depressed the catch further and further until suddenly it sprang back, flinging him into action with a force which nothing could withstand.

  You must economize on idle sentiment or your work will stagnate.

  With Inessa far away his natural caution was coming back to him. Caution forbade any additional stress in his life. A permanent union with Inessa? Life would be chaotic. She was too mercurial, too much
a person in her own right, too distracting. Then there were her children—and a way of life quite strange to him. He could not, he had no right to let himself be slowed down and taken out of his way by those children.

  The best solution was to live with Nadya, and he had been right to adopt it all those years ago. Yakubova had been more vivacious, and nicer-looking, but could never have helped him as Nadya had. Nadya was much more than a fellow spirit: on the most trivial of subjects her thoughts and feelings never differed from his own. She knew how the whole world frayed and fretted and irritated him, and she herself not only did not irritate but soothed and protected him, took all his worries upon herself. However sharp his revulsions of feeling, however sudden his outbursts, she was there to share and soften them. And how quick she was to take her cue! When Radek was behaving like a swine, she was curt and hard with him, and if he made some excuse to call, she stopped him at the door. But when Radek became a model comrade, a congenial adviser, how warmly she welcomed him. If she had needed to rehearse, to make an effort, she might sometimes have gone wrong, but she merely felt for Ilyich with unwavering loyalty. Living with her made no excessive demands on his nerves.

  Then again—and this was not to be ignored—Inessa was not economical, not capable of living sensibly and modestly. She often behaved erratically. She would suddenly, for instance, take it into her head to dress in the latest fashion. Whereas Nadya had no equal for orderliness and economy. She understood instinctively that every extra franc in hand meant extra time for thinking and working. What was more, she never let her tongue run away with her—a rare thing in a woman—never boasted, never said a word to outsiders when she had been warned not to. For that matter, she knew when to keep quiet without being told.

  In view of all this, it would ill become a revolutionary to be uncomfortably conscious in company that his wife was far from beautiful, not outstandingly intelligent, and a year older than himself. To succeed in the world he must be as free as possible from inner doubts and outside distractions, must narrowly concentrate all his efforts on his goal. For Lenin the politician his union with Nadya was all that reason could require.

  True, there had always been the three of them. Leaving their homes in adjoining streets to meet in the forest around Bern; going for mountain rambles on Sörenberg to pick Alpine roses or mushrooms (although sometimes he and Inessa had gone off by themselves to remote mountain refuges); at some pension, where he and Nadya had sat reading in the shade, while Inessa spent hours at the piano; sitting on tree stumps on the warm slopes, he and Nadya at their books as always, and Inessa gracefully sunning herself like a little girl out with her elders; best of all, those long hours when he had talked to both of them about his ideas, his plans, his future articles. How often he had taken in at a glance, and marveled at, his incomparable, incredible, impossible good luck, wished that it would last for years. And it had lasted! If Nadya ever wrote a long, detailed friendly letter, it was to Inessa. If there was one person whom she tirelessly praised to all their comrades, it was Inessa. Only in letters to Volodya’s mother—her own mother saw how things were—in letters from daughter-in-law to mother-in-law, describing their life together and their walks, did she write as though there were just the two of them. Very tactfully.

  Now their mothers had both died within a short time: hers after an attack of influenza last spring, his that summer in Petersburg. The mail reached their mountain pension at Flums by mule, so that the telegram announcing his mother’s death had arrived late, on the second anniversary of the outbreak of war, which was also Swiss Union Day, one of those innumerable, chaotic Swiss festivals when beacons were lit, fireworks shot off, and guns fired on every mountaintop. They had sat together that evening looking at the beacons, and paid their last respects to his mother to the sound of those salvos. It was probably easier like that, at a distance.

  If you are both getting on for fifty, and your mothers, yours and hers, both die, it makes you still older. And brings you closer. Besides, you are both revolutionaries. So that perhaps …

  A motorboat was traveling diagonally across the lake, from that very direction, from Sörenberg, tossing its prow as it swiftly plowed the water, leaving behind a triangular patch of foam and shattering the silence with its metallic coughing.

  There was something about it, as it sped on, cutting a swift furrow through the water, pointing its pitiless beak, harshly chattering, which broke his train of thought, jolted his mind—and forgetting social analysis, forgetting logical argument, he suddenly saw very, very simply what he had never seen before.

  If she stood for free love in theory, and could not be dissuaded, what reason was there to think that she did not practice it? …

  He had mentally reviewed, anticipated, and enumerated for her benefit every point that could be made about relations between bourgeois and proletarians, but he had overlooked just one little thing: if they had not seen each other since Kienthal—and they were so near—if for half a year she had neither come nor summoned him, and had now almost stopped writing …

  Perhaps this summer she had been with someone else?

  Why had he invariably pictured her alone, and never imagined that it could be otherwise?

  On this side of the lake there was still wan sunlight, but on the other side thick gray clouds were streaming over the Uetliberg, packing the valley with mist. The mountain, the lower slopes, the bell tower were quickly swathed, and the mist crept on toward the Zurich shore.

  What could be simpler? And how was it that he had examined the question from every angle—except this one?

  No, it was impossible! His comrade and friend! After their glorious fight against the centrists at Kienthal!

  He gripped the cold railings, and felt like howling—through the railings, across the lake, over the Uetliberg, over all the mountains between them. Inessa! Don’t leave me! Inessa! …

  He must write, immediately, swallowing his pride, write anything so long as it would bring an answer. Of course, the post office opened earlier than the library; why hadn’t he thought of it before? It opened at eight: he should have gone there and written a letter. Now it was too late.

  Yes, it was too late now. They were banging and clanging their bells like madmen, like idiots! As though every bit of old iron in the city was under repair. The bells of the Frau-Münster clanged out over the post office, the double-belfried Gross-Münster crashed out the hour up above the shop signs on every floor of Bellevue … How many more churches were there in Zurich?

  The mist and cloud had rolled over to his side of the lake and it was suddenly gray and cheerless.

  He drew his watch from his vest pocket with numb fingers. If they were banging on their buckets it must be nine o’clock. He hadn’t been to the post office, he’d lost track of time, he’d come too far—however briskly he walked now, he would reach the Cantonal Library well after opening time. A bad start. And he had set out with such good intentions.

  Very well. The letter must wait. He must work now.

  He bowled along, a short, stocky figure, scarcely troubling to avoid those in his path. There, nearby, was the City Library. He could go there, but he had the journals and books for today’s work on call at the other one. He hurried as fast as he could along the loathsome bourgeois embankment, where the smells of delicatessen and confectionery wafted from doorways to tickle jaded appetites, where the shopkeepers had performed miracles of ingenuity to offer their customers a twenty-first version of sausage and a hundred-and-first variety of patisserie. Windows full of chocolates, smokers’ supplies, dinner services, clocks, antiques flashed by … It was so difficult on this smart embankment to imagine a mob with axes and firebrands someday smashing all that plate glass to smithereens.

  But it must be done!

  Everything here looked too solid and permanent—the houses, doors, doorbells, bolts.

  Yes, it must be done!

  From every corner of the city came the clanging of bells, frenzied and hollow.

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  Here, too, Zwingli had laid about him with almost proletarian resolution, setting a good example by bisecting the Predigerkirche midway between its spires. Half of it had been occupied for centuries past by a library. It was a source of particular satisfaction that both the main libraries of Zurich had triumphed over religion.

  He went into the hushed room. Nine windows with pointed arches rose to a height of five or six stories. At a still dizzier height, the ribs of the vaulted roof met in bosses.

  All this soaring space was entirely wasted, except for a two-storied wooden gallery attached to the walls. On the walls, between bookcases, hung many somber portraits—haughty municipal councillors and burgomasters in doublets and frilled shirts. He had never had time to look at them carefully or read the inscriptions.

  As he passed through the heavy doors Lenin saw that his favorite place in the gallery by the central window, and another which he found convenient, were both occupied. He was late. The day had begun awkwardly.

  He signed the register, but the librarian with the glasses and the ex officio smile could not make out what had become of one of his three piles of books on reserve.

  These petty vexations, one on top of another, could rob him of hours of working time.

  The success or failure of a working day may depend on trivial events at its outset. Now he had started late. There was less than half a day, only three hours in fact, between opening time and the lunch break, and part of that was already wasted.

  Imperialism had been fully drafted in twenty exercise books, written up, lost, and rewritten—but Lenin had taken out yet another heap of material on the same subject. He felt that something more was needed. Yet it was difficult to see what. He had had all his findings clearly in mind long before he reached his twentieth copybook. His prevision had become so acute of late that he knew remarkably early, before he sat down to write, what his conclusions would be.

  Now it looked as though he must take out the sweetest knocks in the whole book. Stinking, slimy, sanctimonious old creature! Nowhere, in the whole history of social democracy, had there ever been a more loathsome and despicable humbug. The missing pile was on Persia. He had already begun making extracts. Nobody had thought about socialism’s Eastern Front properly, and it needed study.