November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Should he put the lights on after all? The words seemed to swim before his eyes.

  This damp Russian firewood refused to catch fire! The best blazes were all ancient history—the salt riots, the cholera riots, the copper coin riots, the Razin rebellion, the Pugachev rebellion. Except perhaps to seize the estate of a neighboring landowner, which was there before their eyes, neither proletariat nor professional revolutionaries would ever set the dark peasant mass in motion. Corrupted and emasculated by Orthodoxy, the peasants seemed to have lost their passion for the ax and the torch. If a people could endure such a war without rebelling, what could be done with it?

  The game was lost. There would be no revolution in Russia.

  He covered his eyes with his hands and sat still.

  Whether from tiredness or from depression something seemed to have sagged inside him.

  The readers were reassembling. Chairs were moved. A book fell. Lamps were turned on.

  There might be worse to come. Was Tsarism already wriggling out of the trap? By making a separate peace?? (Treble underlining.) And what else could Germany do, if she couldn’t win a war on two fronts?

  That was really frightening. The worst thing possible. All would be lost. The world revolution. Revolution in Russia. Lenin’s whole life, two decades of ceaseless effort.

  A report that a separate peace was in the making, that secret negotiations between Germany and Russia had already officially begun, and that the two powers were already agreed on the main points, had recently been published by Grimm in the Berner Tagwacht. It was signed K. R. Without asking the rascally Radek you could safely guess that it was he. (But how had he managed to persuade Grimm?!) And if you knew his gift for sparkling improvisation you could safely assume that he had not eavesdropped on diplomats, sneaked a look at secret documents, or even picked up a stray rumor, but that as he idled the morning away in bed, with newspapers on top of and under the blankets and books on the floor, he occasionally composed such items “from our own correspondent” in Norway or Argentina.

  What mattered was not where this particular report had originated. Nor that the Russian ambassador in Bern had denied it—what else could he do? What did matter was that it had the piercing ring of truth: for the Tsar this really was the right way out! Just what he ought to do! Just what Lenin would do in his place!

  So they must strike and strike again at this weak point! Raise the alarm! Put a stop to it! Forestall him! Not let him pull his feet out of the trap unharmed!

  Of course, you could expect only utter stupidity from Nikolai II and his government. You wouldn’t have expected them to start this war if they had had any sense at all. But they did start it—and what a wonderful present they’ve given us!

  So perhaps it was still possible to frighten them with publicity and avert the danger?

  A separate peace! It would of course be a remarkably neat way out. But still, they weren’t clever enough for it.

  In any case, there was nothing to be done in Russia for the time being. Nobody there read Social Democrat. All eyes were on the Milyukovs and Shingarevs. All anyone ever talked of was the Kadets. And just look how their delegation had been received in the West. The Tsar might take it into his head to move over a little, let Guchkov and the Kadets have ministries—and then you’d never get them, never break through.

  How could you knead sad Russian dough into any sort of shape! Why was he born in that uncouth country? Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian, fate had hitched him to the ramshackle Russian rattletrap. A quarter of his blood, but nothing in his character, his will, his inclinations made him kin to that slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken country. Lenin knew of nothing more revolting than backslapping Russian hearties, tearful tavern penitents, self-styled geniuses bewailing their ruined lives. Lenin was a bowstring, or an arrow from the bow. Lenin could size up a situation, and the best or only means to an end, at half a glance. What then tied him to that country? With a little more work he could have mastered three European languages, as he had mastered that semi-Tartar tongue. He was tied, you say, to Russia by twenty years as a practicing revolutionary? Yes, but by nothing else. Now, after the creation of the Zimmerwald left, he was sufficiently well known in international socialist circles to step over. Socialism made no distinctions of nationality. Trotsky, for instance, had left for America. He had made the right choice. Bukharin was on his way there. Perhaps that was the place to go.

  No, there was something wrong with him today. The day had started wrong, and had never got going properly. It was as though the working of his mind was too fast for his body, his physical frame, his breast. And there was that little pocket of emptiness near his left temple. He felt hollow with fatigue, and the tissues of his body seemed to sag around the cavity within him.

  Too much had happened at once, and he suddenly felt that he would not get through a good day’s work, but would roll on downhill, enervated, ineffectual, dejected.

  A true politician is not at the mercy of his years, his feelings, circumstances, but brings at all seasons and times of day an unvarying mechanical efficiency to bear in his actions, his speeches, his battles. Lenin, too, was a remarkably smooth-functioning machine, with inexhaustible drive, but even he experienced one or two days in a year when his drive slackened, leaving him despondent, exhausted, prostrate. On such a day there was no choice but to go to bed early and sleep soundly.

  Lenin might seem completely in control of his mind and his will, but even he was helpless against these attacks of despair. His certainties, his firm perspective, his proven tactics would suddenly become blurred, indistinct, elusive. The world would turn its stupid gray backside on him.

  And the disease which sat inside him, ever watchful, would suddenly make its sharp corners felt, like a stone in a sack.

  He felt it in his temple.

  Yes, he had always followed the path of refusal to compromise, to smooth over differences, and by doing so had created a conquering force. He had a prophetic certainty that it would conquer. That it was important to preserve a strictly centralized group, no matter how small, no matter who its members were. The conciliation and unification movements had long ago shown that they spelled ruin for a workers’ party. Reconciliation with disarmers? Reconciliation with the Nashe Slovo gang? Reconciliation with the Russian Kautskyites? With the swine on the Menshevik Organizing Committee? Become a flunkey to social chauvinists? Embrace the village idiots of socialism? No, to hell with that! Give him a tiny minority which was firm, sure, his own!

  However, he had gradually found himself almost isolated—betrayed and deserted, while all manner of unifiers and disarmers, liquidators and defensists, chauvinists and antistatists, trashy scribblers and mangy timeserving petty bourgeois riffraff had gathered elsewhere in a tight bunch. Sometimes he was reduced to such a small minority that nobody at all remained at his side, as in 1908, the year of loneliness and misery after all his defeats, the most dreadful, the hardest year of his life—also spent in Switzerland. The intellectuals had abandoned the Bolshevik ranks in a panic: so much the better, at least the Party was rid of that petty bourgeois filth. Among those foul caricature intellectuals Lenin had felt particularly humiliated, insignificant, lost. It filled him with despair to feel himself sinking into their mire. It would have been idiotic to become like them. In every gesture, every word, every oath even, he was determined not to resemble them! … But it looked as though soon there would be no one at all left. It reached the point where he was desperately clinging to his last ten or fifteen supporters! And simply in order to capture fifteen Bolsheviks, and to deny them to the Machists, he had dashed off to London for material and written a philosophical work three hundred pages long, which no one had ever read; but he had discredited Bogdanov and dislodged him from the leadership! Then throughout the damp autumn those endless chilly walks by Lake Geneva, endlessly assuring themselves that they were not downhearted, and were on the road to victory.

  Even with the cleverest of t
hem, like Trotsky or Bukharin, he could find no common language. Of the few who stayed near he could never be sure for more than a month ahead—Zinoviev, for instance, with his weak nerves and his precarious beliefs. (Grishka really had no beliefs at all.)

  So that, after all, no “conquering force” had been created. His whole career, twenty-three years of uninterrupted militant campaigning against political stupidity, vulgarity, opportunism, his whole grim life under a constant hail of hatred, had brought him—what? Only isolation. The force of inertia carried him on along the same line—splitting with one, branding another, dissociating himself from a third—but he wearily realized that he was in a rut, that he could no longer look forward to real success.

  The loneliness.

  If only there was someone to tell, someone to share it with, so that he would hear his own voice.

  What a day … Everything had fallen apart in his hands. He had sat away the hours to no purpose.

  Piles of books. Piles of newspapers … In his years as an émigré he must have read, scanned, written, stacks, reams, pillars of paper.

  When he was young, the scent of imminent revolution was fresh in the air. The path toward it seemed simple and short. He told everyone, again and again, that “the universal belief in revolution is in itself the beginning of revolution!” A time of happy expectancy.

  But these last ten years, since his second emigration, had been filled, stuffed, packed tight with—what? Nothing but paper—envelopes, packets, newspaper wrappers, routine letters, express letters—so much time was spent on correspondence alone (not to mention the cost of postage, but that came from Party funds). Almost his whole life, half of every day, went into those endless letters. Nobody lived near him, his sympathizers were scattered to the four corners of the earth, and from a distance he had to keep their loyalty, rally, direct, advise, interrogate, beg, and thank them, coordinate resolutions (all this with his friends, at the same time never interrupting for a moment the fierce struggle with his enemies), and nothing was ever more urgent and important than the letter of the moment (though tomorrow it might seem trivial and too late, and anyway wrong). You exchanged articles in outline, proofs, criticisms, corrections, reviews, summaries, points for discussion, excerpts from the press, newspapers by the cartload, sometimes issues of your own journals, which never got beyond the first few numbers—and all the time you felt that none of it was serious, you couldn’t believe, couldn’t imagine, that a social movement could force its way up through the heaps of paper and newspaper wrappings littering the earth to the cherished goal of state power—where you would need qualities quite different from those required during your dozen years in reading rooms.

  He was nearing the end of his forty-seventh year, in an anxious, monotonous life of nothing but ink on paper, enmities and alliances, quarrels and agreements that sprang up and faded in a day or a week, all terribly important, all requiring enormous tact and skill, and always with politicians so much inferior to himself, all of it water into a bottomless bucket, instantly lost and forgotten, labor in vain. In a life of constant agitation, twisting and turning, his whole achievement was to fight his way into an impassable rubbish heap.

  His arms dangled limply, his back would not straighten, he looked utterly played out.

  Meanwhile his disease grew heavier, fitfully stirring and nagging inside him. It made not a sound, entered into no disputes, but no opponent was more powerful.

  An evil which now would never leave him.

  His vocation—he knew no other—was to change the course of history, and fulfillment had been denied him.

  All his incomparable abilities—appreciated now by everyone in the Party, but he set a truer and still higher value on them—all his quick-wittedness, his penetration, his grasp, his uselessly clear understanding of world events, had failed to bring him not only political victory but even the position of a Member of Parliament in Toyland, like Grimm. Or that of a successful lawyer (though he would hate to be a lawyer—he had lost every case in Samara). Or even that of a journalist.

  Just because he had been born in accursed Russia.

  It was his habit to carry out even the most laborious and thankless tasks conscientiously, and he was still trying to draft his detailed theses for the education of the Swiss left Zimmerwaldists on the cost of living, on the intolerable economic position of the masses. What should be the maximum salary for office workers and bureaucrats? What to watch for in the Party press? How to rid the Party of Grütlian reformists …

  It was no good. His work would not take shape. The heart had gone out of his routine and left a hole. His head was beginning to ache. Breathing was difficult. The very sight of his papers sickened him. By tomorrow the attack should be over, but at present he felt such a loathing for everything that he could have lain down and died.

  Guiltily deciding not to sit through the working day (not that there was much of it left), he stuffed the notebooks and manuscripts into his shopping bag as best he could, slammed the books shut and stacked them, made a neat bundle of the newspapers, put some things on their shelves, and took the rest back to the librarian, treading carefully on the steps so as not to come crashing down with that great pile.

  At the door he pulled on his heavy overcoat, carelessly crammed on his bowler hat, and shuffled off.

  Walking the same way, day in and day out, gave neither legs nor eyes enough to do: it had become automatic.

  It was beginning to get dark, and there was some mist too. Electric lights were already lit in the windows of shops and restaurants.

  A huge barrel was being rolled along the narrow side street, and behind it came a wheelbarrow. There was no way around them.

  He might easily, very easily, never escape from this cramped, apathetic, petty bourgeois Switzerland, and end his days here with the Skittle Club.

  Through the window of a food shop he could see a nickel-plated machine rhythmically cutting an appetizing ham into even slices. The grocer, looking as smug as all Swiss, came out onto the threshold of his establishment, and—whether he knew them or not—presented a grötzi free of charge to one passerby after another. In the third year of war the shops still importunately flaunted their plenty, though prices had risen by leaps and bounds because of the submarines. The bourgeoisie could still pick and choose.

  Luckily it was too cold to put café tables out on the pavement, or they would be sitting, lounging, sprawling there, goggling at the passersby, making you step around them with a curse. Through all his years as an émigré Lenin had hated cafés, those smoke-filled dens of logorrhea, where nine-tenths of the compulsive revolutionary windbags were in permanent session. During the war Zurich had drawn in another dubious crowd from the belligerent neighbors. It was because of them that rents had gone up—this mob of adventurers, shady businessmen, profiteers, draft-dodging students and blathering intellectuals, with their philosophical manifestos and artistic demonstrations, in revolt against they knew not what. And they were all there—in the cafés.

  America was no doubt just as well off. The upper stratum of the working class everywhere would sooner get rich than make a revolution. No one, either here or there, needed his dynamite, the sweep of his ax.

  He, who was capable of taking the world apart, or blowing it up and then rebuilding it, he had been born too soon, born merely to be a torment to himself.

  At its midpoint the Spiegelgasse rose in a hump, riding over a little hill of its own. Leaving home, wherever bound, he half ran downward. Coming back, wherever he had been, he faced a steep hill. If he had gotten into his stride, or was in a good humor, he thought nothing of it. But now he could scarcely drag himself along. He seemed not to be walking but scraping the ground with his feet.

  The steep, narrow staircase of the old house held the smells of many years. It was dark now, but the lamps had not been lit, and he had to tread cautiously.

  Third floor. A polyglot babble. The oppressive smells of the apartment.

  His room was like
a prison cell for two. Two beds, a table, chairs. An iron stove, with its pipe running through the wall, no fire in it (although it was getting cold enough). An upturned crate that had once held books served as a dresser. (Because they were forever on the move they bought no furniture.)

  In the last rays of daylight Nadya was still writing at the table. She looked around. She was surprised.

  But her eyes were used to the poor light, and when she saw him looking sixty, saw his yellow-gray face, his fixed dead gaze, she did not ask why he was so early.

  She had some experience with these attacks, which could prostrate him for days at a time or sometimes for several weeks, when he was burnt out with excitement, or the strain of battle was too much even for his iron body. He had suffered nervous attacks of this sort after 1903, again after One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and more than once after the Fifth Congress.

  The bowler hat weighed heavily on his head, the overcoat on his shoulders. It was a struggle to rid himself of them … Nadya helped him … He dragged his feet and the shopping bag with books across the room.

  He found strength to look at what Nadya had been writing and raised it to his eyes. Their accounts.

  A depressingly long column of figures.

  Though 1908 had been gloomy and lonely, they had been rolling in money after the Tiflis expropriation. They had an account with the Crédit Lyonnais. To escape from their misery they went to concerts in the evenings, had a holiday in Nice, traveled, lived in hotels, took cabs, rented a Paris apartment for a thousand francs, with a mirror over the fireplace.