Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} LIFE AND DEATH

The depth of the spiritual and intellectual discussions held between Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev at Marfino contrasted starkly with the vacuity of the books in the prison library. Through the character of Khorobrov in The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn expressed his contempt for the state of Soviet literature in 1948. He poured scorn on one book in particular, a hack novel called Far from Moscow by Vasiley Azhayev, which topped the bestseller lists in 1948. It describes in glowingly romantic terms the heroic feat of building an oil pipeline in Siberia without ever mentioning that the back-breaking work was done by prison labor. Instead, Azhayev’s novel portrayed the workers as “happy young members of the Komsomol, well-fed, well-shod and bursting with enthusiasm”. There was no mention of half-starved skeletal shadows being literally worked to death. Khorobrov had tried reading the novel but found that it “turned his stomach”. He could sense that the author knew the truth. Perhaps he had even been a security officer in one of the Siberian death camps. He knew, but he “was cold-bloodedly lying”.¹

Khorobrov had then tried a volume of the selected writings of Galakhov, whose literary reputation was at its height. Again he was disappointed and put the book down without finishing it. “Even Galakhov, who could write so prettily about love, had been stricken with mental paralysis and was going down the drain with the ever-swelling crowd of writers who wrote, if not for children, then for morons who had seen and known nothing of life and were only too delighted to be amused with any rubbish.” Soviet literature was truly in a sorry state, Khorobrov mused.

“Everything that really moves the human heart was absent…. There was nothing to read.”²

Pondering the state of Soviet literature during the idle hours on his prison bunk in Marfino, Solzhenitsyn’s own literary vocation began to take shape. With an iron determination, he was resolved to tell the truth—the full, unexpurgated truth—about life in Stalin’s camps. He would, single-handedly if necessary, break the conspiracy of silence.

Even as he pondered dejectedly in his prison cell, several key literary figures in England were speaking out against the evils of communism in the forthright terms that Solzhenitsyn was to use himself in later years. In early June 1948, during a radio broadcast for the BBC, Malcolm Muggeridge criticized the dynamic duo of Fabian socialism, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for their naive eulogizing of the Soviet regime. Muggeridge attributed to Beatrice Webb the statement “Old people take to pets, and mine is the USSR.” With the sardonic humor for which he was famous, Muggeridge added that a tabby or a pekinese “might have been easier to handle and certainly better house-trained”. He concluded his talk by comparing Beatrice Webb to Don Quixote: “[S]he finished up enmeshed in her own self-deception, adulating a regime which bore as little relation to the Fabian Good Life as Dulcinea del Toboso to the Mistress of Don Quixote’s dreams.”³

Having witnessed the horrors of communism as a correspondent in Moscow before the war, Muggeridge was appalled by the continuing gullibility of Western intellectuals. He could not understand the obstinate support for Stalin of Shaw and the Webbs and was amazed at the sermons in support of the “glorious social experiment taking place in the Soviet Union” given by leading Christians such as the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean of Canterbury”. “As a symbol, from the Communists’ point of view, the Dean is incomparable”, Muggeridge wrote. “All their ridicule of Christianity, all their confidence that its day is done, seems to come true in his very person. Moscow newspapers, in their cartoons, present the Christian Church in just such a guise: gaiters, cross, white locks, and seeming venerability, adorning absurdity.”⁴

As he witnessed the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe, Muggeridge considered with dismay the Soviet policy of Clement Attlee’s government. Labor policy toward the Soviet Union was based on the belief that Britain would benefit because “Left would speak to Left”. Such a view, Muggeridge claimed, was the epitome of self-delusion: “As far as Stalin was concerned, the Leftism of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues was about as congenial as ginger beer to a congenital drunkard.”⁵

Such comments, had he been able to read them, would have warmed the prisoner’s heart as he lay in Marfino lamenting the state of affairs in his own country. Doubtless also, his heart would have leapt and his despondency would have been dispersed somewhat, had he known that George Orwell was in the midst of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel which, perhaps, would be more important than any other in turning people away from totalitarianism. Still less could the prisoner have guessed that he was destined as a writer to become more influential even than Orwell in the fight against political dictatorships. Orwell’s classic was published the following year, 1949, complementing Animal Farm, his earlier satirical fable attacking communism, which had been published in 1945.

Years later, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged the importance of both Muggeridge and Orwell in heightening awareness of the dangers of communism in the West. Orwell’s books, he believed, had come as a shock to certain intellectuals: “In the west of course many stubbornly resisted and did not want to understand. Understanding, comprehension, tends to project emotion ahead so that some did not want to know. Bernard Shaw for instance did not want to know, and so Orwell was received with difficulty.”⁶ In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, although “it was difficult to get hold of”, Nineteen Eighty-Four was greeted with “admiration” by those who managed, illegally, to obtain a copy because it was “precisely accurate”.⁷ Meanwhile, Muggeridge was worthy of respect because “he was able to travel that difficult path of freeing himself from socialist lies and attaining spiritual heights”.⁸

Solzhenitsyn, of course, was traveling the same path as Muggeridge but in more difficult circumstances. One particular difficulty, coming to crisis point during his time at Marfino, was the state of his marriage. Again, the autobiographical elements in The First Circle shed some light on his own feelings as he sensed the tension in his precarious relationship with Natalya. In the novel, Gleb Nerzhin mulls over the words of Nadya, his wife, who has written “when you come back…” in a letter to him. “But the horror was that there was no going back. To return was impossible. After four years in the army and a ten-year prison sentence, there would probably not be a single cell of his body which was the same. Although the man who came back would have the same surname as her husband, he would be a different person, and she would realize that her one and only, for whom she had waited fourteen lonely years, was not this man at all—he no longer existed.”⁹

Ironically, the result of Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual development, the fruit of his endless discussions with Panin and Kopelev, was that he was growing ever more divorced from the aspirations he had once nurtured and those his wife continued to nurture in his absence. He was trapped by circumstances. If other married couples sometimes grew apart even when they had lived together for years, what hope had he and Natalya after all the years of enforced separation? Yet however hopeless the situation seemed, he still nurtured the belief that perhaps, in spite of all the odds, they might still survive the experience. Again, Solzhenitsyn uses the character of Gleb Nerzhin to express the emotions he was feeling in 1948:

Then, on December 19, 1948, during a rare prison visit, Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she would have to obtain a formal divorce from him or she would lose her job. She told him that security was being tightened at the laboratory where she worked and that if she declared her marriage to a political prisoner on the forms she was required to fill in, she would certainly not be retained as an employee. Outwardly, Solzhenitsyn put on a brave face and agreed that, under the circumstances, Natalya had no choice but to divorce him. In a letter to Natalya’s mother a couple of weeks later, he wrote that her decision was “correct, the sober thing to do; it should have been done three years ago”.¹¹ Inwardly, however, he was devastated, shaken to the core, and confessed later that after the visit he was left in the darkest despair.¹² In reality, Natalya had already filed court papers declaring the dissolution of their marriage a couple of months before she informed her husband of the fact. As a result, she was able to declare him as a former husband on the form she had to fill out for her job, an act made all the easier by her decision to retain her own surname, rather than take Solzhenitsyn’s, at the time of their marriage eight years earlier.

Although Natalya had assured him during the visit that the divorce was a mere formality and that she would still wait for him, he found himself troubled by doubts. If the divorce was not the end of their marriage, surely it was the beginning of the end:

Throughout 1949, there was a slow but discernible estrangement between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, a creeping paralysis in their relations with each other. Toward the end of the year, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natalya urging her to complete the severance between them and give up writing to him. Her own well-being was more important to him than “this illusion of family relations that long ago ceased to exist”.¹⁴ He was aware that she was becoming more and more involved in her busy new life as a lecturer and that in the evenings she was kept fully occupied playing the piano at various concerts. On the one hand, he saw more clearly than ever that he was casting an unwelcome shadow on her life, while on the other, he was developing a stoic calmness about his own fate. He was also beginning to suspect that his prison term would be followed by a period in “perpetual exile”, effectively ending all hope that he and Natalya would ever be reunited. Natalya ignored Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion, and the couple continued to correspond, though not on the same terms as before. As they were supposed to be no longer married, the tone of the correspondence, particularly on Natalya’s part, was more circumspect, dampening any expressions of affection in their letters. Meanwhile, in her professional life, Natalya continued to prosper, and in March 1950 she was appointed head of the chemistry department at the research institute. In the same month, there was another of the rare visits to Solzhenitsyn. Their meeting, though subdued, was touched by genuine warmth. Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she still loved him and had no intention of leaving him. For his part, Solzhenitsyn confessed that his advice that she end their relationship had come from his head but his heart “had shrunk from fear” that it could possibly come to pass.¹⁵ Solzhenitsyn also confessed that he now regretted they had never had children, a reversal of his pre-prison view that children would merely interfere with his literary aspirations. In those days, it was Natalya, not Solzhenitsyn, who had wanted desperately to start a family, but now she was not so sure. In any case, she told him, it was probably too late to think of such things now.

According to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn was very pensive throughout the meeting. He had much to be pensive about. Their relationship, it seemed, was held together by a thread.

A couple of months later, on May 19, 1950, Solzhenitsyn was transferred, along with several other prisoners, from the relative “luxury” of Marfino to an unknown destination. His feelings, and those of his fellow prisoners, were described at the conclusion of The First Circle:

After yet another short spell at Butyrki, Solzhenitsyn began a long and insufferable journey across the Soviet Union, which took two exhausting months to complete. He eventually arrived at his destination, Ekibastuz labor camp, deep in the semi-arid steppes of Kazakhstan in Soviet central Asia, in the third week of August. The first sight of his new “home” confirmed that Solzhenitsyn was now more securely clasped within the jaws of the Soviet prison system than ever before. The “special camp” in which he found himself was enclosed by double fences of barbed wire, between which Alsatian dogs prowled menacingly, overlooked by armed guards. A strip of ploughed land encircled the perimeter to reveal the footprints of anyone attempting to escape, and sharp-pointed stakes were set in the ground at forty-five-degree angles, designed to impale would-be escapees before they had the opportunity to leave their footprints on the ploughed strip beyond. Thoughts of escape were futile, and, beyond the perimeter, hundreds upon hundreds of miles separated the new arrival from the world he had once known. The thin thread between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, his only remaining link with his old life, was about to snap.

For Natalya, who had lived a life of heroic exile from her husband for almost a decade, it was too much to bear. Until his transfer to the labor camp, she had still clung to the last lingering hopes that some day she and Solzhenitsyn would embrace again in freedom. “But when the first letter came from faraway Ekibastuz, I learned that now we were not to see each other at all. Now there would be no meetings, and letters would arrive only twice a year. Now we were separated not only by time but by distance.”¹⁷

The distance separating them went beyond the merely geographical. Gradually, to her dismay—or perhaps, if she was looking for an excuse to escape, to her relief—she sensed another remoteness. In his infrequent letters, he was “expressing moods entirely different from those I had known”. They appeared to be written by a Solzhenitsyn who was completely new to her. Instead of his impetuous and impatient will and his worldly ambition, there was now a “passive waiting… resignation… submission to destiny”. “Perhaps,” he wrote in one of the rare letters he was permitted to send, “this faith in destiny is the beginning of religiosity? I don’t know. It seems to me I’m still far from having reached the point of believing in a god.” Such a discussion of “god” was itself an example of the remoteness that so alienated Natalya. Neither of them had ever taken religion seriously, both having absorbed the atheism of the Soviet education system, so Natalya viewed this rising religiosity with an element of alarm. “Although the word ‘god’ was still not capitalized,” she wrote, “it nevertheless began to crop up with increasing frequency.” She then quotes a letter of December 1950, in which reference to the divine is indeed frequently made: “Haven’t been ill here yet, thank god, and may god grant that no illness befall me in the future.” Natalya’s memoirs display her continuing irritation with this further example of what she calls one of Solzhenitsyn’s “precious ideas”.¹⁸

During 1951, Natalya no longer perceived Solzhenitsyn “as a living person, in flesh and blood. He was an illusion.”¹⁹ The end was nigh and was hastened by the arrival of a new admirer in Natalya’s life, the flesh and blood she needed to exorcise Solzhenitsyn’s ghost. This was Vsevolod Somov, a scientific colleague, who began courting her in earnest in the spring, encouraged by Natalya’s mother, who was understandably anxious about her daughter’s uncertain future.

Natalya was still going through the motions of corresponding with Solzhenitsyn, but by July he detected from the tone of her letters that something was amiss. “It seems as though you had to force yourself to begin the letter”, he wrote. “A kind of reticence fettered your tongue, and after a few lines you broke off.”²⁰ Soon she stopped writing altogether, except for a solitary birthday greeting in December wishing him happiness in life.

In the spring of 1952, Natalya decided to restructure her life in its entirety. She moved in with Vsevolod Somov without any formal marriage ceremony, declaring to her friends that they should now be considered man and wife. “I shall neither justify nor blame myself”. Natalya wrote in her memoirs. “After all the years of trials, I could no longer sustain my ‘saintliness’. I began to live a real life.”²¹

Natalya admitted that she lacked the courage to write to her former husband, and Solzhenitsyn was forced to write repeatedly to Natalya’s Aunt Nina requesting that she clear up the uncertainty. Feeling that she could say nothing without her niece’s consent, she did not reply until, at Natalya’s request, she finally wrote a short note in September 1952: “Natasha has asked me to tell you that you may arrange your life independently of her.”²² Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn was more confused than ever by the vagueness and terseness of the note and wrote to Natalya directly, urging a full explanation of “such an insignificant, enigmatic phrase”.

Natalya responded by informing him of her “marriage” to another man, ending their careworn, sixteen-year relationship with a finality that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s fears.

However, Solzhenitsyn had other fears to contend with during this period of uncertainty. In December 1951, at around the time Natalya had sent him the birthday card wishing him happiness in life, his own luckless life was thrown into further anxiety by the discovery of a small swelling on his right groin. At first he tried to ignore it, but gradually it grew to the size of a lemon and was becoming increasingly painful. On January 30, 1952, he was diagnosed as having cancer and was admitted to the camp hospital. Having survived the first grueling winter at Ekibastuz, the sufferings of which became the inspiration for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he had been struck down with a potentially fatal disease. He had survived all the cruelty and bullying, the starvation rations, the manual labor in icy winds that slashed knife-like across the flat defenseless steppe at forty below zero, only to succumb to something worse. He had passed from the desperation of the labor camp to the desolation of his deathbed, from bare existence on the edge of death to the final triumph of death itself. Such must have been the thoughts whirling endlessly through Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he waited two long weeks in the camp hospital for an operation that the doctors had recommended should be carried out at once. It was eventually performed on February 12, under a local anaesthetic. For a while after the operation, he ran a high fever and was in considerable pain.

But he was soon making a good recovery. Once more he had proved to be a survivor, and once more he would profit from the threat of loss. In facing death, he had gained an immeasurably greater understanding of life. It was the eternal paradox, at the very heart of life and death, which is encapsulated in the Gospels: he who loses his life shall find it.²⁴

As he recovered physically in the camp hospital, his spirits were simultaneously being healed. The spiritual healing could not be seen as readily as the scar on his right groin, but it was as real—more real, in fact. The former atheist had ceased seeing life in terms of dialectical materialism and was beginning to perceive it in the light of theological mysticism. This was the change, accelerated by his arrival at Ekibastuz, that had so alienated his wife. In one of his letters to her, he had described the change at the very core of his being: “Years go by, yes, but if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain.”²⁵ This, which to Solzhenitsyn was the source of his inner strength, was to Natalya a sign of outward weakness. For her, but not for him, resignation was merely the absence of determination, a failure of the will; for her, but not for him, inner peace was really only an abject surrender to circumstance. They were no longer speaking the same language.

At this time, however, Solzhenitsyn’s experience of strength through suffering was not seen in specifically Christian terms. The way of mortification was not necessarily the way of the Cross; or, returning to his letters to Natalya, God was still “god” and not “God”. All this was to change in the days following his operation, as he lay in the surgical ward of the camp hospital. He was hot and feverish, unable to move, but his thoughts were alive and not prone to dissolve into delirium. In his incapacitated condition, he was grateful for the company of Doctor Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who sat beside his bed talking to him. Alone in the ward together in the evening, with the light turned out so as not to hurt the patient’s eyes, Kornfeld told Solzhenitsyn the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. As he listened, Solzhenitsyn was astonished at the conviction of the new convert, the ardor of his words: “And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”²⁶ Thus Kornfeld ended the account of his conversion experience, and Solzhenitsyn shuddered at the mystical knowledge in his voice. Solzhenitsyn must have shuddered again the following morning when he was awoken by the sound of running about and tramping in the corridor. The orderlies were carrying Kornfeld’s body to the operating room. He had been dealt eight blows to the skull with a plasterer’s mallet while he slept, and died on the operating table without regaining consciousness: “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.”²⁷

Many commentators have suggested that this poignant meeting with Kornfeld, on the eve of his death, was pivotal to Solzhenitsyn’s final embrace of Christianity. This may be so, but its importance should not be overstated. The war, the camps, the cancer, had all prepared the ground before they met. By February 1952, Solzhenitsyn was ripe for conversion. After all, had he not just looked death squarely in the face and lived? The story of Kornfeld’s conversion may perhaps have been the final catalyst, but when the light came on Solzhenitsyn’s own road to Damascus, it was at least half-expected. As Solzhenitsyn remarked concerning his fateful meeting with Kornfeld: “[B]y that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts”.²⁸

In fact, he had matured sufficiently to see through and beyond Kornfeld’s “universal law of life”. The truth, Solzhenitsyn reasoned, went deeper than Kornfeld realized. To accept Kornfeld’s thesis at face value, one would have to admit that those who suffer most are in some way more evil than those who are relatively free from pain. Did that mean that he and the millions of other prisoners in Stalin’s camps were more evil than those who had escaped their miserable fate? Did it mean that those who suffered an even worse fate, such as tortuously slow death, were the most evil people of all? Worse, did it mean that those who committed the torture were less evil than their victims? And what of those who prospered rather than suffered? What of the malicious criminals he had met in various camps over the years? What of the camp guards? Worst of all, what of Stalin himself? Did it mean that Stalin was less evil than the millions of innocents he had slaughtered? Surely not. What of the torturers? Solzhenitsyn asked:

Having passed beyond Kornfeld’s theory, Solzhenitsyn could look back at it from the other side. From this new angle, he saw that for individuals in their one-to-one relationship with the Creator, the theory actually held true: “But there was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.”³⁰

All alone in the recovery room in the camp hospital from which Kornfeld had gone to his death, Solzhenitsyn passed long sleepless nights, pondering with astonishment his own life and the turns it had taken. For the first time, he seemed fully awake, fully alive, to the sublime realities at the root of his personal experiences. At last, all the doubts, all the shadows, seemed to disappear and everything appeared resolved, crystal clear. Slowly, as the interminable minutes passed, he set down his thoughts in rhymed verses: