Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{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.

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.

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:

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:

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

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 one’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

Natalya betrayed further lack of understanding about her husband in her analysis of Candle in the Wind, this time in her failure to grasp one of his secondary intentions in writing the play. “The only thing I found unconvincing and superfluous”, she complained, “was the desire of Alex, the author’s stand-in, to put a stop to the development of science.”²³ With a firm grasp of scientific principles himself, Solzhenitsyn had no desire that the development of science should stop. One of the purposes of the play was to point out that science, like every other field of human activity, was subject to ethical considerations. The abuse of technology, in this case bio-cybernetics, was always likely, indeed inevitable, if science refused to be restrained by ethics.

The nature of scientific abuse in Candle in the Wind centers on the use of Alda, a lovable but over-sensitive and neurotic woman, as a guinea pig in experiments in “neurostabilization”. The result of this “brain-scrambling” is that Alda changes from being hyper-sensitive to insensitive, from painfully alive to comfortably numb. She escapes from suffering only by becoming less alive: the end result, as Solzhenitsyn was eager to stress, of “technological interference in the complex psychology of human beings. It is almost a discussion of a worldwide process, not so much an experiment on her. The rush, the onward push of technology destroys the human psyche.” Does this mean that Alda can be seen as an archetype of the modern world itself? “Yes, yes,” Solzhenitsyn stressed emphatically, “the modern world in the capacity as victim: the vulnerable part of modernity and the modern world.”²⁴

What then would have been the solution to Alda’s, and the world’s, neurosis? Did Alda need love not mechanisms? “Yes,” Solzhenitsyn replied, “the solution would have been spiritual.”²⁵ A spiritual solution. Whatever one may feel about Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual alternative to intrusive technology, it is not, contrary to Natalya’s claims, “wholly negative”.

If Natalya’s views on Candle in the Wind illumine the gulf separating her own aspirations from those of her husband, Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of his “fictional” wife in the play are even more evocative of the sense of alienation in their marriage. Alex tells Alda that he was happy with few possessions and a tiny clay house before his wife appeared on the scene. “She was absolutely tireless and she was ashamed of our hut! She was ambitious as well and demanded that I erect a palace with a slate roof! She demanded that I earn more too. And that I take her to the city and the big stores.” He laments that his wife is typical of those who “think only of how best to grab and buy things and impress their neighbours” and attempts to explain why he is incapable of living that way: “To have to please someone, worry about someone, and let that determine my philosophy. I live only once and I want to act in accordance with absolute truth.” Accepting that as a husband he could never live up to materialist expectations, he adds: “My wife did a wise thing: she immediately found herself another husband who made good money.”²⁶ Apart from the undercurrents of bickering, Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in writing the play was always that higher goal espoused by Pasternak two years earlier. Its principal concern is the meaning of life itself, the preservation of the light within, which is diminished by hedonistic materialism, nihilism, and the lust for life that is really a living death. Against this hell-bound path of least resistance are contraposed suffering—described by Alex as “a lever for the growth of the soul”—and poverty: “It’s not a question of how much you earn, it’s a question of how little you spend.”²⁷

Perhaps the play is summarized most succinctly by Keith Armes in the introduction to his translation of the English edition: “Solzhenitsyn attempts to persuade a reluctant world of the dangers of materialism and of the worship of science. In doing so he proclaims that Christian faith which was later to inspire the Easter Procession and the Lenten Letter.”²⁸

In spite of the suppression of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the much-heralded cultural thaw in the Soviet Union following Khrushchev’s accession to power gave Solzhenitsyn hope that at last he could emerge from the shadows and his literature would see the light of day. “Finally, at the age of forty-two,” he wrote, “this secret authorship began to wear me down. The most difficult thing of all to bear was that I could not get my works judged by people with literary training. In 1961, after the twenty-second Congress of the USSR Communist Party and Tvardovsky’s speech at this, I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”²⁹

In his speech to the Congress, Tvardovsky, editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, had spoken of the need to “show the labours and ordeals of our people in a manner that is totally truthful to life”,³⁰ and even Khrushchev himself, in an attack on Stalin, had promised to erect a monument in Moscow “to the memory of the comrades who fell victims to arbitrary power”. “Comrades!” Khrushchev had implored. “Our duty is to investigate carefully such abuses of power in all their aspects. Time passes and we shall die, since all of us are mortal, but as long as we have the strength to work we must clear up many things and tell the truth to the Party and our people.”³¹

Solzhenitsyn did not trust Khrushchev, still believing that his own emergence from the shadows would be very risky and “might lead to the loss of my manuscripts and to my own destruction”,³² but Tvardovsky’s words offered hope, and he decided to present the manuscript of One Day in the Life to Tvardovsky for possible publication in Novy Mir.

On December 11, 1961, his forty-third birthday, Solzhenitsyn received a telegram from Tvardovsky inviting him to Moscow at Novy Mir’s expense. The dryness of the telegram concealed the delight with which Tvardovsky had read the manuscript. He had sat up all night reading it and declared to several friends the following day that a great writer had just been born. One friend recalled that he had never seen Novy Mir’s editor so enthusiastic as he was that day, insisting that he would do everything in his power to ensure Solzhenitsyn’s novel was published: “They say that Russian literature’s been killed. Damn and blast it! It’s in this folder with the ribbons. But who is he? Nobody’s seen him yet. We’ve sent a telegram…. We’ll take him under our wing, help him, and push his book through.” He told the novelist Vera Panova that “believe it or not, I’ve got a manuscript from a new Gogol”.³³

A year later Solzhenitsyn expressed his gratitude to Tvardovsky: “The greatest happiness that ‘recognition’ has given me I experienced in December last year, when you found Denisovich worth a sleepless night. None of the praise that came afterwards could outstrip that.”³⁴

At the conclusion of their meeting in Moscow, Tvardovsky insisted on drawing up a contract, stipulating the payment of an advance of 300 roubles to the author on signature, a sum equivalent to more than twice his annual salary as a schoolteacher. Solzhenitsyn had made his first major breakthrough as a writer.

Natalya could not believe her eyes when she saw the terms of the contract and burst into tears. Meanwhile, in a spirit of euphoria, Solzhenitsyn wrote to friends that the reception of his manuscript had “exceeded my wildest expectations” and that “the whole thing has knocked me sideways”.³⁵

An unwelcome reminder that he was still walking on a knife-edge came at the beginning of 1962 when he returned to the offices of Novy Mir to hear the verdict on Matryona’s House. Although Tvardovsky liked the story, he feared that it was “a bit too Christian” for a Soviet journal. It was too subversive, and he dared not publish it. Nonetheless, he assured Solzhenitsyn that he wanted to publish it and stressed that he had no wish to browbeat his new-found prodigy into political submission. “Please don’t become ideologically reliable”, he quipped at the end of the meeting. “Don’t write anything that my staff could pass without my having to know about it.”³⁶ It was clear that Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn were on dangerous ground, and both men realized that the courage of their convictions was being put to the test. As if to emphasize the point, Tvardovsky assured Solzhenitsyn that he was determined to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and would do everything he could to overcome any opposition he might meet along the way.

Tvardovsky’s efforts to secure publication involved a complete circumvention of the normal channels that would, if followed, have resulted in the manuscript’s rejection. Instead, he sought the support of leading literary figures, eliciting favorable reports from them about the manuscript’s merits. He then showed these to some of his political friends, in the hope of persuading them that One Day in the Life could be used to bolster Khrushchev’s policy of debunking Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn was becoming a player in a dangerous game of power politics.

On July 23, 1962, Solzhenitsyn raised the tension and the stakes by refusing to agree to various cuts that would have made the book more politically acceptable. These included a number of alleged insults to Soviet art and the discussions about religion centered on Alyosha the Baptist.

Such were the waves that Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript was causing in the higher echelons of Soviet society that by September it had come to the notice of Khrushchev himself. He demanded to see it and, to everyone’s relief, liked it. He could see no reason why One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could not be published. The news was greeted ecstatically at the offices of Novy Mir, and on September 16 the glad tidings were dispatched to Solzhenitsyn in a letter: “Now we can say that Ivan D is on the very threshold. We are expecting news any day.”³⁷ With Khrushchev’s approval, it was surely a mere formality; the Central Committee would simply rubber-stamp the decision. Yet the days passed, and there was still no official go-ahead. Tvardovsky was on tenterhooks and is said to have threatened to resign if permission was refused. Finally, at midday on September 21, the long-awaited phone call was received. It was not, however, what Tvardovsky had either hoped or feared. Permission was neither granted nor refused but merely deferred. Instead, Khrushchev ordered twenty-three copies to be delivered by the following morning.

Tvardovsky was thrown into a panic. He did not possess twenty-three copies, and it would be impossible to get that number typed up in a single night. The only option was a limited printing of the necessary copies. He rang the head of the printing department at the leading national newspaper, Izvestia, explained the urgency of the situation, and arranged to have four machines set aside from printing Izvestia that night and reserved for printing twenty-five copies of Ivan Denisovich.

The copies were duly delivered next morning, and Khrushchev ordered that they be distributed to members of the Party Presidium. What transpired at the next meeting of the Presidium is not known for certain and has become a source of legend. It is clear, however, that Khrushchev met considerable opposition from hard-liners in the government who were strongly against publication. “How can we fight against the remnants of the personality cult if Stalinists of this type are still among us?” Khrushchev is alleged to have said.³⁸ Another source reported Khrushchev as saying that “there’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”³⁹ There were, in fact, more Stalinists at the meeting than Khrushchev cared or dared to admit, each looking for the opportunity to bring about his downfall. One by one, Khrushchev was alienating the powerful interest groups that dominated Soviet politics. His de-Stalinization was unpopular with all hard-line communists and particularly with the KGB; his emphasis on nuclear rather than conventional weapons had lost him the support of the military; and his administrative reforms had struck at the bureaucratic heart of the Party apparatus. Too much was changing too quickly for many sectional interests in the Soviet hierarchy, and it was only a matter of time before they struck back at the man responsible. Like Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev was walking on a knife-edge. Two years later, in October 1964, he would be toppled in a bloodless coup and presented with his own resignation “for reasons of health”. For now, however, he still had a firm grip on power and forced through the publication of One Day in the Life, proposing the motion that authorized it himself.

Having won this small though significant victory at home, Khrushchev was faced down on the world stage by President Kennedy, being induced to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba in October 1962 at the culmination of an international crisis that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn, still not even a published author, had gained many powerful enemies among the Soviet leadership, while enjoying the support of a Soviet President who was living on borrowed time. He was making his literary debut in dangerous circumstances.