Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER ELEVEN} TOO HOT TO HANDLE

On Sunday, October 21, 1962, without a word of explanation, Pravda, the Communist Party daily newspaper, published “The Heirs of Stalin”, an anti-Stalinist poem by Evgeni Evtushenko, in which he warned against those Stalinists in positions of power who wanted to turn back the clock. It was a timely reminder that the winds of change were themselves inconstant, but the fact that Pravda had chosen to publish Evtushenko’s poem indicated that, for the time being at least, the winds were blowing in favor of the reformers.

In the favorable atmosphere of de-Stalinization, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made its first public appearance. It was an instant success. Tvardovsky informed Solzhenitsyn that several thousand copies of the November issue of Novy Mir containing Solzhenitsyn’s novel had been diverted to the bookstalls set up in the Kremlin for delegates to the plenary session of the Central Committee. Khrushchev had announced from the platform that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was an extremely important work, which every delegate should read. Dutifully, they had all trooped off to the bookstalls to acquire a copy. Elsewhere in Moscow, it had sold out completely, despite the printing of several thousand extra copies, and was already a collector’s item.

Solzhenitsyn’s popular success was accompanied by critical acclaim. Either the Soviet press genuinely shared the public’s enthusiasm for One Day in the Life, or else the reviewers were merely intent on following the current party line. Whatever the reason, reviews were universally positive. Konstantin Simonov, writing in Izvestia on November 18, 1962, declared that “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is written with the sure hand of a mature, unique master. A powerful talent has come into our literature. I personally have no doubts on that score.” Although Solzhenitsyn would doubtless have been flattered by such praise, he must have found some of Simonov’s other observations a little difficult to swallow. Worst of all was Simonov’s assertion that Solzhenitsyn “has shown himself a true helper of the Party”. Admittedly, Simonov had made the assertion in relation to the role that One Day in the Life was playing in “the struggle against the cult of personality and its consequences”,¹ but, regardless of the context, Solzhenitsyn must have balked at any suggestion that he was helping to perpetuate the Party he had grown to despise.

The incongruity of Solzhenitsyn’s position as a true helper of the Party was hammered home even more forcefully five days later when a review of his novel appeared in Pravda. The review was written by Vladimir Ermilov, a communist time-server who epitomized everything Solzhenitsyn detested. During the Stalinist purges, Ermilov had been a secret-police informer who had denounced many writers and intellectuals, consigning them to the very camps that Solzhenitsyn was describing. Now that the tide had turned against Stalin, Ermilov had turned with it, determined to remain in favor. Stalin was now the “enemy of the people” while Solzhenitsyn was a newly discovered hero, “a writer gifted with a rare talent, and, as befits a real artist, he has told us a truth that cannot be forgotten, and must not be forgotten, a truth that is staring us in the face”.²

Whatever his attitude to official praise of his work, Solzhenitsyn surely received a degree of genuine consolation from the letters he began to receive from former prisoners.

Another former prisoner, after declaring that his own life was described exactly in the novel, recounted his riposte to “a loudly dressed lady with a gold ring” who had said that she didn’t like Solzhenitsyn’s novel because it was too depressing: “It’s better to have a bitter truth than a sweet lie”, he had replied.⁴

“After reading it,” wrote a woman whose husband had perished in the camps, “the only thing left to do is to knock a nail into the wall, tie a knot and hang oneself.” A young female student who had lost both her grandparents in the camps could not even bear to read it, writing to Solzhenitsyn that she had flicked through it before being forced to put it down. Another woman, the wife of one who had died, expressed the grief more eloquently:

There were other letters too, not sent to Solzhenitsyn but published in the press. These were not from former political prisoners but from those who had never experienced “one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. Many of these were either blissfully ignorant of the realities depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s novel or else were guards or former guards who held the prisoners in contempt.

There was one letter Solzhenitsyn found grimly amusing for its woeful lack of scriptural knowledge. “I’ve never before had to swallow such trash…. And this is not just my opinion. Many of us feel the same, our name is Legion.”

“Quite right,” Solzhenitsyn replied, “their name is Legion. Only they were in too much of a hurry to check their reference to the Gospel. It was of course a Legion of devils.”⁷

Clearly, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had touched a raw nerve. As its impact resounded throughout the Soviet Union, from the grandeur of the Kremlin to the humble homes of former prisoners, Solzhenitsyn contemplated the power his novel had unleashed. “If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?”⁸ Solzhenitsyn was not the only person asking this question. There were many who had a vested interest in keeping the truth hidden, and these people, the hard-line communists, were already preparing their response.

However, it was Khrushchev himself who had planted the psychological bomb at the highest level of Soviet life and had given it his blessing. Encouraged by this, Tvardovsky felt confident enough to overcome his initial misgivings and publish Matryona’s House, along with another short story by Solzhenitsyn entitled “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”, in the January 1963 edition of Novy Mir. In many ways, Matryona’s House is one of the most important of Solzhenitsyn’s works, a spiritual bomb just as One Day in the Life was a psychological bomb. According to the dissident historian Grigori Pomerants, Christianity began for a million Russians with the reading of Matryona’s House: “A million people (if not more) took the first step towards the light with Solzhenitsyn.”⁹

Yet where some saw the light, others saw only darkness. Matryona’s House was condemned at a meeting of Moscow writers in March for failing to educate youth by positive examples. It was the task of Soviet writers to lead the youth “to a bright future, to communism”: “When you read this story you get the impression that the peasant’s psychology has remained the same as it was sixty years ago. But this is not true! We need works which are historically truthful, and tell of the enormous revolutionary changes that have taken place in the Soviet village.”¹⁰

A few days later, Sergei Pavlov, First Secretary of the Young Communist League, attacked Solzhenitsyn and other writers in Novy Mir for failing “to speak of lofty ideas, of communism… under the pretext of the struggle against the consequences of the cult of the individual and dogmatism”. Matryona’s House was “immersed in a narrow little world of philistine problems” and breathed “such pessimism, mustiness, hopelessness”.¹¹

Against the crescendo of resentment, Khrushchev’s words a week or so earlier sounded ominously isolated: “The party gives its backing to artistic creations which are really truthful, whatever negative aspects of life they may deal with, so long as they help the people in their effort to build a new society.”¹²

The last thing the communists desired was a new society with all the unwelcome changes that would inevitably accompany it. Sensing that the winds of change were once more blowing in their direction, they ceased fighting a rearguard action and moved on to the offensive.

The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s For the Good of the Cause in the July 1963 edition of Novy Mir heralded a major debate between the two schools of thought vying for supremacy in the Soviet Union, the Stalinists and those fighting for a de-Stalinized new society. For the Good of the Cause, as the ironic title suggested, was Solzhenitsyn’s boldest attack yet on the corruption and injustice endemic in the communist regime. As such, it was bound to provoke a hostile response.

The first shots were fired by Yuri Barabash, a well-known literary critic and champion of the old guard who considered Solzhenitsyn’s description of a corrupt bureaucracy at the heart of Soviet life to be a fantasy invented by the author: “We are presented with an artificially constructed, imaginary world, where honest, decent, but weak-willed champions of justice are found to be helpless… in the face of some indifferent, unfeeling force, which can be sensed behind the faceless, nameless representatives of unnamed institutions.” These were serious defects in the very conception of Solzhenitsyn’s story, which adversely affected its literary qualities, rendering it a failure.¹³

Barabash also scoffed at the moral tone in Solzhenitsyn’s work, derisively dismissing the concept of the righteous woman in Matryona’s House and the fruitless efforts to discuss right and wrong in terms other than those dictated by dialectical materialism. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn’s insistence on such an unprogressive moral outlook illustrated that his “view of life and his attitude towards it will be seen to have remained just as unmodern, and in many respects as archaic, as they were in Matryona’s House”.¹⁴

The case for the defense was put by the Leningrad novelist Danil Granin, who replied to Barabash’s original article in the leading literary journal Literaturnaya Gazeta. Granin wrote that Solzhenitsyn in For the Good of the Cause was demanding justice and asking some very important questions about life in Soviet society.¹⁵ An irate reader, R. N. Seliverstov, replying to Granin, was incensed at the very suggestion that the Soviet system was unjust: “Genuine justice, fought for and won by the Party and our whole people—and not ‘abstract’ justice—runs through our life today and is triumphant! A writer who takes it upon himself to deal with an important contemporary theme cannot fail to take all this into account.” Seliverstov’s remarks were accompanied by a statement from the editors of the Literaturnaya Gazeta: “It seems to the editors that R. N. Seliverstov makes valid comments on Solzhenitsyn’s story and Granin’s article.”

Furthermore, they insisted that Barabash’s original criticisms of For the Good of the Cause were well founded. The editors chastised Solzhenitsyn for employing the universal approach to concepts of justice rather than the class approach, reminding him that “a socialist-realist artist handles themes from the standpoint of the communist view of the world”.¹⁶

At this stage, the editors of Novy Mir became embroiled in a bitter feud with their rivals at the Literaturnaya Gazeta that would keep the debate over For the Good of the Cause in the forefront of both publications for the rest of the year.

Toward the end of the year, the editors of Novy Mir controversially nominated Solzhenitsyn for the coveted Lenin Prize for Literature for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was a bold gesture but had no real chance of success. The prize was awarded by a jury consisting overwhelmingly of reliable members of the old guard, who would never contemplate awarding someone so heretical as Solzhenitsyn such an accolade. On April 11, 1964, an article in Pravda quoted extracts from letters that the editors had allegedly received from a number of readers whose addresses were not given. “They all come to the same conclusion”, the article stated. “Solzhenitsyn’s short novel deserves a positive assessment but it cannot be placed among such outstanding works which are worthy of the Lenin Prize.”¹⁷

While the controversy surrounding his previous work raged in the pages of the Soviet press, Solzhenitsyn was putting the finishing touches to his next book. This was The First Circle, the novel based on his experiences and discussions at Marfino special prison. Not only was it his most ambitious work to date, it was easily his most audacious, going far beyond his other work in its fundamental questioning of Soviet preconceptions. Having read the attacks that his work had provoked already, he must have had serious concerns about its reception and, more to the point, serious doubts about its chances of ever being published.

The First Circle has been described by the critic Leonid Rzhevsky as “a ruthless rejection of Stalinism”.¹⁸ By early 1964, the ruthless rejection of Stalinism was not as safe as it had been two years previously. It now seemed, in the rapidly changing political climate, that the more ruthless the rejection of Stalinism the more ruthless would be the consequences.

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn put his doubts and fears to one side, inviting Tvardovsky to his home in Ryazan on May 2, 1964, to read the finished manuscript of The First Circle. It was Tvardovsky who had nominated One Day in the Life for the Lenin Prize, and he was still Solzhenitsyn’s most valued and influential champion. If anyone would appreciate the literary merit of The First Circle, it was Tvardovsky, and if anyone could get it published, he could.

Natalya accompanied her husband to the station to meet their distinguished guest. Surprisingly, it was the first time she had ever met Tvardovsky, even though her husband had worked closely with him for nearly two and a half years, an indication of how far she had been marginalized during Solzhenitsyn’s rise to fame. The next day, when Tvardovsky was enchanted by Natalya’s piano playing, he found Solzhenitsyn more interested in a BBC broadcast on the radio. Husband and wife had drifted apart since the days of courtship many years before when Solzhenitsyn himself had been enchanted by her playing.

As Tvardovsky sat down to read The First Circle, he found himself becoming more and more enthusiastic. “Great stuff!… So far, so far: I promise nothing!” Increasingly intoxicated by both the book and the bottle of cognac he was consuming while reading it, he even became flippant about the dangers that the book presented to all concerned: “This is great, as good as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. So far, so far! When you’re inside I’ll bring you parcels! You’ll even get the odd bottle of cognac.” Through the drunken numbness, he endeavored to inject a word of caution, urging Solzhenitsyn to tone down the Stalin pages, but ultimately a heady mixture of undiluted praise and undiluted alcohol prevailed: “This is wonderful, Alexander Isayevich—not a superfluous line!… I shall be put inside for publishing it! Even though it’s basically optimistic.”¹⁹

It was a far more somber and sober Tvardovsky who presided over the editorial meeting to discuss the manuscript of The First Circle on June 11. “By the normal standards,” he began, “this novel should be scuttled and the author arrested. But what sort of people are we?” Tvardovsky’s colleagues on the editorial board of Novy Mir were thrown into confusion. One, with a show of indecision that nevertheless put the problem in a nutshell, remarked that it was impossible to publish, and morally impossible not to. Another procrastinated, requesting a second reading, while a third, clearly disturbed by the issues raised in the novel, said that the writing was tremendous, but “the novel plunges us into doubt and dismay”.²⁰ Only the youngest member of the group, the bright-eyed head of the criticism section, argued warmly and unequivocally for acceptance. He would clearly go far—perhaps all the way to Siberia.

In spite of the initial reluctance, a contract was drawn up within days. Yet the greatest obstacle, state censorship, still remained. Tvardovsky decided to try a similar approach to the one he had employed to circumvent the censors in the case of One Day in the Life. He sent the first quarter of the manuscript to Vladimir Lebedev, Khrushchev’s private secretary, who had been crucial to the successful publication of Solzhenitsyn’s earlier novel. Yet much had changed since the heady days of 1962. The reply, and the advice, was blunt: “Bury it!”

“But Khrushchev…”

“…is no longer enamoured of Ivan Denisovich; he thinks [Ivan’s] brought him a lot of trouble.”²¹

The doom-laden truth dawned on a crestfallen Tvardovsky. If even Khrushchev found Solzhenitsyn too hot to handle, what hope was there for Novy Mir? The author ofOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had passed from being an enemy of the people to being a hero of the people and back to an enemy of the people—all in the space of a couple of years. A surprise beneficiary of de-Stalinization, he had become a casualty of re-Stalinization.

Within months, Khrushchev was himself a casualty, being deposed by the bloodless coup in October. Thereafter he became something of a dissident himself, listening to the BBC World Service and Voice of America, criticizing the persecution of dissidents and opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Shortly after Khrushchev’s downfall, Lebedev, his faithful secretary, died. No one from the hierarchy attended his funeral except Tvardovsky, an isolated figure who must have seen his hopes for the future being lowered with the coffin. “In my mind’s eye,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “I can see that sturdy, broad-backed figure bending sadly over little Lebedev’s coffin.”²²

Solzhenitsyn sensed that the accession of Brezhnev signaled the end of his own brief honeymoon period with the Soviet regime. He was once again a pariah whose work would never get past the state censorship system. Abandoning all hope of expressing himself in official publications, he allowed his work to be published more and more frequently in the underground literature of samizdat, literally “self-publishing house”. Samizdat consisted of dissident literature reproduced mainly in typewritten form and circulated clandestinely among the reading public. Each typescript was copied often and, much like a chain letter, gained additional circulation as a result. Throughout the sixties, samizdat became increasingly organized, and by 1968, there was a regular samizdat periodical called Chronicle of Current Events, which documented instances of state repression and the spirited resistance of the “democratic opposition”. Increasingly, samizdat became the battlefront for the literary underground and the means by which Solzhenitsyn and other dissident writers could be heard.

Even before Khrushchev’s demise, Solzhenitsyn had released his prose poems into samizdat, where they were circulating widely. In the month of the coup that brought Brezhnev to power, they were published in the West in the émigré magazine Grani. Having at last been heard, Solzhenitsyn was determined not to be silenced.

The changed circumstances required a more circumspect approach to his writing, and much more caution. He began to work away from home, a choice dictated by the need for greater security but also, perhaps, made desirable by the increasing estrangement in his marriage. Often he left Natalya at home while he worked away at the houses of friends, or at the home of Agafya, an old peasant woman, in Solotcha, a village about thirty miles from Ryazan. The cautious approach was also due to his work on a detailed history of the Soviet prison system, discovery of which might be perilous. It would, of course, be published many years later as The Gulag Archipelago. His work on this was at its most intensive in 1965, in the period of heightened repression under Brezhnev, so he had to proceed in deepest secrecy. He concealed the source material from prying eyes as far as possible, dispersing it in various places. “I even had to camouflage the time I spent on the book with what looked like work on other things.” The magnitude of the task before him and the immensity of the risk attached to it led to thoughts of abandoning it altogether amidst doubts about whether he had the stamina for its completion. “But when, in addition to what I had collected, prisoners’ letters converged on me from all over the country, I realized that since all this had been given to me, I had a duty.”

“I must explain”, Solzhenitsyn added, “that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time.”²³ The wisdom of this precaution was highlighted in September 1965 when Solzhenitsyn learned that the KGB had raided the home of one of his friends and confiscated all three copies of The First Circle. He had foolishly sent the only other copy to a literary critic at Pravda in the naïve hope that, even in the neo-Stalinist atmosphere of Brezhnev’s presidency, it might be considered fairly. Worse news was to follow. The KGB had also discovered and confiscated the archive containing, among other things, his verse play A Feast of Conquerors, which was far more anti-Soviet than any of his other work. He had only dared show it to his most trusted friends, knowing that it was far too inflammatory and politically incorrect to see the light of day. Now it was in the hands of the KGB. He feared the worst, and visions of the Gulag flitted like a danse macabre through his mind. Perhaps as an enemy of the people he was about to become a prisoner of the people once again.

His fears were well founded. Three days prior to the confiscation of his own material, the KGB had arrested the literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky for smuggling stories to the West. It looked very much like the signal for a general purge of literary dissidents, in which case, Solzhenitsyn, as one of the most prominent, would surely suffer more than most.

It was not, however, the sense of fear that was paramount in the days following the confiscation of his works. Any fear was eclipsed by a sense of loss, a deep mourning for the months of creative labor that had seemingly disappeared, lost forever in the destructive machine of Soviet repression. For some months after “the catastrophe of September 1965”, Solzhenitsyn felt the loss “as though it were a real, unhealing physical wound—a javelin wound right through the breast, with the tip so firmly lodged that it could not be pulled out. The slightest stirring within me (perhaps the memory of some line or other from my impounded archive) caused a stab of pain.”²⁴

For about three months after the KGB raid, he suffered intermittent bouts of hopelessness which, at their most extreme, bordered on despair. It was during this period, possibly the unhappiest in his life, that he contemplated suicide for the first and last time. He woke up every day in the expectation that it would be his last day of freedom. Arrest was inevitable, he thought, and could come at any moment. Desperately and hastily, Solzhenitsyn dispersed his notes and unfinished drafts of The Gulag Archipelago to secret locations and wrote to the editor of Pravda requesting the return of the only copy of The First Circle not in the hands of the KGB. To his great relief, his novel was returned to him, but he was disappointed to learn that Tvardovsky was no longer prepared to consider it for Novy Mir. Solzhenitsyn was now unpublishable; any association with him could carry the risk of arrest. Even Tvardovsky, his greatest ally, was careful to keep him at arm’s length.

The pressures of persecution were also having a detrimental effect on Solzhenitsyn’s marriage, which was once again nearing breaking point. For some time, Natalya had resented Solzhenitsyn’s long absences at the various hiding places where he worked in secrecy and in constant fear of discovery. Solzhenitsyn wrote that his wife had come to hate The Gulag Archipelago, blaming it as the cause of their problems, the bane of their marriage. “She would not have been afraid of typing it if she had been with me, but if I departed for its sake and could not even write home, then it could go to hell, this Archipelago!”²⁵ Natalya’s frustrations came to a head in a bitter row during which she told her husband that she would rather see him arrested than hiding away and deliberately neglecting her. “From that instant,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “I knew I could no longer depend on her. What was worse, I would have to keep up the arrangements that she was party to, while at the same time establishing a whole new secret system that would have to be kept hidden from her as from a hostile outsider.”²⁶

After almost thirty years, their crisis-bound tragedy of a romance was fading to an ignominious conclusion. Over the next few years, the marriage stalled and stuttered to a halt, before sputtering into a series of claims and counter-claims concerning who was ultimately responsible for the breakdown. “I could not have imagined into whose clutches our divorce would drive my wife,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1974, “nor that she was on the verge of becoming (or had already become) more dangerous to me than any spy, both because she was ready to collaborate with anyone against me and because she knew so many of my secret allies.”²⁷

Such an accusation might have appeared unreasonable. No one other than Solzhenitsyn himself had suffered more for his art than his wife. Yet she was unable to appreciate the importance of her husband’s work, either to the world or to Solzhenitsyn himself, and could not share in the sense of mission that motivated him. Particularly in the later stages of their marriage, every sacrifice she was called upon to make on the altar of her husband’s art became irksome, breeding resentment. Solzhenitsyn was not prepared to compromise. He approached his work with a vocational zeal compared with which his very life, and that of his wife, were of little importance. He was a man possessed and, as such, could not and would not be possessed by his wife.

Yet Solzhenitsyn’s accusation is not as unreasonable as it seems. Natalya’s memoir of her life with him, published in the West in 1975, contained many bitter distortions of the truth, designed apparently to cause her former husband as much harm and hurt as possible. Solzhenitsyn became convinced that she was working in league with the Soviet authorities, with the KGB itself. It is tempting to treat such a view with incredulity; it seems too much like the seedy scenario for a Cold War espionage novel. The spurned woman manipulated by the unscrupulous secret police. “The spy who loved me”.

Natalya did her utmost to refute Solzhenitsyn’s published accusations of her treachery. She wrote an open letter to him in 1980, denying that she had collaborated with the KGB, and stating that she had been outraged by the way the original text of her memoirs had been cut by a quarter and grossly distorted. It was only in 1996, when she was seriously ill, that the full and secret truth emerged. On being transferred from one hospital to another, she was told that the new hospital required her internal passport. She asked a female relative to collect it for her, and the woman was astounded to discover that the document listed Natalya as the widow of Konstantin Semyonov, the journalist assigned by the publishers to edit her first memoir. She had been married to him from 1974 until his death in 1981. Since Semyonov was the KGB agent responsible for the gross distortions she had complained of in her open letter, it was surprising to discover that she had been married to him at the time the letter was written. Understandably, Natalya had done everything in her power to keep the marriage secret and was thunderstruck when she realized that her secret was out: “Is that known about? That’s—my secret, my secret marriage.” She was horrified at the prospect of Solzhenitsyn discovering the truth and pleaded in mitigation that marriage to Semyonov had saved her after Solzhenitsyn’s exile. “I was without a job, without everything. Marrying him allowed me to live in Moscow. He was my closest friend…. All that time we concealed our marriage. I was never a KGB agent, I swear it!”²⁸

This confession was Natalya’s last public comment on her long and tragic relationship with Solzhenitsyn. It was the final bitter twist in a complicated tale. Perhaps the closing words should belong to Solzhenitsyn: