Solzhenitsyn

^{CHAPTER TWELVE} OLD ENEMIES AND NEW FRIENDS

In spring 1966, Solzhenitsyn was working away from home at the dacha of his friend Kornei Chukovsky in Peredelkino, the writers’ colony just outside Moscow, where he was putting the finishing touches to his novel Cancer Ward. On the night of Holy Saturday, April 9, he wandered down to the patriarchal Church of the Transfiguration to watch the Easter procession at midnight. What he observed upon his arrival inspired one of his most evocative essays. Instead of pious groups of believers, he was greeted outside the church by rowdy youths dressed in the latest fashions, who, oblivious to the fact that they were on consecrated ground, were shrieking and cavorting to the sound of pop music from transistor radios. “About one in four has been drinking, one in ten is drunk, and half of them are smoking—in that repulsive way with the cigarette stuck to the lower lip. There is no incense yet, but instead of it swathes of grey-blue cigarette smoke rise towards the Easter sky under the electric light of the churchyard in dense, hovering clouds.” Solzhenitsyn looked on in disgust as the youths spat on the asphalt path, whistled loudly, and shouted obscenities at each other. The boys kissed their girlfriends, who were then pulled from one boy to another.

This behavior was in marked contrast to that of the participants in the procession. Some were clearly intimidated by the contemptuous attitude of the onlookers, huddling close together for mutual comfort, but a group of ten women, walking in pairs and holding thick, lighted candles, offered a vision of heroic virtue: “elderly women with faces set in an unworldly gaze, prepared for death if they are attacked”.

Gripped with the poignancy of the moment, Solzhenitsyn prophetically transformed this insignificant incident so that the characters became archetypes of the future, turning the Easter procession at Peredelkino into a parable: “These millions we have bred and reared—what will become of them? Where have the enlightened efforts and the inspiring visions of great thinkers led us? What good can we expect of our future generations? The truth is that one day they will turn and trample on us all. And as for those who urged them on to this, they will trample on them too.”³ Back in his creative hideaway, Solzhenitsyn wrote the essay describing the vision he had just witnessed. Having done so, he returned to work on the final chapters of Cancer Ward, completing a preliminary draft a few weeks later. As soon as it was ready, he dispatched the novel to Novy Mir, where it was discussed at the editorial meeting on June 18. Opinions were divided, as they had been during the earlier discussion on The First Circle, some being strongly in favor of its publication and others as strongly opposed. At first, Tvardovsky spoke vehemently in the novel’s defense, declaring that “art does not exist in this world to be a weapon in the class struggle”. Furthermore, it was “topical in that it presents a moral reckoning on behalf of a newly awakened people”. He assured Solzhenitsyn that he wanted to publish and that “we will launch it and fight for it to the limit of our powers”.⁴

Although initially encouraged by this positive response, Solzhenitsyn soon became irritated by what seemed to be a change of heart, or mind, on Tvardovsky’s part. Novy Mir’s editor appeared to be less enthusiastic, demanded many cuts and alterations, and started to equivocate over his plans for publication. Angered by the straitjacket of censorship with which Tvardovsky was now attempting to constrain him, and frustrated by the uncertainty surrounding prospects for publication, Solzhenitsyn decided to allow Cancer Ward to circulate in samizdat. He still recalled with pain and bitterness the farcical failure of Novy Mir to publish The First Circle, and he was determined that the same fate should not meet his latest offering. Tvardovsky was furious when he learned that copies of the novel were circulating in samizdat, and the ensuing disagreement led to a temporary parting of the ways between Solzhenitsyn and Novy Mir.

Determined to do everything in his power to get Cancer Ward published, Solzhenitsyn managed to arrange a discussion of his novel at a meeting of the Central Writers’ Club in Moscow on November 17, 1966. News of the debate spread rapidly in literary circles, and tickets for the event soon became hard to come by. The attendance was far higher than normal for meetings of the club, with fifty-two writers present. Debate was largely sympathetic and constructive, though it became heated when Zoya Kedrina stood up to address the meeting. Kedrina had gained notoriety during the recent show trial of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for her role as “social accuser” on behalf of the Soviet prosecutors. During her speech to the meeting, she was heckled angrily, and some sections of the audience staged a walk-out in protest. Overall, however, Solzhenitsyn’s novel was praised by his peers and compared favorably with several key works of Russian literature, most notably Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. At the meeting’s conclusion, Solzhenitsyn expressed his gratitude for the hearing he had been given and must have been delighted by the passing of a resolution that the club would take steps to bring about the publication of Cancer Ward. As the first step, it was proposed by Lev Kopelev that a transcript of their discussion be sent to Zvesda and Prostor, two reviews to which Solzhenitsyn had submitted the manuscript of Cancer Ward following its formal rejection by Novy Mir. The meeting had been a personal and practical triumph for Solzhenitsyn, ending on an appropriately optimistic note as the poet Bella Akhmadulina rushed up to the platform and, turning to Solzhenitsyn, shouted: “Wonderful man! Let us pray to God to grant good health to Alexander Solzhenitsyn!”⁵

Encouraged by his success at this meeting, Solzhenitsyn began a tactical war of nerves with the Soviet authorities. Contrary to all regulations, he granted an interview in November 1966 to a Japanese news correspondent, in the course of which he mentioned the existence ofThe First Circle, stated that its publication had been blocked, and referred to his two unpublished plays, The Love Girl and the Innocent and Candle in the Wind. As the world was gripped in the clutches of the Cold War, it was common for interviewers to ask writers to offer their views on “the writer’s duties in defense of peace”. Solzhenitsyn, however, did not offer the Japanese journalist the usual trite response:

Within days of his unauthorized interview with the Japanese journalist, Solzhenitsyn accepted an invitation to speak at the Kurchatov Institute of Physics in Moscow. Six hundred people were present, and his readings from Cancer Ward, Candle in the Wind, and the ostensibly “forbidden” The First Circle were received with warmth and enthusiasm. News of his appearance spread quickly, and he was inundated with similar invitations from all over Moscow. He accepted as many as he could, nine in all, but at the last moment each lecture was mysteriously canceled. At the Karpov Institute, Solzhenitsyn actually arrived in the car that had been sent for him only to find a notice pinned to the door: “Cancelled owing to the author’s indisposition”.⁷ The reason for these cancellations soon became apparent. The Moscow City Party Committee had telephoned the organizers of each of the meetings, threatening reprisals if they went ahead. In spite of this, Solzhenitsyn was invited to speak at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Studies on November 30, although whether this was in open defiance of the Party’s ban or merely because the less than omniscient Party had failed to detect that one particular meeting is not clear.

Five hundred people listened intently as Solzhenitsyn read two chapters from Cancer Ward, but they were not prepared for the open show of defiance that followed. In response to a question from the audience, Solzhenitsyn openly declared war on the power of the Party, boldly testing its alleged omnipotence. “I must explain why, although I used to refuse to talk to reporters or make public appearances, I have now started giving interviews and am standing here before you.” Explaining that circumstances had dictated the necessity that he defend himself, he launched into an outright attack on the KGB:

The audience was at first stunned by the apparently suicidal courage of the speaker in front of them. It was unheard of for anyone to attack the KGB in such terms from a public platform in the Soviet Union. It simply wasn’t done. It was courage beyond the call of duty and beyond the bounds of safety, courage that the faint-hearted would call foolhardy. Yet Solzhenitsyn had just said these words in front of their disbelieving ears. With a growing sense of exhilaration, the audience listened as Solzhenitsyn began to read from The First Circle, the “forbidden” novel that the KGB had confiscated. This time, unlike the readings from the novel he had given at the Kurchatov Institute, which had been tame by comparison, he deliberately read the most provocative chapters, the most political ones. Solzhenitsyn was intoxicated by the freedom of expression and would always look back with pleasure to “that hour of free speech from a platform with an audience of five hundred people, also intoxicated with freedom”.⁹

Within days, the five hundred people had set off a chain reaction of gossip around Moscow that set the city buzzing with the news of Solzhenitsyn’s daring defiance of the KGB. The legend of Solzhenitsyn was being born.

Yet at the beginning of December, even as his escapades were being discussed in countless homes around Russia’s capital, Solzhenitsyn shaved off his beard so that he would be more difficult to recognize and slipped out of the city to one of his hideaways to continue work on The Gulag Archipelago. Commenting on the legend that was beginning to surround Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell writes that he was “not so much a musketeer as a pimpernel” who was “beginning to live a life… that far surpassed, in excitement and danger, the lives of his fictional heroes”.¹⁰

Between December 1966 and February 1967, Solzhenitsyn worked on the second draft of the first six parts of The Gulag Archipelago, revising and retyping over fifteen hundred pages in only two and a half months. To achieve this superhuman task, he worked sixteen hours a day in two eight-hour shifts and completed the work on February 22. On that day, he penned the afterword that appeared at the end of the third volume of the published edition in which he expressed his surprise that he had managed to finish it safely: “I have several times thought they would not let me.” Indeed, if the communist authorities had realized he was working on such a devastating expose of the Soviet prison system, it is certain they would not have let him. As it was, the fact that he had completed the work safely was a tribute to his own cautious and secretive endeavor and that of the small handful of people who had helped him. “I am finishing it”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “in the year of a double anniversary (and the two anniversaries are connected): it is fifty years since the revolution which created Gulag, and a hundred since the invention of barbed wire (1867). This second anniversary will no doubt pass unnoticed.”¹¹

Having completed work on The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn moved back on to the offensive in his struggle against Soviet repression. On May 16, he wrote an open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress, ensuring that copies were sent to the editors of literary newspapers and magazines. The target of his ire was “the no longer tolerable oppression, in the form of censorship, which our literature has endured for decades”. This censorship “imposes a yoke on our literature and gives people unversed in literature arbitrary control over writers…. Works that might express the mature thinking of the people, that might have a timely and salutary influence on the realm of the spirit or on the development of a social conscience, are proscribed or distorted by censorship on the basis of considerations that are petty, egotistical, and—from the national point of view—shortsighted.”¹²

After giving a full exposition of the case against censorship in principle, Solzhenitsyn proceeded to examine the cases of various writers who had suffered censorship and persecution at the hands of the Soviet regime in previous decades. He concluded with an examination of his own case, detailing the plight of each of his works that had been “smothered, gagged, and slandered” at the hands of the censors. “In view of such flagrant infringements… will the Fourth Congress defend me—yes or no? It seems to me that the choice is also not without importance for the literary future of several of the delegates.” He ended on a note of defiance: “I am of course confident that I will fulfil my duty as a writer in all circumstances…. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”¹³

Solzhenitsyn’s calculated gamble in going public with his protestations to the Writers’ Union appeared to have paid off. Within days, a letter of support signed by eighty members of the Writers’ Union was sent to the Presidium of the Fourth All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress. This stated that Solzhenitsyn’s letter confronted the Writers’ Union and each one of its members with questions of vital importance. It was impossible to pretend that the letter did not exist and simply take refuge in silence. To keep silent “would inevitably do grave damage to the authority of our literature and the dignity of our society”.¹⁴ The eighty writers insisted that only a full and open discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s letter could serve as a guarantee for the healthy future of literature, which had been called upon to be the conscience of the people. This was not the only expression of support for Solzhenitsyn’s open letter. A number of other writers sent letters or telegrams to the Presidium of the Writers’ Congress calling for a full discussion of the issues raised.

In a crass disregard for its members’ wishes, the Presidium proceeded with the congress without even mentioning Solzhenitsyn’s letter, and only one delegate had the courage to challenge the leadership’s conspicuous silence on the matter. A writer named Vera Ketlinskaya complained that it was intolerable to ignore someone completely and pretend he did not exist, as the speakers had done with regard to Solzhenitsyn. She was greeted with loud applause, but apart from this one embarrassing moment, the powers that be succeeded in conducting the entire congress without any reference to the open letter.

On June 12, Solzhenitsyn heard from Tvardovsky of an apparent climbdown by the union’s leadership, and, along with Tvardovsky himself, he was invited to a meeting with four members of the union’s secretariat. Solzhenitsyn was surprised to find that his erstwhile adversaries were both polite and conciliatory. The secretariat members were concerned about the number of copies of Cancer Ward circulating in samizdat; there were rumors that copies might even have found their way to the West. Solzhenitsyn simply stated that if this was so he was not to blame. At this point, Tvardovsky seized the opportunity to extract concessions. “That’s just why I say that Cancer Ward must be published immediately. That will put a stop to all the hullabaloo in the West and prevent its publication there. We must put excerpts in the Literaturnaya Gazeta two days from now, with a note that the story will be published in full.”¹⁵ To Solzhenitsyn’s astonishment, the members of the secretariat agreed, and he left the meeting with a feeling of elation that he had at last beaten the ban on his work.

The elation was premature. No statement from the Writers’ Union appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, nor did the promised extract from Cancer Ward. The proposal had been vetoed by the cultural department of the Central Committee.

Three months later, on September 12, 1967, Solzhenitsyn resumed his offensive, writing a letter to all members of the secretariat of the Writers’ Union. He complained that his open letter had still neither been published nor answered, even though supported by more than a hundred writers. His principal purpose, however, was to complain at the persistent stalling tactics being employed to prevent publication of Cancer Ward. His novel had been in the same equivocal state—no direct prohibition, no direct permission—for over a year, since the summer of 1966. He reiterated the desire of Novy Mir to publish the story even though it still lacked permission to do so. “Does the Secretariat believe that my novel will silently disappear as a result of these endless delays, that I will cease to exist…? While this is going on, the book is being read avidly everywhere. At the behest of the readers, it has already appeared in hundreds of typewritten copies.” He reminded the members of the secretariat of their discussion on June 12, and the concerns expressed that Cancer Ward might be published in the West if the censorship persisted in the Soviet Union. Then, in a brilliant coup de grace intended to raise the stakes and step up the pressure, he suggested that publication in the West “will clearly be the fault (or perhaps the wish?)” of the secretariat who were ultimately responsible for the senseless delay of many months in gaining the permission required for Soviet publication. “I insist that my story be published without delay.”¹⁶

The letter had the desired effect. Ten days later, Solzhenitsyn attended a meeting of the secretariat, at which some thirty secretaries of the Writers’ Union were present, along with a representative of the cultural department of the Central Committee.

From the outset, the meeting was highly charged. The chairman commenced proceedings plaintively, stating that Solzhenitsyn’s recent letter had been an insult to the collective and that it contained something in the nature of a threat. It was offensive, “like a slap in the face”, suggesting that members of the secretariat were “reprobates and not representatives of the creative intelligentsia”. Another member demanded to know how the contents of Solzhenitsyn’s first letter had been broadcast over the radio in the West and asked why he had not dissociated himself from this “licentious bourgeois propaganda”. Solzhenitsyn responded that he was not a schoolboy who was required to jump up obediently to answer every question. Later he responded to the complaint of some members of the secretariat that his recent letter amounted to an ultimatum: either print the story or it would be printed in the West. “It isn’t I who presents this ultimatum to the secretariat”, he replied. “Life presents this ultimatum to you and me both.” Hundreds of typewritten copies of Cancer Ward were now circulating around Russia, he explained, and it was only a matter of time before some of these copies made their way to the West. Whether he liked it or not, there was nothing he could do to stop this from happening. Neither was he impressed by the complaints that his letter had failed to treat the members of the secretariat as “brothers in writing and labor”. “Well, the fact of the matter is that these brothers in writing and labor have for two and a half years calmly watched me being oppressed, persecuted, and slandered…. [A]nd newspaper editors, also like brothers, contribute to the web of falsehood that is woven around me by not publishing my denials.”¹⁷

The enmity between the “brothers” became increasingly apparent as the meeting progressed, or rather regressed into the rut of entrenched positions. Utterly unconcerned by Solzhenitsyn’s libelous treatment at the hands of the Soviet press, one of the secretaries demanded that he speak out publicly against Western propaganda. Another stated that Cancer Ward must not be published because it would be used against the Soviet regime: “The works of Solzhenitsyn are more dangerous to us than those of Pasternak: Pasternak was a man divorced from life, while Solzhenitsyn, with his animated, militant, ideological temperament, is a man of principle.”¹⁸

Finding himself hopelessly isolated in the midst of a hostile audience, several members of which had already called for his expulsion from the union, Solzhenitsyn, the dangerous man of principle, struck back:

Solzhenitsyn’s restatement of eternal verities fell on deaf ears. His audience believed that the laws governing the history of mankind had only been discovered a hundred years earlier by a German émigré living in London. Now it had fallen to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be the infallible guardians of that absolute truth. To the secretaries of the Writers’ Union, Solzhenitsyn was simply a heretic who must be silenced. The meeting ended acrimoniously with the secretaries demanding that Solzhenitsyn renounce his role as leader of the political opposition, “the role they ascribe to you in the West”, to which Solzhenitsyn replied that his role as a writer was above politics. Solzhenitsyn left the meeting in the knowledge that his lonely battle with totalitarianism had entered a new and dangerous phase.

Toward the end of the meeting, Solzhenitsyn had remarked defiantly that although he was unable to reply to the slander being spread about him, especially if the Writers’ Union refused to help him refute the false allegations, he derived comfort from the knowledge that he would never suffer from such slander because he had been strengthened in the Soviet camps. Painfully aware that he lacked allies and that his enemies were preparing the next stage of their war on him, he braced himself for another wave of slander. It came on October 5 in a vicious attack by Mikhail Zimyanin, the editor of Pravda, during a speech at the Press House in Leningrad.

In the same month that Zimyanin was making these unjust attacks on him, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter on the subject of justice to three students who had visited him previously. He equated justice with conscience, stating that there was nothing relative about justice, as there is nothing relative about conscience. Indeed, justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. The obverse was equally true, that those sufficiently corrupted that they have ceased following the dictates of conscience are those most susceptible to the perpetration of acts of injustice. “Convictions based on conscience are as infallible as the internal rhythm of the heart (and one knows that in private life it is the voice of conscience which we often try to suppress).”²¹

Solzhenitsyn’s own private life was about to undergo major changes during the coming year. To one who listened as attentively to his conscience as he did, they were to cause pain, introspection, and guilt before resolving themselves in a way which was certainly best for him, though arguably not so for Natalya Reshetovskaya.

On August 26, 1968, he met a twenty-eight-year-old mathematician working for her doctorate, called Natalya Svetlova. He was immediately taken with this “intense young woman, her dark hair swept forward above her hazel eyes! No trace of affectation in her manner of dress.”²² He would soon discover that she thought with electronic rapidity and shared his views on Soviet society. She was to become a highly efficient helper in his struggles with authority.

Alya, as Svetlova liked to be called, was born in Moscow in 1939. Like so many others, she was raised in the shadow of the Gulag. Her maternal grandfather had been arrested the year before her birth and subsequently perished in the camps. Her father had been killed at the front in December 1941. In 1956, she finished high school in Moscow with a gold medal for outstanding academic achievement. (According to Ignat Solzhenitsyn, this was the equivalent of receiving straight As or 5s throughout the ten years of her schooling.)²³ Feeling herself drawn toward history and literature but disgusted by the ideological censorship then omnipresent in the humanities, she decided to enroll in the famous mekhmat, the “mechanic-mathematics” department of Moscow University, where she studied under Professor Kolmogorov. After graduating, she was invited to work in his laboratory of mathematical statistics.

While still at school, and then during her years at university, Alya was active at several sports. She twice won the USSR rowing championship and later took a vigorous interest in mountain climbing, river expeditions, and serious rock climbing. At university, she married an algebra student at the mekhmat, Andrei Tyurin, and in 1962, their son, Dimitri, was born. In 1964, Alya and Tyurin divorced, although a warm relationship with him, and later with his second family, would be maintained.

When Alya first met Solzhenitsyn, she had already been an active participant in the social and cultural life of Moscow for several years and was acquainted with many of the leading figures in the city’s literary and musical circles. She was a frequent guest in the home of Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, one of barely half-a-dozen writers whose names stand out as possibly having world-class literary talent in post-war Russia.²⁴ It was chez Mandelstam that Alya had met and become friendly with Natalya Stolyarova, secretary to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Stolyarova was a great admirer of Solzhenitsyn and, having herself served a sentence in the labor camps after her voluntary return to the Soviet Union from Paris, had supplied him with much valuable information for The Gulag Archipelago. It was Stolyarova who introduced Alya to Solzhenitsyn.²⁵

Following their first meeting, Alya became one of Solzhenitsyn’s most trusted and efficient allies. She agreed to type out the complete version of The First Circle, doing so diligently for a couple of hours each evening after putting her young son to bed. “The fourth or fifth time we met,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “I put my hands on her shoulders as one does when expressing gratitude and confidence to a friend. And this gesture instantly turned our lives upside down: from now on she was Alya, my second wife.”²⁶ There was of course still the awkward question of the first wife. In spite of their many differences and the fact that Solzhenitsyn was away from home for ever longer periods, Natalya still felt possessive toward him and jealous of the greater part of his life he spent apart from her. The awkwardness remained for a further four years until Natalya finally granted the divorce that allowed Solzhenitsyn to marry Alya. In the interim, one can only guess to what degree Solzhenitsyn fought to suppress the voice of conscience. There is, however, little doubt that he had finally found his partner in life. In Alya, a mutual friend reflected, Solzhenitsyn found what he needed most. “She was educated, intelligent, witty, with a great many friends; she was small, shapely, and moved with grace.” She worked conscientiously for him, and he could trust her absolutely with any secret. Although she was strong-willed and independent-minded, no mere echo of Solzhenitsyn, she was nevertheless of one mind with him in essence. “She is a rare woman, and one in whom there has never been any vainglory.”²⁷

For years, Solzhenitsyn wrote, he had dreamed in vain of finding a male friend whose ideas would be so close to his own. At last, when he had all but given up hope, he had met his soul-mate, someone who shared not only his political outlook but, far more importantly, his spiritual outlook also. Although she was Jewish on her maternal side, Alya was an Orthodox Christian in belief and deeply patriotically Russian at the core of her being. She possessed “a deep-rooted spiritual affinity with everything quintessentially Russian, as well as an unusual concern and affection for the Russian language. This, together with her vibrant energy, made me want to see her more often.”²⁸ For her part, Alya told a friend that, much as she had admired and respected her first husband, she had not known what love was until she met Solzhenitsyn.²⁹

Her love would cost her dearly. Following their marriage, she bore him three children, all sons, in quick succession. Then, with three infants, she followed her husband into exile, coping heroically with the omnipresent publicity and the trials of starting life anew, first in Switzerland and then in the United States. Through it all, she proved a tower of resilience, bringing up the children and selflessly supporting her husband in all his endeavors. Solzhenitsyn, in late middle age, had found his greatest ally.

A few months after his first meeting with Alya, Solzhenitsyn found himself with a host of new friends from much farther afield. In the autumn, Cancer Ward and The First Circle were published in Britain and the United States, having been published already in Milan, Frankfurt, and Paris. Unlike his old enemies at home, his new friends in the West had nothing but praise for Solzhenitsyn’s work. Reviews for The First Circle were particularly laudatory. Thomas Lask in the New York Times wrote that it was “at once classic and contemporary… future generations will read it with wonder and awe”. Richard Hingley in the Spectator described it as “arguably the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century”. Julian Symons of the Sunday Times called it “a majestic work of genius”.³⁰

How different this reception was from the one he had received from his brothers in the Writers’ Union. More to the point, what could he expect from those brothers now that the bourgeois forces in the West had declared themselves his friends? Whatever new friends he may have gained, Solzhenitsyn was only too aware that his old enemies were the same as they had always been. He did not need reminding of what awaited him. Even as his books were being published in the West, Soviet tanks were rolling into Czechoslovakia, crushing free speech in the time-honored way pioneered by Stalin.

Solzhenitsyn, with Alya Svetlova for spiritual succor and support, waited expectantly, bracing himself for the impending storm.