Remarks on Two Early Works by Solzhenitsyn

From Blind Faith to Clear-Eyed Remorse: Remarks on Two Early Works by Solzhenitsyn

ALEXIS KLIMOFF Vassar College

In a 1989 interview with David Aikman of TIME magazine, Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn was asked about the evolution of his views, given the fact that he had been an ardent communist in his youth. In his response, the writer summed up his experience as follows:

I was brought up by my elders in the Christian tradition, and throughout most of my school years, to the age of about sixteen or seventeen, I resisted the influence of Soviet education. <.. .> But the force field of Marxism then pervading the So- viet Union was so strong that little by little it infused the minds of the young and began to take them over. Thus by the age of perhaps seventeen or eighteen I indeed did turn inwardly toward Marxism and Leninism, coming to believe all those things (к во всё это поверил). That is the way I was throughout my years of university study and army service, right up to the time I was arrested. But in prison I found myself confronted by an unprecedented range of freely expressed opinions, and I realized that my convictions were shaky, that they were not based on reality, and that they had no ability to stand up in debate. That's when I began the process of rejecting them. This took a matter of years, naturally, but that was the beginning of my return to the Christian faith in which I had been reared.1

The dramatic shifts in Solzhenitsyn's perception of the world, here presented in a brief matter-of-fact account, predictably enough play a

141 prominent role in a number of his works. The best-known instances are probably the autobiographical sections in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, where the author castigates the Marxist zeal of his youth as a grave moral lapse, In one of these passages he asserts that his ideology-induced blindness had been so extreme that he could have easily become an NKVD officer.2 He even finds himself agreeing with the fervent words of a Christian convert who had argued - just before his violent death - that all human suffering represents merited retribution for past transgressions against the moral law. While holding that one could never accept this view as a universal rule, Solzhenitsyn asserts that he fully accepted such a harsh causal relationship with respect to his own fate:

By the seventh year of my incarceration I had scrutinized my life more than enough to understand why prison, and a cancerous growth in addition, had been given me. And I would not have uttered a complaint had even this punishment been deemed insufficient. 3

While the bitter remorse sounded in this passage represents a significant motif in The Gulag Archipelago, it nevertheless accounts for only one of the many voices orchestrated in the rich polyphony that is the special mark of Solzhenitsyn's epic of the camps. In contrast, the themes of self-reproach and contrition completely dominate The Road (Дороженька), a seven-thousand-line-long narrative poem that was Solzhenitsyn's earliest major work. The Road was composed by the author in prison and labor camp in 1948-52 and memorized in toto according to the astonishing method described in The Gulag Archipelago:4 It was begun in the Marfino prison institute (the so-called sharashka) where the author had spent almost three years of his sentence and where, according to his own evaluation, he had first begun to write "in a serious manner" (по-серьёзному) $ Solzhenitsyn has not indicated what parts of the poem had been completed before his mid-1950 eviction from the sharashka and transfer to the Ekibastuz forced labor camp, but his account in The Gulag Archi- pelago indicates that the mental process of composition preoccupied much of his time in camp.6 In any case it is clear that the overall struc- ture of the poem came into focus only at this later stage, since the pref-

142 ace (titled "Зарождение," meaning "inception" or "genesis") opens with an image emblematic of prison camp life: ominous silhouettes of watchtowers against a dawn sky (Чернеют вышки очерком знако- мым). The preface continues with a depiction of the camp setting, one strikingly reminiscent of what Solzhenitsyn has portrayed in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: the jangling rail signaling reveille, the bitter cold, the march under guard to the worksite, the mess hut with its mean fare, and the deadening monotony of the daily cycle with its endless searches and recounts.7 Yet camp as such is not at all the theme of Solzhenitsyn's poem. In- stead, the vision of this grim world in the preface serves to define the vantage point from which the main text will be presented. Specifically, the first-person account that constitutes The Road is set forth by a protagonist whose eyes have been cleared of illusions by his experience of the camp.8 In a passage immediately following the preface, the protagonist- narrator makes an attempt to understand what led to the frightening world depicted in the opening: "Where and when did this begin?" he asks (Где и когда это началось!). Using the first-person plural to indicate the typicality of the situation in the Soviet context, he declares that the principal moral failing had been "our" deliberate refusal to rec- ognize the perfectly visible signs of the terrors that lay ahead:

Мы проходили вчуже, мимо, Скрывши лицо в ладонях.9 (We passed by as though we were strangers, with hands covering our faces.)

In the same way, the protagonist asserts, individuals personally un- touched by misfortune are deliberately blocking their ears and averting their eyes from the fate of prisoners like himself:

He слышать, имея уши, He видеть, глаза имея, - Коровьего равнодушья Что в тебе, Русь, страшнее? (7) (Not to hear, having ears, not to see, having eyes, -

143 is anything more terrifying in you than this bovine indifference, О Russia?)

Gross unconcern is precisely the sin exhibited by the protagonist himself in the early parts of the poem, where he appears with a mind so befogged by ideological dogma that he seems incapable of grasping the plain meaning of the sights before his eyes. Sergei Nerzhin, the protagonist and fictional stand-in for Solzhenitsyn, is a twenty-year-old youth undertaking an open boat trip down the Volga together with a friend of similarly zealous Marxist persuasion. Coming ashore one chilly day in order to buy hot tea, Nerzhin is baffled to find only vodka on sale in a village crippled and demoralized by collectivization. And he seems only slightly perplexed by the tragic account of a local peasant who relates how he lost his entire family during the campaign to "liquidate the kulaks as a class"—Stalin's notorious phrase to which the peasant refers with bitterness. Nerzhin recognizes the slogan, but it evokes no significant emotion on his part because he immediately falls back on the cliche about the heavy price one pays for progress, this banal linguistic for- mula being reinforced by the addition of the equally facile Latin phrase dura lex, sed lex (the law is harsh, but it's the law - 14-15). A little later Nerzhin sees an enormous group of prisoners working with pick-axes, shovels, and wheelbarrows on some kind of gigantic project by the river.H e is again unable to react in any manner free of ideological bromides, deciding that the project is sure to become the promised "miracle of the Third Five-Year Plan," one -more magnificent example of the imminent restructuring of the world. As to the identity of the ragged individuals slogging away, what is the point of worrying about it? (что над этим голову ломать? — 15-16). The two friends' determination to ignore scenes that present a challenge to their settled views then findsit s logical conclusion in their haste to leave a place where they witness a large-scale hunt for escaped convicts, with dogs straining on leashes and a multitude of armed soldiers running in all directions. Nerzhin and his companion hurry to depart in order to dismiss the episode from their minds (Чтобы не думать. Чтобы позабыть - 17). But it turns out that there is a chink in Nerzhin's ideological de- fenses after all, one that is directly related to the theme of the deliber-

144 ate refusal to see that was noted earlier. At one point during their trip down the Volga, the two friends encounter a launch filled with prisoners and armed guards, passing close enough for direct eye contact. Nerzhin feels that the men are looking at them with affection, perhaps thinking of the sons they had left behind. Having grown up without a father (like Solzhenitsyn himself), Nerzhin responds with genuine sympathy to the emotion he intuits, at least for a time dispensing with the ideological labels that had blocked normal human reactions in the earlier episode (18). A year later it is again direct eye contact - in this instance a virtual inability to look away - that serves to challenge his faith, this time in a far more profound fashion. During a trip with his new wife, Nerzhin discovers that their train has pulled up alongside an enormously long prisoner convoy:

Вровень над нами пришлось одно Прутьями перекрещённое Маленькое окно. Лбы и глаза и небритые лица — Сколько их сразу тянулось взглянуть! <...> Глянули злобно на наше цветенье - Выругались завистно <.. .> Наш отлощённый состав с полустанка Тронул с негромким лязгом. Тронул, но ты-ся-че-ле-тье волок он Нас! нас! нас! Вдоль новых и новых закрещенных окон Под ненависть новых гЛаз (27-28). (We happened to stop exactly below a small window criss-crossed with iron rods. There were heads and eyes and unshaven faces - the number straining to look out was astonishing! <.. .> Casting glances of hatred at our well-being, they spat out an envious curse. <.. .> Our glistening train set off again with a soft metallic clang. It set off, but for what seemed like a thousand years it dragged us! us! us! past ever new barred windows and the hatred of ever new eyes.)

145 The hate-filled looks cast by the prisoners are perceived by the protagonist as an envious resentment of the privileged lifestyle and general happiness the newlyweds are projecting. But given the preface to the poem, with its implication that the protagonist had shaken off his illusions and acquired a lucid understanding of reality as a result of the harsh experience of prison camp - the hostility of the prisoners toward Nerzhin functions as a condemnation of the smug unconcern demonstrated by himself in his earlier life. It is as if he were getting a preview of the way he would himself look upon self-satisfied individuals of the type he himself had represented in his previous behavior. In the case at hand, Nerzhin recoils from the naked animus so harshly and unexpectedly directed at him, and the shock serves to re- lease a flood of troubling memories that had been repressed due to his ideological indoctrination. He now relives the time two brutally je- ering GPU men had terrorized his mother and grandfather, recalls his bewilderment at the arrest of a close family friend, and the police hunt for a politically precocious schoolmate (34-39; 51-55). This restora- tion of memory is a crucial step in Nerzhin's long road - the relevan- ce of title The Road becomes very clear - toward full awareness of social and moral reality. Nerzhin's subsequent wartime experiences add immensely to this growing understanding. He struggles to comprehend the phenomenon of the German-sponsored Russian Liberation Army (68-71), experiences horror and nausea as he witnesses a public execution of an alleged collaborator (64-67), and is appalled to discover that Soviet "punishment batallions" (штрафбаты) are being sent on missions certain to result in their total annihilation (72-81). In a long chapter on this theme, Nerzhin allows several members of one such shtrafbat to relate the rea- sons for having been assigned to this unit, and is dismayed by the per- versely vindictive charges that had caused these soldiers to be classifi- ed as "enemies of the people" who could then be heedlessly sacrificed in military operations (82-99).10 The stories that the men relate are so vivid that Nerzhin exclaims, once again invoking the image of percei- ving the truth by seeing, in this case by the artless and convincing manner in which the stories are related:

146 .. .Если это правда - что ж мне, волком выть? Что пришёл я душу разрывать тут? Крикнуть, перебить: «Молчите! Хватит! Этого не может быть!» Не уйти. Не крикнуть. Взгяда не отвесть. Говорят так просто. Будто так и есть... (85) (.. .If that's the truth, am I to howl with distress? Why did I come here to bring torment to my soul? I must interrupt them, I must shout: "Not another word! Enough! This can't be true!" [But] leaving is not possible. Nor is crying out. Or tearing my eyes away. They speak so simply. As though it's really true...)

There follows an anguished passage about the weight of all this tragic information on the author (here speaking as a prisoner) in view of his doubts of surviving long enough to pass on the terrifying truths he has recorded (100-101).11 It is in a further wartime episode that Nerzhin's sense of guilt and remorse receive their most dramatic expression. In the chapter titled "Прусские ночи" (Prussian Nights), Nerzhin participates in the rampa- ging advance of the Red Army into Easterm Prussia in early 1945.12 The atmosphere is well-nigh apocalyptic as Soviet soldiers engage in an orgy of looting, rape, murder, and arson, all possibly sanctioned by the ambiguity of official policy (111). Nerzhin, an officer in charge of a sound-ranging unit, at first resolves to observe absolute moral neutrali- ty amid the wanton destructiveness that swirls around him:

Что ж, гори, дыми, пылай, Трудолюбный, гордый край! Средь неистовства толпы Мести в сердце не ношу: Не сожгу в тебе щепы И дворца не погашу. Я пройду тебя не тронув, Как Пилат, омыв персты (123). (Burn, smolder, and blaze away, land industrious and proud! Amid the frenzy of the crowd I carry no vengeance in my heart: I'll not set fire to a single sliver of yours,

147 but neither shall I extinguish a burning palace. I'll pass on through without touching you, with hands washed like Pilate.)

But this resolution begins to crumble as Nerzhin makes increasingly serious compromises with his conscience. Finally he is drawn into two acts of grave moral consequence, the first entailing a gross lack of concern for another human being. His men had stopped a passing German girl, primarily on the grounds of her proud and defiant look. In her purse they come upon a photograph of her fiance with a swastika- emblazoned armband. Nerzhin agrees with his men that it could indicate SS affiliation (though he suspects - correctly - that other German services may have worn such armbands as well), and waves off his subordinates with a dismissive gesture as he pores over a map. In effect, he looks away. But his casual response is interpreted as certainty, and the unfortunate girl is shot before Nerzhin can intervene (143). In contrast to what is at least partially a sin of omission, the second incident entails an act committed consciously and deliberately. In a newly occupied German town, Nerzhin asks one of his men to bring a woman named Anna to him for a forced sexual rendez-vous. The build- up is extraordinary, as Nerzhin awkwardly makes his tawdry prepara- tions (an abandoned mattress of dubious cleanliness is complemented by a pillow picked up from the dusty floor), all the while feeling in- creasing unease as Anna's gentle and heartrendingly vulnerable air im- presses itself on his consciousness. He sees her through a window carrying a pail of water in a way he finds almost touching in its softness (как-то трогательно-тихо - 148). When she is directed to go to the room where Nerzhin is waiting for her, she looks around "with the same expression of sadness in her meek glance" that he had noted when he had earlier asked her name. Startled to see Nerzhin, she smiles at him apologetically, a gesture he interprets as her wish to assure him that she does not suspect him of anything. And when the act is consummated, she in effect delivers moral coup de grace to the guilt-ridden Nerzhin by begging in a trembling voice not to shoot her (149). He does not, of co- urse, instead experiencing a paroxysm of remorse and self-revulsion of a kind Solzhenitsyn would describe half a century later in one of his prose poems ("Lightening " — «Молния»), where an analogy is drawn

148 between a tree split by a lightening bolt and an individual struck down by the violent protest of an aroused conscience.13 In the epilogue to the "Prussian Nights" chapter, Nerzhin's overwhelming sense of guilt is explicitly assumed by the author of the poem:

Кто ж, как не убийца и насильник Взялся за перо? <.. .> Выхожу я каяться площадно На мороз презрения людского. (150) (Has none other than a murderer and a rapist taken up a pen? <.. .> I come out into the cold of popular contempt to do penance on a city square.)!4

The immediately following chapter of the poem relates Nerzhin's arrest, which corresponds in all details, except names, with the account in The Gulag Archipelago, inevitably suggesting a swift retribution for the sins he has committed.15 However, during the long trip from the front back to Russia - the ultimate destination is Moscow's dread Lu- bianka prison - Nerzhin's mind is not at all focused on the events so vividly described just before. Instead, a Nerzhin vastly changed by his experiences and now seemingly liberated from his ideological obsessions muses on the paradox of his love of Russia, a land "senseless and ac- cursed," both "pitiless and absurd," a land willing to pay with the lives of a hundred elite soldiers for one meter of advance, a land where peasant women can be harnessed to a plow, and scholars from the Acade- my of Sciences can be sent to mine copper.

Позор мой, моё отечество! В лохмотьях, завистно, грубо, Во власти прохожей нечисти — За что ты мне так любо? (170) (My shame and my fatherland! In tatters, uncouth, filled with envy, ruled by filthy riff-raff, why do I love you so?)

Nerzhin provides no answer apart from expressions of profound sorrow for the tragedies and social catastrophes he has catalogued. Al-

149 though, as he now maintains (171), the Russian revolutionary tradition bears part of the responsibility for the disaster, it is ultimately true-believing young men (юноши правоверные) like himself who have bet- rayed Russia, cursing the mother country while doing nothing positive for her (Поносим Россию-матушку / А сами идем к ней ни с чем -172). The acute personal guilt the protagonist has brought away from East Prussia is thus augmented by his feeling of culpability before his country. As the train carrying him to prison crosses into Russian territo- ry, he qualifies his penitent ruminations somewhat with the hope of re- demption:

Быть может и мне не опоздано Ещё человеком стать?! Россия! Не смею жизнию Я прежнюю звать свою. Сегодня рождаюсь сызнова Вот здесь, на твоём краю... (173) (Perhaps there is still time for me to become a worthy human being?! Russia! I dare not call my former existence "life." Today I am being reborn right here, at your very edge...)

But this glimmer of hope is quickly replaced by gloomy contem- plation of the "alien" and "hostile" Moscow to which the train brings him, and by sorrowful recollections of the "courageous and pure" men left behind at the front. And the poem ends with a Dantesque image of the protagonist entering the "black abyss" of Lubianka prison:

Калитку в чёрную пропасть Пред мной отворяет страж. Лубянка! Взяла ты полмира! Ещё одного - прими!.. .. .Над шеей гремит секира И лязгает дверь за плечьми. (175) (A gate into a dark abyss is opened before me by a guard. Lubianka! Half of the world is already yours!

150 Receive one person more! ... Ал axe rises over my neck and the door clangs shut behind me.)

This ending of The Road provides an appropriate resolution to the tormenting sense of guilt that pervades much of the text, and is fully in line with the sentiment voiced in The Gulag Archipelago (and quoted earlier) in which the writer accepts his incarceration as a punishment merited by his sins. Given the essentially autobiographical nature of the poem, moreover, it is hardly surprising that the sense of remorse so pro- minently featured here should have significant echoes in Solzhenitsyn's later works. The most interesting case involves Solzhenitsyn's first major prose work, the unfinished short novel Love the Revolution (Люби ре- волюцию) that was started in 1948 - in the same year as the narrative poem - when the author was incarcerated in the Marfino prison research institute.16 As Solzhenitsyn has explained, Love the Revolution in its extant form represents only the beginning of what was originally in- tended to be a detailed, albeit slightly fictionalized, account of his experience commanding a sound-ranging artillery unit during the Second World War, an account that was to be titled The Story of an Artillery Battery (История одного дивизиона)Л After a forced suspension of work on this project due to his expulsion from the sharashka in 1950, the writer made an attempt to resume work on this text in 1958, but soon abandoned the effort, and Love the Revolution in its extant form comes to an end well before the main protagonist, Gleb Nerzhin,18 assumes his duties as a front-lineofficer . The fate of the text is unusually dramatic. When Solzhenitsyn learned that he would be expelled from the prison institute in May 1950, he realized that the extant manuscript faced the certainty of being con- fiscated during the search of personal effects that all prisoners routinely underwent prior to departure. In Solzhenitsyn's novel In the First Circle (В круге первом), where many of the actual circumstances of the writer's stay in the Marfino sharashka are presented in a chronological- ly condensed form, the virtually autobiographical protagonist (also named Gleb Nerzhin) faces precisely this quandary as he vacillates between destroying his notes or else entrusting them to Simochka, an

151 MGB lieutenant with whom he had become romantically involved. On reflection he makes the painful decision to burn his papers, deeming it unrealistic to count on the long-term loyalty of a girl who, he thinks, will undoubtedly marry and forget him.19 But in the real-life situation on which this episode is based, Solzhenitsyn had made the opposite decision, and he states that he deliberately changed the story in order to protect the actual person on whom the character of Simochka was based - Anna Vasil'evna Isaeva, a genuine MGB employee, who had offered to save his precious notes at grave risk to herself.20 Several years passed. After leaving the sharashka, Solzhenitsyn served out the remaining three years of his sentence in a forced-labor camp in Central Asia, and then faced "eternal exile" in a small settle- ment in northern Kazakhstan. But in 1956, soon after Solzhenitsyn's sentence of exile was annulled in accordance with Nikita Khrushchev's decision to dismantle much of the Gulag system, the writer was able to make a brief visit to Moscow and retrieved the papers Isaeva had pre- served. Two years later, when Solzhenitsyn was residing in Riazan', he made an attempt to resume work on the unfinished manuscript, but abandoned the project after writing only a few additional pages.21 The available text is focused mainly on Nerzhin's astonishingly single-minded efforts to be accepted in the artillery where he, a faithful adherent of Marxism-Leninism, intends to apply his mathematical training in defense of the Revolution. The work's title is drawn from a passage in Boris Lavrenev's short story "Marina" (1924), where a French anarchist gives the following advice to the adolescent protagonist of the story: "Love the revolution, my lad! It's the only thing in the world that is worthy of love."22 The grandiloquent tone of this exhortation (which appears in full as an epi- graph to Love the Revolution) signals the author's ironic intention quite explicitly, in this way introducing the tone that characterizes the naive- ly true-believing protagonist.23 Love the Revolution begins on the morning of June 22,1941, with the protagonist on a train approaching Moscow from a provincial town to enroll in advanced courses in literature and history at a prestigious Moscow institution. The contrast between the self-satisfied thoughts in

152 which he is engaged and the anguished self-criticism of Capt. Nerzhin in The Road who was also approaching Moscow by train - but under arrest — could not be more stark. At this point in the story, the Nerzhin of Love the Revolution is still unaware that Nazi Germany has launched its attack on the U.S.S.R., and he is busy contemplating "what a profound person he is and how much he already knows despite his mere 23 years of age" (213). He then begins counting his blessings:

... Life was wonderful. This was so, above all, because it was under Nerzhin's full control, allowing him to turn it in any way he wished. (214)

Needless to say, within a very few pages Nerzhin discovers that life is infinitely less malleable than he would like to believe. The heavy irony of the above passage is however uncharacteristic of the narrative as a whole, and the protagonist is presented in terms that are more hu- morous than hostile, and, crucially, with none of the self-aware contrition characteristic of The Road24 In large part this is so because despite Nerzhin's naive and exaggerated dedication to revolutionary ideals,25 within the space of the text he is never forced to sacrifice his funda- mentally decent instincts at the altar of ideological purity. An episode during Nerzhin's service in the horse-drawn military transport unit to which he has been assigned illustrates this point very clearly. To Nerzhin's astonishment, Miron Dashkin, Nerzhin's crude and unsavory wagon-mate during this time, suddenly reveals plans to desert, and invites Nerzhin to join him, arguing that in the chaos of wartime the risks would be essentially nonexistent. As Dashkin sets forth his designs, Nerzhin looks away in distress and embarrassment, feeling "so lonely he could cry. Why was he here and not with the valiant men who were dying at the front?" The resolute "no" he then gives in response to Dashkin's point blank question seems to be fully consistent with his ideological position: "Desert? No way. And you shouldn't do it either."26 Dashkin is understandably alarmed by this principled refusal, but when he sheepishly inquires whether Nerzhin now intends to turn him in, Nerzhin's response is equally unequivocal: "I never do that kind of thing."27 No morally problematic consequences ensue from the potential conflict between ethical instinct and ideologi-

153 cal commitment in this or any other episode in the narrative, and Ner- zhin's unalloyed faith in the Marxist-Leninist vision is manifested in ways that brings no visible harm to any individual with whom he comes into contact. Nerzhin's chief fault in Love the Revolution is an ideologically induced blindness that renders him virtually incapable of drawing common-sense conclusions from what he sees, hears, and experiences, despite the fact that he faithfully records episodes that offer him rich opportunities in this regard. Thus he is merely baffled by the episode in which he is falsely accused of having "spread panic" (сеял панику) while standing peacefully in a breadline, being incapable of grasping the the banal truth that the arrest was a purely random act of a lazy po- liceman who was trying to fulfill an artificial quota. (225-6) He learns - without registering outrage - of the arrest of an eccentric family friend that occurred soon after the outbreak of the war for no reason except the man's distantly German origin (230) and listens - once again without significant reaction - to an account of the horrendous conditions in a copper-mining prison-camp from a survivor who happens to be a ne- ighbor. (241)28 Such events and conversations evoke memories from Nerzhin's earlier life in which he had felt the "icy breath" of that "impossible" and "impermissible" world that was denied existence in the glossily optimistic official version of reality. (241) But just like the young protagonist in the early parts of The Road, Nerzhin recoils from drawing conclusions that would contradict his core beliefs. The narrator describes Nerzhin's process of denial as follows:

[Nerzhin] would be briefly oppressed by the waves of truth washing over him, but by dint of some kind of inner resilience: he would never come to the point of changing his mind. (242)29

The link between The Road and Love the Revolution is made very explicit by numerous references to events detailed in both texts. Thus in Love the Revolution Nerzhin speaks with a woman who in the poem had been the object of his boyish crush, and whom he now remembers as "the queen of his childhood" (231-32).30 And the shocking information he receives concerning the copper mines causes him to recall a long list of politically ominous events and episodes that had received extended

154 treatment in The Road. This includes the dramatic message from an anti-Stalinist conspirator that he had to memorize before it was burned, the sadistic harassment of his mother and grandfather by GPU men on a Christmas morning, the brutal arrest of a close family friend who had virtually been a surrogate father to him, the deeply troubling sights he had witnessed during his boat trip down the Volga, and the proximity of his home to the local Cheka-GPU headquarters with its sinister rumors about what went on inside (242).31 It is thus clear that the main protagonists of The Road and of Love the Revolution are meant to be perceived as the same individual. But it is precisely this common past experiences of the two protagonists that allow the divergence between the two works to come into sharp focus. In The Road, the young Nerzhin's inability to draw meaningful conclusions fromhi s observations is presented as a deplorable symptom of the tendency to avert his eyes - literally and figuratively - from the tragic reality around him. It is presented as a profoundly self-deceptive mode of behavior, and the Nerzhin of The Road becomes painfully aware of its harmfulness as he looks back bitterly at his life from the perspective of the forced labor camp. In contrast, the available text of Love the Re- volution is focused on the equally autobiographic Nerzhin who is far from attaining this level of self-awareness, and who exhibits no evolution away from the naive faith of a true believer. Given the decency of his personal behavior within the text, readers can view Nerzhin's dog- matic blindness with considerable forebearance. But ultimately much more important to the context is the fact that ideological issues, fairly prominent in the first chapter of Love the Revolution, fade more and more as the story progresses and simply cease to be the main driving force of his actions. In terms of plot, the focus shifts to Nerzhin's all- consuming wish to join the artillery.32 True, this ambition is linked in his mind to his conviction that he could contribute best to the great cau- se of defending the Revolution by utilizing his mathematical training in the branch of the military where this has great significance. Yet for Ner- zhin, gaining entry into the artillery evolves into something like a goal in itself, almost an obsession that (one may speculate) seems be at least partially traced to his psychological need to duplicate the action of his long-dead father, who had dropped out of university during World War

155 I to join the artillery. (218)33 Nerzhin's single-minded pursuit of this goal in the face of endless obstacles energizes the narrative, providing it with an engaging plot that is presented with a brisk vitality entirely absent in The Road. A fine example is the following high-spirited digression on the proper way to negotiate the phantasmagoric chaos of the Soviet Union's wartime railroad system, when all scheduling information was blacked out in order to foil spies.

Ha <.. .> вагонах не написано черными буквами по белой эмали: «Москва— Минеральные Воды». Сколько ещё этому поезду идти? — один перегон? или пять тысяч километров? И когда он пойдёт, если вообще пойдёт, - то куда: направо или налево? <...> Но поди позадавай такие вопросы в воен- ное время, сейчас тебя и сгребут. Недоверчивы, насторожены все люди в военное время. И они правы. Но и ты же прав. И оказывается: для того чтобы уехать поскорей, поверней и потеплей, — совсем не к теплушкам, не к составам надо идти, не по путям надо бродить, как делает железнодорожный новичок. Волки таких переездов знают, куда идти — в диспетчерскую! На первой двери будет написано: «Вход посторонним воспрещён». Тол- кай эту дверь и иди! На второй будет старая закопчённая надпись: «Слу- жебный вход». Он самый, толкай дверь! На третьей: «Вход категорически воспрещён». Так, так! ты на верном следу. Даже если бы череп увидел и окрещённые кости - не робей, нажимай на дверь! И когда проникнешь сквозь самую последнюю и самую грозную из дверей, то с умилением услышишь здесь и плач младенцев, и материнские колыбельные, увидишь и бородачей с непременными мешками, и таких же солдат, как ты, и тем более командиров. Ты вошёл теперь в то место, где рождается движение поездов. (316-17) (...Gone are the signs on railroad cars, black lettering on white tile, spelling out routes like "Moscow - Mineral'nye Vody." So how much further will this train be going? Just one more stop or five thousand kilometers? And when will it be departing, assuming it will depart at all, and in what direction, left or right? <...> But just try asking questions of this sort in wartime - you'll be hauled away in a flash. During war, people are mistrustful and suspicious. And they're right. But so are you. So it turns out that in order to get away in the quickest, surest, and warmest manner, there is no point in going round looking for heated cars or checking out the standing trains, or wandering over the tracks in the manner of a railroad

156 greenhorn. Seasoned travelers know exactly where to go: to the dispatcher's of- fice. The first door will have a sign saying "Employees Only." Push it open. The second will have an old blackened shingle inscribed "Service Entrance." That's it, stride on! The third will say "Entry Categorically Prohibited." Good for you, you're almost there. Even if you should see a skull and crossbones, don't be timid, push open that door. And after you've passed through this last and most formidable of doors, you will hear the affecting sounds of babies crying and mothers murmuring lullabies, you will see bearded men with their inva- riable sacks of belongings, soldiers just like yourself, and many officers. You have entered the place that gives birth to the movement of trains.)

Other particularly strong sections of writing include the descrip- tion of Nerzhin's wrenching culture shock when he, a city-bred intel- lectual, findshimsel f in an alien world revolving around horses and their care, surrounded by earthy and cynical middle-aged men who care nothing for the ideals he holds dear and look with suspicion at this math teacher with a volume of Engels in his briefcase. Nerzhin is repeatedly subjected to cruel ridicule for his unfamiliarity with the horse-related tasks that are second nature to the other men in this unit, and in these instances we easily sympathize with his plight. These chapters also include vividly drawn portraits of individuals with whom Nerzhin comes into contact, above all the surly Dashkin and the unit's flamboyant commanding officer, David Brant. Perhaps even more compelling in the purelyliterary sense are the last several pages written in 1948. Here Nerzhin discovers to his dismay that the freight car in which he had been hitching a ride has been un- coupled from the locomotive and is standing at a Godforsaken railroad junction in the middle of an empty snowbound plain. His increasingly desperate efforts to resume his journey are presented with riveting in- tensity and culminate with his nearly suicidal leap onto a moving flatcar that will bring him to the locale where he intends to seek permission to transfer to the artrillery. (327-34) But the narrative breaks off at this point, and the several fragments added a decade later are of decidedly lesser interest. It seems clear that Solzhenitsyn's heart had no longer been with this particular project. The reason is not hard to divine. The atmosphere of Love the Re- volution, focused as it is on an ideology-blinded though likeable protagonist in single-minded pursuit of a goal of no universal moral signifi-

157 cance is radically at odds with the ethical tenor of every single work produced by Solzhenitsyn in the subsequent years. The Road serves as a vivid illustration. Begun in the same year as Love the Revolution but completed in camp in 1952 (while the unfinished manuscript of Love the Revolution was lying fallow), the poem presents a startingly in- sistent indictment of the self-satisfied behavior and closed mind pre- viously exhibited by the autobiographical protagonist. The reason these two works differ so greatly in tonality is also quite clear: their produc- tion fell on either side of the two and a half years that the author spent in the Ekibastuz Special Camp.34 It was this experience that gave him the ability to see his past with eyes finally cleared of all earlier illusions. It was here he gained the uncompromising vision of a zek, a gift of which Solzhenitsyn has proudly reminded us on many occasions.35 The poem thus manifests a kind of understanding that had not yet been at- tained by the quasi-autobiographical protagonist of Love the Revolu- tion, who gives voice to an earlier phase in Solzhenitsyn's gradual return to the traditional values. This process, as the writer states in the TIME interview cited at the beginning of the present essay, took "a matter of years." The clash in perspective beween Love the Revolution and other works of Solzhenitsyn's would have been especially obvious in 1958, when the writer made a brief attempt to continue Love the Revolution. By this time, apart from The Road, Solzhenitsyn had composed three plays, each radically at variance with the reigning Soviet ideology (Vic- tory Celebrations [Пир победителей] -1951; Prisoners [Пленники] - 1952-53; Republic of Labor [Республика труда] -1954), and was working on the second edition of his novel In the first Circle [В круге пер- вом - begun in 1955]. What is more, in the spring of 1958 the writer had also begun work on The Gulag Archipelago.36 Given this context, Love the Revolution, for all its literary merits, was fatally handicapped by a quasi-autobiographical protagonist incapable of understanding the profound moral issues now preoccupying the writer. To continue it proved impossible. But Liubi revoliutsiiu has served Solzhenitsyn as a useful source and stimulant for his later productions by jostling memories of the ideology-saturated milieu in which he had grown up. As he explains in the

158 reminiscences of his two decades in the West, provisionally titled The Little Grain in English (Угодило зёрнышко промеж двух жерновов), here referring to 1984:

I re-read [Love the Revolution] and the burden of years flew off in a flash as I re- turned to my youth and to the whole atmosphere of the thirties. The desire to describe it arose in me with great force, for I remember - in my heart and as it were on my very skin - the fiery atmosphere of that time (extinguished today and concealed as well), and I would so much like to transmit it across time for future generations to examine, especially the spirit of the literature of the day - that unclean covering beneath which we were brought up.37

This intention was indeed realized, and the atmosphere of the early Soviet years is evoked in three of Solzhenitsyn's short stories written in the 1990s: "Молодняк" (The Upcoming Generation - 1993), "На- стенька," (1995) and "Абрикосовое варенье" (Apricot Jam - 1995).38 Each of the stories deals with the catastrophic deterioration of social and moral norms amid the upheavals of the revolutionary era. And among the large number of essays on writers and literary works that Solzhenitsyn has published after his return to Russia, several are dedi- cated to writers of the 1920s and 30s who focused on the "atmosphere of the epoch," with Panteleimon Romanov and Aleksandr Malyshkin perhaps being the most important.39

NOTES

1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, 3 vols. (Iaroslavl': Verkhniaia Volga, 1995- 97), III: 337. All translations of Solzhenitsyn's texts are mine. The interview was published in TIME in the issue dated July 24,1989. The excerpt cited appears on p. 59 of that issue, but in a slightly different translation. 2 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULAG: 1918-1953: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia, 3 vols. (Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 2007), I: 160 [Pt. I, ch. 4]. 3 Arkhipelag GULAG, II: 498 [Pt. IV, ch. 1]. On the cancerous growth that developed in camp, see Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984), 301, and Liudmila Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 380-81. See also the memoirs of Irina Meyke in the present volume. 4 Arkhipelag GULAG, Ш: 94-95 [Pt. V. ch. 5]. 5 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsia telenok s dubom (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 22. On the writer's stint in the Marfino sharashka, see Scammell, 226-69, and Saraskina, 329-45. See also the reminiscences of Lev Kopelev, whose term of confinement in the same institution overlapped with Solzhenitsyn's: Lev Kopelev, Ease My Sorrows:

159 A Memoir, tr. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1983), passim. 6 Arkhipelag GULAG, Ш: 93-94 [Pt. 5, ch. 5]. Kopelev recalls how in the sharashka Solzhenitsyn had recited lines that now appear in ch. 1 of Dorozhen 'ka. See his Ease My Sorrows, 24. 7 The Road (Dorozhen 'ka) had its first full publication in a collection of Solzhenit- syn's early works entitled Proterevshi glaza (Moscow: Nash dom — L'Age d'Homme, 1999). The poem occupies pp. 5-175 of this edition, and the "Zarozhde- nie" preface appears on pp. 5-6. 8 The title of the collection in which the poem was first published, Proterevshi glaza, could be translated as "With Eyes Opened to Reality." This title comes from Solzhenitsyn's polemical essay on Griboedov's Woe from Wit, included in the collection. 9 Dorozhen 'ka in Proterevshi glaza, 7. Subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text. 10 The most dramatic story involves the wartime exploits of Pavel Bondarenko whose escape from a German POW camp earns him ten years as a German spy. (85-89) The name is authentic and is repeated in Arkhipelag GULAG, I: 223 [Pt. I, ch. 6] 11 The literary critic Pavel Nuikin, who has written the only substantial review of The Road of which I am aware, notes that Solzhenitsyn anticipated the post-Soviet interest in the hidden aspects of WW II by half a century. See his "Etikh strok neemkikh gorstku tysiach" in the Moscow weekly newspaper Kultura, No. 13 (7472), April 7-13,2005. 12 In slightly abridged form, this chapter appeared as a separate edition by YMCA Press soon after Solzhenitsyn's exile: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Prusskie nochi: Po- ema (Paris, 1974). Three years later it was published in a bilingual facing-page edition: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights: A Poem, tr. Robert Conquest (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). 13 "Molniia," in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rasskazy i krokhotki (Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, torn pervyi) (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 558. English translation in Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 317. 14 An echo of Dostoevsky is hard to miss here,'given Sonia Marmeladova's famous advice to Raskolnikov that he must confess his crime publicly at a cross-roads: Crime and Punishment, Part V, ch. 4. 15 Arkhipelag GULAG, I: 33-35 [Part I, ch. 1]. Symbolism aside, the period between the entry of Solzhenitsyn's unit into East Prussia and his arrest was indeed very short. According to the chronology compiled by Saraskina (p. 907), Solzhenitsyn's unit entered Neidenburg on January 21,1945, and his arrest occurred on February 9. 16 First published in the 1999 Proterevshi glaza collection, Love the Revolution (Liubi revoliutsiiu: Neokonchennaia povest') occupies pp. 212-342 in this volume. All tex- tual references to this edition will be given parenthetically. 17 See Solzhenitsyn's explanatory letter to M.V. Petrova in the appendix to Aleksan- dr Solzhenitsyn, Vkruge pervom: Roman (Moscow: Nauka, "Literaturnye pamiatniki," 2006), 625. (This letter consists of replies to Petrova's queries that are published in the annotation section of the same edition, pp. 789-90.) 18 The first name of the autobiographical protagonist in Love the Revolution is "Gleb"

160 while it is "Sergei" in The Road. The early drafts of the prose work indicate that the name had originally been "Vladimir Severtsev." See the facsimile of a page from the draft in Proterevshi glaza, 300, and M.V. Petrova's essay, 645. 19 In the "Literaturnye pamiatniki" edition noted above, this episode appears on pp. 593-94. For the English translation, see Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, tr. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 721-22. 20 V kruge pervom ("Literaturnye pamiatniki" edition), 625. Natal'ia Reshetovskaia notes that the risk was magnified by the fact that Isaeva soon married a man who also worked in the security services: N.A. Reshetovskaia, V kruge vtorom: Otkroveniia pervoi zheny Solzhenitsyna (Moscow: Algoritm, 2006), 77-78. Solzhenitsyn expresses his thanks to Isaeva in his expanded edition of Bodalsia te- lenoks dubom (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 509. 21 In the 1999 edition, the part dated 1948 contains five chapters totaling 121 pages, while the three fragments dated 1958 add up to only about six pages. 22 "Мальчишка! Люби революцию! Во всем мире она одна стоит любви!" See Boris Lavrenev, Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1963-65), 1:101. 23 Since Solzhenitsyn had originally set out on his project with a title already defined (Istoriia odnogo diviziona), the Love the Revolution title must have been coined in or about 1958, when the initial plan was abandoned for good, and when the author needed a heading to highlight a prominent feature of the text that remained. 24 When Solzhenitsyn re-read his Love the Revolution in 1984, his criticism of the protagonist was quite mild. In his judgment, "The story succeeds because of its hu- moristic nature, with its constant ridicule of the slow-witted hero." See Novyi mir, 2001:4,125. 25 A volume of Engels's writing is in Nerzhin's briefcase throughout his travels, (e.g. 273-4) 26 «Дезертировать? Никак. И тебе не советую». (279) 27 «Докладывать пойдёшь?» — «Никогда этим не занимался». (280) 28 We are told that the man who relates these facts knew from experience that it would be hopeless to make a young man like Nerzhin change his mind, given "his ideolo- gized mind-set (идейность), pitiless as it was toward himself as well as toward oth- ers." (241) 29 Arthur Koestler, who passed through a period of intense faith in communist dogma, describes his behavior during this time in remarkably similar terms. Whenever he saw evidence that contradicted his theoretical assumptions, he would be surprised and bewildered, "but the elastic shock-absorbers of my Party training began to op- erate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what I saw." See Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York, 1954), 52. 30 Cf. Dorozhen 'ka, 46. 31 Cf. Dorozhen 'ka, 35-39, 14-18, 53-55, 32-33. 32 Thus he mentally creates an "honor roll" (золотой список) to which he adds the names of individuals who have helped him advance toward this goal. (308) 33 Memories of his father are clearly of great significance to Nerzhin. For example, he connects his preoccupation with the purposeful use of every moment of time with his father's tragic death at the age of twenty-seven. (213) 34 Between August 1945 and July 1947 Solzhenitsyn had been bounced between

161 several forced-labor institutions, but it is indisputable that he saw his time in Eki- bastuz (August 1950-February 1953) as his most significant camp experience, and simultaneously as one most representative of the Gulag system. 35 For example, when Solzhenitsyn was being pressured to make politically sensitive revisions in the text of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he rejected the de- mands on the grounds that to do so would be a betrayal of his zek identity: "I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself before my zeks, my brothers <.. .> for even dis- cussing anything with these people." See Bodalsia telenok s dubom, p. 40; cf. The Oak and the Calf, p.38. 36 See the annotation to the Vermont-based edition of Arkhipelag Gulag: Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (Vermont and Paris: YMCA Press, 1978-1991), VII: 573. 37 Novyi mir, 2001:4,125. 38 Originally published in Novyi mir, these stories appear in Volume I of the Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Vremia, 2006-). None have been translated into English. 39 "Panteleimon Romanov - rasskazy sovetskikh let," Novyi mir, 1999:7, 197-204; "Aleksandr Malyshkin," Novyi mir, 1999:10,180-192.

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