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Remarks on Two Early Works by Solzhenitsyn

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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 re- sponse, 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 in- deed 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 ideo- logy-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 sig- nificant 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 de- scribed 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 com- pleted 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 end- less 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 pro- tagonist 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 in- dicate 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 protag- onist 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 re- lates 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 signifi- cant 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 pro- ject by the river. He is again unable to react in any manner free of ideo- logical 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 finds its 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 priso- ners 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.
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