* "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," published in November 1962.
hind a desk and suffered from insomnia.
Listening to me talking with my friends at the station, he had also caught the name of Pasternak. He now gave me his view of the Dr. Zhivago affair with professional forthrightness: it had been a case of gross negligence on somebody's part. "How could they have allowed him to send it abroad like that? What a blunder!" He had not himself read Pasternak and had no intention of doing so. "Who reads him? I keep up with literature—I have to—but I'd never heard of him."
I said I bet he'd never heard of Tiutchev or Baratynski either.
He took out a notebook. "Who did you say? I must find out about them."
At first he told me he was a retired doctor (though he looked a little young to be on a pension) and was now helping the militia with juvenile delinquents. "Why have you given up medicine?" I asked. "I just had to," he replied. It appeared that he had practiced medicine only in the distant past. For most of his career he had done work that brought him into contact with both supporters and enemies of the Stalin regime—he claimed to know the opinions of both. "Where did you meet people who talked against it?" I asked, but he gave no reply. After his retirement he had settled in Tallin, where he had to live "in connection with my work." He had been given a three-room apartment there for himself, his wife and his younger son. "I have never heard of doctors getting a three-room apartment for a family of that size," I said. "It can happen," he replied curtly.
At this point he began to tell me, as a teacher, about his family problems. His two eldest children were all right and he was in fact just on his way to visit them. His daughter had married a regional Party secretary, and his son was also a Party official. But the younger son, who was born after the war, was no good at all. He was an idler who wanted to give up school and go to work in a factory. "How can he be an idler if he wants to work?" I asked. It appeared that he simply didn't want to live at home with his father because of things his friends had told him. Moreover, he was having a bad influence on his mother, who was also beginning to play up. "It's all because he's had too easy a time—the older ones grew up during the war and know what it means to suffer hardship. The young one's had everything that money can buy—all the oranges and chocolate he wanted. And now look at him. I should never have had him." He was unable to tell me what it would be like after the achievement of "full Communism" when all children will supposedly have everything they need. Did that mean they would all get out of control? Evidently his son's friends knew something of his father's past activities.
It was quite clear to me that I was talking to a "relic of Stalin's empire." Was it accidental that his son had revolted against him and that he was so much opposed to anyone probing into the past and scrutinizing the "historical necessity" which he had served with such zeal? Solzhenitsyn's story is like a touchstone: you can judge what a man's past (or his family's) has been like by the way he reacts to it. The past weighs heavily on us and we still have to make sense of it. It is difficult for us to confront it because so many people were implicated, either directly or indirectly, in what happened—or at least silently acquiesced in it. It is perfectly clear what people such as my chance traveling companion would like: they are simply waiting for the moment when they can give their blessing to a new generation of like-minded but more sophisticated heirs to Stalin's empire.
People who were silent or closed their eyes to what was happening also try to make excuses for the past. They generally accuse me of subjectivism, saying that I see only one side of the picture and ignore all the other things: the building up of industry, Meyerhold's stage productions, the Cheliuskin expedition and so forth. None of this, to my mind, absolves us from our duty to make sense of what happened. We have lived through a severe crisis of nineteenth-century humanism during which all its ethical values collapsed because they were founded only on man's needs and desires, his longing for personal happiness. The twentieth century has also shown us that evil has an enormous urge to self-destruction. It inevitably ends in total folly and suicide. Unfortunately, as we now understand, in destroying itself, evil may destroy all life on earth as well. However much we shout about these elementary truths, they will only be heeded by people who themselves want no more of evil. None of this, after all, is new: everything is always repeated, though on an ever greater scale. Luckily, I shall not see what the future holds in store.
61 The Electrician
W
e shouldn't give up yet," M. said the next morning and went to the Union of Writers to see Stavski. But Stavski wouldn't see him, letting it be known through his secretary that he couldn't receive him for at least a week because he was frantically busy. From the Union of Writers M. went to the Literary Fund,[21] but on the stairway there he had a slight heart attack. He was brought home in an ambulance and told he must rest for the time being. This suited him very well—if he could manage to stay here until he got an interview with Stavski, he thought there was a good chance of obtaining a residence permit. What he didn't realize was that people like Stavski, and all the other intermediaries between us and the authorities, always say they are too busy and cannot spare a moment. It was exactly the same in 1959 when I was again thrown out of Moscow (for the last time) and Surkov told me that he just couldn't find a second to speak with his colleagues about me. Admittedly, on this occasion I was faced only with the prospect of having nowhere to live—it was not a matter of life and death, as it would have been in Stalin's time.
M. was in a fairly good mood as he lay resting on the "Bessarabian carriage." Every day he was visited by a doctor from the Literary Fund, and after ten days they arranged for him to be seen by a specialist, Professor Razumova, a woman with an intelligent face who had sketches by Nesterov on the walls of her office. We were surprised how readily she wrote out a certificate saying M. needed further rest in bed and a general check-up. Of course she had no reason to know what our legal situation was, but after all our tribulations in Cherdyn and Voronezh we were much struck by the way in which she and the other Literary Fund doctors treated us—it was just like the attitude of intellectuals to exiles in pre-revolutionary Russia.
At this point M. became obsessed with the idea of cheating fate and staying on in Moscow at any price—as the only city where we had a roof over our heads and could lead some sort of life. He was encouraged by the way the Literary Fund had helped him, sent doctors to him and inquired after his health. What was the explanation? It could have been that one of the officials there was sympathetic to M., or they may simply have taken fright when he had his attack and didn't want to be accused of failing to give him help in time. Both things were quite possible. Whatever it was, there was no doubt of the Literary Fund's desire to help, and in our conditions this was quite astounding.
Kostyrev suddenly arrived in the apartment, nosed around a little, banged all the doors, and then went out, telling my mother he would be staying in Moscow for a few days. He soon came back and left the door into our room open—we were sitting with Rudakov (who was passing through Moscow on his way to the Crimea) in the passage, blocked off by a cupboard, where we had put the "Bessarabian" bed. We thought Kostyrev just wanted to eavesdrop, but it turned out that he was waiting for a visitor. When the visitor arrived he brought him into our room, where we were sitting behind the cupboard. The man appeared to be an electrician and we heard him tell Kostyrev that the wiring needed fixing. It struck me as odd that Kostyrev should bother about such household matters. M. was quite alarmed and I thought for a moment that his hallucinations had returned—before I could stop him he went straight up to the electrician and said: "Stop pretending and tell us what you want! Have you come for me?" "What's he saying!" I whispered to Rudakov, convinced that M. was delirious again. But, to my astonishment, the "electrician" seemed to think it was all quite normal. After a further exchange of words, he and M. showed each other their papers, and then the "electrician" asked M. to go with him to the militia station. I felt both horror and relief—horror at the thought of his being arrested and sent to a camp, and relief that he was not suffering from delusions again.