These, however, were the questions of an old man looking back over a lifetime’s suffering. The insight was not available to the young, carefree Solzhenitsyn, who was soon able to put the NKVD episode out of his idealistic mind. By day, he and his young communist friends paraded with banners through the streets of Rostov proclaiming the Revolution while, by night, the Black Marias passed unnoticed through the same streets. Ignorance indeed was bliss. “We twenty-year-olds marched in the column of the October children, and as the Revolution’s children, we looked forward to a glittering future.”31
The aging sage saw things differently: “I was brought up in a Christian spirit but youth in the Soviet period took me away from religion entirely. I now read through some of my letters and my efforts at literature from that period of my youth and I am grasped by a horror of what kind of emptiness awaited me.”32
CHAPTER THREE
MAN AND WIFE
The enormous energy Solzhenitsyn exuded throughout his life was already evident in his youth. Besides his university studies, his dabblings with literature, his extracurricular sorties into the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, and his recreational activities with the close circle of friends with whom he went cycling, he also found time for his first serious romance. Natalya Reshetovskaya records in her memoirs that she first met Solzhenitsyn in 1936, near the beginning of their first year at university. It was during the lunch break, and she looked up from the sandwich she was consuming to see “a tall, lean youth with thick, light hair… bounding up the stairs two steps at a time”.1 He spotted two friends and explained in “a rapid-fire speech” that he was attending some lectures in the chemistry department where Reshetovskaya was studying. “Everything about him seemed rapid, headlong”, she remembered, adding that he had “very mobile features”. At the time of his arrival, Natalya was having lunch with Nikolai Vitkevich and Kirill Simonyan, who along with Solzhenitsyn had formed the “Three Musketeers” at high school. His two friends had both enrolled in the chemistry department, and Natalya recalled that Solzhenitsyn’s eyes “darted from one person to the other or focused on me with interest”. The first time his eyes had rested on her, the lower part of her face was masked by “an enormous apple”, which she was munching between bites of her sandwich. When the apple was lowered, he saw a full-lipped, chestnut-haired girl who had an air of extrovert exuberance. The three boys began to talk animatedly about their schooldays together, and Natalya observed that Solzhenitsyn’s energetic mannerisms were merely an outward expression of a lively intellect: “Their conversation was studded with references to heroic figures from the most varied literary sources imaginable; there were ancient gods, of course, and historical personages galore. They knew everything under the sun, all three of them: that was the way I saw them.”2
Little did Natalya realize, as these first impressions sank in, that she and the lively seventeen-year-old had much in common in their family and social backgrounds. Her father had served as a Cossack officer in the First World War and had fought on the side of the Whites in the civil war that followed. In November 1919, with Bolshevik victory imminent, he went into exile with the remnants of the volunteer army. Natalya was only ten months old at the time so, like Solzhenitsyn, had never known her father. Another similarity with Solzhenitsyn was the fact that she was de facto an only child. Before her, there had been twins, but they had been born prematurely and had died in infancy. Her mother had been joined in Rostov by her exiled husband’s three unmarried sisters, so that, when Solzhenitsyn first set eyes on Natalya, she was living in a flat with four middle-aged ladies, three of them maiden aunts.
Solzhenitsyn’s first contact with Natalya’s family came on November 7, 1936, when he and the other two “Musketeers”, along with three female students, were invited by Natalya’s mother to visit them. During the course of the evening, the group amused themselves by playing forfeits, and Natalya, a gifted pianist, entertained her guests with a rendition of Chopin’s “Fourteenth Etude”. Her musicianship impressed Solzhenitsyn immensely, and he told her as they were preparing for supper how beautifully she played.3 Ten days later there was another party, organized by the biology students for the birthday of Liulya Oster, another of Solzhenitsyn’s high-school classmates. Solzhenitsyn and Natalya were both present, and on this occasion, he seems to have been impressed by more than her prowess at the piano. “Today is exactly twenty years from the day when I considered myself utterly and irrevocably in love with you”, he wrote in a letter to her on November 17, 1956. “The party at Liulya’s; you in a white silk dress and I (playing games, joking, but taking it all quite seriously) on my knees before you. The next day was a holiday—I wandered along Pushkin Boulevard and was out of my mind with love for you.”4
If this was indeed the day that Solzhenitsyn fell in love with his future wife, he kept the fact carefully concealed for many months afterward. One wonders, in fact, whether his letter of twenty years later can be taken as a reliable account of his feelings. It was written at a time when he was once again courting his wife following many years of enforced separation, and one cannot discount the possibility that the words were selected, the memory selective, with this latter-day courtship in mind. Such a view appears to be vindicated by Natalya herself in her observation that Solzhenitsyn conceived his idea for the epic historical novel on the “very same evening” that he was purportedly out of his mind with love for her. Certainly it appears incongruous that a seventeen-year-old, purportedly in the throes of first love, should spend his evenings mulling over ideas for a literary epic about the Revolution, rather than moping over his new love.
The letter’s reliability is further thrown into question by the fact that Solzhenitsyn appears to have shown no outward sign of his love. Perhaps this was mere youthful bashfulness or else the result of loyalty to his friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was closer to Natalya than he was. “That year”, Natalya wrote, she was more Nikolai’s friend “than anyone else’s”.5 It was Nikolai who sat next to Natalya during chemistry lectures and who shared notes with her. It was Nikolai who had taught her to play chess during the winter holidays, and it was Nikolai in the summer who had shown her how to ride a bicycle. When Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai, and several other friends had embarked on their cycling tour of the Georgian Highway, it was Nikolai and not Solzhenitsyn who had written to her.
It is of course possible that Solzhenitsyn had concealed his feelings as a selfless act of chivalry or in a touching display of loyalty to his old schoolfriend. Yet it is certain that he was outwardly happy during 1937 and that his friendship with Nikolai Vitkevich was as close and as apparently untroubled as ever. Furthermore, he had a whole host of other interests that absorbed both his time and attention, and Natalya remained apparently oblivious of any amorous feelings on his part.
It is tempting to conclude that Solzhenitsyn’s feelings were not quite as deep in the early days of their friendship as his letter of twenty years later suggested. Far from being “out of his mind” with love for her, perhaps he felt a mere physical attraction to her in the same way he may have found attractive other young girls of his acquaintance. Possibly she was only one of several for whom his young eyes yearned.