It was not until the winter of 1937, a year after they had first met, that their relationship developed the depth that enabled a full-blown love affair to flourish. Toward the end of the year, a course of dancing classes was started at the university, and of their closely knit group of friends only Natalya and Solzhenitsyn attended. Predictably enough, they became dancing partners and were soon partnering each other beyond the confines of the classes. “We also started going out together to university parties,” Natalya remembered, “and we danced only with each other.”6 Soon they were also going to the theater and the cinema together. Solzhenitsyn would pick her up at home, and, before leaving, she would play the piano for him. Theirs seemed the ideal student relationship; they were enjoying all the fun and frivolity of undergraduate life without the sacrifice and commitment of a married couple. “I was happy with things as they were,” wrote Natalya in her memoirs, “and I did not want any changes at all.” Then, on July 2, 1938, as they sat together in Rostov’s Theatrical Park, Solzhenitsyn declared his love for her, explained that he visualized her always at his side, and asked whether she was able to give him the same commitment. It was a proposal of marriage, and Natalya realized that he was expecting an answer. She was thrown into confusion. What exactly did she feel toward this lively, energetic young man who was seated beside her in the park, waiting expectantly for her reply? “Was it love—that love for whose sake one is ready to forget everything and everyone and plunge headlong into its abyss? At that time this was the only way I could understand the meaning of true love (I got it out of books, of course). Today, with a lifetime of experience behind me, it is still the only way I know how to understand true love.”7
Looking into that abyss, she found herself terrified at the prospect of what true love entailed. She was living such a full and varied life, with many different friends and interests. Solzhenitsyn simply could not take the place of everything, even though he already meant a great deal to her: “For me the world did not consist of him alone. Nevertheless, it seemed that something had to be decided, something had to be said at once. I turned away, laid my head on the back of the park bench, and began to cry.”8
However, it is doubtful whether Solzhenitsyn had reached the position of “true love” himself when he made his proposal to Natalya. At the time, or at least very shortly beforehand, he was seeing another girl, nicknamed “Little Gipsy”, to whom he wrote poems and about whom he later wrote a short story, also called “Little Gipsy”. Forty years later, he still kept photographs of her in his family album. They show a pretty girl with a smiling face; dark, brushed-back hair; and brooding eyes. One of the photographs shows him dancing with her at a student picnic to music from a hand-wound gramophone nestling in the grass. This was in April 1938, well after the date when he is supposed to have fallen in love with Natalya. Another shows him with his arm around her as they pose with others for a group picture. It is difficult to discern exactly how serious was Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with “Little Gipsy”, but the fact that she inspired him to both poetry and prose suggests something deeper than a mere casual acquaintance. Either way, it does illustrate an ambivalence in his feelings toward Natalya that falls far short of true love.
On July 5, 1938, three days after the failure to receive the desired reply to his proposal, he accompanied Natalya to a concert performance by Tamara Tseretelli, a well-known singer. To her dismay, Natalya felt that his attitude to her had cooled. He was “reserved, overpolite, taciturn”. Distraught, she feared the worst: “Did that mean everything was over? Suddenly my full life lost its attractiveness. If only what used to be could have remained that way forever! I could not bear to give up the way things were before. I wanted everything to stay just as it was. Could this be what love was all about?” Many complications, many questions, but precious few answers loomed in front of the naïve nineteen-year-old. Describing herself as “hitherto always reserved in word and deed”,9 a few days later she wrote Solzhenitsyn a note to say that she loved him. Far from being given freely, her hand had been forced.
Following her surrender, Natalya recalled that “everything did remain as I wanted it to—though not altogether the way it was before. Gradually a great tenderness and affection flowed into our relationship. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate after an evening together, more and more painful not to give in to our desires.”10 Once again, one suspects that these memories, written more than thirty years afterward, put a rose-tinted gloss on the reality. Whereas they may have been true for Natalya, it is less likely that Solzhenitsyn’s feelings were quite so intense. During 1938, he was still working on the historical epic, still finding time to write poetry and short stories, and in between was still working diligently at his university studies. In the summer of 1938, he took an extended holiday with Nikolai, cycling through the Ukraine and the Crimea, and at the beginning of 1939, he suggested to Nikolai that they enroll as correspondence students at the MIFLI—the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History, the foremost institution in the country for the study of the humanities. Nikolai accepted with enthusiasm, and, along with their respective university courses, they embarked on serious study of the “Oldsters”, their nickname for the celebrated philosophers of the past. Solzhenitsyn chose to study literature, Nikolai opted for philosophy, and Kirill, the third “Musketeer”, decided on comparative literature. As external students, they would receive their instruction by post, send in their answers to questions also by post, and twice a year, during the winter and summer vacations, were required to travel to Moscow to attend a special course of lectures and be examined on the work of the preceding six months. The content of the courses and the examinations was identical to that for students in residence, and the diploma they received would be of equal academic value. In essence, therefore, the three friends were now embarked on two simultaneous degree courses, one in the sciences and one in the humanities.
Obviously, this entailed a considerable extra workload, encroaching still further on the time Solzhenitsyn had available to spend with Natalya. She recalled that his studies had become almost obsessive. Even while waiting for a trolleybus, he would flip through a set of small homemade cards on one side of which he had inscribed some historical event or personage and on the other the corresponding dates. Often, before a concert or a film began, she would be called upon to test his memory “using the same endless cards: When did Marcus Aurelius reign? When was the Edict of Karakol promulgated?” Another set of homemade cards neatly recorded Latin words and phrases. On the days when the courting couple was not planning to go to the cinema or to a concert, Solzhenitsyn would insist that they didn’t meet until ten o’clock at night when the reading room closed. He was “more willing to sacrifice sleep than study time for the sake of his beloved”, Natalya complained.11
Under these circumstances, it was scarcely surprising that Natalya now sought some assurance of her lover’s commitment. “To merge our beings or to part—that was how I began to see our situation.” Increasingly frustrated at Solzhenitsyn’s apparent unwillingness to merge his being with hers, she wrote to him suggesting that they take the alternative course. His reply, as uncompromising as ever, could hardly have been what she desired. Although he could not conceive of her as anything but his wife, he feared that marriage might interfere with his main goal in life. For the time being, his priority was to complete his course at the MIFLI as quickly as possible after graduating from university. He reminded her that she too was committed to her studies at the conservatory and that this in itself would make rigorous demands on their time. If they were not careful, “time could be placed in jeopardy” by the relative trivia of family life, which might ruin their hopes and aspirations. After listing everything else that could possibly rob them of “the time to spread our wings”, he named the final “pleasant-unpleasant consequence”—a child.12