In spite of these reservations, and perhaps rashly, given their attitudes, the couple still decided to marry, coming to the decision in early 1939 but agreeing to postpone the event until spring of the following year. “It was”, writes Michael Scammell, “as if marriage, for the young Solzhenitsyn, was almost a chore, an inevitable hurdle that somehow had to be taken in one’s stride, without causing too much distraction, before resuming one’s momentum.”13
In the summer of 1939, at the age of twenty, Solzhenitsyn made his first-ever visit to Moscow to register at the MIFLI. He and Nikolai had already resolved to take advantage of the journey north to explore uncharted territory and, after registering and attending some introductory lectures, they made their way to Kazan on the river Volga. For the sum of 225 roubles, they purchased an ancient baidarka, a type of primitive dug-out with high boarded gunwales peculiar to that river and region, and proceeded in this cumbersome boat along the Volga on a three-week camping trip. They traveled light, sleeping by night on straw in the bottom of the boat, and rowing or drifting downstream by day, stopping occasionally to cook a meal on a camp-fire or to visit places of interest. The bulk of their luggage consisted of books, and they spent the time either reading these or else locked in passionate discussions about the future prospects of communism, to which both of them remained wholeheartedly committed. Solzhenitsyn was also deeply impressed with the beautiful scenery embracing the banks of the Volga, comparing it favorably with the drab and dusty flatness of his native south. This was Russia’s heart, the real Russia, which resonated in Russian literature and folklore.
The primeval beauty of the countryside contrasted starkly with the dilapidated state of many of the villages they passed en route. The Russian village, romanticized in many of the classics the two travelers knew so well, had changed beyond recognition, bearing little resemblance to the healthy, self-sufficient communities described by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Instead, as Solzhenitsyn later described in his autobiographical poem The Way, the two friends found only decay, desolation, and neglect. Loudspeakers blared trite propaganda jingles informing the villagers how good life was under communism, while the village consumer cooperative displayed only row upon row of empty shelves. They had arrived in one village looking for food to augment their basic supply of dry biscuits and potatoes, but there was none to be found, except for a bucketful of apples, which they purchased for a few kopecks. The village, like thousands of others throughout Russia, had been devastated by collectivization, yet the two young communists, returning disappointed to their boat, were too naïve to understand how the reality before their eyes belied their idealistic discussions of Marxist dogma, the futility of their utopian theorizing.
As the idealists drifted downstream, there were other grim reminders that Soviet life was not all that it was purported to be. One evening, while moored by the bank for the night at a place called Krasnaya Glinka, they were suddenly surrounded by a platoon of armed guards and tracker dogs. The guards were searching for a pair of escapees and had evidently mistaken the two terrified students for their quarry. Realizing their error, they hurled a string of curses at them, ordered them to move on, and dashed away in pursuit of their prey. On another occasion, they passed an open launch crammed with prisoners handcuffed to one another, and near Zhiguli, they saw gangs of ragged men with picks and shovels digging foundations for a power station. Later Solzhenitsyn came to understand the significance of these sightings, but only after he had become one of the ragged men himself. For the time being, the bewildering visions were cast aside, exorcised from his untroubled mind.
In Kuibyshev, at the end of their voyage, the friends sold their dug-out for 200 roubles, only twenty-five fewer than they had paid for it. Congratulating themselves on a bargain break, they returned by train to Rostov.
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1939, Solzhenitsyn buried himself once more in his studies. Physics and mathematics vied with literature, philosophy, and history for his attention, and, somewhere in the midst, the courtship with Natalya continued. The spring of 1940 arrived, and, as prearranged, they went ahead with the marriage. The date they chose for the wedding ceremony was April 27, although as a ceremony, it was decidedly unceremonious. It was a warm, windy day, and the couple, now both twenty-one, simply went to the city registry office and registered their marriage as the law dictated. They informed no one of the step they were taking, not even their parents. There was only one moment of drama in the otherwise drab affair, and even that was unintended. During the signing of the register, Natalya dipped the ancient quill into the inkwell with a vigorous flourish. As she withdrew it, she caught the nib on the side, and the pen flew out of her hand, somersaulted in mid-air and landed on Solzhenitsyn’s forehead, depositing a large blot. “It was an omen”, he said, not altogether jokingly, when describing the incident many years later.14
In this inauspicious setting, the young couple was registered as man and wife. The secular solemnizing of their love seemed to have little in common with the sacramental sacrifice and lavish surroundings of the Russian Orthodox weddings their parents had known. Times had changed, and for richer or poorer, better or worse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Natalya Reshetovskaya had decided to face the Soviet future together. Yet the doubts remained; as they left the registry office, Solzhenitsyn gave his legally registered wife a photograph of himself with a niggling question inscribed on the back, intended as a plea for the reassurance that even marriage could not give: “Will you under all circumstances love the man with whom you once united your life?”15
CHAPTER FOUR
MAN OF WAR
A few days after their marriage, the newlyweds were separated by Natalya’s departure for Moscow. She, together with Nikolai and some of the other chemistry students, was to spend the remainder of the academic year at the National Institute for Science and Research. The pair was reunited seven weeks later when Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow on June 18 to take his half-yearly MIFLI examinations. Upon his arrival, Natalya rushed to meet him, and they spent the day strolling through the Park of Rest and Culture and wandering into the Neskuchny Gardens. “Of course,” Natalya wrote in her memoirs, “we could not suspect that we would be here again, five years later, and under quite different circumstances. Then we would be separated by barbed wire and would be communicating by sign language, he perched on the third-storey window sill of a house in Kaluzhkaya Plaza, where he was laying parquet floors, and I gazing up at him from these very same Neskuchny Gardens.”1
It was from Moscow that Solzhenitsyn finally wrote to his mother, informing her of the marriage. She relayed the news to Solzhenitsyn’s two aunts, Irina and Maria, who were shocked at the secrecy surrounding the wedding and, since it had not taken place in church, flatly refused to recognize its validity. Many years later, in an interview with Stern magazine in 1971, the aging Irina still referred to Natalya dismissively as a “mistress”. Their attitude must have served to alienate Solzhenitsyn still further from his reactionary relatives.