The impressions were destined to come to dramatic fruition in the battle scenes of August 1914 but also, and with added power, in his great narrative poem Prussian Nights. Having reached Neidenburg (now Nidzica) on January 20, his unit reached Allenstein (now Olsztyn) on January 22, and finally the Baltic—cutting off the German armies to the east—on January 26. Although the poem is not autobiography in the strict sense, the verse narrative conveys Solzhenitsyn’s impressions and experiences of those fateful days far more evocatively than a mere dry rendition of the facts could achieve.
At the beginning of Prussian Nights, the jingoistic praise of Russia’s glorious advance is soon overshadowed as the fiery fingers groping for revenge claw across the “foul witch” of Germany. The narrative sweeps and sways almost drunkenly as Solzhenitsyn describes the wanton destruction of villages, churches, farms, and farm animals. It is an “exultant chaos”. Amid the flames, the narrator almost unwillingly begins to perceive something metaphysically infernal in the physical inferno all about him. It is “portentous, evil, temptingly, work of a devil”.5 As Stalin’s edict is carried out with gusto, the narrator stands aloof. He has no vengeance in his heart but, “like Pilate when he washed his hands”, will do nothing to quench the flames.
Prussian Nights also recounts a scene of inhumanity that exceeds in its shocking precision anything achieved by Owen or Sassoon in their poetic accounts of the First World War. The narrator comes across a house that has “not been burned, just looted, rifled” where he hears “a moaning, by the walls half-muffled”. Inside, he finds a mother and her little daughter. The mother is wounded but still alive. The daughter is dead, having suffered beforehand a fate worse than death. She lies lifeless on a mattress, the victim of a mass rape, and the narrator wonders how many Russian soldiers had lain on top of the girl’s battered body before she died. “A platoon, a company, perhaps?”—“A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse”.6 The mother, her eyes “hazy and bloodshot”, has been blinded in the vain struggle to save herself and her daughter. She has nothing to live for and begs the narrator, a soldier she can hear but not see, to kill her. Neither is this the only sickening account of mass rape depicted in the narrative. A few pages later the anarchic invaders come across “a rich house, full of German virgins”, ignoring the desperate pleas of the women that they are not Germans but Polish.7 There is a description of the coldblooded murder of an elderly woman and her bedridden husband. The poem concludes with the narrator finally succumbing to the temptations all around him. He rapes a woman compliant from fear who, when the ordeal is over, begs him not to shoot her. Sickened with remorse, and knowing that it is too late to rectify the wrong he has done, he feels the burden of another’s soul weighing heavily on his own. The climactic evil he has perpetrated has left him unfulfilled, unsatisfied. All that remains is an anticlimax of guilt, intensified into futility.
Of course, it is impossible to discern which parts of this epic verse are autobiographical, which are the result of conversations with fellow veterans such as his prison-camp friend Lev Kopelev, and which are simply the work of poetic license. Nonetheless, as a description of the terrible days of January 1945, they are invaluably evocative, as well as graphically displaying Solzhenitsyn’s great sense of guilt for the part he played in those heady and hellish weeks. Perhaps his feelings were most accurately expressed through the medium of Gleb Nerzhin, the most autobiographically inspired of all the characters in his novel The First Circle: It’s not that I consider myself a good man. In fact I’m very bad—when I remember what I did during the war in Germany, what we all did…. But I picked up a lot of it in a corrupt world. What was wrong didn’t seem wrong to me, but something normal, even praiseworthy. But the lower I sank in that inhumanly ruthless world, in some strange way the more I listened to those few who, even then, spoke to my conscience.8
In addition to the atrocities perpetrated by Russians on his own side, Solzhenitsyn continued to come across Russians who were fighting for the Germans. His last contact with these enemy compatriots, deep in the heart of East Prussia at the end of January, almost cost him his life. Finding themselves surrounded on all sides by advancing Soviets, the enemy Russians attempted to break through the position occupied by Solzhenitsyn’s unit. This they did in silence, without artillery preparation, under cover of darkness. As there was no firmly delineated front, they succeeded in penetrating deep into Soviet territory. Just before dawn, Solzhenitsyn saw them “as they suddenly rose from the snow where they’d dug in, wearing their winter camouflage cloaks” and “hurled themselves with a cheer” on the battery of a 152-millimeter gun battalion, knocking out twelve heavy cannon with hand grenades before they could fire a shot. Pursued by their tracer bullets, the remnants of Solzhenitsyn’s group ran almost two miles in fresh snow, fleeing for their lives, until they reached the bridge across the Passarge River. Here, hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, the surviving enemy Russians were forced to surrender.9 “They knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy”, wrote Solzhenitsyn. “When we captured them, we shot them as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths.” Whether this was common practice, it was not always what happened. Sometimes Russians in enemy uniform were taken prisoner to await their fate in the Soviet Union. This, for many, was considered worse than death itself. Solzhenitsyn records an occasion when three captured enemy Russians were being marched along the roadside a few steps away from him. All of a sudden, one of them twisted around and threw himself under a T-34 tank. The tank veered to avoid him, but the edge of its track crushed him nevertheless. “The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.”10
Even amidst the chaos of the Russian rampage through a near-defeated Germany, Solzhenitsyn was able to write to his friends and to Natalya. Now, however, things were different between husband and wife. It seemed that much more separated them than the hundreds of miles between them, or the hundreds of days since they had last seen each other. Much had changed, and perhaps it was Solzhenitsyn himself had changed most of all. His experiences as a front-line soldier, stretching back over eighteen months and culminating in the horrific vision of these Prussian nights, had killed off the carefree youth who had married his student girlfriend nearly five years earlier. The boy had become a man, and the man saw things very differently from the boy. He also saw things very differently from the woman he had married, who was unable to comprehend the changes in her husband’s attitude toward her. “The very last letter my husband wrote me from the front again heaped a mountain of suffering upon me. With one hand he seemed to push me away, and with the other he drew me even closer, even tighter to himself.”11