Natalya described the letter as “an irritated sermon”, which perhaps it was, but it is clear from Natalya’s own response that, for her part, she considered it not only irritated but irritating, an annoyance. The truth was that she was as irritated by her husband as he was by her. In essence, the letter castigated Natalya for the “egotistical” nature of her love:
You imagine our future as an uninterrupted life together, with accumulating furniture, with a cozy apartment, with regular visits from guests, evenings at the theatre…. It is quite probable that none of this will transpire. Ours may be a restless life. Moving from apartment to apartment. Things will accumulate but they will have to be just as easily discarded.
Everything depends upon you. I love you, I love nobody else. But just as a train cannot move off the rails for a single millimetre without crashing, so is it with me—I must not swerve from my path at any point. For now, you love only me, which means, in the final analysis, you love only for yourself, for the satisfaction of your own needs.
The letter concluded with a plea that his wife rise above her “completely understandable, completely human” but “egotistical” plans for their future. If she could do this, he suggested, real harmony would reign.12
All that reigned when Natalya read her husband’s words was a sense of confusion born out of incomprehension. This gave way to “worry, fear, despair, and finally a sense of hopelessness”.13
Perhaps it was not surprising that Solzhenitsyn’s words should have been incomprehensible to his wife. They were a conundrum, but contained the key to understanding the man, at least as he was in January 1945. At the simplest level, the letter appears unreasonable. It seems that it is Solzhenitsyn, not Natalya, whose love is egotistical. It is he, not she, who is demanding that the marriage should progress according to pre-set criteria. It is he, not she, who “must not swerve” from the path at any point; he, not she, who is unprepared to compromise. Yet on a deeper level, the unreasonableness was an expression of something more important to the maturing soldier. He was beginning to perceive that a spirit of sacrifice was at the heart of marriage, and of life, and that the selfish pursuit of needlessly created wants was an obstacle to true happiness. Real harmony could reign only when the desire for material possessions was subjugated to higher goals. For Solzhenitsyn, the higher goal was his art, from which he “must not swerve”. Even his marriage to Natalya was of secondary importance when compared with his literary aspirations. What he needed from her, and demanded from her, was an acceptance that she must be prepared to sacrifice herself to this higher goal. She must love him not because she wanted him or needed him or sought to possess him, but by giving herself heart and soul to him, selflessly sacrificing herself on the altar of his art. He, on the other hand, could not be expected to sacrifice his art for her, or indeed for anything else. Either she must sacrifice herself for their marriage, or he would sacrifice their marriage for his art. It was an ultimatum.
Years later, Solzhenitsyn sought to explain these feelings. “I was so wound up—my path was like that of a piston…. Everything’s important, yes, every side of life has its importance, but at the same time I would have lost my momentum and my kinetic energy.”14
The wartime delay in the postal system meant that Solzhenitsyn’s letters to his wife usually took a month to arrive. She received the letter containing his confusing ultimatum in early March. About a week later, instead of his next letter, her own postcard to him was returned. It bore the notation: “The addressee has left the unit.” Natalya panicked and wrote to anyone and everyone who might know her husband’s whereabouts.
Recalling this troubled time in her memoirs, Natalya chose to quote from one of her husband’s novels, letting the autobiographical element in the fiction speak for itself:
It is always difficult to wait for a husband to come home from war. But the last months before war’s end are most difficult of alclass="underline" shrapnel and bullets take no account of how long a man has been fighting.
It was precisely at this point that letters from Gleb stopped arriving.
Nadya would run outside to look for the mailman. She wrote her husband, she wrote his friends, she wrote to his superiors. Everyone maintained a silence, as though enchanted.
In the spring of 1945 hardly an evening went by without salutes blasting the skies. One city after another was taken! Taken! Taken!—Königsberg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague.
But there were no letters. The world dimmed. Apathy set in. But she must not let go of herself. What if he is alive and returns?… And she consumed herself with long-extended days of work—nights alone were reserved for tears.15
Little did Natalya know that even as she worried and wept at home, her husband was languishing in a Soviet jail. In a grim twist of fate, or a providential adjustment of divine symmetry, Solzhenitsyn found himself being sacrificed to a “higher goal”. As he had sought Natalya’s sacrifice on the altar of art, so he was now being sacrificed on the altar of Stalin’s all-powerful state.
A few days after his self-assured letter to his wife insisting that his life could not move one millimeter from the tracks on which he had set it, the crushing apparatus of the Soviet state brought all his plans, his schemes, his ambitions, his life itself, to a grinding halt. He was plucked helpless from his path, and placed in an alien environment where the road ahead could not be seen, if indeed any such road existed.
The catastrophic turn in his fortunes commenced with a telephone call from brigade headquarters on February 9, 1945. He was to report at once to Brigadier-General Travkin. As he entered the brigadier-general’s office, he noticed a group of officers standing in a corner of the room, of whom he recognized only one, the brigade’s political commissar. Travkin ordered Solzhenitsyn to step forward and hand over his revolver. Puzzled, he obeyed, handing the weapon to Travkin, who slowly wound the leather strap round and round the butt before placing it in his desk drawer. Then in a low voice Travkin said, “All right, you must go now.”
Solzhenitsyn did not understand and remained awkwardly where he was.
“Yes, yes,” repeated Travkin in the uneasy silence, “it is time for you to go somewhere.”
Instantly, two officers stepped forward from among the group in the corner and told Solzhenitsyn he was under arrest. “Me?” he gasped in reply. “What for?”
Without bothering to explain further, the two officers ripped his epaulettes from his shoulders and the star from his cap, removed his belt, and snatched the map-case from his hands. Ironically, this unceremonious stripping him off his rank and his dignity came only days before the scheduled medal ceremony at which he was due to be presented with the Order of the Red Banner for his heroism in battle less than two weeks earlier. Without further ado, the two officers began to march him from the room.
“Wait a moment!” ordered Travkin.
The two counter-intelligence officers released their grip momentarily, and Solzhenitsyn turned to face the brigadier-general.
“Have you”, Travkin asked meaningfully, “a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?”
“That’s against regulations!” the two arresting officers shouted angrily. “You have no right!”16
Travkin could say no more, but Solzhenitsyn knew instantly that this was a reference to his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich and that it was intended as a warning. Evidently, his arrest had something to do with his correspondence with Nikolai, or perhaps with their “Resolution No. 1”. Later, he was to consider both the correspondence and the Resolution “a piece of childish stupidity”.17 He and Nikolai knew that censorship was in place and that their letters would be read, but this had not prevented them making derogatory comments about Stalin in their correspondence. They were, with the wisdom of hindsight, extremely foolish. Solzhenitsyn wrote that their naïveté “aroused only laughter and astonishment” when he discussed their case with fellow prisoners. “Other prisoners told me that two more such stupid jackasses couldn’t exist. And I became convinced of it myself.”18