And the next day that fine drizzle kept falling and falling. The clay pit had got drenched, and we were stuck in it for good. No matter how much clay you took on your spade, and no matter how much you banged it on the side of the truck, the clay would not drop off. And each time we had to reach over and push the clay off the spade into the car. And then we realized that we had been merely doing extra work. We put aside the spades and began simply to gather up the squelching clay from under our feet and toss it into the car.10
Solzhenitsyn’s work partner during those days in the pit was Boris Gammerov, the young man whose candid confession of faith back in Butyrki Prison had forced Solzhenitsyn to confront the shallowness of his own implicit atheism. The two men tried to keep their spirits up by discussing the importance of Vladimir Solovyev, the Russian poet, philosopher, and Christian mystic, or endeavored to make light of their labors by telling jokes. When they became too exhausted to talk, Gammerov would gain consolation by composing poetry in his head. Solzhenitsyn looked upon his friend, who was still only twenty-two, with a mixture of admiration and fear. He admired his spiritual strength and dogged resilience, but feared for his physical health. The fragment of a German tank shell was still lodged immovably in his lungs, and he was visibly weakening, his face becoming skeletal in appearance.
The young poet did not survive his first winter in the camps, dying a few months later of tuberculosis and exhaustion. “I revere in him a poet who was never even allowed to peep”, wrote Solzhenitsyn. “His spiritual image was lofty, and his verses seemed to me very powerful at the time. But I did not memorize even one of them, and I can find them nowhere now, so as to be able at least to make him a gravestone from those little stones.”11
Solzhenitsyn escaped from the exhausting labor, the sludge, and the reddish-gray monotony of the clay-pits quite unexpectedly on September 9, 1945. New Jerusalem was to become a camp for German prisoners of war, and, in order to make way for them, all the current prisoners at the camp were to be transferred elsewhere. Solzhenitsyn was being returned to Moscow, this time to Kaluga Gate, on the south side of the city. As he made the return journey, his spirits lifted. He had enjoyed the outward journey, only three weeks earlier, as “one of the supreme hours” of his life, and there is no reason to believe that his feelings on escaping the infernal pits of New Jerusalem were any less exhilarating. He now seemed to see the beauties of life for the first time. Once he had been free to enjoy them whenever he chose but had been too blind to see; now that he was deprived of them except on rare moments such as these journeys between camps, the whole of creation came to glorious life. As the prison transport sped through the Russian countryside heading for Moscow, “a whirlwind of scents of new-mown hay and of the early evening freshness of the meadows swirled around our shaven heads. This meadow breeze—who could breathe it more greedily than prisoners? Real genuine green blinded our eyes, grown used to grey and more grey… all the air, the speed, the colours were ours. Oh, forgotten brightness of the world!”12 For the first time he was enjoying what G. K. Chesterton called “the glorious gift of the senses and the sensational experience of sensation”.13 He was fully alive. As the prison transport arrived in Moscow, he wondered whether the teeming thousands of free people in the city streets were as fully alive as he was. “The streetcars were red, the trolley-buses sky-blue, the crowd in white and many-coloured. Do they themselves see these colours as they crowd onto the buses?”14 Could they see, or were they as blind to the beauty around them as they were to the suffering of their compatriots in the camps?
Solzhenitsyn was destined to spend ten months at Kaluga Gate, until, in the early afternoon of July 18, 1946, he was transferred the short distance across the city to Butyrki, where he had spent a month the preceding summer. In the year that had elapsed since he was last there, the prison had become busier and more crowded. It took eleven hours for Solzhenitsyn to be processed in the now familiar way: search—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell—bath—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell—fumigation—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell…. All punctuated at regular intervals with the endless repetition of the catch-phrase: name, date of birth, place of birth, charge, and sentence.
It was not until three o’clock the following morning that Solzhenitsyn finally arrived at Cell 75, his new home. The overcrowded and stuffy conditions in the hot July air, the buzz of tireless flies flitting from sleeper to sleeper, making them twitch, must have reminded him of the criminal-infested cell at Krasnaya Presnya. This time eighty men had been squeezed into a cell designed for twenty-five, and Solzhenitsyn found a space of unoccupied floor beneath the lowest tier of bunks, next to the latrine tank. Throughout the night, prisoners needing to use the latrine tank would step across Solzhenitsyn’s fitfully sleeping body, and the acrid stench of the tank itself, putrefying in the heat, bore on his nostrils as mercilessly as the two bright electric bulbs bore on his eyelids, and the incessant flies bore on his skin. Yet such was the horror of life in the labor camps that this was luxury in comparison.
I was happy! There, on the asphalt floor, under the bunks, in a dog’s den, with dust and crumbs from the bunks falling in our eyes, I was absolutely happy, without any qualifications. Epicurus spoke truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it. After camp, which had already seemed endless, and after a ten-hour workday, after cold, rain, and aching back, oh, what happiness it was to lie there for whole days on end, to sleep, and nevertheless receive a pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day—made from cattle feed, or from dolphin’s flesh.15
After the ordeal of forced labor at New Jerusalem and Kaluga Gate, sleep was particularly welcome. During his two months in the cell, he slept enough “to make up for the past year and the year ahead”. Nevertheless, his second spell at Butyrki was not all spent in sleep, and he developed many friendships with fellow prisoners. There were discussion groups, games of chess, a limited number of books to read, and all the while his education at the hands of others was continuing. He listened intently as émigrés spoke of their experiences in various parts of the world, and he soaked up the lectures by others on a host of subjects ranging from Gogol and Le Corbusier to the habits of bees.
He was not shy of getting involved himself when the occasion arose. When an Orthodox priest, Evgeny Divnich, strayed from discussions of theology to denunciations of Marxism, Solzhenitsyn felt duty-bound to spring to its defense. He was, after all, still a Marxist, wasn’t he? Battle was joined between the Orthodox believer and the loyal child of the Revolution. Divnich condemned Marxism and claimed that, as a political philosophy, it was a spent force and that nobody in Europe had taken it seriously for years. Solzhenitsyn did his best to counter the arguments with all the well-rehearsed and well-worn ripostes, but somehow his responses sounded hollow and less convincing than they had done in the past. “Even a year ago I would have confidently demolished him with quotations; how disparagingly I would have mocked him!”16 Now, however, a year in prison had left its mark, and he was no longer so sure of the correctness of his former beliefs. He hesitated, fumbled, conceded points that he never would have done previously. Almost imperceptibly, he had changed over the past twelve months, and it was only when he was called upon to defend his old ideas in open debate that he realized the change that had taken place. “My whole line of reasoning began to weaken, and so they could beat me in our arguments without half-trying.”17