“Thank God for prison!” Nerzhin exclaims to Rubin on another occasion. “It has given me the chance to think things out. To understand the nature of happiness we first have to know what it means to eat one’s fill.” He reminds Rubin of the foul prison food they had been given during their interrogation at the Lubyanka:
Can you say you ate it? No. It was like Holy Communion, you took it like the sacraments, like the prana of the yogis. You ate it slowly, from the tip of a wooden spoon, entirely absorbed in the process of eating, in thinking about eating—and it spread through your body like nectar. You quivered from the exquisite feeling you got from those sodden little grains and the muddy slops in which they floated…. Can you compare that with the way people wolf down steaks?… So miserable wretches like ourselves really do know from bitter experience what it means to eat one’s fill. It’s not a matter of how much you eat, but of the way you eat. It’s the same with happiness—it doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to snatch from life, but only on our attitude towards them.
“You’ve certainly worked it all out”, Rubin replies sceptically, asking with suspicion whether Sologdin had put Nerzhin up to it.33
“Perhaps he has”, Nerzhin concedes. “For you I suppose it’s just idealism and metaphysics. But listen! The happiness that comes from easy victories, from the total fulfilment of desire, from success, from feeling completely gorged—that is suffering! That is spiritual death, a kind of unending moral indigestion… people don’t know what they are striving for. They exhaust themselves in the senseless pursuit of material things and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.”34
Looking back over the spiritual wealth he has accrued in the half-century since he first received these revelations, Solzhenitsyn states with simplicity, “I am deeply convinced that God participates in every life.”35 Similarly, in his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf, he hints at the role of providence in his life and work. In 1948, however, Solzhenitsyn did not have this spiritual wealth to draw on. Nor did he know that providence was about to offer further opportunities to make spiritual profit from material loss.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LIFE AND DEATH
The depth of the spiritual and intellectual discussions held between Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev at Marfino contrasted starkly with the vacuity of the books in the prison library. Through the character of Khorobrov in The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn expressed his contempt for the state of Soviet literature in 1948. He poured scorn on one book in particular, a hack novel called Far from Moscow by Vasiley Azhayev, which topped the bestseller lists in 1948. It describes in glowingly romantic terms the heroic feat of building an oil pipeline in Siberia without ever mentioning that the back-breaking work was done by prison labor. Instead, Azhayev’s novel portrayed the workers as “happy young members of the Komsomol, well-fed, well-shod and bursting with enthusiasm”. There was no mention of half-starved skeletal shadows being literally worked to death. Khorobrov had tried reading the novel but found that it “turned his stomach”. He could sense that the author knew the truth. Perhaps he had even been a security officer in one of the Siberian death camps. He knew, but he “was cold-bloodedly lying”.1
Khorobrov had then tried a volume of the selected writings of Galakhov, whose literary reputation was at its height. Again he was disappointed and put the book down without finishing it. “Even Galakhov, who could write so prettily about love, had been stricken with mental paralysis and was going down the drain with the ever-swelling crowd of writers who wrote, if not for children, then for morons who had seen and known nothing of life and were only too delighted to be amused with any rubbish.” Soviet literature was truly in a sorry state, Khorobrov mused.
“Everything that really moves the human heart was absent…. There was nothing to read.”2
Pondering the state of Soviet literature during the idle hours on his prison bunk in Marfino, Solzhenitsyn’s own literary vocation began to take shape. With an iron determination, he was resolved to tell the truth—the full, unexpurgated truth—about life in Stalin’s camps. He would, single-handedly if necessary, break the conspiracy of silence.
Even as he pondered dejectedly in his prison cell, several key literary figures in England were speaking out against the evils of communism in the forthright terms that Solzhenitsyn was to use himself in later years. In early June 1948, during a radio broadcast for the BBC, Malcolm Muggeridge criticized the dynamic duo of Fabian socialism, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for their naive eulogizing of the Soviet regime. Muggeridge attributed to Beatrice Webb the statement “Old people take to pets, and mine is the USSR.” With the sardonic humor for which he was famous, Muggeridge added that a tabby or a pekinese “might have been easier to handle and certainly better house-trained”. He concluded his talk by comparing Beatrice Webb to Don Quixote: “[S]he finished up enmeshed in her own self-deception, adulating a regime which bore as little relation to the Fabian Good Life as Dulcinea del Toboso to the Mistress of Don Quixote’s dreams.”3
Having witnessed the horrors of communism as a correspondent in Moscow before the war, Muggeridge was appalled by the continuing gullibility of Western intellectuals. He could not understand the obstinate support for Stalin of Shaw and the Webbs and was amazed at the sermons in support of the “glorious social experiment taking place in the Soviet Union” given by leading Christians such as the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean of Canterbury”. “As a symbol, from the Communists’ point of view, the Dean is incomparable”, Muggeridge wrote. “All their ridicule of Christianity, all their confidence that its day is done, seems to come true in his very person. Moscow newspapers, in their cartoons, present the Christian Church in just such a guise: gaiters, cross, white locks, and seeming venerability, adorning absurdity.”4
As he witnessed the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe, Muggeridge considered with dismay the Soviet policy of Clement Attlee’s government. Labor policy toward the Soviet Union was based on the belief that Britain would benefit because “Left would speak to Left”. Such a view, Muggeridge claimed, was the epitome of self-delusion: “As far as Stalin was concerned, the Leftism of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues was about as congenial as ginger beer to a congenital drunkard.”5