Such comments, had he been able to read them, would have warmed the prisoner’s heart as he lay in Marfino lamenting the state of affairs in his own country. Doubtless also, his heart would have leapt and his despondency would have been dispersed somewhat, had he known that George Orwell was in the midst of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel which, perhaps, would be more important than any other in turning people away from totalitarianism. Still less could the prisoner have guessed that he was destined as a writer to become more influential even than Orwell in the fight against political dictatorships. Orwell’s classic was published the following year, 1949, complementing Animal Farm, his earlier satirical fable attacking communism, which had been published in 1945.
Years later, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged the importance of both Muggeridge and Orwell in heightening awareness of the dangers of communism in the West. Orwell’s books, he believed, had come as a shock to certain intellectuals: “In the west of course many stubbornly resisted and did not want to understand. Understanding, comprehension, tends to project emotion ahead so that some did not want to know. Bernard Shaw for instance did not want to know, and so Orwell was received with difficulty.”6 In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, although “it was difficult to get hold of”, Nineteen Eighty-Four was greeted with “admiration” by those who managed, illegally, to obtain a copy because it was “precisely accurate”.7 Meanwhile, Muggeridge was worthy of respect because “he was able to travel that difficult path of freeing himself from socialist lies and attaining spiritual heights”.8
Solzhenitsyn, of course, was traveling the same path as Muggeridge but in more difficult circumstances. One particular difficulty, coming to crisis point during his time at Marfino, was the state of his marriage. Again, the autobiographical elements in The First Circle shed some light on his own feelings as he sensed the tension in his precarious relationship with Natalya. In the novel, Gleb Nerzhin mulls over the words of Nadya, his wife, who has written “when you come back…” in a letter to him. “But the horror was that there was no going back. To return was impossible. After four years in the army and a ten-year prison sentence, there would probably not be a single cell of his body which was the same. Although the man who came back would have the same surname as her husband, he would be a different person, and she would realize that her one and only, for whom she had waited fourteen lonely years, was not this man at all—he no longer existed.”9
Ironically, the result of Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual development, the fruit of his endless discussions with Panin and Kopelev, was that he was growing ever more divorced from the aspirations he had once nurtured and those his wife continued to nurture in his absence. He was trapped by circumstances. If other married couples sometimes grew apart even when they had lived together for years, what hope had he and Natalya after all the years of enforced separation? Yet however hopeless the situation seemed, he still nurtured the belief that perhaps, in spite of all the odds, they might still survive the experience. Again, Solzhenitsyn uses the character of Gleb Nerzhin to express the emotions he was feeling in 1948:
He could not understand how Nadya could have waited so long for him. How could she move among those bustling, insatiable crowds, constantly feeling men’s eyes on her—and not waver in her love for him? Gleb imagined that if it had been the other way round—if she were imprisoned and he were free—he would not have held out for as much as a year. Before, he would never have believed his frail little wife to be capable of such rocklike constancy and for a long time he had doubted her, but now he had a feeling that Nadya did not find waiting too difficult.10
Then, on December 19, 1948, during a rare prison visit, Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she would have to obtain a formal divorce from him or she would lose her job. She told him that security was being tightened at the laboratory where she worked and that if she declared her marriage to a political prisoner on the forms she was required to fill in, she would certainly not be retained as an employee. Outwardly, Solzhenitsyn put on a brave face and agreed that, under the circumstances, Natalya had no choice but to divorce him. In a letter to Natalya’s mother a couple of weeks later, he wrote that her decision was “correct, the sober thing to do; it should have been done three years ago”.11 Inwardly, however, he was devastated, shaken to the core, and confessed later that after the visit he was left in the darkest despair.12 In reality, Natalya had already filed court papers declaring the dissolution of their marriage a couple of months before she informed her husband of the fact. As a result, she was able to declare him as a former husband on the form she had to fill out for her job, an act made all the easier by her decision to retain her own surname, rather than take Solzhenitsyn’s, at the time of their marriage eight years earlier.
Although Natalya had assured him during the visit that the divorce was a mere formality and that she would still wait for him, he found himself troubled by doubts. If the divorce was not the end of their marriage, surely it was the beginning of the end:
What a pity that he had not made up his mind to kiss her at the very beginning of the visit. Now, that kiss was gone for ever. His wife’s lips had looked different, they seemed to have weakened and forgotten how to kiss. How weary she had been, what a hunted look there had been in her eyes when she had talked of divorce…. [S]he would get a divorce in order to avoid the persecution inseparable from being a political prisoner’s wife and having done so, before she knew where she was, she would have married again. Somehow, as he had watched her give a last wave of her ringless hand he had felt a stab of premonition that they were saying goodbye to each other for the last time.13
Throughout 1949, there was a slow but discernible estrangement between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, a creeping paralysis in their relations with each other. Toward the end of the year, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natalya urging her to complete the severance between them and give up writing to him. Her own well-being was more important to him than “this illusion of family relations that long ago ceased to exist”.14 He was aware that she was becoming more and more involved in her busy new life as a lecturer and that in the evenings she was kept fully occupied playing the piano at various concerts. On the one hand, he saw more clearly than ever that he was casting an unwelcome shadow on her life, while on the other, he was developing a stoic calmness about his own fate. He was also beginning to suspect that his prison term would be followed by a period in “perpetual exile”, effectively ending all hope that he and Natalya would ever be reunited. Natalya ignored Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion, and the couple continued to correspond, though not on the same terms as before. As they were supposed to be no longer married, the tone of the correspondence, particularly on Natalya’s part, was more circumspect, dampening any expressions of affection in their letters. Meanwhile, in her professional life, Natalya continued to prosper, and in March 1950 she was appointed head of the chemistry department at the research institute. In the same month, there was another of the rare visits to Solzhenitsyn. Their meeting, though subdued, was touched by genuine warmth. Natalya informed Solzhenitsyn that she still loved him and had no intention of leaving him. For his part, Solzhenitsyn confessed that his advice that she end their relationship had come from his head but his heart “had shrunk from fear” that it could possibly come to pass.15 Solzhenitsyn also confessed that he now regretted they had never had children, a reversal of his pre-prison view that children would merely interfere with his literary aspirations. In those days, it was Natalya, not Solzhenitsyn, who had wanted desperately to start a family, but now she was not so sure. In any case, she told him, it was probably too late to think of such things now.