But he was soon making a good recovery. Once more he had proved to be a survivor, and once more he would profit from the threat of loss. In facing death, he had gained an immeasurably greater understanding of life. It was the eternal paradox, at the very heart of life and death, which is encapsulated in the Gospels: he who loses his life shall find it.24
As he recovered physically in the camp hospital, his spirits were simultaneously being healed. The spiritual healing could not be seen as readily as the scar on his right groin, but it was as real—more real, in fact. The former atheist had ceased seeing life in terms of dialectical materialism and was beginning to perceive it in the light of theological mysticism. This was the change, accelerated by his arrival at Ekibastuz, that had so alienated his wife. In one of his letters to her, he had described the change at the very core of his being: “Years go by, yes, but if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain.”25 This, which to Solzhenitsyn was the source of his inner strength, was to Natalya a sign of outward weakness. For her, but not for him, resignation was merely the absence of determination, a failure of the will; for her, but not for him, inner peace was really only an abject surrender to circumstance. They were no longer speaking the same language.
At this time, however, Solzhenitsyn’s experience of strength through suffering was not seen in specifically Christian terms. The way of mortification was not necessarily the way of the Cross; or, returning to his letters to Natalya, God was still “god” and not “God”. All this was to change in the days following his operation, as he lay in the surgical ward of the camp hospital. He was hot and feverish, unable to move, but his thoughts were alive and not prone to dissolve into delirium. In his incapacitated condition, he was grateful for the company of Doctor Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who sat beside his bed talking to him. Alone in the ward together in the evening, with the light turned out so as not to hurt the patient’s eyes, Kornfeld told Solzhenitsyn the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. As he listened, Solzhenitsyn was astonished at the conviction of the new convert, the ardor of his words: “And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”26 Thus Kornfeld ended the account of his conversion experience, and Solzhenitsyn shuddered at the mystical knowledge in his voice. Solzhenitsyn must have shuddered again the following morning when he was awoken by the sound of running about and tramping in the corridor. The orderlies were carrying Kornfeld’s body to the operating room. He had been dealt eight blows to the skull with a plasterer’s mallet while he slept, and died on the operating table without regaining consciousness: “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.”27
Many commentators have suggested that this poignant meeting with Kornfeld, on the eve of his death, was pivotal to Solzhenitsyn’s final embrace of Christianity. This may be so, but its importance should not be overstated. The war, the camps, the cancer, had all prepared the ground before they met. By February 1952, Solzhenitsyn was ripe for conversion. After all, had he not just looked death squarely in the face and lived? The story of Kornfeld’s conversion may perhaps have been the final catalyst, but when the light came on Solzhenitsyn’s own road to Damascus, it was at least half-expected. As Solzhenitsyn remarked concerning his fateful meeting with Kornfeld: “[B]y that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts”.28
In fact, he had matured sufficiently to see through and beyond Kornfeld’s “universal law of life”. The truth, Solzhenitsyn reasoned, went deeper than Kornfeld realized. To accept Kornfeld’s thesis at face value, one would have to admit that those who suffer most are in some way more evil than those who are relatively free from pain. Did that mean that he and the millions of other prisoners in Stalin’s camps were more evil than those who had escaped their miserable fate? Did it mean that those who suffered an even worse fate, such as tortuously slow death, were the most evil people of all? Worse, did it mean that those who committed the torture were less evil than their victims? And what of those who prospered rather than suffered? What of the malicious criminals he had met in various camps over the years? What of the camp guards? Worst of all, what of Stalin himself? Did it mean that Stalin was less evil than the millions of innocents he had slaughtered? Surely not. What of the torturers? Solzhenitsyn asked:
Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?… And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but… in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of alclass="underline" they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development… holds out hope.29
Having passed beyond Kornfeld’s theory, Solzhenitsyn could look back at it from the other side. From this new angle, he saw that for individuals in their one-to-one relationship with the Creator, the theory actually held true: “But there was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.”30
All alone in the recovery room in the camp hospital from which Kornfeld had gone to his death, Solzhenitsyn passed long sleepless nights, pondering with astonishment his own life and the turns it had taken. For the first time, he seemed fully awake, fully alive, to the sublime realities at the root of his personal experiences. At last, all the doubts, all the shadows, seemed to disappear and everything appeared resolved, crystal clear. Slowly, as the interminable minutes passed, he set down his thoughts in rhymed verses: