CHAPTER NINE
BEAUTIFUL EXILE
Solzhenitsyn would always consider his close encounter with death at the Ekibastuz labor camp as the third and final of the “most important and defining moments” in his life, following his experiences as a front-line soldier and his subsequent arrest. “When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer, then I was fully cleansed and came back to a deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life. From that time, I was formed essentially into who I am now. After that it was mostly evolution, there were no abrupt turns, no breaking directions.”1 The process, culminating in religious conversion, was summed up succinctly in an interview Solzhenitsyn gave to Georges Suffert in 1976: “First comes the fight for survival, then the discovery of life, then God.”2
One is drawn to parallels between Solzhenitsyn’s experience and those of his great literary predecessor Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who also felt that his life had been transformed by his sufferings as a prisoner in Siberia. “It was a good school”, Dostoyevsky wrote. “It strengthened my faith and awakened my love for those who bear all their suffering with patience. It also strengthened my love for Russia and opened my eyes to the great qualities of the Russian people.” The kinship is further illustrated in Dostoyevsky’s appraisal of the importance of suffering to his development as a writer: “I have been through a lot and will see and experience even more—you shall see how much I will have to write about.”3
Having embraced Christianity, Solzhenitsyn began to sympathize more than ever with those who had been persecuted for their religious faith. At Ekibastuz, he rubbed shoulders with many devout men who had been imprisoned for their beliefs and began to feel a deep affinity with them. The Old Believers, the traditionalist recusants of the Orthodox Church, were no longer the strange anachronism they had seemed to Solzhenitsyn in his days as a Marxist. Now they were the “eternally persecuted, eternal exiles”, the ones who three centuries earlier had “divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority”.4 He heard with a sense of growing admiration about the struggle of these Old Believers to retain their faith and way of life in the hostile environment of Stalin’s Russia. In The Gulag Archipelago, he recounts the story of the Yaruyevo Old Believers who had fled from the oppression of Soviet collectivization. A whole village had literally uprooted itself and disappeared deep into the remoteness of the Russian wilderness. For twenty years, these uncompromising Christians had lived a self-sufficient existence in the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, living in secluded isolation from the prying eyes of the outside world. The end came in 1950 when the previously unknown settlement was spotted from a plane and its position reported to the authorities. When Soviet troops arrived, they found a small but thriving community that had enjoyed “twenty years of life as free human beings among the wild beasts, instead of twenty years of… misery”. They were all wearing homespun garments and homemade knee boots, and they were all “exceptionally sturdy”.5 The whole village was arrested on a charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” and for constituting a hostile organization and found themselves in the same labor camps as Solzhenitsyn.
In 1946, four years before the Yaruyevo Old Believers were discovered, another group of Old Believers was arrested in a forgotten monastery somewhere in the backwoods. They were then floated on rafts down the Yenisei River bound for the camps. “Prisoners still, and still indomitable—the same under Stalin as they had been under Peter!—they jumped from the rafts into the waters of the Yenisei, where our Tommy-gunners finished them off.”6
Solzhenitsyn heard these stories and consigned them carefully to memory. He was determined that one day the world should know the full truth, the ugly secrets lurking in the murky depths of Soviet society. In order to do this, he had his own secrets to keep. He was now writing more than ever before, scrawling lines of verse on scraps of paper, which were burnt as soon as he had memorized the words. If his thoughts were discovered on paper, he would certainly receive a further sentence of imprisonment, and he was determined not to make the same naive mistakes that had led to his initial arrest more than seven years earlier. At Ekibastuz, his writing became almost obsessive, pressing on his consciousness at all hours of the day. “In the interval between two barrowloads of mortar I would put my bit of paper on the bricks and (without letting my neighbours see what I was doing) write down with a pencil stub the verses which had rushed into my head while I was slapping on the last hodful.” According to his own account of this period of intensive writing at Ekibastuz in 1952, he lived in a dream for much of the time and sat in the mess hall over the ritual gruel “deaf to those around me—feeling my way about my verses and trimming them to fit like bricks in a wall”.7
I realized that I was not the only one, that I was party to a great secret, a secret maturing in other lonely breasts like mine on the scattered islands of the Archipelago, to reveal itself in years to come, perhaps when we were dead, and to merge into the Russian literature of the future….
How many of us were there? Many more, I think, than have come to the surface in the intervening years. Not all of them were to survive. Some buried manuscripts in bottles, without telling anyone where. Some put their work in careless or, on the contrary, in excessively cautious hands for safekeeping. Some could not write their work down in time.
Even on the isle of Ekibastuz, could we really get to know each other? encourage each other? support each other? Like wolves, we hid from everyone, and that meant from each other, too. Yet even so I was to discover a few others in Ekibastuz.8
The most important of Solzhenitsyn’s fellow literary conspirators at Ekibastuz was the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin. Solzhenitsyn had met him initially through their mutual friendship with the Baptist prisoners at the camp. He was over forty, about ten years Solzhenitsyn’s senior, and Solzhenitsyn described him as “meek and gentle with everyone, but reserved”. During their long conversations, strolling round the camp on their Sundays off, the younger prisoner discovered in the older man a kindred spirit. Silin had been a homeless child, brought up as an atheist in a children’s home, but had come across some religious books in a German prisoner-of-war camp and been totally carried away by them. From that time, he had become not only a fervent believer but also a gifted philosopher and theologian. Since he had spent the entire period since his conversion in prisons of one sort or another, he had never had the benefit of further spiritual reading. Instead, he gleaned the truth through his own perceptions, expressed in verse. According to Solzhenitsyn, Silin knew some twenty thousand lines of verse by heart at the time they met, reciting many of them to his younger fellow poet. Like Solzhenitsyn, Silin looked upon his verse as “a way of remembering and of transmitting thoughts”.9