For The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gleaned a few precious memories of their time together in the camp. He recalled Silin bending over one of the rare blades of grass growing in the barren camp. “How beautiful are the grasses of the earth”, he exclaimed. “But even these the Creator has given to man for a carpet under his feet. How much more beautiful, then, must we be than they!” Silin’s theological mysticism was distinctly unpuritanical, and he asserted to Solzhenitsyn that “even earthly, carnal love is a manifestation of a lofty aspiration to Union”. On another occasion, he had answered the refusal of atheists to believe that spirit could beget matter: “Why don’t they ask themselves how crude matter could beget spirit? That way round, it would surely be a miracle. Yes, a still greater miracle!” Yet it was in his belief in the necessity of suffering that he had most in common with Solzhenitsyn. Silin declared that the soul must suffer before it was able to know the “perfect bliss of paradise”, and that “by grief alone is love perfected”. This law, though harsh, was the only way that weak men could “win eternal peace”.10
Solzhenitsyn wrote of Silin that this “doomed and exhausted slave, with four number patches on his clothes… had more in his heart to say to living human beings than the whole tribe of hacks firmly established in journals, in publishing houses, in radio—and of no use to anyone except themselves”.11
If the twenty thousand lines of poetry Silin had memorized was an awesome achievement, Solzhenitsyn’s own powers of retention were scarcely less remarkable. By the time he was released, he had consigned twelve thousand lines of his own work to memory. He had been helped in this by the use of a rosary, which had been made for him by some Catholic Lithuanian prisoners. Each bead, made of small pieces of wet bread, represented a line of verse, and Solzhenitsyn could often be seen fingering the beads, apparently in prayer, but actually memorizing his poetry.
Most of the poetry Solzhenitsyn wrote at Ekibastuz, collectively entitled The Way, was broadly autobiographical. He later rejected much of it as unworthy of publication, but Prussian Nights, the epic poem based on his experiences in Prussia in January 1945, was an exception, being born from The Way but taking on a full and vibrant life of its own. Also composed at Ekibastuz were A Feast of Conquerors (published in English in 1981 under the title Victory Celebrations), which was a play written entirely in rhymed verse, and a longer play entitled Prisoners.
Many critics have highlighted the flaws in these plays, and Solzhenitsyn concedes that “they are inferior to my other work in the sense that I was using them for the expression of ideas and I was not as demanding perhaps in terms of dramaturgical requirements.”12
In A Feast of Conquerors, the idea Solzhenitsyn was seeking to convey found expression in the contrasting characters of Gridnev and Galina. In many respects, these two characters are an incarnation of the warring spirits at the core of all Solzhenitsyn’s art. Gridnev takes the path of least resistance, becoming utterly corrupted by his desire to find the most comfortable route through life; Galina, on the other hand, takes the path of sacrifice, embodying the alternative vision of nobility and heroism in the face of adversity, the way of the Cross. Yet the eternal verities incarnated in these two characters are also rooted in a specific historical context. A Feast of Conquerors is set in an East Prussian country house and depicts a scene similar to one experienced by Solzhenitsyn himself during the Soviet advance in January 1945. Like Prussian Nights, it is infused with autobiographical detail. For this reason, Solzhenitsyn insists that the conflict between Galina and Gridnev should be seen on several different levels, physical as well as metaphysicaclass="underline"
This conflict represents not even their personal tragedy but the tragedy of the Russian people as a whole under the oppression of the communists, the Bolsheviks. The people wanted to be free but it was impossible until the war. They believed that the Germans were bringing freedom to us and looked toward the Germans believing that they would help, or at least would not hinder, the liberation from communism. But the world powers were already aligned in such a way that the Allies—the US, the UK—did not want to tolerate any more fighting against the communists because the communists were their allies. And so these people were trapped between the Russian Soviets, the Germans, and the Americans and English, all of whom considered them as traitors. This affected many millions. Millions. Several millions retreated with the Germans.13
Prisoners shares many of the themes which were at the center of A Feast of Conquerors. The moral dilemma of those fighting in the anti-communist Russian Liberation Army is addressed. Having signed up with the Nazi devil, these “liberators” were swallowed up by the deep red sea of the Soviet advance. The other leitmotif in Prisoners resonant of A Feast of Conquerors is that depicting the triumph of unconquerable spirit over physical adversity. Throughout both plays, there is a recurrent anger at the injustice at the heart of the Soviet regime, an anger that became the energy, the motive force, behind Solzhenitsyn’s future work. The quiet prisoner saying his “prayers” with the crude rosary at Ekibastuz was preparing a literary time bomb, primed to explode at an unknown date in the future.
As the months of 1952 passed slowly away, another future date was pressing ever more insistently on Solzhenitsyn’s mind: the date of his release. Officially, his sentence was to end on February 9, 1953, and as the golden day approached, he dreamed of the exile that awaited him. He knew that he would not be allowed to return to normal life and that, in all probability, perpetual exile was all he could expect, but, after the ordeal of the camps, even “exile” sounded like Eden or Paradise to his freedom-starved heart. “The dream of exile burns like a secret light in the prisoner’s mind”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “a flickering iridescent mirage, and the wasted breasts of prisoners on their dark bunks heave in sighs of longing: ‘If only they would sentence me to exile!’”14 Solzhenitsyn was not immune to such longing. As long ago as the infernal clay-pits at New Jerusalem, which had killed his friend Boris Gammerov, he had listened to the cocks crowing in the nearby village and had dreamed of exile.
His dream came true on February 13, 1953, when, four days after the official end of his sentence, he was led out of the main camp gates with a group of other released prisoners and marched under armed guard to the railway station. Almost exactly a year earlier, he had been operated on for cancer, yet now, fit and well, he was finally on the verge of freedom. Perhaps, at long last, his luckless life was about to change for the better. There followed one of the customary interminable journeys to an unknown destination and an unknown future. Several days later, Solzhenitsyn and the other prisoners arrived in Dzhambul, midway between Alma-Ata and Tashkent in Kazakhstan, where they were informed that they were being exiled “in perpetuity” to the district of Kok-Terek, on the southern fringe of Kazakhstan’s vast desert of Bet-Pak-Dala. He finally arrived at his new home on the edge of the arid wastelands of Kazakhstan on March 3, 1953, eighteen days after leaving Ekibastuz. His eight-year sentence of imprisonment had ended; his perpetual sentence of exile had begun.