For the first few days of his new life, Solzhenitsyn was drunk with freedom. On the first night, he was unable to sleep and walked and walked in the moonlight. “The donkeys sing their song. The camels sing. Every fibre in me sings: I am free! I am free!” In the end, overtaken by tiredness, he spread out on a bed of hay in a barn, listening to the horses a few yards away, standing at their mangers munching hay. He could imagine “no sweeter, no more friendly sound” on this his first night of freedom: “Champ away, you mild, inoffensive creatures!” The following day he managed to find private lodgings in a tiny hut, with a single window and a roof so low that it was impossible to stand upright. The floor was earthen, but he managed to obtain two wooden boxes, which served as a makeshift bed. He didn’t own the hut and even the boxes were borrowed, but he felt richer than he had ever been in his life. “What more could I desire?”15
Then, on March 6, as he woke on his third morning of freedom, he heard the news that surpassed all his desires. His elderly landlady, herself an exile from Novgorod, whispered that he should go to the town square and listen to the announcements on the radio. She dared not repeat the news she had just heard. Intrigued, he made his way to the square where a crowd of about two hundred people had gathered round the loudspeaker. For the most part, the crowd was clearly grief-stricken. Even before he heard the news confirmed by the announcer on the radio, he had guessed what had happened. Stalin was dead.
Throughout the Soviet Union, there was a phenomenal outpouring of largely genuine grief. In the days that followed, countless mourners would be crushed to death outside the House of Unions, where the body of the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” lay in state, in the very Columned Hall where he had ordered the infamous show trials in the 1930s that had consigned so many thousands of his countrymen to the labor camps.
In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn allowed himselfthe liberty of imagining Stalin’s last days, locked up in his room, distrustful of everyone he knew, fearing assassination. Stalin, the great dictator who had exiled millions of Russians to the far-flung corners of the Soviet empire, was himself an exile in his own palace, an exile of his own paranoia. The irony was not lost on the happy exile in Kok-Terek.
They were all like that, in all the ministries—every one of them was trying to hoodwink their Leader. How could he possibly trust them. He had no choice but to work at nights.
He suddenly staggered into a chair…. He felt as though some weight was forcing the left half of his head downwards. He lost hold of his train of thought and stared with blurred gaze round the room, unable to make out whether the walls were near or far.
He was an old man without any friends. Nobody loved him, he believed in nothing and he wanted nothing. He no longer even had any need of his daughter, once his favourite but now only admitted on rare holidays. Helpless fear overcame him as he sensed the dwindling memory, the failing mind. Loneliness crept over him like a paralysis.
Death had already laid its hand on him, but he would not believe it.16
Needless to say, Solzhenitsyn’s feelings as he heard the news of Stalin’s death were anything but grief-stricken:
This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to…. The moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox communists) had prayed! He’s dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died! What unconcealed rejoicing there would be back home in the Special Camp! But where I was, Russian girls, schoolteachers, stood sobbing their hearts out…. They had lost a beloved parent…. I could have howled with joy there by the loudspeaker; I could even have danced a wild jig! But alas, the rivers of history flow slowly. My face, trained to meet all occasions, assumed a frown of mournful attention. For the present I must pretend, go on pretending as before.17
He returned to his hut to spend the remainder of the day writing a poem, “The Fifth of March”, to commemorate the occasion. Certainly his life in exile had begun magnificently.
In April, Solzhenitsyn was finally accepted as a teacher of maths and physics in a local school, having been rejected when he had initially applied a month earlier. He was overjoyed. “Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? This was really the day of my release, the restoration of my citizenship.”18
At last, or so it must have seemed as he began life as a village schoolteacher, Solzhenitsyn’s future could be faced with optimism. His circumstances, which had already improved beyond measure since the misery of the camps, could only get better. He was still only thirty-four years old. He had many good years of life ahead of him. Then, like a death knell tolling his doom across the barren steppe, the specter of his cancer returned. As the year rolled on, the deadly disease tormented him more and more, “as though it was in league with my jailers”.19 Intermittently, but with ever greater frequency, he was struck by excruciating pains in the abdominal area. During the day, he could barely stand up in front of his class, and at night he slept very little. He had no appetite for food and was visibly weakening with every week that passed. At first, he had not wanted to believe that the cause of his illness was a return of the cancer that had nearly claimed his life in Ekibastuz. His hopes were raised, albeit falsely, by the inability of the medical authorities in Kok-Terek to diagnose his condition. They thought it might be an ulcer, or perhaps gastritis. Yet as the year drew to a close, Solzhenitsyn began to fear the worst. Perhaps his own life was also drawing to a close. Hurriedly, he wrote down all that he had previously written in the camp and stored in his memory, and all that he had composed in exile since his release, and buried it in the ground in the forlorn hope that someone, some day, might dig it up by accident and read it.
Since his condition continued to baffle the local doctors, it was decided that he needed the attention of specialists. He was granted permission to leave for Dzhambul, the administrative center of the region, for further tests on his abdomen. An X-ray revealed exactly what Solzhenitsyn had feared. The cause of his pain was not an ulcer, but a tumor the size of a big fist, which had grown from the back wall of the abdominal cavity. It was entirely possible, he was informed, that the tumor was malignant.
Solzhenitsyn returned to Kok-Terek in early December, knowing he would have to report to the Oncological Health Center in Tashkent a few weeks later. Once again, he was staring death in the face, gaining a few priceless morsels of consolation from the belief that death would not be the end of life. Yet even his faith could not totally eclipse the bitterness he felt at what appeared to be the futility of his life. “I remember clearly that night before I left for Tashkent, the last night of 1953: it seemed as though for me life, and literature, was ending right there. I felt cheated.”20
Solzhenitsyn was admitted to Ward 13 of the Tashkent Medical Institute on January 4, 1954. The following day, a drawing was made on his stomach, dividing it into four squares, and each square was irradiated in turn. Over the next month and a half, he had fifty-five sessions of radiotherapy, during which the tumor was bombarded with 12,000 roentgens of radiation.
Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in the Tashkent Medical Institute during January and February 1954 became the background to, and the inspiration for, his novel Cancer Ward. This novel, like The First Circle and so much of his other work, is infused throughout with autobiographical fragments. In the character of Kostoglotov, the most autobiographically sketched of the characters in Cancer Ward, there is much to be gleaned about Solzhenitsyn’s own feelings as a cancer patient. Kostoglotov tells Zoya, one of the nurses, that during the last month he hasn’t been able to lie down, sit down, or stand without it hurting and has been sleeping only a few minutes a day. As a result he has done plenty of thinking: