This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death—and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you.21
This transcendental approach to life’s ultimate realities is contrasted with the inability of other characters in the novel to come to terms with their terminal illness. For these people, corrupted by the transient material comforts of life, the prospect of death is unthinkable, unmentionable. “Modern man is helpless when confronted with death”, another character muses; “he has no weapon to meet it with.”22 The angst at the very core of modern man is analyzed in the relationships of the various cancer patients in the novel, not only with each other but with themselves as they struggle to deal with the abyss lying before them. In one particularly poignant passage, Kostoglotov, in the midst of an argument on the validity of Marxism, suddenly perceives the pettiness and futility of politics in the face of higher truths: “Was it weariness or illness that gave him this urge to yawn? Or was it because these arguments, counter-arguments, technical terms, bitter, angry glances suddenly seemed so much squelching in a swamp? None of this was to be compared with the disease that afflicted them or with death, which loomed before them. He yearned for the touch of something different, something pure and unshakable. But where he would find that Oleg had no idea.”23
This passage from Cancer Ward encapsulates much of Solzhenitsyn’s central message to the modern world—the ultimate subsistence of politics within a higher moral and ultimately religious truth; the transcendent nature of pain and death and the immensity of both in relation to transient circumstantial comforts; and, perhaps most important of all, the inarticulate yearning of agnostic man for the sublime depths of theological truth, a return to religious faith. Commenting on this particular passage, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was attempting to grapple with the way people struggled with eternal verities in the absence of religion: “I am describing Soviet people who are devoid of religion. Therefore there’s a feeling for some sort of other form, some ersatz. They’re groping, they’re trying to clamber upwards.”24
There were, however, other motivations behind the writing of Cancer Ward. One was the desire to explore “the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual aspects of love”.
Then we have the theme of life and death. And it is not by accident that the teaching of Bacon on idols is resurrected to show that several centuries back people used to worship the same idols. And of course there were the undercurrents of the current political events of spring 1955. I was depicting them. I cannot do without doing that, precisely what was going on in those days, during those weeks. It was the first beginnings, hints of freedom from Stalin’s claw. And this political theme is also linked with the image at the end of the book with the mangled monkey, where they threw the tobacco in the monkey’s eyes, a metaphor for what was done to the people.25
Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the cancer ward in Tashkent in mid-March. When he arrived two months earlier, he had been given only a one-in-three chance of survival. He had responded well to treatment and had made a remarkable recovery. The tumor had shrunk to only half its previous size. But he was still not out of danger and was told that he would have to return in June for a further course of treatment.
Before returning to exile at Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to wander round the city and was astonished to find a church that was actually open. For the first time since attending requiem Mass as a child with his mother, he entered a real, living church and gave thanks for having survived to see another spring.
In June, he returned to Tashkent, where radiotherapy was resumed. As he lay once more in the cancer ward, with thoughts of the future novel floating in his head, the horrors of the Gulag he had left less than eighteen months earlier were carrying on without him. During that same June, at Kengir Camp in Kazakhstan, eight thousand political prisoners had staged a mutiny and taken over the camp. Religious services were held, and men and women who had previously corresponded secretly from their separate stockades met and consummated their love. Then, on June 25, the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everyone in their way. One prisoner remembered the corner of a hut collapsing “as if in a nightmare”, and the tank rolling over the wreckage and over living bodies. Prisoners were bayoneted in cold blood; women, desperately trying to shield their men from the cold steel, were bayoneted first. One young couple, unprepared to be separated again so soon after they had been united, threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms, choosing to die together rather than live apart. By the time the rebellion was crushed, some three hundred prisoners had been killed.26
Almost simultaneously, Jean-Paul Sartre, in an act of willful ignorance reminiscent of that shown by Wells, Shaw, and the Webbs in the thirties, was eulogizing the Soviet regime in the pages of Liberation. Having recently visited the Soviet Union, he assured his interviewer that “Soviet citizens criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do. There is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.”27 Furthermore, Sartre assured Liberation’s readers, the only reason that Soviet citizens did not travel abroad was not that they were in any way prevented from doing so but that they had no desire to leave their marvelous country.
Meanwhile, in his marvelous country, Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the hospital, totally cured of the cancer, and returned to the tiny village on the edge of the desert where he was condemned to live in perpetuity, prevented even from traveling to other parts of the Soviet Union, let alone abroad.
Back in Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn threw himself into his writing. He wrote another play, initially called The Republic of Labor but eventually published under the title The Love Girl and the Innocent, and in the following year, 1955, he began work on his first novel. This was The First Circle, based on his experiences at the Marfino sharashka. He must have been helped in this by a renewal of his acquaintance with Dimitri Panin and Lev Kopelev, his old intellectual sparring partners at Marfino. Of course, they couldn’t possibly meet in the flesh—Panin, like Solzhenitsyn, was still in exile, while Kopelev was living in Moscow—but, after Panin’s wife had succeeded in tracking her husband’s friends down, they began to correspond regularly.
In many respects, Solzhenitsyn later looked on these months in Kok-Terek as among the happiest in his life. In The Gulag Archipelago, he referred to the period as “my two years of truly Beautiful Exile”, evoking with delight the contentment that reigned within him: “[A]ll my days were lived in a state of constant blissfully heightened awareness, and I felt no constraint on my freedom. At school I could give as many lessons as I wanted, in both shifts—and every lesson brought a throbbing happiness, never weariness or boredom. And every day I had a little time left for writing—and there was never any need for me to attune my thoughts: as soon as I sat down the lines raced from under my pen.”28 Regular employment as a schoolteacher had improved his financial circumstances. He bought a little clay house and a firm table to write on but still eschewed other material comforts, choosing to continue sleeping on the same bare wooden boxes. He did, however, invest in a short-wave radio set, listening surreptitiously for any forbidden news from the West, holding his ear close to the speaker in an effort to make out what he could through “the cascading crash of jamming”. Yet for all his efforts, he heard little to inspire him: “We were so worn out by decades of lying nonsense, we yearned for any scrap of truth, however tattered—and yet this work was not worth the time I wasted on it: the infantile West had no riches of wisdom or courage to bestow on those of us who were nurtured by the Archipelago.”29