On June 24, Solzhenitsyn was met at the Kazan station in Moscow by both Panin and Kopelev, the former having been released from exile in January. Paradoxically, Solzhenitsyn’s arrival home had found him with nowhere to live, and he moved in with the Kopelevs for a while. Shortly afterward, he resided for a time with some cousins whom he had not seen since childhood, before finding temporary accommodation with the Panins.
It was while staying with the Panins that Solzhenitsyn had a wholly unexpected meeting with Natalya. She was on a trip to Moscow and decided to call on Panin’s wife. When she arrived, she found Solzhenitsyn and Panin seated at a table drinking tea. The Panins contrived to leave Solzhenitsyn and Natalya alone together, and Solzhenitsyn told her of his plans for the future. He hated the hustle and bustle of the city, the noise, the hurry, the crowds, and was determined to escape to a quieter existence in the provinces. He hoped to settle in Vladimir Region, about a hundred miles from Moscow.
Eventually, the subject of their own troubled relationship was broached, and Solzhenitsyn questioned her earnestly, endeavoring to understand how Natalya’s final separation from him had come about. “I was created to love you alone,” she replied, “but fate decreed otherwise.”3 When they parted, Solzhenitsyn handed her a sheaf of poems he had written to or about her throughout the years of separation. That night she read them and discovered that they had “opened up old scars in my soul”. Returning to Ryazan, Natalya found herself continually reading and rereading the poems, turning them over and over in her mind, twisting a knife in the old wound. It was not long before Somov, her second “husband”, began to detect that something was wrong. Although Natalya had told him of her meeting with Solzhenitsyn, she had assured him that “nothing had changed as a result—everything would remain as it was.” He could see, however, that everything was not as it had been, and he did everything in his power to win her back from the ghost of her past. He took her on a boat trip along the Oka in their own motorboat and on a holiday to Solotcha during August. It was a difficult and painful time; Somov was distressed to find that nothing he did could amuse his “wife” or distract her from her thoughts about the other man. Then the other man sent a letter: “If you have the inclination and should you find it possible—you can write me. My address, as of 21 August, is… Vladimir Region.”4
Correspondence commenced, and Solzhenitsyn wrote that he believed a new happiness was possible for them. He suggested they meet, and Natalya agreed, waiting for the opportunity to escape from her “husband”. That opportunity arose in October when Somov went to Odessa to attend a celebration in honor of a scientific colleague. While he was away, Natalya informed her mother that she had been summoned to Moscow in connection with Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation. In fact, she had no intention of going to Moscow but, on October 19, bought a ticket to Torfprodukt, Vladimir Region.
The next three days were like a second honeymoon, exorcising any remaining doubts Natalya may have had about where her future lay. For his part, Solzhenitsyn felt compelled to inform her that he was still gravely ill and was doomed to a short life, possibly only another year or two. “I need you in every way,” Natalya replied, “alive or dying.”5
“As we discussed our joint plans,” Natalya wrote, “… I was quite aware even then that I was causing enormous sorrow to good people, but only now, looking back, do I comprehend the enormity of it. Was there anything that could have stopped me? Probably not.” Among her friends and colleagues, as well as among friends of her second husband, “there were many, very many, who censured me.”6
In November, Natalya and Somov separated.
Solzhenitsyn made his first visit to Ryazan on December 30, 1956, and on the following day, they went to the Registry Office to register their marriage for a second time. No complications were caused by Natalya’s former “marriage” to Somov because they had never been officially wed, merely cohabiting as man and wife, but the re-registry was frustrated by the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s passport contained no record of a divorce. This necessitated a trip to Moscow, which the couple undertook a few days later, to retrieve Solzhenitsyn’s notification of divorce from the archives at the City Court. Now that they could prove to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats that they had been legitimately divorced, they would be allowed to remarry.
Throughout the following months, it gradually became apparent that the chasm that existed between them in the months before their separation had not been bridged by their physical reunion. Solzhenitsyn now preached a gospel of self-limitation, seeking to live as simply as possible without the glitter and glamor of modern diversions. He insisted that they should not visit the cinema more than twice a month, nor go to concerts or the theater more than once every two months. This conscious rationing scarcely constituted a monastic existence, but the restrictions proved irksome to Natalya, who had grown accustomed to a life of relative opulence with her second husband. For Solzhenitsyn, their lifestyle was one of voluntary poverty leading to an improved quality of life freed from the clutter of needlessly created wants; for Natalya, it amounted to the imposition of involuntary poverty, the denial of her right to legitimate pleasures, “about going or not going to the movies; about buying or not buying books; about winning or not winning a bond on a lottery ticket”.7
The intensity and depth of Solzhenitsyn’s own views at the time can be gauged from the fact that this was the period during which he was most deeply involved in the writing of The First Circle. From the summer of 1957 through to the spring of 1958, his life and Natalya’s were spent in the shadow of the sharashka as he relived the long discussions with Panin and Kopelev in Marfino, charting its importance to his own spiritual and intellectual development. “It’s not a matter of how much you eat,” Nerzhin had told Rubin, “but of the way you eat. It’s the same with happiness—it doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to snatch from life, but only on our attitude towards them.” One can imagine Solzhenitsyn repeating such sermons to his wife whenever she complained about the relative austerity of their life together: “But listen! The happiness that comes from easy victories, from the total fulfilment of desire, from success, from feeling completely gorged—that is suffering! That is spiritual death, a kind of unending moral indigestion…”8
Unfortunately, this perception of the eternal conflict between the material and spiritual aspects of life, gained by Solzhenitsyn in the passion and crucifixion of the camps, was seemingly unattainable to Natalya, who continued to resent her husband’s strictures and restrictions. Their own marriage was becoming a physical incarnation of the metaphysical struggle Solzhenitsyn was attempting to explore in The First Circle. This can be seen in Natalya’s incomprehension of her husband’s words. Solzhenitsyn had written to her from prison that “if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain”. In her memoirs, Natalya immediately followed this quote with another from her husband’s letters: “Perhaps, if it should happen some day that I start living happily, I will become heartless again? Although it’s hard to believe, still, anything can happen.” She then appends her own comments: “How I wish that Solzhenitsyn’s own apprehensions had never been confirmed! That he had not also turned in for incineration, along with his prison garb, the highest, noblest impulses of his soul!”9 Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of Natalya’s own version of events, Solzhenitsyn was clearly concerned never to lose sight of the truths he had learned in the camps, never to allow the comforts of life to corrupt him from the purity of the vision he believed he had acquired there. It was precisely “the highest, noblest impulses of the soul” that he felt he had discovered in prison and precisely those impulses that he was determined the material pleasures of life should not obscure. Natalya’s failure to grasp this central aspect of her husband’s psyche illustrates the absence of empathy in their relationship.