Similar conflicts were apparent in Dimitri Panin’s marriage. Panin had found his Christian faith intensified by the experience of prison with the result that, following his release, he had found his wife’s lack of faith difficult to cope with. She in turn had found her husband’s intense Christianity an insurmountable obstacle to their satisfactory reconciliation. By the time Panin came to stay with the Solzhenitsyns at the beginning of 1958, he and his wife had separated. Natalya found herself in complete sympathy with Panin’s wife, possibly sensing parallels with her own situation: “A sinful man had returned to a sinless wife. But he made up for it by becoming a believer. Now both she and her son were supposed to become believers too. There followed persuasions, attempts to convince, demands, ultimatums.”10
During his stay, Panin read through the manuscript of The First Circle. He informed Solzhenitsyn of his utmost approval of the novel, and the two friends discussed the means by which the philosophical dimension could best be expressed.
In the spring Natalya departed for Moscow for several days to attend a scientific conference on catalysis, rejoicing in the realization that her own work had not been forgotten by her former colleagues. Several eminent contributors to the conference referred to her research, and she was pleased to see that the title page of her own dissertation was displayed prominently at the Kobozev Laboratory. “Perhaps everything could have been different”, she pondered wistfully.11 At around the same time, her husband suffered a relapse and was admitted to the hospital for a course of chemotherapy. Natalya and Solzhenitsyn were both gravely concerned. The previous year, he had urged her to go to the Lenin Library to read everything she could about cancer and malignant tumors, with the result that they both believed he had only about four years to live. As Solzhenitsyn entered the hospital, the thought must have crossed their minds that they had miscalculated and the end was coming sooner. In the event, the chemotherapy proved successful, and he was discharged after only two weeks, continuing his treatment as an outpatient. By the end of the treatment, the tumor had subsided and was no longer causing discomfort. He felt fitter than he had for years and threw himself with added gusto into his work.
“The favorite work is always the one on which you are currently working”, Solzhenitsyn stated forty years later. “When I wrote The First Circle it was alive with intrigue, with philosophical underpinnings, and I was absorbed in it.”12 Much of the rest of the year was taken up with completing a third draft of his novel, and only when he was satisfied with it, for the time being at least, could he put his mind to other projects.
The next major project was born on May 18, 1959, with the idea that he should write a novel about one day in the life of a labor camp prisoner in Ekibastuz. This would come to fruition as one of the most influential books ever written in terms of its socio-political impact on the world. In its power to undermine the very foundations of the Soviet system, Ivan Denisovich would become a literary Ivan the Terrible.
Although the book owed its portentous birth to that moment of inspiration in May 1959, its gestation period in the womb of Solzhenitsyn’s imagination stretched back seven years. It had first been conceived while he was working as a bricklayer at Ekibastuz in 1952:
It was an ordinary camp day—hard, as usual, and I was working. I was helping to carry a hand-barrow full of mortar, and I thought that this was the way to describe the whole world of the camps. Of course, I could have described my whole ten years there, I could have done the whole history of the camps that way, but it was sufficient to gather everything into one day, all the different fragments… and to describe just one day in the life of an average and in no way remarkable prisoner from morning till night.13
Once Solzhenitsyn had found the inspiration to put the longstanding idea into practice, it was probably, of all his vast output, one of the easiest books to write. Looking back on its creation, his words interspersed with infectious chuckling and his eyes aglint with pleasure at the memory, Solzhenitsyn recounted with amusement the easy flow of the creative process:
The book by which most people came to know of me, both in the Soviet Union and in America, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, came out of me in one breath, in one flow. I wrote it in forty days. In fact, I was surrounded by so much material, so much material surrounded me at that moment, that I was not in a position of a writer wondering what to put in. There was so much material that, on the contrary, I was saying I won’t take this, I won’t take that, I don’t really need this, I won’t take that. It was like the whole life of the camps fitted into one day of one person’s life.14
One of the principal reasons for the surge of creativity was the choice of subject matter. The overriding desire to tell the world the full and horrific truth about life in the camps was the passionate pulse at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s literary vocation. More than anything else, he desired to tell this truth to anyone who would listen. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he had done this in a condensed and concentrated form with potentially explosive results. “It seemed to me that the most interesting and important thing to do was to depict the fate of Russia. Of all the drama that Russia has lived through, the deepest was the tragedy of the Ivan Denisoviches. I wanted to set the record straight concerning the false rumours about the camps.”15
In spite of its relative brevity compared with the weighty volumes on the subject that Solzhenitsyn was to write in later years, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich contains many of the leitmotifs which recur throughout his work. All the poignant features of camp life discussed in great detail in the three volumes ofThe Gulag Archipelago found expression with microscopic intensity in One Day in the Life: the loss and recovery of human dignity; the injustice at the heart of Soviet “justice”; ennoblement versus decay; self-limitation versus selfishness; hints of divine providence; hunger and the description of meals as a pseudo-religious ritual; and, last but not least, the Christian response to the prisoner’s sense of hopelessness and the temptation to despair.
Apart from Ivan Denisovich himself, the principal hero to emerge from the pages of One Day in the Life is Alyosha the Baptist. He is principal because he is principled, rising above the horror of daily life in the camps through the triumph of belief over adversity. Toward the end of the novel, Solzhenitsyn puts into the words of Alyosha the core of his own belief in self-limitation: “Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels or for extra skilly, not for that. Things that man puts a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit—that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from our hearts.”16
Having written One Day in the Life in a flood of inspiration in May and June 1959, Solzhenitsyn consigned it to his growing pile of unpublished manuscripts, doubting whether it would ever see the light of day. He wrote later that he was convinced he would never see a single line of his work in print in his own lifetime. Such was his fear of Soviet persecution that he scarcely dared allow any of his close acquaintances to read anything he had written for fear that it would become known.17
In the summer of 1959, during a visit to Rostov, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to meet up with some old friends, most notably Nikolai Vitkevich, the closest friend of his school and university years, who had been his partner in crime in the criticism of Stalin during the war. Like Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai had been sentenced to forced labor for his part in the correspondence and the drafting of “Resolution No. 1”. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, the experience had crushed him emotionally and spiritually. They had met briefly at Marfino during their term of imprisonment, where Solzhenitsyn had been disappointed to find his friend broken in spirit and uninterested in philosophical or ideological debate. Whereas Solzhenitsyn was finding himself in vigorous, furious, but ultimately friendly arguments with Panin and Kopelev, Nikolai had not wished to join in and desired only to forget about the past and lead an untroubled life in the future. His response to the struggle for survival in the camps had been psychological surrender.
Any hopes nurtured by Solzhenitsyn that his friend would have regained his old fighting spirit along with his freedom were soon to be dashed. By the summer of 1959, Nikolai had married and was busy completing his Ph.D. dissertation. He was entirely concerned with his own life and career and had lost all interest in wider issues. This became apparent when Solzhenitsyn sought to discuss the Pasternak case. Boris Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago the previous October, causing a storm of controversy in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn sought Nikolai’s opinions but was surprised to find him totally indifferent, being more concerned about the internal politics of the chemistry department at Rostov University, where he now worked, and about his prospects of promotion. The two friends, so inseparable in their youth, had become strangers.
In contrast to Nikolai’s agnostic indifference and apathy, Solzhenitsyn shared Pasternak’s passion for the higher purpose of both life and literature. In an interview with a Swedish critic the previous year, Pasternak had decoded the meaning of Doctor Zhivago as a novel-parable concerned with the need of the human soul to strive for higher sources of spiritual wealth. “During the short period of time that we live in this world,” Pasternak explained, “we have to understand our attitude toward existence, our place in the universe. Otherwise, life is meaningless. This, as I understand it, means a rejection of the nineteenth century materialistic world view, means a resurrection of our interior life, a resurrection of religion.”18 This was a view with which Solzhenitsyn concurred completely and, furthermore, was one of the main motive forces behind many of his own literary endeavors.
In the autumn of 1960, Solzhenitsyn returned to a story he had started some time earlier about an elderly woman, Matryona Zakharova, with whom he had lodged four years earlier during his first weeks of freedom at Torfprodukt in the Vladimir Region. “Matryona’s House was something that was very, very emotional for me”, Solzhenitsyn recalls, “and was dedicated to the memory of a holy Russian woman.”19