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One Day in the Life in a flood of inspiration in May and June 1959, Solzhenitsyn consigned it to his growing pile of unpublished manuscripts, doubting whether it would ever see the light of day.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
She was a poor housekeeper. In other words she refused to strain herself to buy gadgets and possessions and then to guard them and care for them more than for her own life.
She never cared for smart clothes, the garments that embellish the ugly and disguise the wicked.
Misunderstood and rejected by her husband, a stranger to her own family despite her happy, amiable temperament, comical, so foolish that she worked for others for no reward, this woman… had stored up no earthly goods. Nothing but a dirty white goat, a lame cat and a row of fig-plants.
None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand.
Nor the world.20
A few weeks after the completion of Matryona’s House, Solzhenitsyn started work on Candle in the Wind, arguably his best play. Also known as The Light within You, the play’s central theme, as both titles suggest, is the need to protect one’s soul, the light of life which burns within everyone, from the worldly winds which threaten to snub it out. The extent to which the various characters in the play succeed or fail in salvaging the light within is explored as the plot unfolds.
In the character of Aunt Christine, the ghost of Matryona is resurrected as the one righteous person in the midst of the ethical confusion that permeates the rest of the play. In her extreme poverty and contented unworldliness is encapsulated the profound relationship between asceticism and spirituality. Although her physical presence does not play a major role in the dramatic development of the plot, her spiritual presence is crucial. At one key moment, impelled it seems by nothing but mystical intuition, the significantly named Christine appears at Maurice’s deathbed, carrying a candle and invoking the Christian moral that was Solzhenitsyn’s overriding theme: “Take heed therefore that the light which is within thee be not darkness.”21
Taking this theme as his motivation for writing Candle in the Wind, Solzhenitsyn explored its relevance to the play’s protagonists. As always, and as in the character of Aunt Christine, Solzhenitsyn drew heavily from autobiographical experience in delineating his characters. There is little doubt that the character of Philip is a loosely sketched pen portrait of Nikolai Vitkevich. Like Alex, the character in the play most closely based on Solzhenitsyn himself, Philip was sentenced to ten years imprisonment as the result of a legal error. Now, however, he has concealed his past and, as a respected scientist, has become a career-oriented opportunist, hell-bent on success in his chosen field of bio-cybernetics. Perhaps the parallel was a little unfair, or at least uncharitable, but the fact that Philip is a caricature of Nikolai is beyond doubt. Natalya confirmed that her husband had “Nikolai Vitkevich in mind when he created the character of Philip”, but stressed that the character was “enormously exaggerated”. In another example of the lack of empathy between husband and wife, Natalya appeared to prefer the character of Philip to that of Alex—Vitkevich to Solzhenitsyn. If Philip’s purpose in life was misguided, Natalya complained, “that of his antipode Alex—the ‘positive hero’—was wholly negative: I reject this, I don’t want that!”22
Natalya betrayed further lack of understanding about her husband in her analysis of Candle in the Wind, this time in her failure to grasp one of his secondary intentions in writing the play. “The only thing I found unconvincing and superfluous”, she complained, “was the desire of Alex, the author’s stand-in, to put a stop to the development of science.”23 With a firm grasp of scientific principles himself, Solzhenitsyn had no desire that the development of science should stop. One of the purposes of the play was to point out that science, like every other field of human activity, was subject to ethical considerations. The abuse of technology, in this case bio-cybernetics, was always likely, indeed inevitable, if science refused to be restrained by ethics.