In spite of the initial reluctance, a contract was drawn up within days. Yet the greatest obstacle, state censorship, still remained. Tvardovsky decided to try a similar approach to the one he had employed to circumvent the censors in the case of One Day in the Life. He sent the first quarter of the manuscript to Vladimir Lebedev, Khrushchev’s private secretary, who had been crucial to the successful publication of Solzhenitsyn’s earlier novel. Yet much had changed since the heady days of 1962. The reply, and the advice, was blunt: “Bury it!”
“But Khrushchev…”
“…is no longer enamoured of Ivan Denisovich; he thinks [Ivan’s] brought him a lot of trouble.”21
The doom-laden truth dawned on a crestfallen Tvardovsky. If even Khrushchev found Solzhenitsyn too hot to handle, what hope was there for Novy Mir? The author ofOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had passed from being an enemy of the people to being a hero of the people and back to an enemy of the people—all in the space of a couple of years. A surprise beneficiary of de-Stalinization, he had become a casualty of re-Stalinization.
Within months, Khrushchev was himself a casualty, being deposed by the bloodless coup in October. Thereafter he became something of a dissident himself, listening to the BBC World Service and Voice of America, criticizing the persecution of dissidents and opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Shortly after Khrushchev’s downfall, Lebedev, his faithful secretary, died. No one from the hierarchy attended his funeral except Tvardovsky, an isolated figure who must have seen his hopes for the future being lowered with the coffin. “In my mind’s eye,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “I can see that sturdy, broad-backed figure bending sadly over little Lebedev’s coffin.”22
Solzhenitsyn sensed that the accession of Brezhnev signaled the end of his own brief honeymoon period with the Soviet regime. He was once again a pariah whose work would never get past the state censorship system. Abandoning all hope of expressing himself in official publications, he allowed his work to be published more and more frequently in the underground literature of samizdat, literally “self-publishing house”. Samizdat consisted of dissident literature reproduced mainly in typewritten form and circulated clandestinely among the reading public. Each typescript was copied often and, much like a chain letter, gained additional circulation as a result. Throughout the sixties, samizdat became increasingly organized, and by 1968, there was a regular samizdat periodical called Chronicle of Current Events, which documented instances of state repression and the spirited resistance of the “democratic opposition”. Increasingly, samizdat became the battlefront for the literary underground and the means by which Solzhenitsyn and other dissident writers could be heard.
Even before Khrushchev’s demise, Solzhenitsyn had released his prose poems into samizdat, where they were circulating widely. In the month of the coup that brought Brezhnev to power, they were published in the West in the émigré magazine Grani. Having at last been heard, Solzhenitsyn was determined not to be silenced.
The changed circumstances required a more circumspect approach to his writing, and much more caution. He began to work away from home, a choice dictated by the need for greater security but also, perhaps, made desirable by the increasing estrangement in his marriage. Often he left Natalya at home while he worked away at the houses of friends, or at the home of Agafya, an old peasant woman, in Solotcha, a village about thirty miles from Ryazan. The cautious approach was also due to his work on a detailed history of the Soviet prison system, discovery of which might be perilous. It would, of course, be published many years later as The Gulag Archipelago. His work on this was at its most intensive in 1965, in the period of heightened repression under Brezhnev, so he had to proceed in deepest secrecy. He concealed the source material from prying eyes as far as possible, dispersing it in various places. “I even had to camouflage the time I spent on the book with what looked like work on other things.” The magnitude of the task before him and the immensity of the risk attached to it led to thoughts of abandoning it altogether amidst doubts about whether he had the stamina for its completion. “But when, in addition to what I had collected, prisoners’ letters converged on me from all over the country, I realized that since all this had been given to me, I had a duty.”
“I must explain”, Solzhenitsyn added, “that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time.”23 The wisdom of this precaution was highlighted in September 1965 when Solzhenitsyn learned that the KGB had raided the home of one of his friends and confiscated all three copies of The First Circle. He had foolishly sent the only other copy to a literary critic at Pravda in the naïve hope that, even in the neo-Stalinist atmosphere of Brezhnev’s presidency, it might be considered fairly. Worse news was to follow. The KGB had also discovered and confiscated the archive containing, among other things, his verse play A Feast of Conquerors, which was far more anti-Soviet than any of his other work. He had only dared show it to his most trusted friends, knowing that it was far too inflammatory and politically incorrect to see the light of day. Now it was in the hands of the KGB. He feared the worst, and visions of the Gulag flitted like a danse macabre through his mind. Perhaps as an enemy of the people he was about to become a prisoner of the people once again.
His fears were well founded. Three days prior to the confiscation of his own material, the KGB had arrested the literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky for smuggling stories to the West. It looked very much like the signal for a general purge of literary dissidents, in which case, Solzhenitsyn, as one of the most prominent, would surely suffer more than most.
It was not, however, the sense of fear that was paramount in the days following the confiscation of his works. Any fear was eclipsed by a sense of loss, a deep mourning for the months of creative labor that had seemingly disappeared, lost forever in the destructive machine of Soviet repression. For some months after “the catastrophe of September 1965”, Solzhenitsyn felt the loss “as though it were a real, unhealing physical wound—a javelin wound right through the breast, with the tip so firmly lodged that it could not be pulled out. The slightest stirring within me (perhaps the memory of some line or other from my impounded archive) caused a stab of pain.”24
For about three months after the KGB raid, he suffered intermittent bouts of hopelessness which, at their most extreme, bordered on despair. It was during this period, possibly the unhappiest in his life, that he contemplated suicide for the first and last time. He woke up every day in the expectation that it would be his last day of freedom. Arrest was inevitable, he thought, and could come at any moment. Desperately and hastily, Solzhenitsyn dispersed his notes and unfinished drafts of The Gulag Archipelago to secret locations and wrote to the editor of Pravda requesting the return of the only copy of The First Circle not in the hands of the KGB. To his great relief, his novel was returned to him, but he was disappointed to learn that Tvardovsky was no longer prepared to consider it for Novy Mir. Solzhenitsyn was now unpublishable; any association with him could carry the risk of arrest. Even Tvardovsky, his greatest ally, was careful to keep him at arm’s length.