The pressures of persecution were also having a detrimental effect on Solzhenitsyn’s marriage, which was once again nearing breaking point. For some time, Natalya had resented Solzhenitsyn’s long absences at the various hiding places where he worked in secrecy and in constant fear of discovery. Solzhenitsyn wrote that his wife had come to hate The Gulag Archipelago, blaming it as the cause of their problems, the bane of their marriage. “She would not have been afraid of typing it if she had been with me, but if I departed for its sake and could not even write home, then it could go to hell, this Archipelago!”25 Natalya’s frustrations came to a head in a bitter row during which she told her husband that she would rather see him arrested than hiding away and deliberately neglecting her. “From that instant,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “I knew I could no longer depend on her. What was worse, I would have to keep up the arrangements that she was party to, while at the same time establishing a whole new secret system that would have to be kept hidden from her as from a hostile outsider.”26
After almost thirty years, their crisis-bound tragedy of a romance was fading to an ignominious conclusion. Over the next few years, the marriage stalled and stuttered to a halt, before sputtering into a series of claims and counter-claims concerning who was ultimately responsible for the breakdown. “I could not have imagined into whose clutches our divorce would drive my wife,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1974, “nor that she was on the verge of becoming (or had already become) more dangerous to me than any spy, both because she was ready to collaborate with anyone against me and because she knew so many of my secret allies.”27
Such an accusation might have appeared unreasonable. No one other than Solzhenitsyn himself had suffered more for his art than his wife. Yet she was unable to appreciate the importance of her husband’s work, either to the world or to Solzhenitsyn himself, and could not share in the sense of mission that motivated him. Particularly in the later stages of their marriage, every sacrifice she was called upon to make on the altar of her husband’s art became irksome, breeding resentment. Solzhenitsyn was not prepared to compromise. He approached his work with a vocational zeal compared with which his very life, and that of his wife, were of little importance. He was a man possessed and, as such, could not and would not be possessed by his wife.
Yet Solzhenitsyn’s accusation is not as unreasonable as it seems. Natalya’s memoir of her life with him, published in the West in 1975, contained many bitter distortions of the truth, designed apparently to cause her former husband as much harm and hurt as possible. Solzhenitsyn became convinced that she was working in league with the Soviet authorities, with the KGB itself. It is tempting to treat such a view with incredulity; it seems too much like the seedy scenario for a Cold War espionage novel. The spurned woman manipulated by the unscrupulous secret police. “The spy who loved me”.
Natalya did her utmost to refute Solzhenitsyn’s published accusations of her treachery. She wrote an open letter to him in 1980, denying that she had collaborated with the KGB, and stating that she had been outraged by the way the original text of her memoirs had been cut by a quarter and grossly distorted. It was only in 1996, when she was seriously ill, that the full and secret truth emerged. On being transferred from one hospital to another, she was told that the new hospital required her internal passport. She asked a female relative to collect it for her, and the woman was astounded to discover that the document listed Natalya as the widow of Konstantin Semyonov, the journalist assigned by the publishers to edit her first memoir. She had been married to him from 1974 until his death in 1981. Since Semyonov was the KGB agent responsible for the gross distortions she had complained of in her open letter, it was surprising to discover that she had been married to him at the time the letter was written. Understandably, Natalya had done everything in her power to keep the marriage secret and was thunderstruck when she realized that her secret was out: “Is that known about? That’s—my secret, my secret marriage.” She was horrified at the prospect of Solzhenitsyn discovering the truth and pleaded in mitigation that marriage to Semyonov had saved her after Solzhenitsyn’s exile. “I was without a job, without everything. Marrying him allowed me to live in Moscow. He was my closest friend…. All that time we concealed our marriage. I was never a KGB agent, I swear it!”28
This confession was Natalya’s last public comment on her long and tragic relationship with Solzhenitsyn. It was the final bitter twist in a complicated tale. Perhaps the closing words should belong to Solzhenitsyn:
As always, every family story is incredibly complicated and confused. Each side can marshal a thousand arguments, and each person is unavoidably guilty—it’s always that way. That’s why it is the sort of thing that doesn’t allow of a simple solution or a simple paraphrase. All that can be said in the most general terms, when you take a bird’s-eye view of it… is that we were both wrong to get married, especially the second time; we should never have done it twice…. But of course, so many feelings and memories are invested in any joint life together. And it’s terribly painful when it breaks up.29
CHAPTER TWELVE
OLD ENEMIES AND NEW FRIENDS
In spring 1966, Solzhenitsyn was working away from home at the dacha of his friend Kornei Chukovsky in Peredelkino, the writers’ colony just outside Moscow, where he was putting the finishing touches to his novel Cancer Ward. On the night of Holy Saturday, April 9, he wandered down to the patriarchal Church of the Transfiguration to watch the Easter procession at midnight. What he observed upon his arrival inspired one of his most evocative essays. Instead of pious groups of believers, he was greeted outside the church by rowdy youths dressed in the latest fashions, who, oblivious to the fact that they were on consecrated ground, were shrieking and cavorting to the sound of pop music from transistor radios. “About one in four has been drinking, one in ten is drunk, and half of them are smoking—in that repulsive way with the cigarette stuck to the lower lip. There is no incense yet, but instead of it swathes of grey-blue cigarette smoke rise towards the Easter sky under the electric light of the churchyard in dense, hovering clouds.” Solzhenitsyn looked on in disgust as the youths spat on the asphalt path, whistled loudly, and shouted obscenities at each other. The boys kissed their girlfriends, who were then pulled from one boy to another.
These youths are not breaking the law; although they are doing violence, it is bloodless. Their lips twisted into a gangsterish leer, their brazen talk, their loud laughter, their flirting and snide jokes, their smoking and spitting—it all amounts to an insult to the Passion of Christ, which is being celebrated a few yards away from them. It is expressed in the arrogant, derisory look worn by these snotty hooligans as they come to watch how the old folk still practise the rites of their forefathers.1
This behavior was in marked contrast to that of the participants in the procession. Some were clearly intimidated by the contemptuous attitude of the onlookers, huddling close together for mutual comfort, but a group of ten women, walking in pairs and holding thick, lighted candles, offered a vision of heroic virtue: “elderly women with faces set in an unworldly gaze, prepared for death if they are attacked”.
Two out of the ten are young girls of the same age as those crowding round with the boys, yet how pure and bright their faces are. The ten women, walking in close formation, are singing and looking as solemn as though the people around them were crossing themselves, praying and falling to their knees in repentance. They do not breathe the cigarette smoke; their ears are deaf to the vile language; the soles of their feet do not feel how the churchyard has been turned into a dance-floor.2