The future purge of Solzhenitsyn’s teachers was no more than a malevolent threat on the horizon when he started school. His first teacher, Elena Belgorodtseva, was a devout woman who was known to have icons hanging in her home. She would have had no objection to the cross around her new pupil’s neck, which he had worn since infancy. Nevertheless, state education was becoming increasingly atheist in nature, and the Christianity of the young boy’s home life began to contrast ever more starkly with the fundamental tenets of what he was being taught at school.
At home, the influence of his mother’s religious faith was reinforced during the school holidays by visits to his Uncle Roman and Aunt Irina. Most particularly, the devotion of his aunt exerted a lasting influence. “Solzhenitsyn”, writes his biographer, Michael Scammell, “appears to have come deeply under the spell of his intrepid and romantic aunt.”4 In many ways, she was a true mystic, deriving sense and sustenance from the mysteries of the Gospels and the richness of the Orthodox liturgy. The lavishness of Orthodox ritual fired her imagination, nourished by the belief that manifestations of beauty were themselves manifestations of truth, that beauty and truth were inseparable. In this devotion, she had much in common with her pious mother-in-law, Evdokia, Solzhenitsyn’s grandmother with whom he also stayed during holidays. Both women had icons hanging in virtually every room, and both were strict in their observance of daily prayer and the many fasts and acts of worship Orthodox practice demanded.
Irina was an avid communicant at the local church, and Solzhenitsyn, when staying with her, usually accompanied her to the services. Her enduring influence on Solzhenitsyn was emphasized by Michael Scammelclass="underline"
She taught him the true beauty and meaning of the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, emphasizing its ancient traditions and continuity. She showed him its importance to Russian history, demonstrating how the history of the church was inextricably intertwined with the history of the nation; and she instilled into the boy a patriotic love of the past and a firm faith in the greatness and sacred destiny of the Russian people. Irina thus supplied him with a sense of tradition, of family, and of roots that was otherwise severely attenuated.5
Irina was also an avid aficionado of the arts, and she instilled in her nephew an early and lasting love for literature. She had an extensive library and encouraged Solzhenitsyn to use it to satisfy his increasingly voracious appetite for reading. It seems that he needed little encouragement. During stays with his aunt, he introduced himself to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and most of the Russian classics. He first read War and Peace as a ten-year-old and then reread it several times in the course of ensuing summers. It was during this formative period that he first envisaged the figure of Tolstoy as the archetypal Russian writer, a secular icon to be revered and an example to be imitated. Irina also presented him with a copy of Vladimir Dahl’s celebrated collection of Russian proverbs, on which he would draw heavily in his own work in later years.
Aunt Irina’s library was not restricted to Russian literature. Shakespeare, Schiller, and particularly Dickens also made an impression. Another favorite was Jack London, who was enormously popular in Russia both before and after the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s admiration for London found expression many years later when, during his first visit to the United States, he sought out his childhood hero’s home in California and made a brief pilgrimage.
Other than religion, the subject which highlighted the stark contrast between Solzhenitsyn’s youthful home life and that of the world at large was politics. “Everyone, of course, was anti-Bolshevik in the circle in which I grew up”, he recalled many years later. Both his mother and his aunt frequently dwelt on the horrors of the civil war and the suffering it had caused the family. No effort was made to hide from him any of the outrages of the immediate past, and he was often present when members of the family made bitter and candid criticisms of the Soviet regime. As a boy, he learned all about family friends who had been arrested or killed; he knew of his Uncle Roman’s temporary detention under sentence of death and of the confiscation of his grandfather’s estate. Yet at school, the Bolsheviks were glorified, and he remembered how he and his friends would “listen with such wide eyes to the exploits of the Reds, wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”.6
This struggle with the conflicting claims of home and state was to have a profound impact on his adolescent years, demanding a degree of Orwellian doublethink that resulted in a sort of psychological schism, almost a split personality:
The fact that they used to say everything at home and never shielded me from anything decided my destiny. Generally speaking… if you want to know the pivotal point of my life, you have to understand that I received such a charge of social tension in childhood that it pushed everything else to one side and diminished it…. [I]nside me I bore this social tension—on the one hand they used to tell me everything at home, and on the other they used to work on our minds at school. Those were militant times, not like today…. And so this collision between two worlds… somehow defined the path I was to follow for the rest of my life.7
The problem was resolved, at least temporarily, by the victory of the state over the family. Solzhenitsyn bowed under the combined force of peer-group pressure and Soviet propaganda, turning his back on the “reactionary” teaching of his family and embracing Marxist dogma. It was a triumph for the architects of the Soviet education system, which, as part of its indoctrination strategy, had virtually abolished the teaching of history except in a highly selective and slanted way and had replaced it with propaganda and ideological training. Faced with such unscrupulous ingenuity, the youth of Russia quickly succumbed to the mythology surrounding the Revolution. The heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution, like a band of modern-day Robin Hoods, had overthrown the cruel oppressors of the Russian people. Their spirit was marching onward into a just and glorious future, handing over the ill-gotten gains of the rich to the world’s poor. It was all so simple, so good, so unstoppable: the triumph of communist fairness over capitalist greed. So it was that Solzhenitsyn and his schoolfriends learned to “wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”, taking their place in the ranks of those destined to “complete the Revolution”.
Solzhenitsyn took the first decisive step away from the beliefs of his family and toward the teaching of the state in 1930 when, at the age of eleven, he joined the Young Pioneers. This was the junior wing of the Communist Party’s youth movement, the Komsomol, founded in 1918. Although no older than Solzhenitsyn himself, the Young Pioneers were virtually omnipresent in the life of Russia’s children by the beginning of the thirties. In fact, it was easier to become a member than not. Everyone joined, to be with friends, to go camping, to learn to tie knots, to sing rousing revolutionary songs, to parade in the Pioneers’ red tie and red badge with its five logs representing the five continents ablaze in the flames of world revolution. From the Young Pioneers, it was a natural, and expected, progression to the Komsomol, and then to the final achievement of full Party membership when one was old enough. In this way, almost imperceptibly, the Communist Party was tightening its grip on the nation’s life; and in this way, it was tightening its grip ever more on the young life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Initially, Solzhenitsyn had been a reluctant recruit. At the age of ten, the cross he had worn since infancy had been ripped from his neck by jeering Pioneers, and the resentment this must have caused, coupled with the remnants of ambivalence toward Bolshevism inherited from his family, led him to refrain from joining even after most of his friends had done so. For over a year, he was ridiculed and pressurized at school meetings, and repeatedly urged by his friends to join. Eventually, the need to conform was greater than any remaining reservations, and Solzhenitsyn succumbed to convention.