Aside from literature, Solzhenitsyn’s other great love during these years was cycling, having obtained a bicycle in 1936 in somewhat unorthodox circumstances. During his last year at school, he had been nominated by the headmaster for a civic prize for outstanding pupils. Normally, the award of the prize was a mere formality once the nominations were made, but Solzhenitsyn’s nomination was blocked on account of his social background. The headmaster was incensed and demanded that the injustice be rectified. Reluctantly, the officials consented to award Solzhenitsyn a bicycle as an extraordinary consolation prize.
Solzhenitsyn was more than happy with his “consolation”. Bicycles were a rare luxury in those days, and neither he nor his mother would ever have been able to afford one. His other friends also owned bicycles, and thereafter cycling became a favorite hobby. The next three summers were devoted to touring holidays, and the first, in 1937 when Solzhenitsyn was eighteen years old, took the friends, five boys and two girls, to Tbilisi via the most scenic and spectacular passes of the Caucasus Mountains.
Inspired by his new-found love of cycling, Solzhenitsyn indulged his other love for literature in what he called his Cycling Notes. These were composed in the autumn, shortly after his return from the tour of the Caucasus in July and August, and were contained in three school exercise books labeled “My Travels, Volume IV, Books 1, 2, and 3”. The Notes, written in naive schoolboy prose, were nonetheless full of high spirits and infectious humor, notably in a description of a series of punctures and other mishaps in the pouring rain when the group was en route to Stalin’s birthplace at Gori. In an unintentionally amusing display of post-pubescent indignation, Solzhenitsyn waxed lyrical on the arrogant sex discrimination of Georgian men while simultaneously displaying jealousy of their easy southern charm. The Georgian men, he complained, exhibited an insufferably patronizing attitude toward Russian women, regarding them as easy conquests and therefore of easy virtue.
More disturbingly, the Notes displayed a political naïveté that illustrated the extent to which Solzhenitsyn’s generation had soaked up Soviet propaganda. Their very thoughts, it seemed, were saturated with communist slogans and jargon. “Two things cause tuberculosis—poverty and the impotence of medicine”, he stated glibly, referring to the TB sanatorium that the cyclists had come across on their travels. “The Revolution has liquidated poverty. Medicine, why are you lacking behind? Tear these unfortunates from death’s grasping paws!”
These and similarly trite declarations throughout the Notes confirmed that Solzhenitsyn and his friends were now utterly convinced of the correctness of Stalinism. Their pilgrimage to the place of Stalin’s birth, achieved in spite of the combined endeavors of the elements and sundry protesting bicycle tires to prevent their arrival, was an act of homage befitting true and trusted—and trusting—children of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s own devotion to the father of the nation was confirmed by the motto he selected to adorn the cover of one of the exercise books in which he had written his Cycling Notes: “We shall have excellent and numerous cadres in industry, agriculture, transport, and the army—our country will be invincible (Stalin).” It was almost as though only the immortal words of Stalin himself deserved place of honor on the cover of any of Solzhenitsyn’s literary works. The Soviet education system had triumphed indeed.
There was, however, one notable redeeming passage in the Notes, inspired by a visit to the grave of Alexander Griboyedov, described by Solzhenitsyn as “that radiant genius, that pride of the Russian nation”. Woe from Wit, Griboyedov’s masterpiece, a verse comedy in the manner of Moliere written in 1822-1823, was one of Solzhenitsyn’s favorite plays, and he often declaimed passages from it when, as a student, he took part in readings. While in Tbilisi, he had taken the opportunity to visit Griboyedov’s resting place, and the poignancy of the occasion inspired thoughts more worthy of the selfless and incisively introspective writer who was to emerge triumphant from the Gulag Archipelago almost twenty years later:
I love graveyards!… Sitting in a graveyard you involuntarily cast your mind back over all your past life, your past actions, and your plans for the future. And here you do not lie to yourself as you do so often in life, because you feel as if all those people sleeping the sleep of peace around you were somehow still present, and you were conversing with them. Sitting in a graveyard you momentarily rise above your daily ambitions, cares and emotions—you rise for an instant even above yourself. And then, when you leave the graveyard, you become yourself again and subside into the morass of daily trivia, and only the rarest of individuals is able to leap from that morass onto the firm ground of immortality.10
In 1937, there were early signs that Solzhenitsyn was destined to become one of these “rarest of individuals”. It was at this time that he conceived the idea for an epic work which, more than sixty years later, he was to consider “the most important book of my life”.11 Eventually, under the collective title of The Red Wheel, this would run to several volumes, the fruit of a lifetime’s labor:
I conceived it when I was eighteen years old and in sum, including thinking it through, collecting materials, writing, I worked on The Red Wheel for a total of fifty-four years. I finished The Red Wheel when I was seventy-two years old. The subject is the history of our Revolution. Initially, I had assumed that its centre would be the October events of 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, but in the course of immersing myself deeper in the material in studying these events I realized that the main event was in fact the February revolution of 1917.12
When he first conceived it, the eighteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn did not have the benefit of the wisdom his seventy-nine-year-old counterpart had accrued. Nevertheless, when, on November 18, 1936, he first resolved to write “a big novel about the Revolution”, he envisaged it on the grandest of scales, modeled in scope on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It would be not merely a novel but a true epic, in multiple volumes and parts. It would be his masterpiece. What a tribute it is to Solzhenitsyn’s vision, his determination, and, indeed, his genius that this wildest and most arrogantly ambitious of teenage dreams was brought to fruition through half a century of careful and considered reflection, coupled with superhuman endeavor.
Provisionally labeled R-17, its principal focus being the Revolution of 1917, the young Solzhenitsyn’s epic had originally been planned to reflect the orthodox communist point of view. “From childhood on, I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and that nothing else concerned me. To understand the Revolution I had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it.”13 The novel’s hero, Olkhovsky, who was to become Lenartovich in August 1914, was intended to be an idealistic communist; according to Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, the purpose of the novel was to show “the complete triumph of the Revolution on a global scale”.14