Moving in with a close friend helped Sverdlov, but did not bring full relief. The friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, born “Shaia Itskov” but known as “Georges,” “contributed quite a bit” to Sverdlov’s reawakening. “He is a lively person. He raises countless questions, which he tries to resolve through dialog…. But don’t start thinking that it’s so great for the two of us, that we have a vibrant comradely atmosphere here. After all, we are only two.” And still worse: “Georges has become a certified neurotic and is on his way to becoming a misanthrope. He has a good opinion of people in general, of abstract people, but he is terribly quarrelsome with particular human beings he comes into contact with. The result is that he is on the outs with everyone—except for me, of course, because I know what a good fellow he is, what a kind soul he has.” Finally, they parted—“not because of a quarrel, nothing of the kind,” but because “a separate apartment is better, after all.” They had been going to bed at different times and studying at different times, “and, moreover, I can’t write intimate letters when there’s someone else around who is awake.”58
Sverdlov wrote many intimate letters, especially when there was no one else around. “You know, my little one,” he wrote to Novgorodtseva from Kureika, after he and Dzhugashvili had stopped talking to each other, “I really do love you so—so very, very much. Are you asleep and cannot hear? Sleep then, sleep, my darling, I won’t disturb you. Oh my, oh my!” A year after the birth of Andrei, he still had not seen his son and wife (he called her his “wife” in his letters, although some Bolsheviks were wary of the term).
I feel so strongly that my existence is inseparable from yours, and talk to you in my soul so often that it seems strange somehow that we haven’t seen each other for so long. Oh how I want to be near you, to see you and our little one. But I’ll confess that my greatest desire is to be with you; you are in my thoughts much more, you and you and you again, and then our little one. Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, I do want your caress, sometimes I want it so much it hurts, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I want to lay my head in your lap and gaze endlessly at your dear, beloved, beautiful face, peer into your eyes, turn into a tiny babe and feel the touch of your hand on my hair. Yes, there is inexpressible joy in this, but even stronger, much much greater is my desire to share with you all my feelings, my thoughts, and in sharing them to gain new strength, to ensure that you are carried along by my mood, that we become one person within that mood…. I want to caress you, take care of you, fill your life with new energy and joy…. I want to give you so, so much. But what can I do?59
Meanwhile, Sverdlov’s pupil, Boris Ivanov, was writing to a “dear, distant friend” Bliuma Faktorovich. “I am writing to you in the dusk. You are standing before me in my cabin the way you did back then at the New Year’s Eve party in our workers’ club. Your thick brown hair is like a crown, and your dark, fiery eyes are sparkling in the glow of the lights.” The letter ends with a poem that transforms his loneliness and longing into their common—and tragic—devotion to the cause.
We’ll welcome the New Year with a kiss
This night of joy is not for you and me.
We’ll kiss like brothers, as we struggle for the people
Who suffer from oppression and from want.
Please don’t be jealous of the feasting all around,
Let’s drink our cup of tears to the bottom.60
Thousands of miles away, Voronsky was drinking from the same cup.
During those long, dull nights, I used to read until my head spun, then stoke the stove, and turn down the lamp. The birch logs would hiss, crackle drily, and pop, like roasting nuts, while ugly, furry shadows wandered around the room. The coals covered in gray ashes reminded me of things lost and extinguished. Life in the capitals and big cities seemed far away and gone forever…. Enchanting female images would come alive and disappear, those past passions turned into ghostly, elusive shadows. In a rush I would finish stoking up the stove, close the stove doors and shutters with a bang, get dressed, cast a last worried, melancholy look around the dark room, and set off to see Vadim, Jan, or Valentin. The dark heavenly depths used to crush me with their frightening immensity.61
Boris Ivanov
Even Sverdlov, whose “cheerfulness and optimism” were, according to Ivanov, the colony’s main “support for the weak,” would occasionally give way to despair. Once, when he had not received any letters for several weeks, his lip was swollen, and he was “shivering from the cold (or a cold, he wasn’t sure),” he wrote to Novgorodtseva, “Yesterday it got so bad that I felt like crying and moaning, and could not sleep. I had to use all my strength not to let myself go. I managed to pull myself together somewhat, but then got to the point of regretting that I didn’t have any potassium bromide pills with me—and I’m not sure I would’ve been able to keep from taking them, either.”62
Those were rare moments, however, and they were always followed by expressions of hope based on some combination of comradeship, love, and faith in the truth of the prophecy. “The days of light will come; believe in it firmly, be full of this faith,” was the main theme of Sverdlov’s letters to his wife, sisters, and friends. Most of them, including Sverdlov himself, followed this injunction. Voronsky’s visions and doubts are dispelled by “conversations with comrades”; Piatnitsky’s passage about melancholy and depression is followed by an account of mutual support among the exiles; and Ivanov’s description of the long Arctic nights ends with an image of the “heavenly depths” that is sublime, not crushing. “The sky is covered with countless stars, which shine much more brightly here than they do at home or in the south. The fantastic bands of the northern lights dance around like searchlights, and, every once in a while, a white fiery pillar rises from the earth all the way to the sky or a spray of blue, red, and violet lights might shoot up.”63
Postyshev, too, found solace in nature (and in belles lettres):
It is not easy for me to describe these mountains in all their glory—when they are painted golden by the rising sun and, high above them, the turquoise sky is glistening, and the fiery dawn clings so closely to the earth that it seems that the earth might catch fire. At sunset, I prefer to walk between the mountains, in the “gashes,” as they are called here. Then the mountains are shrouded in a blue haze; their tops seem to touch the clouds; and the rays of the setting sun radiate through the pine trees. At such moments, your eyes can perceive magic; your soul becomes transcendent; and you wish to live and to hug everyone in sight and to forgive and be forgiven.64