This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyn's development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties, preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies. Solzhenitsyn's life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsia's attitudes to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyn's life to his works, all of which contain a large element of autobiography.
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Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918 in his uncleâs villa in Kislovodsk, a fashionable spa in the Caucasus Mountains, in southern Russia. His dead father, Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, would have been twenty-seven years old at the time of his sonâs birth. His mother, Taissia Solzhenitsyn, was twenty-three.
The Solzhenitsyn family was not special enough to have kept track of its ancestry. A supposed forebear, Philip Solzhenitsyn, is known to have been living in a free colony of peasants outside the town of Bobrov, in the central Russian province of Voronezh, at the time of Peter the Great. In 1698, enraged by some routine act of rebelliousness, Peter had ordered the colony to be burnt to the ground and had forced its inhabitants to move elsewhere. About a hundred years later another Solzhenitsyn, Alexanderâs great-great-grandfather, was convicted of having participated in another peasant rebellion in Voronezh and was exiled to the just conquered virgin lands in the southâa traditional method of colonizing new territory at that time.
There was thus a tradition of stubbornness and independence in the family, which was to stand them in good stead when they were sent to the newly created province of Stavropol, a wedge of territory on a low plateau between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Plain. To the north and south were the two major âhosts,â as they were called, of the Kuban and Terek Cossacks,* who had helped conquer these territories and been installed here by Catherine the Great to secure the new frontiers. There were some Cossacks in Stavropol, too, but not many, for this area had been reserved by the crown. The chief colonists were the so-called inogorodniye, or âoutsiders,â the somewhat contemptuous name applied by Cossacks to non-Cossack Russians and subsequently adopted by the latter as a normal mode of description. The Solzhenitsyns were non-Cossack Russians, or âoutsiders.â
The land they found in Stavropol Province was less fertile than in the lush valleys of the Kuban and Terek rivers, but there was plenty of it. According to Solzhenitsyn himself, the Solzhenitsyns and their fellows âwere let loose in the wild steppe country beyond the Kuma River, where they lived in harmony, with land in such abundance that they didnât have to divide it up in strips. They sowed where they ploughed, sheared sheep where their carts took them, and put down roots.â1
Of the next generation of Solzhenitsyns we know nothing, except the name of the Voronezh rebelâs son and Solzhenitsynâs great-grandfather, Efim, which survives in the patronymic of Solzhenitsynâs grandfather, Semyon Efimovich. But with Grandfather Semyon we enter the second half of the nineteenth century and the era of photography. A sole surviving faded snapshot shows him standing, tall and self-consciously erect, in a field of corn, gazing firmly into the camera lens. Balding, with bristling Victorian mustaches and a full beard, and wearing a striped shirt, cravat, waistcoat, and jacket, he looks the very picture of a self-confident yeoman farmer.
The village where they lived was known locally as Sablia, after the many-branched shallow stream that flowed through it in winter (in summer it was usually dry), though it is now marked on the map as Sablinskoye. It was a typical south Russian settlement, consisting of a single main street lined with adobe houses, each with its own yard and kitchen garden at the back and outbuildings for the livestock. By the 1880s it had a parish church and a parish school and was a posting stage on the broad, muddy road that wound its way from the town of Stavropol, the provincial capital, to Georgievsk, forty miles away, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. There was little to distinguish this place, except perhaps the view of the distant mountains, which had so captivated Lev Tolstoy when he drove through here in 1851 on his way to join the Terek Cossacks. Early one morning, he writes, he was stunned by these âgleaming white colossi with their delicate silhouettes and the distinct contours of their summits etched against the distant sky.â2 It is pleasant to think of Solzhenitsynâs literary model and hero passing this way some 70 years before his discipleâs birth, when the Solzhenitsyns still toiled at the plough. Did Solzhenitsyn think of that when, 120 years later, he devoted the opening pages of August 1914 to an evocation of that same mountain scenery (and was there an element of competition in that opening)?
*The Cossacks of southern Russia generally took their name from the river along which they settled. The Kuban and the Terek were the principal rivers of the North Caucasus.
The Solzhenitsyn farm was about six miles east of Sablia and consisted of a low clay farmhouse and a cluster of outbuildings standing in the midst of the open steppe, surrounded by fields. This isolation was a distinctive feature of the Russian South. In the North, the vast majority of the peasants were serfs or share-croppers, living on their ownersâ land and paying tribute in the form of goods, taxes, or labour. There the land was managed collectively, divided into strips and allocated on a family basis, under a feudal system whose iniquities were to provide much of the fuel for the Revolution when it eventually came. In the South, with land available in such abundance, independence was the rule, the peasants either owning or leasing large parcels of land and working as individual farmers. This bred an entirely different spirit from that prevailing in the North and was to leave its mark on Solzhenitsyn, too.
Semyon, Solzhenitsynâs grandfather, worked the farm with the help of his elder sons. He married twice. By his first wife, Pelageya, he had three sons and two daughters, and by his second, Marfa, a son and a daughter. The gap between their ages was considerable. Konstantin, the eldest of the first three sons, was over twenty when the youngest, Isaaki, was born. The middle son was Vasily, and in between came the two daughters, Evdokia and Anastasia. Marfaâs two children, considerably younger than Isaaki, were Ilya and Maria.3
Solzhenitsyn maintains that his paternal grandfather was not particularly rich and that several pairs of oxen and horses for ploughing, a dozen cows, and a couple of hundred sheep were the sum total of his disposable wealth. And it seems that he employed no hired labourers, so that his land could not have been particularly extensive. But after Semyonâs remarriage to Marfa, a rift appears to have opened up between Semyon and the two older sons. Marfa, according to Solzhenitsyn, was âenergetic and greedy,â anxious to take over the family property for herself and her two children, and Konstantin and Vasily were sufficiently well off to move away and buy farms of their own. Meanwhile, the two daughters, Evdokia and Anastasia, were married and moved to the neighbouring villages of Kursavka and Nagutskoye.*
Solzhenitsynâs father, Isaaki, who was born on 6 June 1891 (Old Style),â had been just a child when his mother died and was replaced by an unwelcome stepmother. Solzhenitsyn believes that he felt his orphanhood keenly, but he was set apart from his older brothers and sisters in another way, tooâ he was the first and only one of the family to receive a proper education. Whereas the others had merely attended the local parish school, before joining their father on the farm, Isaaki had gone on to secondary school and then to the unheard-of heights of a gymnasium in Pyatigorsk, the biggest of the Caucasian mountain spas. It had not been accomplished without a struggle. Semyon saw no reason why his third son shouldnât do exactly as the first two had done and join him on the land. For a whole year he had refused to yield to Isaakiâs demands for a proper schooling, while Isaaki marked time on the farm. But in the end Isaakiâs stubbornness had won through, and he went to Pyatigorsk. After four years at the gymnasium the whole process was repeated, and another year passed before Isaaki was allowed by his disgruntled and sceptical father to go on to university. This was in 1911, when Isaaki was twenty.
*Coincidentally the birthplace of Yuri Andropov.
â Until the Revolution, Russia adhered to the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar, used in Europe and most of the rest of the world. Isaaki was born on 19 May according to the Gregorian calendar.
He went first to the University of Kharkov, in the Ukraine. In August 1914 Solzhenitsyn tells a story of Isaakiâs being refused admission because his first name, the Orthodox Christian âIsaaki,â. was confused with the Jewish âIsaak,â which would have made him subject to the limitations on university admissions for the Jews. Solzhenitsyn heard this story from a distant relative, but he now believes it to be mistaken. It seems to be true, however, that Isaakiâs peasant name, which he had been given in honour of the obscure saint Isaac the Dalmatian, on whose name-day he was born, struck university ears as outlandish and quaint and was already old-fashioned in the central parts of Russia. But Kharkov, in any case, did not suit Isaaki very well. The gymnasium in Pyatigorsk had been of a very high intellectual standard, whereas this newly opened provincial university, whose only virtue was that it was cheap and fairly close to home, was mediocre. The following year, in 1912, overcoming any residual opposition from his father, Isaaki transferred to the University of Moscow.
He was now at the top of the educational ladder and began to enter fully into the intellectual life of the time. In the short period of ten years, he had made the leap from peasant to membership in the metropolitan intelligentsia. Yet it was not plain sailing. Sensitive to his origins and loyal to his roots, Isaaki was torn by the conflict between the pull of his peasant past and his hopes for a brilliant future. His ambition, like that of generations of scholarship boys before and since, was somehow to link these two worlds of past and future, to be a bridge between them and perhaps to narrow the gap for future generations. But the task was uphill, and human nature, as he found it in himself and others, unregenerate.
According to Solzhenitsynâs description of his father in August 1914, Isaaki was very attached to his native village and always returned to work on the family farm during his vacations. But he grew increasingly estranged from his roots as his education progressed, and he was teased by the villagers for his city clothes and his narodnik, or âpopulist,â* opinions. He regarded himself as âsomeone who had received an education in order to use it for the benefit of the people and who would go back to the people with the book, the word, and with love.â
*The Russian populists were utopian socialists who took their inspiration from Proudhon and their name from the Russian narod, meaning âpeople.â They were influential in the 1870s and 1880s. Herzen was a forerunner and Mikhailovsky their chief theoretician.
The two intellectual movements that appear to have influenced the idealistic Isaaki the most (and that were to be not without influence on Solzhenitsyn himself) were populism and Tolstoyanism,* both of which were well past their peak by 1912 and would have been regarded as distinctly old-fashioned in Moscow. The populists had long since been supplanted in the public esteem by the anarchists, the anarchists by the Socialist Revolutionaries and increasingly by the Social Democrats, which was the innocuous-sounding official name of what was in effect the Communist Party. Earlier that same year, in fact, in Prague, a then obscure lawyer by the name of Vladimir Ulyanov (alias Lenin) had taken over the leadership of the Social Democratic Party and was laying the foundations of a tightly knit conspiratorial group that had taken the name of Bolsheviks. And shortly afterwards the Party was joined by a lapsed seminarist named Iosif Dzhugashvili (alias Stalin), whose views on revolutionary development far outstripped, in their ruthlessness, the theories of the fierce-sounding Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists.
When war broke out between Russia and Germany, on 1 August 1914, Isaaki was holidaying on the family farm in the south and helping his father in the fields. Two manifestos declaring war on Germany and Austria were read aloud in t...
