A Memoir of Repression

When the Kremlin leaders deported Alexander Solzhenitsyn a year ago last month they evidently hoped that the great Russian writer's thunderous condemnations of the Soviet system would lose their authority once he became a mere emigre. On the anniversary of his banishment, Paris' Russian-language Y.M.C.A. Press published yet another devastating chronicle of Soviet repression by the author of The Gulag Archipelago. This was Solzhenitsyn's 629-page account of his 13-year struggle to survive as a writer in his homeland until he was arrested and dispatched to the West against his will. The book is called The Calf Butted the Oak--a Russian proverb that suggests a lonely struggle against an overwhelming power, in this case the Soviet state.*

Forbidden Theme. Solzhenitsyn's memoirs begin in 1961, when he was living in the provincial city of Ryazan after having endured eleven years in prison, concentration camps and exile and a bout of cancer. A high school math teacher, Solzhenitsyn even by then had become the archetypal "underground man" of Russian letters. Writing secretly in every spare moment, he had already completed his novels on the forbidden theme of Stalinist prisons and camps, The First Circle and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Fearful that his dangerous activity might be discovered by nosy friends and colleagues and his work confiscated, he cultivated the reputation of being a recluse. Although he then never dreamed that he might be able to publish in the Soviet Union, he was dedicated to recording and preserving for future generations the story of the 66 million victims of the vast "archipelago" of terror instituted by Lenin and Stalin.

After Nikita Khrushchev's 1962 decision to let One Day be published in order to further the Premier's destalinization policies, Solzhenitsyn's fortunes depended on Khrushchev's. A year after his fall, the secret police raided two Moscow apartments where Solzhenitsyn's archives, including copies of The First Circle, were hidden. "I was so depressed," he writes about learning of his exposure, "that I contemplated suicide, for the first and, I hope, the last time in my life." After that raid, Solzhenitsyn began microfilming all his work and arranging for its underground transmission abroad for safekeeping.

The fact that the foreign press took hardly any note of the police seizure of Solzhenitsyn's archives provoked the writer into a bitter fulmination: "There was no point in relying on the West and, for us, there never will be. If we become free it will be through our own efforts.

If there is any lesson to be drawn from the 20th century for mankind, we shall give to the West, and not the West to us. Their excessive affluence has weakened their will and their reason." Still, Solzhenitsyn credits the Western press with having focused world attention on his plight.

Solzhenitsyn's description of his arrest and deportation adds some compelling new details to earlier accounts. After being charged with treason he was put in a cell with a pair of currency black-marketeers. Recognizing the author, one of the criminals expressed his dismay that Solzhenitsyn had not gone to Stockholm to collect his 70,000-ruble ($78,000) Nobel Prize in 1970. "You could have bought so many automobiles with that money!" Touched by the man's naive pity, Solzhenitsyn felt his first twinge of regret at having decided not to go to Sweden. Believing that he would probably die in jail, he dreamed for a moment of owning an isolated little country house where he might live for another ten or 20 years, have a real library, write his books, and live the normal life of an author. "It is easier to accept a death that is inevitable than a death one has chosen," he mused.

Isolated House. Solzhenitsyn was spared that fate by his deportation. Since then he has found his isolated little house high in the Swiss mountains, where he labors at his prodigious production of memoirs, essays and novels. But exile is bitter to him. "All my life is in the homeland," he has said. "I listen only to its sadness, I write only about it."

* A translation will appear in France in April, but Solzhenitsyn has not yet decided on an American publisher.

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