Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Turns to Faith

The shift came on a night when the wind cut straight across the steppe and into the barracks like a blade through canvas. I was on the lower bunk next to his, both of us still in the same work gang that had spent the day hauling slag from the foundry. My hands were raw from the tongs. His were the same. We lay there listening to the guards change at the wire, the dogs barking once and then settling. He had been quieter than usual for weeks, ever since the letters from his wife stopped coming. The divorce papers had arrived in the spring, carried by the camp censor like any other official notice. He read them once, folded them, and put them under his mattress. After that he stopped talking about home.

We had known each other since the sharashka days, though neither of us said much about the past. In Ekibastuz the past was a luxury no one could afford. What mattered was whether a man could stand his shift without collapsing and whether he would share a crust if the bread ration came short. He worked the same jobs as the rest of us—miner, bricklayer, foundry hand—and he never asked for lighter duty even when the cough started. One evening after roll call a new prisoner arrived from the transit point carrying a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth. The man had been searched twice already, yet the bundle passed through. He found our section, asked quietly for the writer who had been an artillery captain, and handed it over. Inside was a New Testament, the pages thin and already softened at the edges from handling.

He took it without a word and set it on the plank between our bunks. For three nights it stayed there untouched while the others slept. On the fourth night I woke to the sound of paper turning. He had a small stub of pencil and was copying lines by the light that leaked from the guard tower. He did not write on the book itself. He wrote on whatever scraps he could find—cigarette paper, the back of a work order, once on the inside of his own sleeve when the paper ran out. The words were not complaints about the food or the quotas. They were verses and responses, arranged like a service he was trying to remember from childhood.

The work continued. We were moved to a new section of the mine where the air was thicker and the timbering had begun to rot. One afternoon a support beam gave way and three men from the next gang were buried to the waist. He helped dig them out with his hands until the guards brought shovels. That evening, back in the barracks, he asked whether any of us still prayed. No one answered at first. Then an old man from the far end of the row said he remembered the words to the Trisagion. They spoke them together, low enough that the guard on the catwalk would not hear. After that the book moved. It went from bunk to bunk for a few hours each night, always returned before morning inspection. He never kept it longer than his turn.

By late summer the cough had settled into his chest and would not leave. The camp doctor gave him an extra blanket and nothing else. He used the blanket to wrap the book when he slept. One morning he did not rise for roll call. The rest of us lined up while the medic checked his temperature with a finger against his forehead. They let him stay in the barracks that day. When I returned at dusk he was sitting on the edge of the bunk, the book open on his knees, the pencil moving again. He looked thinner, but his eyes were steady. He asked me if I could remember the name of the priest who had baptized him as a boy. I told him I did not know. He nodded and went back to the page.

The poem took shape over weeks. He carried it in his head during the day and set it down at night when the tower light swung away from our window. It was not addressed to any of us. It spoke of grain scattered and faith that had crumbled without noise, of standing at the edge between living and dying and looking back without anger. When he finished the last lines he read them once to the old man who knew the Trisagion. Then he rolled the papers tight and hid them inside the lining of his jacket. The book itself stayed on the plank between our bunks until a new arrival needed it more than we did.

He was released the following March and sent into exile. I stayed another year. The last time I saw him he was standing at the gate with his bundle and the jacket that still held the rolled papers. He did not wave. He simply turned and walked toward the truck that would take him south. Years later word reached the camp that he had written about those nights, though never under his own name while the sentence still ran. The book had passed through many hands by then. Some pages were missing. The cover was gone. What remained was enough for the next man who needed it.

The truck that carried him south from the Ekibastuz gates reached Kok-Terek on 5 March 1953, the same week Stalin’s death was announced over the district loudspeaker, and within days he had registered at the local school as a mathematics teacher for the seventh and eighth forms. The exile order fixed him there for three years without the right to leave the district; he slept in a clay-walled hut behind the school and kept the rolled papers inside his jacket lining until he could copy them again onto school exercise books bought with his first month’s pay of 420 rubles. In letters that reached me after my own release in February 1954 he described the evening routine: after the last lesson he would walk to the edge of the irrigation canal, spread the pages on a flat stone, and add lines that began with the words “Grain that falls on stone still sends up a shoot if the rain remembers it,” lines he later placed in the closing section of the poem cycle “Prussian Nights.” A former zek named Georgi Tenno visited him there in October 1954 and later recorded that the manuscript already ran to ninety-four pages written in a hand so small that a magnifying glass was needed to read the marginal notes.

By the summer of 1956 the sentence had been annulled under the review commission sitting in Alma-Ata, and he was permitted to return to European Russia; he arrived in Rostov-on-Don on 6 June with a single suitcase containing the New Testament whose cover had been replaced by cardboard from a packing crate. Natalia Reshetovskaya, whom he had married in 1940 before the front, met him at the station and took him first to the apartment on Engels Street where their son Yermolai was waiting; within three weeks he had secured a teaching post at Secondary School No. 2 and begun typing the prison poem on a borrowed Underwood machine whose ribbon he changed every fourth night to avoid detection. The typescript that reached Novy Mir in December 1961 carried the title “Shch-854” and ran to 227 pages; Aleksandr Tvardovsky read it aloud to the editorial board on 12 January 1962 and noted in his diary that the line “the stars were still the same stars that had shone over the wire at Ekibastuz” had made two of the younger editors weep.