Solzhenitsyn Alexander I

A calf butted with an oak

A. Solzhenitsyn

A CALF BUTTED WITH AN OAK TREE

Essays on literary life

RESERVATION

There is such a considerable secondary literature: literature about literature; literature around literature; literature born of literature (if there had not been a similar one before, this one would not have been born). I myself, by profession, like to read such a thing, but I put it much lower than primary literature. And there is so much written everything, and people have less and less leisure to read, that it seems that it is not a shame to write memoirs, and even literary ones?

And I certainly did not imagine that myself, at the age of 49, I would dare to scrape together this something memoir. But two circumstances came together and directed me.

One thing is our cruel and cowardly secrecy, from which all the troubles of our country are derived. It is not that we speak and write openly and tell our friends what we think and how true the matter was, we are afraid to trust paper, for as before the axe hangs over each of our necks, it looks like it will come down. How long this mystery will last is impossible to predict, maybe many of us will be cut before that, and the unspoken will disappear with us.

The second circumstance is that the noose has been put on my neck for two years, but not tightened, and in the coming spring I want to tear my head lightly. Whether the noose will break, whether the neck will strangle - it is impossible to predict for sure.

And then, just between two boulders - I rolled one away, before the second timidity, I had a small break.

And I thought maybe it's time to explain something, just in case.

April 1967

UNDERGROUND WRITER

It is not surprising when revolutionaries are underground members. It's a wonder when writers.

With writers who are concerned with the truth, life has never been simple, never is (and never will be!): one was pestered with slander, another with a duel, one with the rupture of family life, the other with ruin or restless insurmountable poverty, some with a madhouse, some with prison. And with complete well-being, like Leo Tolstoy, your own conscience will scratch your chest even more bitterly from the inside.

But still, to dive underground and not to worry about the world recognizing you, but so that on the contrary - God forbid - this writer's lot is our native, purely Russian, Russian-Soviet. It has now been established that in the last part of his life Radishchev wrote something important both deeply and prudently concealed so deeply that now we will not find and will not know. And Pushkin wittily encrypted the 10th chapter of Onegin, everyone knows this. Less was known how long Chaadaev had been engaged in secret writing: he laid out his manuscript in separate leaves in various books of his large library. This, of course, is not a hiding point for the Lubyanka search: after all, no matter how many books I have, it is always possible to bring in a fair amount of operatives, so that each book can be taken by the ends of the spine and battered with patience (do not hide it in books, friends!). In the 1920s, they were discovered, found, studied, and in the 1930s, finally, prepared for publication by D. S. Shakhovsky - but then Shakhovsky was imprisoned (without return), and Chaadaev's manuscripts are still secretly stored in the Pushkin House - they are not allowed to be printed because of... their reactionary nature! So Chaadaev set a record - already 110 years after his death! - silence of the Russian writer. I have already written, so I have written!

And then times went much freer: Russian writers no longer wrote to the desk, but printed everything they wanted (and only critics and publicists chose Aesopian expressions). And to such an extent did they write freely and freely shake the whole state structure that all those young people grew up from Russian literature, who hated the tsar and the gendarmes, went to the revolution and made it.

But having stepped over the threshold of the revolutions it had engendered, literature quickly came to a halt: it fell not into the glittering celestial world, but under the ceiling and between the closer walls, which were becoming more and more cramped. Soviet writers learned very quickly that not every book can pass. And a dozen years later, they learned that the fee for the book could be a lattice and wire. And again the writers began to hide what they had written, although not of course despairing of seeing their books in print during their lifetime.

Before my arrest, I didn't understand much about it. I was senselessly drawn to literature, not knowing well why I needed it and why literature needed it. He was only tormented by the fact that it was difficult, they said, to find fresh topics for stories. It's scary to think what kind of writer I would have become (and would have been) if I hadn't been imprisoned.