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Solzhenitsyn knows exactly that freedom: all his work is intensely autobiographical, and large parts were even composed in his head and memorized during the years that took him through every circle of the Stalinist hell before casting him loose, sick with cancer. Solzhenitsyn tells it photographically, with the careful interlocking of closely observed detail, and with total recall that stretches back to childhood.
Only Stalin Stood to Gain. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa in the mountains of the central Caucasus, when the Bolshevik revolution was barely a year old and civil war was raging. He grew up in South Russia, in Rostov-on-the-Don. His father, an office worker, died while Alexander was still a boy, as Stalin's repressions were beginning. Gleb Nerzhin, a prisoner who is a counterpart of Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle, recalls that "he had been twelve when he first opened the huge pages of Izvestia and had read about the trial of some engineers accused of sabotage. The young Gleb did not believe a word of it; he did not know why, but he saw quite clearly that it was all a pack of lies. Several of his friends' fathers were engineers and he simply could not imagine people like that sabotaging things; their job was building things."
Solzhenitsyn took a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov in 1941; during his last two years at the university, he was also taking a correspondence course at the Institute of Philosophy and Literature in Moscow. For a time he was stage-struck and wanted to become an actor. When he failed his tryouts, he then dreamed of being a playwright. Friends report that he still loves to do imitations—with uproarious gusto and very badly. His three plays, all unpublished, are said to be poor theater.
Master and Busybody. Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalya had not long been married when war broke out. He joined the army in 1941, got himself transferred to artillery school, graduated in 1942 and was sent to the front.
Solzhenitsyn commanded a battery at the Leningrad front and was twice decorated. Near the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn and a friend in another unit discussed how badly Stalin was conducting the war—and how badly he wrote the Russian language. Foolishly, they continued such comments in letters, lightly disguising their references to Stalin by calling him khozyain, "master," or balabos, an Odessan Yiddish slang word meaning "busybody."
SMERSH* read the letters. In February of 1945, having fought his way through Poland and into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, interrogated, beaten, and taken to the Greater Lyubyanka prison in Moscow.
Consigned to Limbo. Solzhenitsyn entered that hell whose torments his novels describe. One of Stalin's notorious three-man tribunals sentenced him without a hearing to eight years. He was first put to work laying the parquet flooring of a Moscow apartment building for secret police officials. Twenty years later, when some of the apartments had been turned over to high-ranking scientists, Solzhenitsyn was invited to visit a friend in that same building. He was proud to