Abstract
This was the first ever publication in English of verse by
The poem that follows is an extract from a longer autobiographical work composed in 1950-53, ‘The Road’, while Solzhenitsyn was in the camp that formed the setting of his celebrated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The verse was quoted in a samizdat article on the novel called ‘Ivan Denisovich and the Writer’s Spiritual Mission’ by Venyamin Teush, a former schoolteacher colleague and close friend of Solzhenitsyn. Teush signed it with the pseudonym D Blagov.
There never was, nor will be, a world of brightness! A frozen footcloth is the scarf that binds my face. Fights over porridge, the ganger’s constant griping And day follows day follows day, and no end to this dreary fate. My feeble pick strikes sparks from the frozen earth. And the sun stares down unblinking from the sky. But the world is here! And will be! The daily round Suffices. But man is not to be prisoned in the day. To write! To write now, without delay, Not in heated wrath, but with cool and clear understanding. The millstones of my thoughts can hardly turn, Too rare the flicker of light in my aching soul. Yes, tight is the circle around us tautly drawn, But my verses will burst their bonds and freely roam And I can guard, perhaps, beyond their reach, In rhythmic harmony this hard-won gift of speech. And then they can grope my body in vain – ‘Here I am. All yours. Look hard. Not a line… Our indestructible memory, by wonder divine, Is beyond the reach of your butcher’s hands!' My labour of love! Year after year with me you will grow, Year after year you will tread the prisoner’s path. The day will come when you warm not me alone, Nor me alone embrace with a shiver of wrath. Let the stanzas throb – but no whisper let slip, Let them hammer away – not a twitch of the lip, Let your eyes not gleam in another’s presence And let no one see, let no one see You put pencil to paper. From every corner I am stalked by prison –
God keep me from going mad!
I do not write my verses for idle pleasure, Nor from a sense of energy to burn. Nor out of mischief, to evade their searches, Do I carry them past my captors in my brain. The free flow of my verse is dearly bought, I have paid a cruel price for my poet’s rights: The barren sacrifice of all her youth And ten cold solitary years for my wife – The unuttered cries of children still unborn, My mother’s death, toiling in gaunt starvation, The madness of prison cells, midnight interrogations, Autumn’s sticky red clay in an opencast mine, The secret, slow and silent erosive force Of winters laying bricks, of summers feeding the furnace – Oh, if this were but the sum of the price paid for my verse! But those others paid the price with their lives, Immured in the silence of Solovki, drowned in thunder of waves, Or shot without trial in Vorkuta’s polar night. Love and warmth and their executed cries Have combined in my breast to carve The receptive metre of this sorrowful tale, These few poor thousand incapacious lines. Oh, hopeless labour! Can you really pay the price? Do you think to redeem the pledge with a single life? For what an age has my country been so poor In women’s happy laughter, so very rich In poets’ lamentations! Verse verse – for all that we have lost, A drop of scented resin in the razed forest! But this is all I live for! On its wings I transport my feeble body through prison walls And one day, in distant exile dim, Biding my time, I will free my tortured memory from its thrall: On paper, birchbark, in a blackened bottle rolled, I will consign my tale to the forest leaves, Or to a drift of shifting snow. But what if beforehand they give me poisoned bread? Or if darkness beclouds my mind at last? Oh, let me die there! Let it not be here! God keep me from going mad! ❒
Translated by Michael Scammell
This poem first appeared in Index on Censorship Volume 1, Number 2, Summer 1972