The Joy of Reading

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The Hudson Review, in its Autumn issue, has published two intriguing excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. “The Joy of Reading”, written in 1987, reflects Solzhenitsyn’s joy at his newfound opportunity to read for pleasure after forty years of fighting at the front, incarceration in Soviet prisons and camps, and unrelenting harassment. Then in the second excerpt, “Delving into The Red Wheel”, he looks for methods to grapple with the enormous literary-historical task of shaping his revolutionary epic The Red Wheel.

“I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason. And I’m young at heart. I’ll study in old age, at least—and what a shame so few years are left. All the strands I began at some time—I must not let them go to waste but guide them to completion. In my constant haste, burrowing forward via tunnels of intuition, how many, many mountains I’ve left behind me, never conquered! But, of course: Tantum possumus, quantum scimus. (The more we know, the more we can do.) I’d like to climb up to an observation platform with a view of the centuries behind us and a half century ahead.”
“In my case, enormous help has come from old people, the elderly émigrés of the revolutionary years. They have gifted me both with anecdotes and with the spirit of the time itself, which can only be conveyed by “non-historical,” ordinary people. How very many evenings I have spent warming myself with their recollections in my spacious study that is always poorly heated in winter. For me, each of those evenings was a refreshing encounter with contemporaries of the events—with “my” contemporaries in spirit, the living characters of my tale. In the evenings they strengthened me for the next day’s work. A table lamp shone down onto the pages while all the dark expanse of the high-ceilinged study was as if filled with a living, sympathetic, amiable throng of these “White Guards.” I certainly wasn’t lonely for even a minute.

I felt I was a bridge stretching from prerevolutionary Russia to the post-Soviet Russia of the future, a bridge over which the heavily laden wagon train of History is lugged over, across the entire abyss of the Soviet years, so that its priceless load would not be lost to the future.”