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A new collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's early work reveals sides of the Nobel Prize-winning author little known before.

By Victor Sonkin
Published: November 19, 2004

With the recent publication of his early works, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has confirmed his status as a living classic by laying out his youthful beginnings for all to see.

Titled "The Path," or Dorozhenka, after the long epic poem that forms the bulk of the book, the collection reveals sides of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and memoirist little known before -- most notably, his early attempts at poetry. As it turns out, Solzhenitsyn's reasons for composing verse in his youth were quite prosaic. Confined to labor camps and exile in the 1940s and 1950s, the author dared not write his ideas down, and so composed them in his mind instead. Naturally, poems were easier to memorize. "Back then, they were my breath and my life," Solzhenitsyn writes in a laconic foreword to the book. "They helped me to survive."

The very origin and existence of these works is a monument to the man's dedication and willpower. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with counterrevolutionary activity. Unlike many similar cases of the time, however, the charges against Solzhenitsyn were not completely groundless. Indeed, in a letter to a friend, the writer had harshly -- and fearlessly -- criticized Josef Stalin's regime. After several years in prisons and labor camps, he was diagnosed with cancer and became convinced that his days were numbered. "I wrote like mad," he recollects, "thinking that while I write, I'm not finished yet."

Rehabilitated both politically and medically in 1956, Solzhenitsyn stormed into literary life six years later with the publication of his novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." It was not long before he was arrested and exiled again, and took up a life of solitude in Vermont. After years of writing and research, a Nobel Prize and the collapse of communist rule, Solzhenitsyn saw his major books published in Russia and triumphantly returned.

"The Path," of course, is no match for Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" or for "The Red Wheel," his multi-volume epic about the sources and hidden forces of the Revolution. His poetry is sometimes painfully bad, and his 50-year-old recollections can seem naive. But Solzhenitsyn is probably the only living person in Russia who can trace a straight line between his humble beginnings and his equally principled activities today. Because in fact his beginnings were not that humble -- they were steeped in the blood of this country's history and in the courage of the few who had the guts to stand their ground.

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