Books: A Flight into Poetry

• Share

(2 of 2)

unwanted, Move forward, their necks bowed

as though to bend Under the harsh stroke of a

clumsy ax blade, Toward the distant parts of a

cruel land.

At that precise moment in the narrative, the Red Army officer with literary ambitions merges with the more familiar figure of Solzhenitsyn as hero, martyr and witness of the Gulag archipelago. The poem that began in the voice of the victor ends in the cry of the victim.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn never made it to the victory celebrations in Berlin. He was arrested in mid-route and sentenced to eight years for having written letters critical of Stalin. Prussian Nights was composed in a concentration camp, its form dictated by necessity. Paper was scarce and punishment swift for prisoners caught writing. So Solzhenitsyn turned to poetry—the genre easiest to commit to memory. Some Roman Catholic prisoners made him a rosary of bread pellets, which Solzhenitsyn used to mark the meter of his verse, the better to retain it. By the time he was released in 1953, he had stored in his head some 12,000 lines of original verse, including Prussian Nights.

In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, which will be published next year in English. Solzhenitsyn tells how it was done. "I needed a clear head, because for two years 1 had been writing a poem—a most rewarding poem that helped me not to notice what was being done to my body. Sometimes, while standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted overhead . . . At such moments I was both free and happy . . . Some prisoners tried to escape by smashing a car through the barbed wire. For me there was no barbed wire. The head count of prisoners remained unchanged, but I was actually away on a distant flight." Though earthbound, all Solzhenitsyn's later fiction is the result of that first heroic flight into poetry.

Patricia Blake