The story “Narrow Escape” is excerpted from Solzhenitsyn’s unfinished novel “Love the Revolution,” most of which was written in 1948, though it wasn’t published in Russia until 1999, and is only now forthcoming in an English translation. Can you tell me what you know about the writing of the book, why it was never finished, and why it was finally published in 1999? Was your father involved with that publication? Do you know what he thought of the novel from that distance?

The book was begun in 1948, in the relative comfort of a sharashka, a prison research laboratory, where Solzhenitsyn—who had been sentenced to eight years in labor camps for criticizing Stalin in a private letter—had been temporarily moved. There he had access to pen and paper, and was able to write without the very act arousing immediate suspicion. He had not yet completed the novel when he was abruptly sent back to the labor camps. Although his manuscript miraculously survived, by the time it was restored to him, ten years later, too much time had passed and he was too different a man—and writer—to pick up its thread. In 1987, he would reflect upon this novel, “It’s not a very productive task, editing your own old work when you’re not able, indeed aren’t even trying, to start rewriting it as you would today. Let it stay as it is, early and unfinished.” And, in 1999, in that same state of mind, Solzhenitsyn prefaced the first Russian edition of his early works from his years of incarceration—including “Love the Revolution”—by declaring, “During that time they were my air and my life. They helped me to withstand. Gently and unassumingly, they lay dormant for forty-five years. Now that I’ve passed age eighty, I deemed it time to publish them.”

The novel has been referred to as autobiographical. Should we see a lot of your father in the hero of “Narrow Escape,” Gleb Nerzhin?

Oh, yes! While allowing for the proper pliability inherent in an author’s conjuring of a fictional hero, Nerzhin is most certainly, and very closely, modelled on the bookishly brilliant but streetwise-foolish true believer and inhaler of the “Marxist mist” that my father undoubtedly was on the cusp of the Second World War.

The story, which is set in Rostov-on-Don in the summer of 1941, begins shortly after Stalin’s July 3rd radio address, in which he called for “a ruthless fight against all disorganizers of the rear, deserters, panic-mongers, and rumor-spreaders” and announced that “all who by their panic-mongering and cowardice hinder the work of defense, no matter who they may be, must be immediately hauled before a military tribunal.” Why does Gleb discount the power of those words and feel himself invulnerable?

He doesn’t discount those words—he simply fails to connect them to actuality, and particularly to his own life. Earlier in the first chapter of “Love the Revolution,” from which this episode is drawn, Gleb listens “with gloomy approval,” on the very first day of the war, to a whole string of such decrees being transmitted over the radio. Yet, only a few weeks later, he is incredulous when his seemingly innocuous efforts to win a favorable place in a bread queue result in his being charged with what suddenly amounts to major crimes against the state. It is a microcosm of the delusions of his world view, of the mismatch between the theory of the “Vanguard Doctrine” and the “inadmissible” reality of life under Communism.

“Narrow Escape” is, in a sense, a loss-of-innocence story: this twenty-three-year-old believes that he can prevail by being reasonable—which is no longer a reasonable belief. Do you think that your father, six years older than Gleb, incarcerated, and soon to be sent into very difficult conditions, was looking back regretfully at his own mistakes?

It’s more that Gleb’s blindness to the ruthless truths of the Soviet experience sets up the predictable actual outcome in my father’s life: he’d only just missed being “squashed to a pulp” by the revolutionary wheel—but hadn’t understood, hadn’t taken notice, hadn’t adjusted. Inevitable, then, that his continued naïveté—in the form of barely veiled criticism of Stalin in correspondence subject to censorship review, as all correspondence in the U.S.S.R. was—should result in his arrest and conviction under that catchall of thoughtcrime, Article 58. ♦