Prussian Nights - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Prussian Nights is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

, a captain in the Soviet Red Army

Red Army

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...

during the Second World War. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army

Red Army

's march across East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...

, and focuses on the traumatic acts of rape and murder

Red Army atrocities

War crimes perpetrated by the armed forces of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1991 include acts committed by the regular army—the Red Army —as well as the NKVD, including the NKVD's Internal Troops. In some cases, these crimes may have been committed on express orders of the early...

that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.

Originally it was Chapter 8 of his huge autobiographic poem Dorozhen'ka (The Road) that he wrote in 1947 as a sharashka
Sharashka
Sharashka was an informal name for secret research and development laboratories in the Soviet Gulag labor camp system...

(scientific research camp) inmate. The original poem did not survive, but in 1950–1951, working in a hard labour camp near Ekibastuz

Ekibastuz

Ekibastuz is a town in Pavlodar Province, northeastern Kazakhstan. it had a population of 141,000. It is served by Ekibastuz Airport.-History:...

, Solzhenitsyn restored Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 (The Feast of the victors) as separate poems. The poem is in trochaic tetrameter

Trochaic tetrameter

Trochaic tetrameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line of four trochaic feet. The word "tetrameter" simply means that the poem has four trochees...

, "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky was a Soviet poet, chief editor of Novy Mir literary magazine from 1950 to 1954 and 1958 to 1970...

's Vasili Tyorkin."

The poem is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences – he was a captain of an artillery battery which formed a part of the Second Belorussian Front, which invaded East Prussia

East Prussian Offensive

The East Prussian Offensive was a strategic offensive by the Red Army against the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front . It lasted from 13 January to 25 April 1945, though some German units did not surrender until 9 May...

from south-east in January 1945. The Soviet offensive followed the path of the disastrous offensive by the Russian Second Army under Alexander Samsonov

Alexander Samsonov

Aleksandr Vassilievich Samsonov was a career officer in the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army and a general served during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.-Biography:...

during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

; the comparison with the Soviet victorious offensive is one of the underlying themes of the poem.

Solzhenitsyn was arrested soon afterwards, in early February, three weeks after the offensive had started. His arrest was partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians. In the poem he recalls the pillages, rapes and murders committed by the Soviet troops taking their revenge on the German populace, the events which later resulted in the first part of the German exodus from Eastern Europe, e.g.:

The little daughter’s on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse.

It's all come down to simple phrases:

Do not forget! Do not forgive!

Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!

That is not to say that the poem is in any way or form white or black; Solzhenitsyn was a patriot—he rejoiced in the victory and noted that the Soviet troops were taking what they saw as a revenge for equivalent German crimes committed in the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn composed the poem—about twelve thousand lines and over fifty pages long—while he was serving a sentence of hard labor in Gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

camps. He is rumored to have written a few lines of the poem each day on a bar of soap and memorized them while using it. He also wrote about how composing this poem helped him to survive his imprisonment: "I needed a clear head, because for two years I 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."

He wrote down the poem between the 1950s and 1970s. He made a recording of it in 1969; it was not published in Russian until 1974 when it was published in Paris, France. A German translation was done by Nikolaus Ehlert in 1976, and it was officially first translated into English by Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

in 1977.

The New York Times reviewed it thus: "a clumsy and disjointed 1400 line narrative which can be called poetry only because it is written in meter and rhyme. Sent to any publishing house of émigré Russian journal bearing any name but Solzhenitsyn's, it would be rejected unhesitatingly."

Further reading