ABSTRACT
In most respects Solzhenitsyn and his friends were models of Soviet youth. Soviet ideals during this period were embodied in the “literature of the Five-Year Plan” and in the classics of communism, whose authors had been canonized by the recent introduction of “socialist realism” as the country’s approved artistic doctrine. Solzhenitsyn and his friends were heavily imbued with this puritanical Party spirit and seem in many respects to have been as straitlaced a bunch of youngsters as we could hope to find anywhere. In the summer of 1939, at the age of twenty, Solzhenitsyn made his first journey north to the capital to register at MIFLI. Solzhenitsyn had an additional reason to be pleased at returning to Rostov, unknown to Nikolai. When Solzhenitsyn met Natalia, he had thus found her living in a flat with four middle-aged ladies, three of them maiden aunts.
