A Tale of Two Komsomol Girls: Solzhenitsyn’s “Nastenka”

Nastenka is a short story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (better known for The Gulag Archipelago) about two girls who grow up in the Soviet Union. This is a story about loss — not of people or things, but of innocence and ideals.

The story is split into two parts. The first is about a peasant girl named Nastenka. The second is about a middle-class girl named Nastenka who wants to teach literature. The girls never interact, but Solzhenitsyn juxtaposes their stories to show the effect of Soviet culture on their spirits.

[Quick Aside]

It’d be ironic to distinguish these women by numbers, so I’ll call the first, “Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter)” and the second, “Nastenka (scholar’s daughter).” Before the feminists come at me for identifying the women by their male guardians, this is the most succinct way to remember the more colorful worlds the Nastenkas inhabit before Soviet service greys their individuality.

Young and Innocent

Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter) grows up in the Russian countryside. She’s headstrong and independent, but devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church her grandfather, Father Filaret, raises her in. Although she has no trouble defending herself from school bullies, she cherishes a respect for authority. Nastenka is motivated by two things — her childlike faith, and her conviction to do what’s right.

Nastenka (scholar’s daughter) loves to read, attends a classical high school, and goes to university — a very different material life than Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter). The narrator comments that,

“Nastenka had not yet developed a crush on any boy, but how she loved everything that was literature! It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her” (92).

Literature is both the fuel for and expression of her ideals, her love of beauty, and her hope that the world will live up to its potential. She’s motivated by her desire to know and embody the goodness she finds in the classics she loves.

Betrayed and Broken

Both Nastenkas’ lives change when they join the Komsomols — the Soviet youth league — in their teens. As a farewell to her childhood, Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter) “took with her a little paper icon of the Savior, ‘Persevere and Pray.’ She hid it in an envelope and then put it inside a notebook: it was a bad idea to let anyone see it there” (77). But she works hard and is initially undisturbed when her overseer’s bedroom attaches to hers because “he was a grown-up and her master” (80).

Her trust is violently betrayed by him, and by the other Soviet official she confides in. “So, is this how it happens?” she thinks after his first trespass (80).

In college, Nastenka (scholar’s daughter) learns she shouldn’t enjoy literature for the sake of the goodness and truth written into the stories. She can’t even enjoy the art for beauty’s sake. “Literature, though, isn’t some object of enjoyment, it’s a battlefield,” a comrade tells her (96). Ideals are just upper-class propaganda. And her world becomes a shade greyer.

But Nastenka (scholar’s daughter) resists. She refuses to believe that love is just “a favor, as a comrade and a Komsomol girl” (102). But after her father dies and a boy breaks her heart, she weakens. She gradually surrenders to the belief that the only way to improve the world is through Communism and that nonpolitical ideals are simply girlish dreams.

Disillusioned: ‘I guess this is the real world’

Her faith shattered, Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter) spirals. She tries to swear off men, but fails because “so hungry had she become for loving” (88). After a series of abortions, she is unable to conceive anymore — internally dead to life. Her story ends as she joins the Moscow Industrial Academy and her happiness is that it has refrigeration and good food. Nastenka (priest’s granddaughter) transforms from a devout, unassuming girl to a depressed, promiscuous woman desperate for security in a world full of abuse.

As planned, Nastenka (scholar’s daughter) becomes a teacher. She once longed to instill in her students her love of literature, but her Soviet education has disoriented her. “How were you to lead the children toward a better time while preserving unspoiled their sense of the Pure and Beautiful?” (106). She’s torn between her intuition that life without ideals is meaningless, and her desire to prepare the children for “the real world” where it seems ideals can’t survive. She turns to propaganda as a cheap substitute for inspiration and gives her students poetry about streets filled with blood to usher in a new order (112). And so the woman who dreamed of teaching about Dostoevsky’s insights into the human soul is “frightened to talk about an author or a book without providing some class basis for them” (111).

Final thoughts

Nastenka isn’t written with the existential intensity of other Russian stories I’ve read. There are no moving scenes of prostitutes redeeming murderers and playboys redirecting their passion towards their own sanctification. This is the kind of story that any modern American can see on the streets or in the humanities department of the local college. It’s the story of young women who grow up with a desire to do what’s right and to love beauty and goodness, but who are betrayed by those who take their ideals for innocence. And so this is a story that may hurt your heart.