A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky,
occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain.
I stand under an apple tree in blossom and I breathe.
Not only the apple tree but the grass round it glistens
with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance
that pervades the air. I inhale as deeply as I can, and the
aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open,
I breathe with my eyes closed-I cannot say which gives me
the greater pleasure.
This, I believe, is the single most precious freedom that
prison takes away from us; the freedom to breathe freely
as I now can. No food on earth, no wine, not even a woman's kiss
is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance of flowers,
of moisture and freshness.
No matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-story
houses like cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backing
radios whining, the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh
air to breathe under an apple tree after a shower, we may survive a little
longer.
About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(b. Dec. 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia [U.S.S.R.]), Russian novelist and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1970 and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother (his father was killed in an accident before his birth). He attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics, and took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. He fought in World War II, achieving the rank of captain of artillery; in 1945, however, he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was officially restored in 1990. He ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. Excerpted from the 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.