The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (40 page)

The situation with Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
repeated itself when, in November 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers’ Union for publishing his works abroad. He rushed to share the news of his purge with Natalya, but she was away on a skiing trip. When she returned from the Caucasus, he came to consult her about tactics. Her advice was laconic: “We’ve got to hit back!” It matched his determination to launch a counter-battle. In fact, Solzhenitsyn had already written an open letter to the Party and the Writers’ Union; he wanted to show it to Natalya before releasing it. Unintimidated by the expulsion, Solzhenitsyn attacked the government head-on. Alluding to Pasternak’s harassment a decade earlier, he told Soviet rulers to reset their clocks and open their heavy curtains to see the world outside. In addition, he demanded abolition of censorship, a major societal ill, and “full
glasnost
.”
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Solzhenitsyn’s letter stunned his opponents in the Party and the Writers’ Union. But it also made the liberal magazine
Novy Mir
, which had published and defended him, a convenient target. Tvardovsky was appalled when he received a copy of the letter and
angry that Solzhenitsyn had not even warned him. From then on, the authorities waited for a suitable moment to take revenge on the magazine. Within a year,
Novy Mir’s
senior staff was dismissed on Party orders and Tvardovsky was forced to resign; having lost his magazine, the editor had a stroke and died in 1971.

Solzhenitsyn was burning his bridges. He considered emigrating and had discussed it with Natalya, which generated their first argument. “Alya thought that everyone should live and die in his homeland whatever turn things took, and I thought, camp fashion, let those who are stupid enough die; I’d sooner live to see my work published.”
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Fighting “a Goliath,” or the Communist state, was better from abroad, where his works would appear uncensored.
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Soviet authorities believed Solzhenitsyn’s exile would diminish his harm, so calls to expel him became more frequent. Attempts to intimidate him produced an outpouring of sympathy from abroad: Western writers, such as Arthur Miller, Alberto Moravia, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Elsa Triolet sent letters in his support to the Soviet government.

In the fall of 1969, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich sheltered Solzhenitsyn at his dacha in Zhukovka, where authorities would not dare touch him. Ironically, at the height of the campaign against him, Solzhenitsyn found himself in a privileged settlement with government dachas. From there he would travel to Moscow to see Natalya and drop off subversive chapters of his new revolutionary sequence
The Red Wheel
.

Around this time, Solzhenitsyn visited her to deliver the Lenin chapters from this work, which were as “incriminating” as
The Gulag Archipelago
. He left the manuscript with her despite knowing he was being trailed: he spotted several KGB agents from the window of Natalya’s apartment. As he would later explain, his desire to return to work at the dacha without wasting time was responsible for this failure of conspiratorial tactics. Back at the dacha, he realized his mistake and lived through “the torments” of having his archive confiscated. “Consumed with apprehension,” and envisioning the worst, he rushed back to Moscow, but the would-be “disaster” did
not strike this time. (In 1965, the KGB seized Solzhenitsyn’s archive from his friend, Veniamin Teush.) Despite his and Natalya’s desire to have a child, both were more concerned about his archive than their own safety.

In summer 1970, Natalya gave Solzhenitsyn the news he was waiting for: she was pregnant. Although Natalya said she was prepared to raise their child alone, he immediately wrote Reshetovskaya, revealing the seriousness of their relationship. “I truly
wanted
a child for my old age,
wanted
to have my extension on earth.”
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The admission embittered Reshetovskaya. She would not grant Solzhenitsyn a divorce at a time when he had risen to the top, she told her family. In early October, after the announcement of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize, Reshetovskaya arrived at Rostropovich’s dacha, where days later she took an overdose of sleeping pills. But her attempted suicide was discovered, and she was taken to the hospital and saved.

When Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize, Natalya felt “absolute elation, triumph, joy for him and for all of us.” There was also her despair because both realized that if Solzhenitsyn were to collect the Prize in Stockholm, Soviet authorities could refuse his reentry. Nonetheless, when he discussed it with Natalya, she said he ought to go. Later recalling her difficult choice, she would remark, “Our marriage was not registered; I was pregnant with Ermolai, our firstborn.… He clearly had to go, but they would definitely refuse to let him back. This would mean separation forever.”
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The Soviet authorities had already considered revoking Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and even drafted such a resolution. In November, the writer decided against traveling to Stockholm and proposed that the Academy give him his diploma and medal in Moscow.

On December 10, Natalya was invited to Rostropovich’s dacha to celebrate two events—the Prize and Solzhenitsyn’s fifty-second birthday. Despite her capacity for stress, the tension of the past year was beginning to show. On December 30, she gave birth to Ermolai six weeks prematurely. Solzhenitsyn sent her an ecstatic letter to the hospital, calling the birth “a great event.” He wrote in his diary that while he had several novels, this was his first son!
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Friends
heard him say he had never been so happy, a significant admission for an obsessive writer.

Rostropovich’s wife, opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who had observed Solzhenitsyn at her dacha, remarked that he “lived only to write.” Getting up before everyone else, he would work at a wooden table outside, so the first thing she would see “was Solzhenitsyn pacing off the kilometers like a tiger—walking alongside the fence, back and forth. Then he would go to the table quickly and write.… One felt that his ideas obsessed him, and pulsed feverishly within.…”
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Rostropovich was asked to be Ermolai’s godfather. During a lunch after the christening, Vishnevskaya had a good look at Natalya, “a strong woman and the personification of a good wife and mother.… I realized that such a woman would follow him [Solzhenitsyn] into the fire without thinking twice.”
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The christening was celebrated at Natalya’s new downtown apartment on central Gorky Street.
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(Three years later, Solzhenitsyn would be led away by the KGB from this apartment.) Natalya had acquired the flat through a clever exchange in the fall of 1970. Soon after, the house manager received a call from the Politburo, requiring him to find adjoining quarters for the KGB so they could conduct surveillance over the inhabitants. Natalya and Solzhenitsyn knew that their conversations were being recorded around the clock.

Her flat became headquarters of the Solzhenitsyn conspiracy: here his manuscripts were photographed for smuggling abroad. In 1971, the couple decided to make another copy of
The Gulag Archipelago
with his latest revisions and Natalya asked her friend Valery Kurdyumov, a physicist, to microfilm the updated version. Kurdyumov, whose father was a former gulag prisoner, did not refuse to come to her apartment, despite knowing the risk. Microfilming could have been performed elsewhere, but Natalya wanted him to photograph all versions of this extensive novel and even raw drafts. Kurdyumov brought his equipment to her apartment, where for three days and nights he photographed the manuscripts and developed the film. It was to be deposited in Zurich with
Solzhenitsyn’s lawyer, Dr. Fritz Heeb, retained through Natalya’s efforts. Kurdyumov would pay a high price with his career. Upon Solzhenitsyn’s deportation in 1974, he was interrogated by the KGB in the Lubyanka headquarters and threatened with dismissal from the high-security Radio-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. (Other people who had helped Solzhenitsyn also would later be interrogated, threatened with arrest, and beaten, and would lose their jobs. Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya were restricted from performing and had to leave the Soviet Union in 1974.)

Natalya was instrumental in arranging a steady circle of allies with channels to the West, through which Solzhenitsyn would also send his novel
August 1914
. It was delivered to his Paris publisher, Nikita Struve, with a traveler, an unsuspecting French policeman, who thought he was taking “a big box of candy for a sick nun.”

In August 1971, while collecting material for
The Red Wheel
in Novocherkassk, southern Russia, Solzhenitsyn was trailed closely by the KGB and injected with a poisonous substance. Although he had not been exposed to the sun, he developed enormous blisters, typical of a second-degree burn, that spread over the entire left side of his body. Within hours he was incapacitated. Back at Rostropovich’s dacha, doctors diagnosed him with a massive allergy caused by a highly toxic substance. Still, the cause of his illness remained a mystery until 1992, when a retired KGB colonel, Boris Ivanov, published his account of their failed attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn. He described how they tracked Solzhenitsyn in Novocherkassk: one agent followed him on foot through the city, communicating with the rest through a radio transmitter. When Solzhenitsyn entered a crowded grocery store, several agents followed him there. They almost pressed against him while he stood in line and, apparently, it was then that the poisonous substance was injected. Their entire “operation” lasted three minutes. When the KGB agents left the store, Ivanov, who was waiting outside, heard them say, “Now he is done for. It won’t take long.” In 1994, Ivanov gave Solzhenitsyn a note with names of the other participants.
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While Solzhenitsyn was bedridden, Natalya came to the dacha to
care for him. He was only able to resume writing five months later, the only such interruption in his career.

There was also a setback with Solzhenitsyn’s divorce that year: the court granted his wife a six-month adjournment. The authorities supported Reshetovskaya, making the divorce a political affair that would drag on for another year; however, Solzhenitsyn became only more determined to end his marriage. Without being legally married, Natalya would have no visiting rights in the event of his arrest; and if he were deported, she and their son could not follow. In winter 1972, Solzhenitsyn was alerted to a new assassination plan; surprisingly, the information came from a government source, the daughter of the minister of Internal Affairs. Rostropovich’s neighbor at the dacha, she told Solzhenitsyn that the KGB was planning to kill him in a car crash. The Internal Affairs minister wanted to prevent this from happening, having advised his government colleagues that Solzhenitsyn’s harassment was undermining the country’s international prestige. Instead, he suggested treating Solzhenitsyn kindly—“Don’t kill the enemy, smother him with a hug”—but his shrewd letter was ignored.
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In February, German writer Heinrich Böll, dedicated to human-rights activism, came to Moscow with the goal of meeting Solzhenitsyn. The authorities were unable to prevent the meeting, and it took place on February 20 at Natalya’s apartment. Solzhenitsyn’s friend, writer Lev Kopelev, fluent in German, translated. Because conversations were bugged, they discussed serious matters in writing, immediately destroying the notes. Solzhenitsyn asked Böll to witness his will, which made Natalya his literary heir and executor, and to deliver the document to his lawyer in Zurich. This was important to Solzhenitsyn, because Natalya was still not legally his wife and he wanted her to manage his literary inheritance. In his turn, Böll advised Solzhenitsyn not to respond to every hostile article in the Soviet press: his books were read around the world, and history would put things right.
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On March 30, Natalya welcomed journalists Robert Kaiser from
The Washington Post
and Hedrick Smith from
The New York Times
.
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They had come to interview Solzhenitsyn before President Nixon’s arrival in Moscow in May. The president would sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, but Solzhenitsyn’s interview would be at odds with Nixon’s conciliatory mission. The interview turned into a stressful four-hour ordeal for everyone involved. As the KGB reported, “Solzhenitsyn’s mistress warned the correspondents that someone might well be eavesdropping on them, in view of which the rest of the exchange was largely carried out by writing notes.”
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In addition, Solzhenitsyn produced a 25-page typescript, containing questions and answers he had composed in advance. He insisted that it be published in full, to which the journalists, of course, could not agree. Natalya eased the tension with humor and helped achieve a compromise. Solzhenitsyn agreed to take a few live questions, Kaiser remembers, but discussed his answers with Natalya first: “She offered extensive advice, some of which he accepted. The sport of it seemed to please him, though he was obviously nervous about a situation he could not fully control.”
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Soon the KGB reported another major development: Natalya was preparing to host a reception for the Nobel Prize ceremony in Moscow. However, on April 9, the authorities denied an entry visa to Nobel Foundation Secretary Karl Gierow. After the plan for the ceremony was dropped, Solzhenitsyn wanted to pass a microfilm with his Nobel speech to Sweden. The couple expected that a Swedish journalist, Stig Fredrikson, would agree to take it through the border. Natalya accompanied Solzhenitsyn to the meeting with Fredrikson, who arrived with his wife Ingrid. Both women were pregnant, which, Solzhenitsyn believed, was a good omen for the fruition of his plans. Fredrikson received the roll of film in a dark courtyard and smuggled it inside his transistor radio.

In June 1972, Natalya was in her final months of carrying their second child when she learned of yet another postponement in Solzhenitsyn’s divorce. Vishnevskaya recalls that despite her difficult pregnancy, Natalya was handling the situation coolly: “With circles under her eyes and pains in her belly, she said, ‘But why all
this fuss? I’ve told him [Solzhenitsyn] already that we can just go on the way we are. I don’t need anything.…’”
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