The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (42 page)

They can separate a Russian writer from his native land, but no one has the power and strength to sever his spiritual link with it.… And even if his books are now set ablaze on bonfires, their existence in his homeland is indestructible, just as Solzhenitsyn’s love for Russia is indestructible.… My place is beside him, but leaving Russia is excruciatingly painful.
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Natalya felt the pain of deportation more acutely than Solzhenitsyn, who had already moved to Zurich to collect material for his novel about Lenin. (The Bolshevik leader had lived and worked there for several years before the 1917 Revolution.) On March 29,
Natalya with their four children and her mother arrived in Zurich, met by a crowd of reporters and Solzhenitsyn on the tarmac. Allowed to meet her onboard in private, he dived into the plane, where she promptly told him that his archives had been dispatched separately; he emerged, smiling, carrying his two sons.

That spring and summer, when suitcases with Solzhenitsyn’s archive were delivered to their house in Zurich, the couple was jubilant: “It was all here—everything that really mattered, the most priceless things of all! We had saved it all!” The three-story house near downtown where Solzhenitsyn was staying “felt empty and unlived in,” Natalya recalls. “Rooms snowed under with thousands of letters.…”
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They were swamped by mail from around the world, and bags of unopened letters accumulated in the attic. Solzhenitsyn would not hire a secretary and issued a statement, apologizing that he was unable to reply to his numerous correspondents.

Days after Natalya’s arrival, the couple decided to establish the Russian Social Fund to help political prisoners and their families and to support writers and publishers as well. Solzhenitsyn donated his worldwide royalties from
The Gulag Archipelago
to this cause. Natalya became the fund’s president, acquiring a score of new responsibilities of which the most troublesome was transferring aid to the Soviet Union. (This fund could not be registered in their homeland until after the Soviet Union was dismantled. Before 1992, it functioned clandestinely and aid could not reach the victims of Stalin’s gulag.
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The Solzhenitsyns mainly helped dissidents and their families who suffered under Brezhnev. In 1976, when the fund’s political agenda was discovered, the Soviet authorities revoked Natalya’s citizenship.)

Also, within weeks of her arrival, the couple discussed moving to America, where Solzhenitsyn wanted to buy property. There were distractions in Zurich, where fans, reporters, and photographers followed him everywhere. Solzhenitsyn had already quarreled with the press: pursued by reporters while walking in the hills, he bellowed, “Go away! You’re worse than the KGB!”
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The remark was
published by many newspapers and a good relationship with the press was lost, which Solzhenitsyn would later regret.

When Zurich’s mayor, Sigmund Widmer, offered Solzhenitsyn his farmhouse in Sternenberg to work in, he resumed his solitary writing habits. He would spend most of the week in the picturesque village, traveling to Zurich on weekends, in effect maintaining the same schedule as before his deportation. Meantime, Frau Widmer, solicitous of Natalya, took her on hikes in the mountains.

In October, Solzhenitsyn took time from writing to drive with Natalya through Switzerland, visiting Bern, Geneva, Chillon Castle, and Montreux. Upon arrival in the West, he had received a welcoming letter from Vladimir Nabokov, who extended an open invitation to visit him. Solzhenitsyn had admired Nabokov’s talent, having nominated him for the Nobel Prize in 1971. (Nabokov joined the league of prominent writers, including Tolstoy and Chekhov, who did not receive the award.) Proposing a certain day and hour for their meeting, Solzhenitsyn expected Nabokov to confirm, but received no reply. The Nabokovs assumed the date had been settled. At the appointed hour, they waited for their guests in a private dining room at the Montreux Palace Hotel, while the Solzhenitsyns, in the car, argued whether they should go in. Because of the miscommunication, the two famous literary couples never met.

Four years after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn finally collected it in December 1974. (The festivities that followed coincided with his birthday on December 11.) He was the second Russian writer to receive the Prize, after Ivan Bunin, and Natalya, who accompanied him to Stockholm, would later say in an interview that she felt “it was our victory, victory of Russia, victory
of Ivan Denisovich.”

The New Year found them in Paris, where the couple visited the publishing house, YMCA Press, that had produced the works they had been sending from Moscow on microfilm, most notably
The Gulag Archipelago
. They had imagined it as a more conspiratorial place, not a house just anyone could enter. In April, Natalya prevailed on Solzhenitsyn to take another driving trip to France for
the release of his memoir,
The Oak and the Calf
. Afterwards, they spent several days in Italy. At the end of April, Solzhenitsyn took off to Canada, alone. The airplane ticket was purchased under an assumed name, to conceal his intentions to settle in Canada; however, within days of his arrival, Canadian newspapers wrote that Solzhenitsyn was looking to buy land. Solzhenitsyn traveled through Ontario and Quebec to buy a place that looked “Russian.” Father Alexander Shmemann drove him to see places with Russian Orthodox communities and churches. In May, he summons Natalya from Zurich, and she rejected the shortlisted options. Solzhenitsyn wanted to live near a Russian community in Canada or in America, while Natalya preferred to remain in Europe where they would be less isolated.

For lack of time (Natalya was returning to Zurich and Solzhenitsyn had speaking engagements in America), the issue had to be solved by a third party. In October 1975, a Russian émigré architect, Alexei Vinogradov, to whom Solzhenitsyn gave power of attorney, bought a house and fifty acres of land in Cavendish, Vermont. It was a former farm, with the house buried in the woods and concealed from the road. Solzhenitsyn liked the forested property for its remote location, its two ponds and brooks that looked Russian. It resembled Yasnaya Polyana with its ponds and woods. The place was called “Twinbrook,” but Solzhenitsyn renamed it “Five Brooks,” the actual number on the property. He only regretted that there were no meadows or clearings (which would have made it more like Tolstoy’s estate).

The family’s move to America was to be handled clandestinely: when, in March 1976, Natalya applied for U.S. visas, nobody in Zurich or elsewhere knew. On April 2, Solzhenitsyn left Europe for New York, telling his confidant, Father Shmemann, that he had left for good. Shmemann commented in his diary, “Today (of course, secretly from all the rest) Solzhenitsyn moved to America! This country does not leave anybody unchanged.… But will he see America … beyond the trees?”
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In early July, Natalya joined Solzhenitsyn to watch construction of their new house. He lived
in a small cottage by the pond where the noise of construction disturbed him until year’s end. The new three-story house had spacious storage for his library and archive, a private chapel, and a top-floor study with a glass ceiling and numerous windows where he would work in winter. (Solzhenitsyn needed light and quiet to write, Natalya remarked, adding that otherwise he was unpretentious.) A twenty-meter underground tunnel connected the main house with the small cottage where Solzhenitsyn worked in other seasons. At the end of July, the rest of the family arrived in Cavendish.

The Solzhenitsyns’ escape from Zurich came as a shock to the mayor who had welcomed the exiles. They left without saying thanks, and all of Switzerland was offended. Only Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin’s daughter, could understand their conspiracy: “That’s Russian,” she commented.
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But in fact, Solzhenitsyn broke with a tradition of Russian writers, who stood for openness, and with Tolstoy’s and Dostoevskys’ practice of receiving visitors indiscriminately. Visitors to Solzhenitsyn would face a chain-link fence, eight feet high, topped with barbed wire, and a sign on the gate, “No Trespassing.”

Solzhenitsyn shut himself from the Western world with which he was now in conflict. In public appearances he criticized the West’s embrace of socialism, the pleasures of its consumer society, and the lack of spiritual values. He disparaged Roosevelt, compared Britain’s position in the world to that of Uganda, and so on. The West was discovering that the famous dissident was not a democrat: newspapers described him as a “bearded prophet” and anti-capitalist. Solzhenitsyn’s audiences found his heated political rhetoric overwhelming and out of touch. The writer discovered himself isolated and ridiculed by the press, so his decision to live as a recluse was logical. In addition, he wanted to protect his family from American culture.

Writer Lydia Chukovskaya, who had sheltered Solzhenitsyn in the Moscow countryside, had observed him back in 1973–74 working sixteen hours a day, six days a week. His self-imposed
“strictest possible regime” resembled that of a corrective labor camp. “The lesson was intended for heroic shoulders, for a lifetime’s labor with no days off.…”
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His mission in the past was to tell the world about the gulag; after his arrival in the West, Solzhenitsyn was determined to write the true history of the 1917 Revolution and reestablish the facts distorted by the Bolsheviks. Comprising ten volumes, his saga
The Red Wheel
would consume him and Natalya for two decades.

At thirty-eight, Natalya, a city woman, settled on their secluded estate, in “a zone of quiet” where she would remain for eighteen years. Solzhenitsyn could not afford interruptions, so there were few visitors. Getting used to isolation was hard: she had never lived in a place so remote, having to drive ten miles to pick up necessities. Her life was ruled by Solzhenitsyn’s inflexible schedule, which she would try to present to a Russian reporter as satisfying: “It’s very simple. Alexander Isaevich gets up early, at about seven o’clock.… Coffee—and back to work.… We live in a forest … work fourteen hours a day; people might say, it’s a convict’s life, but we are happy.”
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In 1977, Natalya began to produce Solzhenitsyn’s collected works in twenty volumes on an IBM computer, creating what they called a
“samizdat
in exile.” She indexed the works, edited, typeset, and proofread the volumes. In a foreword to his Vermont edition, Solzhenitsyn wrote that she worked with a meticulousness impossible for a regular publishing house.

Natalya, who matched Solzhenitsyn’s tremendous capacity for work, handled another major project. After deciding to create the All-Russian Memoir Library, Solzhenitsyn appealed to émigrés who had fled Russia after the Revolution and during or after the Second World War to send memoirs, photographs, and letters. The couple received thousands of manuscripts, which included testimonies by former inmates of the German concentration camps. Natalya handled this flood of contributions, corresponded with the authors, catalogued the materials, and eventually, in the 1990s, transferred it all to Russia for storage and publication.

In addition, she helped Solzhenitsyn with his research for
The Red Wheel
. The amount of her groundwork for just this sequence could have occupied a research institute. “Entire archives, libraries” cooperated with the author, inundating the couple with mountains of material, which Natalya processed and organized. Solzhenitsyn said her contribution was so great that it was impossible to describe it. Natalya was his editor, and she had replaced his entire audience. Her attention to detail and grammar helped improve his style. She participated in every stage of his writing: “I dare not say which other Russian writer had beside him such a collaborator, such a fine and keen critic and adviser. I have never met in my life a person with such a brilliant editor’s talent as my wife, sent to me indispensably in my seclusion.…”
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In fact, Natalya was the only editor Solzhenitsyn had known, aside from his brief association with
Novy Mir
. He anticipated her suggestions, which she made in the margins of his first proofs; as with a real publishing house, the pages were then brought to Solzhenitsyn. Stepan recalls carrying proofs “from the editor’s station” to the author’s: his mother’s revisions were penciled in red, while Solzhenitsyn’s changes were entered in blue.
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When the printer broke down, Solzhenitsyn missed their scheduled collaboration and was visibly nervous without it.

Such responsibilities consumed most of her day, leaving no time even to read for pleasure. To her Moscow friends, Evgeny Pasternak (Boris Pasternak’s son) and his wife Elena, Natalya wrote that Solzhenitsyn is “of course, the bright center of our life and its purpose.”
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(Evgeny Pasternak was among those who came to see Natalya off at the Moscow airport when she was leaving to join Solzhenitsyn in exile. For this alone, he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute.)

In her diaries, comprising thirty thick notebooks, Natalya recorded Solzhenitsyn’s work progress and his moods. Her style bears the influence of Solzhenitsyn, unsurprising because she was occupied with his works almost exclusively while living in isolation. Her husband never stopped writing: Natalya could not remember
him experiencing a single creative crisis. Even with Solzhenitsyn working outside the house in his cabin, the family had a sense of unremitting deadline. Biographer Michael Scammell, who visited the place in 1977, describes an atmosphere of “purposefulness and order to the entire household, which had the cohesiveness of a kind of informal monastery, each individual working away for the common good—a situation that Solzhenitsyn emphatically approved of and encouraged.”
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By their own example, the couple taught their children how to work. At ten, Ermolai helped his mother typeset a volume of the All-Russian Memoir Library. Preserving their sons’ native tongue was important, and so the couple supplemented private schooling with instruction at home. Solzhenitsyn taught math, physics, and astronomy, while Natalya gave lessons in Russian language and literature (the same division as in the Tolstoy family). The children met their father at a regular time to receive his instruction: “It did not even occur to them that they could knock on his door 30 seconds later.…”
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