The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (44 page)

In 2007, Putin awarded Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work. The only previous recipient of this award was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II. Solzhenitsyn was unwell and stayed home, so Natalya received the award for him at the Kremlin.

On August 3, 2008, just months before his ninetieth birthday, Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure. He was buried in the cemetery of Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, as personally consented to by Patriarch Alexy II five years earlier. Around the world he was remembered as a literary giant who had exposed Stalin’s atrocities and had made a powerful indictment of the communist regime. This achievement will not be overshadowed by his contradictory views and actions of the later years.

In 2009, Putin received Natalya in the Kremlin to discuss teaching
The Gulag Archipelago
in school. Although Putin has made every effort to rehabilitate Stalin, he also surprisingly endorsed this major anti-Stalinist work. Today, Solzhenitsyn’s volumes are available in bookstores, alongside works promoting a positive view of Stalin and his henchmen. How the two views can be reconciled or simultaneously taught in schools defies analysis.

In April 2002, I came to the headquarters of the Russian Social Fund, the very downtown apartment from where Solzhenitsyn was led away by the KGB. I had asked Natalya for an informal talk: I wanted to understand her as a person, not Solzhenitsyn’s spokeswoman. Short in stature, energetic, and attractive, Natalya was wearing a black pantsuit, a white shirt, and a gray necktie. She took me to her study, sat at her desk, and, as she spoke, kept stroking its shiny surface with small confident hands. Natalya is charismatic but likes to speak uninterrupted.

She believes that in Russia women are more dedicated to their families than in the West. They also tend to be more involved in their husbands’ affairs. But truly dedicated writers’ wives are rare, even in Russia. Her predecessors did not influence her decision to abandon her career as a mathematician and partake in Solzhenitsyn’s work. She has never regretted her choice and believes her assistance to Solzhenitsyn more important than obtaining a doctorate in mathematics. She then turned to Tolstoy’s marriage, which she knew intimately. She disapproved of Sophia for not following Tolstoy on his spiritual path and for her disagreements with him when he renounced property: “She should have followed him and lived in a hut, as he had asked.” If Sophia loved Tolstoy, she had to go along; if she stopped loving him, “she had to step aside.” It was unreasonable to expect Tolstoy to participate in their children’s upbringing. Solzhenitsyn, for example, was able to give one hour a day to the children. Natalya continued her argument with Sophia, drawing a parallel between Tolstoy’s renunciation of copyright and Solzhenitsyn’s decision to give up profits from
The Gulag Archipelago
, which she supported.

She dislikes the word “sacrifice” and substitutes “love” for it. Nadezhda Mandelstam did not make a sacrifice: she loved the poet. “They were together and she [Nadezhda] believed they should die together.” (Natalya, of course, was also prepared to die for Solzhenitsyn’s cause.)

As I left, Natalya said Russia was going through difficult times, and the role of the writer in society had changed. The question
that concerned her was whether the new generation would read Solzhenitsyn. She gave me a three-volume collection of his non-fiction, published in Russia for the first time and which she had annotated and edited.
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Natalya’s portrait remains unfinished because she continues to work. In recent years, she was occupied with a project she had started with Solzhenitsyn, issuing his thirty-volume edition of collected works. Today, Natalya wields considerable influence and has become Russia’s most powerful literary widow. Over time, the complete picture of her literary marriage will emerge.

Epilogue

D
espite investing themselves in greater talents, the six wives in this book made their own mark as publishers, translators, and editors. Their collaboration with writers made them prominent in their day. But their roles beside the geniuses were extraordinarily difficult. The problems they handled—shielding writers from practical concerns, balancing their moods, and dealing with their oversized egos—made them stronger and more resilient.

Such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. William Wordsworth relied on his family—his sister, his wife, and his sister-in-law—to copy out his manuscripts. Thomas Carlyle also wanted his wife to assist him, but according to Rosemary Ashton, the author of
Thomas and Jane Carlyle
, Jane “became increasingly bitter and resentful of this role, though obviously it hugely helped her husband.” In Russian literary marriages, the women did not resent taking a secondary position and, in fact, viewed their collaboration as rewarding.

These women played important and powerful roles as the writers’ intellectual companions, confidantes, and creative partners. In their widowhood, they carried on as before, translating and promoting
their husbands’ works, establishing their museums, and helping biographers. This book should change a popular perception of such lives as miserable, lonely, and unfulfilled.

While Russia’s most celebrated literary couples are portrayed in this book, readers should know about other literary wives who made contributions to Russian letters. I want to mention at least two of them here.

Klavdia Bugaev was a muse and collaborator of the prominent twentieth-century writer and poet Andrei Bely. (In 1933, the couple met the Mandelstams in the Crimea, but never became friends.) Much like Elena Bulgakov, Klavdia left her comfortable first marriage (her husband was a medical doctor) to join a writer who was barely published after the Revolution. In 1931, Klavdia was arrested as a prominent member of the Anthroposophical Society, which promoted spiritual philosophy and was banned under Stalin. Bely wrote in desperation to theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold: “Klavdia Nikolaevna is more than my life—but 1,000 lives.”
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Later that year, Klavdia was released from Lubyanka prison due to Meyerhold’s efforts. Soon after, she and Bely officially married, which was only a few years before his death in 1934. A professional librarian, Klavdia spent the following three decades cataloguing Bely’s archive and writing a memoir, which essentially was a survey of the writer’s life and works. She analyzed Bely’s innovative vocabulary, conducting this selfless work without financial help: Bely was an apolitical writer and of no value to the Soviet state. Bely’s diary and letters, of which she made a copy, survive because of her efforts. Paralyzed and bedridden during her last seventeen years, she remained the only reliable source for Bely scholars across the world. Her reminiscences were published posthumously in America in 1981; two decades later, they appeared in Russia.

The wife of Ivan Bunin, Vera Muromtseva, had studied chemistry at the Moscow University. She was also passionately interested in literature and met Bunin at a literary evening in 1906. Vera left university to join the writer on his travels to Palestine, Egypt, and Europe. After the 1917 Revolution, the couple emigrated to France,
where Vera kept a diary chronicling Bunin’s life. His companion of forty-six years, she also collected Bunin’s archive and wrote his biography. Fluent in four European languages, she published her translations, but to the émigré community she was memorable for her dedication to the writer. Prominent twentieth-century poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who had met the couple in France and corresponded with Vera, remarked that Bunin was indebted to her for his literary achievement. “Her unconditional love, dedication, and selflessness gave the world another classic of Russian literature. I’m confident that Ivan Bunin would not have achieved what he had without his Vera.”
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Throughout its history, Russia’s writers were the main opposition to repressive regimes. Their struggle for freedom was important and inspiring; some were prepared to die for their work, which put greater value on genuine literature. Russian literary wives had helped these works emerge and had ensured their survival and, by doing so, made lasting cultural contributions to the world.

Anna in 1871, four years into her marriage with Dostoevsky.

Anna with her grandsons, Fyodor’s boys. She did not like her photographs, except this one, made in 1912, at age sixty-six. “I consider my life to have been one of exceptional happiness, and I would not wish to change anything in it.”
Photos courtesy the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
.

The Tolstoys in 1884, the year Sophia bore their twelfth child, Alexandra. Tolstoy has already made his material renunciations, leaving her responsible for the family’s well-being.
Photo courtesy the L.N. Tolstoy State Museum
.

The Tolstoys in 1908, when the writer’s 80th birthday was widely celebrated. “I cannot surrender my love of your artistic work,” Sophia wrote him earlier.
Photo courtesy the L.N. Tolstoy State Museum
.