Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the most important political novelist of the twentieth century,
died on August 3, 2008, at the age of eighty-nine. A couple of weeks after his
burial, at the Donskoi Monastery, in Moscow, the Russian government ordered
that Ulitsa Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya—Big Communist Street—be renamed in his
honor. A sly, even cynical gesture, considering Vladimir Putin’s early career.
On the same street, a plaque describing the bare outlines of Solzhenitsyn’s
achievement was placed next to a McDonald’s.
The
writer’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyn, bears these ironies of history with wry
patience. Last week, she came to BookExpo America, at the Javits Center, to describe
a far more important memorial project––the ongoing development of a proper
archive containing everything from Solzhenitsyn’s childhood crucifix to
thousands of manuscript pages written in his hand, including a complete
manuscript of “The Gulag Archipelago” that friends kept buried for twenty years
in the Estonian countryside, out of the reach of the K.G.B.
During
their thirty-five years of marriage, Natalia Dmitriyevna served as her
husband’s first reader, editor, assistant, cook, driver, researcher, and
(because Solzhenitsyn was a kind of literary monk) conduit to the earthly realm
of agents, publishers, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. She also raised
three sons because, she said jokingly, “the way Aleksandr Isayevich saw it,
they would just grow up on their own.”
At
seventy-two, Natalia Dmitriyevna is a handsome woman with high cheekbones,
intense, intelligent eyes, and wintry, swept-back hair. As thousands of
conventioneers wheeled around the vast hall, she showed slides of some of the
exhibits being collected in the archive. Solzhenitsyn trained as a
mathematician, and his mind ran to the systematic: he was a man of files,
boxes, catalogues, labelled envelopes. And because he had suffered years in
prison and internal exile, writing under the constant surveillance and
harassment of the K.G.B., his gift for scrupulous, almost fanatical
organization was a matter of survival––both for him and for his work.
Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archive of
handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives, if
they dare.)
Natalia
Dmitriyevna described just a few items in the archive: A childhood manuscript
on which Solzhenitsyn had written “Volume One of the Collected Works.” His I.D.
card for the Soviet Army. An unfinished novella called “Love the Revolution!,”
written while he was in prison. His padded jacket from the Gulag. A rosary that
he used to help him memorize poems. An official document issued after his
imprisonment, saying that his sentence had been overturned “for lack of
evidence of a crime.” A typescript of the novel “In the First Circle.” Work
over forty years on an expansion of the Russian dictionary. A book of poems
from Anna Akhmatova, inscribed, in 1962, “To A. Solzhenitsyn, In the days of
his glory.” His 1970 Nobel Prize medal, which he was unable to collect until
four years later, when the Kremlin forced him onto a plane to Germany and into
exile.
Natalia
Dmitriyevna lived her life with Solzhenitsyn as if in a foxhole: the foxhole of
persecution in Moscow, and the foxhole of isolation and common purpose in the
United States. During their years in America, 1976 to 1994, in the remote town
of Cavendish, Vermont, she learned English. Through her sons––Yermolai, Ignat,
and Stephan––she learned a little about the Red Sox and about rock and roll. It
is fair to say that her husband did not. In eighteen years, he barely left the
property. He worked. And she worked alongside him, an integral part of his
creative process. All the while, Solzhenitsyn believed that the Soviet Union
would collapse and that he would return home.
“In
1979, when the Soviet war in Afghanistan began, some of our friends in Moscow
and St. Petersburg were arrested and a new darkness descended in the Soviet
Union,” Natalia Dmitriyevna said. “Even then, Aleksandr Isayevich would say,
apologetically, even as we were discussing where he would be buried in the
West, ‘You are right: I can see no fact that supports any notion of my
returning home. And yet, while I’m not trying to be prophetic, I also know that
I will return. I see it.’ ” In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, and spent
his last years in a house in the woods outside Moscow. He worked until the
final days of his life.
“There
are two facts of my new life,” his widow said. “On the one hand, when I’m
working with these texts, when I am reading words written in his hand, I feel
that I am with him. That life seems to continue. But even now I have a physical
sense of grief, of loss, that can be set off by the most banal thing. The sight
of his toothbrush, say, triggers this intensely painful feeling. And yet I live
mainly in this happy circumstance, the sense of being with my husband until the
end of my days.” ♦
Publicado
en The New Yorker, 18/06/2012
Imagen:
Natalia Dmitriyevna
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