Synopsis
After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy.
Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe, circulated in samizdat, and "exported" via illicit channels. These imperiled conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of the regime that brought terror to every part of their lives. The circle included scholars and fellow writers and artists, but also such unlikely operatives as an elderly babushka who picked up and delivered manuscripts in her shopping bag.
With tenderness, respect, and humor, Solzhenitsyn tells us of the fates of these partners in intrigue: the women who typed distribution copies of his works late into the night under the noses of prying neighbors; the correspondents and diplomats who covertly carried the microfilmed texts across borders; the farflung friends who hid various drafts of Solzhenitsyn's works anywhere they could - under an apple tree, beneath the bathtub, in a mathematics professor's loft with her canoe.
In this group of deftly drawn portraits, Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the anonymous heroes who evaded the KGB to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his many other works to the world.
Reviews
Their number grew to more than 100; they had code names such as the Queen, Dandelion, the Badger, these invisible allies who formed Solzhenitsyn's secret channel in the U.S.S.R. before he was expelled. They made copies of his manuscripts, microfilmed and helped hide them, distributed them through samizdat and performed other services. They were courageous, if not always cautious, as when Elizaveta Denisovna preserved a manuscript copy Solzhenitsyn wanted destroyed, was interrogated by the KGB, then either was killed or committed suicide. In The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn's 1980 memoir of his underground life, she was identified as Q. Now, without endangering lives, he reveals these allies. Prominent among them is Elena Chukovskaya, granddaughter of famed children's writer Kornie Chukovsky, who for the first part of this book is the unnamed half of the pair Solzhenitsyn refers to as "we." Then, in 1969, the inner circle expanded to include Natalya Svetlova, Alya, who would become Solzhenitsyn's wife (and whose former husband would join the brigade of invisible allies along with other such surprising folk as a nun in the French embassy in Moscow). This memoir was written at the same time as Oak; it formed the subplot of that book, but it is really the plot. The Solzhenitsyn met here is less bombastic than his reputation. He may describe himself as a "wilful old bear," but the streak of sentimentality running through these pages as he recreates the excruciating stresses of his conspiratorial life is humanizing. 30,000 first printing.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Solzhenitsyn's best-known works, including the Gulag Archipelago (LJ 8/74), were written in secret, circulated only as underground typescripts (samizdat), and eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union for publication in the West. This current work details how all that occurred and thanks the more than 100 individuals who typed manuscripts, microfilmed them, stored copies, and transported them. Although it was written at the same time as the autobiographical Oak and the Calf (LJ 5/1/80), in 1974 at the beginning of Solzhenitsyn's exile in Switzerland (and later the United States), publication was delayed to protect those still in Russia (whose real names are used throughout) and those Western journalists and diplomats who helped carry material out of the country. The manuscript was not updated after 1974 to record how those people fared after Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union. The book will be of interest to specialized collections.?Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Written immediately after his expulsion from the USSR in 1974, these essays reveal how Solzhenitsyn concealed his works from the "Unsleeping Eye," state security. Because flouting the KGB was so dangerous, and within these pages encounters with that agency result in at least one death and an assassination attempt against the author himself, safety compelled Solzhenitsyn to conceal this material until Communism fell. In style, they are literary descriptions of extraordinary, ordinary people, whose hitherto anonymous support and loyalty the author must now herald. As typists, researchers, or samizdat conduits for his manuscripts, they receive the full-blooded, individualized portraits readers expect from a Nobelist's pen, and none is stronger, or more full of pathos, than his memorial to Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya. The simple woman wrote a fan letter that touched Solzhenitsyn; he entrusted her to type The Gulag Archipelago. The KGB, relentless in trying to suppress the anti-Stalinist expose, seized a copy and either drove her to suicide or murdered her: in tribute the author plays Mozart's Requiem on the fatal anniversary. Regarding others, Solzhenitsyn remembers the Estonians who sheltered him while he wrote Gulag, the woman who coordinated his underground network, a housekeeper in the French embassy who spirited his writings to the West, plus dozens of lesser but still crucial helpers. An inspiriting recollection of Solzhenitzyn's steadfast resistance and the trustful companionship that sustained it. Gilbert Taylor
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