Book Review
A Dual Estrangement
Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Notre Dame Press, 2018
(470 pages, $35.00, hardcover)
reviewed by James A. Altena
Between Two Millstones is Part I of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's memoirs of his years of American exile. (Parts II–IV are to follow shortly in a second volume.) It thus forms a sequel to the author's previous memoirs of his final years in the Soviet Union (The Oak and the Calf and Invisible Allies). The title (drawn from a passage on page 264) captures the overarching theme of the book: Solzhenitsyn's struggle to avoid being ground down between the soulless totalitarian regime of the USSR, from which he had just been forcibly deported, and the unexpectedly secular, materialist West into which he found himself cast, spiritually dead in its own quite different way.
Trials & Tribulations
The main text—accompanied by a prefatory publisher's note, a foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney, footnotes, an index of selected names (most useful), and a general index—is divided into five chapters. The first, "Untethered," covers Solzhenitsyn's initial landing in Germany and his immediate relocation to Zurich in Switzerland for the next two years, with all the attendant chaos and difficulties. His wife Natalya ("Alya") and three young sons needed to obtain exit visas to follow him. His papers (miraculously not seized by the KGB) had to be smuggled out by means of various Western diplomats. A residence and other basic necessities had to be established in a strange land with a foreign tongue, in conditions that would permit him to resume writing. A constant inundation of requirements, demands, and requests from all around the globe had to be dealt with, including vitriolic disputes within the various, badly fractured Russian émigré communities.
Two difficulties were especially burdensome. The first was incessant harassment by a Western news media eager for sensationalist exploitation rather than truth, which over the next several years would fabricate imaginary interviews and false quotations by which to exploit and malign Solzhenitsyn. Having an idealized conception of the Western press as free champions of objectivity and truth, Solzhenitsyn was unprepared for its self-interested and disingenuous tactics, and never really learned how to deal with it. Second were the ever-present threats of surveillance, harassment, and possible assassination attempts by the KGB (the latter actually planned but fortuitously thwarted). This began almost immediately when Solzhenitsyn accepted an offer of help for several months from the Holubs, a couple that ostensibly had fled communist Czechoslovakia during the 1968 "Prague Spring." Only later would he learn that they were secret agents of the Czech government, feeding information on him to the KGB.
The second chapter, "Predators and Dupes," details Solzhenitsyn's increasingly frustrated attempts to deal with Western translators and publishers of his works. Here again he initially was naïvely trusting, comprehending neither the profit motives of publishers nor the tangle of legal provisions accompanying copyrights, royalties, and other issues. To compound matters, many translations into several languages were badly done.
Worst of all was the deviancy of Olga Carlisle (née Andreev), who maneuvered to obtain legal control of and to sign away rights to the English translations, while also drafting contracts on Solzhenitsyn's behalf that ensured generous fees for herself and her husband Henry. Olga and Henry also mangled translations of In the First Circle and the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and then delayed the publication of the latter work in English by holding hostage the sole copy of the Russian manuscript. (Olga later published her own anti-Solzhenitsyn memoir about these matters.) Meanwhile, the leftist tabloid Stern used the threat of a lawsuit to delay the appearance of a German translation of August 1914.
Inadvertently adding to the problems was Solzhenitsyn's Swiss attorney, Fritz Heeb. Although Heeb is saluted in Invisible Allies as one of the "three pillars" who protected Solzhenitsyn's interests in the West during the latter's final years in the USSR, his lack of expertise in publishing matters created serious legal and financial difficulties for the author that other, more experienced lawyers later had to resolve.
The remaining thee chapters can be summarized more briefly. "Another Year Adrift" chronicles the decision to leave Switzerland and settle in North America. Canada was rejected after a cursory inspection, and the choice eventually settled on the small town of Cavendish, Vermont. This was also a period of many frustrating interruptions to Solzhenitsyn's work.
"At Five Brooks" details the settling in of the Solzhenitsyn family in their new home; the author's research in the archives of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which profoundly altered the shape and content of the four-volume epic The Red Wheel; the creation of the Russian Social Fund to funnel aid to Soviet dissidents (bankrolled by royalties from The Gulag Archipelago, resulting in complex tax entanglements with the Swiss government); an unexpected lengthy attack in print on Solzhenitsyn by Vladimir Lakshin (with Solzhenitsyn's description of the three "waves" of Russian emigrants to the West and their respective political characteristics); and finally the famed 1978 Harvard commencement address and its fallout.
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
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