Solzhenitsyn’s own private life was about to undergo major changes during the coming year. To one who listened as attentively to his conscience as he did, they were to cause pain, introspection, and guilt before resolving themselves in a way which was certainly best for him, though arguably not so for Natalya Reshetovskaya.
On August 26, 1968, he met a twenty-eight-year-old mathematician working for her doctorate, called Natalya Svetlova. He was immediately taken with this “intense young woman, her dark hair swept forward above her hazel eyes! No trace of affectation in her manner of dress.”22 He would soon discover that she thought with electronic rapidity and shared his views on Soviet society. She was to become a highly efficient helper in his struggles with authority.
Alya, as Svetlova liked to be called, was born in Moscow in 1939. Like so many others, she was raised in the shadow of the Gulag. Her maternal grandfather had been arrested the year before her birth and subsequently perished in the camps. Her father had been killed at the front in December 1941. In 1956, she finished high school in Moscow with a gold medal for outstanding academic achievement. (According to Ignat Solzhenitsyn, this was the equivalent of receiving straight As or 5s throughout the ten years of her schooling.)23 Feeling herself drawn toward history and literature but disgusted by the ideological censorship then omnipresent in the humanities, she decided to enroll in the famous mekhmat, the “mechanic-mathematics” department of Moscow University, where she studied under Professor Kolmogorov. After graduating, she was invited to work in his laboratory of mathematical statistics.
While still at school, and then during her years at university, Alya was active at several sports. She twice won the USSR rowing championship and later took a vigorous interest in mountain climbing, river expeditions, and serious rock climbing. At university, she married an algebra student at the mekhmat, Andrei Tyurin, and in 1962, their son, Dimitri, was born. In 1964, Alya and Tyurin divorced, although a warm relationship with him, and later with his second family, would be maintained.
When Alya first met Solzhenitsyn, she had already been an active participant in the social and cultural life of Moscow for several years and was acquainted with many of the leading figures in the city’s literary and musical circles. She was a frequent guest in the home of Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, one of barely half-a-dozen writers whose names stand out as possibly having world-class literary talent in post-war Russia.24 It was chez Mandelstam that Alya had met and become friendly with Natalya Stolyarova, secretary to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Stolyarova was a great admirer of Solzhenitsyn and, having herself served a sentence in the labor camps after her voluntary return to the Soviet Union from Paris, had supplied him with much valuable information for The Gulag Archipelago. It was Stolyarova who introduced Alya to Solzhenitsyn.25
Following their first meeting, Alya became one of Solzhenitsyn’s most trusted and efficient allies. She agreed to type out the complete version of The First Circle, doing so diligently for a couple of hours each evening after putting her young son to bed. “The fourth or fifth time we met,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “I put my hands on her shoulders as one does when expressing gratitude and confidence to a friend. And this gesture instantly turned our lives upside down: from now on she was Alya, my second wife.”26 There was of course still the awkward question of the first wife. In spite of their many differences and the fact that Solzhenitsyn was away from home for ever longer periods, Natalya still felt possessive toward him and jealous of the greater part of his life he spent apart from her. The awkwardness remained for a further four years until Natalya finally granted the divorce that allowed Solzhenitsyn to marry Alya. In the interim, one can only guess to what degree Solzhenitsyn fought to suppress the voice of conscience. There is, however, little doubt that he had finally found his partner in life. In Alya, a mutual friend reflected, Solzhenitsyn found what he needed most. “She was educated, intelligent, witty, with a great many friends; she was small, shapely, and moved with grace.” She worked conscientiously for him, and he could trust her absolutely with any secret. Although she was strong-willed and independent-minded, no mere echo of Solzhenitsyn, she was nevertheless of one mind with him in essence. “She is a rare woman, and one in whom there has never been any vainglory.”27
For years, Solzhenitsyn wrote, he had dreamed in vain of finding a male friend whose ideas would be so close to his own. At last, when he had all but given up hope, he had met his soul-mate, someone who shared not only his political outlook but, far more importantly, his spiritual outlook also. Although she was Jewish on her maternal side, Alya was an Orthodox Christian in belief and deeply patriotically Russian at the core of her being. She possessed “a deep-rooted spiritual affinity with everything quintessentially Russian, as well as an unusual concern and affection for the Russian language. This, together with her vibrant energy, made me want to see her more often.”28 For her part, Alya told a friend that, much as she had admired and respected her first husband, she had not known what love was until she met Solzhenitsyn.29
Her love would cost her dearly. Following their marriage, she bore him three children, all sons, in quick succession. Then, with three infants, she followed her husband into exile, coping heroically with the omnipresent publicity and the trials of starting life anew, first in Switzerland and then in the United States. Through it all, she proved a tower of resilience, bringing up the children and selflessly supporting her husband in all his endeavors. Solzhenitsyn, in late middle age, had found his greatest ally.
A few months after his first meeting with Alya, Solzhenitsyn found himself with a host of new friends from much farther afield. In the autumn, Cancer Ward and The First Circle were published in Britain and the United States, having been published already in Milan, Frankfurt, and Paris. Unlike his old enemies at home, his new friends in the West had nothing but praise for Solzhenitsyn’s work. Reviews for The First Circle were particularly laudatory. Thomas Lask in the New York Times wrote that it was “at once classic and contemporary… future generations will read it with wonder and awe”. Richard Hingley in the Spectator described it as “arguably the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century”. Julian Symons of the Sunday Times called it “a majestic work of genius”.30
How different this reception was from the one he had received from his brothers in the Writers’ Union. More to the point, what could he expect from those brothers now that the bourgeois forces in the West had declared themselves his friends? Whatever new friends he may have gained, Solzhenitsyn was only too aware that his old enemies were the same as they had always been. He did not need reminding of what awaited him. Even as his books were being published in the West, Soviet tanks were rolling into Czechoslovakia, crushing free speech in the time-honored way pioneered by Stalin.