Table of Contents

Nikolai Ivanovich Zubov Nikolai Ivanovich Kobozev Veniamin Lvovich and Susanna Lazarevna Teush The Estonians Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya Natalya Milyevna Anichkova and Nadya Levitskaya Mirra Gennadyevna Petrova Elena Tsezarevna Chukovskaya Natalya Ivanovna Stolyarova (Eva) The Column in the Shadows A New Network Three Pillars of Support The Foreigners Troubled Waters of the Quiet Don

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucusus Mountains. He received a degree in physics and math from Rostov University in 1941. He served in the Russian army during World War II but was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons and labor camps and, later, exile, before being allowed to return to central Russia, where he worked as a high school science teacher. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was arrested for treason and exiled following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to Switzerland and later the U. S. where he continued to write fiction and history.

Reviews

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

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. (Dec.)