Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the subject of this book. Without the full and generous cooperation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, my efforts would have floundered in an ocean of secondary sources. That is not to say that I have not made use of an extensive array of such sources. I have, of course, and the principal published sources have been acknowledged in the Notes, but without Solzhenitsyn’s personal involvement I would not have had the benefit of the insight into his life and work that, I hope and trust, is conveyed in this volume. I am acutely conscious of the privileged nature of my access, not least because of the Russian writer’s well-known distrust of Western biographers and journalists, and this only serves to accentuate my feelings of gratitude. I am mindful, for instance, that a previous biographer met with no success whatsoever in securing Solzhenitsyn’s aid, to the extent that even his letters were not answered. (It was a tribute to that particular biographer’s powers as a writer that the book he produced was still of exceptional quality.) I don’t know why Solzhenitsyn broke his boycott of Western writers in my case, and this is not the place to conjecture, but I am nonetheless delighted to be the beneficiary of his assistance.

During my visit to Russia, I was the recipient of Alya Solzhenitsyn’s warm hospitality as well as being the eager and hungry recipient of her traditional Russian cuisine. Subsequently, she has helped me considerably with details of her own life and that of her husband. I am grateful also to Yermolai Solzhenitsyn, not only for his patient and grueling work as simultaneous translator during the interview with his father, but also for the impromptu guided tour of Moscow which followed. Yermolai continued to help me in the following months, replying to my questions at length and sharing his childhood memories of life in Vermont and in England, and his impressions of his father’s return to Russia and subsequent reception by the Russian people.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Yermolai’s brother, was tireless in his assistance throughout the months that the book was in preparation. In spite of his own busy schedule in the United States, where he is a highly accomplished and much sought-after concert pianist, he never failed to respond to my pleas for help, replying by phone, fax, e-mail, and even, on occasion, by the old-fashioned postal service. Without his help in arranging my visit to Moscow, in acting as go-between and translator for his father and mother, and in offering his own memories and opinions, this biography would scarcely have been possible. I am, indeed, deeply indebted.

This new, revised edition has been the beneficiary of Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s translations of several Russian sources into English, and is enriched by recent photographs supplied by Natalya Solzhenitsyn. Apart from my indebtedness to Mrs. Solzhenitsyn for her generosity in supplying these new photographs, I am also grateful to Ignat and Stephan Solzhenitsyn for their assistance in getting them to me expeditiously, via cyber-space, in time for their inclusion.

I am grateful to Michael Nicholson for the help he has given me during the writing and researching of the book, both at University College, Oxford, and during numerous telephone conversations. He was also kind enough to translate twenty-four lines of Solzhenitsyn’s verse from the Russian edition of The Gulag Archipelago, volume two.

I must express my thanks to Sarah Hollingsworth for her invaluable critical appraisal of the original manuscript; to the late Alfred Simmonds for his tireless encouragement; to Katrina White for help with translation; and to James Catford, Elspeth Taylor, and Kathy Dyke at HarperCollins UK, who labored to bring the original edition of this work to fruition. In similar vein, I owe a debt of gratitude to Father Joseph Fessio, Mark Brumley, Tony Ryan, Carolyn Lemon, Diane Eriksen, and the rest of the people at Ignatius Press for their work on this second and revised edition.