Word: nadya
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Solzhenitsyn's account of the fate of prisoners' wives is the most sorrowing part of The First Circle. His cool realism is suffused with a rush of personal grief as he describes Gleb Ner-zhin's Nadya: waiting outside prisons for a glimpse of her husband, allowed rare letters and rarer visits, herself persecuted whenever her relationship to a prisoner is discovered?and, finally, driven to divorce in self-defense. (Solzhenitsyn's own wife, Natalya, divorced him at his urging while he was in prison. She remarried and bore two children, but after his release she divorced her second husband...
What went wrong for the little girl whose earlier "cloudless years were a fairy tale"? Svetlana has two explanations. One is the death of her mother, for which Stalin in rage and grief punished everyone she knew. Yet Svetlana concedes that Nadya could not have lived with Stalin through the years of terror that followed 1932. Svetlana's other explanation is still more doubtful. She finds a devil. His name is Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's last and most infamous secret policeman. "A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name...
...country, but my wife [an Icelandic pianist whom he had met in Moscow] prefers to live in England." Nevertheless, Ashkenazy has not been back to Russia since 1963. His parents have not seen their oldest grandchild, Vladimir Jr., 41, in three years; they have never seen their infant granddaughter Nadya. Still, alone of all the Soviet artists who prefer the Western side of the Iron Curtain, Ashkenazy refuses to defect, clings carefully to his Russian citizenship. He hardly notices that each year he edges a little farther away. In the old days, he forgot to put articles in his English...