Word: svetlana
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...when Svetlana arrived in the U.S. following her defection during a visit to India, little of her inner conflict was visible. The face she turned on a mesmerized U.S. public was alight with happiness. A handsome, vibrant woman of 41, with crisp, coppery curls, ruddy cheeks, shy blue eyes and a winning smile, she exuded sweetness and candor. She seemed pleased by her celebrity--and by the $1.5 million she earned from her first book of memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Well-wishers kept the house she rented in Princeton, N.J., filled with flowers. Fan letters, presents, even proposals...
...reincarnation, of her own daughter, who had died in an auto accident in 1946. Mrs. Wright, a disciple of the Russian-born mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, was spellbound by some coincidences between the living and the dead. Her daughter, by an earlier marriage in Russia, had also been named Svetlana; moreover, she had been born in Georgia, the region from which Svetlana Alliluyeva's father hailed. Somehow it followed in Mrs. Wright's mind that Stalin's daughter should marry the first Svetlana's widower, William Wesley Peters, known as Wes, Taliesin West's chief architect...
...Svetlana promptly went along with Mrs. Wright's desires: within days she was calling Taliesin West's matriarch Mother. She also fell in love with the distinguished-looking, 6-ft. 4-in. Peters, then 57. Soon Svetlana was pressing for an early wedding, and less than three weeks after her arrival in Arizona, she and Peters were married. Mrs. Wright was heard to exult, "Now I can say again, 'Svetlana...
...Svetlana's happiness was short-lived. The egalitarian atmosphere at Taliesin West--everyone was expected to share in the house and yard work--was not to her liking. It reminded her of Communism, she said. Less than a month ( after the wedding, clients of the architectural firm were shocked to see Svetlana slap her husband at a gala dinner party. At Taliesin West's summer headquarters in Spring Green, Wis., a resident recalls, Svetlana threw the contents of a highball glass into the hostess's face during a cocktail party and was forcibly escorted...
...Much of Svetlana's anger came to center on Mrs. Wright, who ran the residents' lives at Taliesin West with what she proudly called "invisible discipline." Mrs. Wright decided what they wore, what they discussed at dinner and whether they should have children. "I detested her power over others," Svetlana said. "The lady bore such a resemblance to my father's worst qualities that I shrank from...