The Wing That Saved Me

Today LitHub publishes an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. This selection, written in the mid-’80s but published here for the first time in English, relates the formidable challenges Solzhenitsyn faced, in rural Vermont, in accomplishing the ambitious literary and social goals he had set for himself, and the unique gifts and temperament that his wife, “Alya” (Natalia)—“the wing that saved me” from the book’s dedication—had brought to bear upon their joint mission.

“No, neither the electronic typesetting machine with its large memory nor my own zeal and perseverance would have achieved my goal without a wife equal to the task. I doubt whether any other Russian writer ever had at his side such a co-worker and such an astute and sensitive critic and adviser. As for me, I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence, with such taste in matters of design, as my wife, sent to me—and now irreplaceable—in my insular seclusion, where the brain of one author with his unvarying perceptions is not enough. Close attention to the text was needed, a keen eye, a sensitivity to the slightest break in the phonetic or rhythmic form and to the falseness or truthfulness of a tone, a touch, an item of syntax, a sensitivity to everything in a work of literature—from the large structural elements and the believability of characters down to the nuances of images and expressions, their ordering, to interjections and punctuation. Alya helped me, as no one else could, with her criticism, her advice, her challenges, and did a lot to help me improve the clarity of my texts as well.”