Silent Partners

...Solzhenitsyn's invisible allies also included scores of foreigners, many of them Americans...

...All were selfless and courageous—fully aware of the risks to themselves and their families...

...He is unable to comprehend her "naive" worship of Aleksandr Herzen, the uncompromisingly liberal 19th-century thinker and arguably the most attractive figure in Russia's intellectual history...

...He had become politically irrelevant to his countrymen...

...Most recently he caused a slight stir by announcing that he would not vote in the parliamentary elections, claiming they were rigged...

...And it was her father who generously praised my first book in the same journal, displaying in the process the considerable skills of a seasoned conspirator...

...One might have expected Solzhenitsyn to at least respect the memory of this founding father of samiz-dat—self-publishing—mitamizdai?publishing abroad...

...Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Center for Advanced Study Professor of Russian Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign SHORT OF restoration of the monarchy, no single event could have symbolized the finality of the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 better than the return of its most famous exile three years later...

...He sneers at Lev Kopelev, the prototype for Rubin in The First Circle, for having reverted to a form of Marxism, notwithstanding their common experiences in the Gulag...

...The fine English translation by Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson is essentially the same text, except for their occasional notes...

...Even so, many of Solzhenitsyn's erstwhile supporters, including Efim Etkind, a literary scholar now at the Sorbonne, have broken with him overborn issues...

...Not that Solzhenitsyn reciprocated their tolerance...

...The novelist resolutely denies this, much as he denies any desire to see Russia rebuilt as a theocratic state...

...Future historians will likely disregard Solzhenitsyn's petty conceits and ascribe a similar impact to his work...

...These were newspapermen, scholars and diplomats stationed in Moscow...

...On another occasion, he continues, "Lyusha launched into a passionate tirade against my unspeakably shameful Ortho-dox-cum-patriotic orientation in From Under the Rubble" Perceptive psychologist that he is, Solzhenitsyn is not fooled by outward appearances: "A certain degree of emotional substitution was involved here, no doubt, as can happen in arguments with women, where annoyance in one sphere is transferred to an entirely unrelated one...

...But it did not see print until the author allowed the Moscow monthly Novy Mir to serialize it in 1991, during the USSR's dying days...

...Some of his benefactors were famous, for instance the cellist Mstislav Rostro-povich and the writer, critic and translator Komei Chukovsky...

...Earlier it was Etkind and a second Jewish academic who, at great personal risk, succeeded in "smuggling" Solzhenitsyn into the Tauris Palace, where the Duma met prior to the February Revolution...

...Curiously, Solzhenitsyn was humiliated by having to rely on Jews: "And the fact that I did, nevertheless, manage to get inside during the spring of 1972—I a Russian writer entering a Russian historical building in a land ruled by allegedly Russian leaders—was entirely due to the daring and ingenuity of two Russian Jews, Efim Etkind and David Petrovich Pritsker...

...Some years ago, Norman Podhoretz suggested in Commentary that Solzhenitsyn may be a closet anti-Semite...

...Appraising the role of Tolstoy's iconoclastic writings in the demise of the Tsarist Empire, Lenin called him "a mirror of the Russian Revolution...

...She was almost killed for her devotion to him, he tells us, yet was revolted by such "minor" matters as his benign understanding for Vlasovites, Hitler's wartime Russian collaborators...

...Moreover, he remains a leading Russian writer, although strangely this seems to require reiteration in his native land as well as in the West...

...The KGB harassed the author's friends, of course, going so far as engineering automobile accidents...

...For a while he presided over a run-of-the-mill TV talk show that was canceled last September...

...The volume consists of a dozen or so chapter-length portraits of those who aided Solzhenitsyn between the sanctioned publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 (Nikita S. Khrushchev found its depiction of suffering and degradation in a labor camp useful in his repudiation of Stalin) and his expulsion from the USSR in February 1974...

...I was in Moscow at the time Solzhenitsyn came back, and I was struck by the modest media attention his deliberately slow journey across Siberia received...

...Solzhenitsyn himself, a former KGB colonel attested in 1992, was nearly poisoned...

...His novels, and above all The Gulag Archipelago, were among the gravediggersof the Soviet State...

...And all continued to help even after it became apparent that Solzhenitsyn's ultraconservative Russian nationalism and religious fundamentalism clashed with their own liberal and secular values...

...The assistance took various forms, ranging from typing and library research to providing the novelist with lodging despite his lack of residence permits to downright dangerous storage of his anti-Soviet manuscripts to their equally perilous smuggling abroad...

...Invisible Allies, Solzhenitsyn's latest book to appear here, actually was completed two decades ago...

...The intelligentsia, he complains, "had a clear awareness only of slights directed against the Jews and to a lesser degree of those against some other nationalities...

...Yet when Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn set foot on Russian soil the occasion bore little resemblance to the tragicomic vision of Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, in which an emigre writer resembling him hopes to go home one day and be acclaimed the next Tsar...

...Unbeknown to Lidia Chukovskaya, for example, I helped deliver the manuscript of her Deserted House to the New York-based Russian monthly Novy Zhur-nal...

...He did so without explicitly mentioning me or the title of the book that was then being unanimously denounced in the USSR as vile anti-Soviet slander...

...In any case, we know from a preceding passage that Solzhenitsyn is irritated by his country's "educated society" for its insensitivity to "slights to the Russian national consciousness...

...I am more inclined to believe Lyusha herself, who "understood that it was not for nothing that she had some Jewish blood in her veins...

...Not a few of their names are familiar to readers of the New Leader...

...It was originally intended to be a supplement to The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Soviet Literary Life, published in Paris in 1975...

...As they observe, Nevidimki (the Russian title) "could not appear [when written] for the simple reason that it discloses the names of the numerous individuals who had lent their support to Solzhenitsyn in the course of his long career as an 'underground' writer and bitter opponent of the Soviet regime...

...He is genuinely puzzled by several outbursts of Lidia Chukovskaya's daughter Lyusha (Elena Tsezarevna Chukovskaya), his most important "invisible ally...

...Other Russian writers, NL readers know too, had invisible allies of their own...

...Others were quite unknown...

...He writes with amused condescension of Lidia Chukovskaya, Kornei's daughter and an established novelist in her own right...