Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1977

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prizing writing writer and Soviet dissident, spent 18 of his 20 years in exile in Cavendish, VT. With the publication of Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1977 now there is more than a glimpse of what life was like for him during this time.

"Between Two Millstones" contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Notre Dame Press 

For Vermonters, Senator Patrick Leahy summed it up when he wrote, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took to Vermont and Vermonters took to him. I felt it a privilege to have met with him in his new Vermont setting, and I know that our state’s forested beauty reminded him of home. We are proud that he believed that his homeland, and the world, could learn from the local self-government that is embodied in Town Meeting Day in towns and hamlets across the Green Mountain State.”

There were differing ideas of how Solzhenitsyn lived in Cavendish- a self -imposed “gulag,” to a lavish lifestyle in a “gated” compound. However, the truth was quite different. The suddenness of our move caught everyone’s attention: it is unacceptable for people of fame not to inform the world of what they are doing, not to advertise their next move but to go ahead and do what they want unannounced. Over a hundred press vehicles now converged on the tiny town of Cavendish from Boston, from New York, quizzing the townspeople to get information, journalists crowding in front of our gate, scurrying along our fence—they even arranged for a helicopter to fly over our property and take pictures. ....To make things worse, our light chain-link fence had a single strand of barbed wire on top where the fence ran along the side of the road, to hook the pants of snoopers trying to climb over. This single strand of barbed wire the media now magnified into a “barbed-wire fence surrounding the entire property,” and that it was if I were willing myself up in a new prison, a “self-imposed gulag.” I did intend to sequester myself, not in a prison but in a tranquil refuge, the kind necessary for creativity in this mad, whirling world. But the press also picked up details from the locals about us having a pond, setting off the legend about my “swimming pool,” which immediately turned our supposed life within a prion into a “bourgeois lifestyle” in which the Solzhenitsyn family now intended to indulge. Ah, wretches, they were writing not about us but about themselves, revealing what mattered to them. We have been expelled from our country, our hearts are constricted, my wife’s eyes are never dry of tears, only work can save us—and that is our so-called “bourgeois lifestyle.”

Between Two Millstones is available at Amazon in both hardcover and Kindle formats.