Please note that on Nov. 15 (Thursday) at noon Margo Caulfield will be
speaking in Burlington on Solzhenitsyn’s Life in Cavendish. The talk will be at
University Heights South (2&3), Rm 133. However, the talk is being videoed
and will be streaming at the VHS Facebook page
and you will be able to ask questions during the talk. It will then be
available to watch at other times via their Facebook page.
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With Cavendish already having its first snow, it may
seem a little late for the fall edition of the Cavendish Historical Society
(CHS) newsletter. Technically we have until Dec. 21 when winter officially
begins. However, we were holding off so we could include some excerpts from Between Two Millstone: Sketches of Exile
1974-1978 Book 1 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was published on October
30 in English. It covers the first two years of Solzhenitsyn’s life in Cavendish
and provides answers to questions about why he ended up here and how he spent
his time. Copies of the book are available from Amazon.
On December 2 (Sunday) at 4 pm, CHS will be hosting a
celebration of Solzhenitsyn’s 100th birthday (Dec. 11, 1918), which
will include the showing the video of Solzhenitsyn’s farewell address to
Cavendish in 1994. Following the screening there will be a discussion and
potluck supper. CHS will be providing the ice cream and cake. This event will
take place at the Cavendish Baptist Church, 2258 Main St. The snow date is
December 9 (Sunday), same time and place.
WHAT ABOUT THE DOORS?
 |
| Bob Naess working on the doors |
The wet fall made it very
difficult for Dave Stern and Bob Naess to complete the installation of the new
doors to the Museum. While they are up, they are boarded for the winter. Look
forward to the big reveal Memorial Day 2019. In the mean time, here’s a sneak
peak of what’s behind the wooden panels. Thank you Dave and Bob for all your
hard work.
ARMISTICE DAY 100TH ANNIVERSARY
 |
| Clyde Bailey |
Armistice Day is commemorated every year on November
11th to mark the end of World War I that took effect at eleven
o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month in 1918. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the
Armistice.
Cavendish had 57 men and one
woman serve in the war. A few families had two members of their family serving
but the Pollards had four sons and one daughter, Mary, who was a dietician in
an Army Hospital on Ellis Island. Of those serving, four died: George Dixon,
Winthrop Hoyle, Truman McNulty and Francis Wallace. Hoyle was only 16 and died
of nephritis in Rhode Island, while the other three died from what was known as
the “Spanish Flu.”
Killing between 50-100
million people around the world, this flu was more deadly than WWI where nine
million men were killed in combat and another twenty one million wounded, many
left without arms, legs, noses, and even genitals, while others suffered the
remainder of their lives from mustard gas.
Clyde Bailey, who is pictured in this article,
was a WWI vet and quite well known in Cavendish. He painted the Grange Hall
Curtain.
 |
| Joe Allen posing with his sign |
REMEMBERING JOE ALLEN
It is with sadness that we report
the passing of Joe Allen, former owner of the Cavendish General Store and known
the world over for his sign, "No restrooms, No Bare Feet, No Directions to
the Solzhenitsyns’ Home!" Having had the sign stolen so many times, he
made it out of wood and nailed it to the store. Joe retired in 1996 and moved
to Chester, VT. Our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.
EXCERPTS FROM BETWEEN TWO MILLSTONES
Serialized
between 1998 and 2003, Between Two Millstones:
has finally been published in English. While appearing in Russian,
French and German in one volume, the English version is being divided into two
books, the first covering Solzhenitsyn’s time in Switzerland and his move to
Cavendish, VT-1974-19978. The second book projected publication date is fall 2019. Edit: Since the newsletter was published, CHS has learned that the book appeared in both French and German in two books-similar to how it is being published in English. In Russia, though it was serialized it's not slated for publication until 2019, where it will appear in one book as intended.
The
title references Solzhenitsyn’s status as an irritant (the grain) between the
“millstones” of the Soviet Union and the USA, the latter being alienated with
his infamous 1978 Harvard address, where he denounced western materialistic
culture. Before my Harvard speech, I naively believed that I had found myself in
a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that
society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out
“live not by lies!” in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I
called out “live not by lies!” in the United States, I was told to go take a
hike.
While
many English-speaking scholars have waited for the publication of Between Two Millstones, the people of
Cavendish and Vermont will now have their answer as to how Solzhenitsyn spent
his time living in their town and state.
Moving to Cavendish: 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 prison 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.”
 |
| Solzhenitsyn speaking at Town Mtg 1977 |
The
American public, friendly and childishly hankering for the sensational, of
course immediately deluged us with an avalanche of letters, telegrams,
invitations and congratulations, wishing us well with much kindness, but it was
an avalanche that would have killed a novice. I, however, had experienced such
a deluge at least twice before in my life, and was no novice. Even once the
deluge subsided, the flow continued invitations to speak, to greet someone,
requests to write forewords, directive as to what topics I ought to speak on,
whom I should defend with all due haste; requests from Slavists for additional
information about this or that place in this or that book of mine; people inquiring
whether I knew this or that relative of theirs in the Archipelago; requests
from cancer patients concerning information on cures, where to get and how to
use the Issyk-Kul root and birch mushroom. (I always replied to cancer patients
immediately.)
There was
also the threat of complications arising from another quarter, the locals. Putting
up a fence around one’s land, even a fence that was see-through, was an unusual
and provocative action. What’s more, it cut off one of the paths used by
snowmobiles, which people enjoyed riding through the forests and mountains.
Governor Snelling, whom I went to meet, gave me the good advice to attend the
annual town meeting and talk to the locals. The meeting took place in February,
at the end of our first winter in Vermont, and I went, sat with the others and
then talked. Immediately the tension in the town eased and a staunch
neighborliness was established.
Gradually
another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small-town and
robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing my speech,
[his address at the 1977 Cavendish Town Meeting] and to which my speech was
addressed, I now felt a glimmer of hope that I could connect with this America,
warn it of what we had experienced, and perhaps even it to change direction.
But how many years would that take, and how much strength?
Then there
was the matter of the language. To resurrect and develop my English would have
taken time, time that I was loath to spare when there were still tens of
thousands of pages connected to the history of the Revolution languishing
unread, when so many accounts written down by the aged witnesses of those years
were still waiting-not to mention that I needed time to write. It made no sense
to take time away from my Russian work, and anyway the texts of my talks would
have had to be thought out and homed in Russian.
In the even
landscape, the landscape here in Vermont, the woods, and even the changes in
the weather, the play of sun, sky and clouds: here I cannot take them in with
the same intensity and specificity as in Russia. It all seems to me as if it
were in another language, as if something stands between us.
 |
| The Magic Stone |
As Father and Teacher: In the meantime, our sons were
growing. During the warmer half of the year, from April to October, I lived in
the cottage by the pond, and early in the morning the boys would make their way
in single down the steep path through the majestic sanctuary of the woods to
pray with me. We knelt on a bed of pine needles by the bushes, and they
repeated after me short prayers and our own special prayer that I had composed:
“Grant us, O Lord, to live in health and strength, our minds bright, until the
day when you will open our path home to Russia, to labor and to sacrifice
ourselves so that she may recover and flourish.” A few steps behind us was a
rock that looked very much like a horse, its legs tucked under, a winged horse
that have been turned to stone. I told the children, and they believed me, that
the horse breathes lightly at night and when Russia will rise again the spell
shall be broken, the winged horse will breathe in deep and carry us on its
back, through the air, across the North, all the way to Russia...(At bedtime
the boys would ask me: You’ll go to the horse tonight, wont you, to check if
it’s breathing?)
Several times a day one of the boys would come running down
the steep path, brings a number of pages his mother typed out in an initial
draft along with her editorial suggestions. Then a little while later, another
son, would come to take back the results.
I now began giving the two older
boys lessons in mathematics. ....We also had a blackboard nailed to the wall of
the cottage, chalk, notebooks, and tests, everything that was necessary. I
would never have thought I’d ever teach mathematics again, though this was
definitely going to be the last time. What a wonderful experience, how exquisite
our traditional arithmetic, problems are in developing the logic of the
questions...
Immediately after the lesson we
would go swimming. The pond is in some places shallow, in other places very
deep, and I taught the boys swimming at my side. Water flowing from the
mountain is very cold. The older boys would eagerly shout, “Papa, can we swim
to the waterfall, can we?”...
Further up the creek there was a
real waterfall that was some fifty feet high, the boys in single file making
their way to it and staring at it in awe. It was impressive, even for
grown-ups. Two or three years later the older boys, beginning with Yermolai,
would start sawing and splitting firewood with me.
Adjusting to the west It was July 1977. I was feeling
smothered, bewildered: how were we to live in the West? The millstone of the
KGB had never tired of crushing me, I was used to that, but now a second
millstone, the millstone of the West, was descending upon me to grind me all
over again (and not for the first time). How were we to live here? In every
business, financial, and organizational matter in the West, I always find
myself blundering, backed into a corner pulling the short straw, everything in
utter confusion, so that there are moments when I simply despair; it is as if I
had lost all reason, no longer knew how to act, invariably misstepped! As
sharp-eyed as my actions had been in the East, so blind where they in the West.
How was I to find my way through this tangle of rules and laws? (Would not a
Westerner suddenly dropped into the Soviet Union be just as helpless?) ....
How humiliating and crushing is my
realization that over these last years I’ve been nothing but a weakling, an
ass, despite all my skill at countering the evils of Soviet society. What
confidence I once had with my few kopecks and rubles! Not hundreds of
thousands! Things were so different, everything fit into one little wallet.
Among the ideas that life has sent me there now comes another, the ordeal of
the Western financial system. And I must admit that I am struggling in the face
of it; it has been sent down upon me for some reason, but I’m having a hard
time bearing up. I wouldn’t care one whit if I could free my mind and soul so I
could work. What is degrading is that I’m drowning in a puddle, not in stormy
seas (then again, that’s how it always works. I was strong and at times even
cheerful in the camps and in prison; cancer didn’t break me, I suffered painful
family tribulations, endured years of fear that my clandestine work would fail,
but I always lived easily in poverty, got used to it, was adapted only to
privation, and now feel perturbed in the face of poverty-free affluence, where
no one appreciates anything, where everyone thoughtlessly squanders and allows
everything to spill. But on the other hand affluence, and my being freed for
many years from having to earn a living to support a large family, have given
me the opportunity to move away from the accursed cities into quiet and clean
surroundings, freeing up space and time for my main task.
BECOME A MEMBER, RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP,
DONATE
If
you have not joined the Cavendish Historical Society, need to renew your
membership, and/or would like to be a volunteer, please complete the form below
and sending a check, payable to CHS, to CHS, PO Box 472, Cavendish, VT 05142.
All contributions are tax deductible.
Name: _______________________________________
Address:
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Phone Number: _____________________ E-Mail:
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65+ $5 ___ Sustaining Member $500
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Household Member $15 ___ Contributing
Member $250
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I would be interested in serving, as a volunteer .I would be interested in
serving on the following committee(s):__ Program Planning __ Fundraising
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Donations are always welcome and can be designated as
follows:
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general purposes __ Young Historians __Publications
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Williams Fund __ Solzhenitsyn Project
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