Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
The first book that was given me on my day of freedom was yours. Now I gift it myself so that each of my new friends will be tempted to bring me great spiritual happiness.
I write to you as an authoress, author of an astounding book, showing your incredible knowledge of the agonizing history of Russian cultural thought; you are a comrade in this difficult craft of writing.
25
In 1944, at the age of twenty-three, Belinkov had been arrested for writing an anti-Soviet novel and circulating it among friends. Betrayed by a
stukach
(informer), he was sentenced to death until Count Aleksei Tolstoy interceded with Stalin. He spent twelve years in the Gulag, one of those years in a cell once occupied by Aleksei Kapler. “The chamber was still full of stories of him,” he wrote to Svetlana.
26
Belinkov was freed in 1956, but the repressions of the Brezhnev government led him and his wife, Natalia, to flee to West Germany in 1968 and
then to the United States. That Svetlana’s was the first book he read as he prepared to leave for the West and that he gave it to friends was the deepest affirmation she could wish for.
Svetlana immediately phoned to say she would love to meet the Belinkovs. She would drop by on her way back from a trip to Boston. The idea that someone could so casually drop over still shocked them. In a book Natalia and Arkady Belinkov wrote together, Natalia described that first meeting in Greenwich:
She was of an average height, a fragile, red-haired woman who was warmhearted and gentle. At the same time, Svetlana’s resemblance to her father made anyone speaking with her a bit uncomfortable…. Imagine a house that I already described as “rural” in the suburbs of New York. (Tranquillity in the park beyond the windows.) The face of comrade Stalin is leaning over his escaped victim, and the hands of his daughter gently touch Arkadii’s stooped shoulders. And a quiet voice: “Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.” Who was Svetlana persuading that time: him or herself?
Our “foreign” fates were so similar! We agreed that as soon as we would get the chance, we would come to Princeton. “And we will drink tea in the kitchen! Yes?” (Svetlana felt joy from the renewal of Moscow customs.) “Some evening in the kitchen, over a cup of weak Moscow tea, could be a revelation” … she wrote in one of her books.
27
The previous January she had written to the critic Edmund Wilson to say she was grateful for his review of
Twenty Letters to a Friend
in the
New Yorker
, and now she wrote to him again to ask him if he might be interested in the work of her friend Arkady Belinkov. Wilson asked her for more information
about him, and she replied that Belinkov was an intelligent and charming man who had suffered terribly, and she wanted to help him. The circles he had landed in at Yale were inviting him to lecture, but their liberal delusion that “capitalism and socialism [could] meet halfway” drove Belinkov crazy. He had been imprisoned in the “socialist” Gulag. She told Wilson she rather enjoyed the fact that Americans seemed healthy, naive, and openhearted. It was a relief after “Russian psychological complexities,” but Belinkov was finding it hard going.
28
On September 10 the Belinkovs took the bus to Princeton. They were impressed by Svetlana’s spacious house on Elm Road, with its grand piano, and amused to find bouquets of plastic flowers jumping out from the linen closets where Svetlana had stuffed them. The three spent most of their time in the large kitchen drinking tea and talking of their escapes, their common friends in Russia, and the current repression under Leonid Brezhnev. The Belinkovs were already aware of the tactless behavior of the Russian émigré community toward Svetlana. As Natalia Belinkov put it, “Some treated Svetlana with utter spite because she was the daughter of a tyrant; others fawned over her as if she were a crown princess; yet others were not against marrying her or, at the very least, borrowing money from her.”
29
The Belinkovs were eager to assure her that their friendship was genuine.
For much of that summer, Louis Fischer was not in Princeton. He traveled often to New York and had flown to Paris in mid-August to work on the manuscript for his new book,
Russia’s Road from Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations 1917–1941
, published by Harper & Row in 1969. The night of August 20, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Everyone was reeling in shock from the terrible news, though Svetlana explained
that it was a logical move for the Brezhnev regime. She told George Kennan that the invasion must be an indication of turmoil and dissention at the top in the Politburo, which might lead to further unexpected events.
Soon she was hearing of arrests in Moscow. She wrote to Fischer:
Did you know that Pavel Litvinov is arrested? Larissa Daniels, and many others? Arkady says that he knows them all well, and that he recently received a letter from Moscow which said they just started grabbing them and choking them—so far events in Czechoslovakia are stealing the attention of the public from such “minutia” like some poets and intellectuals—horrible. It’s necessary to pay attention to the news every minute.
30
As the repression continued, she worried for friends—the authorities were arresting so many—and was desperate for news of her children. She knew that the Komsomols and the Communist Party would be exerting brutal pressure on all youth—the slightest statement or action would lead to expulsion from a university. “All of this seriously complicates my contact with my children,” she wrote to Fischer. “That’s unavoidable. I’m really trying to avoid danger. I’m always trying to guess whether Katya has applied/been accepted to MGU [Moscow State University].”
31
At a distance, the relationship with Fischer continued smoothly. She sent him chatty letters, tried to reply to his questions about Politburo members like Zhukov and Mikoyan, and reassured him: “Be good and calm, dear Louis, I embrace you tenderly, like always. Kiss your dear eyes, your hands, your face.”
32
By the end of August, Louis was on a beach in Tunis editing the manuscript of his book, and sent Svetlana brief notes on hotel stationery. She responded with her chatty loving letters.
One piece of good news was that she’d found a house to buy at 50 Wilson Road. The Kennans had noticed it was for sale and urged her not to miss the chance. She’d decided to look at it because it wasn’t far from Fischer’s house near Bayard Lane, and once she saw it, she knew she must have it. She was rather appalled at the price—$60,000—but this was not extravagant for Princeton. She had $50,000 from the advance for her new book, but she still had to request the remaining $10,000 from her New York lawyers. She had begun to be annoyed that she had to ask for her own money.
It was a typical New England frame house, cozy and compact, with a big study, a screened-in porch, a lovely terrace, and a small backyard filled with dogwoods, forsythia, crab apples, and lilac bushes. It reminded her of her dacha in Zhukovka, where she’d spent each summer with her children. The rooms upstairs were even laid out the same way Katya’s and Joseph’s had been. “I’m having strange premonitions about this house,” she told Fischer. “Strange analogies: nice and sad. This house is calling me in to itself. These rooms upstairs, it’s as if they’re waiting for my children. I can’t describe to you what the feeling is like.”
33
She was tired of living in other people’s houses, and at least Fischer would finally discover what her personal “lifestyle” was like. She would be able to move in on December 20.
Fischer was due home from Tunis on September 17. Svetlana went to his house to bring some welcome-home flowers to greet him on his arrival. When his housekeeper, Mrs. Duffs, let her in, she found on a shelf intimate possessions of Deirdre Randall, who was working as his “research assistant.” Svetlana wrote in fury to Fischer about this “evidence of [his] lies” and demanded that he choose between them. She concluded: “I could never expect you to be so dishonest to me.”
34
But in this soap opera Fischer was staging (it must have been addictive to have women fighting over him), this was exactly
what she could expect. As usual, the women turned each other into enemies. Randall reported coyly to Fischer that Svetlana had phoned—her voice had had “the elaborate sinisterness of people in Eisenstein movies”—and had asked, “Are you wearing your beautiful nightgown?” Deirdre told Fischer that she had replied, “Of course not. Most of the time I was in bed naked.” Her attack on Svetlana was cheap:
I think she’s absolutely crackers and that one of us is going to end up with an icon buried in her heart. My mommy told me not to fool around with married men. If you get home at a reasonable hour, better call her. I really feel awful. I hate being bullied and I hate most of all being afraid and she’s so crude I feel I know what it was like to talk to Stalin.
35
Svetlana resolved to end the relationship and wrote to Fischer that it was best if they parted. But she could not so easily exorcise her feelings for him. By the end of October, she confessed:
I’m so frightened without you … my whole life is falling apart, I can’t do anything, I’ll either die or go crazy…. Don’t leave me without any live contact with you—that’s inhuman. I cannot think, I cannot work, everything is falling out of my hands.
36
She asked to meet him on October 31. She said it was a sad and meaningful day for her, two years since Brajesh Singh died. They could have breakfast. She wouldn’t offer this to anybody but him on
that
day; he must at least acknowledge this. She wouldn’t call, since he had told her not to, but she begged
him not to leave her completely alone on that day. Fischer did not come.
There was one piece of good news during this dark time. She received in the mail a photograph of the walls of her hospital in Kalakankar. She named it the Brajesh Singh Hospital. She wrote to Joan Kennan: “You know, what does the medical help mean for a large rural area, where thousands of people—women and children—have no doctor. This hospital will provide for them a
free
treatment. It makes me feel perfectly satisfied that after all—I have done something for the real people.”
37
Joan, who had worked for the Peace Corps in Tonga, would understand, unlike other people who “often do not care about others at all.” The barb was clearly directed at Fischer. She told Joan she had finished her new book. All she needed was one more month to reshape and edit it.
Yet Svetlana could not stop brooding. On November 22, she asked Fischer to return her love letters. She said it disturbed her to think his archive was under the administration of Miss Randall. She wanted to destroy her letters herself; she couldn’t trust him to do it: “I no longer BELIEVE A SINGLE word you say, so I won’t calm down until these documents have been returned to me.”
38
Fischer replied officiously:
NOVEMBER
24, 1968
Dear Svetlana,
Letters belong to the recipient.
Your letters to me are therefore mine and you have no right to them and no right to ask for their return either politely, much less “categorically.” However, since you are eager to have them, I shall send them back to you when I find time to search my files.
Fischer obviously kept a carbon copy of this letter since it remained in his archive and he certainly never found the time to return Svetlana’s letters.
39
The note was a cruel rebuff. By this gesture he had washed his hands of all responsibility. This is probably when Svetlana marched over once again to his house, this time to demand the return of her letters and other things. What happened next is sad.
Like all stories attached to Svetlana, it would eventually become available for public consumption. Years later the journalist Patricia Blake, who had worked as Fischer’s co-translator, would write in a
Time
magazine article:
One autumn evening in 1968 [Svetlana] arrived in fury at Fischer’s house. He was inside with his editorial assistant, Deirdre Randall, but ignored Svetlana’s knocks and shouts. As Randall remembers the scene, Svetlana raged outside the house for over an hour, weeping and demanding the return of her presents to Fischer: a travel clock and two decorative candles. When Svetlana shattered the glass panels on the sides of the door in an attempt to break in, Fischer called the police. Two officers arrived and found Svetlana hysterical, blood dripping from her cut hands.
40
The gossip buzzed around Princeton, a town unused to such emotional extravagance: Svetlana was unstable, but what could you expect? After all, she was Stalin’s daughter. Blake did not identify Randall as Fischer’s lover.
One might have hoped at least for some discretion, if not sympathy, from Deirdre Randall, because she knew who Louis Fischer was. In one of her letters she chastised him: “What manner of a man sees three women in as many hours? Who would allow such a thing? Well, I just want to be the last.”
41
She told his son George that “Lou” had a “horrible hard, tough, thick-skulled frightening ego,” but she adored the man, and she did manage to be the last of his girlfriends.
42
Fischer died a little over a year later, on January 15, 1970. Randall worked for the next two years on the final preparation of his book.
The gossip soon swelled. In a rage, Svetlana drove her car into Fischer’s house. Prince ton hostesses invited Svetlana to important dinner parties where she disappointed the guests who had wanted to meet her. She sat in stony silence and once broke into tears and abruptly left. No one thought to ask why.