Svetlana in Wonderland
The Faraway Music.
by Svetlana Allilueva.
Lancer International (New Delhi). 192 pp. 115 rupees.
In the flurry of publicity surrounding the return of Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilueva to the Soviet Union in October 1984, few commentators noted that months before her departure she had published a third volume of memoirs, a sequel to Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year. Although one might reasonably expect that the book, appearing at such a time, would explain why Svetlana had decided to go back to Russia after seventeen years in the West, The Faraway Music instead offers insights that are more indirect and general, if just as curious, into the mind of the world's best-known Soviet defector.
Why, indeed, did she choose to publish this latest installment of her autobiography in India rather than England or the U.S.? In an interview with the Indian journalist Dhiren Bhagat, she said that it was because British and American publishers were not content with the manuscript and wanted her to rewrite it, focusing on her past experiences in the Kremlin rather than on her life in the West. This explanation, like so much of what she has written, seems disingenuous, particularly as it was given only a week before her sudden departure. While it may be true that publishers would have wanted her to revise the somewhat sketchy manuscript, they probably would have requested more discussion of her later experiences in the United States, about which she is remarkably evasive. Instead, her book conveys the sense of a woman appallingly unaware of her own motivation as she restlessly crisscrossed the country with her young daughter in tow, uprooting each home she managed to make for herself in the U.S. (and later in England).
Frequently this strong-willed, capricious woman portrays herself as a helpless victim of circumstances. At one point she notes ruefully, “Although I would have much preferred to live in California, by strange coincidence of fate I could never stay exactly where I wanted.” And, later on: “I have become a divorced wife and a single mother once again—something totally unforeseen, but obviously programmed for me in my stars.” If, as she complained to the British journalist Miriam Gross last year, she was fated to have “bad experiences everywhere—it is my lot,” the statement is true in a deeper sense than she realizes.
Nowhere in The Faraway Music is there any indication of the violent temper that led Svetlana to quarrel with many of her American friends, and with such British ones as Malcolm Muggeridge, with whom she filmed a BBC program in 1981. Instead she portrays herself as the mildest-mannered of women who finds even the pledge of allegiance required of all new U.S. citizens too violent because in it they promise “to bear arms to protect the Republic.” A pacifist who sees the U.S. as ominously similar in national character to the Soviet Union, she describes both alike in her book as superpowers “whose enlarged, overgrown bodies are governed by very small brains at the top, by the fearful minds of paranoiacs”—in the contrast to the “moderation” and “rationalism of Europeans and Asians, even of neutrals with their patience and tolerance, for answers” (her emphasis).
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In her personal life, unnamed Princeton friends drop out of sight for no reason that she can discern, and when she notices that her growing daughter is seldom invited to other girls' homes, she can only attribute it to cold-war hostilities (this, in the days of détente). Moreover, those friends whom in Only One Year she had described with affection are now viewed with a more critical eye, if not outright hostility. This is especially true of her lawyers. In 1969 she was all gratitude to them, noting in her book that “I was venturing on a voyage in a ship with a good, friendly crew—was it necessary to think about what the crew was doing? I could only thank them for having taken me on board.” Now she makes a complete turnaround, claiming that they “used, deceived, and tricked” her.
Svetlana's latest account of her relations with her lawyers reveals her own naiveté as much as others' opportunism. When she appeared at the American embassy in New Delhi on March 6, 1967 requesting asylum, she handed over to State Department officials the manuscript of the book which was to become Twenty Letters to a Friend. Without her knowledge or consent it was copied and circulated among State Department employees, one of whom sent a copy to the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff, and Ernst. Soon afterward, the elderly head of the firm, Eddie (“the General”) Greenbaum, flew to Switzerland to meet Svetlana and arranged an unusual agreement in which for the sum of $1.5 million she signed all her rights over to Copex, the firm's corporation based in Liechtenstein. Although several publishers had already written to Svetlana in Switzerland proposing offers, she claims that the Swiss Foreign Office, supposedly at the behest of the American government, kept them from meeting her until after she had signed the agreement.
Svetlana further maintains that she was not fully informed at the time of the nature of her agreement with Copex and Patientia (another Liechenstein-based corporation for the lawyers). She was shown an attaché case filled with banknotes, and when she asked whether it represented a publisher's advance, a Swiss lawyer laughingly replied, “Well, you may regard it as advance money, yes.” Then the case was whisked away, never to be seen again. Instead, she drew checks on an account in the name of the law firm, and later received an allowance from a personal trust fund. All publicity was in the hands of the lawyers, as were the serialization rights, another source of distress. When Life published excerpts from her book, it included family photographs some of which had been obtained from unknown sources, while others had been taken from the desk of Svetlana's Moscow apartment; in either case, many of the attributions were erroneous.
More seriously, Svetlana's lawyers exploited her ignorance of translators by advising her to give the job to a novice, Priscilla MacMillan Johnson, whose chief qualification seems to have been her connection with the law firm, rather than to the distinguished translator Max Hayward, who had requested the assignment. No names were mentioned; she was merely told that the two candidates included “a girl about your age, a nice person in whose house you could stay upon arrival in the U.S.” and “an Englishman who wants very much to come to the U.S. to translate your book.” As it turned out, although she spent several weeks with the Johnson family on Long Island, she was not consulted about the translation, which she found embarrassingly bad.
As for immigration procedures, also handled by the law firm, Svetlana claims that she was not informed that she had been admitted to the United States on a six-month tourist visa rather than as a resident alien (a status she did not receive for a full year later). At the same time, the story given to the press by her lawyers was that she merely wanted to travel in the West in order to publish her memoirs. (The Soviet government, embarrassed by her flight on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Revolution, was putting pressure on Washington to play down her defection.) Indeed, from the very first, the State Department had been exceedingly nervous about her defection, not knowing what to do with her. Not only did Svetlana have to spend six weeks in Switzerland before the U.S. finally decided to admit her, but we learn here that she had to hide out illegally in Rome for three days before being allowed to fly into Switzerland.
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The note of comedy implicit in the account of Svetlana's surreptitious flight to Switzerland (complete with disguise of raincoat and sunglasses) broadens into farce with the story of her ill-fated union with Wesley Peters some three years later. By 1970 the celebrated author of Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year was receiving persistent letters of invitation from the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright to visit Taliesin West, the architectural commune run by the Wright Foundation near Scottsdale, Arizona. Olga Milianov Wright, a Georgian by birth who had lost a daughter named Svetlana in an auto accident some twenty-five years before, sensed a mystic affinity with the younger woman, while Svetlana on her part seems to have felt that she had found a replacement for the mother she had lost in early childhood. Mrs. Wright actively encouraged the courtship of Svetlana and her former son-in-law, Wesley Peters, the chief architect for the firm. As for Svetlana, she was dazzled by the whirlwind courtship conducted by Peters (whom she married within three weeks of coming to Taliesin) and by the community itself.
To be sure, there were warning signs. A few days before the wedding Mrs. Wright advised Svetlana that her fiancé was a compulsive spender addicted to gift-giving, and was heavily in debt. Soon Svetlana also began to notice deficiencies in the set-up at Taliesin. Since there were no private accommodations for residents, Svetlana had to take all her meals, along with mid-morning and afternoon tea, in the public dining hall. Inevitably she came into conflict with Mrs. Wright, who saw herself as the spiritual as well as the administrative head of the community.
A devotee of Eastern mysticism and a disciple of Gurdjieff, Mrs. Wright “communicated” with her dead husband and daughter and preached Sunday-morning sermons to a crowd assembled in her living room. While Mrs. Wright could announce to her associates that Taliesin “is set against all conventionalities. We are Truth Against the World,” Svetlana saw it more as a primitive version of the society she had taken so much trouble to leave. No doubt she also found it irksome that her husband had never had a vacation in his nearly forty years of service, but was constantly on call like the busiest obstetrician, to be paged in restaurants and telephoned at midnight by clients.
Not surprisingly, the honeymoon at Taliesin was quickly over. It is not clear from Svetlana's account whether Mrs. Wright's friendship cooled as soon as she learned that Svetlana was not going to donate $30,000 annually to the Foundation, as requested; or whether it was because Svetlana had broken with tradition there by conceiving a child, and thus forcing some semblance of individual family life for herself and her husband. As it turned out, the husband found his needs admirably served by the communal set-up and felt no obligation to change it so late in life for a new wife and child. The wonder is not that the marriage lasted as long as it did, but that two middle-aged people of such differing tastes and temperaments should have been so deluded as to have married at all.
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Both the episode of her brief marriage and the publication of her first book illustrate Svetlana's impulsiveness and her ability, once decided on a course of action, to close her eyes to unpleasant facts. With regard to the lawyers, it seems doubtful that they lied outright about her immigration status, and whatever huge profits they made on the worldwide distribution of Twenty Letters to a Friend, they did not exactly leave her impoverished: the $1.5 million she received in 1967 would be worth somewhere between $3 and $5 million in today's money. From her own account, she signed her agreement with the lawyers in Switzerland in an agony of impatience, and when advised by friends to wait before publishing her book in Europe, she told them she wanted no delay. In both love and business it would seem from her account that an initial ill-considered enthusiasm was followed by an equally intemperate swing in the other direction.
In her book Svetlana is similarly unable to resolve the contradictions of her status in the West. She deplores the vulgar publicity with which her defection was received, and particularly the television appearances insisted on by her lawyers to promote Twenty Letters to a Friend. Yet, against the wishes of her lawyers, she volunteered to read the most anti-Soviet chapters of her second book, Only One Year, over the Voice of America, thereby provoking the Soviet government to retaliate by stripping her of her citizenship. Again and again in her books Svetlana writes of her wish for a quiet, simple life in the West, but the suburban obscurity in which she lived over the past dozen years as a single mother suited her even less.
She complains that in America she missed “those sophisticated intellectuals and artists I used to know in Moscow and Leningrad: there they were able to understand me and to separate me from my father. Oh, how I longed here too to be amidst such fine minds—but I had no access to them.” Why such fine minds should be expected to seek out her company she does not explain. The influential and powerful friends described in Only One Year are no longer in evidence, for the most part—perhaps because, as she claimed in an interview, she did not want to become a mere “pet” of Russian experts. She did not attempt to teach Russian at a university, or pursue any other kind of regular employment. Nor did she seem to have much interest in the artistic or literary scene in the U.S.
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If autobiography is a kind of self-discovery, The Faraway Music is the least successful work of Svetlana's trilogy, displaying as it does an astonishing lack of self-awareness. Although the book is not exactly anti-American (and is still quite hostile to the Soviet regime), it was written at a time when she was far from happy with her life in the West, and probably speculating on the possibility of returning to the son and daughter she had left behind in the Soviet Union. Whatever autobiographical impulses were prompting her were partially blocked, if not utterly sabotaged, by Svetlana's uncertainty about her present and future life. She may have begun the book as a kind of therapy, but seems to have finished it in haste out of impatience with a project that had grown too problematic.
Her motives aside, The Faraway Music remains a curious footnote to a life which is itself a historical oddity. Were she not the only daughter of one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of all time, Svetlana would have been just another neurotic, middle-aged émigrée unable to put down roots in new soil. Instead, because of her uniquely privileged position, she was able to come full circle, returning to the land of her birth with her Soviet citizenship restored. No doubt she has found new sources of unhappiness in Tbilisi, where she now lives with her teen-aged American daughter. As for her autobiography, the next and by far the most fascinating installment will remain unpublished in India—and everywhere else.
