Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Clare Kitson (Translator), Melanie Moore (Translator), Daniel J. Mahoney (Foreword by)

Overview

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” —Kirkus Reviews

This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away—the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other.

Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too—the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268109011
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Series:	The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series
Pages:	584
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.29(d)

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Oak and the Calf, and Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).

Clare Kitson is a Russian literary translator. She has also translated part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic cycle, The Red Wheel.

Melanie Moore is a Russian and French translator, and she has produced a number of Russian literary translations.

Daniel J. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College.

Read an Excerpt

When I look back, I cannot fail to recognize that the past six years, at Five Brooks, have been the happiest of my life. Some disagreeable Western problems descended on us—and passed by, an insignificant froth. It was just then, in those years, that the invective increased—but it didn’t spoil a single working day for me—I didn’t even notice it, following the advice of the proverb, “hear no evil, see no evil.” Sometimes it’s better not to know what people are saying about you. Alya, whenever she entered my office, always found me in a joyful, even radiant mood—so well was my work coming along. I’ve been piling that abuse, those magazines, on a shelf and haven’t read it for all these years—until now. For the first time I am now, for Millstones, thinking of reading and simultaneously contesting it, to save time.

When you are immersed in a once-in-a-lifetime piece of work, you don’t notice, aren’t aware of any other tasks. At various times in that period my plays were produced, in Germany, Denmark, England, and the States, and I was invited to the premieres—but I never went. And as for the various gatherings, meetings, these are madness to me, just fruitless reeling in a New York or Paris whirlwind—while to them it’s my eccentricity that’s mad, retreating from the world to dig my grave. Some American literary critics, judging me by their own standards, decided that it was “well-organized publicity.” (Critics! Do they not understand what the writer’s work consists of? Every one of us who has something to say dreams of going into seclusion to work. I’ve been told that’s exactly what the intelligent ones do, here in Vermont and environs—Robert Penn Warren, Salinger. At one time Kipling lived right here for ten years. Now, if I accepted all the invitations and spoke at the events—that would certainly be advertising myself.)

One day Alya called to mind our catchphrase from before we were exiled, and repeated it now: how to decode the heavenly cipher for these years? How to recognize the right course of action, especially now we’re in the West? But, for as long as necessary, the whole message was unmistakable: sit there, write, fill in the Russian history that’s been lost. I have a prayer: “Lord, guide me!” And when necessary, He will. I am at peace.

Table of Contents

Publisher’s Note

Foreword to Book 2

PART TWO (1978–1982)

6. Russian Pain

7. A Creeping Host

8. More Headaches

PART THREE (1982–1987)

9. Around Three Islands

10. Drawing Inward

11. Ordeal by Tawdriness

12. Alarm in the Senate

13. Warm Breeze

PART FOUR (1987–1994)

14. Through the Brambles

15. Ideas Spurned

16. Nearing the Return

APPENDICES

List of Appendices

Appendices (25–36)

Notes to the English Translation

Index of Selected Names

General Index

Editorial Reviews

When you read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn you know that you are reading and being read by one of the greatest men of the bloody 20th century. . . . He wouldn’t be muzzled. . . . He is also frank. Solzhenitsyn never hesitated to reveal to his readers the truth of things, including his own soul.” —The American Conservative

“This long-awaited translation does not disappoint, offering insights into [Solzhenitsyn’s] work on The Red Wheel, his family life in Vermont, and his responses to the rapidly evolving political circumstances of what proved to be Soviet Communism’s waning years. . . . Between Two Millstones provides interesting insights into not just Solzhenitsyn but also the landscape he inhabited . . . [and] may be the most pleasurable read in his catalog—an opportunity to spend time with the writer in pleasant refuge.” —The American Spectator

“In Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn blends several literary genres—autobiography, essay, and a touch of diary. . . . Readers encounter a great-souled Russian and Christian man in medias res, as he thinks, feels, lives his way through the years of separation from his beloved homeland.” —Will Morrisey Reviews

"Outsiders see things those on the inside cannot see. Alexis de Tocqueville penetrated American democracy as no American could. In a similar fashion, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones[, Book 2]: Exile in America, 1978-1994 presents a view of America that few Americans could have grasped." —Law & Liberty

“The thread unifying the second volume of Between Two Millstones . . . is Solzhenitsyn’s ongoing research and writing of The Red Wheel, his cycle of four novels (with more planned) spanning Russian history from the eruption of World War I in August 1914 to December 1917, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. . . . For Solzhenitsyn, fiction can be an instrument of truth, as it was for many of his Russian predecessors.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Solzhenitsyn assumes a Tolstoyan mien (unwittingly or deliberately?). Striving for his works’ publication in Russia, he envisioned his exegi monumentum would restore Russia’s glory and soul. Thus in this second book . . . he corrects the lies and misinterpretations his works and appearances suffered from Soviet invectives as well as Western misperceptions. . . . Recommended." —Choice

"This memoir exemplifies the difficult question of belonging. Without slipping into clichés, Solzhenitsyn challenges both émigré and American alike to seek the truth, not only of one’s own existence, but also that of a nation." —Modern Age

“Today, as America seems more fractured than ever before, Solzhenitsyn’s reflections on how to restore Russia to a state of ordered liberty seem especially pertinent. . . . Solzhenitsyn is an inspiration—as a thinker, an artist, and a warrior who never tired of the battle.” —City Journal

"Perhaps the lengthiest but most important single episode recounted in Book 2 is Solzhenitsyn’s account of working with his biographer, Michael Scammel. For anyone familiar with this affair, reading this autobiographical account offers a fascinating first-hand view into the complicated professional relationship between the two men. For those who are unfamiliar, it is an edge-of-your-seat intellectual thriller, a rollercoaster of literary intrigue." —The University Bookman

“The last volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the recently translated second part of Between Two Millstones, . . . casts the Gorbachev years as an eerie repeat of 1917.” —The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

2020-08-27
The second part of Solzhenitsyn's memoir of his time in the West, before he returned to Russia in 1994.

The author delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat with Natalia, his wife and intellectual partner, and three sons, the Nobel laureate found what scholar Daniel J. Mahoney describes as “a happiness in free and uninterrupted work—conditions he could only dream of during the years of repression and harassment in the Soviet Union chronicled in The Oak and the Calf, perhaps the greatest of his literary memoirs.” While Book 1 was devoted mostly to “speeches and interventions,” these pieces demonstrate Solzhenitsyn’s deep research and engagement in his life's work, as he struggled to navigate the "millstones" of criticism against his historical assessments of the Russian Revolution. One of his translators even criticized him for anti-Semitism and for “romanticizing prerevolutionary days and urging a return to the orthodox beliefs and chauvinistic traditions of the past,” all of which the author addresses in his sage, deliberative way. Solzhenitsyn's experiences in the gulags led to the further development of his philosophical Christian beliefs, and he never shied away from his condemnations of Bolshevism, Communism, and the Soviet system as destructive to the "historical Russia." As he writes, “during my twenty years of exile the Communist government has never tired of sullying my name either—indefatigably, in every way, and at every opportunity.” Whether he is chronicling his assistance to others caught up in the oppressive Soviet society, engaging in an ongoing dialogue with fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov, or responding to the "blowing hot and cold" developments from the Soviet Union, the author leaves a riveting record of his work in the West,

Powerful intellectual arguments against a repressive regime interwoven with pleasant familial reflections.

Kirkus Reviews