The Solzhenitsyns are in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. They came with almost their entire large family. The occasion, if you don’t count the past and ongoing anniversary of the writer’s widow, Natalia Dmitrievna, was the first showing of perhaps the most personal part of Elena Yakovich’s three-part film: “Natalia Solzhenitsyna. The Meeting.” Personal because it is during these hundred minutes of the monologue film that Natalia Dmitrievna tells what is perhaps the most intimate thing for any woman: how she met her husband in August 1968, how feelings arose between them, and how they built their family happiness on the sharpest turns of fate, right up until their forced departure from the USSR. The filming took place in the very apartment on Tverskaya where she and Alexander Isayevich lived before their expulsion, where they made secret photocopies of “The Gulag Archipelago,” and where the writer was arrested for this book in 1974. Now there is a museum of Alexander Isaevich and a foundation named after him.
Why did this screening and this meeting – very warm, almost family-like – take place in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta? The editorial office is not a random address for Natalia Dmitrievna, and for all the Solzhenitsyns.
The history of the relationship between the newspaper and the family began on that very day in 1990, when Vladislav Fronin, then the editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda and now of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, called Vermont, America, the Solzhenitsyns’ refuge in exile, asking if it would be possible to publish the writer’s article “How Should We Organize Russia?” in the USSR for the first time after his long disgrace. Natalya Dmitrievna picked up the phone and gave Alexander Isayevich’s permission to publish it. Later, in the editorial office of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a discussion of this article took place. It was here that the writer’s brochure “Reflections on the February Revolution” was presented in the 2000s. In the same hall where this film-monologue was now shown…
Editor-in-chief Vladislav Fronin reminded Natalia Dmitrievna of this: “I hope this hall is your home. At least for us, since then you have remained the link between Alexander Isayevich’s principle of “live without lies” – and Pravda Street, where our editorial office is located.”
Natalia Dmitrievna herself chose the editorial office for the film’s premiere, and of course she did not refuse such spiritual kinship: “Alexander Isaevich loved Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and was, to be honest, amazed at one time that such a high-quality newspaper appeared in Russia – there were no such newspapers in the USSR before.”
It was in this familiar hall of the newspaper that the Solzhenitsyns gathered for a family photo. There was one problem – how to fit everyone in? “We have a large family, yesterday we counted everyone, there were 31 of us,” Natalya Dmitrievna said. Three sons, their wives, children came out on stage… Only great-grandchildren were not brought – they were still small. On the big screen behind them hung the famous photo from Vermont – here are the same sons, Yermolai, Ignat, Stepan, but small and with their father.
It happened this way: the editorial office became the place where the Solzhenitsyns met their own past, and in fact, with the whole big and complicated history of our country. This is essentially what the film is about – the writer’s family against the backdrop of the era. Here are names and events, like frames from a family album. Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose apartment Ehrenburg’s secretary Natalya Stolyarova invited the 29-year-old girl to become an assistant to the author of the most famous story of that time, which appeared in Novy Mir – “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. Here is Academician Sakharov, to whom the writer went on the day of his first meeting with Natalya Dmitrievna. Here are dissidents and the KGB hunt for Solzhenitsyn. And in the middle of history, two.
“Alexander Isaevich could be charming, kind, courteous, but he was not a champion in courtship,” the writer’s widow admits in the film. “But he knew how to accurately express what he really felt without any words.”
And then – an episode that gave me goosebumps… “During one of our meetings, he suddenly put his hands on my shoulders, it looked as if he was initiating me into some order, but I felt then that there was something else in this gesture, besides trust in me as an assistant,” recalls Natalia Dmitrievna. “At that moment, both he and I understood that these four hands were intertwined forever, that we were together.”
A total of 20 hours of candid monologue were filmed for the movie. Three films were made from them, the first about Natalia Dmitrievna’s life before the meeting, and the third about her life in exile and return. This part is still being prepared for release. It is possible that it will also be presented in Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Family – for the Solzhenitsyns is not only the inner circle. Numerous friends who became family over the years of the family’s life in Russia were invited to the screening of the film in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The legendary neurosurgeon Alexander Konovalov, who literally extended the writer’s life, the actor Yevgeny Mironov, whom the writer himself chose for the main role in the series “In the First Circle”, Alexander Isaevich’s friend from emigration, the poet Yuri Kublanovsky, the head of VGTRK Oleg Dobrodeyev, the famous bibliophile Mikhail Seslavinsky, Mikhail Shvydkoy, the director of the House of Russian Abroad Viktor Moskvin, the widow of Dmitry Shostakovich – Irina Antonovna, who, like Natalia Dmitrievna, knows what it is like to live with an inconvenient genius…
And on the same day, July 29, Monday, news arrived: Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the writer’s widow, head of the foundation named after her husband, Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 3rd degree. “For her great contribution to the development of national culture, active charitable and social work,” the decree says, published on the Kremlin website. A week ago, on July 22, the president congratulated Natalia Solzhenitsyn on her birthday, noting her contribution to the development of traditions of charity and education in the Russian Federation. “Natalia Dmitrievna’s main work in life is preserving the memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose original works and humanistic ideas are undoubtedly an integral part of national culture,” the president also noted.
By: Maxim Vasyunov, Rossiyskaya Gazeta
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