And here, just in time to keep away catastrophic depression, comes the pretty Swiss Air stewardess with extrafine stockings, asking would I like another vodka martini?
You bet I would.
Where are you now, Mr. Staehelin? What have I done to you? Mrs. Staehelin toasts you anyway. You and I were here before, remember? It was you who brought me across this ocean. You spread your proverbial jacket over the water so I could make the crossing like a lady. I was no lady, but I enjoyed every moment of the journey.
Your loving
Svetlana
EDITOR’S NOTE
The teashop doorbell tinkles softly, and a squat, heavy-set old woman, with rheumy eyes and broken red veins ribboning her cheeks, peers suspiciously inside. It is a crisp winter morning in a remote West Country seaside village, and the place is deserted. Even so, she pulls down her black beret, raises the collar of her camel overcoat, and requests a table in the most conspiratorial corner. Svetlana Evans (née Stalin)—her voice a strange mixture of drawing-room English and East European idioms—says, “Tell me please, how did you find me here?”
—Daily Mail, 15 February 1996
LETTER
8 April 1996
Cornwall, England
Dear Peter,
You were with me just a few short days ago—such surprise, and so strange to write it now—so perhaps this letter reaches Princeton before you. Would you give my hugs to your Jean, who has not been little for many years? She will not remember crazy “Aunt Lana” from long ago, but I will never forget my first American summer with your family on Block Island. Such stories in the sands of Time.
I must apologize for not allowing you to see the flat where I was living. No matter, for I have again moved house just since you were here—another charity-run flat in another Cornish village, which are all much the same, some closer to the sea than others. Closer preferably, for salt air does my mind good even if cold and damp make my joints creak and my nose run. Yasha says I have “thrown in the towel” by living unknown and poor in this boring West Country England of soggy tea parlors and sagging boats. He doesn’t enjoy visiting me in these surroundings compared with his London life with girlfriend and art classes. So when you talk about your Jean I understand. You and I have reached ages when silences we have known in life have finally taught us that words alone are not always the answer. Sitting across from you in the pub under that stuffed one-eyed bird neither of us could identify, I took your hand and held it, which you let me do with the same shy courtesy I remember from our first hours together on our very first journey.
And yet, my love, do not become too quiet to yourself in your late years. This idea you still carry that despite noble exertions you have not lived some better version of yourself—or rather, that you have lived too well some lesser version you believe you were handed down by your wounded father—this does not do you justice. Your loyalty to Martha (to say nothing of your profession) stands for more than this. Choices you made and must now try to understand while there is time, the strength of the man you are who made these choices and what he means to you. I too have made choices and have a contradictory strength, which sometimes frightens these Cornish villagers, who have no real idea who I am. Perhaps, in my case, this is merely the natural product of permanent exile: such stateless state in which my dear aunt and uncle and all the disappeared members of the Alliluyev family lived, but which I have earned most of all through my failure, ever since the loss of my mother and my father’s turning against me, to feel at peace anywhere in this world.
Dear Peter, I confess there are times now when my mind feels like a fist clenching (you taught me this word, remember?) itself too tightly, so that thoughts are pressed one against another and all the air, all the freedom, gets squeezed out and I realize to my dismay that in the end I am holding nothing. The result is what you found on your visit. How my words not in Russian cannot manage to express to an urgent enough degree what it is like inside this fist of my being. I could not describe to you how our time that afternoon turned so short. Like winter light, you were gone before the day was finished. But first you walked me out of the pub and across the road. People who saw us must have thought you were helping some bag lady, but you didn’t mind. Arm in arm we crossed the green with its ancient stone well—dry now—and continued all the way to the edge of town and the river that has flowed through here since the beginning of time, and I said, “If this is the last we ever see each other—” And you cut off my words saying, “It won’t be. We will see each other again.” And you sounded so certain that all the rest of that day and evening, after you left me there by the river, I believed you.
Have you ever read Nabokov’s autobiography: “The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.”
My love always,
Svetlana
EDITOR’S NOTE
I didn’t want to leave her standing alone by the river. I didn’t want to leave her at all. I wanted to walk her back to her flat as the sky began to fade and the chill came down; to see her safe inside, where she would stay; someplace where I would be able to find her again.
Because I would find her. I always would, somehow, no matter how much time passed between us. I believed this.
But she would not let me walk her back to her flat. And I had a plane to catch; a wife to return to. And so, in the end, I left her there: an old woman, facing away across a river in a foreign town, staring at ghosts.
It was the last time I ever saw her.
LETTER
12 November 2010
Spring Green, Wisconsin
My dearest Peter,
What can I say to comfort you after such sad loss of your Martha? I am not the person she would have chosen to give such comfort, this we both know. And yet one way and another, however unlikely, my life and hers did cross and a kind of intimacy discovered us where we were hiding.
Do not punish yourself. This is what I wish to say: anyone who has never committed mistakes of the heart has never committed himself bravely enough to life. So yes, you perhaps had more courage than either of you expected. Did she have as much as you? I don’t know. But I know that you did not leave her. You accompanied her until the end. This is much more than I have ever done for another.
There is something else I know and wish to tell you. You have always been a far stronger and braver man than you ever believed, with a capacity for love that is not an accident of your experience, but rather its reward.
And you have left your mark on me.
So, my love, do not be lonely in this new solitude that has come to you. An old lady in Wisconsin holds you close in her thoughts. She herself is almost across the bridge of this life, stopping here and there to record the view while there is still light. And, with all her heart, to remember how it truly was.
My love always,
Svetlana
CODA
On November 22, 2011, Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, died from complications due to advanced cancer in the hospital at Pine Valley assisted living facility in Richland Center, Wisconsin. She was eighty-five years old and had always believed she would die in November, the same month as her mother’s suicide. Officially she was an American citizen, though as she claimed to a local journalist—the last she would ever speak to—a year before her passing, she was “not American, not Russian, neither this thing or that thing but always now between these things, which is the tragedy of my life.”
* * *
—
According to his website, Jacob “Yasha” Evans is a “video artist and professional digital archivist” living in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and son, whose names are not given. His photograph shows a lean, handsome man in early middle age with strong cheekbones, light-streaked brown eyes, and his mother’s (and grandfather’
s) thick reddish hair.
I do hereby authorize and demand that following my death my body be cremated to ashes and spread by considerate person or persons into the Atlantic Ocean, where the waves touch the shore of the beautiful Block Island, USA.
—Lana Evans, Last Will and Testament
* * *
—
And so she was.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the spring of 1967, a young New York lawyer named Alan U. Schwartz traveled to Switzerland under CIA cover to meet a Russian woman and escort her secretly into the United States. The woman, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was the only daughter and surviving child of Joseph Stalin, ruler of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953 and unquestionably among the most lethal, ruthless, and monstrous dictators the world has ever known. The young lawyer was my father.
On the wall of our house while I was growing up was a photograph of him standing beside Svetlana on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy Airport facing a forest of microphones. Svetlana spent most of that August (when I was two) with my family—the first of numerous such visits over the next several years. Then, after this relatively brief period, she fell out of our lives and my thoughts until the day in late November 2011 when I read about her death—and her haunted, nomadic, improbable life—on the front page of The New York Times. All of which is to say that, though the character of Peter Horvath could not be more different from my father in countless ways, and—for the record—my father and Svetlana never to any degree fell in love or had an affair, the roots of my interest in this story date back to my childhood.
My father could not have been more generous to me in my years of research. He opened his expansive “Svetlana” file to me, which included fascinating original material not only from her first few years in America, when he was her legal representative, friend, and trusted adviser but from the decades afterward, when occasionally she would write to him in her stridently emotional and (as she aged) increasingly aggrieved English about various problems of her life and heart. And he patiently answered my questions about his involvement in her defection and in her first turbulent, dislocating years in America. It was with no small amount of surprise that I learned, for example, that he had been Svetlana’s only representative at her sudden marriage to Frank Lloyd Wright’s son-in-law in 1970; had, in fact, given away the bride.
My love and thanks to my father, then, for his help with this book that has meant so much to me. The fact that he did so while harboring some understandable ambivalence about my literary project—a nagging feeling (perhaps not uncommon among the close relatives and friends of novelists) that I might be leaving colonizing footprints on aspects of his own personal narrative—only increases my sense of gratitude and admiration for his assistance.
* * *
—
Twenty Letters to a Friend—the manuscript that Svetlana Alliluyeva carried with her during her defection, and that was first published, in English, in 1967—was not her only memoir, but it was certainly her best. One can question the author’s perceptions about her life, times, and especially about her murderous father, with whom by most accounts she shared a loving and tender relationship until she was sixteen, but the book as a whole still rings true at its emotional core and in its very Russian expressiveness. Twenty Letters, however, takes Svetlana only up to 1963; it gives no hint of the seismic break with her past that she would enact only a few short years later. Her second memoir, Only One Year, published in 1968, was intended for that purpose. Yet where the first book was written in unhurried privacy in her home country, surrounded by her children and her living memories, the second book too often shows the stress cracks of rushed ruminations and the unsettled, confusing environment of American semi-celebrity in which she now found herself. Her final attempt at memoir, The Faraway Music, written in English not long before her disastrous decision to re-defect to the Soviet Union in 1982, and never published anywhere but in India, stands mostly as a long, fractious letter of disenchantment with the West at a particularly unhappy time in her life.
In addition to these three books, no current bibliography about Svetlana would be complete without Rosemary Sullivan’s very good 2015 biography, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Ms. Sullivan’s exhaustive research, smart use of primary sources, and the overall empathy she displayed toward her challenging subject’s contradictory nature and emotionally irreconcilable personal history all acted as a nurturing tributary to my own endeavor, while at the same time underscoring for me the fundamental differences between my novelistic intentions and those of a historian or biographer.
With such differences in mind, I think it bears repeating that The Red Daughter is a work of fiction. Its portrayals—from Svetlana and Peter Horvath on down—are products of my imagination. Within this fictional frame, however, I have in certain places used actual letters, or parts of them, between Svetlana and her parents and children; certain news items that were published at the time; and a section of the actual psychological profile of Svetlana done by the CIA at the American Embassy in Delhi in the days following her initial defection. The “private journals of Svetlana Alliluyeva 1967–2011” depicted in these pages are my own invention—to my knowledge, there were no such journals—as is the voice in which they are written.
There were other works too, to varying degrees and in various ways, which helped light my passage through the years of research: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s pair of vivid histories, Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; Wendell Steavenson’s evocative and perspicacious book about her time living in Georgia, Stories I Stole; Harold Zellman and Roger Friedland’s tell-all account, The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship; Priscilla J. Henken’s far quieter Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright; Adam Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin; Francis Spufford’s historical novel Red Plenty; the great Belarussian investigative journalist and nonfiction prose writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets; and Nicholas Thompson’s March 2014 New Yorker article, “My Friend, Stalin’s Daughter.”
My thanks to all, and many more. One writes alone but never in a vacuum: my wife, Aleksandra, and son, Garrick (and my dog, Griffin, too) are my constant guarantors of this truth, for which I am forever grateful. Onward, with love.
J.B.S.
Brooklyn, New York
FOR MY FATHER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One day in the spring of my last year of college, I took the train down from Boston to meet the literary agent Binky Urban in New York for the first time. Binky had read a hundred pages of fiction I’d written about a young man living in Japan and had sent me an encouraging note. I very much doubt that she expected me to arrive at her office in person later that week. But arrive I did. And she has been by my side, and had my back, ever since. She has my profound gratitude and deepest affection.
My extraordinary editor, Susanna Porter, arrived in my life when I most needed her, just as I was finishing the first draft of The Red Daughter, and with patient wisdom and miraculous grace guided me through the many further drafts that it required. Susanna is that rare thing: a teller of hard truths whom one always looks forward to hearing from. I was, and am, so excited and thankful to be working with her.
My thanks also to David Ebershoff, whose comments about The Red Daughter in its early stages showed the fine perceptiveness mixed with clear-eyed literary ruthlessness that have made him not only a wonderful editor but the excellent novelist that he is.
Finally, a team of very talented people at Random House took my final draft of this novel and turned it into the published book it is today: Emily Hartley in editorial; Carrie Neill, Melissa Sanford, and Katie Tull in publicity and marketing; Paolo Pepe, who designed such a stirring cover; Debbie Glasserman, Kelly Chian, and Susan Brown, who added their skills in
text design, production editorial, and copyediting respectively; and, in the publisher’s office, Avideh Bashirrad, Susan Kamil, and Andy Ward. My sincere thanks to all.
BY JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ
Bicycle Days
Reservation Road
Claire Marvel
The Commoner
Northwest Corner
The Red Daughter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ is the author of five acclaimed novels, including The Commoner, Northwest Corner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. He is literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son, Garrick.
johnburnhamschwartz.com
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