First Words from Svetana

When Svetlana Alliluyeva was on her way to Switzerland from India in March, someone gave her a copy of Doctor Zhivago in Russian. It was, she is sure, no coincidence, but an act of fate. Soon immersed in the book, which is banned in Russia, she found that it affected her like "a squall of rain and snow, like an avalanche, like a hurricane." Suffused with Pasternak's lan guage and imagery, she sat down and wrote an extraordinary 3,200-word document that she hoped would find its way back to her children and friends in Russia. Last week it appeared in the Atlantic magazine, which, pleased with its journalistic coup, proclaimed in an ad: "The great tradition of Russian literature has a direct descendant in the daughter of Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva and Josef Stalin."

Literary judgments had better wait. Obviously dictated by powerful feelings, the article testified to an agonized conflict between love of country and children on the one hand and a higher love on the other. But between sincere and moving flights of emotion, there were also little hops of bathos.

"My Prince." Stalin's daughter was powerfully struck by Zhivago mostly because she kept finding mystical parallels: between her own children and the book's young people, between her second husband ("whom I did not love") and the cold, mechanical commissar, and above all between herself and the doctor. "The Russia I have lost," she writes, "the Russia that has been taken from me by a cruel fate, as she was taken from Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago . . . wolves howl on your snow-covered plains, the land is still prey to folly and desolation, and there is no end to the rule of the Pharisees. I shall not see you again, I shall not see you for a long time, you have been taken away, abducted . . . but what am I saying? Who took her away? I went away myself. I gave her up myself."

Slightly reminiscent of Saul Bellow's Herzog, who in his imagination writes letters to everybody, Svetlana addresses one and all, including God. Her words to her daughter: "My darling Katya, my heart's blood, straight as a rowan tree, sweet as a cherry, what have I done to you?! I have left you all alone, my love, and how you must be crying there now, though you are such a brave girl and don't like to be a crybaby, my little one. . . . Let them all condemn me--and you condemn me as well, if that will make things easier for you, only do not reject me in your hearts, my children."

To her third husband, Brajesh Singh, who died last fall in Moscow of a heart attack: "As you lay in your coffin in our dismal Moscow crematorium, strangers came up to look at your calm, beautiful face. It was very cold, and we stood there in fur coats ... all of you, my dear friends from the unfortunate Institute of World Literature . . .

You were such a good, defenseless, sun-filled tree, my unforgettable one, my love, my prince . . ."

And to Pasternak, after a denunciation of Russian repression: "All this is more than flesh and blood can stand, dear doctor, dear Boris Leonidovich. All this is more than I can bear to see, people of the whole world, and this is why I am here, and not there, in Russia. How much longer, doctor, will it go on, how much longer?"

Pittance. Literature or not, the article has great topical interest and was a scoop for Atlantic Editor in Chief Robert Manning. Though few in the U.S. were even aware of her Swiss writing,

Manning had heard hints of its existence from various sources, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia George Kennan. "I thought: what the hell, I probably won't get it, but why not try?" recalls Manning. He got it because Svetlana wanted a low-key presentation in literary surroundings.

The Atlantic, says Manning, paid a "pittance" compared with the offers for the 80,000-word memoir that Svetlana had written earlier in Russia.* Close to deadline when the deal was completed, Manning scrapped his planned cover, substituted a plain yellow and white page headlining the article. The press run was upped from the usual 325,000 to 405,000, and the printing was finished a week late. Atlantic will soon oversee publication of the article in pamphlet form in Russian. The pamphlet, Svetlana hopes, will be the means of getting through to her children and friends who are still living "our unbearable Soviet life," but who may some day "wake from their long sleep."

*Accepted offers from book and magazine publishers in the U.S. and abroad reached $2,-500,000 last week, with many countries still to be heard from. For tax purposes, a corporation has been formed in Liechtenstein to receive her publishing profits.

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