Her remaining brother, Vasili, died of alcoholism two days short of his 41st birthday. camp after Stalin refused a prisoner exchange to save him. Her half brother Yakov, with whom she was close, perished in a German P.O.W.
(According to the official Soviet version, Nadezhda Alliluyeva died of acute appendicitis Svetlana learned the truth only at the age of 16, from an article in The Illustrated London News that she was reading to practice her English.) Her first love, the prominent screenwriter Aleksei Kapler, was sent to labor camps when Stalin learned of their courtship (he disapproved). She experienced not only her mother’s suicide but also the disappearance of most of her relatives into gulags. Born in 1926, Svetlana lived through the purges and the war. It would perhaps be difficult to write a dull book given the material. “You can’t regret your fate,” she will say later, “though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” She is Svetlana, her father is Joseph Stalin, and her extraordinary story is the subject of “Stalin’s Daughter,” Rosemary Sullivan’s thoughtful new biography.Īt 623 pages of text, plus sources and footnotes, the work may seem daunting, but it remains riveting throughout. Troubled and lonely, she will spend decades trying to escape the horror of her past, the terrible weight of history. The little girl’s world is shattered, never to be the same. Her grandmother says: “Where is your soul? You will know when it aches.” Her mother draws a little square over the child’s heart with her finger and tells the girl, “That is where you must bury your secrets” then, before the girl’s seventh birthday, she shoots herself in her own heart with a Mauser pistol. The aunts and uncles begin to vanish one by one.
The world she inhabits seems magical to her, “that place of sunshine.”īut as she gets older, she starts seeing and hearing more, and sinister shadows creep into the light, dimming it little by little. She spends idyllic summers at the family dacha, where her father’s merry friends, whom she calls “aunts” and “uncles,” come on visits and regale her with stories and songs. Her father is a beloved ruler of a vast country, and she is his only daughter and favorite child, his “little sparrow,” his “little fly.” She brings him presents of violets and strawberries, and he pets her, showering her in bristly kisses redolent of tobacco. A young princess walks the corridors of an ancient palace, surrounded by adoring relatives, governesses and tutors.
0 kommentar(er)
