Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle Author:Olga Andreyev Carlisle While visiting Moscow in April 1967 Olga Carlisle, an American writer and translator, was asked by Solzhenitsyn himself to see to the publication of The First Circle in the West. She agreed to do this, and in the years that followed conducted with her husband an international publishing operation of extraordinary delicacy. If it had become known... more » at any stage that Solzhenitsyn was seeking to have his great novel published outside Russia, there can be no doubt that his life would have been in danger.
The working relationship extended for seven years and included the publication of The First Circle and the custodianship of Solzhenitsyn's monumental work of nono-fiction, The Gulag Archipelago. These were arduous years, years during which Mrs Carlisle put aside her own work to further that of Solzhenitwyn by securing worldwide publication, by timing that publication to his best advantage and, above all, by ensuring total secrecy.
As time passed, however, and Solzhenitsyn attained his unique stature as a writer and dissident, distrust and confusion sprang up between the increasing number of people involved in the operation, reaching its peak at the time of publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974. Mrs Carlisle's account of the events leading up to this crisis and to the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union is a tribute to a writer of genius and enormous courage, and at the same time a sensitive account of the problems of working with such a man in conditions of protracted international intrigue.« less