ABSTRACT
I discovered a remarkable development while preparing the final material for this text: a relationship among the three authors that I had not been aware of when I started out. All three seemed to have turned to nature and to the writing about nature as their final legacy. This seemed, on first investigation, to be a similar, although uncoordinated, response to the Cold War hysteria that had blasted each of them, jeopardizing their very survival. One must also consider that as communists, both affiliated and independent, they must have had some response to the news that started coming out in the 1950s about the purges and the criminal nature of the Stalinist regime. If none of them exactly recanted, neither was any of them involved in a public campaign to defend her beliefs, whatever those beliefs may have been at that time.
