ABSTRACT
The period when Natalia was going through the formalities of filing for a divorce was made doubly difficult for Solzhenitsyn by some major changes taking place simultaneously at the sharashka. At the beginning of 1949 Marfino was officially designated a scientific research institute and given a new chief, Colonel Anton Vasiliev. Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn were obliged to hand over the library to three women employees of the MGB and were assigned to a special research group headed by an engineer called Alexander P, to make a statistical study of the phonetic properties of the Russian language, so that it could later be broken down into its phonetic components for “scrambling” by the telephone engineers. Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev quickly set up their own cosy corner once more at one end of the new laboratory. In March 1950 Solzhenitsyn had his first meeting with Natalia since she had moved to Ryazan.
