ABSTRACT
Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, in Leningrad, accompanied Solzhenitsyn on one or two research trips as an amanuensis and typed up final versions of The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. Two hundred and fifty copies of his letter to the Writers’ Congress had had to be typed, addressed, and mailed from a variety of postboxes in Moscow, as did forty-four copies of his letter to members of the Writers’ Union secretariat, with his transcript of the Cancer Ward discussion. The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s destination after his dive had been the Chukovskys was partly accidental. Kornei, Lydia, and Elena could have been only dimly aware of Solzhenitsyn’s state of mind when he went to them, of the complex reorientation taking place in his mood and his thinking. It should not be forgotten that in his years in Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn had virtually cut her off from her former friends and colleagues.
