ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn’s destination in Moscow on this occasion was not the Chukovskys’ flat or their dacha in Peredelkino but Rostropovich’s dacha in the outer Moscow suburb of Zhukovka, a quiet, leafy district of spacious houses and large gardens reserved for Soviet notables and top Party leaders, to which access was virtually barred for the general public. Solzhenitsyn’s other immediate destination in Moscow on 11 November was the offices of Novy Mir. Solzhenitsyn’s attitude to the events seems to have been contradictory. On the one hand, he couldn’t but be depressed and angered by the virtual suppression of the one decent journal that remained in the Soviet Union and by this brutal humiliation of Tvardovsky. On the other, he himself had gone far beyond Novy Mir, had outgrown it years ago, politically and artistically, and had therefore come to regard it, somewhat patronizingly, as excessively timid and conformist.
