ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn’s visit to Stockholm signalled an end to his period of retreat in Zurich and the start of a spate of intensive travelling that was to take him to six countries on two continents within the next eighteen months. Finding himself in Zurich, where Lenin had spent some of the most eventful years of his exile, Solzhenitsyn had been able to enrich his pages not only with local colour but also with material drawn from the Zurich archives. During his year in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn had also made some major changes in the conduct of his literary affairs. Solzhenitsyn, according to Fritz, “kept producing little scraps of paper from his pocket” with different questions on them and wrote down the answers in one of his little notebooks. According to Natalia Svetlova, Solzhenitsyn had exercised his prerogative as a Nobel Prize winner to nominate Nabokov for the literature prize and had sent Nabokov a copy of the letter.
