Solzhenitsyn's Idyll in Vermont

Today’s Review section of the Wall Street Journal features a full-page excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. These pages, written in 1982 but published here for the first time in English, describe Solzhenitsyn’s joy, after years of tightly constricted time and space, at his newfound opportunity to commune with nature in rural Vermont and to work undisturbed on his magnum opus, The Red Wheel.

“For six months, I revel in my work in a spacious, high-ceilinged office with “arrow” beams—cold in winter, it’s true—with big windows, skylights, and ample tables where I spread out my quantities of little notes. But for the other half of the year, the summer months, I decamp to the little house by the pond and derive a new rush of energy from this change of workplace: Something new flows into me, some kind of expanded creative capacity.

Here, nature is so close all around us that it even becomes a curse: Chipmunks dart in and out under your feet, several of them at a time, little snakes occasionally slip past you through the grass and a raccoon rustles along, heaving a sigh, beneath our floorboards; at dawn every day, squirrels bombard our metal roof with the pine-cones they’ve picked, and red flying squirrels with wings like bats move into the attic of the big house for the winter, and start romping around there at random times of the day and night. But the ones I dearly love are the coyotes: In the winter, they often roam our land, coming right up to the house and emitting their intricate, inimitable cry. I won’t attempt to describe it, but I am very fond of it.”