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Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
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animals conducted in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 5
The clipping was meant as proof that such experiments were under way in the Soviet Union. She continued:
I have deadackes [ sic ], heartaches, sudden high blood pressure, sudden depressions, bad eyesight, and what not—and all I can do is JUST try to pull myself together again—like Humpty-Dumpty. Sometimes it works; the presence of any NICE person is a help….
I feel at the present time desperately opened, unprotected and half-destroyed…. We have just moved into that apartment. But I already am going to move back to the house I bought—WHY? I DO NOT KNOW. That URGE CAME—and I will go. Everyone will be once again surprised. I have to say something to explain. But I do not know. I am already in some sort of dead end….
Please let me know what do you think about all this.
Yours,
Svetlana 6
Deeply disturbed by her letter, Jamie rushed to California to see how he could help. His visit was welcome, but other than urging her to return to the East Coast, there was little he could do.
It was as if all the self-control that it took to be Svetlana was failing. As the fears and terrors broke through, she felt invaded and occupied. She had always censored her feelings of betrayal. Now she would have to confront them. She faced a dark winter trying to hang on. In the spring, still desolate, she wrote to George Kennan:
Dear George,
I am definitely not a stone wall, neither a block of concrete. Nor do I possess those nerves of steel, famousenough, which have made a name for my father. Rather from my mother’s side comes oversensitivity and capacity to react to minor things…. 7
I respond TOO EASILY, George, to the ideas, wishes, suggestions, and desires of other people: instead of PRESSING MY OWN instinctive wish, which IS very often the most right one. My father noticed this in me, when I was a teenager, and used to say angrily: “Don’t you repeat to me what others want you to say, like an empty drum! Say what you really want: Yes or No!” I am afraid he noticed that weak point in me. The GOOD things to see was not HIS talent. But he was pretty smart about human weaknesses, and despised those. 8
Her self-contempt is obvious, still filtered through her father’s voice.
Finally, in March Svetlana consulted her family doctor and, through him, found a psychiatrist. What precipitated this desperate gesture was her sudden realization that her undigested bitterness at Wes was affecting her relationship with Olga. She told Joan Kennan that if Olga was stubborn or bossy, she saw her child as “a copy of Wes.” That was “unhealthy (I knew that!) and wrong.” She was panicked. “Olga is my dearest child (no matter who is the father).” 9
She began to visit the psychiatrist once a week. She never identified him, calling him simply Peter, but it was important to her that Peter had once been a Jesuit. He did not judge her or rush to conclusions. One can imagine the shock to the West Coast psychiatrist of finding Stalin’s daughter on his couch, but she told Joan Kennan she was able to speak to this kind, gentle man about her “whole life.” He gave her the simple acceptance she craved.
It may have been her psychiatrist who helped her to see thatthe bedrock of her current despair was located in her broken marriage. It was not Soviet experiments in mind control that were paralyzing her. It was grief. After her defection, the disaster of Taliesin had been the second total break in her life, and it had been a brutal betrayal. She had to find a way to exorcise the rage that resulted from the death of what she’d thought had been love from Wes, from the litany of betrayals during her father’s murderous attacks on her family, and from that terrifying moment in 1932 when her mother had abandoned her and she was psychologically orphaned.
Because of Wes, she had lost money, of course, and money is freedom, especially in the West, and is the only route to
The clipping was meant as proof that such experiments were under way in the Soviet Union. She continued:
I have deadackes [ sic ], heartaches, sudden high blood pressure, sudden depressions, bad eyesight, and what not—and all I can do is JUST try to pull myself together again—like Humpty-Dumpty. Sometimes it works; the presence of any NICE person is a help….
I feel at the present time desperately opened, unprotected and half-destroyed…. We have just moved into that apartment. But I already am going to move back to the house I bought—WHY? I DO NOT KNOW. That URGE CAME—and I will go. Everyone will be once again surprised. I have to say something to explain. But I do not know. I am already in some sort of dead end….
Please let me know what do you think about all this.
Yours,
Svetlana 6
Deeply disturbed by her letter, Jamie rushed to California to see how he could help. His visit was welcome, but other than urging her to return to the East Coast, there was little he could do.
It was as if all the self-control that it took to be Svetlana was failing. As the fears and terrors broke through, she felt invaded and occupied. She had always censored her feelings of betrayal. Now she would have to confront them. She faced a dark winter trying to hang on. In the spring, still desolate, she wrote to George Kennan:
Dear George,
I am definitely not a stone wall, neither a block of concrete. Nor do I possess those nerves of steel, famousenough, which have made a name for my father. Rather from my mother’s side comes oversensitivity and capacity to react to minor things…. 7
I respond TOO EASILY, George, to the ideas, wishes, suggestions, and desires of other people: instead of PRESSING MY OWN instinctive wish, which IS very often the most right one. My father noticed this in me, when I was a teenager, and used to say angrily: “Don’t you repeat to me what others want you to say, like an empty drum! Say what you really want: Yes or No!” I am afraid he noticed that weak point in me. The GOOD things to see was not HIS talent. But he was pretty smart about human weaknesses, and despised those. 8
Her self-contempt is obvious, still filtered through her father’s voice.
Finally, in March Svetlana consulted her family doctor and, through him, found a psychiatrist. What precipitated this desperate gesture was her sudden realization that her undigested bitterness at Wes was affecting her relationship with Olga. She told Joan Kennan that if Olga was stubborn or bossy, she saw her child as “a copy of Wes.” That was “unhealthy (I knew that!) and wrong.” She was panicked. “Olga is my dearest child (no matter who is the father).” 9
She began to visit the psychiatrist once a week. She never identified him, calling him simply Peter, but it was important to her that Peter had once been a Jesuit. He did not judge her or rush to conclusions. One can imagine the shock to the West Coast psychiatrist of finding Stalin’s daughter on his couch, but she told Joan Kennan she was able to speak to this kind, gentle man about her “whole life.” He gave her the simple acceptance she craved.
It may have been her psychiatrist who helped her to see thatthe bedrock of her current despair was located in her broken marriage. It was not Soviet experiments in mind control that were paralyzing her. It was grief. After her defection, the disaster of Taliesin had been the second total break in her life, and it had been a brutal betrayal. She had to find a way to exorcise the rage that resulted from the death of what she’d thought had been love from Wes, from the litany of betrayals during her father’s murderous attacks on her family, and from that terrifying moment in 1932 when her mother had abandoned her and she was psychologically orphaned.
Because of Wes, she had lost money, of course, and money is freedom, especially in the West, and is the only route to
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