Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan

Author:Rosemary Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The Taliesin Fiasco

Svetlana married Wesley Peters, the head architect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation, on April 4, 1970, at the Taliesin West compound in the Sonoran desert.

(Courtesy of John Amarantides)

Svetlana had been in the United States three years now and was still receiving letters from strangers around the world. In November 1969, persistent letters began arriving from Olgivanna Wright, the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, exhorting her to come to Arizona to visit the Taliesin Fellowship. Svetlana didn’t know much about the famous architect, and friends tried to warn her gently that the “Fellowship,” as Wright’s School of Architecture was called, was strange, but in the books and pamphlets Olgivanna was sending, Taliesin looked exceedingly beautiful.

Svetlana had planned a monthlong trip to California to meet a number of her new pen pals, and then intended to go on to Hawaii to visit a Russian-born American painter she had met on Long Island. She decided she would stop in Phoenix for a week. It would be an American experience to add to her list. Truthfully, she was desperate to put Louis Fischer and Princeton gossip behind her.

There was an unexpected hook in Olgivanna Wright’s letters. Olgivanna wrote that her eldest daughter, Svetlana, had died in a car accident twenty-five years earlier. What a strange coincidence that Svetlana should carry the same magical name, which means “enlightened.” The name itself was a talisman. According to Olgivanna, they were destined to meet.

Svetlana had an equally compelling fantasy. She knew that Olgivanna was Montenegrin and was only four years older than her own mother, Nadya, would have been if had she lived. She imagined a woman with the dark Georgian looks of her mother. As she remembered it, “We both expected something very important to come out of this meeting, both caring for beloved images and fantasies. . . . Apart from this strange connection, I really did not expect anything exciting from the Arizona desert.”1

Svetlana had no idea that she was about to encounter a titan who’d already plotted the role she was to play in the world of Taliesin. Few could stand up to Olgivanna Wright.

Olga Ivanovna Lazovich was born in the kingdom of Montenegro in the Balkans in 1897, and her genetic inheritance was fierceness. Her father was a chief justice and her mother was a general in the Montenegrin army who’d once ridden on the back of her father’s saddle into battle against the Turks. Olga viewed her mother, the general, with awe and fear. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to Batum (Batumi) on the Black Sea to live with her sister. While visiting friends in Tiflis, Olga found her escape route. Now nineteen, she married a Latvian architect named Valdemar Hinzenberg. She weathered the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Tiflis and learned what near-starvation was. Soon she gave birth to her daughter Svetlana. In Tiflis she met the Armenian “spiritual teacher” Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Coincidentally, the Gurdjieff family knew Joseph Djugashvili before he was Stalin.

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