FACTS ABOUT STALIN’S DAUGHTER
ALINA STEFANESCU
Svetlana Alliluyeva was Stalin's daughter. 2
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Svetlana married, had children, divorced her husband, fled his country. She defected. She was a defector. She carried her defects in one single bag. She left a son and a daughter behind in the Soviet paradise. 7
Stalin died a slow, painful death. His daughter said: God grants an easy death only to the just. Death is a timbre of justice. 8
Upon arriving in the US, Svetlana said she felt able to fly out free, like a bird to exist in the condition of foreignness. 9
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When asked if she wanted to be a US citizen, Svetlana replied: B efore the marriage it should be love...So if I will love this country and this country will love me, then the marriage will be settled.11
After becoming a US citizen, Svetlana returned to the USSR and reclaimed her Soviet citizenship. She flew back to the US. She lived in France. She moved to England. She had lovers and books and debt.
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She loved writing letters. In 2006, she wrote a letter to a close friend named Nicholas Thompson. I am still here in the USA, she penned, as a guest after all 40 years--never quite 'at home' here.
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Svetlana was Stalin's last surviving child. 15
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2 All italics are direct quotations from the diary of Svetlana Alliluyeva, an essay by Nicholas Thompson, and Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski. All happy endings are products listed on massage parlor menus. 3 Her mother was Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda. Her mother died when she was six.
4 Years later, Svetlana discovered that her mother actually took her own life.
5 Svetlana said learning the truth about her mother's death d estroyed something inside her. After that, she could no longer obey the word and will of her father.
6 Mothers die. Fathers lie.
7 She left a son and a daughter behind.
8 Nadezhda's mother warned her never to marry Stalin, never to build her home on Siberian ice.
9 After becoming a US citizen, Adam Zagajewski yearned to go back, to find the homeland he had left. On his way to Lwov, he stopped in Prague, where he discovered foreignness, a new form of awe. I was foreign to them....but I also became a little foreign to myself, and thus a little more real, Zagajewski wrote.
10 A mother's warnings haunt a landscape, the smile of a hill revealed as snarl.
11 Some of us have more than one lover in a lifetime. More than one spouse. Some of us cannot settle for national monogamy.
12 When my mother's father killed my grandmother with an overdose of mercy, something in my mom died.
13 She left me behind with the bones of my namesake. The defectress was born from destruction. 14 One leaves the fatherland for the motherland located inside.
15 My mother died.
16 Her mother died.
17 Her father lied.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She serves as Co-Director of PEN Birmingham. Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Prize and was published in May 2018. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Co-Founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, and proud board member of Magic City Poetry Festival. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, the 2019 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the 2019 Frank McCourt Prize, and the 2019 Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.