Divorce Taliesin Style

Svetlana reaches a breaking point at Taliesin. But as she tries to move forward into the next chapter of her life, her past continues to haunt her.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Joseph Stalin's daughter probably never imagined that by forty five,
she'd be married to an American, summering amongst cows in
Wisconsin and wintering amongst cacti in Arizona, mothering a newborn baby,
and bending off a quasi mother in law she thought
could maybe potentially end her. It's funny how that happens.

(00:20):
I also had different plans for my life. I thought
I was going to live in New York forever. But
then I met the right guy who pushed me to
take a giant leap of faith and leave everything behind
to move to a city I'd never even visited. I
want to take You. That's a song I wrote for

(00:52):
Jordan at our wedding in Portland a few years later.
See that's the thing about choosing to spend your life
with some one. It feels like this big, scary, exciting
leap into the unknown, and then suddenly you have a
floor under you for all time. That is, unless it's

(01:19):
not the right person, or the right time, or the
right circumstance, and then it turns out that the floor
was made of glass and someone stomped too hard. Listen.
There are challenges to every marriage and sped Lana was
willing to do everything in her power to make the
marriage work. But there are some challenges that are pretty

(01:41):
hard to overcome, like a woman in a golf cart
who might want to kill you. My name is Dan Katroser,
and this is sped Lana. Sped Lana. You wake up
in the morning, you live your day, and then you

(02:02):
do it tomorrow and over and over again, and over
again and over. Act one. Well, we have ruined it.

(02:27):
When we last left stet Lana, it was a sticky,
sweaty day in spring Green, Wisconsin, and strolling through the
small cemetery of Budding tali Essen, she had come upon
a grave that bore her own name, stet Lana Peters.
It felt like a warning when I saw my name
set Lana Peters. So, oh my god, that's how little

(02:50):
finished was me and little baby Daniel Peters, who lay
dead and buried next to his mother, was an omen
for her baby Olga. I was afraid. I was afraid
for her life. And the source of that fear, missus Wright,
could I was. I was scared of her. Excuse me,

(03:12):
I just kids. My heart starts racing like no. This
interview is recorded by Roger and Harold about thirty years
after the fact, but speed Lana still talks about Olga
Vanna as if she's right there breathing down her neck.

(03:33):
She tells this story about taking a walk with baby
Olga in her arms and coming across missus Wright roaming
the expansive property on her golf cart. She invited us
to sit down to the cart and we will go
on that road down to the lake. Spent Lana squeezes
onto the seat, cradling the baby with one hand. By

(03:57):
speed Lana's account, Olga Vana suddenly has a need for speed.
She's flying down the rolling hills, kicking up dirt. Her
passenger is panicked. She I think she could just kill us,
row astolutely. I don't know what she was, this kind
of a person, fighting, frighting, frightful person. Okay, just to

(04:25):
recap speed Lana things, Olga Vanna could kill her and
her baby daughter and throw them into a lake. There
was only one thing speed Lana could do to ward
off the evil that was lurking around her and her daughter.
I wanted sort of protection. She wants to baptize Olga

(04:46):
as a sort of protection. Sped Lana was a very
spiritual person. It was her grandmother, Olga's namesake, who had
instilled in her a strong sense of faith from a
young age. Sveet Lana's father had even started out in
the seminary studying to be a priest. Of course, a
little later he all butt outlawed religion in the Soviet Union,

(05:06):
So you know, holidays were always a little complicated. At
the Stalins, Wes is on board with the baptism. He
even knows the perfect spot. So in September of nineteen
seventy one, spent Lana and West find themselves in Milwaukee
at the Greek Orthodox Church of Annunciation. Neither spent Lana

(05:28):
nor Wes are Greek Orthodox or Annunst. But this church
was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it was being
consecrated for its ten year anniversary. The Archbishop Yakovos had
come all the way from Greece for the big affair.
Hello Yakovos. So there is little baby Olga in the
arms of Yakovos, a sea of taliess and fellows waiting

(05:50):
in the pews before her, and behind her a painting
of Mother Mary cradling Jesus, and I ship you not
that Mary and Jesus were modeled off of the deceased
spet Lana and her baby Daniel. This is where the
phrase WTF comes from. Little baby Olga is covered in
fragrant oils and dipped in holy water three times during

(06:13):
the five hour ceremony, just to put that in context.
That is one hour less than Franco Zepharelli's landmark film
Jesus of Nazareth. What's your hoss? Marbe threes, Wes is beaming.
Stet Lana dubs it the best of all possible baptisms.

(06:35):
Everyone is happy, everyone that is, except for missus Wright.
She was angry from the beginning. So she's angry at
the beginning, but certainly by the end she's less angry. Right, No,
in the end, she was more angry. Oh see, Olga.
Vanna is pissed at this whole event, This event that

(06:57):
should have honored Francloyd right and the fellowship has been
overshadowed by spet Lana and her small, stupid baby. A
baby can't make a church. As soon as the ceremony
is over, missus Wright haul's ass out of Milwaukee, skipping
the big celebratory dinner and just to be clear when
missus Wright isn't happy. It's not like she keeps it

(07:18):
to herself. Her absence is loud. When was returned, she
called West of course late at night, and she gave
him great talk. And when she returns to me, she said, well,
we have ruined it. You know, we have ruined this celebration.
I feel for West in this moment. He'd wanted to

(07:40):
do something nice for the two women he loved, and
it blew up in his face. He felt that he
had to blame. He was very easily taking blame on himself. Well,
I was at this point. I didn't even talk to
her because I thought that she was some kind of dreagon.

(08:00):
So West is trying to smooth things over. But then
he has to go back to Iran to keep working
on his palace, obviously, and so that fall, the tally
Essen fam returns to Scottsdale and spent Lana is left
alone with her freshly baptized baby, just steps away from
the dragon woman she thinks could kill her. With West
away on business in the Middle East, the tension between

(08:23):
these two women escalates to an untenable level. There's the
evening spet Lana as having dinner with Olgavana and Yavannah.
Rosemary Sullivan documents this one beautifully, and Stalin's daughter she
said to Olgavana, you know West works too hard. He's
always working, He's never free. It's going to be hard
on his health. He's going to die, cries spet Lana

(08:46):
through gritted teeth. Olgavannah growls, so will you so pretty
frosty dinner parties. And then there's the time I'm spet Lana,
according to friends of Taliessen, threatens to burn down the
place for the third and final time. I think that

(09:06):
was probably a hilarious joke, but olga Vana hires private security.
On Christmas Day, it becomes clear that their differences might
be irreconcilable. Olgavana shows up barefoot at stet Lana's front
door and offers her a pair of diamond earrings a
gesture of reconciliation. Let it be known that this is

(09:28):
exactly the kind of olive branch that I expect from
anyone who has ever wronged me. But stet Lana isn't
having it. She throws the earrings onto the ground, exclaiming,
you cannot buy my friendship. When Olga Vanna's daughter Yavannah
hears this, she screams, I'll kill her. What surrounds tally

(09:49):
Essen West is desert. There's a vastness to the landscape.
But even with those majestic mountains and that epic sky
Spetlana felt suffocated by old Vanna, Yavannah and every small
infraction to her hard fought freedom. After Christmas, she moves
out of tally Esen. She buys a house in residential

(10:11):
Scottsdale and writes mister and Missus Peters on the deed
because her beloved husband will of course be joining her shortly,
won't he more? After the break Act two Our House

(10:34):
January nineteen seventy two, Don McLean's American Pie hits number
one on the billboards. Women's livers are trying to get
that equal, writes Amendment Past, and Nixon announces he's gonna
pull seventy thousand troops out of the Vietnam War. Speed
Lana has pulled her own kind of withdrawal. After the
tumultuous autumn Back at tally Esen West, speed Lana and

(10:55):
West jointly purchase a house, and by jointly, of course,
that Spetlana paid for it, and West's name got to
be on it. This is a huge deal. Stet Lana
had been asking for their own family home for months
and months, and now she had one. A fully furnished
house in a resort area of Scottsdale called Mountain Shadows East,

(11:17):
cream colored with a wood shingled roof and a uniform
guard at the complex entrance. It was perfect. But West,
dear West, loyal royal charcoal broiled West. He has no
intention of ever moving in. I would say she half
believes he's going to follow her. One has to say
from the outside that he's not a courageous man. Yeah, yeah,

(11:41):
Wes wasn't incapable of leaving. He'd done it once before
as a young man with the first set Lana disillusioned
with life at tally Essen and determined to make it
on their own. West since fet Lana dramatically ran away together.
In letters from that time, West is positively vitriolic, calling
Right a scaly rascal, Olgavana a crazy, dirty feminine demon

(12:05):
and tally Esen a canker oh Burne. But life outside
of the womb of tally Esen was hard. West couldn't
walk on his own as an architect. He needed his
father figure. She married the king's daughter, and he found
his king, and he had to serve him, and he
needed his mother figure. Here's celest Davidson. He was so

(12:30):
devoted to missus Wright he practically laid on the floor
in front of her. So Wes and his bride crawled
back to tally Esen. West didn't want to be the
king of his own castle. So here's ft Lana. Married
to a knight in King Arthur's court. He's taken a
lifelong oath of loyalty and a wife and kid aren't
going to change that. But sent Lana has no desire

(12:53):
to join the royal court. She'd already been a princess.
All she wants is autonomy and privacy, but even that
proves too much to ask. One day, at her little
house in Scottsdale, there's a knock at the door. She
opens the door a crack, still in her house dress,
and finds a male reporter from the Arizona Republic. Before

(13:14):
Spetlana can close the door, the reporter has taken a
snapshot of her new single life and then asks her
about the apparent separation. She is embroiled in with West,
still living over atalis in West and she and her
daughter in this gated community. Spetlana didn't think they were
separated in any sort of predivorce sense. She's still hopeful

(13:35):
that this is a transitional period of their relationship. All
she tells the reporter is that while she is done
with communal living, she is still all in with her husband.
The NBC Evening News had this to report, So Stalin
Peters and the man she married two years ago seemed
to be headed for a divorce. The husband, William Peters,

(13:56):
said today they got married too fast and let his
wife walked out on them. Dalan's daughters said she objected
to communal living and that's why she moved out of
the architectural foundation for which her husband works in Arizonas.
The Arizona Republic frames the ensuing media chaos brilliantly as
a quote Dink and Lob tennis match with American spectators

(14:16):
looking on as Wes and stet Lana quote said their
marital linen in public. That's right? Or shall I say
that's right? With a w stet Lana and Wes both
confess their disappointments and marital failures, not to each other,
but to report after reporter. So now, in a thrilling
toward a force performance, I and I alone will perform

(14:40):
a selection of direct quotes from this heartbreaking media circus.
Stet Lana, I was back under dictatorial rule. I just
couldn't do it, Wes. Her mind has been conditioned by
years of communist training. Stet Lana. I only hope that
he will not be a pawn for others or allow
someone else to direct his private life. Wes. She rejected

(15:01):
a life pattern which I helped build, and I believe
in sped Lana. This is not a conflict between my
husband and me. He is a gentle person, Wes. I
don't want any two bits of bourbon life sped Lana. Divorce,
My god, I can't think of it, Wes. Divorce is
inevitable scene. What you just witnessed was theater. Listen. I

(15:27):
don't know what Wes since sped Lana said directly to
each other, or if they said anything at all, but
I do know this time must have been incredibly trying.
Sped Lana writes, I was being tormented and the press
was continually at the door or the telephone. But still
she kept holding onto the hope that her husband might

(15:49):
one day walk through the door of the house she'd
bought for them. I want to take a pause and
tell you how I've come to understand all of this
from spet Lana's perspective. It comes from a manuscript of
a memoir called The Faraway Music, which you've heard Cassie
reading in this podcast. The third of set Lana's memoirs.

(16:11):
It details her time at Taliessen. I managed to find
a copy at Amherst College's Center for Russian Studies in
western Massachusetts. In the middle of the winter, I flew
across the country to meet up with my parents, Neil
and Diane, and together we went to Amherst as snow
blanketed the quad. For three days, I would wake up

(16:32):
early and walk from the jeff In to the Russian Center.
I had to check my bags, but was allowed to
take in my phone and a notepad as I furiously
took pictures of each and every page of this mysterious manuscript,
the ones fet Lana could never convince any major publisher
to print. The Russian Center library was lined with giant

(16:54):
Samovars and tended to by the archivist, whose name was Nadia.
She stayed in her office as I poured over the pages.
Nadia was a Russian immigrant herself, having left her family
back in the Motherland and not having seen them for
many years. I don't remember the specific thrill of each
and every page I read, but I do remember the

(17:16):
feeling when I reached page one hundred and thirty in
the book, the page where we are now after Stetlana
was told by her marriage counselor not to go back
to tally Esen, a scene that I could see so
clearly on the screen, a scene that broke my heart.
Here's Cassie reading from that page once. I could not

(17:39):
resist it anymore and drove to Taliesin it's dark, all
the fellows tucked into the rooms after a long day.
Stet Lana walks up to the glass door of what
was once her small apartment with West. My heart sank.

(18:06):
All was as when I left. She enters softly, and
then she sees him. I moved slowly into the sitting room,
and there was Wess, his back to me, barefoot in
his silk dressing gown, sitting before the television. He was

(18:29):
sitting like that for a while, quite motionless, and I
came closer and touched him by the shoulder, weeping. He
stands up, sad, pale, exhausted. You must go, he said,

(18:50):
fearing that someone might see me there. You shouldn't, You shouldn't.
He was unable to say anything more, neither was I.
He walks out the door barefoot, as speed Lana follows
and takes her towards her car, parked amidst the cacti.

(19:15):
Only the stars were glittering on a deep, dark sky.
We did not talk, and then I drove away, slowly,
still crying. I could see him in my driving mirror,
standing there by the roadside, the same beautiful desert road

(19:38):
through which I was driven to taliesin the first time.
That was the last time I saw it. I could
picture it speed Lana driving through that desolate landscape, crying,
feeling more alone than she's ever been. She'd come here

(20:00):
with an American dream, money, family, peace. But as she
drives away from tali Essen that night, in the stillness
of the desert, I imagine all she can hear are
her darkest thoughts, her feelings of failure, her father's voice
in her head, You're a fool's ft Lana. I had

(20:26):
to stop reading that day. There was no more breath
inside of me. I looked over at the archivists Naja
and said, it's so sad. Her life was so hard.
Naja looked at me. She nodded, half interested, half focused
on whatever archival Workley before her, probably mostly annoyed. An

(20:47):
immigrant in America herself, she probably thought, yes, most of
our stories are hard. Some of us are still living
them more. After the break Act three, less of Wes

(21:10):
Stelana wanted to be married to Wes. She tried so
hard to save their marriage, and yet the inevitable becomes official.
They agree to a divorce. Here's Rosemary. When they finally divorced,
he put the blame on her, and then he finally
said more honestly, I should never have let her marry me.

(21:33):
Her finances are pretty grim. Of her one point five million,
she was almost broke. There was almost nothing left. She
knew that there was no point in trying to get
support from Wesley because he didn't have a salary and
all the money he ever made went right into tally Esen.
And she wanted to not have any grounds for acrimony

(21:54):
or anger or complaint. She said, one day he'll understand
who I was. I cried for him, for myself, for
our small child, and gradually I felt that all my
hatred or whatever it was, was leaving me. I've lost

(22:20):
the game in a way, but from the other point
of view, I've won something too. One day, Wes, we'll
recognize that. I'm not entirely sure what she means by that,
but clearly spent Lana is trying to pick herself back
up and start over again, like she always does. In

(22:42):
the summer of nineteen seventy two, spent Lana buys back
her old house in Princeton, New Jersey. Wes accompanies his
soon to be ex wife and daughter as far as
the Philadelphia airport, kisses them goodbye, and then immediately flies
back to tally Esen. Sped Lana is left starting over
with a broken heart. I know what you're thinking. Back

(23:04):
to Princeton. Another escape, a relationship demolished, new enemies forged.
This is the same story again and again, a story
about breaking out of old chains and then climbing into
new ones, a cycle of obsession and then abandonment, another
fresh start, except something's different now. Stetlana's a divorced, single

(23:25):
mother in her late forties, without the financial security she'd
first come into in America and with a young child
to support, and that child, well, she grew up to
be an adult. She's in her fifties now. She's changed
her name, but I'll still refer to her as Olga
throughout the podcast, both for consistency and because she's a

(23:48):
very private person. I've spoken to her several times over
the last year, both on and off Mike. She's a
wonderful storyteller who has lived a big life and gave
me a lot of insight into her mother. But out
of respect for her desire for privacy, you won't hear
much of her voice in this podcast. The biggest thing
I learned from her was that in these postaliessin years

(24:09):
starting over again, stet Lana and Olga are everything to
each other. No matter what challenges they face, it's the
two of them against the world. I believe that without her,
Slana would have done herself in or something. You know,
she wouldn't have made it. But as a mother once again,
a mother who tried to make peace with the loss
of her two adult children back in Russia, the past

(24:32):
was hard to shake. In December of nineteen seventy five,
stet Lana and Olga go to California for the holidays
to visit West's sister and brother in law. So imagine
it Christmas Day. Maybe there's jazz humming from the record
player or Carol's being played on the piano, eggnog being drunk,
presents being unwrapped, a family gathering on the holiest of nights.

(24:57):
You can see it, can't you. A Russian emigre close
in on fifty with a four and a half year old.
She doesn't have a job, she's all but given up
writing as a profession. The woman who was born speed
Lana Stelina was now an appendage, an American divorcee at
the end of someone else's Christmas table. And then something happens.

(25:18):
Set Lana gets up from the table. She makes her
way to the telephone, and she places a very long
distance call. The phone rings and rings and rings, and
then suddenly someone answers if it was the evening in California,
it would be morning on the other end of the line. Bunny,

(25:40):
is that you, speed Lana asks a gruff voice answers.
Do you think you'd sound like yourself after nine years?
That gruff voice it belongs to Svetlana's son, Joseph Bunny
as his mother called him as a child. And then
the phone goes dead. Did he hang up? Did the

(26:05):
KGB intercept the call? We don't know, neither did she
Her heart must have ached yearned it had been nine
years since she'd last heard her son's voice. You can
see her, can't you, by herself holding the receiver of
a telephone, a dial tone playing a solitary solo while

(26:26):
Christmas jazz plays softly in the other room. She had
a whole new life here in America, but that didn't
erase the previous one. The characters from the last chapter
were still living on in a different book, and up
until now, Stetlana had conditioned herself to keep those stories
separate so she could move on to the next chapter

(26:46):
in her life. But maybe this is the moment here
holding the telephone, when Stetlana finally feels the urge to
unify all those stories, where she feels the only way
to move forward is to go backwards. And this, my friends,

(27:10):
is set Lana's cycle doing the same thing over and
over again, and over and over again. So on the
next episode of set Lana spet Lana, We're going back

(27:32):
to Russia. Set Lana stet Lana is a production of
iHeart Podcasts and the documentary group I'm Your Host Dan Catrosser.
The show was written and produced by me Adam Webber,
Alison Joy, and Catherine Isaac. We also serve as executive
producers at the documentary group. Our executive producer is Joe Batzilouitz,

(27:57):
with production oversight by Stacy kleeger An additional support from
Tom Yellen and Gabrielle Tenenbaum. Our iHeart team is supervising
producer Casey Pegram and executive producer Maya Howard. Editing assistants
from producers Christina Loranger and Joey pat Original music by
Elan Izakov. Production counsel by slas Ekhouse, Dasty Haynes Lockoe,

(28:20):
Clearance counsel by Ballard Sparr, Back checking assistance by Meghan Trout.
Special thanks to my husband Jordan Siegel and Roger Friedland
and Harold Zelman, authors of the book The Fellowship, who
kindly granted permission to include excerpts from their taped interview
with Spetlana, excerpts from Stetlana Alujeva's book The Faraway. Music

(28:40):
are performed by Cassie Greer.