I wrote to her about twice a month, and eventually I started to ask about her life, too. Sometimes she replied in a chaotic cursive. At other times, she typed, annotating the text with underlining, insertions, and sketches of herself pushing a walker, which she referred to as her “four-wheel drive.” She had a vexed relationship with her caps-lock key. A year after we began corresponding, I went to visit her.

Svetlana, who was then eighty-one years old, lived in a senior citizens’ center in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a town of sixteen hundred people. When we met, she was dressed in baggy gray sweatpants and sunglasses, which she wore because of a recent cataract operation. She was short and compact, and her once red hair had turned white and had started to thin. Scoliosis had given her a hunch, and she used a cane. She showed me her one-bedroom apartment on the second floor, and the little desk by a window where her typewriter stood. Her bookshelf included old National Geographic videos, maps of California, Balinese batiks, Hemingway novels, and the Russian-English dictionary that her father had used.

Svetlana was welcoming, and she spoke with the energy of someone who hadn’t told her story in a long time. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. I offered my arm as we approached the stairs, but she brushed it away. We headed down a quiet street, to a garage sale, where a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was selling a small cast-iron bookshelf. He asked Svetlana if she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t, she said. She had only twenty-five dollars until the first of the month, when her welfare check came. But maybe he could stash it for her until then?

The man protested, but she persuaded him. Then we started to walk away. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the man called out. She trudged onward, without looking back. “People think that I have a German accent, and I usually say, ‘Yes, I had a German grandmother,’ ” she said, breaking into a laugh.

In the early eighteen-nineties, when Svetlana’s German grandmother, Olga, was a teen-ager, she climbed out of a window in her home in Georgia to elope. Olga’s daughter, Nadya Alliluyeva, when she was sixteen, ran off with Joseph Stalin, a thirty-eight-year-old seminarian, poet, and family friend who had become a revolutionary leader.

Stalin had a son, Yakov, from a previous marriage, and he and Alliluyeva had two more children, a boy named Vasily and Svetlana, who was Stalin’s favorite. Throughout her youth, they played a game in which she would send short letters to him, bossing him about: “I order you to take me to the theatre”; “I order you to let me go to the movies.” He would write back: “I obey,” “I submit,” or “It will be done.” He called her “my little housekeeper,” and signed off, “From Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant.”

Nadya died when Svetlana was six—from appendicitis, she was told. But when Svetlana was fifteen she was home one day reading Western magazines to practice her English and came across an article about her father, which noted that Nadya had committed suicide. Olga confirmed it, and told Svetlana that she had warned Nadya not to marry Stalin. In “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” Svetlana wrote, “The whole thing nearly drove me out of my mind. Something in me was destroyed. I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father.”

The following year, Svetlana, too, fell in love with a thirty-eight-year-old man, a Jewish filmmaker and journalist named Aleksei Kapler. The romance began in the late fall of 1942, during the Nazi invasion of Russia. Kapler and Svetlana met at a film screening; the next time they saw each other, they danced the foxtrot and he asked her why she seemed sad. It was, she said, the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. Kapler gave Svetlana a banned translation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and his annotated copy of “Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century.” They watched the Disney movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” together.

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Svetlana had a premonition that the relationship would end badly. Her brother Vasily, she told me, had always been jealous of the attention she received from their father, and he now told Stalin that Kapler had introduced her to something more than just Hemingway. Stalin confronted Svetlana in her bedroom: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” He then yelled at Svetlana for having sex with Kapler while there was a war going on. The accusation was false, but Kapler was arrested and sent to the Vorkuta labor camp, in the Arctic Circle. It was the first time, Svetlana told me, that she realized that her father had the power to send someone to prison.

Svetlana enrolled at Moscow State University, where she met and then married a Jewish classmate named Grigory Morozov. It was the only way she could escape the Kremlin, she believed, and her father, preoccupied with the war, grudgingly approved. “Go and marry him, but I will never meet your Jew,” she told me that he said. Their first child, Iosif, was born just as the Nazis surrendered. Morozov wanted many more children, but Svetlana, who had literary ambitions, wanted to finish school. Iosif’s birth was followed by three abortions and a miscarriage. “I was a pale, sickly, green woman,” Svetlana told me. She divorced Morozov and then followed her two acts of romantic rebellion with one of obedience, marrying Yuri Zhdanov, the son of one of her father’s closest confidants. But, she said, “by the time I became a married adult, my father had lost all interest in me.” In 1950, just before the Korean War broke out, she gave birth to a girl named Yekaterina. Svetlana found her new husband cold and uninteresting, and she soon divorced him. She finished school, and she began a career lecturing and translating books from English into Russian.

In March, 1953, Stalin had a stroke. Svetlana wrote, “The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed the very last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.”

His suffering, she wrote, came because “God grants an easy death only to the just.” But she still loved him. As his body was removed for autopsy, she wrote, “It was the first time I had seen my father naked. It was a beautiful body. It didn’t look old or as if he’d been sick at all. . . . I realized that the body that had given me life no longer had life or breath in it, yet I would go on living.”

That June, Aleksei Kapler returned from the Gulag. A year later, he and Svetlana happened to attend the same writers’ conference. “There was very bright light in the foyer,” Svetlana told me, smiling and closing her eyes, as she often did when retreating into memory. “We just walked into each other.”

His hair had turned white, but she thought this only made him more handsome. Although Kapler was married, they soon became lovers. “It’s a miracle that I can call you,” he would say. To her, it was a miracle that he had forgiven her for her father’s crimes. Svetlana wanted Kapler to divorce his wife, but he wanted only an affair. Never one to concede defeat, Svetlana confronted Kapler’s wife one night at a theatre. “That was the end of my second marriage, the end of that second part of my life with Sveta,” Kapler later told the writer Enzo Biagi.