Solzhenitsyn got married
The great writer became a father-in-law
On Friday, September 8, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's son Ermolai, an employee of an international consulting firm, got married in a rural church near New Jerusalem with Nadezhda Karpova, a resident of Perm and a graduate of the Moscow Academy of Management.

The wedding ceremony, to which neither prominent public figures nor journalists were invited, took place in the strictest secrecy, but Kommersant was able to find out some details about this event.
At first there was a rumor that the wedding was scheduled in a rural church somewhere near the city of Konakovo. In Konakovo itself there is only one church - Ilyinskaya, and its rector, Father Boris, was very surprised when he learned about the wedding of Solzhenitsyn Jr. “We have been friends with the Solzhenitsyns for a long time,” he said, “but this is the first time I’ve heard about the wedding. In fact, it would be quite understandable if the wedding took place in Konakovo, because Konakovo was one of the first places that the Solzhenitsyns visited upon returning to their homeland. This was four years ago, and they spent several days in the area, got acquainted with our children's Orthodox center, which they have been helping since then. And they are helping quite significantly, and we have more than 600 children and teenagers in our center... And I think, If there had been a wedding, we probably would have known about it."
The Konakov administration knew nothing about the wedding either. Solzhenitsyn’s Russian public foundation refused to talk about the wedding and also refused to connect him with the Solzhenitsyns. “I don’t understand at all why you need this,” answered the girl-secretary. “I was not invited to the wedding, but Natalya Dmitrievna herself will not talk to you about it.”
In the end, we still managed to find out about the wedding location. Ermolai Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Karpova got married in the Intercession-Rubtsovskaya Church in the village of Pionerskoye, Istrinsky district, not far from New Jerusalem. It is in the dacha village located in this area, according to employees of the administration of the village of Pionerskoye, that one of Solzhenitsyn’s sons lives. About 40 people attended the ceremony, about half of whom were American friends of the Solzhenitsyns - they came to Russia specifically for the wedding. The wedding was captured by photojournalist of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper Ilya Pitalev, who, according to him, happened to be there by accident. “I tried to be quiet, because I almost got kicked out anyway,” Pitalev told a Kommersant correspondent.
The newlyweds were married by the rector of the Intercession-Rubtsovskaya Church, Father Georgy, who made some deviations in the ritual: the final part of the ceremony was performed by the famous musician Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the brother of the newlywed, instead of the priest.
From a worldly point of view, the young people were already married: three weeks ago they registered their marriage. Registration took place in the bride’s homeland, in Perm, also in the strictest secrecy. The management of the Perm Municipal Wedding Palace even forbade its employees to report anything about the newlyweds.
The Solzhenitsyns’ new relatives are famous people, and not only in Perm. The newlywed's mother, Olga Todoshchenko, is the deputy editor-in-chief of the Perm News newspaper. Father, Pyotr Karpov, is a former deputy general director of the Federal Administration for Insolvency (Bankruptcy) of Enterprises. In July 1996, Pyotr Karpov was accused of receiving a bribe for false bankruptcy, and he was arrested. During a search of Karpov's apartment, only $154 was found. The case fell apart.
The place for registration was chosen forcedly, since Nadezhda Karpova does not yet have a Moscow residence permit, and Ermolai is a citizen of the United States. They met at a hotel in Cherepovets, where both were on a business trip.
However, for the older Solzhenitsyns, registration remained an empty formality: they consider the wedding to be the basis of marriage. And the registration stamp was generally placed only in Nadezhda’s passport, because in the passport of the American citizen Solzhenitsyn there is no corresponding column.

OLGA Kommersant-ALLENOVA, VITALY Kommersant-KARNAUKHOV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 169 dated September 12, 2000, p. 9

Authors:

Olga Allenova