Svetlana Wright Peters

Olgivanna's only other daughter, Svetlana Hinzenberg, adopted the surname Wright. She married one of Wright's apprentices, Fellowship member William Wesley "Wes" Peters, when she turned 18 in 1935. Wes helped Wright ward off creditors and bankruptcy. Svetlana Peters died in a car crash in 1946 with her and Wes Peters' youngest son, Daniel, leaving Wes Peters widowed to raise their remaining child, Brandoch (b. 1941).

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olgivanna_Lloyd_Wright

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Svetlana Hinzenberg Wright Peters was a beautiful, charismatic musician (violinist) and mother of two sons: Brandoch Peters of Spring Green, WI, and Daniel Peters, deceased.

She is the daughter of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, by her first marriage to Vladimir Hinzenberg. She was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, then a province of Tsarist Russia, in 1918, after the initial outbreak of the Russian Revolution.

She came to the United States with her mother, when Olgivanna traveled to New York and Chicago in 1924 where, the same year, she met Frank Lloyd Wright.

After a harrowing year or so, during which Svetlana, her half-sister Iovanna, her mother Olgivanna and her adopted father Frank Lloyd Wright, were fleeing the jealous mania of Mr. Wright's ex-wife Miriam Noel, a morphine addict who pursued the family unto jail (under the Mann Act), where Frank Lloyd Wright was separated from his "little" family and put in solitary confinement -- all for having exercised a freedom of choice now taken for granted and manifested in its most extreme forms.

When that nightmare ended, FLLW and his new family, after battles with foreclosing banks and more threats by Ms. Noel and her lawyer, settled into Taliesin in Wisconsin, located outside the village of Spring Green. Taliesin had suffered one fire in 1914, and was to suffer another in 1925 due to unknown causes, in the year of the birth of FLLW's daughter, Iovanna.

In her autobiography, Iovanna Lloyd Wright recounts an episode in the mid 1930's, when the family had virtually no money, and her half-sister "Svet" asked her adopted father FLLW if he would buy her some stockings, since hers were filled with tears and runs: in the ensuing dialogue, Iovanna writes that she heard her half-sister tell their father that the children and adults in the village mocked the family, saying that FLLW was nothing but "an old ghost counting out his old ghost money", and, "who ever heard of a house on a hill?"; while, in their view, her mother was not much better. Having emigrated from Europe, and having entered freely and with her innate grace the portals of her new husband's kingdom, the access to which was forbidden to the general public, she was mocked and reviled, as she continues to be in the U.S. media of the 21st century.

Not much has changed in 2016. The soul of Taliesin has been eviscerated and separated from its once-living body and life, a condition that would have been a cause of unbearable grief for Svet's family -- most of all its patriarch and original creator, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Svetlana Wright Peters was an integral and much-needed member and leader of the Taliesin Fellowship, founded in 1932. She directed the music group and supervised the work in the kitchen, which fed the school and community, and her leadership and ingenuity held many aspects of the life of the architectural school and community together. In the mid 1940's she was in an auto accident, which her older son Brandoch survived, but which she and her then two-year-old son Daniel, didn't.

Her sudden passing devastated her mother, her sister Iovanna and her adopted father, Frank Lloyd Wright, who loved her as his own daughter. Gene Masselink, Mr. Wright's secretary, was in shock, as were other members of the Fellowship. I am glad, however, that Svet did not live to know of the devastation -- on another level -- of her home, her sister, her mother and her father, and the leveling of their personalities and lives in and by a media consumed by a frenzy of inexplicable hatred and prejudice; not unlike what she witnessed in that rural village in the 1930's.

Svetlana Wright Peters is buried in the Lloyd Jones family cemetery next to the family Chapel, across from Midway farm, located around the hill from Taliesin, in Wisconsin.

Wes Peters married Svetlana Alliluyeva in 1970 after Svetlana Hinzenberg was deceased.