Solzhenitsyn: A Candle in the Wind

For some time, the celebrated author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been under attack in the Soviet Union.

He has been expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union and threatened with exile from his country. The official press regularly denounces him; only last week the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, in a poem that did not name Solzhenitsyn but was plainly aimed at him, charged that he "long ago defected with his soul."

Uneasy as his situation may be at home, Solzhenitsyn is also concerned by a growing menace to his freedom from abroad. Several of his manuscripts have come into the hands of American and European publishers. At least one of the manuscripts could only have been obtained and passed on by the KGB, the Soviet secret police. None were released by Solzhenitsyn, who is categorically opposed to publication of his work in the West. He has already been accused of sending his banned writings abroad to be exploited by Russia's enemies, and of allowing his royalties to go" to subversive anti-Soviet organizations. For such offenses, a Soviet citizen could be imprisoned at hard labor for seven years--Solzhenitsyn has already served eight years in Stalinist prisons and concentration camps.

Solzhenitsyn is trying to combat the threats to him on two fronts. He has pressed Soviet authorities for an answer to the question "Why do you refuse to publish me in Russia?" To prevent unauthorized publication of his works in the West, he has repeatedly and vainly asked the Soviet Writers' Union to protect his author's rights. Now that he has been expelled from the union, Solzhenitsyn has engaged a Swiss lawyer, Fritz Heeb, to balk what he regards as "the exploitation and distortion" of his work by publishers in the West. In Zurich last week, Heeb told TIME: "Solzhenitsyn has no intention of becoming the easy prey of unscrupulous publishers. He intends to take legal action, if necessary, to prevent the misuse of his name and the unauthorized publication of his work." Heeb described the charge that Solzhcnitsyn's royalties have gone to "anti-Soviet organizations" as malicious and false.

Solzhenitsyn won fame in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev authorized the publication in Russia of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a chilling indictment of Stalin-era labor camps. In 1966, however, Solzhenitsyn's writings were banned. Manuscripts that Solzhenitsyn had previously submitted to Soviet publishers began circulating from hand to hand in Russia. The KGB seized others from the writer. As a result, a number of novels, stories, poems and plays have been peddled to Western publishers by shadowy figures claiming to be "representatives" of the author. Sometimes the items for sale were accompanied by purported authorizations. Some of the manuscripts that were circulating privately were brought out of the country by travelers. The secret police planted others with publishers in an attempt to manufacture a criminal case against Solzhenitsyn under the Soviet law that forbids an author to disseminate "anti-Soviet literature." Since 1968, Cancer Ward and other works forbidden in Russia have become bestsellers in the West despite Solzhenitsyn's vehement public protests against their publication.

It was a copy of TIME that tipped Solzhenitsyn off to the fact that one of his major new works was in the West. To his consternation and alarm, Solzhenitsyn read in the magazine's issue of March 21, 1969, that Western publishers were eagerly bidding for his massive documentary novel about Stalinist concentration camps, Arkhipelag Gulag.*

Another blow to Solzhenitsyn was the appearance of a play, Candle in the Wind, in the German-based Russian-language magazine Grant last March. Friends say that Solzhenitsyn has no idea how the play reached Grani, which is published by a fiercely anti-Soviet organization of Russian emigres in Frankfurt. What particularly worries Solzhenitsyn's friends is that when some other Soviet writers and intellectuals, including Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov, were tried and convicted for anti-Soviet activities, their alleged connection with Grant's publishers was cited prominently by the state. Following the Grani incident, the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit published extracts in November of an epic poem, Prussian Nights, attributing it to Solzhenitsyn and promising more in later issues. After Heeb protested, Die Zeit agreed to stop further publication.

Mysterious intermediaries have also offered European publishers an old Solzhenitsyn play, Banquet of Victors. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the play in 1950 while serving in a labor camp, has often repudiated it. "It was not written by Solzhenitsyn, but by nameless prisoner No. SHCH 232," he told the Soviet Writers' Union in 1967, referring to the number he was given in prison. He also asserts that he destroyed all but one copy of the work, and that this was seized by the KGB.

While the storm gathers around him, Russia's greatest living writer is at work on a novel about Russia's military struggle with Germany in World War I. But his strict writing schedule has been upset since his expulsion from the Writers' Union last November. Friends report that the atmosphere in Ryazan, where he lives, is hostile and even dangerous because of threats of violence by local zealots. Since Solzhenitsyn has been denied official authorization to live in Moscow, he has taken refuge in the country house near Moscow of Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Friends like Rostropovich represent crucial moral and practical support for Solzhenitsyn. Well-to-do writers and other intellectuals have contributed to Solzhenitsyn's support since his income ceased with the ban on his works. But friends are finding it increasingly dangerous to rally round the beleaguered writer. Only eight out of the 6,790 members of the Soviet Writers' Union were fearless enough to protest formally Solzhenitsyn's expulsion. Two of them were promptly expelled from the union. Solzhenitsyn's protector and publisher, Alexander Tvardovsky, was forced to resign as editor of the magazine Novy Mir last month.

Solzhenitsyn has endured imprisonment, survived cancer, been reviled and abjured by Russia's authorities and suffered the supreme penalty for a writer--suppression of his work in his own country. Still, he seems to grow in strength and moral authority. As Solzhenitsyn himself observed in The First Circle: "One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings."

* Literally, Labor Camp Archipelago. The title suggests that in the Stalin era, vast areas of the Soviet Union were dotted with countless islands of concentration camps.

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