Unthinkable Journey

Preparations for the solemn, glittering ceremony that was to honor this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature halted abruptly in Stockholm last week. In Moscow, Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn called at the Swedish embassy to inform Ambassador Gunnar Jarring that he would not be making the journey to Stockholm. Earlier, the writer had expressed his determination to attend the Nobel festivities Dec. 10, "as far as it depends on me." But denunciations of him in the Soviet press have climaxed in the charge that the writer, a twice-decorated war hero, was a Nazi sympathizer.

It seems likely that the Soviet authorities either had denied him a visa for Sweden or had refused to guarantee that he could return home after the ceremony. In spite of the ban on his writings and the abuse poured on him in Russia, friends in Moscow report that Solzhenitsyn considers it "unthinkable" that he could live or work anywhere in the world except in his beloved country.

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