SOLZHENITSYN RECORDER OF THE TRAGEDY AND PAIN OF A GENERATION

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 16

SOLZHENITSYN RECORDER OF THE TRAGEDY AND PAIN OF A GENERATION

(By

VICTOR ZORZA)

Unhappily, the man who is being increasingly recognised as the greatest writer Russia has produced since tiie Revolution has spent more time in the last few years fighting the security services of the K.G.B. than writing books. But out of this struggle a new type of Soviet literary figure has emerged.

Previously, there were official writers, many of them men of real talent, who had made the necessary accommodation in order to see their books in print. There were others who refused to compromise and wrote, as the Russian saying has it, "for the drawer.” But Solzhenitsyn is the first writer to. have bridged the two main streams of Soviet literature, the official and the unofficial? the permitted and the banned. No other writer had managed to receive more public acclaim and to be attacked and pilloried more mercilessly than Solzhenitsyn. The public acclaim came first; after Khrushchev himself had intervened to ensure the publication of “One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich,” the novel about the prisoners in Stalin’s camps. The condemnation came later, when Solzhenitsyn refused to make the changes in “The First Circle,” another prison novel, and in "Cancer Ward,” that might have made it possible to publish them in the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn’s feud with the K.G.B. began long before his first book was published —when, as a wartime officer in the Red Army, he was carted off to the camps by Stalin’s political police. After eight years as a prisoner, he recounts: “I spent three years in exile with that eternal feeling of doom,” in Soviet Central Asia.

When the K.G.B. began to circulate later false details about his past, in order to discredit him, it claimed that he had been released from prison “ahead of time.” He protested: “If a man did not die beside a camp rubbish heap, if be was just able to crawl out of the camp, this was taken to mean that he had been set free ‘ahead of time’—after all, the sentence was for eternity, and anything earlier was ’ahead of time’.’’

Stories were circulated that he had gone over to the Germans during the war, that he was a common criminal, and the like. The K.G.P. and the "thought police” regarded him as its enemy number one in the literary community, not only because he had described so effectively many aspects of the police state for which it was responsible, but also because further unhindered publication of his work might have speeded up the disintegration of the system.

Alexey Surkov, one of the leading “official” writers said that “if ‘Cancer Ward’’ were to be published, it would be used against us, and it would be more dangerous than Svetlana's memoirs.” Soviet readers were now so mature “that no measly little book will alienate them from Communism,” he said.

Talen not questioned

And yet Surkov, like all other writers who took part m this debate in the Writers’ Union, did not question Solzhenitsyn’s talent. (The transcript, smuggled to the West, is reproduced in Abraham Bromberg’s “in Quest of Justice protest and dissent in the Soviet Union,” published by Pall Mall.)

“Cancer Ward” is more dangerous because it is no longer about the prisons—but about the life of the free m a system that restricts freedom, about the hopelessly incurable who go on fighting. His critics said that the book was “anti-humani-tarian.” Quite the reverse, Solzhenitsyn retorted. “Life conquers death, the past is conquered by the future.” It was not the task of literature, he argued, to conceal the truth or to tone it down, whether he was writing about the society or the individual, or to defend or to criticise one or another form of government.

“The task of the writer is to select more universal or eternal questions, such as the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the confrontation between life and death. . . .”

Many writers believe that this is what they should write about Very few, certainly in the Soviet Union, have done it successfully. Pasternak was a great poet, but his literary character was formed before the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn was bom after it. He comes nearer than anyone has yet done to expressing the pain and the tragedy that have overtaken the post-revolu-tionary generation. It is in this sense that he is the greatest writer that Russia has produced since the Revolution.

Much to written

But even he has not plumbed the depth. There is still much to be written, much that must be written, before the nation can purge itself of the memory of those terrible years, in order that it may regain its mental health; and its social balance, its political sanity. Solzhenitsyn made a start, and refused to stop when the Kremlin demanded. That is why the "thought police” went after him.

Not only did the "thought police” seek to orchestrate a hate campaign against him. flooding the Soviet press with “critical” articles and sending lecturers out to defame him with the sort of slander that could not be easily published. It also confiscated the only extant copy of “Feast of the Conquerors,” and arranged for it to be distributed privately to show just how "anti-Soviet” Solzhenitsyn was. He wrote it when he was still a prisoner—and it reflects the hopelessness and the bitterness of a man unjustly condemned. He has repeatedly renounced it. It was written not by him, he said, "but by nameless prisoner SSH-232. in those distant years when there was no return to freedom for those arrested for political crimes, when no one in the country, not even in the writers’ community, spoke out against repression in either word or deed.” The K.G.B.’s emissaries had hawked this play around Europe, trying to get it published, so that it could then be used against Solzhenitsyn at home. “Cancer Ward,” too. appeared to have been smuggled out to the West by the well-known Moscow factotum, Victor Louis, “in order to block its publication” in Russia. As a telegram from Germany informed Solzhenitsyn (on the principle that no books smuggled abroad may be published at home) Solzhenitsyn fired off a letter to the Moscow “Literary Gazette”: “Who is this Victor Louis?” be asked. “What does the Committee of State Security have to do with this?” The letter was not published. The K.G.B. has never explained what it “has to do” with literature. But the explanation is simple. Literature, especially great literature, has the power to move the hearts and the minds of men, to make them look into themselves and to ask questions about the society of which they are part. An unworthy society always tries to smother real literature—not just in Russia. [Copyright]

Victor Zorza writes on the importance of Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.