Russians comment on Nobel-prize winner

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32431, 19 October 1970, Page 17

Russians comment on Nobel-prize winner

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) MOSCOW, October 18 The disgraced Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who last week was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a man of “morbid self-importance” who had given way to flattery, according to a commentary issued in Moscow. The Soviet press agency, “Novosti,” said that the 51-year-old author had “made of his loneliness not a tragedy, but a business.” Other comments are directed at the Nobel Prize committee, accusing it of a provocative political act: “If one turns to everything written by Solzhenitsyn, it is easy to convince oneself that the further he goes, the more the literary gives way in his works to the political lampoon; a scandalous glory at least.” Mr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union last year, has had ,only one full-length work pub-

lished in Russia, his “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which told of life in a prison camp during the time of Stalin. His more recent works, “Cancer Ward,” and “The First Circle,” have won widespread fame abroad, but are proscribed reading in the Soviet Union.

“Novosti” said that little time would be needed for “the widest strata of society to be finally convinced of the literary and political bankruptcy of Solzhenitsyn’s writings. “The tragedy of Solzenitsyn, in general an ordinary writer, is that once having put on dark glasses he deprived himself of the ability to see the multi-coloured life of his country. “A man with morbid self-im-portance, Solzhenitsyn easily gave in 'to the flattery of people who are not choosy about the means where the fight against the Soviet system is concerned.”