No Solzhenitsyn Nobel lecture

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32561, 22 March 1971, Page 15

No Solzhenitsyn Nobel lecture

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) STOCKHOLM, March 21. The Nobel Foundation said that the Soviet novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, would not provide the traditional prizewinner’s lecture for publication by the foundation.

Mr Nils Staahle, the foundation’s director, said last night that the author had asked to be relieved of the task because he felt that if the lecture were sent to Stockholm in the usual way it would be subject to censorship—and possibly held up for some time.

Mr Solzhenitsyn did not want the lecture to be smuggled out because this would constitute a crime in Soviet eyes, the director said. Mr Staahle said that it was by no means unusual for winners of the literature prize to fail to supply the lectures. “In this particular case it is a perfectly understandable decision,” he said. Mr Solzhenitsyn is in official disgrace in his homeland because his writing is considered critical of the Soviet system. He accepted the prize last October but did not come to Stockholm to collect it because he feared that he would not be allowed to return home. The writer’s novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” about the Stalinist prison camps, was published in the Soviet Union with official approval in 1962.

But his later novels, “The First Circle” and "Cancer Ward” were considered too critical of Soviet society to be permitted publication in Russia. They were published abroad.