Politics and literature!

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 12

Politics and literature!

Sir, —The sub-leader in Wednesday’s issue on Alexander Tvardovsky makes the brash claim on behalf of Alexander Solzhenitsyn that he “ . . . may come to be considered the greatest novelist of this century.” If only the Western world, where he is published, were taken into account, there could even be some demur about this absurd claim. Novel-writing in the West could hardly be in so parlous a plight, but in the Soviet Union his claim would face the formidable accomplishments of Mikhail Sholokov, to name no other writer, who, unpardonably in Western eyes, suffers the disqualification of supporting socialism. The sub-leader further perpetuates the perversion of

meaning of the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” originated by Western news services, which, mechanically transferred from a Western context and applied to a Soviet context, makes sheer nonsense of them. A true evaluation of Solzhenitsyn’s literary stature will be possible in the West only when, if one may quote the subleader, “political considerations no longer override literary.”—Yours, etc., M.C.H. December 29, 1971.