Word: solzhenitsyn
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Despite the risk for the authors, Western publishers go to considerable lengths to obtain Russian manuscripts. The latest literary contraband, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward, is at the very least a tribute to their competitive zeal. As of last week, it had already been printed in excerpts by two magazines, in full by one publisher, and was being readied for printing by at least two others-a wild maze of editions even for the strange world of literary smuggling...
Bitter Dialogue. Solzhenitsyn's novel, set in the dark atmosphere of a terminal-cancer ward, explores the contrasting lives of the patients-a soldier who was imprisoned for many years in a labor camp, a field geologist who was stricken in young manhood, an aging bureaucrat who improved his lot in life by informing on friends and neighbors. The physical malignancies of the doomed are used by the author to symbolize life in post-Stalin Russia...
...mimeograph the manuscripts lent them. In the case of Cancer Ward, ironically, that chore was performed by the state publishing house, which set type and ran off proofs of the book while it was still scheduled for official publication last December. At the last moment, government censors balked at Solzhenitsyn's bitter indictment. By that time, however, as Soviet Novelist Venyamin Kaverin revealed recently, "thousands" of galleys existed, and many sets "sold, it is said, for large sums...
Broken Promise. Soviet writers also had another cause for rage. Last week, at the last possible moment, the Kremlin vetoed the printing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's long-suppressed novel Cancer Ward. The literary community has long regarded the Kremlin's promise to publish the novel in the December issue of the journal Novy Mir as a test of the regime's avowed good intentions. But Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, last summer denounced censorship in a widely circulated letter and recently was attacked by the editor of Pravda as a "psychologically...
...book to explore the camps or dig into the new subcellars that were constructed under the Lower Depths. It occupies a place on the same shelf as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Lydia Chukovskaya's The Deserted House, another homefront view of the purges recently published in the U.S. But since Mrs. Ginzburg's book is a work of nonfiction, an intensely personal and passionately felt document in which...