Word: solzhenitsyns
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Another blow to Solzhenitsyn was the appearance of a play, Candle in the Wind, in the German-based Russian-language magazine Grant last March. Friends say that Solzhenitsyn has no idea how the play reached Grani, which is published by a fiercely anti-Soviet organization of Russian emigres in Frankfurt. What particularly worries Solzhenitsyn's friends is that when some other Soviet writers and intellectuals, including Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov, were tried and convicted for anti-Soviet activities, their alleged connection with Grant's publishers was cited prominently by the state. Following the Grani incident, the Hamburg...
Mysterious intermediaries have also offered European publishers an old Solzhenitsyn play, Banquet of Victors. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the play in 1950 while serving in a labor camp, has often repudiated it. "It was not written by Solzhenitsyn, but by nameless prisoner No. SHCH 232," he told the Soviet Writers' Union in 1967, referring to the number he was given in prison. He also asserts that he destroyed all but one copy of the work, and that this was seized...
...struggle with Germany in World War I. But his strict writing schedule has been upset since his expulsion from the Writers' Union last November. Friends report that the atmosphere in Ryazan, where he lives, is hostile and even dangerous because of threats of violence by local zealots. Since Solzhenitsyn has been denied official authorization to live in Moscow, he has taken refuge in the country house near Moscow of Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich...
Friends like Rostropovich represent crucial moral and practical support for Solzhenitsyn. Well-to-do writers and other intellectuals have contributed to Solzhenitsyn's support since his income ceased with the ban on his works. But friends are finding it increasingly dangerous to rally round the beleaguered writer. Only eight out of the 6,790 members of the Soviet Writers' Union were fearless enough to protest formally Solzhenitsyn's expulsion. Two of them were promptly expelled from the union. Solzhenitsyn's protector and publisher, Alexander Tvardovsky, was forced to resign as editor of the magazine Novy...
...Solzhenitsyn has endured imprisonment, survived cancer, been reviled and abjured by Russia's authorities and suffered the supreme penalty for a writer-suppression of his work in his own country. Still, he seems to grow in strength and moral authority. As Solzhenitsyn himself observed in The First Circle: "One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings...