Word: solzhenitsyns
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Arrests are less frequent than they used to be for ideological transgressions, but Russian writers are well aware that they are still at the mercy of the Soviet bureaucracy. At the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union last May, Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) circulated a statement charging that there were "more than 600 writers whom the Writers' Union obediently handed over to their fate in prisons and camps." Solzhenitsyn's letter was a daring diatribe against censorship that accused the censors of making Russian literature "something infinitely poorer, flatter...
...Patience. The wave of protests in the U.S.S.R. also encourages rebellion in fellow Communist nations of Eastern Europe. Doubtless encouraged by Solzhenitsyn, Polish writers at their recent congress passed a resolution demanding that the censors fully explain every deletion in the future. Earlier this month, delegates to the Czechoslovak Writers' Union Congress were so stormy in their demands that the Politburo member assigned as the writers' watchdog, Jiři Hendrych, rose and sputtered: "I have finally reached the end of my patience with you people." Later Hendrych stomped out when all the delegates endorsed Solzhenitsyn...
...from an almost certain prison sentence their colleague Jan Beneš, who was on trial last week in Prague for smuggling his manuscripts abroad. Yet the rising tide of protest seems to be achieving a degree of success. There is speculation that Soviet censors may soon release for publication Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward, a novel about Stalin's secret police that has been smothered in recent years for ideological reasons. Some prominent Russian writers are even predicting that the regime may soon go so far as to abolish all censorship except for that imposed on grounds...
...GOOD OF THE CAUSE by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 190 pages. Praeger...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is doubtless the least favorite novelist of Russia's remaining Stalinists: he always makes them the villains. In his much-publicized first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he catalogued the horrors of a Stalinist labor camp. His second novel (after a pair of anti-Stalinist short stories) is slighter and shorter, but the target is still recognizable. The concentration camps are no longer in evidence, but the Stalinist greasy-collared thugs have only turned into white-collar bureaucrats: bald, corpulent, obtuse paper shufflers. Their opponents are ardent provincial youths who scoff at party...