For the Good of the Cause

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translated by David Floyd and Max Hayward

Introduction by David Floyd

FOR THE GOOD OF THE CAUSE

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translated by David Floyd and Max Hayward

Introduction by David Floyd

PRAEGER PUBLISHERS

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Published in the United States of America in 1964

by Praeger Publishers, Inc.

© 1964 by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc.

All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-145541

Printed in the United States of America

“None of us denies his talent.”
—KONSTANTIN FEDIN, as chairman of a meeting of the Secretariat of the Soviet Union of writers, called to discuss the “Solzhenitsyn affair” on September 22, 1967

On October 8, 1970, the Swedish Academy of Letters announced its decision to award the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The award had been made, the Academy said, in recognition of the high moral level of Solzhenitsyn’s work, which continued the “best traditions of Russian literature.”

The storm that then broke over Solzhenitsyn’s head served to demonstrate to the world the unforrunate plight of a great writer, and of contemporary Russian literature as a whole, under a rigid Communist dictatorship. The award was generally welcomed in the democratic world, where Solzhenitsyn was already recognized as an author of remarkable power as a result of the publication in translation of his major works
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
,
Cancer Ward
, and The First Circle—as well as shorter works, such as
For the Good of the Cause
, “Matryona’s Home,” and “An Incident at Krechetovka.” In the West, he was already a “best-seller.” But in Russia itself, only
Ivan Denisovich
and a few of the shorter works had appeared in print;
Cancer Ward
and
The First Circle
were known to readers inside the Soviet Union only in typewritten copies passed clandestinely from hand to hand on the
samizdat
network.

Unofficially, Solzhenitsyn is acknowledged to be the greatest prose writer to emerge in Russia since the death of Stalin in 1953. But officially, he is not recognized as a writer at all. He has been expelled from the professional organizations that alone give him the right to earn his living as an author; those of his works that have been published have been withdrawn from circulation; and none of the state-controlled publications or publishing houses will print anything from his pen. Though his works have earned him substantial sums of money outside the Soviet Union, he is forced to exist in a state of semi-poverty in Russia, where his only income is a small pension that he receives as a war invalid, which is supplemented by contributions from his friends. Even his wife, Natalia, has been prevented from adding to the family income by working as a teacher. By the autumn of 1970, the Soviet authorities, using all the enormous resources of the secret police, mass media, and censorship, had reduced Solzhenitsyn practically to the status of an “un-person.”

The attitude of Soviet officialdom to Solzhenitsyn was best expressed by Mikhail Zimyanin, editor in chief of
Pravda
, who in 1967 told a private meeting of Soviet journalists in Leningrad: “We obviously cannot publish his works. Solzhenitsyn’s demand that we do so cannot be accepted. If he writes works corresponding to the interests of our society, then he will be published. Nobody will prevent him from having a crust of bread. Solzhenitsyn is a teacher of physics—let him go and teach.”

No less revealing was Zimyanin’s comment on the same occasion concerning the behavior of the poet Andrei Voznesensky: “I told him that the first time he would perhaps be reprimanded and that would be the end of it. But if anything similar happened again he would be ground to dust. I myself would make it my business to see that not a trace of him remained.”

It was undoubtedly the intention of the Soviet authorities that Solzhenitsyn should also be reduced to dust, and they were well on their way to achieving that end when the Swedish Academy announced their decision to award him the Nobel Prize. The Soviet propaganda machine quickly swung into action to denounce the Swedish authorities and Solzhenitsyn for becoming the instruments of “anti-Soviet” forces in the world. Typical of the attacks launched on him in the Soviet press was one circulated by the
Novosti
press agency, which, after denouncing the “literary and political bankruptcy” of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, commented: “A man with a morbid sense of his own importance, Solzhenitsyn easily gave way to flattery by people who are not especially particular about what means they select to fight against the Soviet system.”

That was the view of purblind Soviet officials, who could see in Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of the excesses and evils of Stalinist rule in Russia only a frontal attack on their own positions and security. It was a view that was not shared by the more intelligent and liberal-minded of Soviet intellectuals or even by Communists and Communist sympathizers outside the Soviet Union. In France, for example,
Les Lettres Françaises
, the influential literary periodical directed by Louis Aragon, the veteran Communist author, published an article by its editor, M. Pierre Daix, welcoming the Nobel Prize award in the following unambiguous terms:

Let us say at once: the choice of Solzhenitsyn is the sort of choice that justifies the existence of the Nobel Prize for literature. One knows of few examples where, in the course of seven years, a writer has succeeded in winning such unanimous respect and authority on such a world-wide scale. And there can be no doubt here that in the eyes of the world Solzhenitsyn is the bearer of a great literature of a great people toward great heights.

To make it clear beyond any doubt that Western intellectuals knew that their view of Solzhenitsyn was shared by writers inside the Soviet Union, M. Daix quoted a passage from a letter written in January, 1968, to Konstantin Fedin, the secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, by Alexander Tvardovsky, former editor of the review
Novy Mir
and the man who first presented Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet reading public. At the end of his powerful plea for greater understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s position, Tvardovsky said:

You cannot talk like that about a man and a writer who has paid for every page and every line he has written as none of us has done who now sit in judgment over him. He has been through the supreme tests to which the human spirit can be subjected—war, prison, and a fatal illness. And now, after such a successful entry into literature, he is being subjected to ordeals no less severe and of, to put it mildly, an extraliterary nature: unofficial political ostracism, outright slander, a ban on all reference to his name in the press, and so forth… All right, I do not approve of the form taken by his “Letter” [of protest to the Writers’ Union] but, in all humanity, I cannot bring myself to a stone at him when I think of the degree of despair that forced him to take that step.

The campaign mounted against Solzhcnitsyn in the autumn of 1970 inevitably recalled the pressures brought to bear on another great Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, who was similarly honored by the Swedish Academy in 1958. Pasternak was forced to refuse the prize, and he died a few years later. His
Doctor Zhivago
made him famous throughout the world, but it remains unpublished in Russia to this day. There were, however, important differences between the two cases. Pasternak made his name in the early years of the Soviet regime primarily as a lyric poet, and, although he was utterly alienated from Communism, he did not challenge the regime during Stalin’s lifetime. It was not until after Stalin’s death that he could contemplate publishing
Doctor Zhivago
.

Solzhenitsyn’s writings, however, are undisguised and deeply penetrating exposures of the nature of the Soviet system as it is today, or at least as it was until very recently. His works reflect the life of the society in which he lives and the character of the people whom he has met and suffered under. It was this that made Alexei Surkov, one of the staunchest defenders of the Soviet literary “establishment,” say in 1967 that “Solzhenitsyn’s works are more dangerous for us than the works of Pasternak.” He went on to explain: “Pasternak was a person cut off from life, but Solzhenitsyn, with his lively, fighting, highly principled temperament, is a man with ideas.” It is clearly the ideas and principles that animate Solzhenitsyn’s writing that have earned him the bitter hostility of the Soviet authorities.

It is this strange conflict-between one honest writer of unusual power and the rulers of one of the two great powers dominating the world today—that was thrown into relief by the Nobel Prize award. What sort of man, then, is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, what sort of life has he had, and what are the works that have won him such fame and misfortune? Few people outside Russia can claim to know him or even to have spoken to him, and even inside the country he has few close friends. For most of what we know about him and his life we have to rely on his own works, in which there is much that is autobiographical.

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in the town of Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. He grew up in Rostov-on-Don, where he studied in the faculty of physics and mathematics of Rostov University, which awarded him a science degree in 1941, on the eve of World War II. But even while he was studying for his degree, Solzhenitsyn revealed his literary yearnings: He took a correspondence course with the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature. After leaving the university, he became a teacher of physics in a secondary school in Morozovsk, in the Rostov region. But his career as a teacher and his literary studies were soon interrupted. German armies were sweeping across the western territories of the Soviet Union, and normal life came to an end for everyone for the next four years of war.

On October 18, 1941, Solzhenitsyn was enlisted into the Soviet Army and a year later was made commander of an artillery battery. He proved himself to be a competent and brave officer. From the beginning of 1942 to February, 1945, he fought with his units on various fronts, earning a reputation for personal bravery and good leadership. By 1945, he had achieved the rank of captain and had been awarded two medals.

Then came his first direct encounter with Stalinism in its crudest form. In February, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested while he was still serving in the Soviet Army, which was pursuing the retreating Germans in East Prussia. The charges against him were that “from 1940 he had been conducting anti-Soviet propaganda among his friends and had taken steps to set up an anti-Soviet organization.” The truth was that, in his letters and diaries, Solzhenitsyn had dared to criticize Stalin. In July, 1945, a special secret-police court sentenced him, in his absence, to eight years in a concentration camp.

He served his sentence in full, partly in camps and partly in a special prison in Moscow, for which he was selected because of his training as a physicist. His life in the camps is reflected vividly in
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
. His experiences in the special prison provided the material for his novel
The First Circle
.

When his sentence expired in 1953, however, Solzhenitsyn’s sufferings did not come to an end. After spending a month being shifted from one transit camp to another, he was told that he had been sentenced to “exile for life,” and he was sent off to serve his sentence in the Dzhambul region of the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. While he was there, he was stricken by cancer and was sent for treatment to Tashkent, an experience that provided him with the setting for his novel
Cancer Ward
.

Another misfortune struck him while he was in exile. In the absence of any news, his wife, Natalia, whom he had married while still at Rostov University, had given him up for dead and had married another man. After his release, however, she returned to him.

It was not until March, 1956, and the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which Khrushchev made his crucial denunciation of Stalin’s rule, that Solzhenitsyn was released from exile and “rehabilitated.” The Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. reviewed his case, declared that the charges against him in 1945 had not been substantiated, and annulled the sentence of the special court. And so, later in 1956, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a free man at last and with his cancer apparently cured, settled in the Russian provincial town of Ryazan, a hundred miles or so southeast of Moscow, and took up work as a physics teacher. He chose the provinces rather than the capital because he needed peace and quiet in which to write the works that had been taking shape in his mind during the years of prison and exile. He probably did not suspect then the extent to which his writing would eventually upset the tranquility he sought. For a few years, however, he was able to live quietly in a three-room apartment in Ryazan, with his wife, mother-in-law, and two aunts. He went to work on
Ivan Denisovich
.