For the Good of the Cause (3 page)

In 1964 and 1965, he concentrated on a new major work,
Cancer Ward
, which was ready for publication by the summer of 1966, when he handed it over to Tvardovsky, who wanted to publish it in
Novy Mir
right away. But Solzhenitsyn was by this time too important and controversial a figure for Tvardovsky to publish on his own authority, and so he turned to the Soviet Writers’ Union for support. Instead of support, he met only with obstructionism. The literary bureaucrats had sensed the winds of change and were not ready to risk offending the Party leaders. Meanwhile, the authorities, acting through the censorship and the secret police, had already started the process of suppressing Solzhenitsyn entirely. His position had deteriorated to such an extent by the beginning of 1967 that when the Soviet Writers’ Union held its Fourth Congress in May, Solzhenitsyn decided to distribute to the delegates a letter in which he described in detail how he and his works were being treated and appealed to the Union to demand the abolition of the censorship and to protect its members from slander and persecution. Although this letter was not discussed at the Congress, it was widely rend in the Soviet Union and regarded as something of a programmatic document.

Summing up his own situation in May, 1967, Solzhenitsyn the following measures taken to prevent his works from appearing:

1. His novel The First Circle had been confiscated by the secret police. “My novel has become available to literary officials, but it is hidden away from the majority of writers,” he said.

2. The police had confiscated the whole of his literary archives, going back fifteen or twenty years, but were circulating extracts from some of them to a closed circle of officials.

3. A campaign had been started to smear his reputation, suggesting that he had been imprisoned as a criminal, that he had “betrayed his country” and “worked for the Germans.” He had been refused means of publishing a public denial.

4. His novel Cancer Ward, the first part of which had already been approved for publication by the Moscow writers’ organization, had been turned down by all the reviews to which he had submitted it, including
Novy Mir
.

5. His play “The Reindeer and the Little Hut,” which had been accepted by the
Sovremennik
theater in 1962, still lacked permission to be produced.

6. A film scenario, “The Tanks Know the Truth,” a play, “The Light That Is in You,” and some short stories were still without publisher or producer.

7. His short stories that had already appeared in
Novy Mir
had not been republished.

8. He had been prevented from giving public readings from his works.

“In this way my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered,” Solzhenitsyn commented, and concluded his letter with this moving passage: “I am quite sure, of course, that I shall carry out my task as a writer no matter what happens, and even more successfully and with less controversy from the grave than in my lifetime. No one can prevent the truth from spreading, and to advance it I am ready to accept even death. But perhaps so many lessons will teach us in the end not to stop a writer’s pen during his lifetime?

“Not once has that enhanced our history.”

It was true, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the prose section of the Moscow writers’ organization had discussed and approved
Cancer Ward
at a meeting in November, 1966. There had been criticism of the work, some of it not unreasonable, but practically every speaker had paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s talents as a writer and to the powerful impression left on them by
Cancer Ward
. At the end of the meeting, a resolution was passed in favor of publication, and a report of the debate was sent to the editors of the reviews
Zvezda
and
Prostor
. This was not sufficient, however, to overcome official opposition, and the battle continued.

By 1967, the manuscript of
Cancer Ward
was circulating in hundreds of typewritten copies in Russia itself, and it was clearly only a matter of time before some copies reached the outside world. Solzhenitsyn argued with the officials of the Soviet Writers’ Union that it would be in everyone’s interest that the work should be published first in Russia and not, possibly in a distorted form, abroad. But the officials chose to see in this only an attempt by Solzhenitsyn to blackmail them into approving publication. Typical of the attitude of the extreme defenders of Soviet orthodoxy was the concluding remark of Alexei Surkov: “You must first say whether you renounce the role of leader of the political opposition in our country that they ascribe to you in the West.”

Solzhenitsyn continued to protest, with the support of many distinguished writers, but without, effect.
Cancer Ward
duly appeared in the West in 1968, not without some part being played in its appearance by the Soviet secret police. This provided the authorities with an excuse for depriving Solzhenitsyn of his membership in the Writers’ Union and thus of his right to earn his living as a writer.

In November, 1969, the Ryazan branch of the Russian writers’ organization met and passed a resolution calling for Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. This decision was then quickly approved by the writers’ organization of the Russian Federation. With that, Solzhenitsvn was, as far as Soviet officialdom was concerned, no longer a writer. He was, as Zimyanin had said, free to earn his living as a teacher. He could write if he wished, but nothing he wrote would be published; not even his name would be mentioned anywhere.

Despite this harassment, Solzhenitsyn has continued to write, working regularly as many as eighteen hours a day. The world-famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has provided him with accommodation in the country, where he can have peace and quiet. His many friends and admirers help to relieve him of financial worries. He has completed a further work on the Stalinist concentration camp system, called
Arkhipelag Gulag
, and he is said to have been working on a book about World War I called
August 1914
. There is now no hope that these will be published in the Soviet Union unless there is a major change of policy and personnel in the Kremlin. Even if copies of these works were to reach the West, publishers with any concern for Solzhenitsyn’s fate would not dare to print them.

Such is the story to date of the first truly great writer to emerge in Russia after the scourge of Stalin’s rule. It is a tragic story. There are few enough great writers in any country in any age, and it is scarcely credible that in the twentieth century the government of a great nation can solemnly set about the liquidation of one of its citizens as the Soviet Government has tried to liquidate Solzhenitsyn and his works. On the other hand, we have the certain knowledge that, even if Solzhenitsyn is now reduced to silence and his works banned in Russia, he will eventually be heard, as have other persecuted Russian writers.

Solzhenitsyn is already a part of Russian literature, and his great merit is to have shown that Russian literature is still capable of reaching great heights. As he said in his reply to the Swedish Academy: “I see in the decision to award me the Nobel Prize a tribute to Russian literature and to our troubled history.”

DAVID FLOYD

London, England
October, 1970

“Fayina, who’s got the schedule for the electrical classes?”

“What do you want it for if you’ve got radio?”

“Please reduce the noise here by about twenty decibels … There’s a new comrade here—I want it for him.”

“I’m sorry. What subject are you going to be giving here?”

“Generators … and power-transmission theory.”

“There’s so much noise, you can’t hear a thing! And they call themselves teachers! … The schedule is over there in the corner. Go have a look.”

“Susanna! How are you?”

“Lidia, my dear! How well you look! Where did you spend the summer?”

“A good question. I spent all of July on the building site!”

“On the building site? But didn’t you have a vacation?”

“Not really. Three weeks instead of eight. But I didn’t really mind. You look a bit pale to me.”

“Grigori! What have you got down for the electricians? You mean you’ve scheduled only two days?”

“But none of the other departments have fixed their classes past September second. It’s all provisional. Comrades—who’s that leaving? Comrades! Listen! Quiet! I repeat—Fyodor Mikheyevich asked you not to go away.”

“But where is he?”

“In the new building. He’ll be right back. Then we can talk about the business of moving.”

“Well, it better be settled soon. We’ve already got out-of-town students coming in. Do we have to find them places to live or will the dormitory be ready?”

“God knows! It’s dragged on so long. Why on earth can’t we ever get anything done on time?”

“I’m getting two rooms in the new building, Maria Diomidovna, and that’ll do me fine! Electrical engineering in one and measurements in the other.”

“So am I. I’ve got one room for electronics and another for insulating materials and lighting.”

“Well, I’m really glad, for your sake. What you have now isn’t a laboratory. It’s a dumping-ground for broken glass.”

“All this stuff lying around in crates in the corridor and the cellar—it’s a nightmare! But with the shelves we’ve put up in the new building there’ll be a place for everything: ignitrons, thyratrons, and what have you. It’ll be great.”

“Vitali, stop smoking! If you want to smoke you should ask the ladies.”

“Let me introduce our new engineering teacher, Anatoli Germanovich. This is Susanna Samoilovna. She is head of our mathematics department.”

“Don’t be funny. What do you mean, head of the department?”

“Well, head of the examination board, then. Isn’t that the same thing? Except you don’t get paid for it. Oh, and you must meet someone else—Lidia Georgievna. She’s one of the most important people around here.”

“Important! I’m probably the least important. As a matter of fact, before you know it you’ll be more important.”

“I bet you only say that because I’m wearing glasses.”

“No. Because you’re an engineer and a specialist. But they could easily do without me. I’m quite superfluous.”

“What do you teach?”

“Russian language. And literature.”

“You can tell from Lidia Georgievna’s smile that she doesn’t feel at all superfluous. In the first place, she’s in charge of our youth organization.”

“Really? Did the students elect you?”

“No, the Party Buro assigned me to the Komsomol (The Communist Youth League) Committee.”

“Come on now, Lidia, no false modesty. The kids asked for
you
and nobody else. And they’ve done it now for four years in a row.”

“I’ll go further than that. I’d say that Lidia Georgievna deserves most of the credit for getting the new building put up.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“I don’t quite understand. Who built this new building of yours? Was it the Trust or did you do it yourselves?”

“We did it together. But that’s a long story.”

“Let’s hear it, Lidia. We’ve got nothing else to do while we’re waiting.”

“Well, it was like this. The Trust told us it didn’t have enough money this year for all its jobs and it would take another couple of years to get ours done. So we asked: Can we help? And they said: Okay. If you do, you can have the building by the first of September. We jumped at the chance. We called a general meeting of the Komsomol …”

“But where could you hold a meeting here?”

“Well, we managed in the corridors and on the stairs, and we had loudspeakers in the classrooms. That was the best we could do. Anyway, we got a meeting together and put the question to them. And the answer was: Yes. So we split up into work groups. At first we put a teacher in charge of each group. But the boys said that wasn’t necessary—they could manage on their own. We were worried about the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, though. We were afraid one of them might get caught under a crane or fall or something. But we kept an eye on them.”

“Wasn’t it chaos?”

“We did our best to make it work. The foreman in charge told us a week ahead how many hands he would need, what kind, and when. So we set up a sort of headquarters and decided who was to do what. The kids worked every day—some before classes and some after. And a lot of them worked on Sundays too. They decided that everybody should put in at least two weeks’ work during the summer vacation. Of course we tried to fix it so that out-of-town students could do their share either at the start or the end of the summer. But even if they were needed in the middle they showed up.”

“Amazing!”

“Not at all. What
was
amazing was that it was all done without any kind of pressure. You wouldn’t have recognized those kids. The people from the Trust just couldn’t believe it. They said: We can’t keep up with them, we just can’t.”

“Incredible.”

“You don’t believe me? Ask anybody you like.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you. I suppose enthusiasm is natural, and a good thing too. But the trouble is that in this country the word has become hackneyed. It’s abused all the time—take the radio, for instance. What
I
hear constantly at the factory is: ‘What’s in it for me? What does the job pay? Let’s have it in writing.’ And nobody raises an eyebrow— ‘incentives’ and all that.”

“And that’s not all. They took a copy of the architect’s plan and made a scale model of it. Then they carried it at the head of the May Day parade.”

“Lidia Georgievna is giving you the romantic side. But to really understand it you have to hear the practical side. This school’s been in existence for seven years and all this time we’ve been stuck out here near the railroad. A while ago they added a one-story wing for workshops and gave us another small building about half a mile from here, but even that didn’t help much. And then Fyodor Mikheyevich managed to get hold of some land right in town where we could build. There were some shacks on it that had to be pulled down first.”