PIRATED EDITIONS OF "CANCER WARD" SLIP BY SOVIET CENSOR
By George Saunders
In a letter last December, Soviet novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn demanded immediate publication of his most recent novel The Cancer Ward. He warned that the Writers Union officials who had withheld authorization for its publication for over a year would have to hurry if they wanted it published in Russian first. {For the text of the letter, see World Outlook, February 16, p. 129.]
The novel was already well known to the Soviet reading public, Solzhenitsyn's letter stated: it had circulated in hundreds of typed copies "through the desire of its readers." In such circunstances, he suggested, the text could easily fall into foreign hands and be published in the West "without our permission."
"If this happens," said the novelist, "it will be the fault (or the secret desire?) of the secretariat" of the Soviet Writers Union. He disclaimed responsibility.
Solzhenitsyn's warnings have proved well founded. An Italian publisher, Alberto Mondadori of Milan, recently printed a Russian text in Switzerland. A London publishing house, The Bodley Head, plans to put out an English translation this summer. And the London Times Literary Supplement, April 11, ran extracts obtained "from a special correspondent in Europe"; the extracts were said to be retranslated into English from a previous translation from Russian into an unspecified language.
Thus the race of the publishing vultures is on. What is it about Solzhenitsyn's novel that makes the Soviet bureaucrats so reluctant to print it? Why would they rather suppress it, and undergo another international sensation, with cash registers jumping to the tune of "Banned in Moscow"?
A look at the extracts as printed in the Times Literary Supplement suggests the answer, at least in part. Here again, in the tradition of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and For the Good of the Cause, is a candid and effective description of resurgent forces representing proletarian democracy, in conflict with brutal, deadening Stalinism and bureaucratism. Short as these excerpts are, they already tell why the censors wished to blunt the pen of this gifted writer.
* * *
The protagonist of The Cancer Ward
is Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov, whose
last name might be freely translated
"Bone in the Throat." And indeed, that
is what Oleg symbolizes vis-a-vis the
bureaucratic regime.
"All through my life I have suf-
fered most for professing democracy,"
Oleg relates. (He has been released from
a penal labor camp because he is dying
of cancer. His seven-year imprisonment
had been imposed because he was "not
exactly enthusiastic" about Stalin.)
"I tried to get democracy accepted
in the army," he explains. "In fact, I
thought a lot about it. Because of that,
in 1939 they didn't send me to the mili-
tary college and I remained in the ranks.
In 1940 I managed to get to the college,
but I was so insolent to my superiors
that they expelled me. In 1941 I just
managed to get through the course for non-
commissioned officers in the Far East. I
must tell you frankly that it annoyed me
very much that I did not become an offi-
cer. All my friends became officers.
When you're young these things are diffi-
cult to bear, but justice meant more to
me."
The circumstances of Kostoglotov's
release from the labor camp show de-
Stalinization in a poor light. Solzhenit-
syn paints a grim picture of petty ha-
rassment, official arrogance, and endless
red tape, spawned by the unrestrained
bureaucratism at every level.
Released from the camp, Kostoglo-
tov arrived after dark in.a Soviet Asian
town, location of the hospital he was to
enter. He planned to look up an address
he had in the old part of town, but others
dissuaded him: "Don't go there. They'11
kill you. Since the amnesty of 1953, all
the criminal riffraff have been roaming
around there."
Trying the hotels, he found their
entrance halls "so elegant that I was
ashamed to go there as I was. Some of
them had room, but when instead of the
normal citizen's passport I gave my ex-
ile's one, ‘Impossible. Impossible.'"
He went to the militia (police)
station and was told to spend the night
at the tavern. ("They don't check docu-
ments there.") Unable to find it, he re-~
turned to the militia station, but was
not allowed to sleep there. "The militia
man kept on coming round and stopping
me.
In the morning, after a long wait
in line at the hospital, he was told,
"You must go to bed at once." But first he had to get his document stamped -at the Commandant's Office on the other side of town.
"Throughout the Soviet Union the working hours are the same, but the Conmandant had gone away and didn't care a hoot about anything. And because I was an exile they wouldn't tell me when he was expected."
Because of various regulations and bureaucratic complications, his effort to "go to bed at once" put him through a seemingly endless round of red tape. "I spent ten roubles on trams alone. Then I had to walk about another mile in the mud, and I was in such pain that I could hardly drag myself along. I had to lug my case with me all the time."
At last, the Commandant showed up. "I gave him the permit from the Commandant's Office in my region and I showed him the admission certificate from the Outpatients Department. He stamped it. I could go lie down."
*x* * *
Another excerpt describes a nightmare dreamed by a character named Pavel Rusanov, who held a high party office, "controller of cadres." Rusanov had forged his career by denouncing people to the secret police in the Stalin era.
In the nightmare, one of the uglier episodes in this "successful" career comes back to haunt its maker.
Rusanov had informed against a fellow worker, Yelchansky. "He only did it because he was asked to do so by Chukhnenko, whom Yelchansky was hindering in his work," so goes the dream apologia.
Later, the victim's wife, Grusha Yelchanskaya, was also imprisoned "because she gossiped against the Leader." Rusanov's role in this is hinted at in another piece of self-justification. He dreams he has been called before the post-Stalin Supreme Court to answer for his Stalin-era crimes. He imagines what he would say in his own defense:
"T have never been a judge, I have never even conducted an investigation. I've only notified [fof] suspicion. If I find a newspaper cutting in the latrines with a picture of the Leader torn in pieces, it's my duty to send up the-cutting and report it. The organs of investigation are there to investigate the matter. Perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps it isn't. The investigating organs are there to establish the truth. I have only discharged my simple duties as a citizen." (Emphasis added.) ~383-
Such was life under Stalin's terror.
Rusanov did not stop with the husband and wife. He also threatened to prosecute the daughter, apparently a teen-age girl, "for not having filled in fa] questionnaire properly."
In desperation, she poisoned herself. The figure of the dead girl haunts his dream.
In his guilt and fear, Rusanov especially dreads the workers of the post- Stalin era ("All young men and unknown to him"). "They knew everything -- how did they know it?"
He dreams that he asks one young welder for a match (so that he can burn the document in which he had denounced Yelchanskaya -- before the workers discover it). The welder looks at him and, to his horror, quotes the following sentence from the very document he had hoped to burn: —
"From the fact that Yelchanskaya promised me her daughter, I draw the conclusion that she feels guilty and is waiting to be arrested." (Emphasis added.)
*x* * *
In the third extract, Kostoglotov gives a humorous satirical description for his nurse friend, Zoya, of a "tremendous event" that occurred in the cancer ward that day. "The head doctor Nizamuddin Bachramovich himself came on an inspection."
"At once we had fifteen white coats, even the head of the department, the senior doctors as well as the doctors on duty, even some I have never seen before. The head doctor threw himself on the night tables like a tiger, but we had all heard that he was coming and had got things ready.
"There was nothing for him to get his teeth into. He was bad—tempered and dissatisfied. And just then they told him about me." Inadvertently, it came out that Kostoglotov was from Kazakhstan.
"'What!' said Nizamuddin. 'From another Republic? We have very few beds. Do you have to treat foreigners? Discharge him at once!...I can go now to the Outpatients Department and bring you five patients as ill as he is. Discharge him.'"
Kostoglotov thought quickly. "I put my elbows on my knees, gave a good cough, and asked calmly: 'But how can you discharge me like that when I come from the virgin lands?' 'From the virgin lands?' said Nizamuddin in some fear (he
had come close to making a political mistake!) 'For the virgin lands Russia will do anything.' And he went on to the next patient." (The "virgin lands" was an arid region of Kazakhstan that Khrushchev in the 1950's ordered plowed up in a much—publicized but not very successful campaign to increase wheat production. )
When Zoya remarked on Kostoglotov's cunning in this encounter, he replied, "I became cunning in the camp... I never used to be. In general I have many features now which are quite foreign to me and which I only acquired in the
BALTIMORE CLERGYMEN CONVICTED
Four Vietnam war protesters were convicted April 16 in Baltimore, Maryland, of "mutilating and destroying government records and interfering with the Selective Service program." They poured animal blood on draft records.
The four were the Rev. Philip E. Berrigan, 44, curate of St. Peter Claver Church; David Eberhardt, 26, secretary of the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission; the Rev. James L. Mengel, 38; and Thomas Lewis, 27, a Baltimore artist.
Father Berrigan testified that he and the others were "tormented by anger"
FOR PROTESTING VIETNAM WAR
over the death and destruction caused by
American intervention in Vietnam.
The defendants freely admitted hav-
ing participated in the demonstration
last October 27. They said the blood was
used to dramatically symbolize "a dis-
taste for the war and the suffering it
has caused."
Their attorney, Fred E. Weisgal,
said after the verdict that he would file
a motion for a new trial on the grounds
that the defendants had acted in "the best
traditions of American democracy." Sen-
tencing was deferred to a later date.
Call Joint Meeting
New York. N.Y. 10010
du Faubourg Saint-Martin, Paris 10, France.