DEMANDS PUBLICATION OF HIS NEW NOVEL
{The following letter by the Soviet novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, addressed to the Administrative Board of the Writers Union and dated December 10, 1967, is said to be currently circulating in Moscow.
[Solzhenitsyn first achieved fame as the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a powerful account of conditions in a Stalin-era labor camp which was published in Novy Mir in November 1962. Its publication, which started a controversy still going on today, was reportedly approved by Khrushchev himself.
(More recently, Solzhenitsyn drew attention with his open letter to the May, 1967, Congress of the Soviet Writers Union. In that letter he called for an end to Soviet literary censorship and specifically charged that his own work was being censored. Unpublished works of his had been seized, he charged; published works of his were being denied republication, and new works he had submitted were refused approval by the censors. A slander campaign on the part of official persons and the secret police was also being waged against him, he asserted. (For an account of Solzhenitsyn's open letter, see World Outlook, June 30, 1967, p. 651.)
[It has been reported from Moscow that the December issue of Novy Mir (which always appears with about two months' delay, thanks to the censors) would carry a new work by Solzhenitsyn. However, after an unusually long delay, that issue appeared on February 7, 1968, without the controversial author's work. ]
* * *
Although it received the support of more than a hundred writers, my letter to the Fourth Congress of Writers has not been published or answered. Nothing but rumors, strangely similar in nature and probably originating from a single source, have been spread, aimed at quieting public opinion: My archives are alleged to have been returned to me and my novel Cancer Ward is whispe:red to be on the press along with a book of short stories.
But that is all lies and you know it. In a conversation with me on June le, the Administrative Council secretaries, G. Markov, K. Voronkov, S. Sartakov and L. Sobolev, told me that the Administrative Council judged it its duty to issue a public repudiation of the base lie being spread about my conduct in the war.
But no such repudiation has been forth-
coming -- to the contrary, these slan-
ders are still being disseminated at
meetings specially held for propagandists
and for activists and at seminars.
New and fantastic rumors are being
spread about me. I am supposed to have
fled to the Arab Republic or to England
(I would like to assure my slanderers
that if anyone is going to flee it will
be they, not I).
Some personages have very insis-—
tently expressed their regret that I did
not die in the concentration camp, that I
was liberated, etc. (Such sentiments were
voiced, for instance, immediately after
the publication of A Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovitch). Now, this book has
been quietly removed from the libraries.
The secretaries themselves prom-
ised to consider the possibility of pub-
lishing at least my last novel, Cancer
Ward. But three months have already
elapsed and nothing has happened. In
three months, forty-two secretaries of
the Administrative Council have not been
able to render an opinion or to give the
approval necessary for publication. For
a year now, since the summer of 1966,.my
novel has been in a strange state of
suspension -- not openly vetoed but not
approved either.
Now the magazine Novy Mir would
like to publish it but has not received
the necessary authorization. Does the
secretariat think that all these delays
will bury my novel in oblivion and dis-
pose of it, thus making it needless to
vote whether it should become part of
the national literature?
In the meantime, everybody, in-
cluding the writers, is reading it on his
own accord. Through the desire of its
readers, this novel has circulated in
hundreds of typed copies. In our meeting
in June, I warned the secretariat that it
would have to hurry if we wanted it to be
published first in Russian, that in these
circumstances I was unable to prevent its
being published in the West, without our
permission.
After a senseless delay of many
months, the time has come to declare
that if this happens it will be the fault
(or the secret desire?) of the secretar-
iat. I demand immediate publication of
my novel.