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From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 24.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Solzhenitsyn
Giovanni Grazzini, trans. Eric Mosbacher
Michael Joseph, £3.50
In October, 1962 Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, took home with him a bundle of manuscripts sent in by unkown writers. He chose one and went to bed. As he read the pages of One Day in the Life of Ivan D. he decided, ‘I must celebrate the event. I got out of bed, got fully dressed in every particular and sat down at my desk.’ Tvardovsky’s enthusiasm for the work enabled him to get the work published in Novy Mir through a mixture of bluff and directness. He sent a manuscript to the printers and at the same time went to Khrushchev. Khrushchev covered himself by getting the view of Mikhail Sholokhov about the work, and then put it to the Soviet Presidium. ‘Isn’t it a fine book?’ he asked. Silence. ‘Silence means consent,’ Khruschev remarked and closed the meeting.
By 1969 the situation had changed. Tvardovsky, under pressure, resigned the editorship of Novy Mir. The previous year he had written to Fedin, the leader of the conservatives in the Writer’s Union, protesting against the ban on the publication of Cancer Ward, and the systematic attempt to make Solzhenitsyn a non-person:
‘Two days ago, while I was sitting at my desk re-reading this letter, I received a telephone call from the State Publishing House. They said to me: “In the fifth volume of your complete works there is an article on Marshak in which you mention the name of Solzhenitsyn. Our instructions are ...” Needless to say, I refused to delete it, even at the cost of the volume’s not being published, but it is astonishing that such things can happen.’
Tvardovsky died in December 1971. Solzhenitsyn attended the funeral and circulated a tribute to the former editor, while attacking those who persecuted him while alive, yet mounted a guard of honour over him once dead.
There are several such details in Grazzini’s book, but to say it is about Solzhenitsyn is to mistitle it. There is little about Solzhenitsyn’s art, or his place in Russian literature. The relations between intellectuals and the party bureaucracy are dealt with in detail, and the monstrous regime of censorship and coercion around GLAVLIT and the Writers’ Union. Many documents, statements, and so on, are included. What is lacking is an assessment of Solzhenitsyn’s writing, not as sociological or political evidence of this or that aspect of Soviet society, but the ‘mightier justification’ which Victor Serge suggested for literature – ‘a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express ... a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspects we must try to fix for those who come after us.’
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