[In the following essay, Nicholson points out that Solzhenitsyn's participation in the culture of the opposition, or samizdat, in Russia was conscious and deliberate, but that the author also made a distinction between a writer's obligation as an artist and as a creator who has a responsibility to defend the free expression of political beliefs.]

In September 1967 Solzhenitsyn appeared before the Secretariat of the Board of the Soviet Writers' Union for a discussion of mutual grievances. Towards the close of what proved to be a hostile encounter, he was involved in the following exchange with Aleksei Surkov, an established poet of the older generation:

SURKOV:
You should tell us whether you disassociate yourself from the role ascribed to you in the West, the role of leader of the political opposition in our country.
SOLZHENITSYN:
Aleksei Aleksandrovich, it's sickening to hear such a thing, and from you of all people. A creative writer and a leader of the political opposition! How do they fit together?

(VI, 57)¹

This incredulous question could usefully stand as a cautionary epigraph to any discussion of Solzhenitsyn's links with manifestations of dissidence in the Soviet Union. Neither his literary credo, nor his civic, publicistic utterances could, in good faith, be interpreted as the program of a political oppositionist, and any attempt to depict him as the underground demagogue of Russia's disaffected minorities would be patently absurd. The fact that Solzhenitsyn's photograph frequently occupies a place of honor in the homes of men and women whose conscience and convictions have brought them into conflict with aspects of Soviet society and its political administration should not lead us glibly to translate an act of moral identification into political terms, to seek programs, platforms and organizational structure where none are to be found.

Such a caveat in no way detracts from the importance of Solzhenitsyn's place in the development of samizdat, that comparatively recent episode in Russia's long history of “unofficial” publishing. Indeed, it will be shown in the course of this survey that his participation in the ethos of samizdat has been increasingly conscious and deliberate. Yet, whether as the author of stories and novels spontaneously adopted by the reader-distributors of samizdat, or as an orator availing himself of the only medium open to him, Solzhenitsyn has endeavored to distinguish between political intervention and the defense of supra-political values and beliefs. Thus, earlier in the session already referred to, he defined the writer's obligations in terms which, given the occasion and the composition of his audience, were breathtakingly a-political:

And besides, the tasks of the writer cannot be reduced to a defense or criticism of one or another means of distributing the social product, to a defense or criticism of one form of state system or another. The tasks of the writer are concerned with more general and universal questions: the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the confrontation of life and death, the triumph over spiritual grief, and those laws of mankind's long history which were born in the depths of time immemorial and which will not cease until the sun itself is extinguished.

(VI, 53)

The ultimate repository of such laws and secrets is the individual and not the collective, party or “Opposition.” Moral self-assertion in the face of falsehood or evil is of greater moment than the victories won and defeats sustained in the practical arena. Solzhenitsyn's firm belief in the social responsibilities of the writer, his alleged statement that “the basis of literature is a profound experience of social processes,”² must be considered in this light. He is no more a politician than he is a quietist.

Five years ago the word samizdat (translated approximately as “do-it-yourself publishing”) was virtually unknown in the West outside specialist circles. By now there can be few newspaper readers for whom it does not have at least vague associations of dissidence, typescripts and official displeasure.³ Stripped of its historical and cultural specificity, samizdat may be tentatively defined as a process of duplicating and disseminating written works independently of the state-controlled press and publishing-houses, and without legal access to means of mass duplication beyond the typewriter. Such a working definition emphasizes the traditions and continuity which lie behind the new name. With all due acknowledgement of the relative technical sophistication of the typewriter and carbon paper, this remains in essence a “neo-scribal” process of copying and recopying, a fact which has not escaped attention in the Soviet Union. In his letter of May 1967 to the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union Solzhenitsyn complains that “simply giving someone a manuscript to ‘read and copy’ is now forbidden by law in our country (the ancient Russian scribes of five centuries ago were permitted to do this!)” (VI, 13). One of the best known songs by the unofficial chansonnier Aleksandr Galich, “We're No Worse than Horace,”⁴ describes the elegant life of privileged, conformist intellectuals, ironically comparing them with the “good” Kievan knight of the Russian oral folk tradition, Dobrynia Nikitich. But among the Dobrynias walk “those parasites, the Nestors and Pimens,” modest chroniclers and scribes of Russia's ancient past, an allusion to the maligned heroes of the new uncensored Soviet literature, whose “names are not syrupped forth from the stage.” The stanza ends:

An “Erika” [typewriter] can take four copies,
That's all, and it's sufficient!
We'll make do for now with just four copies,
That's sufficient!

There is nothing uniquely Russian about censorship evasion. Aleksandr Radishchev, who was himself to suffer after outwitting Catherine the Great's censors, pointed out in his Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) that “printing begat censorship.”⁵ Some forty years after the first printed book came off Johann Gutenburg's press in Mainz around 1445, the Archbishop of that city promulgated the first recorded preventive censorship decree, availing himself of the centralization and controllability of the printing trade. But preventive censorship swiftly stimulated methods of bypassing it, and the ingenuity expended in the process increased in direct proportion to the intellectual ferment which the censor was anxious to check. Thus Paul Hazard's account of the illicit publication and distribution of banned works in Europe during the Enlightenment⁶ reveals many parallels with the more recent Russian experience. Fits of fanatical severity alternated with spells of near-anarchy, producing an atmosphere of uncertainty which eroded the efficacy of the censorship. Apart from the proliferation of underground printing presses and a brisk trade in manuscript copies of unpublishable works, the eighteenth century had its own forerunner of tamizdat (publication “over there,” i.e. in the West, often leading to reimportation in one form or another). Manuscripts would be smuggled out of France, usually to Holland, where they were printed on presses specializing in this trade. The finished product would return to its country of origin, often concealed amongst the cargo of a river barge.

Whatever the method used, be it pen, typewriter, camera, tape-recorder or even the human memory, Soviet Russia has had its share of men and women who took a similar pride in “overcoming Gutenburg.”⁷ At a meeting in memory of the poet Osip Mandel'shtam, liquidated in the purges of the 1930's, which was held at Moscow University on 13 May 1965, Varlam Shalamov recalled the tenacity with which Mandel'shtam's verses had survived: “In fact, it has turned out that we need him now more than ever, even though he has made scarcely any use of Gutenburg's press.”⁸ On the debit side, dispensing with the services of Gutenburg can lead to the proliferation of “scribal errors,” the intrusion of loci spurii, and the circulation on an equal footing of revised and superseded variants. The canon of Solzhenitsyn's works is still affected by factors of this sort, despite his recent efforts to control the fate of his manuscripts at least beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Union.

Inevitably some aspects of the struggle for independent publication in the Soviet Union have precedents in other lands and other ages. Nevertheless, it may be argued that Russian history, particularly in the past 150 years, has been so fraught with confrontations between writers and authority as to establish a living tradition of clandestine circulation which has become an organic part of the Russian literary heritage, and which even the bleakest years of Stalin's Terror could not wholly extinguish. Perhaps the most famous comedy in the Russian language is Griboedov's Gore ot uma [The Misfortunes of Being Clever] (1824). Its unrestrained satire ensured that only extracts appeared in the poet's life-time, and some forty years were to elapse before an integral version could be printed. Meanwhile, the play led an independent existence, circulating “in copies” [v spiskakh] in an “edition” which some scholars have estimated at as many as 40,000 copies. One Soviet scholar, N. K. Piksanov, is satisfied that “no book was published at that time in as many copies as there were manuscript copies of The Misfortunes of Being Clever in circulation.”⁹ Many of Pushkin's blasphemous or subversive poems reached a wide audience in the same manner: such were the ode “Liberty” (1817), the notorious “Gabrieliad” (1821), and “Fairy Tales: A Noel” (1818), of which a contemporary, Ivan Iakushin, could write: “Everyone knew the poem by heart and sang it almost in the streets.”¹⁰

The nineteenth century is rich in examples of this kind, ranging from the indiscretions of established writers, to the systematic preparation and proliferation of verse, prose and pamphlets as propaganda for one radical cause or another. Since any efforts to frustrate the tsarist censors are regarded in the Soviet Union as, by definition, healthy and progressive, scholarly research in this field has continued uninterrupted.¹¹ However, while meticulously documenting the evolution of the “free Russian uncensored press,” Soviet scholars apparently develop a certain imperviousness to historical irony. Thus, A. Bikhter, in his introduction to a collection of underground Populist poetry, writes: “It is also known that there existed among the student youth of that epoch a tradition of circulating in manuscript form the most popular works of the uncensored press.”¹² Bikhter's words were published in 1967, several years after the dramatic revival of that same student tradition in a new, Soviet setting. Needless to say, the resurgence was officially regarded as anything but “progressive.”

Information regarding censorship and its evasion is as scant for the Soviet period as it is voluminous for the preceding century. The late Arkadii Belinkov drew a distinction between Soviet censorship and that of any previous era: “Before it emerged, dictatorial societies, from antiquity onwards, had been concerned merely to repress heretical opinions, whereas the Soviet Communist Party has introduced a system so thorough that it not only censors a writer but dictates what he shall say.” Belinkov provides a graphic illustration of the baneful effects of such prescriptive censorship. Referring to recent achievements by Soviet scholars engaged in restoring censored Russian literary classics, he emphasizes the fact that such developments have not led to any substantial alteration in our view of nineteenth century Russian literature. “If, however, the same painstaking method of correcting the censor's distortions were to be applied to Soviet literature, different works would emerge, because Soviet censorship has consistently mutilated manuscripts to such a degree that it has transformed them into works quite opposed to their authors' intentions.” Accordingly, the result of Soviet censorship has been, in Belinkov's words, “that the great Russian literary tradition has all but been destroyed.”¹³ The works of Solzhenitsyn and others are living proof that the tradition has survived in its essentials, but alternative literature under Stalin was an altogether grimmer and sparser province than ever Griboedov or Pushkin had known.

Apart from writing “for the desk drawer,” there was beyond a doubt limited and cautious “publication” of the samizdat type during the 1930's and 1940's. For obvious reasons, poetry lent itself more readily than prose to clandestine transmission and retention. Towards the end of his life Maksimilian Voloshin (1877-1932) was barred from publishing his verse, yet, despite the material hardship which this caused him, he could still follow with pride the secret life of his banned works:

But my own lips have long been sealed. No matter!
There's greater honour still in being learned by heart
And copied out in secret, furtively,
In this life being not a volume but—a notebook.(14)

In an article in the Soviet press in 1957 A. Kovalenkov recalled how poems by Nikolai Gumilev were still being circulated in duplicated form in the early 1930's, some ten years after the poet's execution for allegedly subversive activities.¹⁵ It was during the same decade that Nikolai Kliuev, Mikhail Kuzmin and Osip Mandel'shtam read their unpublished works at private gatherings. “Many of them,” writes Boris Filippov, “frequently unbeknown to their authors, were copied out by hand, multiplied, also by hand, and circulated throughout the Soviet Union.”¹⁶ In some cases, at least, poems were deliberately committed to the vagaries of manuscript and oral transmission in the belief that, in Mandel'shtam's words, “people will preserve them.”¹⁷ And, indeed, unpublished poems by Mandel'shtam, Kliuev and Voloshin did survive, to reemerge in samizdat after the death of Stalin.

In their own way, Stalin's prisons and labor camps came to be the country's main bastions of unofficial literary expression. As one imprisoned communist, Evgeniia Ginzburg, discovered, recalling and composing verse provided some relief during the long hours of solitary confinement: “My memory, cut off from all impressions from outside, unfolded like a chrysalis transformed into a butterfly.”¹⁸ Another survivor, Varlam Shalamov, devotes one of his harrowing “Kolyma Stories” to the function of the rasskazchik [story-teller] in camp society.¹⁹ The intellectual Platonov keeps himself alive in a particularly harsh camp by paraphrasing Dumas and Conan Doyle from memory for the delectation of the common criminals whose law is absolute within the barracks.

Two lighter examples of the creative powers of the storyteller are given in The First Circle, in the episodes “The Traitor Prince” (Ch. 50) and “The Smile of Buddha” (Ch. 54). But the preeminence of poetry in this setting is perhaps best expressed in a poem by Boris Slutskii written in 1951, which begins with the stanza:

When Russian prose went off to the camps,
Some to be shovellers, and smarter ones—medics,
Some to be wood-cutters, sharper ones—drivers,
Or barbers, or actors;
                    All of you forgot your own craft straight away.
                    What comfort is prose in moments of grief?
                    Like frail little splinters
                                                                                                    the ocean of poetry
Drew you and rocked you and bore you away.(20)

Later in the poem Slutskii describes how “the iambus was born out of the steady pounding of shovels … And the trochee was commissioned by a thief in exchange for sugar …” Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn shared something of this experience. He too created and memorized poems and plays in verse during his years in the camps. The most sombre of these works to reach the West has as its refrain Pushkin's line, “God, Do Not Let Me Lose My Mind!”²¹ In it Solzhenitsyn describes how dearly he has bought his right to be a poet: he writes of his mother, who died alone and destitute, of the years of marriage stolen from him, of the cries of children he will never father. To this price he adds the deaths and ruined lives of countless fellow-prisoners. His poem is a precious burden, “the dripping of fragrant resin in a chopped-down forest,” and he looks forward to the moment when he will at last release his memory and commit the lines to paper in the seclusion of his place of exile.

During his three years of “exile in perpetuity” in Southern Kazakhstan Solzhenitsyn fulfilled his pledge, leading a dual existence, as school-teacher and writer “for the desk-drawer.” This continued after the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, when he was permitted to return to Central Russia. The factual and speculative aspects of his literary debut in 1962 need not be repeated here.²² Suffice to say that Solzhenitsyn effected the transition from surreptitious to officially recognized writer with dramatic suddenness, and apparently without involvement in the nascent samizdat of those years. For the late 1950's saw the growth of a new phase in the uncensored literary life of the Soviet Union. Although the name itself would not gain currency until after 1966, that year marked a coming-of-age rather than a beginning.

Samizdat was born out of the spasmodic easing of literary controls which followed the death of Stalin and the public criticism of his dictatorship initiated by Khrushchev. This is not to say, of course, that the Party abdicated its responsibility for the ideological content of literary output. It did mean, however, that a measure of genuine debate was to be tolerated here as in other walks of life, and that miscreant writers would henceforth be disciplined as writers rather than as political offenders, to be swept away at the first sign of heterodoxy. As it became clear that some kind of “sincerity in literature”²³ was once again compatible with physical survival, any attempt to stem the tide was likely to lead to the opening of alternative channels. Thus in the latter part of the 1950's the desk-drawers gradually yielded up their well-guarded contents, and manuscripts circulated privately on a scale which had been impossible for decades. Evtushenko recalls how Boris Slutskii once showed him drawers bulging with unpublished verse and reassured him that: “Our day will come. All we have to do is wait for that day and have something ready for it in our desks and in our hearts.”²⁴ That day appeared to be dawning, although many examples of “camp” and “purge” literature, such as Lidiia Chukovskaia's Opustelyi dom [Deserted House] and Evgeniia Ginzburg's memoirs, would be submitted for publication in the wake of Solzhenitsyn's first triumph only to find that the breach had already been stemmed. Controversial works by Dudintsev, Iashin and Tendriakov appeared, as did the anthologies Literaturnaia Moskva [Literary Moscow] and Tarusskie stranitsy [Pages from Tarusa], thanks, in part at least, to censorship “irregularities.” Other works which could not find a publisher, or which were, of their essence, unpublishable, found their way abroad and were published there. These ranged from Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago and the works of Siniavskii and Daniel' to comparatively obscure items such as Mikhail Naritsa's novel Nespetaia pesnia [An Unsung Song]. The uncertainties of Khrushchev's cultural policies did at least permit a degree of creative friction in the arts.

Moscow's Maiakovskii Square was the crucible from which emerged an amalgam characteristic of the early samizdat. In the summer of 1958, at a time when Solzhenitsyn was working on his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, the first spontaneous meetings were held at the foot of the newly erected statue to Maiakovskii. Thanks to eyewitness accounts, notably that of Vladimir Osipov,²⁵ we have an excellent picture, both of the events which lay behind the open-air maiaki, as they came to be called, and of the mood and atmosphere which dominated the gatherings up to their dispersal in 1961. These were amateur poetry-readings, accompanied by discussions, primarily of a literary nature. Apart from the works of established poets, the young people who assembled in the square on Saturday and Sunday evenings would recite their own unpublished verse, and it was but a short step from here to the creation of the first typewritten journal, Sintaksis [Syntax]. The existence of various unofficial student journals had been mentioned in the press as early as 1955, but they appear to have been mainly handwritten, and of extremely limited circulation.²⁶Syntax was in a different category altogether. In 1960 a disapproving Soviet journalist noted: “Judging by the different type-faces, it has not just been printed in four or five copies to adorn the book-shelf of a poetry lover, but was intended to reach a significantly wider circle of readers.”²⁷ In the winter and spring of 1959 and 1960 three issues appeared, under the editorship of Aleksandr Ginzburg. They were devoted almost exclusively to poetry of all shades, “formalistic, religious, frankly pro-Soviet, ‘decadent,’ anti-Stalinist, etc.” (Osipov, p. 112). Other journals soon followed: Bumerang [Boomerang] in November 1960, edited by Osipov himself, and Iurii Galanskov's Feniks [Phoenix] in spring of the following year.

Although journals such as Syntax and Phoenix were, in L. Sergeeva's words, “created in an epoch when intellectual and spiritual searching was chiefly reflected in poetry,”²⁸ and as such were close to the spirit of the mass poetry-readings and Days of Poetry held in this period, the seeds of the later, socio-political phase of samizdat were already discernible in the preoccupations of at least some of the maiakovtsy. “Nineteen fifty-six had been the spring of hope,” writes one of them, “but the spring had turned in its tracks, and in 1958 we found ourselves at a dead-end. It was this chaos of doubts and searchings which we brought into the spontaneous open-air club” (Osipov, p. 111). From mid-1960 the political aspect loomed ever larger. In 1961 Iurii Galanskov wrote that the authorities regarded Maiakovskii Square as “a hotbed of anti-Sovietism,”²⁹ and another, unidentified maiakovets appealed to the Central Committee to set up a discussion club for young people, arguing that: “Full independence, free initiative—these are the demands of the young, and then they will show some concern for laws and ethics.”³⁰ By the end of 1961 the unique public forum which the Square provided had been destroyed in a wave of press attacks, arrests, interrogations and reprisals. Henceforth the successors to Syntax and Phoenix would move increasingly towards the type of the mixed literary and socio-political journal, already discussed in the early 1960's. Such ventures were Kolokol [The Bell], Russkoe slovo [The Russian Word] and Phoenix-66, all of which appeared between 1965 and 1966. In the December 1965 issue of another such journal, Tetrad' [The Notebook], a poem by Iosif Brodskii and one of Solzhenitsyn's prose poems, “Ozero Segden” [“Lake Segden”] appear between the same covers as an article entitled “Who Killed Trotskii?” and other publicistic materials.³¹ By the late 1960's this tendency would culminate in the appearance of samizdat journals with little or no literary content, including the celebrated Khronika tekushchikh sobytii [Chronicle of Current Events], Valerii Chalidze's Obshchestvennye problemy [Social Problems], and Ukrainskii vestnik [The Ukrainian Herald].

Thus, at the turn of the decade and on the eve of Solzhenitsyn's emergence as a public figure, some of the outstanding names in the later history of samizdat, Galanskov, Ginzburg, Vladimir Bukovskii et al., were already undergoing their baptism of fire. These years saw a marked hardening in what had been relatively fluid official attitudes towards spontaneous expression and publication. Moreover, they gave a number of idealistic young people a firsthand insight into the way in which the provisions of the Soviet Constitution could be vitiated by the official countenancing of procedural “irregularities” and by a mechanical interpretation and application of the article of the Criminal Code intended to combat “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Osipov writes of how the baton borne by the maiakovtsy would, some years later, “be taken up by the ‘constitutionalists,’ who chose the statue of Pushkin as the site of their meetings” (p. 136). He is referring to the period following the arrest of Siniavskii and Daniel in the autumn of 1965, a date which marks the beginning of a new intensity and a new spirit in samizdat. As will be seen, Solzhenitsyn's own experiences closely parallel the events of these years.

Solzhenitsyn's attitude towards the phenomenon of samizdat publication develops perceptibly from a passive curiosity to a feeling of protectiveness and sympathy. It is singularly apt that even his first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared with the explicit support of the First Secretary of the Communist Party, should have enjoyed a brief unofficial circulation prior to its publication in Novyi mir in November 1962. D. Blagov alleges that the story was privately duplicated despite stringent precautions to prevent copies from leaving the Novyi mir offices, and speaks of it “whistling,” as through the chinks in a vacuum chamber, and finding its way to “thousands of readers.”³² Reviewing One Day … in the official press in January 1963, I. Drutse confirms that its fame had spread before even the awaited issue of Novyi mir appeared on the newsstands; rumors had given way to detailed paraphrase even before the advance distribution of proof copies to reviewers.³³ It has been observed that submission of a talented, but ideologically eccentric work to a publishing house or editorial board in those years almost guaranteed “quasi-publication” or “crypto-publication” of the samizdat sort.³⁴ In Solzhenitsyn's case, however, this appeared, initially at least, to be an “accidental” occurrence, which the availability of authorized editions made irrelevant. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that, in fact, the official publication, rather than the crypto-publication, was historically aberrant.

Some insight into Solzhenitsyn's reaction to the samizdat dissemination of his writings in the first half of the decade is afforded by the transcript of his meeting with the Writers' Union Secretariat in September 1967. Asked to explain the appearance of hundreds of typewritten copies of Cancer Ward, he replied:

Well, it turns out that my works have some strange quality. People insistently ask to read them, and once they've taken them to read they re-type them in their own time, or at their own expense, and pass them on to others to read … Three years ago my “micro-stories” or poems in prose were circulated just as rapidly. I'd no sooner begun to let people read them, than they had flown from one Soviet city to the next.

(VI, 38)

Solzhenitsyn's tone combined irony, directed at his interlocutors, with something resembling amused surprise at the industry shown by the samizdatchiki. The scene has strong historical echoes. In a letter of June 1825 to S. N. Begichev, Griboedov complained that: “Everyone is pestering me with requests for the manuscript [of The Misfortune of Being Clever].”³⁵ Twelve years later an obscure young cornet in the Life-Guards, Mikhail Lermontov, was called upon to account for his behaviour in composing and disseminating a “seditious” poem, “Death of a Poet” (1837). His statement reads, in part: “When I wrote my poem on the death of Pushkin (which I unfortunately did precipitously), my good friend Raevskii, not finding anything illegal in my verses, asked if he could copy them; he probably showed them to someone else as a novelty, and in this way they passed around.”³⁶

Such allusions to Russia's literary past are by no means irrelevant to the present discussion. One of the most intriguing features of Solzhenitsyn's works is their relationship to earlier literary traditions, and above all to aspects of the nineteenth century Russian literary heritage which were “discontinued” after 1917 or during the literary Gleichschaltung of the early 1930's. His deliberate practice of citing or evoking the words, themes, and ethical preoccupations of Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy adds a rich dimension to works which are still all too often regarded as mere fictionalized autobiography. When the official Soviet attitude towards Solzhenitsyn began to change from 1963 onwards, and particularly after his unsuccessful candidacy for the Lenin Prize in Literature, it was precisely the alleged archaism, inertia and “Karataevism” (after the God-fearing peasant, Platon Karataev, in Tolstoy's War and Peace) of Ivan Denisovich and Matrena Vasil'evna which were seized upon by his critics. They endeavored to depict Solzhenitsyn as a writer locked in the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century “abstract” humanism, a mystical, pessimistic world-view, unalleviated by that capacity to comprehend reality in its revolutionary development which is expected of the creators of Socialist Realism. The frequent remoteness of such assessments from the texts on which they were ostensibly based did not prevent them from being canonized and from contributing substantially to Solzhenitsyn's progressive disfranchisement as a Soviet writer. Ironically, this process could not but force his works into the realm of Russia's alternative literary life, thereby establishing him in another of Russia's venerable literary lineages, that of the writer beset by officialdom, but read in spite of it.

The essentially passive phase of Solzhenitsyn's experiences with samizdat came to an end during the critical period from autumn 1965 to summer 1968. In these years he fought and lost a campaign to secure publication of his works, notably Cancer Ward, through official channels, falling foul, in the process, of the KGB, the Soviet Writers' Union and virtually the whole of the Soviet press. By summer 1968 his position within his homeland had changed dramatically; circumstances had for the first time forced him actively to seek the support of public opinion; his unpublished works were circulating in an astounding number of copies (Tvardovskii speaks of thousands)³⁷ and had appeared abroad, providing the Writers' Union with a welcome pretext for a de facto expulsion, which was formalized the following year. A more detailed consideration of some of these events may help to explain the particular warmth with which Solzhenitsyn was later to recall the achievements of “our noble samizdat.”³⁸

A tragi-comic finale to the period of predominantly literary and cultural dissidence epitomized by the Maiakovskii Square readings was the brief heyday of SMOG, an abbreviation which may be deciphered in at least three different ways. Composed almost entirely of amateur poets at Moscow's various institutes of higher learning, the group asserted its right to read and publish its own verse and to disavow the hallowed tenets of Socialist Realism. The SMOG-ists did not eschew confrontation in the cause of freedom of expression. After organizing readings and discussions during 1964 with a bravado reminiscent of the “yellow-blouse” iconoclasm of Maiakovskii's early Futurist days, they held a well-publicized meeting and demonstration in April 1965 which was duly attended by plain-clothes KGB operatives and druzhinniki [“vigilantes”]. One observer of the SMOG episode and the reprisals taken after its disintegration has attempted to locate it in the cultural and political currents of that time: “Now, after some ten years have elapsed, I personally see SMOG as nothing less than a natural manifestation of the troubled background to the last … months of Khrushchev's ‘thaw,’ when the country's intellectuals lived in nervous anticipation of the position which the authorities would finally adopt with regard to questions of artistic creativity.”³⁹ Uncertainty came to an end with the arrest of Siniavskii and Daniel' in September 1965, and the almost simultaneous confiscation of typescripts of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, together with his literary archive, from the home of one of his acquaintances. The arrest and trial of the two lesser known writers marks a watershed, and is widely accepted as the prelude to the appearance of samizdat proper. By intimation and example the KGB made it known that the unofficial preparation and dissemination of written materials was henceforth to be regarded as reprehensible per se, and new legislation introduced in September 1966 put teeth into this threat.⁴⁰ Such terms as “slanderous fabrications” and “anti-Soviet” content acquired a corresponding elasticity, and the scene was set for the best-known and best-documented causes célèbres in the recent history of dissent in Russia: Ginzburg's compilation of a transcript and other materials on the Siniavskii-Daniel' trial led to his own arrest in January 1967 along with others who had engaged in comparable “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”; Bukovskii, Delone, and a group of companions who protested in Pushkin Square against these latest arrests were detained in their turn and eventually brought to trial on a variety of charges, from “hooliganism” to unlawful assembly.⁴¹

In these momentous years a pattern was established of kangaroo courts, calling forth protests, open letters and “white books” of otherwise inaccessible documentation, and, inevitably, generating further arrests and repression. The uncensored typewritten “press” reduplicated hundreds of appeals against closed or blatantly biased hearings. Glasnost' [publicity] and zakonnost' [legality] became unifying slogans, and the rapid adoption of the name samizdat itself testifies eloquently to a growing sense of identity. For the editors of the Chronicle of Current Events 1968 was a year of transition: “In this year samizdat has not been enriched by a single major prose work, as it was in past years by such works as the novels of Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs of Evgeniia Ginzburg, the collections of stories by Shalamov … ; during the year no literary miscellany such as Syntax or Phoenix has appeared. On the other hand, the readers of samizdat (they are also its volunteer publishers) have received during the year a regular flow of documents, open letters, speeches, commentaries, articles, news items, etc.”⁴² From 1968 dates the feeling, among sections of the intelligentsia, that samizdat is reporting on and chronicling a process or “movement.” Whether any such coherent dissident movement actually exists, and whether Solzhenitsyn is a participant in it, are questions which must be considered in due course.

Solzhenitsyn's struggle during the mid-1960's was distinct, yet by no means unrelated. He has been ever loath to tolerate distractions from his consuming vocation, as more than one would-be interviewer has learned to his cost. Yet the confiscation of his manuscripts and the mounting pressure of which it was symptomatic could not go unanswered. Private letters proved ineffective. Meanwhile, public readings from his works planned for 1966 were cancelled, and, in spite of the somewhat anachronistic appearance of “Zakhar-Kalita” in January of that year, it was soon evident that Novyi mir would be no more able to honor its agreement to publish Cancer Ward than it had been in the case of The First Circle. Accordingly, Solzhenitsyn cast about for a wider audience. A meeting of rank-and-file members of the Moscow Writers' Organization, convened at his request in November 1966, discussed Cancer Ward, expressing itself overwhelmingly in support of publication, and directing its officials to assist the passage of the book. The euphoric atmosphere which prevailed at the meeting had little or nothing to do with the realities of the day, and Cancer Ward was blocked again, even though it had been partially set up in type. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn's pilfered manuscripts, far from being returned to him, were circulating in the very antipole of samizdat, a secret limited edition officially distributed as ammunition in the campaign to discredit and silence him. It was against this background that Solzhenitsyn laboriously typed out his appeal to the Fourth Writers' Congress in May 1967, sending a copy to each of the several hundred delegates. The letter was concerned with the fate of Russian literature, with the baneful consequences of censorship, that “relic of the middle ages” (VI, 7), and with the abject failure of the Writers' Union to defend its members against victimization. Only limited success attended this venture. Despite letters of support from over 100 of Solzhenitsyn's fellow-writers, the presidium allowed no discussion of the appeal. Needless to say, it circulated widely in samizdat, earning for Solzhenitsyn the enduring hatred of certain members of the Board of the Soviet Writers' Union, who regarded the public washing of dirty linen and the resulting “clamor” in the West as far greater evils than any which exercised Solzhenitsyn.

There was no question of Solzhenitsyn deliberately and demonstratively scorning the use of accepted channels in favor of samizdat, as had certainly been the case with some of the young poets of earlier years. Indeed, in 1967 and 1968, samizdat revealed itself as something of a double-edged weapon. Uncontrollable proliferation within the country meant that sooner or later copies would fall into the hands of Western journalists, diplomats or tourists and find their way into print beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In the case of an open letter, or the transcript of a meeting held in camera, foreign publication might increase the possibility of repercussions. At the same time, those who circulated such materials did so in order to overcome a communications barrier and the added resonance of foreign publication could actually help to achieve this aim. However, seeing his stories and novels surface in Western Europe was a far more disturbing experience for Solzhenitsyn. As has so often been emphasized, he regards himself above all as a Russian writer, and addresses himself in the first instance to his fellow-countrymen. Where samizdat provided a makeshift substitute for, and in certain cases might even stimulate, a more desirable form of mass-publication, foreign publication could so incense the authorities as to seriously damage the chances of the work ever reaching more than a fraction of the Russian reading public. It was considerations such as these which led Solzhenitsyn to exercise rigorous control over manuscript copies of August 1914 until all hope of official publication had passed. The importance of distinguishing between literary and non-literary writings when discussing Solzhenitsyn's attitude towards samizdat is illustrated by his position in early 1968, when he was obliged to employ the samizdat network in an attempt to avert a danger to which samizdat itself had inadvertently contributed: Cancer Ward had passed out of his control and might soon be published abroad without his approval if the competent authorities continued to hold up its scheduled appearance at home.

A similar warning sent to Literaturnaia gazeta in April 1968 was published some three months later when Solzhenitsyn's fears had already become reality.⁴³ The accompanying editorial comment gave a very clear picture of the official view of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to samizdat during those years. It was a sharply worded and wide-ranging attack on the whole spectrum of dissent among Soviet intellectuals and on its external manifestation, samizdat. Galanskov and Ginzburg were two of the targets identified by name, and mention was made of those irresponsible writers who had signed letters in support of them and their ilk. Solzhenitsyn's behaviour was then presented as part and parcel of this wider malaise: he had left typescript copies of his works in the care of a man known to have delivered anti-Soviet materials abroad, thus effectively relinquishing control of them; he had sent his letter to the Fourth Writers' Congress, “obviously calculating that it would be even further duplicated, but this time in an uncontrolled manner, and would pass from hand to hand, becoming a literary sensation” (VI, 110); furthermore, he had circulated two letters in which he expressed “feigned alarm” at the prospect of Cancer Ward being published in the West, together with a “tendentious, extremely unobjective” transcript of his meeting with the secretaries of the Writers' Union (VI, 113). Lest the point be missed, Literaturnaia gazeta rewrote Solzhenitsyn's biography in order to insinuate that he was justly punished in 1945 for anti-Soviet activity (criticizing Stalin!), and confined its analysis of his works to a single play, written in a labour camp some twenty years before and purloined in its only extant copy by the KGB.

This is the point at which discussion, or indeed any pretense of discussion, disappears once and for all from official Soviet coverage of Solzhenitsyn's life and works. Henceforth his works are by definition “anti-Soviet” (even when they are set in tsarist Russia), the channels by which he transmits them are by definition “illicit,” and any of his statements which cannot be ignored altogether are by definition “fabrications” or “distortions.” None the less, Literaturnaia gazeta's blanket condemnation of samizdat, dissidence and Solzhenitsyn does invite comment. Certainly Solzhenitsyn was, as has been seen, “involved” willy-nilly with samizdat. It had adopted his works, and helped to ventilate his grievances. Nor is Literaturnaia gazeta's decision to mention him in the same breath as Galanskov and Ginzburg entirely inappropriate. For several of the many letters of protest which found their way into samizdat during and after the “Trial of the Four,” as it has come to be known, ranged far beyond the case in point. They touched upon all manner of “Stalinist” illegalities in contemporary Soviet society, the treatment of minorities, the stifling of all forms of intellectual creativity, and a number of them mentioned Solzhenitsyn specifically: “What were our homegrown bosses thinking of, shutting Solzhenitsyn's mouth … ?” (I. Iakhimovich); “There is room in our literature for the paltry works of Kochetov … But only the fortunate few have been able to read Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward” (I. Gabai, Iu. Kim and P. Iakir); “I pity those readers who do not know that there is a great Russian writer living and working in the land of Russia, Solzhenitsyn, the author of the novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle, and the plays Candle in the Wind and The Love-Girl and the Innocent” (L. Pliushch).⁴⁴ The crucial distinction is that Solzhenitsyn has never been a “joiner,” a “signer,” or a “demonstrator.” His understanding of the potential of true literature is such as to make literary creation itself a profoundly social act. “Beauty will save the world,” he says in his Nobel Lecture,⁴⁵ echoing Dostoevsky, and it is at this level that the active dissidents appear most often to respond to him. Certainly, he is respected as a man who has demonstrated his readiness to speak out on matters of public concern. But it is as the author of works which combine talent with integrity that Solzhenitsyn is perhaps closest to Iakhimovich, Gabai or Galanskov and Ginzburg themselves. For the world of Solzhenitsyn's fiction offers amplification and confirmation of the individual act of conscience, and his personal example of dedication and fortitude is felt in every line he writes.

While preferring not to become embroiled in the politics of dissent, Solzhenitsyn has lent his strong support to individuals and “causes” on more than one occasion since 1968. Do these actions constitute some kind of affiliation with an identifiable “Democratic Movement” in the Soviet Union? Probably nobody would claim that the many hundreds of samizdat items known in the West, and including a vast body of documents prepared by representatives of national and religious minorities, reflect an identity of interests, grievances and goals. On the other hand, many observers, both within the Soviet Union and without, have discerned what they feel to be a common denominator in the various dissident factions. Naoum Odnopozov, a former “underground poet,” writes: “democratization is a common platform, but on the forms which it should take, a discussion is in progress.”⁴⁶ Among the best-known contributions to that discussion is Andrei Amal'rik's essay, “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” In it he distinguishes between the earlier period of unofficial publishing, which he terms the “Cultural Opposition,” and the samizdat which developed after 1965: “Nevertheless, samizdat, like the Cultural Opposition, gradually gave birth to a new independent force which can already be regarded as a real political opposition to the regime, or, at least, as a political opposition in embryo.”⁴⁷ Although it lacks organizational form, it has a sense of cohesion, a body of activists or “leaders,” and a number of common aims and traditions. Moreover, Amal'rik argues, the movement desires and actively seeks legal status and full publicity for its activities. Peter Reddaway gives cautious support to the notion that a Democratic Movement is indeed in the making:

… the Democratic Movement is essentially middle and upper-middle class. Launched partly through the unification of groups in the natural sciences and the humanities, it has yet to make any serious appeal to “the people” or “narod.” Not surprisingly, therefore, its adherents are few in number: only about two thousand mainstream members have so far dared to identify themselves deliberately by name. Clearly, however, these people receive support from many thousands of sympathizers who, while reading and circulating samizdat, prefer for various reasons to stop short of signing protests, forming groups or demonstrating.⁴⁸

Added authority for this view would appear to have come in the form of a new samizdat journal, Svobodnaia mysl' [Free Thought], the first issue of which is dated 20 December 1971. Free Thought sets itself the goal of “promoting the exchange of opinions on pressing theoretical and practical questions of the Democratic Movement,”⁴⁹ and assumes throughout that the existence of such a movement is self-evident. However, it must be emphasized at once that Free Thought has yet to establish its credentials as an organ of dissident opinion in the Soviet Union, and at this stage only the most tentative conclusions may be drawn from its appearance. This new socio-political journal pays considerable attention to the minutiae of arranging subscriptions, contributions and delivery in such a way as to protect the identities of those involved, and its first article discusses the desirability of moving more swiftly from the amateurish and wasteful methods of samizdat towards a new concept of kolizdat [“collective publishing”].⁵⁰Kolizdat is used to designate a far more rationalized and better organized form of samizdat activity, in which the gap between typewriter and printing-press would be bridged by wider use of hectographs, mimeographs and a variety of other mechanical duplicating processes. Whether the term and the ideas behind it will gain currency remains to be seen. The strongest warning against overestimating the incipient Democratic Movement has come from the late Tibor Szamuely, who regards the title itself as a misnomer.⁵¹ According to Szamuely, the mainstream of samizdat could more accurately be called a “civil rights movement” and is essentially “a movement of the intelligentsia, by the intelligentsia and for the intelligentsia.” Liberal appeals for freedom to hold and express opinions not shared by those in power, for creative freedom in the arts and freedom of research and consultation in the sciences, have no appeal in the country at the grass-roots level, and are politically an irritant rather than a threat: “An unbridgeable abyss divides samizdat from the Soviet population,” writes Szamuely, and even within samizdat the alliance between the liberal civil rights wing and such radical factions as the Ukrainian nationalists is temporary, if not illusory. Whatever conclusion is reached as to the nature and effectiveness of the Democratic Movement, the concept exists, and it is appropriate that Solzhenitsyn's public commitment in recent years should be considered in the light of the foregoing discussion.

In general such selective gestures of identification as Solzhenitsyn has chosen to make have been with the civil rights mainstream, an assertion which requires immediate qualification. Solzhenitsyn is not insensitive to the suffering of persecuted national and religious minorities and evidence of this fact may be found in his earliest published works. The composition of Ivan Denisovich's labor camp accurately reflects the treatment of the smaller nations under Stalin. In Cancer Ward they are represented by such figures as Federau, a Volga German, and Sibgatov, a Crimean Tatar. Forcibly deported to Central Asia in 1944 for their alleged collective betrayal of the Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars have been campaigning since 1956 for the right to return. By 1968, when contact was made with Russian civil-rights dissidents, the Crimean Tatars had already collected more than three million signatures on countless letters and petitions. Apart from nominal rehabilitation in 1967 they achieved nothing. This lends particular poignancy to the scene in which Sibgatov, called upon to answer Tolstoy's question “What do men live by?”, utters a single word, rodinoi [homeland] (II, 121). An even greater qualification must be made in the case of Solzhenitsyn's concern for the fate of oppressed religious believers. One need only recall the sympathetic portrayal of Alesha the Baptist in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or of the ethereal Agniia in The First Circle. Further evidence of his involvement in the Russian Orthodox Church's struggle for survival in an officially atheistic society is provided by his “Lenten Letter” to the Patriarch, and the subsequent exchange with Father Sergii Zheludkov.⁵²

The cause of civil and human rights in the Soviet Union derived a considerable impetus from the foundation of the Chronicle of Current Events in 1968, International Human Rights Year. The journal appropriately took as its epigraph a quotation from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and after 1968 issues bore the heading “Human Rights Year in the Soviet Union Continues.” Solzhenitsyn's sympathy with this cause is deeply rooted in his personal experiences and reflected in a variety of ways in his writings and thought. Thus, in his insistence upon the need for openness and publicity, he speaks not simply as a writer but as a trained scientist and a member of that scientific and cultural intelligentsia which has so influenced the samizdat era. In Candle in the Wind the scientist Terbol'm uses a model of the human brain to illustrate the flow of information within a healthy society. Threads of light are seen constantly darting to and fro between all the individual cells of the organism, demonstrating the cybernetic principles of “information, co-ordination and feedback” (V, 173). The alternative presented is that of an organically inert paradigm, a pyramidic structure in which information flows only from the apex downwards. Years later Solzhenitsyn would return to scientific comparisons when composing his Nobel Lecture: “Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and universal destruction.”⁵³ Similar warnings are expressed throughout his literary and publicistic writings. Thus, in “For the Good of the Cause” Lidiia Georgievna reminds the secretary of the partbiuro of Lenin's words: “Lenin taught us: Do not be afraid of publicity! Publicity is a healing sword!” (I, 277). In an open letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union following his expulsion in November 1969 Solzhenitsyn wrote that mankind is set apart from the animal world by the power of thought and speech: “But if these are fettered, then we revert to the animal state. Publicity, full and honest publicity—this is the first condition of health in any society, including our own” (VI, 149-150).

Solzhenitsyn has not confined himself to broad statements of principle. He has protested against the political persecution of those who share his attachment to freedom of expression and to samizdat as one means of attaining it. The year 1970 provides two instances. On 29 May Zhores Medvedev, an outstanding geneticist and close acquaintance of Solzhenitsyn, was forcibly interned in a psychiatric hospital. The details of this incident are set out in a book which Zhores wrote in collaboration with his brother Roy.⁵⁴ The fact that a typescript copy of an unfinished work on international scientific co-operation, which Medvedev had hoped eventually to publish, had fallen into the hands of the KGB no doubt played a part, as also did his open letter on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers' Union some six months previously. When, after two weeks, Medvedev's relatives, friends and colleagues had been unable to effect his release, Solzhenitsyn contacted Medvedev's brother and told him of his desire to make a statement in defence of Medvedev and “all others imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals.”⁵⁵ The offer was accepted and Solzhenitsyn's declaration, dated 14 June 1970, circulated widely and rapidly.

Though primarily a bid to help a friend in distress, the statement “This Is the Way We Live!” may be set in a wider context. Solzhenitsyn's abhorrence of the abuse of psychiatry is of long standing. The play, Candle in the Wind, was written in the early 1960's at a time when such practices were not yet systematically applied against Soviet citizens who declined to conform. A central theme of the play is scientific interference with the human personality. Set in an indeterminate country at some time in the future, it shows the threat from an irresponsible branch of cybernetics which proposes to “neurostabilize” people who fall short of rigid criteria of normality. Soon the military authorities recognize the project's potential and guarantee to fund its development. The “candle” of the title is the flickering flame of the human soul threatened by the “terrible wind” (V, 167) of a science which has chosen to disregard the voice of conscience. Some years later the editor-in-chief of Pravda would publicly describe Solzhenitsyn himself as a “schizophrenic” and “a psychologically abnormal person” (VI, 58), and anonymous agitatory would echo the charge at closed meetings of party activists throughout the country. All of this can be felt in Solzhenitsyn's appeal: “This may happen tomorrow to any one of us … seizing free-thinking healthy people and locking them in mental homes is spiritual murder … It is short-sighted to think that you can live by constantly relying on force alone, constantly ignoring the objections of conscience.”⁵⁶

When he wrote that: “Some of the victims are widely known, many more are unknown,”⁵⁷ Solzhenitsyn may have had at least one such “unknown” man in mind. In October 1969, shortly before Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union, Vladimir Gershuni was arrested. He had been a supporter of the Action Group for the Defence of Civil Rights in the Soviet Union, a body formed in May 1969 after the arrest of Petr Grigorenko, a leading civil rights campaigner. The Chronicle of Current Events writes: “Gershuni is a man with an unusually highly developed instinct for justice. For him the struggle against lies is not a part of life, but the whole of it.”⁵⁸ The Chronicle further reveals that Gershuni had been imprisoned for political offences some twenty years earlier and had served his sentence in the same labour camp as Solzhenitsyn and at the same time. In March 1970 Gershuni was judged to be a schizophrenic and was sentenced in absentia to detention in a psychiatric prison hospital for an unspecified time.

By the time it became known in October 1970 that Solzhenitsyn had been awarded the year's Nobel Prize for Literature, Medvedev was a free man once more. Gershuni, on the other hand, had been moved to Butyrki prison and was awaiting transfer to a special psychiatric prison.⁵⁹ This did not prevent him from adding his signature, by proxy, to a letter from thirty-seven Soviet intellectuals congratulating Solzhenitsyn upon the award.⁶⁰ Many of the names it bore are inseparable from the history of samizdat, such as those of Iakir, Bukovskii, Chalidze and Lashkova. Equally prominent among the signers were Zinaida Grigorenko, whose husband, Petr, had already been confined for over a year in a prison psychiatric hospital, and the mother of Aleksandr Ginzburg, still serving his sentence in a labour camp. At about the same time Solzhenitsyn must have been particularly moved to receive a message of congratulations smuggled out of the Pot'ma camp complex and signed by a group of prisoners, including Iurii Galanskov, who by then had only two more years to live. The text reads in part: “Barbed wire and automatic weapons prevent us from expressing to you personally the depth of our admiration for your courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling down of the human soul and the destruction of human values.”⁶¹

All of this must have been in Solzhenitsyn's mind as he sat down to compose his message to the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm. The ceremony was to be held on 10 December, International Human Rights Day, when Gershuni, Galanskov and scores of other prisoners would declare the now traditional hunger-strike. Thus it came about that Solzhenitsyn's message of greetings not only drew the attention of those present to the significance of the date, but, in a line which was not read out, urged: “Let us, at this richly laden table, not forget the political prisoners who are today on hunger strike for restitution of their limited rights, which have been completely trampled underfoot.”⁶²

It would be precipitate to interpret the events of December 1970 as a major new departure for Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel citation had referred to “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature,”⁶³ and one of these is undoubtedly the “civic” tradition. The idea that the writer's vocation brings with it obligations to the society in which he lives has never been lastingly challenged in Russia, although such commitment is by no means synonymous with political partisanship. Solzhenitsyn emphasized his adherence to this tradition in his Nobel Lecture: “Indeed, Russian literature has for decades tended to avoid losing itself in self-contemplation or blithe frivolity, and I am not ashamed to continue this tradition to the best of my powers. Russian literature has long fostered the innate idea that a writer can, and ought to do much for his people.”⁶⁴ Under the circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for Solzhenitsyn to have allowed a banquet to be held in his honor on Human Rights Day without so much as an allusion to the suffering of the new generation of Soviet political prisoners. In The First Circle Gleb Nerzhin recalls with abhorrence the behavior of Soviet men of letters in the years following the murder of Kirov. Confronted on all hands with palpable falsehood, “Russian writers who dared to trace their lineage back to Pushkin and Tolstoy were composing nauseating, sugary eulogies on the tyrant” (III, 285). How could the author of these words, representing in the eyes of the whole world the “indispensable traditions of Russian literature,” ignore the special meaning of Human Rights Day in his homeland?

Some eight years before the Nobel festivities in his honor Solzhenitsyn, the otherwise obscure author of a sensational first novel, had begun to receive letters from readers throughout the Soviet Union, many of them former and present labour camp inmates. These responses impressed him so deeply that he compiled and edited a collection of excerpts from them. When it became clear to even the most sanguine that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had not, after all, ushered in an era of truth and justice, the collection, which bore the title “They Are Reading Ivan Denisovich,”⁶⁵ began to circulate in samizdat. No clearer evidence of the inner consistency of Solzhenitsyn's literary and public career can be found than his introduction to the letters sent by present-day political prisoners. Dismissing the official enthusiasm for his novel, expressed in countless headlines to the effect that “it happened, but will never happen again,”⁶⁶ Solzhenitsyn writes: “As always, they have lied about the main thing. They make it sound as if we are now out of the mire. But we are still in it, even today. And this has particularly annoyed the present-day zeks” (V, 247). For them the story of Ivan Denisovich is a continuing saga; they await the sequel which will reveal how little things have improved. “Let the truth be told, and let things be changed! If words aren't concerned with deeds and don't lead to deeds, then what good are they? They're no more use than the barking of village dogs in the night” (V, 247).

Reaffirming this commitment in December 1970, Solzhenitsyn was not abandoning the pen in favor of the tribune. As at the beginning of his career, he spoke first and foremost as a writer intent on producing works which would not simply engender glib headlines, but, in the words of one of Ivan Denisovich's fellow-prisoners, would “arouse good feelings” (I, 64). Later, in his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn would declare his concern with the individual ethical sensibility as the touch-stone of a just, “organic” social order, and, at the same time, his faith in the ability of art to transform the world. As ever in Solzhenitsyn's writings, social commitment is ultimately subsumed under literary commitment, the endeavor to create works “which might express the mature thinking of the people, which might have a timely and salutory influence in the realm of the spirit or upon the development of social conscience …” (VI, 7).

Since the days when Solzhenitsyn's admirers first undertook the labor of copying out works, some of which ran to many hundreds of pages, samizdat has developed into a much-needed alternative medium for discussion and exchange of information. Far from competing with the official press, it has become, at least in Solzhenitsyn's case, the only source of reliable information and balanced comment available to a Soviet citizen. Where else can he find documented case after case in which Solzhenitsyn's works, public appeals and even his photograph have been confiscated during house-searches?⁶⁷ Where else can he read a 40,000-word compilation of reviews of August 1914⁶⁸ unconnected with the orchestrated “responses” to the novel with which Literaturnaia gazeta has regaled its readers? However tiny may be the percentage of the Soviet population which has access to samizdat channels, the value of any effort to retard the process of “entropy” may not be assessed exclusively in terms of statistics. At present samizdat is threatened as never before, and not simply by the latest wave of arrests and investigations, apparently aimed at suppressing the Chronicle of Current Events and breaking the back of the civil rights movement. A further threat has come in the form of the Soviet Union's accession to the International Copyright Convention, something which Solzhenitsyn could never have anticipated when, in 1968, he urged just such a move to protect the authors of samizdat works pirated by Western publishers (VI, 101). In April 1973 the text of a letter addressed to UNESCO became known, in which a group of Soviet citizens, including three full members of the Human Rights Committee, warned that the agreement might, in effect, lead to the suppression of authors' rights.⁶⁹

Samizdat, in one form or another, is as old as the “Great Tradition” of Russian literature itself. It is hard to believe that it will prove less enduring. In March 1971, not long before his arrest, Petr Iakir wrote to the Presidium of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in the following words: “Samizdat has appeared and stubbornly continues to exist. Surely this is a sign that the spiritual needs of society are not being properly satisfied? And surely imprisonment for samizdat publishing is no way to satisfy a spiritual hunger?”⁷⁰ It is for the spiritual sustenance which his works offer that Solzhenitsyn is revered in the world of samizdat, and not as a “leader of the political opposition.” It seems appropriate to close this survey with the words which Petr Grigorenko wrote to Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Grigorenko, who now seems likely to end his life in a prison psychiatric hospital, typifies the “democratic” or civil rights movement which has grown up in direct association with samizdat. His message, unpublished except in samizdat, indicates the sense in which Solzhenitsyn and samizdat may be said to belong together. A great people, reaffirming its greatness in moments of moral extremity, brings forth titans, writes Grigorenko: “I am proud that my people has also shown itself capable of this. I bow before your titanic talent and wish, on this your fiftieth birthday, that it may continue to flourish and bear fruit for many, many years to come.”⁷¹

Notes

1. References given in this form are to the appropriate volume and page number of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1969).

2. Pavel Licko, “Jedného Dna u Alexandra Isajevica Solzenicyna,” Kulturny Zivot (Bratislava), 31 March 1967, p. 10. Russian in Posev, 23 June 1967, p. 4.

3. For further discussion of the history, mechanics and background of samizdat see, e.g., Aspects of Intellectual Ferment and Dissent in the Soviet Union, a study by the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, prepared for a Senate Sub-Committee (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1968); Albert Boiter, “Samisdat in der UdSSR,” Osteuropa, 22 (1972), 645-654; Abraham Brumberg, ed., In Quest of Justice: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today (New York: Praeger, 1970); L. Donatov, “Tamizdat-literatura v izgnanii,” Posev, 28 (Feb. 1972), 47-51; The Future of Samizdat: Its Significance and Prospects, transcript of a conference held in London on 23 April 1971 (Information Division, Radio Liberty); M. Osharov, “Iubilei Samizdata,” Russkaia mysl', 12 March 1970, p. 4; Albert Parry, “Samizdat Is Russia's Underground Press,” NYT Magazine, 15 March 1970, pp. 64-77; Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union: The Annotated Text of the Unofficial Moscow Journal A Chronicle of Current Events [Nos. 1-11] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Abraham Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime 1953-1970 (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972); L. Sergeeva, “Samizdat: vozniknovenie i budushchee,” Posev, 25 (Oct. 1969), 38-47; and Alan Wood, “The Resurgent Russian Intelligentsia,” in Dissent and Disorder: Essays in Social Theory, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (Toronto: World University Service of Canada, 1971), pp. 81-95. Of particular interest are the following articles, whose authors were until recently closely involved with the phenomenon of samizdat: Julius Telesin, “Inside ‘Samizdat,’” Encounter, 40 (Feb. 1973), pp. 25-33; and Iurii Glazov, “Background to Dissent,” Survey, 19, No. 1 (86) [Winter 1973], pp. 75-91. For information concerning the most comprehensive collection of samizdat materials in the West, Radio Liberty's Arkhiv Samizdata, see Albert Boiter, “Samizdat: Primary Source Material in the Study of Current Soviet Affairs,” Russian Review, 31 (1972), 282-285.

4. “My ne khuzhe Goratsiia” in Aleksandr Galich, Pesni (Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1969), pp. 115-116.

5. Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969), p. 137.

6. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 107-113.

7. Marina Tsvetaeva, cited in Telesin, p. 25.

8. “Vecher pamiati Mandel'shtama v Moskovskom Universitete: 13 maia 1965 g. mekhmat. Predsedatel'—Erenburg” (handwritten samizdat transcript), repr. in Grani, 25, No. 77 (1970), p. 86.

9. A. S. Griboedov, Gore ot uma, ed. N. K. Piksanov and A. L. Grishunina (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), p. 332.

10. Cited in David Magarshack, Pushkin: A Biography (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), p. 86.

11. See Martin Dewhirst's valuable introduction and bibliographical annotation to The Soviet Censorship, publ. as one issue of Studies on the Soviet Union, NS 11, No. 2 (1971), especially pp. i-vii.

12. Poety revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), p. 11.

13. The Soviet Censorship, pp. 1 and 4.

14. Cited in Boris Filippov, “Maksimilian Voloshin,” Russkaia mysl', 11 Jan. 1973, p. 6.

15. A. Kovalenkov, “Pis'mo staromu drugu,” Znamia, No. 7 (1957), p. 167.

16. In the introduction to his anthology Sovetskaia potaennaia muza: Iz stikhov sovetskikh poetov, napisannykh ne dlia pechati (Munich: I. Baschkirzew Verlag, 1961), pp. 6-7.

17. Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov Publishing Corporation, 1970), p. 289.

18. Krutoi marshrut (Milan: Mondadori, 1967); this translation from Evgenia S. Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 157.

19. “Zaklinatel' zmei,” Novyi zhurnal, No. 86 (1967), pp. 10-16.

20. Printed anonymously in Sovetskaia potaennaia muza, p. 127. On Slutskii's authorship see L. Donatov, “Kogda russkaia proza ushla v lageria …,” Posev, 24 (Sept. 1968), 45.

21. “Pust' b'iutsia stroki—ne shepni …” (1948-1950), one of three poems or excerpts cited in D. Blagov (pseud. of Veniamin Teush), “A. Solzhenitsyn i dukhovnaia missiia pisatelia” (not publ. in the Soviet Union, dated “autumn 1963”), Sobr. soch. (VI, 308-309).

22. See, e.g., Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev's Decline to Collective Leadership (London: Collins, 1969), pp. 247-248; Peter Benno, “The Political Aspect,” in Soviet Literature in the Sixties: An International Symposium, eds. Max Hayward and Edward L. Crowley (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 191-192; and David Burg and George Feifer, Solzhenitsyn (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), Chs. XX and XXI.

23. The title of an article by V. Pomerantsev, “Ob iskrennosti v literature,” Novyi mir, No. 12 (1953), pp. 218-245.

24. Yevgeny Yevtushenko [Evgenii Evtushenko], A Precocious Autobiography (London: Collins and Harvill, 1963), p. 80.

25. Vladimir Osipov, “Ploshchad' Maiakovskogo; stat'ia 70-aia” (Samizdat, 1970), Grani, 26, No. 80 (1971), 107-162.

26. See Alexander Steininger, Literatur und Politik in der Sowjetunion nach Stalins Tod (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1965), pp. 99-100.

27. Iu. Ivaschenko in Izvestiia, 2 Sept. 1960, cited in M. Osharov, “Iubilei Samizdata.” Iosif Brodskii regards the term “journal” as inappropriate and estimates the number of copies of Syntax at 100 or less, see “Interview with Iosif Brodsky,” Index, 1, Nos. 3/4 (1972), 151.

28. “Samizdat: Vozniknovenie i budushchee,” p. 42.

29. “Pis'mo Iuriia Galanskova v Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti,” Russkaia mysl', 20 April 1968.

30. E. A., “Pis'mo v TsK KPSS po povodu publichnogo chteniia i diskussii na ploshchadi Maiakovskogo,” ibid.

31. For a facsimile of the list of contents see L. Sergeeva, “Samizdat: Vozniknovenie i budushchee,” p. 43.

32. D. Blagov, “Dukhovnaia missiia,” pp. 311-312.

33. I. Drutse, “O muzhestve i dostoinstve cheloveka,” Druzhba narodov, No. 1 (1963), pp. 272-274, repr. in Slovo probivaet sebe dorogu (USSR: Samizdat, n.d.), p. 31.

34. Peter Benno, “The Political Aspect,” p. 193.

35. Cited in A. S. Griboedov, Gore ot uma, ed. N. K. Piksanov and A. L. Grishunina (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), p. 331.

36. “Ob iasnenie korneta leib-gvardii Gusarskogo polka Lermantova,” cited in V. Manuilov, Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva M. Iu. Lermontova (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1964), p. 73.

37. In his letter of 7-15 January 1968 to Konstantin Fedin (VI, 73).

38. “Interv'iu A. Solzhenitsyna zapadnym korrespondentam 30 marta 1972,” Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia, No. 103 (1, 1972), p. 191. Contrast the reference to “the notorious samizdat” in one of the most recent Soviet articles to attack Solzhenitsyn: V. Ozerov, “‘Dukhovnaia elita’ ili boitsy partii?” Znamia, No. 4 (1973), p. 199.

39. A. Dror, “Samoe molodoe obshchestvo …,” Posev, 29 (April 1973), 33.

40. Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code was directed against “the systematic dissemination by word of mouth of deliberate fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social system, or the manufacture or dissemination in written, printed or other form of works of the same content.” It provided a more versatile weapon against samizdat than the existing article 70, which dealt specifically with “fabrications” manufactured and disseminated “for the purpose of subverting or weakening Soviet power, or of committing particular especially dangerous crimes against the state” (Emphasis added—M. N.). See Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia, p. 11.

41. A number of collections of materials relating to these and other trials are available in English: Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward, eds., On Trial. The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (London: Collins and Harvill, 1967); The Trial of the Four. A Collection of Materials on the Case of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova 1967-68, compiled by Pavel Litvinov, ed. Peter Reddaway (London: Longman, 1972); Pavel Litvinov, ed., The Demonstration on Pushkin Square (London: Collins and Harvill, 1969); and Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Red Square at Noon (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972).

42. Chronicle of Current Events, No. 5 (December 1968) in Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia, p. 350.

43. Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 June 1968. The editorial commentary, “Otvetstvennost' pisatelia,” is reprinted in Sobr. soch. (VI, 104-115).

44. The Trial of the Four, compiled by Pavel Litvinov, pp. 236, 245 and 335.

45. Les Prix Nobel en 1971 (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 1972), pp. 130-131.

46. Naoum Odnopozov, “Life in the Soviet Underground,” Sunday Times, 14 Jan. 1968.

47. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 9-10.

48. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, p. 23.

49. Svobodnaia mysl'. Obshchestvenno-politicheskii zhurnal, Vypusk 1 (20 Dec. 1971), repr. in Vol'noe slovo (Frankfurt am Main), No. 7 (1973), p. 5.

50. S. Topolev, “Ot samizdata k kolizdatu,” ibid., pp. 10-27.

51. Tibor Szamuely, “The Future of Soviet Dissent,” Spectator, 22 July 1972, pp. 132-133. Quotations in this paragraph are from p. 133 of Szamuely's article.

52. Solzhenitsyn's “Velikopostnoe pis'mo” appeared in Russkaia mysl', 30 March 1972, Zheludkov's reply ibid., 22 June 1972, and both, together with Solzhenitsyn's response to Zheludkov, in Vestnik RSKhD, No. 103 (1, 1973), pp. 145-149, 156-159.

53. Les Prix Nobel en 1971, p. 137.

54. Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, Kto sumasshedshii? (London: Macmillan, 1971). An English translation, A Case of Madness, was brought out in the same year and by the same publisher.

55. Kto sumasshedshii?, p. 99.

56. Cited ibid., pp. 99-100.

57. Ibid., p. 100.

58. Chronicle of Current Events, No. 11 (October 1969) in Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia, p. 169. For further evidence that Solzhenitsyn was thinking of Gershuni see Per Egil Hegge, Mellommann i Moskva (Oslo: Cappelen, 1971), p. 100.

59. For further details see Uncensored Russia, pp. 169-170; Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, No. 2 (13), 30 April 1970, repr. in Posev. Chetvertyi spetsial'nyi vypusk (June 1970), p. 24; Khronika, No. 18 (5 March 1971), repr. in Posev. Vos'moi spets. vyp. (June 1971), pp. 41-42; Gershuni's notes from Orel special psychiatric prison appeared in Khronika, No. 19 (30 April 1971), repr. in Posev. Deviatyi spets. vyp. (Oct. 1971), pp. 4-6. Issues of the Chronicle from No. 16 onwards have been published in English by Amnesty International Publications (London).

60. English in Leopold Labedz, ed., Solzhenitsyn. A Documentary Record (New York, Evanston, etc.: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 214-215. For the Russian text, with a full list of signatures, see Radio Liberty Arkhiv Samizdata, No. 516.

61. For this extract see Labedz, Solzhenitsyn, p. 219. The full text appeared in Khronika, No. 16 (31 Oct. 1970), repr. in Posev. Shestoi spets. vyp. (Feb. 1971), p. 29.

62. English in Labedz, Solzhenitsyn, p. 225. Russian in Khronika, No. 17 (31 Dec. 1970), repr. in Posev. Vos'moi spets. vyp. (June 1971), p. 7.

63. See the facsimile of Solzhenitsyn's Nobel-Diploma in Svenska Dagbladet, 5 April 1972, p. 1.

64. Les Prix Nobel en 1971, p. 135.

65. “Chitaiut Ivana Denisovicha” (V, 241-260).

66. For examples see the bibliography of Soviet responses appended to this volume.

67. Since its creation, the Chronicle of Current Events has repeatedly provided such details.

68. “Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo” chitaiut na rodine (Moscow: Samizdat, 1972), repr. in Radio Liberty Arkhiv Samizdata, No. 1199, and published by the YMCA-Press (Paris), 1973.

69. Peter Reddaway, “Russians Send Plea to West on Copyright,” Sunday Times, 15 April 1973, p. 9.

70. Khronika, No. 19 (reference as in note 59), p. 22.

71. Slovo probivaet sebe dorogu (USSR: Samizdat, n.d.), p. 482.