For the Good of the Cause Read Online Free

controversial a figure for Tvardovsky to publish on his own authority, and so he turned to the Soviet Writers’ Union for support. Instead of support, he met only with obstructionism. The literary bureaucrats had sensed the winds of change and were not ready to risk offending the Party leaders. Meanwhile, the authorities, acting through the censorship and the secret police, had already started the process of suppressing Solzhenitsyn entirely. His position had deteriorated to such an extent by the beginning of 1967 that when the Soviet Writers’ Union held its Fourth Congress in May, Solzhenitsyn decided to distribute to the delegates a letter in which he described in detail how he and his works were being treated and appealed to the Union to demand the abolition of the censorship and to protect its members from slander and persecution. Although this letter was not discussed at the Congress, it was widely rend in the Soviet Union and regarded as something of a programmatic document.
    Summing up his own situation in May, 1967, Solzhenitsyn the following measures taken to prevent his works from appearing:
1. His novel The First Circle had been confiscated by the secret police. “My novel has become available to literary officials, but it is hidden away from the majority of writers,” he said.
    2. The police had confiscated the whole of his literary archives, going back fifteen or twenty years, but were circulating extracts from some of them to a closed circle of officials.
    3. A campaign had been started to smear his reputation, suggesting that he had been imprisoned as a criminal, that he had “betrayed his country” and “worked for the Germans.” He had been refused means of publishing a public denial.
    4. His novel Cancer Ward, the first part of which had already been approved for publication by the Moscow writers’ organization, had been turned down by all the reviews to which he had submitted it, including Novy Mir .
    5. His play “The Reindeer and the Little Hut,” which had been accepted by the Sovremennik theater in 1962, still lacked permission to be produced.
    6. A film scenario, “The Tanks Know the Truth,” a play, “The Light That Is in You,” and some short stories were still without publisher or producer.
    7. His short stories that had already appeared in Novy Mir had not been republished.
    8. He had been prevented from giving public readings from his works.
    “In this way my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered,” Solzhenitsyn commented, and concluded his letter with this moving passage: “I am quite sure, of course, that I shall carry out my task as a writer no matter what happens, and even more successfully and with less controversy from the grave than in my lifetime. No one can prevent the truth from spreading, and to advance it I am ready to accept even death. But perhaps so many lessons will teach us in the end not to stop a writer’s pen during his lifetime?
    “Not once has that enhanced our history.”
    It was true, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the prose section of the Moscow writers’ organization had discussed and approved Cancer Ward at a meeting in November, 1966. There had been criticism of the work, some of it not unreasonable, but practically every speaker had paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s talents as a writer and to the powerful impression left on them by Cancer Ward . At the end of the meeting, a resolution was passed in favor of publication, and a report of the debate was sent to the editors of the reviews Zvezda and Prostor . This was not sufficient, however, to overcome official opposition, and the battle continued.
    By 1967, the manuscript of Cancer Ward was circulating in hundreds of typewritten copies in Russia itself, and it was clearly only a matter of time before some copies reached the outside world. Solzhenitsyn argued with the officials of the Soviet Writers’ Union that it would be in everyone’s interest that the work should be published first