Solzhenitsyn Will Return to the Soviet Reader for Literary, Not Political, Reasons

MOSCOW — Lately, I’ve been virtually attacked by American journalists who are asking me one and the same question: Why we are publishing this author and not that one, and when we are going to publish the author in question? It is funny, but now that I am free from censorship, the censor’s role has been assumed by the Americans. Of course, I am well aware of the American reporters’ immanent curiosity, but, to be frank, I’m tired of this “interference,” the more so since it takes us away from work.

Naturally, everyone has his own ways. When I come to the United States, it doesn’t even occur to me to ask American publishers and editors such a question. Which authors they are going to publish and when is none of my business. Neither do I like to make sensational statements. Yet, because emotions about this subject are running so high, I’ll depart from this principle of mine just this once.

Yes, we’ll continue publications that bring back to memory forgotten authors and sometimes rediscovering them for the reader--among them Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose name until recently was pronounced in a whisper.

We’ve chosen his “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle.” I cannot say when exactly we’ll publish these novels. We’re still trying to make arrangements concerning the copyrights, but we will publish them.

Let me say right away that when choosing an author, we are guided mostly by the literary value of the work. Our magazine is known for its high literary standards. We’ll not publish a single thing that doesn’t meet our requirements, however good it may be otherwise. The first criterion is literary merit, the rest is less important. “Cancer Ward” is a novel of high literary standing, and this speaks for itself.

We were guided by the same principles when we decided to devote four issues to Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” when we chose Dombrovsky’s “Faculty of Needless Things,” which will appear in three issues, or when we published Varlam Shalamov’s seven Kolyma stories, each worth a novel.

But we can’t, we have no right to turn our magazine into a literary museum. We are Novy Mir (New World), not Heritage. We can’t publish only the authors once unavailable for the well-known reasons, so “Cancer Ward” will have to wait for its turn.

Although the circulation of our magazine has increased 2.3 times in the past year and stands now at 1.15 million copies, we can’t limit ourselves to filling blank spaces in the history of national literature. We can’t neglect the current literary process and modern authors only because we need to publish Pasternak or Dombrovsky.

I’d like the Americans to know that when we publish things about labor camps, it’s not about Stalin that we think, but about literature. Do they have any meaning now? Are they interesting or not? We’re thinking about the enormous intellectual power of an original literary work. It’s not so much the subject, however topical, but its strong literary and intellectual impact that promotes social renewal and openness, which begin from the press, of course. The press makes the first and perhaps the most important step toward democracy and openness. Some Soviet authors have said a lot more about Stalinism than Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” does. Take Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Destiny,” for instance.

At one time, Novy Mir published Solzhenitsyn’s first work, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which instantly made the author a celebrity. Twenty-five years later, Novy Mir is returning to Solzhenitsyn, and through him to the traditions that were started by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and, unfortunately, are disappearing from modern literature.

The reader is prepared for such reading, and has been all along, as was the case with “One Day,” “Matryona’s Yard” and “An Episode on the Station Krechetovka.” But, whatever the circumstances of Solzhenitsyn’s own life, our reader perceives him as a writer devoted to the great Russian tradition of truth and humanism.

Solzhenitsyn will be returned to the Soviet reader by virtue of his talent born here on this land.