Russia: Notes from the Underground

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Ever since the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, some of Russia's best writing has been published only in the West. Despite its liberalization since Stalin's death, Russia remains full of talented, frustrated authors who are denied an audience in their own country and hunger to be read. Publication abroad can lead straight to prison—as it did for Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who in 1966 were sentenced to seven-and five-year terms for allowing their biting satirical novels to escape across the border.

Despite the risk for the authors, Western publishers go to considerable lengths to obtain Russian manuscripts. The latest literary contraband, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward, is at the very least a tribute to their competitive zeal. As of last week, it had already been printed in excerpts by two magazines, in full by one publisher, and was being readied for printing by at least two others—a wild maze of editions even for the strange world of literary smuggling.

Bitter Dialogue. Solzhenitsyn's novel, set in the dark atmosphere of a terminal-cancer ward, explores the contrasting lives of the patients—a soldier who was imprisoned for many years in a labor camp, a field geologist who was stricken in young manhood, an aging bureaucrat who improved his lot in life by informing on friends and neighbors. The physical malignancies of the doomed are used by the author to symbolize life in post-Stalin Russia.

Like most of the underground writing that finds its way out of the Soviet Union, the book has already circulated at home. Soviet intellectuals pass around unpublished manuscripts like chain letters, copy by hand or mimeograph the manuscripts lent them. In the case of Cancer Ward, ironically, that chore was performed by the state publishing house, which set type and ran off proofs of the book while it was still scheduled for official publication last December. At the last moment, government censors balked at Solzhenitsyn's bitter indictment. By that time, however, as Soviet Novelist Venyamin Kaverin revealed recently, "thousands" of galleys existed, and many sets "sold, it is said, for large sums."

One of them ended up at a single-story, soot-stained building on the industrial outskirts of Frankfurt, West Germany. From the presses within has come in recent years an irregular, handset journal, Grani (Facets), containing some of the major finds of contemporary Soviet letters. Among them: poems from Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in 1956, a year before the novel appeared in the West, and a transcript of the 1966 Sinyavsky-Daniel trial. Grani also printed excerpts from the now-famous memoirs of Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (TIME, Dec. 1, 1967), an account of life under Stalinist terror.