World: THE WRITER'S PEN SHOULD NOT BE STOPPED

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In May of last year, the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers assembled in Moscow to hymn the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The party hacks were in full control, and neither Solzhenitsyn nor any other dissenter was permitted to mount the rostrum. So Solzhenitsyn put his protest in the form of a letter to the congress that was circulated privately among the delegates and soon dominated all the corridor discussion. It has become the credo of dissenters not only in Russia but in Eastern Europe as well. Excerpts:

Since I am unable to speak from the platform, I would ask the congress to consider the oppression to which our literature has for decades and decades been subjected on the part of the censorship—the censorship for which there is no provision in the constitution and which is therefore illegal, the censorship that never passes under its own name and gives literary illiterates arbitrary power over writers. There is no recognition of the right of our writers to state publicly their opinions about the moral life of men and society, to elucidate in their own way the social problems or the historical experiences that have so profoundly affected our country. Many delegates to this congress know how they themselves have had to bow to the pressure of the censorship, to capitulate. They have rewritten chapters, pages, paragraphs, phrases; they have sweetened them only because they wanted to have them published; in so doing, they have damaged them irreparably. What is best in our literature is mutilated before it appears.

Dostoevsky, the pride of world literature, could not at one time be published in our country (even today he is not published in full). There were the writers of the '20s who at a very early stage denounced the birth of the personality cult and the characteristic traits of Stalin. But they were annihilated, they were stifled, instead of being listened to. Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted" and "not permitted." Literature that does not breathe the same air as contemporary society, that cannot communicate to it its pains and fears, that cannot give warning in time against moral and social dangers, does not deserve the name of literature. It deserves only the name of literary makeup. Our literature has lost the leading position that it occupied in the world at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one; it has also lost the passion for experimentation that distinguished it during the '20s. The literature of our country appears today to all the world as infinitely poorer, more flat and worthless than it is in reality, than it would look if it were not being restricted. I propose that the congress should demand and obtain the abolition of all censorship—open or concealed—of artistic works.