World: I COULD NO LONGER BREATHE

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Like any man beginning a new life, Author Anatoly Kuznetsov last week sought to explain why he ended the old one. Denouncing his earlier published works as hopelessly corrupted by the Soviet system, he even took a new name: A. Anatol. TIME here presents, in documents made available to its editors, Kuznetsov's explanation of why he fled to the West and three letters that he sent to the Soviet Union after his defection.

Kuznetsov's Explanation

You will say it's hard to understand.

Why should a writer whose books have sold millions of copies, and who is extremely popular and well-off in his own country, suddenly decide not to return to that country, which, moreover, he loves?

The loss of hope: I simply cannot live there any longer. This feeling is something stronger than me. I just can't go on living there. If I were now to find myself again in the Soviet Union, I should go out of my mind. If I were not a writer, I might have been able to bear it. But, since I am a writer, I can't. Writing is the only occupation in the world that seriously appeals to me. When I write, I have the illusion that there is some sort of sense in my life. Not to write is for me roughly the same as for a fish not to swim. I have been writing as long as I can remember. My first work was published 25 years ago.

In those 25 years, not a single one of my works has been printed in the Soviet Union as I wrote it. For political reasons, the Soviet censorship and the editors shorten, distort and violate my works to the point of making them completely unrecognizable. Or they do not permit them to be published at all. So long as I was young, I went on hoping for something. But the appearance of each new work of mine was not a cause for rejoicing but for sorrow. Because my writing appears in such an ugly, false and misshapen form, and I am ashamed to look people in the face. To write a good book in the Soviet Union, that is still the simplest thing to do. The real trouble begins only later, when you try to get it published. For the past ten years, I have been living in a state of constant, unavoidable and irresolvable contradiction. Finally, I have simply given up.

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I wrote my last novel, The Fire, with no feeling left in my heart, without faith and without hope. I knew in advance for certain that, even if they published it, they would ruthlessly cut everything human out of it, and that at best it would appear as just one more "ideological" potboiler. (And that is, incidentally, exactly what happens.)

I came to the point where I could no longer write, no longer sleep, no longer breathe.

A writer is above all an artist who is trying to penetrate into the unknown. He must be honest and objective, and be able to do his creative work in freedom. These are all obvious truths. These are the very things that writers are forbidden in the Soviet Union.

Artistic freedom in the Soviet Union has been reduced to the "freedom" to praise the Soviet system and the Communist Party and to urge people to fight for Communism. The theoretical basis for this is an article that Lenin wrote 60 years ago on "The Party Organization and Party Literature," which laid it down that every writer is a propagandist for the party. His job is to receive slogans and orders from the party and make propaganda out of them.