Four New Works
Any roster of the great Russian novelists ofthis century must include Mi khail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak andAlexander Solzhenitsyn. Sholokhov and Pasternak were both Nobel prize winners. Solzhenitsyn's recently published The First Circle and Cancer Ward firmly established him as thegreatest living writer of Russian prose today .Last week, in di verse manners and locales, important new works by allthree men simultaneously appeared.
>Sholokhov's They Fought for Their Country, his first major novel sinceThe Quiet Don came out 40 years ago, began to be excerpted in Pravda.That was slightly surprising, since the novel had been rumored to bebanned be cause of its critical portrayal of Joseph Stalin. In fact,Sholokhov does seem to go somewhat beyond what the Brezhnev regime hasuntil now considered politic in Soviet literature—but not very far. Hementions the existence of Stalinist concentration camps, but inconsiderable understatement notes that "thousands" were wronglyimprisoned in them. Russians know the figures to be in the millions.Stalin would doubtless be astonished to read that many of his crimeswere committed because he had been "misinformed, misled and mystified"by his secret police chiefs.
> Pasternak's The Blind Beauty, a play,was published in an Italian magazine, Il Dramma,-the first of a seriesof three plays that Pasternak had intended as his "testament." Il Dramma Editor Giancarlo Vigorelli, in his introduction to the play,writes that he believes Pasternak's purpose was nothing less than "areligious, popular, social interpretation of the history of Russia,this 'Blind Beauty.'" Pasternak completed The Blind Beauty before hisdeath nine years ago and left notes for the second play, but never gotaround to outlining the final drama, so far as is known. Blind Beautyitself was, in fact, believed lost, the only copies having been seizedby the secret police. How a copy survived and reached the West isunknown. A sensational melodrama, set in the 1840s, the work bristleswith bandits and bursts of gunfire. The heroine is a serf girl, blindedas the result of a violent quarrel between master and slave. She seemsto be meant to symbolize Russia, forever the victim of the conflictbetween barbarism and the simple, instinctive virtue that exists in itssoul.
> Solzhenitsyn's new novel, Arkhipelag Gulag, reached the West, smuggledout in manuscript form without the author's knowledge or consent, andwas being eagerly bid for by Western publishers. Banned by the Kremlin,as were the author's two previous novels, the work has long beencirculating in Russia by hand-copied samizdat, the underground press.The book is said to form the last part of a trilogy with The FirstCircle and Cancer Ward. In it, Solzhenitsyn takes Gleb Nerzhin,Circle's hero, from the relative comfort of the prison scientificcommunity to the most terrible of Stalin's concentration camps. Thenovel's virtually untranslatable Russian title, Arkhipelag Gulag,suggests that all of Russia under Stalin was like a vast sea dottedwith islands of concentration camps. Gulag is an acronym of the dreadMain Labor Camp Administration.
In addition to this novel, another new work, The Easter Procession, hasjust reached the West. It is a contemporary vignette reported as only agreat novelist can. In it, Solzhenitsyn sketches brilliantly the clashof generations and cultures in Soviet Russia .
-These good tidings were somewhat marred by word from Milanthat Publisher Gian-giacomo Feltrinelli had forbidden the publicationof Doctor Zhivago in Czechoslovakia on the grounds that he did not wantthe book, which has always been proscribed in Russia, to be used "as aninstrument of anti-Soviet policy." Feltrinelli, who holds the copyrighton the novel, has made a fortune selling Doctor Zhivago's book andmovie rights around the world.
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