"THE WRITER'S PEN SHOULD NOT BE STOPPED"

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.

In their lifetime many writers have been exposed, in the press and from the platform, to insults and slander without having any opportunity to reply. What is more, they have been exposed to violence and physical persecution. The board of the Writers' Union in cowardly fashion abandoned to their misfortune those whom persecution finally condemned to exile, to the concentration camp, to death. After the 20th Party Congress (1956) we learned that there were more than 600 writers who were guilty of no crime and whom the union obediently left to their fate in the prisons and the camps. But the list is still longer. Our eyes have not seen, and never will see, the end of the list. It contains the names of young writers and poets of whom we learned only by chance, thanks to personal meetings, men whose talent withered in the camps before coming to flower, men whose writings have not been rescued from the offices of the security services.

I have a clear conscience, because I have fulfilled my duties as a writer in all circumstances and because I will fulfill them even more successfully, more indisputably, when I am dead than I can while I am still alive. Nobody can bar the road to the truth. I am ready to accept death for the sake of the movement. But how many lessons do we need to teach us that the writer's pen should not be stopped while he still lives?

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