Four New Works

Any roster of the great Russian novelists of this century must include Mi khail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Sholokhov (The Quiet Don) and Pasternak (Doc tor Zhivago) were both Nobel prize winners. Solzhenitsyn's recently published The First Circle and Cancer Ward firmly established him as the greatest living writer of Russian prose today (TIME Cover, Sept. 27). Last week, in di verse manners and locales, important new works by all three men simultaneously appeared.

>Sholokhov's They Fought for Their Country, his first major novel since The Quiet Don came out 40 years ago, began to be excerpted in Pravda. That was slightly surprising, since the novel had been rumored to be banned be cause of its critical portrayal of Joseph Stalin. In fact, Sholokhov does seem to go somewhat beyond what the Brezhnev regime has until now considered politic in Soviet literature--but not very far. He mentions the existence of Stalinist concentration camps, but in considerable understatement notes that "thousands" were wrongly imprisoned in them. Russians know the figures to be in the millions. Stalin would doubtless be astonished to read that many of his crimes were 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 series of 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 "a religious, popular, social interpretation of the history of Russia, this 'Blind Beauty.'" Pasternak completed The Blind Beauty before his death nine years ago and left notes for the second play, but never got around to outlining the final drama, so far as is known. Blind Beauty itself was, in fact, believed lost, the only copies having been seized by the secret police. How a copy survived and reached the West is unknown. A sensational melodrama, set in the 1840s, the work bristles with bandits and bursts of gunfire. The heroine is a serf girl, blinded as the result of a violent quarrel between master and slave. She seems to be meant to symbolize Russia, forever the victim of the conflict between barbarism and the simple, instinctive virtue that exists in its soul.

> Solzhenitsyn's new novel, Arkhipelag Gulag, reached the West, smuggled out in manuscript form without the author's knowledge or consent, and was being eagerly bid for by Western publishers. Banned by the Kremlin, as were the author's two previous novels, the work has long been circulating in Russia by hand-copied samizdat, the underground press. The book is said to form the last part of a trilogy with The First Circle and Cancer Ward. In it, Solzhenitsyn takes Gleb Nerzhin, Circle's hero, from the relative comfort of the prison scientific community to the most terrible of Stalin's concentration camps. The novel's virtually untranslatable Russian title, Arkhipelag Gulag, suggests that all of Russia under Stalin was like a vast sea dotted with islands of concentration camps. Gulag is an acronym of the dread Main Labor Camp Administration.

In addition to this novel, another new work, The Easter Procession, has just reached the West. It is a contemporary vignette reported as only a great novelist can. In it, Solzhenitsyn sketches brilliantly the clash of generations and cultures in Soviet Russia (see box).

-These good tidings were somewhat marred by word from Milan that Publisher Gian-giacomo Feltrinelli had forbidden the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Czechoslovakia on the grounds that he did not want the book, which has always been proscribed in Russia, to be used "as an instrument of anti-Soviet policy." Feltrinelli, who holds the copyright on the novel, has made a fortune selling Doctor Zhivago's book and movie rights around the world.

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