A Prize and a Dilemma

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN refused to believe it. Even though his friends told him last week that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Russia's greatest living writer, whose works are banned in the Soviet Union, remained incredulous. The friends, who normally shield his whereabouts carefully from outsiders, finally told a Norwegian correspondent in Moscow how he could reach Solzhenitsyn by telephone. Per Egil Hegge of Oslo's Aftenposten immediately called him to confirm the news. Then Hegge asked the author for a comment.

At first Solzhenitsyn demurred, but the reporter persisted. "The world is interested in your reaction," Hegge said. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed to draft a statement, which he then read to Hegge. "I accept the prize," said Solzhenitsyn. "As far as it will depend on me, I intend to receive the prize in person on the traditional day." To make sure no one could say that he was too ill to travel, Solzhenitsyn added: "I am in good health."

Ominous Outlook. In granting the award, the Swedish Academy may well have set in motion a showdown that will pit the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin against a lone and indomitable man who has become a hero of Russia's growing dissident movement and a symbol to those of his countrymen who yearn for greater artistic freedom. Even as Solzhenitsyn, 51, and his wife Natalya celebrated the award with friends at a party outside Moscow in the little wooden dacha of Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, hard-lining Soviet literary bureaucrats were preparing an attack on him. Under the heading "An Unseemly Game," the Soviet Writers' Union, which reflects the Kremlin's views, issued a statement that denounced the award as deplorable and stated that Solzhenitsyn's works gave Western reactionaries ammunition for criticizing the Soviet Union.

So far, the start of the attack is frighteningly similar to the one in 1958, when Boris Pasternak was ultimately forced to reject the prize and in the later stages was reviled by party-lining writers as, among other things, "a pig who fouled the spot where he ate." The Solzhenitsyn affair, however, is potentially far more serious. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was less a political novel than a lyrically philosophical view of the effects of the Revolution on the lives of people. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn's main works (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle) are explicit descriptions of the day-by-day degradation that some 16 million Russians unjustly underwent in prisons and concentration camps during Stalin's regime. His books indirectly raise the question of the complicity of Russia's present rulers in the old tyrant's crimes.

Pasternak was ultimately cowed not so much by threats against him as by those against his great love Olga Ivinskaya, who was the model for Lara. He feared that she would be without protection if he left Russia, and those fears were borne out when she was imprisoned after his death. Solzhenitsyn, who served eight years in Stalin's prison camps, is unlikely to break in the face of threats to himself or his relations. "No one can block the road to truth," he has said. "In order to advance it, I am willing to accept even death."

Three Alternatives. The Nobel Prize presents the Kremlin with an extremely complex dilemma. Solzhenitsyn has already been expelled from the Writers' Union, denounced as a malicious slanderer, and told to go live in the West. Never having been abroad and deeply rooted to Russia, he vehemently rejects that suggestion. "All my life is here, my homeland," he says. "I listen only to its sadness." Thus he would probably insist on an official public guarantee of being readmitted to Russia if he were allowed to leave to accept the prize. As TIME Contributing Editor Patricia Blake cabled from London, where she interviewed leading British Sovietologists, the Kremlin has three basic alternatives for dealing with Solzhenitsyn:

P: It can permit Solzhenitsyn to go to Stockholm on Dec. 10 to accept the prize, which includes a $79,000 award. This would cause the least furor and would win Moscow good will abroad. But at home, where dissent in intellectual and scientific circles has grown rapidly during the past three or four years, the decision might encourage others to test the resolve of the Soviet leaders.

P: It can expel him from the Soviet Union on the grounds that he and Western imperialists are engaged in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Such action would provoke an intense outcry within the Soviet Union as well as in the U.S. and Western Europe. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn is so famous and outspoken that his statements as an exile might be extremely damaging to Soviet prestige.

P:It can refuse him the right to leave while intensifying a campaign of harassment and public denunciation that could conceivably end in his arrest and trial. For the past three years, the KGB (secret police) has been constructing a case against Solzhenitsyn by selling his manuscripts abroad, along with fake authorizations from him for their publication. As a result, the KGB could now try to present fabricated evidence that Solzhenitsyn has, in the words of Article 70 of the Russian Republic's criminal code, "willfully disseminated anti-Soviet literature." The maximum penalty: seven years' imprisonment. Perhaps significantly, the Writers' Union statement charged that Solzhenitsyn's works "were illegally taken abroad and used by Western reactionary forces for anti-Soviet aims."

The KGB campaign is one reason Solzhenitsyn is so wary of talking with Western journalists. He lives in seclusion with friends in little dachas near Moscow or in his own small house near the village of Nafrominsk southwest of the capital. He has recovered from the tumor described in Cancer Ward, but retains an almost peasantlike distrust of modern medicine. Solzhenitsyn, who writes steadily for as many as 16 hours a day, is now working on a novel about World War I.

Indispensable Tradition. The Swedish Academy cited Solzhenitsyn for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In a country where church, judiciary and other institutions have often proved unable to restrain the power of either czar or commissar, the writer has emerged as the last authoritative voice of conscience. Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn is aware of the power--and perils--of the writer's role. "For a country to have a great writer is like having another government," says one of the prisoners in The First Circle. "That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."

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