God Is Upper-Case

This book cannot now be published in our homeland except in Samizdat* because of objections by censors that are inconceivable to the normal human mind and also because it would be necessary to write the word God in lowercase. I cannot bow down to such a humiliation.

So writes Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a postscript to his new novel, August 1914, which was published last week in Russian by the small YMCA Press in Paris. It is the only one of his books, aside from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, that Solzhenitsyn has agreed to have published in the West.

Ever since he completed August 1914 in October 1970, Solzhenitsyn has been trying to have it published in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that all his major works except One Day have been banned in Russia, he felt that there was some hope for the new novel; unlike the other books, it does not center on the crimes of Stalinism, which by implication embarrass Soviet leaders who came to prominence under the old tyrant. Nonetheless, Soviet censors raised many objections. They even insisted, as Solzhenitsyn points out in the postscript, that the word God be printed in lowercase but that KGB (the secret police) be printed in capitals.

When Solzhenitsyn learned that a copy of the novel had made its way to the West, he got in touch with his Zurich lawyer, Fritz Heeb. He wanted to avoid what had happened to his other books: Western publishers scrambled to print competing editions, often in execrable translations. To establish copyright in Solzhenitsyn's name in France, Heeb quietly authorized the small YMCA Press (so named because it was founded by a member of the association, Dr. John Mott, in 1921) to publish August 1914 in Russian.

Veiled Criticism. The novel is the first part of a trilogy on a subject that has haunted Solzhenitsyn all his life: Russia's role in the war against Germany in 1914. The work is intended as a memorial to his father, an artillery officer in the Czarist army who participated in the disastrous battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia in August 1914. As an artillery captain in World War II, Solzhenitsyn passed through Tannenberg, but he was not around to savor the eventual Russian victory. In February 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing barely veiled criticism of Stalin in letters to a friend, and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. During that time, he developed and overcame cancer. Solzhenitsyn's greatest fear is that he will be prevented from finishing the trilogy--either by a recurrence of cancer or by the Soviet authorities.

Even as Solzhenitsyn's latest book appeared in the West, another Russian writer, imprisoned for publishing articles and stories abroad (On Socialist Realism, The Trial Begins), was released from a Soviet labor camp. In late 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky, now 46, was sentenced to seven years at hard labor for "anti-Soviet slander," while Fellow Writer Yuli Daniel was given five years on the same charge. Daniel was released last year after serving his full sentence, but Sinyavsky was set free 20 months early for good behavior. Even so, he was banned for two more years from returning to Moscow,

*Literally, self-publishing--the clandestine retyping and circulation of forbidden literary documents.

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