A moment with Solzhenitsyn
The great Russian writer almost seemed to have opened the door on his life.
My first encounter with Alexander Solzhenitsyn came not long after I founded an anti-censorship magazine in 1972 in London called Index on Censorship. I was a huge admirer of his, and among the samizdat items I hoped to publish was an excerpt from an unpublished autobiographical poem he had written called "The Way." At that time, Solzhenitsyn was the Soviet Union's best-known dissident, having won the Nobel Prize in literature two years earlier.
Shortly before the poem was to appear, however, I got an agonized call from a dissident friend of the author asking me to pull it from the magazine because Solzhenitsyn thought it had been disseminated by the KGB after it was found during a search of his belongings. That wasn't the case, of course; I had gotten the excerpt from an obscure samizdat journal circulating in Moscow, and when I proved this, I was told to go ahead.
After that, Solzhenitsyn's unpublished writings and news of his struggle to publish appeared in almost every issue of our magazine, and the following year, when I traveled to Moscow to meet with some dissidents, I hoped to see my hero as well. I was already thinking of writing a biography of him.
This was at the height of a pitiless KGB crackdown on dissident intellectuals. I visited the dacha of the writer and poet Lydia Chukovskaya, with whom Solzhenitsyn had taken refuge for a while, but Solzhenitsyn had already fled. I was then invited to visit the dacha of Lev Kopelev, a dissident leader and close friend of Solzhenitsyn's. I hoped to meet the writer there, but just before the train was to leave the station, two police officers materialized and ordered me to get off.
I was later followed everywhere I went, and I was strip-searched at the airport before leaving. Solzhenitsyn, it turned out, had gone underground to finish "The Gulag Archipelago," and the KGB was frantically searching for him and the book.
As the noose began to tighten around him, Solzhenitsyn made a last-ditch attempt to engage the Soviet regime in dialogue by writing "A Letter to the Soviet Leaders." He received no reply, and soon afterward was expelled from the Soviet Union. He then released the Russian text of the letter and sent a message by way of his Swiss lawyer asking me to publish an English translation.
The English publication was a success. I also helped with the translation of "The Gulag Archipelago" and spoke with Solzhenitsyn by telephone, but he declined my requests to meet him until my knowledge of samizdat came to the rescue.
