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Such manuscripts reach the hands of Grani Publisher Gleb Rar by a variety of well-planned means, including secret contacts arranged by Rar between Russian writers and Western visitors (one was British Lecturer Gerald Brooke, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for bringing in anti-Soviet propaganda). Rar says that he prints "only a fraction" of what he gets. Usually, as in Cancer Ward, he publishes excerpts in Grani first and then a full text through Grani's parent publishing house, Possev, which prints a variety of Russian-language fiction and nonfiction titles; much of its output is smuggled back into Russia.
Wispy Smuggler. Other copies of Cancer Ward have been brought out from Russia. Several chapters turned up in a Slovak literary journal called Bratislava, which, like many East European Communist periodicals, is not heavily censored and thus provides another source for sharp-eyed Westerners. A completed copy of Cancer Ward turned up in Rome, where Publisher Alberto Mondadori in March copyrighted a Russian-language edition that he says was brought to him unsolicited. He now has an Italian edition in print and claims worldwide rights to the book. In Britain, a man purporting to represent Solzhenitsyn delivered a manuscript to the Bodley Head publishers, who plan to issue it Aug. 1. Eventually, the Soviets apparently got fed up with all the illicit excitement about the book. Victor Louis, a Moscow-based journalist who has run such other errands for the Russian government as selling a copy of Svetlana Alliluyeva's Twenty Letters to a Friend before its authorized publication, delivered a manuscript to London's Flegon Press; its fate is still uncertain.
Still another copy of Cancer Ward went to Madame Helene Peltier-Zamoyska, the wispy Frenchwoman who spirited all the works of her old friends Sinyavsky and Daniel to the Polish exiles running Kultura magazine in Paris. As for Solzhenitsyn, rumored to be ailing from cancer himself, he has demanded that everyone cancel foreign publication of his book—not so much to prevent Westerners from reading it, probably, as to deprive the Soviet censors of one more excuse for banning it at home.