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Plausible Case. Last week Alexander Solzhenitsyn was still a free man. He is rarely glimpsed in Moscow. He is an irreverent individualist. He wears good clothes, bought with the East European royalties of One Day, but in haphazard combinations: round fur hat, shiny green Finnish car coat, smart imported trousers and enormous Soviet-made leather clodhoppers. At a bus stop in Moscow, where people are chronically short of small coins for the ticket machines, he will give out dozens of five-kopeck pieces, laughing exuberantly. But at his back, the shadow of the camps lingers. Once, after handing in his coat at a Moscow restaurant, he showed the claim check sadly to his companion. "I shall never escape that number." It was 232, the same number he had borne in the labor camps.
The appearance of his books in the West has put him in an extremely dangerous position. KGB agents have peddled some of his manuscripts. If the KGB were to fabricate a plausible case that Solzhenitsyn has had a part in getting the works abroad, he might be tried on the same charge of distributing "anti-Soviet literature" that was used against Sinyavsky and Daniel.
As recently as April 21, Solzhenitsyn again protested against the publication of his banned works abroad. This time he singled out the British publisher, the Bodley Head, which together with Farrar, Straus & Giroux had publicly claimed that they had authorization from an "accredited representative" of the author. Harper & Row has made a similar claim for The First Circle. In a letter to Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta and to French and Italian newspapers, Solzhenitsyn denied that any foreign publishers obtained the manuscript of Cancer Ward, or authorization to publish it, from him. "I have already seen how all the translations of One Day were spoiled because of haste. Evidently this fate also awaits Cancer Ward. But over and above money, there is literature too."
Professor Kathryn Feuer, head of the Slavic department at the University of Toronto, has put the case most tactfully against those Western publishers who are claiming authorization. "How tragic, if accustomed to operating in a free society, they have misjudged the situation and are playing into the hands of Solzhenitsyn's enemies while thinking to serve freedom and literature. Solzhenitsyn has already done more than most men for both causes. If he must be sacrificed, we in the West should at least leave him free to choose his own martyrdom." To which can be added only the hope that the worldwide respect for his work, and attention to his danger, will help somewhat to protect Alexander Solzhenitsyn—as Pasternak was similarly protected—from the Stalinists' determination to punish him for his great talent and raw courage.
The intellectuals' dissent should not be overestimated. Russia's millions are by and large indifferent to the issues that unite the intelligentsia. Only a few hundred people at most have been bold enough to demonstrate; only a few thousand at most have