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The poet Alexander Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn's great patron, was forced in disgrace from the editorship of Novy Mir. Soon afterward, he had a stroke, but the official word came down that he had cancer; as one literary figure said: "The word thrombosis might be connected with the Novy Mir business, but cancer—that's from God."
The campaign against Solzhenitsyn was systematic. "From the beginning of 1966," writes Medvedev, "the name of Solzhenitsyn was no longer mentioned in articles of literary criticism." The secret police confiscated Solzhenitsyn's personal papers and records and made off with the typescript of his novel The First Circle. He found evidence that an electronic bug was installed in his house. Solzhenitsyn accepted speaking dates for various professional and cultural groups, often in confidence, and then found that every one of them had been mysteriously canceled, sometimes hours before the event.
Martyred Presence. A rumor was floated that Solzhenitsyn, an almost obsessively ascetic man, was giving drunken parties. An ideological lecturer put it out that "the person known to you as Solzhenitsyn is really Solzhenitser, and he's a Jew." The deputy editor in chief of Pravda, M.V. Zimyanin, declared Solzhenitsyn "ab normal, a schizophrenic," and added: "[He seeks] only to find sores and cancerous tumors. He notices nothing positive in our society."
Medvedev is hard on Westerners too. He criticizes many slovenly translations and the exploitation of Solzhenitsyn's works by Western publishers. The Swedes come off, with some justification, as villains for awarding Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize and then clouding his efforts to accept it in person. Medvedev's book is a lucid and partisan document over which Solzhenitsyn presides as a martyred presence.
Medvedev, whose father died in Stalin's camps, has earned his partisanship, and so has Solzhenitsyn; a favorable Western reception for Ten Years is unlikely to diminish the official harassment. In the Nobel lecture he could not deliver for fear he might become exiled as surely as Medvedev now is, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "Woe betide the nation whose literature is interrupted by force. It is the incarceration of the nation's heart, the amputation of the nation's memory . . . The lie has no way of maintaining itself except by violence."
·Lance Morrow