From Zamyatin to Solzhenitsyn

...It immediately established him as the doyen of prison camp literature, a position he has since consolidated with The Cancer Ward and The First Circle...

...B i'a change...

...This time the preservation of his integrity proves fatal: He is promptly felled by an accident in the foundry...

...For both, a modus vivendi becomes a modus morendi...

...Solzhenitsyn's most recent contribution to what might be called the "literature of survival" is a play, The Love-Girl and the Innocent (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 131 pp., $4.95...

...the other is Kultura Essays), the emigre spirit has been extended to the English-speaking reader...

...For freedom of expression is meaningless if its exercise changes nothing...

...If criticism in the West consists largely of reports to the consumer, in the turmoil of revolution it was felt to be a matter of life and death...

...This paradox—that the uses of freedom can best be explored in situations of unfreedom—is the key to the peculiar fascination of camp literature...

...there was nothing funny about famine and civil war...

...In a moving tribute to Aleksandr Blok, Zamyatin says of his generation, "we were all locked up together in a steel projectile and, cooped up in darkness, whistled through space, no one knew where...

...Its editor is Leopold Tyrmand, a successful Polish writer and lecturer now living in the United States who has contributed...

...His novel We, an early and not very successful exercise in the anti-Utopian genre later ripened to maturity in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, has little to commend it to the modern reader...

...The traditional approach is basically prescriptive, primarily limiting what may be written...

...This admirable document, which is likely to be Zamyatin's chief memorial, was unexpectedly effective...

...The journal and the Institut, besides fulfilling their primary function of serving as a bridge between Polish writers at home and abroad, have made it possible for Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others to channel their work to the free world as well...

...himself an engineer, he understood the human implications of relativity theory: "Einstein broke space and time themselves from their anchors...

...In The First Circle, a political prisoner tells the Minister of State Security: "A person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power...

...She stalls, although realizing that if she turns him down he can have her shipped out on the next transport to spend the winter in a remote lumber camp—a virtual death sentence...

...Over the years the Institut has offered Polish readers many other works from both the East and West...

...And the art that grows out of this present-day reality—can it be anything but fantastic, dreamlike...

...Nemov is relieved to find himself an ordinary prisoner again...

...Who wants to read a Greek writer in Argentina...

...And the intelligentsia, caught up in the excitement of revolution, cared intensely what happened to their country...

...Some, of excellent literary quality, are in good health...

...As Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, they were first introduced to the West in 1959 when the Institut issued editions of their works in both Russian and Polish...

...Instead, he wrote two letters, both reproduced in the present collection: one of resignation from the Writers' Union, and the other to Stalin asking permission to leave the Soviet Union "with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men...

...Lyuba chooses slow death...

...and one's relief at not being put to that particular test is perhaps not unmixed with envy...

...The early 1920s were not unlike our own time: There was a similar sense of human affairs going out of control, of impending apocalypse...

...National and ethnic animosities of long standing have been subordinated in recognition of the common hardships and interests...

...Based in Paris, both were established in 1947 by Jerzy Giedroyc and a few collaborators...

...Nemov refuses to share her, the only way they could be together, and must therefore give her up...

...Is life worth living at any price...

...He's free all over again...

...Wiser in the ways of captivity than he, she sadly admits to having prostituted herself in order to stay alive ("I'm what prisoners call a 'love-girl'"), and their brief affair is shadowed by the knowledge that she may soon have to do so again...

...Most important, he was alert to the intimate link between culture and technology...

...And on "the spiritual revolutionaries" who tended the sacred flame—such as Aleksei Remizov, Blok, Fyodor Solo-gub, Andrei Bely—he lavished his tender love...

...Seizing the opportunity, Nemov's enemies push forward someone they understand and can live with: Boris Khomich, an engineer of consummate cynicism, who gets Nemov's job by undertaking to do the impossible and promising to build the commandant a new house into the bargain...

...Now, with the publication of Explorations in Freedom (one of two companion anthologies...

...If he continues to write in his home country, he must either produce mediocre work that will pass censorship or suffer "inner emigration"—writing for the desk drawer, not publication...

...Zamyatin speaks with something approaching exaltation about "the vast, fantastic sweep of the spirit of our epoch, which has demolished everyday life to pose the problems of being...

...the cost of preserving his integrity is not yet prohibitive...

...and although no less a master than Isaac Bashevis Singer classes Zamyatin's short stories with those of Isaac Babel, I do not find them comparable in intensity of personal vision or economy of means...

...Like all his writing, The Love-Girl and the Innocent turns on the question of survival: How much will you sacrifice in order to stay alive...

...Furthermore, because emigre reviews inevitably find their way through the Iron Curtain, they frequently have a unique ideological impact...

...many have perished...

...others are faltering...

...A publisher and editor, Giedroyc could not bring himself to return to a Communist Poland after serving with the Polish Army in the Near East and Africa during World War II...

...Polish emigres are particularly fortunate in their excellent publishing house, the Institut Litteraire...

...Almost every East European nationality has its own literary community in exile, with publications generally superior to those sanctioned by the Central Committee...

...One Day in the Life is of classic simplicity, focusing on one central character and following him around like a cinema-verite unit from dawn to dusk...

...Exploring the Emigre Spirit_ Explorations in Freedom Edited by Leopold Tyrmand The Free Press...

...One of the liveliest and most articulate of that first crop of writers under Bolshevism Triumphant was Yevgeny Zamyatin...

...The Hungarians have Vj Latohatar (New Horizons), a bimonthly published in Munich, and Iradalmi Ujsag (Literary News), issued every month in Paris...

...New publishing houses, such as the Herzen Foundation in Amsterdam and the revived Chekhov Publishing House in New York (both for Russian literature), are emerging to meet new needs...

...That justly famous novel, published with Nikita Khrushchev's approval in the first flush of de-Stalinization, was the bitter fruit of Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year stint in Stalin's labor camps...

...We watch the camp coming to fife at dawn, and the arrival of new prisoners on an incoming transport: we eavesdrop on the rough camaraderie of the foundrymen, and witness a savage fight between a tough foreman and work-shy "professional" crooks placed in the camps to terrorize the political prisoners...

...to the writer in exile, they represent the opportunity to be printed in his native language instead of being doomed to silence...

...we overhear the angry gang-leaders and rate-fixers squabbling about the fulfillment of work quotas...

...As the play ends, she enters the doctor's hut...

...Tracing the interweaving fortunes of a whole cast of characters over a period of several days, it presents the action in a succession of skillfully juxtaposed vignettes...

...But he neither backed away, as did Boris Pilnyak and Viktor Shklovsky (Zamyatin speaks of "an epidemic of penitence"), nor committed suicide, like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin...

...Given these circumstances, a number of East European emigre literary journals and publishing houses have won deserved recognition for their dual role in combatting the erosions of Communist conformity: To the writer who has chosen inner emigration, they offer the chance to publish his work (usually under a pseudonym) as he wrote it...

...He was merciless to members of the writing fraternity who came down from the crow's nest to hobnob with the officers and take their ease in the mess, regarding those too eager to toe the Party line as traitors to the true, never-ending revolution...

...Zamyatin studied the rise and fall of the Symbolist, Synthetist, Imaginist, Neorealist, Constructivist, and Futurist factions like a fever chart...

...Decades later, in November 1969...

...above all, they felt certain that what they wrote mattered...

...Russian readers have Novy Zhurnal (The New Review) a quarterly published in New York, Grani (Facets), printed in Frankfurt, and many more...

...Zamyatin was perhaps not a writer of major importance...

...He threw all his energy into producing Kultura, feeling strongly that political expatriates needed to make their presence and positions known...

...When he is made production manager, those with a stake in the status quo—the work allocator, the head clerk, the storekeeper—plot his downfall...

...Communist censorship is essentially prescriptive, not only imposing limitations but also telling authors how and what they are to write...

...A poet in Russia or Eastern Europe is forbidden to dwell on "decadent themes" or preoccupy himself with innovations in verse structure and style...

...There is a marked difference, however, between the literary restrictions imposed over the ages by various emperors, kings and tsars, or even such modern-day totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany, and the repression practiced by Communist states...

...442 pp...

...through the intercession of Maxim Gorky he was allowed to quit the country, and moved to Paris, where he died in 1937...

...another writer who had the temerity to stand up to the little men was ousted from the Writers' Union: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...

...Such diverse authors as George Orwell, Daniel Bell, Graham Greene, and Albert Camus have been translated into Polish along with Milovan Djilas, Boris Pasternak and A. D. Sakharov...

...Zamyatin was more impressive as a critic and intellectual journalist...

...And who will publish him...

...8.95...

...For she is beseiged by the camp doctor, who bribes her with food and privileges to become his "wife...

...So outspoken a heretic as Zamyatin could not long escape the strictures of the faithful ("Originality is unquestionably criminal," he said), and when the government-controlled Russian Association of Proletarian Writers began to crack down on creative freedom at the end of the '20s, he was a natural target for the Party hacks who were henceforth to dominate the arts...

...In a storm you must have a man aloft...

...The camp commandant, himself under pressure from higher up, calls for a fantastic production increase everybody knows to be utterly unattainable...

...JLalf a century after the October Revolution, postindustrial man looks back on the travails of the newly hatched homo sovielicus like an impotent roue contemplating young love: how endearing those enthusiasms, and in retrospect how absurd...

...The Czechs have Svedectvi (Testimony), also published in Paris...

...and monthly review, Kultura...

...Literature is "a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck...

...Nemov, the "innocent" of the title, is a conscientious man who cannot bring himself to participate in the featherbedding and corruption by which the camp is operated for the benefit of a few unscrupulous prisoners...

...There but for the accident of birth go I, one feels, contemplating the character-building rigors of prison existence...

...Whatever the sufferings of a Soviet writer, the burden of indifference is not, after all, likely to be among them...

...A prose writer dare not show the dark aspects of human nature or end his story on an unhappy note...

...As these essays demonstrate, he had great insight into the movements of the spirit in those tumultuous postrevolutionary years, and brought a keen analytical intelligence to bear on the work of his contemporaries...

...From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and through the Communist domination of Eastern Europe following World War II, multilingual journals mushroomed across Western Europe, the United States and South America...

...As if by way of reward, he falls in love with Lyuba, a recent arrival...

...Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne A totalitarian government anywhere is perhaps a greater hardship on the writer than on most other members of society...

...If he goes into exile, he cuts himself off from the main body of his readership...

...There was, too, an exhilarating awareness of the possibilities in a situation where the very foundations of existence were shifting under the impact of multiple revolutions...

...The new work attempts an epic complexity...

...A strong current of modernity runs through Zamyatin's nonfiction...

...he himself was right in the thick of it, exhorting his brethren to take their literary responsibilities as seriously as he did himself...

...These and other dictates are incorporated in the official doctrine of Socialist Realism—the literary straitjacket of the Soviet Union since 1932...

...The sufferings were real enough, to be sure...

...A Soviet Heretic (University of Chicago, 322 pp., $9.50), a collection of his essays edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, sparkles with the intellectual ferment of the times...

...Most controversial among the non-Polish authors whose works have been published by the Institut are the Russians Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel...

...Containing 38 selections by 27 authors, this anthology is an excellent sampling from Kultura's 22 years...