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PARTISAN REVIEW
the few survivors of the great age of Russian literature, a poet who had
limited his work to translation since the end of the war, decided to try
to publish the massive, ill-shaped, awkward novel he had been at work
on for many years in a kind of attenuated inner exile.
This is not the place to recapitulate the well-known details of the
Doctor Zhivago
affair. But the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to
him, followed by Pasternak's forced and somewhat ignominious rejection
of it, at least had the effect of permitting the editorial board of
Novy Mir
to publish its reasons for rejecting the novel, along with generous
quotations from the novel itself. Didactic, clumsy, lyrical, personal,
romantic, the novel clearly rejected Marxism and expressed disillusion–
ment in the regime established by the Bolshevik revolution. Yet it seemed
a very mild response to the horrors of the Stalin years, a growing
awareness of which the returnees from the
gil lag
brought with them. The
gulags
-
that vast empire of labor camps created by the Stalin regime -
became the crucial issue of de-Stalinization . Fear of a return to the use of
the
gulag
was a potent weapon in Khrushchev's hands against his more
retrograde
nomenklat ll ra.
Fear that the magnitude and depth of the
degradation of the
gulags,
once they became known, could and would
destroy whatever shreds of authority remained to the Party apparatus that
was his constituency limited the extent of the exposure he would or
could permit. These were the bounds within which Khrushchev and his
supporters moved. Then in November 1962, with Khrushchev's express
permission,
Novy Mir
published a novella by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called
One Day il1 the Life oj Ivan Dellisovich .
It created a sensation.
The nature and extent of the labor camps were not exactly news ei–
ther in Russia or abroad. David Dallin and Boris Nikolaevsky had pub–
lished a well-informed book on them in English as early as the 1950s.
Gustav Herling and other foreigners had recounted their experiences in
print. In the Soviet Union itself few families had not had a member or
close friend shipped off to the camps, and although those who came
back were far fewer, they were still numerous. But Russian culture is
10-
gocentric, and there is a deep need among Russians to put into words
what is felt and experienced; what is felt and horrendously experienced
must indeed be given a public voice. Solzhenitsyn became more than a
culture hero, almost a saint. Other novelists had touched on the existence
of the camps and even hinted at their nature and extent. But it was
Solzhenitsyn's central subject. And his hero was not an intellectual but
an ordinary Russian peasant, a simple, honest, decent, dignified man, a
literary creation that drew on deep resonances from the poetry of
Nekrasov and the powerful populist strain in Russian nationalism. In
terms of political importance, the
Doctor Zhivago
controversy seemed to
