Communists: And Quiet Flow the Words

In the Soviet Union, “no one is being prevented from writing anything he wants,” said Russian Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov. “The only problem is how to write it and for what purpose.” With that, Sholokhov headed for Stockholm, where last week he received the $56,400 Nobel Prize for literature—and a plea from 18 free-world writers who would like him to put his mouth where his money is. The writers* are incensed over the recent arrests of Soviet Critic Andrei Sinyavsky and Translator Yuli Daniel for smuggling manuscripts of satirical anti-Soviet works to the West (TIME, Oct. 29). They wanted Sholokhov, as Russia’s leading writer, to defend his colleagues. But when a representative of the Western group tried to reach Sholokhov in Stockholm with the petition, his phone calls and visit to the novelist’s hotel were greeted by a silence as quiet as the flow of the Don.

Smugglers & Talent. Sholokhov’s fear of involvement was perhaps understandable—if pitiable—for Sinyavsky is believed to be “Abram Tertz,” the most biting of Russia’s underground satirists, while the lesser-known Daniel reportedly wrote rebellious novels under the . name “Nikolai Arzhak.” Sinyavsky also has a strong following among Moscow’s youth, and last week 200 students from the Gorky Institute of World Literature (where Sinyavsky lectured) demonstrated against his arrest at the statue of Poet Aleksandr Pushkin, demanding an open trial. Cops broke up the crowd, confiscated its banners, and detained the ringleaders.

The works of both Tertz and Arzhak reached the West through an improbable smuggling network with headquarters in a 16-room Tudor mansion in the somnolent Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte. The smugglers themselves are mild-mannered Polish emigre intellectuals, who for 20 years have been deftly and dedicatedly slipping politically explosive manuscripts into and out of Communist Europe. They call themselves the Institut Litteraire, and their stable of largely anonymous Iron Curtain authors runs from Tertz through Yugoslavia’s recently convicted Mihajlo Mihajlov (Moscow Summer). Of I.L.’s novelists, three have been arrested to date; no count has been taken of how many of the essayists and short-story writers who contribute to the group’s magazine Kultura have been arrested.

I.L.’s boss is Jerzy Giedroyc, 58; his brother Henryk, 43, assists him. Jerzy, an energetic but embittered Pole, published two Warsaw weeklies before the war and served briefly as chef de cabinet to the Minister of Agriculture. When Poland fell to the Nazis, Giedroyc fled to the Middle East, joined the Free Polish army and fought through the North African and Italian campaigns. En route he met Zygmunt and Zofia Hertz, Polish Jews fresh from 14 months in a Soviet concentration camp. War’s end found the trio in Rome, where they turned their literary talents to publishing the patriotic verse of Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish Byron. Kultura followed—only 1,000 copies at first, 6,000 today in 58 countries. But from the start, Giedroyc & Co. hoped to smuggle books into and out of the Communist bloc.

Couriers & Hives. Shifting their headquarters to Paris, the group began to search out fissures in the Iron Curtain. Out filtered not only the manuscript of Polish Novelist Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, but Milosz himself. In 1951, he spent 13 months in hiding at Maisons-Laffitte before moving on to Berkeley as professor of Slavic languages. Other books and authors followed: in 1957 Marek Hlasko, winner of Poland’s grandest literary award; in 1960, Andrzej Stawar, a Marxist theoretician dying of cancer who wanted to attack the Polish government before dying—and did, with his I.L.-published Last Writings. Stawars study: a reconverted stable behind the suburban mansion. Tertz, Daniel, Mihajlov—all knew where to turn for Western publication. And into Eastern Europe at the same time flowed dozens of Western works, smuggled translations of Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler, Thomas Merton and George Orwell.

Just how I.L. manages its intricate network of couriers and its hives of anti-Communist industry, Giedroyc is not about to tell. Such a disclosure might not be dangerous to I.L. itself, but it could spell more years of prison for the writers I.L. publishes. Next on Giedroyc’s publishing list: Mihajlov’s as-yet unpublished works (working title: Russian Themes) and a pun-rich novel in the Joycean vein that relates the absurd experiences of a Polish security cop. “From Milosz to Tertz,” says Giedroyc with a wry laugh, “there is only one theme: freedom. A writer cannot do his work under censorship and police harassment. You will find in all our books the bitterness, the sadness of life in those countries.”

* William Styron, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Lillian Hellman, John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Lewis Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Hannah Arendt, Edward Albee, Michael Harrington, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Philip Roth, Meyer Schapiro.