Soviet Union: The Truth That Hurt

Tvardovsky is truly the poet of “the truth, the whole truth, the truth that goes to the soul—the more of it the better—no matter how bitter.”

That accolade to Alexander Tvardovsky was printed with official blessing in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1956. But in recent years Tvar-dovsky’s truth has begun to hurt. Russia’s most popular poet has come under increasing attack for failing to show enough vigilance against “bourgeois ideology” in his magazine, Novy Mir (New World). Last week, after four of his top staff members were fired and replaced by men who can be relied upon to follow party dictates faithfully, Tvardovsky could no longer ignore official displeasure: he submitted his resignation as editor of Novy Mir.

A new editor has not yet been named.

For many, both in Russia and the West, the government crackdown on Novy Mir and Tvardovsky’s resignation marked the end of an era. Since its founding in 1928, the magazine has published most of Russia’s greatest contemporary writers. During the twelve years of Tvardovsky’s editorship in the post-Stalin period, Novy Mir earned the reputation of being one of the best literary magazines published in any language anywhere. In addition to fiction and poetry, Tvardovsky managed to publish articles discussing, in a veiled way, Soviet antiSemitism, the wretchedness of village life, and other subjects hardly ever mentioned in the controlled press.

But Tvardovsky’s greatest service to Russia and Russian literature was his discovery and support of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was Tvardovsky, for example, who first brought One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (see SHOW BUSINESS) to the attention of Nikita Khrushchev. The Premier was so impressed by the novel that he ordered it to be published in Novy Mir in 1962. But in 1966 Solzhenitsyn’s writings were banned and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union last November.

Says Oxford’s Max Hayward, one of the leading Western specialists on Soviet literature: Tvardovsky’s departure marks the “decapitation” of Novy Mir and “an incalculable loss to Russia and the world.” The magazine, he adds, “provided the focus for the post-Stalin revival of a critically thinking intelligentsia in Russia.” The immediate effect of Novy Mir’s disappearance as an outlet for independent writers will probably be an increase in the amount of good writing circulating from hand to hand by samizdat, the underground press.