Abstract
During my years as editor of Index, our sympathies were always with individual writers and intellectuals, rather than movements – the word ‘dissident’ still sums them up best – and we made a point of publishing original work by as many authors as we could (we had two Nobel Prize winners in our first year). In fact, we published the Soviet Union’s number one dissident, Solzhenitsyn, even before he won the Nobel Prize. In our first issue we carried a hitherto unknown prose poem, ‘Means of Transport’; in our second an excerpt from a long, unpublished autobiographical poem, ‘The Road’; and in our double issue at the end of the year, Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize speech.
The following year we had only one long article on Solzhenitsyn – an interview with two western correspondents – but along with the rest of the world we followed the sensational news that the KGB had acquired a copy of The Gulag Archipelago after torturing one of the typists and that Solzhenitsyn had gone into hiding, which was followed by his arrest and his deportation to the West in February 1974.
By this time I had been involuntarily drawn into Solzhenitsyn’s circle myself. Index’s publication of his prose poem and the news that we planned to publish an excerpt from ‘The Road’, neither of which had appeared anywhere in print, had alarmed him, and at one point he had asked me, through a dissident friend of mine, to stop publication. He feared his works were being circulated by the KGB as a provocation in order to frame him, but I was able to show they came from genuine samizdat. There were more desultory contacts of this nature, and then a Swiss lawyer, Dr Fritz Heeb, who was acting as Solzhenitsyn’s literary agent in the West, got in touch with me. He sent a Russian copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Leaders (as it was originally called) and asked if I could begin to make arrangements for its publication in English. It was a call to the Soviet leaders to liberalise their system, ease censorship, and begin the transition to a form of limited democracy. It was a sensational proposal, which Solzhenitsyn had written well before his exile, but had kept secret in the vain hope the government would respond.
Solzhenitsyn was deported and arrived at Dr Heeb’s home in Zurich before I could begin, and he sent instructions for his Letter to be published as soon as possible. At 15,000 words it was too long for the magazine, and we decided to publish it as a book. Our tiny staff of four at Index immediately swung into action. I had planned to do the translation myself, but there was no time, so I asked a friend, Hilary Sternberg, to translate it, and she worked frantically day and night to get it finished. I also knew that the Letter was hot news and deserved extended press coverage. The Sunday Times in London seized on the opportunity and published our translation of the Letter in full. The New York Times, however, double-crossed us. Having turned down my offer of the text, they sent a correspondent to Solzhenitsyn’s Russian-language publisher in Paris and, using my name, obtained a copy of the Russian and did a translation of their own.
Hilary Sternberg, helped by our assistant editor, George Theiner, and our distribution manager, Philip Spender (with Philip’s wife, Jane, reading the proofs), pulled out all the stops to get the translation finished and our book out. It was printed and distributed by Collins (Fontana handled the paperback) and sold tens of thousands of copies, bringing in a very large sum of money. We had hoped to be able to keep some of it to support Index, and were disappointed when Solzhenitsyn insisted that all the proceeds should go to him, but I myself benefitted greatly from the enterprise. In the course of the next few months I went to New York to edit the English translation of volume one of The Gulag Archipelago, began a translation of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir, The Oak and the Calf (which I later handed over to his translator Harry Willetts), visited Solzhenitsyn in Zurich, and got his grudging agreement ‘not to oppose’ my idea of writing his biography. ❒