K. Voronkov

At the request of the Secretariat,

Secretary of the Board of the Union

writers of the USSR

[6]

1.12.67 Ryazan

TO THE SECRETARIAT OF THE UNION OF WRITERS OF THE USSR

From your No 3142 of 25.11.67 I cannot understand:

1) Does the Secretariat intend to protect me from three years of continuous (to put it mildly "unfriendly") slander in my homeland? (New facts: on 5.10.67 in Leningrad, in the House of Press, in front of a crowded crowd of listeners, the editor-in-chief of "Pravda" Zimyanin repeated the tired lie that I was in captivity, and also groped for a hackneyed trick against the undesirables - to declare me a schizophrenic, and the camp past - an obsession. why did the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court not see this in the case.)

2) What measures has the Secretariat taken to reverse the illegal ban on my printed works in library use and the censorship order to remove my name from mention in critical articles? (In "Questions of Literature" they did so even... in translation of the Japanese article. At Perm University, a group of students was sanctioned for trying to discuss my printed works in their scientific collection.)

3) Does the Secretariat want to prevent the uncontrolled appearance of the "Cancer Ward" abroad, or does it remain indifferent to this danger? Are any steps being taken to publish excerpts from the story in Literaturnaya Gazeta, and the whole story in Novy Mir?

(4) Does the Secretariat intend to petition the Government for our country to accede to the international copyright convention? In this way, our authors would have a reliable means of protecting their works from illegal foreign publications and the shameless commercial translation race.

5) In the six months that have passed since my letter to the Congress, has the distribution of the illegal "edition" of excerpts from my archive finally been stopped, and has this "edition" been destroyed?

6) What measures did the Secretariat take to return the seized archive and the novel "In the First Circle" to me, apart from public assurances that they had allegedly already been returned (secretary Ozerov, for example)?

7) Did the Secretariat accept or reject K. M. Simonov's proposal to publish a collection of my stories?

(8) Why have I not yet received the transcript of the September 22 meeting of the Secretariat to study it?

I would greatly appreciate clarification of these issues.

Solzhenitsyn

[7]

MEMBER OF THE UNION OF WRITERS OF THE USSR

Soon it will be a year since I sent my irrevocable letter to the Congress of Writers. Since then, I have written to the Secretariat of the Chamber of Writers twice more, and I have been there three times myself. Nothing has changed to this day: my archive has not been returned to me, books are not published, the name is banned. I have persistently warned the Secretariat about the danger of my works going abroad, since they have long been widely circulated. The secretariat not only did not help the publication of "Cancer Ward", which had already been typed in Novy Mir, but stubbornly opposed it, even preventing the Moscow section of prose from discussing the second part of the story.