Word: warded
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Bitter Dialogue. Solzhenitsyn's novel, set in the dark atmosphere of a terminal-cancer ward, explores the contrasting lives of the patients-a soldier who was imprisoned for many years in a labor camp, a field geologist who was stricken in young manhood, an aging bureaucrat who improved his lot in life by informing on friends and neighbors. The physical malignancies of the doomed are used by the author to symbolize life in post-Stalin Russia...
Like most of the underground writing that finds its way out of the Soviet Union, the book has already circulated at home. Soviet intellectuals pass around unpublished manuscripts like chain letters, copy by hand or mimeograph the manuscripts lent them. In the case of Cancer Ward, ironically, that chore was performed by the state publishing house, which set type and ran off proofs of the book while it was still scheduled for official publication last December. At the last moment, government censors balked at Solzhenitsyn's bitter indictment. By that time, however, as Soviet Novelist Venyamin Kaverin revealed recently...
...means, including secret contacts arranged by Rar between Russian writers and Western visitors (one was British Lecturer Gerald Brooke, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for bringing in anti-Soviet propaganda). Rar says that he prints "only a fraction" of what he gets. Usually, as in Cancer Ward, he publishes excerpts in Grani first and then a full text through Grani's parent publishing house, Possev, which prints a variety of Russian-language fiction and nonfiction titles; much of its output is smuggled back into Russia...
Wispy Smuggler. Other copies of Cancer Ward have been brought out from Russia. Several chapters turned up in a Slovak literary journal called Bratislava, which, like many East European Communist periodicals, is not heavily censored and thus provides another source for sharp-eyed Westerners. A completed copy of Cancer Ward turned up in Rome, where Publisher Alberto Mondadori in March copyrighted a Russian-language edition that he says was brought to him unsolicited. He now has an Italian edition in print and claims worldwide rights to the book. In Britain, a man purporting to represent Solzhenitsyn delivered a manuscript...
Still another copy of Cancer Ward went to Madame Helene Peltier-Zamoyska, the wispy Frenchwoman who spirited all the works of her old friends Sinyavsky and Daniel to the Polish exiles running Kultura magazine in Paris. As for Solzhenitsyn, rumored to be ailing from cancer himself, he has demanded that everyone cancel foreign publication of his book-not so much to prevent Westerners from reading it, probably, as to deprive the Soviet censors of one more excuse for banning it at home...