Soviets to Print Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Gulag’ Novel

Soviet authorities plan to publish “Gulag Archipelago” and another banned work by exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn as part of a new openness policy, a Greek author just returned from Moscow said today.

Writer and journalist T. Takis Michas said the Soviet Union already has decided to publish Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” soon and later release “Gulag Archipelago,” perhaps the best-known novel critical of the Soviet penal system.

Michas said Sergei Zalygin, editor in chief of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, informed him of the publication plans during a recent interview in Moscow. He said a high-ranking member of the Novosti press agency said the same thing.

Novi Mir already has announced plans to publish Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” next year.

Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Natalya, contacted at their home in Cavendish, Vt., said she was unaware of the Soviet publishing plans. “This is the first I have heard of this,” she said.

In New York, Roger Straus, head of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the house that published “Cancer Ward” in the United States, said, “Wow! That’s good news.”

Harper and Row, American publisher of “Gulag,” had no immediate comment.