Soviet Editor Seeks to Publish Solzhenitsyn

The editor of the Soviet Union’s most prominent literary magazine said today that he is negotiating to publish “Cancer Ward” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Soviet writer who was exiled 14 years ago.

“Things should become clear in about a week or 10 days,” Sergei P. Zalygin, editor of Novy Mir, said in an interview.

If the novel is published, it will represent a stunning turnaround in the official Soviet evaluation of Solzhenitsyn, who earned official opprobrium in the 1970s for his three-volume chronology of Soviet political repression titled “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, was exiled from his native country in 1974, and his works were ordered removed from public libraries. He now lives in Vermont.

Reagan’s Appeal

During the Moscow summit, President Reagan appealed for the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s works in his native land.

Zalygin told reporters then that publication of “Cancer Ward” is contingent on an agreement with Solzhenitsyn, who owns the copyright to the book, and that he is conducting the negotiations.

Since Mikhail S. Gorbachev became Soviet leader in March, 1985, Soviet authors, including Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose works were once banned, have been published in Soviet editions. But to date, Solzhenitsyn has remained off limits.

Many of the criticisms leveled by Solzhenitsyn at the bloody political terror waged by dictator Josef Stalin have now become official doctrine.

Start Under Lenin

But in works like the “Gulag” trilogy, Solzhenitsyn goes beyond official Soviet thinking by saying that wide-scale repression began under Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin.

In “Cancer Ward” Solzhenitsyn depicts a hospital in Soviet Kazakhstan at the twilight of Stalin’s reign, which ended with the dictator’s death in 1953. The hospital seems to stand for Soviet society as a whole, while the cancer the patients suffer from represents the ravages of Stalin’s terror.