Book Biz Confounds E. European Writers : Publishing: Artists and printers who have risked their lives come to grips with a new variety of problems, having to do with the U.S. mass market.

The Polish publisher had struggled for 12 years in the underground to provide books to an audience hungry for the truth. Now all those clandestine times were behind him, and he was touring the West to seek the help of friends in transforming his press into a commercial venture.

But Grzegorz Boguta’s first taste of the Western publishing trade was a bit sour. Arriving on a New York visit, he learned that his friend, Andre Schiffren, had been forced to resign as director of prestigious Pantheon. The publisher’s corporate parent, Random House Inc., found that Schiffren had not been paying enough attention to the bottom line.

This lesson about the duress that money can exert on artistic endeavors was a “good one for us to learn,” Boguta said, somewhat ruefully. “It showed us we have to mix books we think are important with books that will sell.”

Boguta’s NOWA (independent publishing house) press published more than 500 titles from 1977 to March, when he closed it. Most were tiny editions distributed free among friends. Among the authors he published were Nobel laureates Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, Jean Paul Satre and Philip Roth.

One advantage to underground publishing, Boguta said, is that as long as it remains free of the security police’s clutches, it is totally independent. As he tries to restart NOWA as a commercial publisher, Boguta is coming to grips with a new variety of problems.

No one in Poland has the money to invest in a publishing house, and Boguta is leery about relying on the Polish state or foreign investors. Furthermore, Poland’s brusque experiment with free-market capitalism has sent prices skyrocketing.

“People don’t have enough money to buy food, let alone books,” he said.

“Coming into a free market economy is hurting publishers even more than it’s hurting other people,” said Roland Algrant, director of the International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Assn. of American Publishers.

The group provided money to clandestine publishers of manuscripts in the Soviet Union in the old days and continues to help them. But their needs have increased dramatically, Algrant said.

“When they did everything with carbon copies, $100 was a lot of money,” he said. “Now a $2,000 grant is practically nothing. They need paper, they need equipment. All of a sudden they have a market and want to make 10,000 copies instead of 10.”

Americans are helping. Such writers as William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut have donated the rights to their novels to publishers in the newly democratic countries of Central Europe. The U.S. Information Service is providing grants for equipment.

Schiffrin, who as Pantheon’s director led a group called Friends of NOWA, had signed an agreement that provided the Polish publisher $25,000 for rights to the English translations of future NOWA books. But out of solidarity with Schiffrin, Boguta has not approached the publisher’s new directors to ask about the status of that loan.

The Pantheon brouhaha is part of a wave of mergers, shake-ups and financial troubles at quality U.S. publishers in recent years. Amid the general nervousness, some editors questioned whether these houses are capable of showing greater interest in Eastern European writers.

“You have a whole attitude in the publishing industry these days that you don’t publish unless you can make profits,” Algrant said. “The editors are all dying to get new Eastern European writers, but the financial managers say, ‘Where’s all this going to lead?’ ”

One editor who has worked with Czechoslovak writers said: “I think it’s sadly ironic that just when the Eastern European writers have an opportunity to publish without smuggling their manuscripts out, the climate in the United States is a little harder nosed as far as the bottom line goes.”

Some believe the apparent end of Communist rule will diminish interest in a literature whose piquancy partly resided in its dissident character.

Wendy Luers, who befriended many of Czechoslovakia’s leading intellectuals when she and her husband, then-U.S. Ambassador William Luers, were in Prague in 1983-86, recalled telling a Czechoslovak novelist: “If you want to be judged on your merits, not as a dissident, you have to hit the hard old business of getting your manuscripts rejected.”

Luers, as president of Charter 77 Foundation-New York, has been involved in varied programs to support Czechoslovak culture and bring U.S. writers together with Czechoslovak writers. She is organizing a Prague visit for top literary agents, Lynn Nesbitt and Mort Janklow.

“We hope that if we can get American publishers interested in Eastern European writers, we’ll get the Latin American literary phenomenon--creating a genre that people will be interested in reading,” she said.

Knopf is publishing two of Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel’s works this year, as well as two books by novelist Ivan Klima. But the lasting appeal of many important dissident writers, both in translation and their home countries, remains to be seen. Some suggest that many members of the underground will stay there, although it will be a legal underground.

“Nobody knows yet whether the ‘alternative culture’ that existed can continue to exist in a free society,” Czechoslovak writer Iva Pekarkova said. “There were some writers who were read simply because they were illegal. Now they may have to face the fact that nobody wants to read them any more. Not all of them are great writers.”

Pekarkova, who has lived in New York for four years, took part in a panel of young Czechoslovak and U.S. writers at New York University in March. When some U.S. participants complained about publishers’ timidity, the Czechoslovak panelists nodded sympathetically, Pekarkova said, but they did not really understand the problems, because the translator was unable to convey what the Americans meant by censorship.

“I personally have had problems trying to publish my book in English,” said Pekarkova, who has been driving cabs for a living. “But you can’t call it censorship. If the American public does not want to read a book, and therefore a publisher doesn’t want to buy it, that’s not the fault of the government.

“Czech writers haven’t had to worry about money, but . . . how can you worry about money when you can’t get published at all, for political reasons?”