ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn was not the only Soviet writer to be exploring openings in the West in 1970. As a deus ex machina, came the news that Francois Mauriac, supported by about fifty other French writers, had nominated Solzhenitsyn for the Nobel Prize for literature. This was in July 1970, and again it complicated matters. Solzhenitsyn was convinced that he had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize the year before, in 1969, and that the decision to expel him from the Writers’ Union had been a direct result of his failure to get it. All in all, he had a curious and uniquely Soviet attitude to the Nobel Prize as an instrument in a larger struggle. Natalia Reshetovskaya reports that Solzhenitsyn kept a list of Nobel Prize winners in his desk and updated it each year after the announcement of that year’s winner.
