ABSTRACT
In the weeks following the Nobel ceremony, news began to trickle through to Moscow of the way it had gone. From reports it became clear that Solzhenitsyn’s absence had both cast a shadow over the proceedings and in a peculiar way also dominated them. Until now some foreign observers had professed to see a certain leniency in the Soviet government’s attitude to Solzhenitsyn over the Nobel Prize affair. Most of the official attacks, they felt, had been directed as much against the Swedish Academy as against Solzhenitsyn himself, and there had been nothing like the scurrilous insults hurled at Pasternak. The Soviet authorities had in the end expelled Per Hegge, and Solzhenitsyn was having trouble with the Nobel lecture that he had promised to write. A subsidiary reason of Solzhenitsyn’s for wanting to publish his book openly in the West was his desire to reach readers in the Russian emigration and to ask for their help.
