"I COULD NO LONGER BREATHE"

Like any man beginning a new life, Author Anatoly Kuznetsov last week sought to explain why he ended the old one. Denouncing his earlier published works as hopelessly corrupted by the Soviet system, he even took a new name: A. Anatol. TIME here presents, in documents made available to its editors, Kuznetsov's explanation of why he fled to the West and three letters that he sent to the Soviet Union after his defection.

Kuznetsov's Explanation

You will say it's hard to understand.

Why should a writer whose books have sold millions of copies, and who is extremely popular and well-off in his own country, suddenly decide not to return to that country, which, moreover, he loves?

The loss of hope: I simply cannot live there any longer. This feeling is something stronger than me. I just can't go on living there. If I were now to find myself again in the Soviet Union, I should go out of my mind. If I were not a writer, I might have been able to bear it. But, since I am a writer, I can't. Writing is the only occupation in the world that seriously appeals to me. When I write, I have the illusion that there is some sort of sense in my life. Not to write is for me roughly the same as for a fish not to swim. I have been writing as long as I can remember. My first work was published 25 years ago.

In those 25 years, not a single one of my works has been printed in the Soviet Union as I wrote it. For political reasons, the Soviet censorship and the editors shorten, distort and violate my works to the point of making them completely unrecognizable. Or they do not permit them to be published at all. So long as I was young, I went on hoping for something. But the appearance of each new work of mine was not a cause for rejoicing but for sorrow. Because my writing appears in such an ugly, false and misshapen form, and I am ashamed to look people in the face. To write a good book in the Soviet Union, that is still the simplest thing to do. The real trouble begins only later, when you try to get it published. For the past ten years, I have been living in a state of constant, unavoidable and irresolvable contradiction. Finally, I have simply given up.

I wrote my last novel, The Fire, with no feeling left in my heart, without faith and without hope. I knew in advance for certain that, even if they published it, they would ruthlessly cut everything human out of it, and that at best it would appear as just one more "ideological" potboiler. (And that is, incidentally, exactly what happens.)

I came to the point where I could no longer write, no longer sleep, no longer breathe.

A writer is above all an artist who is trying to penetrate into the unknown. He must be honest and objective, and be able to do his creative work in freedom. These are all obvious truths. These are the very things that writers are forbidden in the Soviet Union.

Artistic freedom in the Soviet Union has been reduced to the "freedom" to praise the Soviet system and the Communist Party and to urge people to fight for Communism. The theoretical basis for this is an article that Lenin wrote 60 years ago on "The Party Organization and Party Literature," which laid it down that every writer is a propagandist for the party. His job is to receive slogans and orders from the party and make propaganda out of them.

This means that writers in Russia are faced with the following choices:

(a) Simply to go along with this idiocy --to let their brains and their consciences have no effect on their actions. If Stalin is on top, then praise Stalin. If they order people to plant maize, then write about maize. If they decide to expose Stalin's crimes, then expose Stalin. And when they stop criticizing him, you stop too. There are so very many Soviet "writers" who are just like that.

But real life will not forgive a man who violates his conscience. Those writers have all become such cynics and spiritual cripples and their hidden regret for their wasted talent eats away at them to such an extent that their wretched existence cannot be called life but rather a caricature of life. It would probably be difficult to think up a worse punishment for oneself than to have to spend one's whole life trembling, cringing, trying fearfully to get the sense of the latest order and fearing to make the slightest mistake. Oh, God!

(b) To write properly, as their ability and consciences dictate.

It is then 100-to-l that what they write will not be published. It will simply be buried. It may even be the cause of the author's physical destruction. It is a sad thoueht that Russia has long and deep "traditions" in this connection. The best Russian writers were always persecuted, dragged before the courts, murdered or reduced to suicide.

(c) To try and write honestly "as far as possible." To choose subjects that are not dangerous. To write in allegories. To seek out cracks in the censorship. To circulate your works from hand to hand in manuscript form. To do at least something: a sort of compromise solution. I was one of those who chose this third way. But it didn't work for me. The censors always managed to bring me to my knees. My anxiety to save at least something from what I had written, so that something would reach the reader, meant only that in the end all mv published writings were neither genuine literature nor utterly contemptible but something in between.

However much I protested or tried to prove some point, it was like beating my head against a wall. Literature in the Soviet Union is controlled by people who are ignorant, cynical, and themselves very remote from literature. But they are people with excellent knowledge of the latest instructions from the men at the top of the prevailing Party dogmas. I could not force my way through their ranks. [Evgeny] Evtushenko managed to achieve a little in this way. [Al-exanderl Solzhenitsyn managed a little more, but even that is all over now. The cracks were noticed and cemented up. Russian writers go on writing and keep hoping for something. It is a nightmare.

Mv mama: So for a quarter of a century I went on dreaming about a happy state of affairs, which is unthinkable for a Soviet writer--to be able to write and publish his writings without restriction and without fear. Not to choke off his own song. To have no thought for party instructions, government-appointed editors and political censors. Not to start trembling at every knock on the door. Not to be hiding his manuscripts away in a hole in the ground almost before the ink on them is dry.

Oh, the number of holes I have dug in the ground to conceal my jam jars full of "dangerous" and "doubtful" manuscripts. I couldn't keep them in my desk because whenever I wasn't there my flat could be broken into and searched and my manuscripts confiscated, as happened with Solzhenitsyn and many others. My writing desk, in fact, had no drawers at all. The Russian earth itself served as my desk and my safe. It became a real mania for me to be able to see my writing published in the form in which I had written it. I wanted to see it just once, and then they could do what they liked with me. Yes, in that sense I was a sick man, I was a maniac.

As a boy I saw books being burned in Russia in 1937, under Stalin. I saw books being burned in 1942 in occupied Kiev, under Hitler, and now it has pleased God to let me know in my lifetime that my own books are being burned. Because now that I have left the Soviet Union, my books will, of course, be destroyed there too. In fact, I pray that my published works should be destroyed down to the very last one. Since they are not what I actually wrote and wanted to say to my readers, that means, after all, that they are not my books! I disassociate myself from them.

And so: I hereby, publicly and definitively, disassociate myself from everything that has been published under the name of "Kuznetsov" in the U.S.S.R. or has appeared in translation from Soviet editions in other countries of the world. I solemnly declare that Kuznetsov is a dishonest, conformist, cowardly author. I renounce this name. I want to be, at last, an honest man and an honest writer. All my writings published from this day onward will bear the signature "A. Anatol." I request you to regard only such works as being mine.

What do I hope for? In recent years I have, from time to time, locked securely in my room, permitted myself a treat: I wrote as I pleased. It was a painful and unusual experience. It was as if, in a world where everybody went on all fours, somebody, shut in a cellar, had stood up and walked upright.

Then for some months, I dug my manuscripts up from their hiding places in the ground, photographed them and buried them again. I have succeeded in bringing those films across the frontier with me--thousands of pages on film, everything I have ever written in my life. They include my known works, such as Babi Yar, but in its true form. They also include things that could not be published in Russia. And some that I doubt whether I shall be able to publish in the West.

But now I have hope, at least. In any case, these are not the words of Kuznetsov but of a quite different author. Not a Soviet author and not a Western author, not a Red one and not a White one, but just an author living in this 20th century on this earth. And what is more, a writer who has made a desperate effort to be in this century, an honest writer who wants to associate himself with those who strive for humanity in the present wild, wild, wild life of this mad, mad world.

Yours, A. Anatol.

Letter to the Soviet Government:

I am remaining in Britain so as to be able to carry on in freedom the work which is the very essence of my life --literature. I took this decision a long time ago, after having thought about it carefully, and I have been preparing to carry it out for a whole year. Nobody else knew about this but me. Conditions of life in the Soviet Union, where everybody is obliged to spy on everybody else and where hypocrisy prevails, does not allow anyone to take the risk of entrusting a single person with such a secret. Moreover, I was twice refused permission to travel abroad. I realized that a third refusal would mean that I would never be allowed out of Russia.

For that reason, I made preparations at the same time to cross the frontier by swimming under water. I have to mention all this so as to make it clear just how serious a matter it was and that no one else was, or could be, involved in my plans. I beg the Soviet Government not to persecute my mother, my son, my wife or my personal secretary. It is bad enough for them already, and it will be worse still, because my earnings were their only means of support. I beg you not to confiscate their possessions and not to deprive them of their accommodation. I swear that they knew nothing at all. I have informed the Soviet embassy in London that I have not the slightest desire to meet any Soviet official. I request you to send instructions to the embassy that I should be left in peace. Strictly personally, for my own part, I have decided that if ever it should be possible for me to meet any Soviet officials or to offer them my hand, it will not be before the U.S.S.R. grants complete freedom to Czechoslovakia and withdraws its troops from there forever. I wish to apologize for the deception to which I had to resort in order to obtain permission to leave Russia. It was a deception forced on me. You have yourselves created the conditions in which it is impossible even to go abroad without trickery.

To the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

After much serious reflection over many years, I have arrived at the complete rejection of Marxism-Leninism. I consider today that this doctrine is utterly obsolete, rigid and naive. It is utterly incapable of resolving the contradictions in society today, and, what is worse, it has led, continues to lead, and threatens to go on leading to frightful social tragedies.

I can no longer remain a member of the Communist Party. I request you to release me from membership of the C.P.S.U. I hereby withdraw from my duties as party secretary of the Writers Organization of the Tula Region. I have left my party membership card there. -

To the Union of Writers of the U.S.S.R:

I, a member of the Union of Writers of the U.S.S.R. since 1959, have written a number of works in which I have tried to be guided by the principles of "Socialist Realism." But with every work I have written, conditions have become more restricted and difficult. After long reflection and much practical experience, I have come to realize the utter falsity, stupidity and reactionary nature of "Socialist Realism."

The most frightful failures and the periods of complete prostration that descend on official Soviet literature are due, I am firmly convinced, to the imposition on it by dictatorial means of "Socialist Realism," and in particular of the doctrine of the "Party content" of literature.

I no longer wish to remain a member of the Union of Writers of the U.S.S.R. I request you to release me from membership and from my obligations as Deputy Secretary of the Tula Regional Writers Organization.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.