Embarrassing Award

Joyful occasions have rarely been granted Russia's great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His life, like his work, is a chronicle of disaster: prison, concentration camps, exile, cancer and relentless persecution by the Soviet authorities. Still, one exhilarating moment came last year when news arrived from Stockholm that he had won the world's most prestigious literary award, the Nobel Prize. "I am thankful," he said with feeling to Per Egil Hegge, then correspondent for Oslo's Aftenposten, who phoned him the glad tidings in Moscow.

Hegge now reports that the Nobel prizewinner's joy was soon blighted-not so much by the leaders of the Soviet Union but by the government of democratic Sweden. In a short, explosive book, Go-Between in Moscow, to be published this week in Stockholm and Oslo, Hegge adds a disturbing chapter to the record of Solzhenitsyn's misfortunes. Solzhenitsyn chose Hegge to act for him in making arrangements with the Swedish embassy for receiving the award. This was necessary because Solzhenitsyn was under constant police surveillance and the target of fierce attack in the Soviet press for having won the prize. Hegge soon realized that the Swedish embassy in Moscow viewed the choice of Solzhenitsyn as a diplomatic embarrassment. Hegge says that he was told by an embassy officer that any official dealings with the persecuted writer might endanger Swedish-Soviet relations. He calls this "a sterling example of diplomatic servility."

Cheerfully unaware that he was less than welcome, says Hegge, Solzhenitsyn requested that the Swedish embassy provide him with a formal invitation card. Without this, he thought that he might not get past the Soviet policemen ordinarily posted outside embassies. Hegge writes that when the Swedish officials heard of Solzhenitsyn's intention to visit them, they demurred: "We are not exactly begging him to come." The invitation card was refused.

Problematic Ceremony. While the Swedish embassy fretted, Solzhenitsyn decided not to go to Stockholm to receive his award from King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, because he feared that the Soviet government would not allow him to return to Russia. He then inquired if the Nobel Prize could be given to him at the Swedish embassy. The ambassador, Gunnar Jarring, could have acted as the King's representative. At first there seemed to be no obstacle; Jarring's predecessor in Russia had presented the prize to Soviet Physicist Lev Landau in Moscow in 1962.

Hegge says that the Swedish government refused to do the same for Solzhenitsyn. As he reports it, an embassy spokesman explained to Hegge: "We are here to maintain good relations with the Soviet state officials. A ceremony in honor of an author who is being increasingly criticized, with the authorities' obvious approval, is problematical."

Happy and Enthusiastic. Hegge describes his unenviable task of telling this to Solzhenitsyn, whom he met on a Moscow street. Writes Hegge: "Solzhenitsyn came to me very happy and enthusiastic." When told he could not receive his Nobel Prize at the Swedish Embassy, Solzhenitsyn said sadly: "It is too bad I will not get to see Jarring. I had really looked forward to meeting such a famous man."

Solzhenitsyn's friends reacted more angrily, says Hegge; they pointed out that Jarring had given an embassy dinner for the Stalinist novelist Mikhail Sholokhov when he won the prize in 1965. The offense was compounded, they felt, by the fact that Sholokhov had compared Solzhenitsyn to a "Colorado beetle" that should be "exterminated."

Hegge relates that Jarring relented on two points. He received the writer informally for 20 minutes at the embassy and agreed to send a letter from Solzhenitsyn to the Swedish Academy via diplomatic pouch. But Solzhenitsyn emerged, says Hegge, with the decided impression that Jarring would be unwilling to transmit his planned Nobel Prize lecture in the same manner. Solzhenitsyn had intended to spend five months writing the lecture for publication in Stockholm. Since the Soviets regularly confiscate his mail, the pouch was the only means of transmitting it. Hegge is convinced that the Swedish embassy's rebuff was one of the reasons Solzhenitsyn never completed this major literary work.

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