The Soul of the Censor

David Levine Alexander Solzhenitsyn

What is censorship?

If the concept of censorship is extended to everything, it means nothing. It should not be trivialized. Although I would agree that power is exerted in many ways, I think it crucial to distinguish between the kind of power that is monopolized by the state (or other constituted authorities such as religious organizations in some cases) and power that exists everywhere else in society. Censorship as I understand it is essentially political; it is wielded by the state.

Not that all states impose sanctions in the same way. Their actions might be arbitrary, but they clothe them in procedures that had a tincture of legality. One of the striking aspects of the dossiers from the Bastille is the effort by the police to ferret out clues and establish guilt by rigorous interrogations, even though the prisoners had no legal defense. Under the pressure of circumstances, trials in the British Raj returned the expected verdicts, yet they adopted elaborate ceremonies to act out the rule of British law and affirm the fiction of freedom of the press. Walter Jankas conviction in Berlin for publishing an author who fell out of favor (Lukcs) was a ceremony of a different kind: a show trial orchestrated in Stalinist fashion to launch a purge and to signal a change in the Party line. The line determined legitimacy in a system that had no room for civil rights.

Reading was an essential aspect of censoring, not only in the act of vetting texts, which often led to competing exegeses, but also as an aspect of the inner workings of the state, because contested readings could lead to power struggles, which sometimes led to public scandals. Not only did censors perceive nuances of hidden meaning, but they also understood the way published texts reverberated in the public. Their sophistication should not be surprising in the case of the GDR, because they included authors, scholars, and critics. Eminent authors also functioned as censors in eighteenth-century France, and the surveillance of vernacular literatures in India was carried out by learned librarians as well as district officers with a keen eye for the folkways of the natives. To dismiss censorship as crude repression by ignorant bureaucrats is to get it wrong. Although it varied enormously, it usually was a complex process that required talent and training and that extended deep into the social order.

It also could be positive. The approbations of the French censors testified to the excellence of the books deemed worthy of a royal privilege. They often resemble promotional blurbs on the back of the dust jackets on books today. Column 16 in the secret catalogues of the India Civil Service sometimes read like modern book reviews, and they frequently lauded the books they kept under surveillance. While acting as censors, East German editors worked hard to improve the quality of the texts they vetted. Despite its ideological function, the reworking of texts had resemblances to the editing done by professionals in open societies. From start to finish, the novels of the GDR bore the marks of intervention by the censors. Some censors complained that they had done most of the work.

Negotiation occurred at every level, but especially at the early stages when a text began to take shape. That did not happen in the Raj, where censorship was restricted to post-publication repression, nor did it affect the literature that circulated outside the system in eighteenth-century France. But even Voltaire, when he published legal or quasi-legal works, negotiated with censors, their superiors, influential intermediaries, and the police. He knew how to manipulate all the gears and levers of the power apparatus, and he was an expert in using it for his benefit. For East German authors like Erich Loest and Volker Braun, negotiation was so important that it could hardly be distinguished from the publication process. They sometimes spent more time haggling over passages than writing them. The parties on both sides understood the nature of the give-and-take. They shared a sense of participating in the same game, accepting its rules, and respecting their opposite number.

Consider Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns account of his experience in The Oak and the Calf, published in 1975, a year after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. When you open it, you expect to encounter the voice of a prophet, crying in the wilderness; and you wont be disappointed, for Solzhenitsyn casts himself as a Jeremiah. Yet he recounts much of his story in a surprising register: shrewd, precise, ironic, and sociologically rich observations of how literature functioned as a power system in a Stalinist society. We meet him first in the gulag. During eight years of labor in the prison camps, he writes about the misery around him, and he continues writing after his release while living miserably as a teacher. He writes in isolation and with total freedom, because he knows he cannot publish anything. His words will not be read until long after his death. But he must keep them secret. He memorizes them, writes them in a minute hand on thin strips of paper, and rolls the paper into cylinders, which he squeezes into a bottle and buries in the ground. As manuscript follows manuscript, he continues to hide them in the safest, most unlikely places. Then, to his amazement, Khrushchev denounces the excesses of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961, and Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, the most important review in the USSR, proclaims a readiness to publish bolder texts. Solzhenitsyn decides to take a risk. He rewrites, in milder form, the work that will eventually break through the wall of silence about the atrocities of the gulag under the title A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and he submits it to Novy Mir.

At this point, Solzhenitsyns narrative turns into a kind of sociology. He describes all the editors at the review, their rivalries, self-protective maneuvers, and struggles to stifle the bomb that he has planted in their midst. Aleksandr Dementyev, the intelligent, duplicitous agent of the Central Committee of the Party, sets traps and erects barriers during editorial conferences, but Tvardovsky is torn. As a genuine poet with roots in the peasantry, his first loyalty was to Russian literature, with its devout belief in the moral duty of the writer. Yet he also felt compelled by the Partys truth. In the end, he prevails over his own doubts and the doubters on the staff, and he goes over the manuscript line by line with Solzhenitsyn, negotiating changes. Solzhenitsyn is willing to make them, up to a point, because he understands that the text must be modified enough to pass through the obstacle course that constitutes literary reality.

The course itself is describedleaked copies, huddled conversations in corridors of power, a reading before Khrushchev in his dacha, and approval by the Presidium (Politburo). The official censors, kept in the dark, are horrified when they see the proofs. But they praise the book when it goes to press, having been informed at the last minute that it received the approval of the Central Committee. The work creates a sensation, and it could have been followed by the other books that Solzhenitsyn has prepared; but he holds them back, unwilling to make the necessary modificationsa strategic mistake, he sees in retrospect, because the window of opportunity will close when Brezhnev succeeds Khrushchev in 1964 and a new wave of Stalinization shuts down genuine literature, driving Solzhenitsyn, now notorious, into exile. For all its vivid detail, backed up by a great deal of documentation, the story does not come across as a journalistic expos. Nor does it invoke a Western view of freedom of speech. In a specifically Russian idiom, it proclaims a prophetic view of literature as a vehicle of truth.

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The Soul of the Censor