Cancer Ward [antikvár]

Letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet WritersMay 16, 1967To the Presidium and the delegates to the Congress, to members of the Union of Soviet Writers, and to the editors of literary newspapers and magazines:Not having access to the podium at this Congress, I ask that the Congress discuss:I. The no longer tolerable oppression, in the form of censorship, that our literature has endured for decades, and that the Union of Writers can no longer accept.Under the obfuscating label of Glavlit, this censorship which is not provided for in the Constitution and is therefore illegal, and which is nowhere publicly labeled as suchimposes a yoke on our literature and gives people unversed in literature arbitrary control over writers. A survival of the Middle Ages, this censorship has managed, Methuselah-like, to drag out its existence almost to the twenty-first century. Of fleeting significance, it attempts to appropriate to itself the role of unfleeting timethat of separating good books from bad.Our writers are not supposed to have the right, are not endowed with the right, to express their considered judgments about the moral life of man and society, or to explain in their own way the social problems and historical experience that have been so deeply felt in our country. Works that might express the mature thinking of the people, that might have a timely and salutary influence in the realm of the human spirit or on the development of a social conscience, are proscribed or distorted by censorship on the basis of considerations that are petty, egotistical, andfrom the national point of view shortsighted. Outstanding manuscripts by young authors, as yet entirely unknown, are nowadays rejected by editors solely on the ground that they "will not pass" with the public. Many members of the Writers' Union, and even many of the delegates at this Congress, know how they themselves have bowed to the pressures of the censorship and made concessions in thevii