The last days of Pablo Neru-
| the great Poet and Nobel
Prize winner, are described in
€ following article published
? Humanite;
The _ Venezuelan newspaper,
Nacional, reports the account
of Mathilda Urrutia, Pablo Ne-
uda’s widow, about Neruda’s
ast days:
“One could Say that Pablo
4s a happy man. This could be
Perceived in everything he
Tote, though he was forced to

ely and said: ‘Keep all the

€ws from Pablo, for it could
him beyond recovery.’

TV set in front

ive heard of Allende’s death
ough a Mendoza (Argentina)

i

By BORIS KOROLEV
(APN Commentator)

A Tesearcher who will look for
e Solzhenitsyn Archipelago
the latitudes of literature is

Oomed to Columbus’ mistake:

Pe bain of large and small

mie of this author wholly lies
© waters of anti-Sovietism.

Ae word “Solzhenitsyn” can
West € seen in the pages of
{ es newspapers and heard
iS TV Screens as frequently
Pa energy crisis” and
Boi ee » and although it does

i or ees and does not
fool 80ld content of the

against indigestion prescrib-
ye a family doctor, he would
eae talking about in so
a etail. But he is assigned a
React role: it is the op-
% S of international detente
s are pushing him into the
~Scenium of modern politics.
'S Tole there is no mono-
aS ‘to ‘be or not to be’? —
: Zhenitsyn did not exist, he
d have been invented,

d

The Tree and History

a e Story about what Solzhe-
yn 's will answer the ques-
» “Why is Solzhenitsyn?”

n his early childhood Alexan-
Sayevich Solzhenitsyn fell
4 oe That was the family
OF rich landowners, which
deep roots in the
ack-earth soil, The
i knocked
ee tree, and handed over
s to the farm hands who
Weated for the rich Solzhe-
Ae The bruises and bumps

€ got when falling Alexan-
; Olzhenitsyn has entered
in € list of claims he is now

8 to the socialist system.

The October Revolution was
for the Solzhenitsyn
HS ae eee it as an
€ history of the

Ople, Herein lies dhe ideolaat:
Meeting ground between
EB eniteyn and those in the
* who view the October So-

Station, and this announcement
killed him. Yes, it killed him.

“On the day following AI-
lende’s death, Pablo awoke in a
fever, without medical care,
because the head doctor had
been arrested and his assistant
did not dare to go as far as Isle
Negra.

“Thus we were isolated with-
out medical help. The days were
passing and Pablo’s condition
was growing worse. At the end
of the fifth day, I called the phy-
sician and told him, ‘We must
take him to a clinic. He is most
seriously ill.’ -

“All day, he was riveted to
the radio listening to stations in
Venezuela, Argentina, and the
Soviet Union. Finally, he grasp-
ed the situation.

“His mind was perfectly lucid
—absolutely clear till he fell
asleep.

“At the end of five days, I
called a private ambulance to
take him to a Santiago clinic.
The vehicle was _ thoroughly
searched during the trip, and

cialist Revolution as an accident
in human history.

As a feature of the portrait
it should be said that, sensitive
as he is to family offences, Alex-
ander Isayevich does not have a
grudge against Grand Duke
Nikolay Nikolayevich, who in
August 1914 commandeered the
Solzhenitsyns’ Rolls-Royce (and
there were only nine of them at
that time in Russia) and could
have easily become a target of
scathing sarcasm for the author
of the novel “August 1914,”
since he was the supreme com-
mander of the tsarist army.

Defends Racists

However; Solzhenitsyn level-
led all his venom against the
Russian soldiers, whom he de-
scribed in the book as a gang
of marauders, putting the ques-
tion to them: ‘What is your
hope? Can you vanquish a civil-
ized people?”
The civilized people, “accord-

‘

The last days of Pablo Neruda

that affected him adversely.”
The interviewer asked: ‘Were
there any brutalities?”
Mathilda
“Yes, many, and that affected
him visibly. I was at his side.
They made me descend. They
searched me and the ambulance.
It was terrible for him. I kept
telling him: ‘It’s Pablo Neruda.
He is very ill. Let us through.’
It was frightful, and he reached
the clinic in a critical condition.

“Pablo died at 10:30 p.m., and
no one was able to go to the
clinic because of the curfew. I
then had him transported to his
Santiago home, which had been
destroyed, without books, with-
out anything. There we kept
watch, and many people came,
in spite of the times we were
passing through in Santiago.

“When we escorted him to the
cemetery, people came from
everywhere, workers, all work-
ers with hard, serious faces.
Half of them kept shouting,
‘Pablo Neruda,’ and the other
half replied, ‘Present’ This

MILKING (T DRY

ing to Solzhenitsyn — the Kais-
er’s soldiers — marked August
1914 in the following way: 384
people were executed on the
23rd in the Belgian town of
Tamines. On the same day, in
Dinan, the Kaiser’s soldiers
drove a crowd of peaceful inha-
bitants to the town square,
forced the women to kneel on
one side and the men on the
other and shot them. Among the
612 dead bodies there was the
body of a three-week-old child.
He would have been 60 now,
and he would hardly have joined
the ranks of admirers of Solzhe-
nitsyn’s work,

The crimes committed by the
occupationists in Belgium and
France shocked Romain Rolland.
He wrote a letter to Gerhart
Hauptmann: “Who are you, des-
cendants of Goethe or the des-
cendants of Attila’s Huns?”

Did Solzhenitsyn know these
facts? Certainly.. He had: care-:

Urrutia answered:.

| :

crowd entered the cemetery
singing The Internationale in
spite of the repression.”

Mathilda Urrutia then reveal-
ed that on the day of his death
Neruda was to have been flown

fully studied the Russian and
foreign press of that period. Any
wonder then that this “human-
ist” and “Christian” is coming
out in defence of the racist re-
gime in South Africa, slandering
the Vietnamese patriots, bless-
ing the outrages of the fascist
junta in Chile, and calling upon
the USA to prevent the process
of detente?

Any wonder then that among
the most zealous propagandists
of Solzhenitsyn’s “work” are
such relicis of the “cold war” as
the radio stations Liberty and
Free Europe? Or the Hitlerites’
henchman Mr. Orekhovy, the edi-
tor of the magazine Chasovoi,
published in Brussels? A former
retainer of White Guard gener-
als Wrangel and Kutepov, he is
frantically preaching that the
solely worthy form of govern-
ment can be only the tsarist
monarchy.

Apology for Betrayal

Solzhenitsyn’s new book “Ar-
chipelago Gulag” is in fact an
apology for betrayal, a rehabili-
tation of those who hated all
that is socialist, those who in
the years of the revolution, the
civil war, the construction of
socialism and the Second World
War fought against the Soviet
people.

It has been repeatedly pointed
Out that this motif in his work
is autobiographical. The very
start of his literary career was
marked by attempts to rehabili-
tate the traitor Vlasovites. In his
first work, the play in verse
“The Victors’ Feast,’ which he
now renounces, Solzhenitsyn
portrayed Soviet army officers
aS marauders and rapers. He

ave the laurels of the only posi-

tive character to the one. who
helps the mistress of a Vlasovite.
Even Hollywood films at the
height of the “cold war” were
not so heavily spiced with anti-
Sovietism.

Why does he regard the play
as a failure?

Apparently, he is embarrassed
by the literary feebleness of this
work. Solzhenitsyn is surprising-
ly conceited and claims a top
place of honour at the table of
writers: ‘Remember his. words:

to Mexico at the invitation of
President Echeverria, who had
sent a* special plane for that
purpose.

It never came about. The jun-
ta had accomplished its mission.

“The Russian writers older than
me have bypassed the main
theme of our recent history or
touched upon it superficially. So
I must try.” And these writers
who “touched — superficially”
upon the war and revolution
theme include the giants of
Russian literature Maxim Gorky,
Alexei Tolstoi and Mikhail Sho-
lokhov.

One may say: “But® Solzheni-
tsyn is a Nobel laureate!” Yes,
but not in the province of lite-
rature, only in that of anti-
Sovietism. Even Springer’s Welt
stated that “the awarding of a
Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn is a
political demonstration.” And.
Gunnar Fredriksson, the editor
of the Swedish Aftonbladet,
noted that this action “will be
met with approval in certain
circles and organizations oper-’
ating outside the USSR, which,
in particular, are circulating
anti-Soviet leaflets which, under
scrutiny, prove to be essentially
fascist.”

To complete the political
Portrait of Solzhenitsyn, we
shall add the statement of the
U.S. publicist Philip Bonosky:

“In Solzhenitsyn’s works
everything shows that he sim-
ply deeply hates socialism.”

A Worm in the Apple

Who, what political forces
need Solzhenitsyn today? Pri-
marily those who are seriously
frightened by the active imple-
mentation of the Soviet peace
program, which has led to the
relaxation of international ten-
sion. The task of the opponents
of detente is to prevent the
stabilization of peace and the
development of cooperation be-
tween states with opposed so-
cial systems. The means to
achieve this end is seen by them
only in discrediting the Soviet
system. And this is precisely
what Solzhenitsyn is doing. He
is in socialism, like a worm in
the apple, and vilifies the Soviet
system from inside. Should he
fall out of the apple, all the
value of this internal emigree
for its external patrons and in-
stigators will immediately dis-

appear..

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 1974—PAGE 7