Day of the Imprisoned Writer

PEN International, a human rights organization of poets, writers and journalists, created a holiday in 1981 to honor imprisoned colleagues around the world Since then, the Day of Imprisoned Writers has been celebrated annually on November 15th Day of the Imprisoned Writer honors writers who have found themselves in captivity for exercising their right to free speech The history of world literature knows many cases of works of art written by authors while behind bars Writers often became victims of political regimes “You may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen,” this is how one of the heroes of the poem NA declared his position Nekrasova This position was close to many writers Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by the Francoists in 1936 for his socialist views, and the poet's books were banned in his homeland until the death of the Spanish dictator Some writers were imprisoned on charges of a domestic nature that were not fully proven The creation of Don Quixote began with the imprisonment of Miguel de Cervantes in 1602 for tax evasion O Henry wrote his first stories while in captivity from 1898 to 1901 on suspicion of embezzling money On November 15, the victims of the Tsarist secret police and the “Red Terror” are remembered The first includes F M Dostoevsky, who kept a diary, which became the basis of “Notes from the House of the Dead,” while in captivity for organizing a coup d’etat from 1849 to 1854 NK Chernyshevsky, who criticized the Peasant Reform of 1861, wrote the novel “What to Do?” during his two years in the Peter and Paul Fortress awaiting sentencing V Mayakovsky was arrested three times in 1908-1909 for connections with a group of anarchist expropriators N Gumilyov and his son L Gumilyov, O Mandelstam, D Kharms, L Andreev, V Shalamov, A Solzhenitsyn, A Sinyavskoy, Yu Daniel These and many other anti-Soviet poets and writers held more than one year in prisons and Stalinist camps The imprisonment, no matter how monstrous it may sound, had a positive effect on the biographies of some of them In 1974, A Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate in literature in 1970, was expelled from the USSR for the book “The Gulag Archipelago” published in the West I Brodsky was arrested in 1963 and sent into exile in the Arkhangelsk region, where he continued to write poetry The poet immigrated in June 1972, and in 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Both writers were greeted in the West as victims of a political regime that helped create auras of martyrs around them The fact of imprisonment had a positive impact on the foreign life and career of both Nobel laureates The words spoken by A Akhmatova during the trial of I Brodsky are widely known: “What a biography they are making for our redhead” However, not all writers’ lives turned out this way Many of them broke down, unable to withstand the pressure of the state machine with its punitive system Talented writers perished in Soviet camps and prisons of other countries In honor of these and other creative personalities who have been behind bars, November 15 is celebrated as Writers in Prison Day