I had conducted myself as the struggle demanded until the very last moment in the Soviet Union. I had not slackened in the West either, but could not bring myself to submit to political calculation. If I was now truly in the free world, I wanted to be free: free of all the harassment from the press, free of all the invitations and public appearances. All my refusals were a literary self-defense mechanism, the same spontaneous and unconsidered mechanism (definitely a mistaken one from a pragmatic point of view) that, after Ivan Denisovich had been published, had kept me from going to the
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