The 1984 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Czech poet JAROSLAV SEIFERT, now 83 and in delicate health. Le Monde welcomed the award for drawing international attention to 'an author who embodies perfectly the spirit of his country, but who has hitherto gone unnoticed beyond the borders of his own land. For two reasons: first, language-who can read the text in Czech?-and second, formal-poems do not play the same fundamental role for us as they do in several other countries.' In Britain, Seifert's work has been published in book form so far only by London Magazine Editions. The editor Alan Ross was happy that a small publishing house should be so honoured. It is not the first time that a Nobel laureate has been available in Britain only through one of the small presses.

Seifert 'embodies perfectly the spirit of his country' in another sense, it would appear from a briefing paper (KK 11) circulated by Index on Censorship on 13 November. 'There are signs that the Czechoslovak regime has been putting pressure on the ageing poet, so that his acceptance speech will not in any way embarrass the authorities.' Seifert is the first Czech to be honoured with the prize. The pressure of the authorities would appear to go well beyond the acceptance speech. It should be borne in mind that Seifert was president of the Czechoslovak Writers' Association before it was officially dismantled in 1970. He was among those cited as 'enemies of socialism'. After he signed the Charter 77 human rights manifesto in 1977 he again came under attack. Up to 1979 his new writing appeared in samizdat only. His earlier work was widely popular and could not be obliterated, but it appeared only in anthologies and very limited editions.

In 1978 the Czech secret police intercepted a letter from abroad which hinted at the danger that he might be awarded the Nobel Prize in his 80th year, 1981. Suddenly his work was taken up and published-a change of policy 'presumably designed to enable the authorities to maintain that Seifert was not a silenced poet, should he be awarded the Nobel prize'. Though Milosz won the prize that year, Seifert's work continued to be published and re-issued.

When the 1984 award was announced, Seifert was in hospital and beyond the range of interviewers' microphones. One person, the Czech poet Jan Pilar, did gain access-he had contacted Seifert before on behalf of the police who wished him to withdraw his signature from the Charter 77 manifesto. Pilar, on his second visit, persuaded Seifert, who was under sedation, to sign a document stating that the copyright in his work belonged solely to the official Czech literary agency Dilia and that he had never given the copyright to anyone else. In fact, in 1970, when he became a virtual non-person in Czechoslovakia, he gave his copyright to Professor Frantisek Janouch, a Czech exile living in Stockholm, and Janouch has arranged for most of the translations of Seifert's work published in the West, The poet is at liberty to change his mind, of course. But if he does so under pressure (his family learned of this development only three weeks after the event), then the 'decision' and its consequences are more doubtful. Seifert lives still in trying circumstances. 'His acceptance speech on 10 December in Stockholm,' Index comments, 'will be written by a hostage.' 'If an ordinary person is silent about the truth,' Seifert has said, 'it may be a tactical manoeuvre. If a writer is silent, he is lying.'

The 1984 Büchner Prize was awarded on 12 October to ERNST JANDL, the Viennese experimental and sound poet. Jandl's most important publications are Laut und Luise, der gelbe hund, Der künstliche Baum and the voice opera Aus der Fremde; his most recent is Selbstporträt des Schachspielers als trinkende Uhr, The Darmstadt laudatio was given by Helmut Heissenbüttel. (MH)

The German Booksellers' annual Peace Prize was awarded at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year to OCTAVIO PAZ, the Mexican poet, who celebrates his seventieth birthday this year.

The East German poet ERICH ARENDT died in September, aged 81. Arendt, who was born in Neuruppin in 1903, joined the German Communist Party in 1926 and in 1933 left Hitler's Germany for Switzerland. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, and spent the years from 1939 to 1950 first in France and then in Columbia, returning to Germany at the age of 47 and settling in East Berlin. He had published poetry as early as 1926, in Der Sturm, but it was only in the 1950s that he gradually established his reputation as poet (Trug doch die Nacht den Albatros, Bergwindballade, Gesang der sieben Inseln, Flugoden) and as translator (of Neruda, Alberti, Aleixandre, Hernández, etc.). Winner of the GDR's Nationalpreis (1952), Ubersetzerpreis (1956) and Johannes R. Becher Preis (1966), Arendt was far from being one of those honoured but empty figures that attract state awards; formalist and inward-looking as it is, his poetry (and particularly the later work in Feuerhalm, 1973) has been of considerable importance for a younger generation of East German poets such as Manfred Streubel, Sarah Kirsch and Wulf Kirsten, so that Fritz J. Raddatz was able to write in 1976 that 'one can say without exaggeration that Arendt's influence on GDR lyric poetry today is greater than Brecht's'. (MH)

The French film director FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT died of cancer in Paris on 21 October 1984. He was 52. Starting as an aggressive critic for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut, along with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, was seen as a leading figure in the 'new wave' in French film-making, but his work, in formal terms, was largely conservative, and the increasing divergence between his films and those of Godard can be compared to the divergence, in contemporary literature-especially the novel-between representational and self-reflexive approaches. In contrast to Godard's attempts, particularly after 1968, to rupture narrative and foreground the process of representation, Truffaut continued to offer, sometimes rather lazily, the pleasures of narrative and identification, of a concern with the individual and personal relationships, of a lyrical humanism like that of Jean Renoir. Among his 22 films, a very enjoyable one is La nuit américaine (1972), an affectionate tribute to the Hollywood movies that fed Truffaut's imagination as a child, and in which he plays a leading role as the director of such a movie. Though on one level La nuit américaine foregrounds the process of film-making, it remains firmly inside a film-within-a-film format. A lesser-known but interesting work is La chambre verte (1977) which, in its portrayal of a young man who refuses to forget those who have died, owes something to Henry James's story 'The Altar of the Dead'. (NT)

On 7 October 1984 the Ukrainian writer VALERY MARCHENKO died in a Leningrad prison hospital. He was 37. His devotion to the Ukrainian language and cultural tradition led him to challenge government policies towards the cultures of non-Russian peoples in the USSR. He was first arrested in 1973 for 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'. Re-arrested in 1983, in failing health, he was given 15 years. He served only one. (Index MF 7)

FAIZ AHMAD FAIZ died on 20 November at the age of 73. He was the leading Urdu poet of his generation, a successor to Muhammad Iqbal, and a master of traditional forms, especially the ghazal. He served in the Indian army during the Second World War in non-combatant roles and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, becoming after independence in 1947 a distinguished editor. He suffered imprisonment under various military governments but emerged under Mr Bhutto and set up a National Council for the Arts. After Mr Bhutto's death he maintained his independence, and his popularity grew. He visited Britain and other countries and edited the magazine Lotus in Beirut. He was a 'national poet' in a very real sense. His contacts in Eastern Europe (he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962) made him a useful diplomatic vehicle, and he served his culture at various levels.

On 12 November a party was given at the Australian Studies Centre in London to launch the University of London monograph, Jack Lindsay: the Thirties and Forties, edited by Robert Mackie. The main guest was JACK LINDSAY himself, now 84. He has lived in England since 1926 and has published well over a hundred books-poetry, anthropology, biography, criticism, fiction, politics, memoirs, etc. Literary students are most likely to know him as editor of the London Aphrodite (1928-29), an exuberant journal which, along with his friend Edgell Rickword's Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-27), represents an early challenge to the stance of Eliot's Criterion. So far were Lindsay and Rickword from Eliot's 'neo-classicism' that they veered towards Marxism and joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, working together on Left Review (1934-38) and Our Time (1941-49). Articles in the monograph cover this ground in detail and also consider the main novels, the poetry (in particular 'On Guard for Spain', written for 'mass declamation' in 1937) and the philosophical shift from Nietzsche to Marx evident in Arena (1949-53) and Decay and Renewal (1976). In a short speech, Lindsay said he felt that a major revaluation of the 1930s and 1940s was in progress.

Lindsay and Rickword are not, in the terms of Donald Davie's PNR 28 editorial, 'impenitent ex-Stalinists'. Both were ostracized by the Party during the Stalin years and lucidly challenged the language of economic determinism. The monograph is available from the Australian Studies Centre, 27-28 Russell Square, London WC1 (£3.00). (Laurence Coupe)

A vigorously unorthodox evaluation of writing in Canada has been produced by a young Toronto critic, B.W.Powe, under the title A Climate Charged (Mosaic Press, UK distributor John Calder). Powe attacks 'Can.Lit.', the officially sustained literary industry designed as a showpiece of Canadian cultural 'maturity' with the universities as the chief source of sanction and place of incubation. 'Then the scholars become the main audience for poetry, fiction, and the serious essay . . . art becomes "Egyptianized", a mummy, fit only for immaculate display in a museum.' Powe blithely takes on the Olympian Northrop Frye whose practice of criticism as non-moral synthesis he rejects and whom he catches in the act of moralizing at the expense of a writer the great Anatomist cannot categorize. Powe provides forthright analyses of Margarets Atwood and Laurence, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler and others, as well as praising the now unfashionable Marshall McLuhan. The book courts the dangers of anti-academicism, outsider's syndrome and a sort of inverted provincialism. But, in assailing 'Can.Lit.', it strikes a welcome blow against organized literary incest and the parochial. It also conveys a message of international relevance: 'No amount of government money, media advice or cultural propaganda can create "instant art" or "character".' (CJF)

A recent issue of the magazine Scripsi (volume 2, number 4, Department of English, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia 3052) features an interview with the old Anatomist himself, NORTHROP FRYE. Though a pioneer of theory, Frye is uneasy about the new theoretical emphasis in literary studies; he feels that knowledge of literature is inductive, 'a matter of reading one book after another', and remarks on how easily undergraduates may 'accept a theory of criticism as a substitute for the experience of literature', Frye points out that he has been mistaken for an American critic because of his theoretical concerns, but he is, of course, Canadian, and he makes some interesting observations about his country. He contrasts a Canadian culture 'built up from dispossessed Tories' and displaying 'the inductive, Burke tradition of limping along from precedent to precedent' with a 'deductive' American culture produced by a Whig revolution and deriving itself from a founding text. Asked about constitutional changes in Canada, Frye expresses his attraction to the notion of a common-wealth that is non-imperialistic, and to the symbol of royalty as something which, since it cannot possibly be earned but only gained by accident, precludes a wholly competitive society and acts as a very potent 'community image'. (NT)

In the artists' community of Peredelkino in the Soviet Union, there has been controversy surrounding the eviction of BORIS PASTERNAK's heirs from the famous dacha-'a wooden facsimile of a Scottish tower', as Andrei Voznesensky called it-where Pasternak lived. The dacha had been preserved as a kind of Pasternak museum, left much as it had been when the poet died in 1960. It had been a place of pilgrimage for Russians and tourists alike. Now it is unmarked with a plaque and quite empty apart from an up-ended grand piano-the Bechstein that Richter played at Pasternak's wake. Pasternak's works-apart from Doctor Zhivago-are now generally available in the Soviet Union. However, his memory is not a cherished one with the authorities and the removal of his family and his works from the dacha is seen as a vindictive act. The dachas of other writers less troublesome to the State are left to their immediate heirs. But Pasternak, even a quarter of a century after his death, remains a problem.

The troubles for General Pinochet in Chile have their literary consequences. Two literary magazines, La Bicicleta and Pluma y Pincel, which though not political are broadly sympathetic to the opposition in Chile, have been banned. At present the temporary ban affects major newspapers too. (Index NC 13)

The VICTOR HUGO centenary is being marked by a fifteen volume edition of the Collected Works to be published by Laffont. The first five volumes will appear next year, and five more will follow in 1986 and again in 1987. The general editor will be Professor Paul Seebacher of the University of Paris. He will be assisted by 20 specialists. There are to be three volumes of novels, four of poetry, two of dramatic works, five of assorted works (critical writings, philosophy, politics, historical pieces, travel writing, and 'fragments'-some previously unpublished). The last volume will be an index of proper names-people and places. Each volume will run to about 1000 pages in length and will cost 120 francs. The first edition will be of 12,000 copies. A grant of no less than 2,000,000 francs has been made available for this astounding mausoleum which may even dwarf the Collected Works of Goethe, so prolific was Hugo.

The Italian Institute in Paris has mounted an exhibition devoted to Futurism and in particular to Futurist books. At the heart of the exhibition is MARINETTI, whose influence-now oblique and attenuated-continues to be felt. In terms of the book, Futurism revealed new possibilities. Words were to be set free within the traditional book form, typography and the use of colour and space were often of equal importance with the words themselves. Over half a century from the birth of Futurism, we can look back on some of Marinetti's and his colleagues' experiments and see in them a prophecy as well as dead-end invention. Taken with the Russian Futurists, the Italians still have much to suggest by way of design and execution. (LW)

Richard Findlater's anthology Author! Author! (see editorial) leaves one in doubt as to whether writing can ever be a vocation to which general laws apply-even laws of the most simple, practical kind. The Author devoted its first decade, Findlater says, 'to the definition and defence of literary property'. 'Material interest' was the only thing, as Walter Besant knew, that would bring writers together. In 1978 the Society of Authors triumphantly declared itself a trade union. This marked a culmination of effort, to be sure, but not perhaps an access of unanimity among the members. It introduced a further distortion, too, into the relations between writers, publishers and agents. In Findlater's anthology, the writer-publisher L.A.G.Strong makes this point forcefully. Earlier in the book Storm Jameson quotes Claudel: 'It is indecent to try to live on your soul, by selling it to the mob'; and Coleridge: 'Never pursue literature' as a trade'- refreshing aphorisms set against the avaricious brilliance of Shaw and the pompous benignity of Galsworthy. Findlater contrives many telling contrasts, orchestrating a debate through the book so that, in the end, every point of view is qualified and attenuated. In an article proposing a national publishing house, Herbert Read states: 'No patronage can confer greatness on an art whose roots are withering in an impoverished soil.' Yet a 1949 editorial, following Read's line without his cavils, declares: 'Authorship has fallen on such evil times that a national plan to make it a field of opportunity again may be the only way of bringing life back into our literature.' Sir Osbert Sitwell, advocating public patronage, asserts that the writer 'realises what the state as patron involves: glittering prizes that soon bring his genius level with that of the contemporary politician. It means pandering to the aesthetic sense of the town council, to that of every oaf, who says "I know what I like".'

Most prescient is V.S.Pritchett, writing in 1940: 'The real economic struggle [for the writer] is going to begin when popular publishing with a huge public finally destroys the gains in status and income which authors have had under the present system of restricted and expensive publishing.' That struggle began in earnest thirty years ago.

Eastern Arts has launched an interesting venture: the first of what one hopes will be a series of Publishers' Tours in their area. The press release for the first tour, which is devoted to authors published by John Calder, promised visits by Eugene Ionesco, William Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Yves Navarre, Nathalie Sarraute and others. The intention is that they should read and discuss their work at various venues-in Wells-next-the-Sea, Cambridge, Norwich, Bedford, Ipswich and Colchester.