Description:

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
n.p., April 24, 1995
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Signed Groundbreaking Book, "A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich"
Signed book
A rare signed copy of "Odin den' Ivana Denisovich." (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). YMCA-Press, 1978. Vol 3 of Collected Works. Design by Polygram, Smolensk. Hardbound with gilt title at spine and possibly rebound. 4.75" x 6.75" octavo, 120pp. The slightest touch of bumping to corners, else very good.

Solzhenitsyn signs on the first free endpaper: "To Alexander Ivanovich, with the same name which is especially pleasing. In good memory of our meeting. A. Solzhenitsyn. Troitse-Lykovo 24 April 1995."

"Ivan Denisovich" was based on Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year incarceration in a Kazakhstan labor camp from 1945-1953. Ironically, Solzhenitsyn had a unblemished record during World War II and was celebrated for his actions; however, he was also a former Communist devotee who had become an enemy of the Soviet state at the end of the war and was imprisoned in the Gulag.

This short novel describes with unbridled frankness a single day in the life of one Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp. Ivan Denisovich is the first and perhaps the best example of the Nobel laureate's belief in the indivisibility of truth and "the perception of world literature as the one great heart which beats for the concerns and misfortunes of our world." (Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1970).

Ironically, Ivan Denisovich was the only of Solzhenitsyn's works allowed to be published in the Soviet Union. It was first serialized in the influential literary journal Novy Mir in November 1962, then issued in book form the following year. Nikita Khrushchev himself approved its publication after some censorship of the text. Despite The Thaw under Khrushchev, the hard-lined Russian public was not prepared for such an unrelenting denunciation of Stalinist oppression. In 1968, the journal Literaturnaya Gazeta denounced the novel as un-Soviet, and Solzhenitsyn was branded an enemy of the people. He was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union the following year.

While the Russians were not ready for the novel's naked and brutal exposé of prison life, Ivan Denisovich was immediately published abroad and eagerly devoured by the international public. E. P. Dutton published the first American edition in 1963, and the very same year, the novel was made into a TV movie that aired on NBC on November 8, 1963.

When it was announced that Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he chose not to retrieve it for fear he might be barred from returning to the USSR because the Nobel Prize Committee specifically mentioned the title Ivan Denisovich in its citation. Needless to say, Solzhenitsyn would be arrested and then expelled from his native land in 1974. He did not return until 1994 after the fall of the Communist regime.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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  • Dimensions: 4.75" x 6.75"
  • Medium: Signed book

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