Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1963) ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’, true signed and inscribed first edition

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn/ Александр Исаевич Солженицын (1963) ‘One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich/ ‘Один день Ивана Денисовича‘, true signed and inscribed first edition, published in the Soviet Union by Sovetskii Pisatel in Moscow. Small square 5.25″ x 6.5″ octavo, original paper wrappers. Presentation copy. First edition in book form of the Nobel Prize-winner’s first published work, with a large inscription on the half-title page by Solzhenitsyn in Cyrillic “Andriy Ilych Terentiev, once my opponent, with time has become of one mind to the delight of the author”. There is also a small newspaper clip in Cyrillic tipped in along the left edge of the half title page from the newspaper “Pravda” dated October 10th, 1970 stating that Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been awarded the Nobel Prize for this book.

Condition: very good with a touch of light chipping to the front wraps with some paper loss to the spine. Text in fine condition. This was a cheap paperback production and most copies do not survive the passage of time in good condition.

Solzhenitsyn found himself catapulted to literary fame by his first published work, not only for its intrinsic merits but for the very fact that the government was allowing fictional treatment of a formerly forbidden topic, life in Stalin’s forced-labor camps” (Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 437). The novel was based on Solzhenitsyn’s eight-year incarceration in a Kazakhstan labor camp. It is the first and perhaps the best example of this 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'”

This novel was the only one of A. Solzhenitsyn’s works ever allowed to be published in the Soviet Union. It was first serialized in the influential literary journal Novy Mir in November 1962 and issued in book form the following year. Nikita Khrushchev himself approved its publication after some censorship of the text. 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. Despite the Thaw under Khrushchev, the hard-lined Russian public was not prepared for such an unrelenting denunciation of Stalinist oppression. It was immediately published abroad, most notably by E. P. Dutton in the first American edition of 1963. Jason Robarts Jr. portrayed Ivan Denisovich in a TV movie that aired on NBC on November 8, 1963. Literaturnaya Gazeta denounced the novel in 1968 as un-Soviet; and Solzhenitsyn was branded an enemy of the people. He was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union the following year. 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. The Nobel Prize Committee mentioned specifically Odin den Ivana Denisovicha in its citation. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and then expelled from his native land and did not return until 1994 after the fall of the Communist regime. Few inscribed copies of this modern classic have ever come on the market.