One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

SOLZHENITSYN, Alexander. [Solzhentizyn].

Item Number: 144064

London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

First British edition of the Nobel Prize-winner’s first published work. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a  fine dust jacket. Translated by Ralph Parker. An exceptional example.

“The speech denouncing Stalin at the 22nd Communist Party Congress in 1961 emboldened Solzhenitsyn to submit One Day for publication to… the Moscow literary journal Novyi Mir. Premier Nikita Khrushchev piloted a special resolution through the Central Committee authorizing its publication; it appeared in November 1962, and 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” (Handbook of Russian Literature). 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” (Solzhenitsyn, Nobel prize acceptance speech, 1970). This, the first English translation, was faithful to the Russian original and necessarily included the “deliberately muted themes” resultant from Solzhenitsyn’s self-censorship required for publication in the Soviet Union in 1962.