Books

First edition of Solzhenitsyn's first published book: a celebrated "pirate" edition published abroad without the author's consent. A very good example of the issue with the striking "bearded-man" cover, which Flegon used later in his own book about "the slanderer Solzhenitsyn". There was another cover published, showing a watchtower instead; there is no priority firmly established, the watchtower being possibly the first. The plot of Solzhenitsyn's very first published novel is set in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. The novel was specifically mentioned in the Nobel Prize presentation speech when the Nobel Committee awarded Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. After more than half a century since its publication the significance and influence of the deceptively simple story remains unsurpassed. The novel first appeared in print in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novii Mir…

Published in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir in 1962, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' is one of Solzhenitsyn's most famous works and a hallmark piece of Soviet dissident literature, exemplifying the brutalities of life in the Stalin-era labor camps. Following its publication in the magazine, it was released as a book, with early copies being particularly valued by collectors.