One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich … Translated by Ralph Parker.

Alexander SOLZHENITSYN (1918-2008)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ... Translated by Ralph Parker.

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963.Octavo (7 ¾ x 5 inches). Pp.[1-]192 (including 'About the Author' on pp.191-192).

Condition of contents: light spotting to page edges

Original red boards, original dust-jacket.

Condition of binding: covers excellent, dust-jacket a little discoloured, but otherwise generally excellent

First edition in English of the Nobel Prize-winner's first published work."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" (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'" (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, where it was originally published, in Russian in November 1962 in Novyi Mir. This is first translation of the great novelist's magnum opus - a work which exposed the horrors of the Gulag system, i.e. the terrible Soviet labour camps. The author was very surprised that the book ever made it into print, surprised that anything he had written would ever get published. He later wrote: "During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."

The work was an immediate sensation on both sides of the Iron Curtain, both because of its controversial realism and the fact that, since the 1920s, it was the first piece of Soviet literature to be published on such a dangerous political subject. Because of the book the author became, in general, something of a hero in the West, although his warnings against Communist aggression and the lack of morals in the West were later criticized by American liberals and secularists.