Solzhenitsyn - A Biography

Solzhenitsyn – A Biography (1972) by David Burg and George Feifer – Hodder and Stoughton – Good Condition

Some writers have difficult careers. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had the sort of career in which publishing the wrong sentence could result in surveillance, censorship, exile, imprisonment or a lengthy and highly involuntary change of address.

In Solzhenitsyn – A Biography, David Burg and George Feifer examine the life and extraordinary rise of the Russian novelist, dissident and former prisoner whose writing became one of the most powerful literary challenges to the Soviet state. Published in 1972, this biography appeared while Solzhenitsyn was still very much a living political problem for the authorities, which gives the book an immediacy rather different from biographies written comfortably after everybody involved has become history.

Solzhenitsyn’s life had already included service in the Red Army during the Second World War, arrest for criticising Stalin in private correspondence, years in labour camps and internal exile, followed by the deeply inconvenient discovery that he possessed both a formidable literary talent and a determination to write about what he had experienced.

Works such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward brought him international recognition while simultaneously ensuring that official enthusiasm for his literary career cooled rather dramatically. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 did not exactly make relations with the Soviet establishment less complicated.

Burg and Feifer trace not only Solzhenitsyn the writer, but Solzhenitsyn the public figure: stubborn, controversial, intensely serious and increasingly symbolic of the struggle between individual testimony and state-controlled history. It is difficult to imagine a government being genuinely alarmed by a novelist today, but Solzhenitsyn operated in an environment where a manuscript could be regarded as politically more dangerous than a weapon, largely because people could read it without permission.

Because this biography dates from 1972, it also captures Solzhenitsyn at a particularly fascinating moment. His later expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, his years in the West and eventual return to Russia were still in the future. Readers therefore encounter the story before its later chapters had actually happened, when both admirers and opponents were still trying to work out what Solzhenitsyn represented and what the Soviet authorities might do about him next.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton, this is an interesting period biography as much as a literary one: a contemporary attempt to understand a man whose reputation was developing in real time amid Cold War politics, censorship, ideological conflict and international attention.

This copy is in Good condition, having survived rather more peacefully than its subject. It may display the usual signs of age and previous ownership expected of a book from the early 1970s, but remains a sound reading copy and an appealing addition to a shelf devoted to Russian literature, twentieth-century history, political biography or books about people governments would strongly have preferred to keep quiet.

ISBN 0340165936.

Ideal for readers interested in Solzhenitsyn, Soviet history, dissident literature, the Cold War, censorship, the Gulag system or the curious period when writing a serious novel could result in an international diplomatic incident.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where troublesome authors are welcomed, censorship is minimal, and the only thing likely to disappear mysteriously is the last copy after somebody buys it.

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