Written while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was still living inside the Soviet Union, Burg and Feifer’s Solzhenitsyn was one of the first substantial attempts to map the life behind One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward.

It follows him from childhood and military service through arrest, the labour camps, exile, cancer, rehabilitation and his emergence as perhaps the Soviet Union’s most internationally visible dissident writer. The book is especially useful now as a document of proximity: it was produced before exile transformed Solzhenitsyn into a global Cold War figure, while the political struggle around his writing was still actively unfolding. 

That proximity also made the biography controversial, as Solzhenitsyn objected sharply to Burg and Feifer’s methods and to some of the material gathered from people around him. Even before publication, the dispute was public. Contemporary discussion treated the book as important precisely because it tried to reconstruct a life whose records, witnesses and manuscripts were all politically dangerous things to possess. 

The contents move chronologically through ‘War’, ‘Arrest’, ‘Sentence’, ‘The First Circle’, ‘Survival’, ‘Exile’, ‘Cancer’, ‘Publication’, ‘Stalemate’ and ‘Protest’, with photographic illustrations throughout.

Abacus / Sphere Books, London, 1973. First Abacus edition. Paperback. Illustrated. Moderate edge and corner wear, rubbing and creasing to covers, with age-toning to text block. Internally clean; binding sound. Good condition.