Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

I was going through my collection of books and rediscovered some nine books by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. I had been reading his books on and off for about 10 years, starting with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich around 1975. I got to know of Solzhenitsyn after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. It was big news in those days and it started my interest in Soviet literature and story books. The last Solzhenitsyn book I bought was The Gulag Archipelago Volume Two. I never got round to reading the third volume of Gulag because by then, I was already well immersed into my career and at the same time, trying to settle down into a family life.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich This crisp, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Krushchev himself, during the Russian thaw, is said to have authorised the publication of this spare, stark description of life in a Siberian labour camp. (Summary on back cover)

For the Good of the Cause Set in a new provincial school, this is a scathing indictment of the victimisation of ordinary, decent people by Soviet careerist bureaucrats. Solzhenitsyn presents the conflicts between right and wrong, between the freedom of the individual and the harshness of the system with absolute sincerity and conviction. (Summary on back cover)

The First Circle It is the tome of this huge book that is so marvellously new. It has no villians in it - which many people may think shows incredible tolerance. It shows something else, really - that when the world is reduced to guiltless criminals, freaks, narks, nuts and placemen, a loud laugh is more crushing than a howl of agony. (Nigel Dennis, Sunday Telegraph)

Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn, like Oleg Kostoglotov, the central character of this novel, went in the mid-1950s from concentration camp to cancer ward and later recovered. The British publication of Cancer Ward in 1968 confirmed him as Russia's greatest living novelist although it has never been openly published in the Soviet Union. (Summary on back cover)

The Love Girl and the Innocent Drawing on his personal experience, the Nobel Prize-winning author sets this play in a Stalinist slave camp in 1945. His vivid dramatisation creates a terrifying picture of the despair and degradation suffered under a merciless camp regime. (Summary on back cover)

August 1914 Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 is what it promised to be - a classic of contemporary world literature... We can only marvel at the sweep and power of this epic work written in isolation by a man of unbreakable spirit (John Barkham, New York Post)

We Never Make Mistakes brings together Solzhenitsyn's two most famous novellas, Incident at Krechetovka Station and Matryona's House, both of which were first published in the prestigious Russian literary magazine, Novy Mir, in 1963. Both stories form part of the larger canvas in which Solzhenitsyn describes the havoc brought on human dignity by Stalin's bureaucratic and secret police. The title of the book is taken from the concluding remark of a NKVD investigator in this story. (Summary on back cover)

The Gulag Archipelago is a key work unparalleled in Russian or any other national literature. Solzhenitsyn has created it from his own experience of imprisonment and forced labour, and from that of numerous victims of Stalin's Terror and of Soviet prisons and labour camps. The result is a unique and startling national epic that presents the suppressed history of a vicious epoch and clearly documents the system that deformed or destroyed the lives of millions. (Summary on back cover)

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2 With this publication, Solzhenitsyn's staggering achievement becomes more apparent: he has created an enduring and brilliant literary monument to the victims of one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity ever committed and the most complete account of the history, function and scope of the concentration camp system yet written. (Summary on back cover)