The Love-Girl and the Innocent

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander (Translated By Bethell, Nicholas & Burg, David)

ISBN 10: 0370013212 / ISBN 13: 9780370013213

Published by The Bodley Head, London, 1969

About this Item

Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Green cloth with gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 131 pages clean and tight. The action of this four-act play is set in a Stalinist labour camp similar to the one where Solzhenitsyn himself served an eight-year term. The `Innocent' of the title is a new prisoner who doesn't know what's what or how to survive. He falls in love with a girl (`love-girl' is camp slang for a girl who sells her favours for privileges or extra rations) who warns him that in the labour camp integrity is the passport to death. He tries desperately to keep his honour and self-respect; she tries to convince him that to survive one must be ready to sin a little. Finally he realises that the only way he can have her is by sharing her with one of the high-ups in the camp. He will then have extra food, a comfortable job, and the woman he loves. All he has to do is to make that one compromise. The love story is only a small part of the play, which is also a vivid and frightening picture of camp life with its complicated hierarchies, its bribery, `fiddling', `lead-swinging' and cruelty. There is a large cast, ranging from the camp commandant to the `goners' - prisoners who have lost all interest in life. It is an unforgettable picture of Camp-land, `that famous country where ninety-nine men weep while one man laughs'. This is the first publication of The Love-Girl and the Innocent in any language. It reached dress-rehearsal stage in Moscow, but was banned by the authorities at the last moment. It has never been publicly performed. Size: 12mo.

Seller Inventory # 115576

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Love-Girl and the Innocent
• Publisher: The Bodley Head, London
• Publication Date: 1969
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0370013212
• ISBN 13: 9780370013213
• Binding: Hard Cloth Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

. with dustjacket, 1969, clean copy

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In February 1945, while he was captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent internal exile, which was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to Central Russia in 1956. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962--which remained his only full-length work to have appeared in his homeland until 1990--Solzhenitsyn was by 1969 expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of his other novels and, in particular, of The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation from the authorities. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. Solzhenitsyn and his wife and children moved to the United States in 1976. In September 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him; Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.