The Oak and The Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union.

SOLZHENITSYN, Aleksandr I. [Madeleine K. Albright].

$300.00

Item Number: 147594

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980.

First American edition of master novelist and historian Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s personal narrative to publish his work in his own country. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth, bookplate to the front pastedown from “The Private Collection of Secretary Madeleine K. Albright.” Madeleine K. Albright, was the first woman to serve as the U.S. Secretary of State. She acted under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, leading the United States through foreign policy in the Middle East with the endorsement of military action in Iraq. At the 1998 NATO summit, Albright coined the “3 Ds” of NATO, “which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication – because I think that we don’t need any of those three “Ds” to happen.” After her tenure as Secretary of State, she served as chair of the consulting Albright Stonebridge Group and was the Michael and Virginia Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. For Albright’s contributions to foreign policy and relations that defined a century, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Near fine in a very good dust jacket.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and its totalitarianism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". Solzhenitsyn was afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he wouldn't be allowed to reenter. He was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.