10 years after Ivan Denisovich [antikvár]

Author's Note to the English EditionTHE PUBLICATION OF this book is unconnected with my arrival in England for a temporary term of research. I began working on the book in November 1971 long before I received the invitation from my British colleagues, and I completed it at the beginning of November 1972, more than a month before I learned that permission for my trip abroad had been granted.When in December 1972 I learned of the possibility that I might be coming to work at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, my book had already been caught up by samizdat and I notified my English publisher that I intended to have an authorised edition brought out in order to avoid uncontrolled publication of the work. However, after my family and I had been given our foreign travel passports I decided to restrict as far as possible the samizdat circulation of the book and to refrain from publishing an edition abroad so as not to give the impression that my trip was in any way connected with the intention to publish the work abroad, and so as not to create uanecessary obstacles when I returned home in 1973. Our luggage was carefully searched at the Brest frontier-station and we were even subjected to the so-called 'personal examination' (body search); all our papers were scrutinised; but the search revealed that I was not trying to take any manuscripts out of the Soviet Union. The only item confiscated by the customs oflicials was my draft notes on the history of the ancient Russian town of Borovsk - six pages in all.It was after I had arrived in London that my intentions altered, when one of the characters in my book, the Soviet journalist Victor Louis, published an article in the London Evening News on 23 February 1973 claiming that once the USSR had signed the Universal Copyright Convention, Soviet authors who published their writings abroad without the permission of Soviet state publishing houses would be prosecuted. Louis was especially careful to stress that Solzhenitsyn might find himself the victim of severe penalties - up to seven