Quote:
Originally Posted by bfisher
I admire your choice of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, but does "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" count as a banned book, since it was actually published in the USSR in Novy Mir. Perhaps Cancer Ward or The First Circle would be more appropriate, as they were not published in the USSR but only circulated as samizdat. It was after he wrote Cancer Ward that he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union.
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Thanks bfisher.
It's been banned and challenged, and not only in Russia. It was initially published in Russia, but banned after a change in power. Here's the relevant paragraph from
an article on the book:
Quote:
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After Brezhnev came to power, Solzhenitsyn's works were pretty much banned, and a black-market rose up where people read his work in secret. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported from Russia in 1974 and his works, including One Day, weren't openly available again until 1989, when the Soviet Union began to crumble. The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991.
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If the link works correctly,
here's a google books preview of the book "Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds" open to the section on Ivan Denisovich. It talks about various U.S. school libraries challenging and sometimes removing the book, often for "vulgar language".
Relatedly, the film version was banned in Finland for many years too.
I think it'd be a great selection for the last banned/challenged month.