Голос из хора [Golos iz khora]

First edition, printed in Russian by the London-based Stenvalley Press.

Publisher's red cloth binding, author, title and publisher lettered in gilt on the spine, complete with its two-colour printed dust jacket showing light wear.

A few ballpoint pen annotations on some pages, presumably by the recipient.

Autograph presentation inscription, signed and dated by the author, to Michel Garder: "Дорогому Мишелю Гарде - с глубокой признательностью. На добрую память. 29.I.1975." [To dear Michel Garder - with profound gratitude. In fond remembrance. 29.I.1975.]

A researcher at Moscow's Institute of World Literature and one of the leading literary critics for the liberal journal Novy Mir, Andrei Sinyavsky was also the author of writings mocking the Soviet regime and "Socialist Realism", its officially sanctioned literary doctrine. To evade Soviet censorship, Sinyavsky published these works in the West; the most important among them, the Fantastic Stories, appeared in France in 1958 under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. This "provocation" could not long escape the attention of the KGB: in 1966, the writer was tried for anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to seven years' hard labour.

The present work is one of three texts brought back by Sinyavsky from the labour camp. Голос из хора was published in London in 1973 by Stenvalley Press, a small publishing house associated with tamizdat and Russian émigré circles, amid the growing circulation of Soviet dissident writings in the West. The same press issued the bilingual Russian-English version of the speech Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was to deliver upon receiving his Nobel Prize: published by Stenvalley in 1973, the text had first appeared a year earlier in the September 1972 issue of the Nobel Yearbook of September 1972. Released after six years' detention, Sinyavsky emigrated to France, where he became a professor at the Sorbonne.

Structured as letters to his wife, Голос из хора blends the coarse jargon of the Gulag with reflections on art. Though it left the polite society of Russian émigrés perplexed, it nonetheless won the 1974 Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger in the essay category, and became Sinyavsky's masterpiece. Its French translation was published that same year by Éditions du Seuil.

The presentation inscription enriching this copy, addressed to the fellow Russian émigré Michel Garder, bears witness to the close ties within the Russian diaspora opposed to the Soviet regime. The author of numerous works on Soviet society, Garder also reported on current affairs in the USSR for the weekly Rousskaïa Mysl (Russian Thought), the oldest Russian-language newspaper published in Europe. This newspaper campaigned against the USSR's repressive policy and ideology, championed democratic values and freedom of conscience, and supported the dissident movement; the fate and work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, close in this respect to Sinyavsky's own, were widely commented upon in its pages. It is thus hardly surprising that Michel Garder, an important contributor to the newspaper, maintained close ties with Andrei Sinyavsky.

Rare presentation copy of one of the great works of Russian dissidence, brought back from the camps by Andrei Sinyavsky and inscribed to Michel Garder, a leading figure of the anti-communist emigration.