A gift book with a handwritten wish and autograph by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

On the title page - "Lyudmila Timofeevna Semak in good memory, sincerely /autograph/ Moscow. 13.11.94".

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a Russian writer, playwright, essayist, poet, public and political figure who lived and worked in the USSR, Switzerland, the USA and Russia.

The life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn turned out to be connected with almost all the turning events in the history of Russia. He was born in the year of the outbreak of the Civil War, never saw his father who died before his birth, survived collectivization with his mother, during the Great Patriotic War he tried for a long time to be sent to the front and finally left to fight in 1943.

In February 1945, he, the commander of an artillery intelligence unit, was arrested right at the headquarters on the front line, sent to Moscow to Lubyanka and soon sentenced to eight years in camps - on charges of espionage and anti-Soviet activities. After being released (and simultaneously managing to recover from cancer), Solzhenitsyn achieved rehabilitation and in the early 60s was even approved by the authorities: with Khrushchev's permission, "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" was published in Novy Mir, which immediately made the writer famous.

The idea to write a narrative about camp life arose from the author in the 50th year in the Ekibastuz camp, where he served his prison sentence. It was a cold winter day. Solzhenitsyn and his partner were carrying a heavy stretcher. These endless camp days were so much alike. They passed into weeks, months, and years. Thanks to this, the author came up with the idea to write the story of an ordinary prisoner and put it in one day.

Since the second half of the 60s, the work has been banned in the Soviet Union and withdrawn from libraries. And only in 1990 it was published again in the writer's homeland.