Manuscripts Don't Burn

Having started in 1928, Bulgakov burned the manuscript in 1930, only to rewrite and revise it for the next ten years until 1938. In common with most of Bulgakov’s prose it was not published until long after his death in 1940.

During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he wrote for the Moscow Art Theatre. He published a number of novels and stories through the early and mid 1920s, but by 1929 his career was ruined: government censorship prevented publication of any of his work and Stalin personally forbade him to emigrate.

It is a book in which one man, living in a future totalitarian society, finds himself rebelling against the dehumanising forces of an omnipotent dictator. Sound familiar?

The Eastern Origins of Orwell's 1984

The work’s influence on George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldoux Huxley’s Brave New World has been well documented. Huxley however always denied that he had read the work before writing his novel. Orwell maintained that Huxley was in denial, and fully acknowledged that he himself read and reviewed a French edition of the novel some months before starting on 1984.

During the early 1920s, Zamyatin’s masterpiece circulated in the Soviet Union amongst a small literary circle and received one public reading, but was almost immediately banned.

A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in Russian until 1952.

Lifetime edition of a heavily censored collection of poems written between 1909 and 1945 - the first of Akhmatova’s works to be published after the death of Stalin.

Akhmatova (1889–1966) was one of the legendary figures of modern Russian poetry. Her life was one of great achievement and great loss. Her first husband, Nikolay Gumilev, was executed, her second husband, Nikolay Punin, died in the Gulag and her son Lev was also sent to the labour camps. Being one of her country's great lyric poets, she wrote first hand and movingly about Stalin's terror. While fellow poets and artists adored her, she was spied on by the state and finally expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. She survived to become one of the century's most eloquent witnesses to the Soviet nightmare and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965.

More Books Banned in the Soviet Union

Platonov's Chevengur tells of a disastrous attempt to bring about Communism in a small town in central Russia. Originally written in the late 1920s, it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988. Platonov's extraordinary use of words, reflecting both his own inventiveness and the corruption of linguistic meaning in the Soviet Union, unsettles the reader, layering the text with multiple meanings. This, coupled with Platonov's authenticity of voice gives a spiritual profundity to the novel that stretches far beyond its immediate plot lines.

For so many years lost amidst the onslaught of official literature, Platonov's reputation has grown exponentially since the fall of the Soviet Union. Once called 'scum' by Stalin, he has since been described by the translator Robert Chandler as the greatest Russian prose stylist of the twentieth century.

Tsvetaeva's last book of poems - one of only 400 copies for sale.

Written in the early years of her emigration to Western Europe, Tsvetaeva wanted to publish the book in Russia in 1924 on the grounds that it did not contain any political poems. Gosizdat, the state publishing house, however, did not give their consent and so she had to print the collection in Paris four years later, using money she had raised with subscriptions. All of Tsvetaeva's émigré editions were banned for circulation in the USSR.