BEK, Aleksandr Alexander

A good copy of this rare German first edition in original dust-wrapper, text in Russian, portrait frontis. Small mark to f.e.p., first gathering loose with no loss. Cover photograph from Yugoslav film archive. Publisher's advertisements for Solzhenitsyn works bound in back. Used; Very Good Bek's controversial 1965 novel Novoe naznachenie [A New Appointment] was written as a roman à clef centred around Soviet politician Ivan Tevosian, who under Joseph Stalin's period as head of the Soviet Union had been appointed to play a key role in heading the Soviet metallurgical production. The work was completed and delivered to Novyi mir on 15th October 1964, the day of Krushchev's downfall. Although it was published in Germany in 1971, it appeared in the USSR only in 1986. (The editor) of Znamia in which it was published, saw it as an important stage in the perestroika of the journal, and in his introduction to the first instalment described the novel " as [an] account rendered to the times in which he lived, to his contemporaries, to his conscience and to the future". (Woodhouse, 1991). "One of our best authors" Roy Medvedev.