Adams had provided the introduction for this first English language edition. A very rare signed copy of Vladimov's most important work.

Signed in Russian by Georgi Vladimov to the copyright page. His novel A General and His Army won the Russian Booker Prize in 1995. Vladimov emigrated to Germany in 1983 and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. From the private library of Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, with his attractive bookplate to front pastedown endpaper. GEORGI VLADIMOV wrote for Novy mir until resigning from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1977, whereupon he established an office of Amnesty International, an officially outlawed organization. Light foxing to page edges, clean text throughout. In this case it’s a beautiful canine silhouette, as the book is told from the perspective of a dog. The series prominently places the main character of each book in perfect profile on the cover.

Quarter black cloth with red paper covered boards. In Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov, the cover is part of a series of silhouetted figures by Melville House. The first book edition was published in Russian language in West Germany in 1975. Originally distributed as a samizdat publication in the USSR. Book: First English language edition and first US edition. Overall jacket condition is Very Good Minus. Preserved in a removable jacket protector. Dust jacket: Spine faded, light foxing to flaps, a couple of short tears to edges. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.Hardback. A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners-but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian)