Provocateur, Pirate, Book Artist, Part II: An Archival Description of the Alec Flegon Papers material Alexander L. Jacobson Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge, Jahrgang 10 (2022), Ausgabe 1, Seite 272 - 285 This article provides a continuation to “Provocateur, Pirate, Book Artist: An Introduction to Alec Flegon” (Jacobson 2020), published in this journal two years ago. Expanding on the biography established in the former piece, this article describes the publisher’s archive at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, focusing on materials which illuminate key elements of Alec Flegon’s life and work. In particular, the article describes material relating to Flegon’s numerous publications of and spats with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; papers on other books issued by the Flegon Press, including first editions of Kotlovan and Sobach’e serdtse; and documentation from the publisher’s personal life. The piece also employs archival images to illustrate Flegon’s creative process, bolstering the claim, first advanced in the previous article, that Flegon was “an insightful book artist, creating critiques of Soviet publishing practice only possible within the medium of the book.” (Jacobson 2020: 240).This article is written in English.
Provocateur, Pirate, Book Artist: An Introduction to Alec Flegon research-article Alexander L. Jacobson Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge, Jahrgang 8 (2020), Ausgabe 1, Seite 240 - 253 This article provides a short overview of the life and work of Alec Flegon (1924-2003), a Russian publisher based in London during the Cold War. Working for the first time with the publisher's archive, the article reconstructs the broad contours of Flegon's life, including his first Western editions of Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, Sobach'e serdtse, and Kotlovan; his frequent disregard for authorial rights; and his series of lawsuits against Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In addition, the article calls attention to Flegon‘s output of bibliographic oddities and false imprints, such as a copy of Arkhipelag Gulag published under the Soviet imprint of Izdatel‘stvo politicheskoi literatury. Based on this and other such works, the piece argues that Flegon was an insightful book artist, creating critiques of Soviet publishing practice only possible within the medium of the book.
