The Makepeace Experiment

The Makepeace Experiment (1963) by Andrei Sinyavsky, written under the pseudonym Abram Tertz and originally published in French as Lyubimov, is a satirical fable set in a small Russian town whose inhabitants fall under the hypnotic control of a young man named Lyubimov. Through sheer force of will, he briefly reshapes the town's social reality, substituting his own imposed order for the official one, until the Soviet state reasserts itself. Less a conventional dystopia than a darkly comic parable about the nature of power and the ease with which one form of control replaces another. It draws on Russian metaphysical and folk traditions as much as political satire. This first English edition was translated by Manya Harari and published by Harvill Press in 1965, two years after the novel first circulated in the West. Sinyavsky was arrested in 1966, tried in a Soviet show trial alongside fellow dissident Yuli Daniel, and sentenced to seven years of hard labor for works smuggled out of the USSR under his pseudonym.

Hardcover. First Edition in English, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: The Harvill Press, 1965. #10388.
Light foxing to page edges else fine in price-clipped dust jacket.