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“This book is important.” —Ronald Reagan
“A landmark book and a human document that remains vital.” —Tom Stoppard
“If human bravery were a book, it would be To Build a Castle.”—Garry Kasparov
A major document in the literature of human rights, Vladimir Bukovksy’s To Build a Castle is a legendary memoir that has been hailed as a vital classic by figures ranging from Ronald Reagan to Tom Stoppard to Garry Kasparov.
At the age of twenty, Vladimir Bukovsky was falsely declared insane and committed to a psychiatric hospital—standard practice for communism's critics in 1963. But the quack doctors and brutal guards who kept him captive didn't realize: Bukovsky wasn't locked up with them. They were locked up with Bukovsky.
In this haunting work, Bukovsky details with equal parts burning outrage and bitter humor the cruelties imposed upon Soviet prisoners of conscience. But he also recounts how he found his inner strength and built a fortress around it—the imaginary castle of the title—in which he could remain safe from the daily assaults on his body and mind.
In To Build a Castle, Bukovsky offers powerful firsthand testimony to the importance of personal integrity and perseverance under seemingly boundless oppression and abuse. For nearly fifty years, Bukovsky's story has inspired dissidents, prisoners, and others trapped by circumstance with a profound truth: Even in chains, you can be free.
A worldwide bestseller when first published in 1978, this new edition, masterfully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell, includes a major introduction by acclaimed political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney.
“A landmark book and a human document that remains vital.” —Sir Tom Stoppard, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love
“Sometimes ironic, sometimes detached, sometimes written in cold fury, but always compelling.” —New Yorker
“If human bravery were a book, it would be To Build a Castle. Bukovsky's memoir serves as testimony to the horrors of totalitarianism, a reference manual of the Soviet gulag during the Brezhnev years, and an unforgettable tribute to the courage of dissidents like Bukovsky. Unfortunately, the book is a reminder we still very much need today, when Western moral equivalence would have us believe that such monsters no longer exist. They do, and To Build a Castle is an essential guide to understanding them, and how to fight them.” —Garry Kasparov, Chairman, Human Rights Foundation
“A huge story we must not forget. Even inside prison, a revolt of the mind is possible.” —Masha Alyokhina, co-founder, Pussy Riot
“One of the great books of the twentieth century.” —John Podhoretz, Commentary
“Vladimir Bukovsky has written an extraordinary account of his life in the Soviet Union. . . . Listen closely.” —New York Times