To Build a Castle (My Life as a Dissenter)

“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.