The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago (Abridged)
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Describes individual escapes and attempted escapes from Stalin's camps.Tags
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"… to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket…" (pg. 161)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's dense, sprawling The Gulag Archipelago is a hard book to appraise, not only because of the sombre weight of its content but because it is impossible to classify. A history, a journalistic account, a personal memoir, a polemic, a piece of philosophy, a cultural document, with some novelistic flourishes in the Russian tradition… it is all of these, and yet none of them stand alone as an adequate qualifier. A 'literary investigation' is how Solzhenitsyn subtitles the book, and that is perhaps the closest approximation.
The Foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the show more book, written by Jordan B. Peterson, emphasises the philosophical aspect of Solzhenitsyn's writing: the totalitarian nature of the gulags ("if you did manage to poison yourself, you would only make the task of the authorities easier" (pg. 353)); the importance of truth ("every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie" (pg. 325)) and free exchange of ideas (pg. 452); the dangerous follies of ideology (pg. 77), regardless of the particulars of that ideology; and, perhaps most importantly, the human nature of both prisoner and guard, including perhaps Solzhenitsyn's finest (and oft-quoted) piece of writing, where he explains how "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart" (pg. 312 – a similar passage is on pg. 75). "If my life had turned out differently," Solzhenitsyn asks on page 73, "might I myself not have become just such an executioner?" These ideas, Peterson correctly identifies, are the greatest riches of The Gulag Archipelago, and his astute Foreword focuses a message that can sometimes be lost in the mass of the book itself.
Peterson has said, elsewhere, that The Gulag Archipelago is perhaps the most important book of the 20th century. If this is the case, it is not because of the dexterity of the book itself, but because of its implications; implications that Solzhenitsyn himself doesn't consistently explore. Even in this abridgement (an excellent one, and one of the few books that is improved by such an action), the great bulk of the book is a litany of dry reportage from the gulags, whether that be Solzhenitsyn's personal reflections, accounts from other prisoners across the Soviet Union, observations on the day-to-day workings of the camps, or passages on how the gulag system was birthed. It is a worthy endeavour – many of these stories would be lost otherwise – but a repetitive one. There are passages with a literary flourish, and sometimes entire chapters with a consistent fire, like 'The Ascent' (pp299-313), but it is often hard to hold on to Solzhenitsyn's thread, even if you can identify it.
Nevertheless, it is an impressive achievement. Even if the book's literary merit is diminished by the fact its difficulty comes more from the density of the content than any literary complexity, just consider how unlikely this achievement is. Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were confiscated by the secret police, his archives were raided, much was written from memory or from fragments – and that's even before you consider the overwhelming nature of writing about a continent's worth of gulag, or the mental hurdles Solzhenitsyn had to overcome in order to process his own personal experience within that system. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the "jerkiness of the book", and when he marks this out as emblematic of Russia's "persecuted literature" during the Soviet years (pg. 470), he's not wrong. The fact that this book was not only conceived, but completed and published, under such conditions is remarkable.
Solzhenitsyn did not intend for the book to be the final word on anything; not on morality or philosophy or human nature, and not even on the Stalinist prison system. Its sole intention was survival. Ending the book with an appeal to "write your own commentaries… correct and add to it where necessary" (pg. 470), Solzhenitsyn shows that he only intended to start a conversation, to protect and then plant a seed. "Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime… no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism – no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler" (pg. 342). Our continued inability to accept this fact – as Peterson writes in his Foreword, we find it much more difficult to identify when the Left has gone too far, compared to the Right (pp xvi-xvii) – not to mention our struggles in assimilating Solzhenitsyn's broader ideas, means that, if you can appreciate the difference, The Gulag Archipelago remains an essential document even if it is not an essential read in the literary sense. show less
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's dense, sprawling The Gulag Archipelago is a hard book to appraise, not only because of the sombre weight of its content but because it is impossible to classify. A history, a journalistic account, a personal memoir, a polemic, a piece of philosophy, a cultural document, with some novelistic flourishes in the Russian tradition… it is all of these, and yet none of them stand alone as an adequate qualifier. A 'literary investigation' is how Solzhenitsyn subtitles the book, and that is perhaps the closest approximation.
The Foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the show more book, written by Jordan B. Peterson, emphasises the philosophical aspect of Solzhenitsyn's writing: the totalitarian nature of the gulags ("if you did manage to poison yourself, you would only make the task of the authorities easier" (pg. 353)); the importance of truth ("every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie" (pg. 325)) and free exchange of ideas (pg. 452); the dangerous follies of ideology (pg. 77), regardless of the particulars of that ideology; and, perhaps most importantly, the human nature of both prisoner and guard, including perhaps Solzhenitsyn's finest (and oft-quoted) piece of writing, where he explains how "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart" (pg. 312 – a similar passage is on pg. 75). "If my life had turned out differently," Solzhenitsyn asks on page 73, "might I myself not have become just such an executioner?" These ideas, Peterson correctly identifies, are the greatest riches of The Gulag Archipelago, and his astute Foreword focuses a message that can sometimes be lost in the mass of the book itself.
Peterson has said, elsewhere, that The Gulag Archipelago is perhaps the most important book of the 20th century. If this is the case, it is not because of the dexterity of the book itself, but because of its implications; implications that Solzhenitsyn himself doesn't consistently explore. Even in this abridgement (an excellent one, and one of the few books that is improved by such an action), the great bulk of the book is a litany of dry reportage from the gulags, whether that be Solzhenitsyn's personal reflections, accounts from other prisoners across the Soviet Union, observations on the day-to-day workings of the camps, or passages on how the gulag system was birthed. It is a worthy endeavour – many of these stories would be lost otherwise – but a repetitive one. There are passages with a literary flourish, and sometimes entire chapters with a consistent fire, like 'The Ascent' (pp299-313), but it is often hard to hold on to Solzhenitsyn's thread, even if you can identify it.
Nevertheless, it is an impressive achievement. Even if the book's literary merit is diminished by the fact its difficulty comes more from the density of the content than any literary complexity, just consider how unlikely this achievement is. Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were confiscated by the secret police, his archives were raided, much was written from memory or from fragments – and that's even before you consider the overwhelming nature of writing about a continent's worth of gulag, or the mental hurdles Solzhenitsyn had to overcome in order to process his own personal experience within that system. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the "jerkiness of the book", and when he marks this out as emblematic of Russia's "persecuted literature" during the Soviet years (pg. 470), he's not wrong. The fact that this book was not only conceived, but completed and published, under such conditions is remarkable.
Solzhenitsyn did not intend for the book to be the final word on anything; not on morality or philosophy or human nature, and not even on the Stalinist prison system. Its sole intention was survival. Ending the book with an appeal to "write your own commentaries… correct and add to it where necessary" (pg. 470), Solzhenitsyn shows that he only intended to start a conversation, to protect and then plant a seed. "Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime… no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism – no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler" (pg. 342). Our continued inability to accept this fact – as Peterson writes in his Foreword, we find it much more difficult to identify when the Left has gone too far, compared to the Right (pp xvi-xvii) – not to mention our struggles in assimilating Solzhenitsyn's broader ideas, means that, if you can appreciate the difference, The Gulag Archipelago remains an essential document even if it is not an essential read in the literary sense. show less
I'll admit it's taken me a while to get through this. Probably six or seven weeks of inconsistent reading. It's not a difficult read, but it's a dense and demanding book that needs full attention and the right reading mood. Somehow it felt like there was a lot crammed on each page - my reading time felt noticeably slow.
Solzhenitsyn is famous for winning not just the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book, but also for supposedly being a catalyst contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union as he exposed atrocities of the most horrendous scale which had been kept silent for decades. The original is a vast book (some 1,800 pages), and I must admit I was glad I was reading the abridged version (still chunky enough at close to 500 show more pages), but still - it's a terrifically enlightening, engaging and horrifying read. I appreciated that in this abridged version at least, each chapter was relatively short so I could attack it in small chunks.
Despite it's sombre subject matter of the Russian gulags, where millions of Russians were sent for 'political crimes' (no one can quite authenticate the numbers on how many people died - somewhere between 1.6 million and 60 million depending on where you take your facts from; Solzhenitsyn believed in the region of 20 million), I was surprised that Solzhenitsyn keeps his tone light and almost playful throughout. He served 8 years in the gulags himself, and it's as if it was all so utterly insane that he could only write of it with almost fun-poking incredulity at the sheer audacity of the Soviet regime barbarism.
There's a nice logic to how he sets out the book, from arrests to interrogation to prison transits to life in the camps, followed by exile. Occasionally Solzhenistyn writes of his own memories, but in most of the book he is giving his voice to the stories of others. Much of it is almost too cruel and insane to take in. He tells of a man arrested whilst having his stomach operated on, lifted out of the operating theatre with his innards hanging out. Of people tortured with no sleep for days on end, or with bright lights shone unceasingly in their eyes. Of ten and twenty-five year sentences handed out for absurd 'political' reasons to keep the jails full and work gangs on the railroads and canals supplied with free labour. Of men sent out to work in the depths of winter in thin, tattered clothes and shoes in snowfall up to their waist for 12 hours before a walk of several miles back to huts which may not have even had a roof on, never mind heating. Of women paraded naked upon arrest so the prison officers could choose who they fancied to 'have'. And if you survived the near starvation, hard labour and horrendous conditions to get to the end of your sentence (which could randomly have more time added on to it at will), then the enforced exile to Kazakhstan or Siberia (if you were lucky, as there at least you might have a chance of picking up some work, whereas if you were released into 'regular' society without banishment you had little hope of being accepted back into society).
It's a book that feels as important now as when first released back in 1985. My knowledge on Russian history is potted, and I felt that reading about where the country has come from during this era of the gulags helped me to understand better current behaviours that we now see taking place on the world stage in the 21st century. Can we verify all of Solzhenitsyn's facts? Of course not, but the passage of time has gradually laid bare the atrocities of the gulags from enough sources for us to take what he tells us as a reasonable truth.
4 stars - a really engaging and eye-opening historical read. show less
Solzhenitsyn is famous for winning not just the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book, but also for supposedly being a catalyst contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union as he exposed atrocities of the most horrendous scale which had been kept silent for decades. The original is a vast book (some 1,800 pages), and I must admit I was glad I was reading the abridged version (still chunky enough at close to 500 show more pages), but still - it's a terrifically enlightening, engaging and horrifying read. I appreciated that in this abridged version at least, each chapter was relatively short so I could attack it in small chunks.
Despite it's sombre subject matter of the Russian gulags, where millions of Russians were sent for 'political crimes' (no one can quite authenticate the numbers on how many people died - somewhere between 1.6 million and 60 million depending on where you take your facts from; Solzhenitsyn believed in the region of 20 million), I was surprised that Solzhenitsyn keeps his tone light and almost playful throughout. He served 8 years in the gulags himself, and it's as if it was all so utterly insane that he could only write of it with almost fun-poking incredulity at the sheer audacity of the Soviet regime barbarism.
There's a nice logic to how he sets out the book, from arrests to interrogation to prison transits to life in the camps, followed by exile. Occasionally Solzhenistyn writes of his own memories, but in most of the book he is giving his voice to the stories of others. Much of it is almost too cruel and insane to take in. He tells of a man arrested whilst having his stomach operated on, lifted out of the operating theatre with his innards hanging out. Of people tortured with no sleep for days on end, or with bright lights shone unceasingly in their eyes. Of ten and twenty-five year sentences handed out for absurd 'political' reasons to keep the jails full and work gangs on the railroads and canals supplied with free labour. Of men sent out to work in the depths of winter in thin, tattered clothes and shoes in snowfall up to their waist for 12 hours before a walk of several miles back to huts which may not have even had a roof on, never mind heating. Of women paraded naked upon arrest so the prison officers could choose who they fancied to 'have'. And if you survived the near starvation, hard labour and horrendous conditions to get to the end of your sentence (which could randomly have more time added on to it at will), then the enforced exile to Kazakhstan or Siberia (if you were lucky, as there at least you might have a chance of picking up some work, whereas if you were released into 'regular' society without banishment you had little hope of being accepted back into society).
It's a book that feels as important now as when first released back in 1985. My knowledge on Russian history is potted, and I felt that reading about where the country has come from during this era of the gulags helped me to understand better current behaviours that we now see taking place on the world stage in the 21st century. Can we verify all of Solzhenitsyn's facts? Of course not, but the passage of time has gradually laid bare the atrocities of the gulags from enough sources for us to take what he tells us as a reasonable truth.
4 stars - a really engaging and eye-opening historical read. show less
The most obvious feature of The Gulag Archipelago is its scale. The original books themselves are huge: three dictionary-sized tomes; the enormities they recount are so vast that they can be difficult to fathom. Solzhenitsyn bears witness to the suffering and death of millions of people on one of the world's largest landmasses over several decades. Although I generally avoid abridgements, this single volume seems the most feasible way to read this hugely important work. Some caveats are needed for the potential reader: The book is, as Solzhenitsyn says more than once, monotonous. It tells of suffering, brutality and systematic dehumanisation – over and over again. This is a reflection on the barbarism of the regime rather than the show more author's literary style, but, unlike the concentration camp accounts written by Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl, there is no redemptive ending here. Another caveat is that Solzhenitsyn was writing for a contemporary Russian audience, and so uses many names of people and institutions that might be unfamiliar to today's western readers; these are glossed at the end of the book (which I did not realise until I had completed it). The Gulag Archipelago is wry, bitter and potentially soul-crushing; there is much wisdom on offer here if you can stomach the horrifying context. The new introduction by Jordan Peterson is excellent. show less
Firstly a note on the edition - this is the ABRIDGED version, but it was authorised by the author, as the original runs to 1800 pages in some editions and would be too much for most non-specialised readers. On the whole I think the abridgement is impressive, but if you value your sanity, you should skip Jordan Peterson's introduction unless you like being talked down to by aggressively right wing Americans. I read the book for a discussion in the Reading the 20th Century group, and I am glad I did, though it is not an easy read and there might have been better ways to start a new reading year.
Solzhenitsyn's own experience of the gulags is a key source, but he also accumulated stories from many others - this edition also contains a show more glossary of names which identifies which of them were among his witnesses. While there is inevitably a degree of political spin, it is humanity, laced with a surprising amount of dry humour, that characterise the authorial voice, despite the grimmest of subject matter - the list of torture techniques employed by Soviet investigators is long and detailed, and the sheer scale of the atrocities becomes mind-numbing.
The book broadly follows the experience of a political prisoner (zek) as he passes through the system, so the first part is about arrest, interrogation and initial prison experiences, and it is quite some time before we reach the main subject, life in Stalin's camps. Right at the end we get a little about release and its aftermath.
Solzhenitsyn also challenges the widely held view that the atrocities were largely confined to Stalin's famous purges of the 1930s - his list of state casualties starts with the Revolution and continues right through to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. There is also quite a lot on how the Bolsheviks tightened and massively extended the systems of repression developed by the Tsars.
This is a monumental and sobering book that had to be written for the many victims whose stories can never be fully told (and it is oddly comforting to think that there are much worse places to be than a western country in the throes of a pandemic), but it is never a comfortable one to read. show less
Solzhenitsyn's own experience of the gulags is a key source, but he also accumulated stories from many others - this edition also contains a show more glossary of names which identifies which of them were among his witnesses. While there is inevitably a degree of political spin, it is humanity, laced with a surprising amount of dry humour, that characterise the authorial voice, despite the grimmest of subject matter - the list of torture techniques employed by Soviet investigators is long and detailed, and the sheer scale of the atrocities becomes mind-numbing.
The book broadly follows the experience of a political prisoner (zek) as he passes through the system, so the first part is about arrest, interrogation and initial prison experiences, and it is quite some time before we reach the main subject, life in Stalin's camps. Right at the end we get a little about release and its aftermath.
Solzhenitsyn also challenges the widely held view that the atrocities were largely confined to Stalin's famous purges of the 1930s - his list of state casualties starts with the Revolution and continues right through to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. There is also quite a lot on how the Bolsheviks tightened and massively extended the systems of repression developed by the Tsars.
This is a monumental and sobering book that had to be written for the many victims whose stories can never be fully told (and it is oddly comforting to think that there are much worse places to be than a western country in the throes of a pandemic), but it is never a comfortable one to read. show less
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is a history of the Soviet Russian system of forced labor concentration camps from 1918 to 1956. The preface by Anne Applebaum says it destroyed the prestige of the Soviet Union and the belief that its version of communism, at least, had any moral legitimacy and as such this isn't just history--it made history. It originally circulated in 1974 underground from hand to hand in unbound typed manuscripts. The subtitle is "an experiment in literary investigation." Solzhenitsyn had no "access to archival documents or government records" so, as he explains in his own introduction, the history is based on "reports, memoirs and letters by 227 witnesses"--including himself since he famously was an inmate of the show more Gulag system.
The tone of this is no detached, sober history. It's a scathing indictment of a brutal, surreal system with flashes of the blackest of humor and sharpest of ironies. I'm not about to forget, for instance, the tale of an auditorium of people applauding Stalin for over ten exhausting minutes because they all were afraid to be the first to stop. And the man who did was arrested. It's written in a powerful, very personal voice worthy of literary fiction--absolutely absorbing and despite the length not at all the slog I thought it would be. Not that some parts were not hard to read. In the beginning because so much is horrific, even for someone like me who has read first hand accounts of the Holocaust. And later the torrent of misery became numbing--I particularly started feeling that in the midst of reading about the Soviet "show trials" of the 1930s. It might be best to give this book a rest in the middle before continuing on afresh. And mind you--this edition--and all of those I've seen for sale in bookstores, is only the first two volumes of a seven-volume work.
This is a tour through islands of man-made hells and the contours of the police state by one who knew the territory intimately. In that regard, the chapters "The Arrest" and "The Interrogation" particularly stand out. Solzhenitsyn listed techniques ranging from sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings and starvation to practices so barbaric, I flinch away at repeating them here. The Soviets could have taught the Gestapo a thing or two on torture. Solzhenitsyn recounts reading about a woman who was interrogated in a Nazi Camp and survived without giving away any information. Many, he said, would consider her a "model of a heroine." But Solzhenitsyn observes that "for a reader with a bitter Gulag past it's a model of inefficient interrogation" since she didn't "die under torture" nor was "driven insane." But above all what I think I will take away from this book is expressed in this quote: He says that "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts." show less
The tone of this is no detached, sober history. It's a scathing indictment of a brutal, surreal system with flashes of the blackest of humor and sharpest of ironies. I'm not about to forget, for instance, the tale of an auditorium of people applauding Stalin for over ten exhausting minutes because they all were afraid to be the first to stop. And the man who did was arrested. It's written in a powerful, very personal voice worthy of literary fiction--absolutely absorbing and despite the length not at all the slog I thought it would be. Not that some parts were not hard to read. In the beginning because so much is horrific, even for someone like me who has read first hand accounts of the Holocaust. And later the torrent of misery became numbing--I particularly started feeling that in the midst of reading about the Soviet "show trials" of the 1930s. It might be best to give this book a rest in the middle before continuing on afresh. And mind you--this edition--and all of those I've seen for sale in bookstores, is only the first two volumes of a seven-volume work.
This is a tour through islands of man-made hells and the contours of the police state by one who knew the territory intimately. In that regard, the chapters "The Arrest" and "The Interrogation" particularly stand out. Solzhenitsyn listed techniques ranging from sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings and starvation to practices so barbaric, I flinch away at repeating them here. The Soviets could have taught the Gestapo a thing or two on torture. Solzhenitsyn recounts reading about a woman who was interrogated in a Nazi Camp and survived without giving away any information. Many, he said, would consider her a "model of a heroine." But Solzhenitsyn observes that "for a reader with a bitter Gulag past it's a model of inefficient interrogation" since she didn't "die under torture" nor was "driven insane." But above all what I think I will take away from this book is expressed in this quote: He says that "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts." show less
It was not until late high school that I began to develop an interest in Russian history. This is curious, not that it was so late, but that it happened at all. American history classes are woefully ignorant of the nuances of Russian history. It is often distilled to a very brief summary that the Soviet Union was involved in WWII, yes, and then the Cold War, with its space race and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Certain exceptional schools may even briefly mention the detente and an exceptionally bright pupil may have some inkling of Kruschev and gulag.
This book is a tour-de-force of Russian history, the history that no one remarks upon and everyone shamefully ignores. With poetic prose and passion, Solzhenitsyn recounts the atrocities of show more gulag life, weaving survivors' histories (as well as some stories handed to him from those who did not survive, but remained preserved in his memory) with his own horrific experiences. He condemns those liberals who praised communism and ignored its hatred, its horrors, and its heinousness. He does not spare Western sensibilities, but talks about how British and American troops and politicians handed over Russians who pleaded not to be taken back, and who even sometimes committed suicide en masse to avoid the fate they knew awaited them back in Mother Russia. Should we feel embarrassed on account of our fathers and forefathers? Yes. We should be teaching these things in our schools, not avoiding them to spare our own embarrassment.
Some of the stories he tells are Kafka-esque; tragicomic, he calls them, such as the case of the captive audience who desperately applauded a speech but were afraid to be the first to stop - and of course, the one who finally did, was arrested. He was told that you should never be the first to stop. It is difficult to imagine what a system so horrifically twisted and corrupted could be like, but Solzhenitsyn provides account after account, a surfeit of helplessness and aburdist tragedy.
The book can be dense and hard to read, probably due to its translation (this is not to say that the translation is not accurate, but it is evident at some points that smoothness was sacrificed for accuracy), but it should be read. It should be remembered. It should be taken as a warning and, more importantly, as a memorial for those who lost their souls and died in ignominy and were forgotten in mass graves in parks and snow and camps far away. show less
This book is a tour-de-force of Russian history, the history that no one remarks upon and everyone shamefully ignores. With poetic prose and passion, Solzhenitsyn recounts the atrocities of show more gulag life, weaving survivors' histories (as well as some stories handed to him from those who did not survive, but remained preserved in his memory) with his own horrific experiences. He condemns those liberals who praised communism and ignored its hatred, its horrors, and its heinousness. He does not spare Western sensibilities, but talks about how British and American troops and politicians handed over Russians who pleaded not to be taken back, and who even sometimes committed suicide en masse to avoid the fate they knew awaited them back in Mother Russia. Should we feel embarrassed on account of our fathers and forefathers? Yes. We should be teaching these things in our schools, not avoiding them to spare our own embarrassment.
Some of the stories he tells are Kafka-esque; tragicomic, he calls them, such as the case of the captive audience who desperately applauded a speech but were afraid to be the first to stop - and of course, the one who finally did, was arrested. He was told that you should never be the first to stop. It is difficult to imagine what a system so horrifically twisted and corrupted could be like, but Solzhenitsyn provides account after account, a surfeit of helplessness and aburdist tragedy.
The book can be dense and hard to read, probably due to its translation (this is not to say that the translation is not accurate, but it is evident at some points that smoothness was sacrificed for accuracy), but it should be read. It should be remembered. It should be taken as a warning and, more importantly, as a memorial for those who lost their souls and died in ignominy and were forgotten in mass graves in parks and snow and camps far away. show less
Note: This is my fourth review of a non-fiction book, first on good reads. As a policy I don't give ratings for non-fiction works, I'm perfectly happy to let my personal biases reflect my opinions of non-fiction work, but I'd rather reflect on non-fiction as it is, than let how much I agree with it impact how much I like it
I just got around to reading Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago', I read the abridged because I'm too much of a pussy to read 3 volumes of this.
The more recent editions prologue is written by Jordan Peterson, I didn't hate the prologue, I actually largely like Peterson as controversial as that is, but I do think that took away from the rest of the book. Peterson was (unsurprisingly) far more political than the book show more intended to be and probably would have turned some readers off from an otherwise highly valuable book
I learned a lot more about the operations of secret police than I expected too.
On the treatment of people in gulags, in some ways, it was much better than I expected, in some ways it was worse. My expectations were pretty low so I guess that was unsurprising.
We then get to the line, Solzhenitsyn's most famous quote, one I was familiar with well before reading this book, it's poetic, and probably would have been even more profound in the unabridged than the abridged version. "In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible", I mean maybe I'm wrong but had I read more about Solzhenitsyn's backstory, much of which, as I've been told, was cut from the unabridged version that already powerful quote might have been even moreso
But one thing I didn't know before reading which I love even more now, was directly after that quote, Solzhenitsyn says something I've been echoing for years, the importance of the Nuremberg trials. Putting evil on trial and actually giving evil a fair trial when doing so
I actually view the Nuremberg trials alongside the US Constitution as two of the pinnacles of morality in human history, and I was really happy to see Solzhenitsyn had similar sentiments, especially because he's a much better person than I am show less
I just got around to reading Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago', I read the abridged because I'm too much of a pussy to read 3 volumes of this.
The more recent editions prologue is written by Jordan Peterson, I didn't hate the prologue, I actually largely like Peterson as controversial as that is, but I do think that took away from the rest of the book. Peterson was (unsurprisingly) far more political than the book show more intended to be and probably would have turned some readers off from an otherwise highly valuable book
I learned a lot more about the operations of secret police than I expected too.
On the treatment of people in gulags, in some ways, it was much better than I expected, in some ways it was worse. My expectations were pretty low so I guess that was unsurprising.
We then get to the line, Solzhenitsyn's most famous quote, one I was familiar with well before reading this book, it's poetic, and probably would have been even more profound in the unabridged than the abridged version. "In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible", I mean maybe I'm wrong but had I read more about Solzhenitsyn's backstory, much of which, as I've been told, was cut from the unabridged version that already powerful quote might have been even moreso
But one thing I didn't know before reading which I love even more now, was directly after that quote, Solzhenitsyn says something I've been echoing for years, the importance of the Nuremberg trials. Putting evil on trial and actually giving evil a fair trial when doing so
I actually view the Nuremberg trials alongside the US Constitution as two of the pinnacles of morality in human history, and I was really happy to see Solzhenitsyn had similar sentiments, especially because he's a much better person than I am show less
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucusus Mountains. He received a degree in physics and math from Rostov University in 1941. He served in the Russian army during World War II but was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons and labor camps and, show more later, exile, before being allowed to return to central Russia, where he worked as a high school science teacher. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was arrested for treason and exiled following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to Switzerland and later the U. S. where he continued to write fiction and history. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to his homeland. His other works include The First Circle and The Cancer Ward. He died due to a heart ailment on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
- Original title
- Arkhipelag Gulag, 1918-1956
- Important places
- USSR
- Epigraph
- In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness. - Krylenko, speech at the Promparty trial
- Dedication
- I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for nt having divined all of it.
- First words
- How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago?
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And our younger brothers would only look at us contemptuously: Oh, you stupid dolts!
- Original language
- Russian
- Disambiguation notice
- Aleksandr Solzhenistyn's The Gulag Archipelago has been published in a number of formats, and is catalogued in a variety of ways. The complete work consists of seven parts, often divided into three volumes as follow: V... (show all)olume One, consisting of Part I ("The Prison Industry") and Part II ("Perpetual Motion"); Volume Two, consisting of Part III ("The Destructive-Labor Camps") and Part IV ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"); and Volume III, consisting of Part V ("Katorga"), Part VI ("Exile") and Part VII ("Stalin Is No More").
THIS LT WORK IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE ABRIDGED EDITION.
Please do not combine it with other copies having materially different content (e.g., Parts I-II, Parts III-IV, Parts V-VII, the complete work, an omnibus [such as Parts I-VI], any individual Part, or the abridged version). Thank you.
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- 365.450947 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Punishment Institutions for specific classes of inmates Institutions for political prisoners and related groups of people
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- HV9713 .S6413 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminal justice administration Penology. Prisons. Corrections By region or country
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