The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books I-II

An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One)

by , , , , ,

Paperback, 672 pages

English language

Published Feb. 28, 1997 by Westview Press.

ISBN:
978-0-8133-3289-5
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(2 reviews)

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.

64 editions

reviewed The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Well, that was depressing.

A lesson in the Soviet approach to totalitarian population control. Solzhenitsyn thoroughly documents the inhumanity of the Soviet political prison apparatus. Did enjoy it? Uh... no. That's not the point though. It is a documentary monument to those who went through it. In the same period of time (1918-1956) the Soviet Union "accomplished" many things, but it did it while standing firmly on the neck of its own people.

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Subjects

  • European history: from c 1900 -
  • Political imprisonment
  • Inter-war period, 1918-1939
  • Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000
  • Second World War, 1939-1945
  • Literary Criticism
  • Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union
  • History - General History
  • Soviet Union
  • Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe)
  • Penology
  • Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich
  • Concentration camps
  • GULag NKVD
  • Political prisoners
  • Prisons