GULAG Archipelago – the history of repressions, camps and prisons in the Soviet Union (GULAG – General Administration of Camps). The book was completed in 1968.
“The Gulag Archipelago” is both a historical study with elements of a parody-ethnographic sketch, and the author’s memories of the camp experience, and an epic of suffering, and martyrology – stories about the martyrs of the Gulag. The history of Soviet concentration camps is centered on the text of the Bible: the creation of the GULAG is presented as the “turned inside out” creation of the world by God (a satanic antiworld is created); the seven books of the Gulag Archipelago correspond to the seven seals of the Book from the Revelation of John the Theologian, by which the Lord will judge people at the end of time.
The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English, and French, the following year.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined his epoch-making work “The Gulag Archipelago” as an artistic study. This is very accurate. The documentary and journalistic presentation of the innumerable facts of Stalinist repressions with brutal evidence allows every reader to feel like a prisoner of the Gulag: arrested without fault, tormented by night interrogations and sophisticated torture. Signing confessions of uncommitted crimes. The atmosphere of total terror on the one hand, and all-consuming fear on the other, burns and engenders an internal protest against the anti-human system, which distorts the soul of a great nation on both sides of the barbed wire. This work must be read if only for the sake of never again allowing this to happen, in order to remember the value of the acquired freedom every second.
Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of the Soviet Gulag forced-labor camp system.
Solzhenitsyn Gulag “The archipelago arises from the sea” – this is the title of the chapter about the legendary early Soviet Solovki. What are the outlines of the emerging Archipelago? Following the author, we step into a boat, on which we will sail from island to island, then squeezing through narrow channels, then rushing straight channels, then choking in the waves of the open sea. Such is the power of his art that from outside spectators we quickly turn into participants in the journey: we shudder from the hiss: “You are under arrest!” in the neighborhood on death row – and through the comedy “trial”, or even without him, throws us out to the islands of the Archipelago.
With an embarrassment in my heart, for years I refrained from printing this already finished book: the debt to the living outweighed the debt to the dead. But now that the state security has taken this book anyway, I have no choice but to publish it immediately. A. Solzhenitsyn September 1973 .
This is how the GULAG Archipelago begins. The book that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote “on the table” at almost 10 years old. The book, because of which he was expelled from his native country, and then the State Prize was given for it. The book that the KGB was hunting for, and which was first able to see the light of day abroad.
