The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

an experiment in literary investigation Perennial classics

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Paperback, 472 pages

English language

Published Sept. 6, 2002 by Perennial.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-000776-8

(20 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.

69 editions

Eduardo Santiago reviewed gulag archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Review of 'gulag archipelago' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Painful in so many ways. Not entirely comprehensible to a Western reader, but the rest is gut-wrenching and horrifying; possibly even a warning about what may be coming for the U.S. if the republicans have their way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lost humanity of the torturers and guards. How did they get that way? What happens to such monsters? And are we breeding a new set of those in our U.S. southern border?

I don’t know if I’ll be able to read Volume 2: “And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be ... worse.” (Spoiler alert: Volume 1—this one—is an unrelenting catalog of atrocities and cruelty; “worse” is hard to imagine.)