Customer Reviews

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For this book I would give 5 stars, for this version, only 1. Do yourself a favour and save time and money, buy the unabriged editions! (Three volumes, takes abit of work)Reading this amazes you, but leaves you dissatisfied, wanting the whole story, for that is what you need with this book.

If Orwellian writers described the dangers of totalitarianism and dehumanization in works of fiction, this is the raw articulation of that brutal reality in hard detail. Every student of History must read this.

Solzhenitsyn's effort is massive, to say the least. Sure, it's a long book. But before long, the reader begins to appreciate George Kennan's celebrated description of the GA as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times."

On the other hand, GA is also more personal and reflective that you might expect. Solzhenitsyn writes: "let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now."

In the end, I'm not sure that it matters much whether you agree with Solzhenitsyn's conclusions or not - the weight of his testament is value enough.

Suffice it to listen to a story that, until now, we've only heard ABOUT but of which we hardly knew the details.

So is this volume I (as it says above), or is it an abridgement (as another reviewer says)? I have the Fontana edition, and there is NO indication of whether what I am reading is an abridgment or the the first volume, or what, it`s very annoying. It has the same cover as the one above, and is 650 pages long and split into two parts. But I`ve no idea which parts they are. If I knew I was reading an abridgement I could stop reading and buy the entire thing.

Review by Mike, Age 13

Solzhenitsyn does an excellent job of retelling the story of the atrocities of the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is a disturbing account of what happened inside the Gulag prisons. This is an account about the things hidden from the public and the things the Marxists wanted to keep hidden. And how he gave a first person account of prison life, well that was just amazing! His vivid descriptions about the kinds of arrests that took place I thought was very interesting and an amazing brainchild of a distorted Soviet Union!

How Stalin could turn an innocent gesture of two long lost friends being reunited into an arrest is beyond me. The Gulag Archipelago is an excellent book that unveiled an entirely new side of the Soviet Union and its perverted system of justice. It's a great book for historians and World War II buffs, or even if you are trying to find out more about the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is quite possibly one of the best books I've ever read! I would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the Soviet Union. (Content will be confusing for younger readers.)

After I read this book I bought a rifle!

How thin is the veil we call Civilization!! This book is indeed a tedious read by virtue of its length. However, Solzhenitsyn's history is written with the prosaic style of a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Captain in the Soviet Army as it charged through Nazi occupied Poland when he was arrested on trumped-up charges in February 1945. Thus began his odyssey through Gulag, "the country within a country". The perpetually weak economy of Communism could not survive without the forced labor of millions of is own citizens who became prisoners for one reason or another, or no reason at all. Solzhenitsyn relates his own experiences as well as those of other prisoners with whom he became acquainted while incarcerated. He relates how ordinary Russians were arrested and charged with fraudulent charges (if charged at all), interrogated, tortured and forced to confess under extreme duress, and sent off to labor for the good of the Motherland.
Throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn asks the reader incredulously, "how did we let this happen?" That is no doubt one of the most important questions posed in all of human history. If we study history in order to prevent the repetition of our mistakes, then Solzhenitsyn's work should be required reading of all residents of Planet Earth.

I expected this to be hard reading, since it was translated from Russian. I was wrong. It is very readable. The crimes against humanity committed in the Soviet Union must never be forgotten!

What HAS happened to the gulags, those notorious Soviet prison camps? Did their brutal conditions and horribly abused prisoners just evaporate with the downfall of the Soviet Union? This has not been answered to my satisfaction.

Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner himself at one time, puts his considerable literary skills to work in documenting, in sometimes excrutiating detail, the vastness of the Soviet prison system and its atrocities. From his earlier work ("Ivan Denisovitch") to "The First Circle" which was the first installment to this work, to the completed volumes, we are given a tour of living hell. It's interesting to note that the officer who befriended pianist Szpilman ("The Pianist) died as a POW in a Soviet prison camp in 1952--well after the war was over and long after treaties decreed that POW's should be released.

Solzhenitsyn documents the evils of the system so we not only know what happened, but that, like the Holocaust, we can never forget. This was a book that demanded to be written, and despite its great length, it is surprisingly readable, though horrifying in detail and scope.

It is a marvel to flip through this book again, though the abridged version is nothing compared to the original 3-volume trilogy. Though it is very difficult to get into - in the original v1 there is a long abstract section on gulags as a sewage system in turbid prose - once the reader gets swept into thos narrative of suffering there is no other reading experience like it.

Solzhenitsyn spent his youth as a gulag prisoner for having criticized Stalin on a postcard. V1 covers his arrest and interrogation and transport into despair and disillusionment. What he experienced, from his start as a strong and idealistic young war leader, can only be described as hell on earth. Only Hitler's death factories could compare, and yet Stalin's slave labor camps were being held up as marvels of social policy and redemption. The cruelty of treatment, the insights into the astonishing characters around him, and the compilation of other people's stories - Solzhenitsyn describes his experience as only one gulp from an ocean of bitterness and shattered lives - are unequalled in the modern literature on totalitarianism. My experience was to be utterly transported into this realm, to look at my life and values and think about what mattered most to develop within myself. No other book ever had a deeper impact on me. That makes this, in my opinion, essential reading to understand the last century at its very very worst.

The second volume follows Solzhenitsyn as he becomes a hardened and grief-stricken prison slave, indifferent to whether he is killed by a stray bullet during riots and abandoning his faith in communism. A central pert of the book is his religious conversion - the only one I ever read about that I truly understood on an emotional level - at the deathbed of perhaps his greatest freind. V3 covers his relesase from prison and his attempts to rebuild his life.

All three volumes offered to me the experience of living totally outside of myself and in the reality of a totalitarian state. I first read these in EUrope when they appeared, and the debates on the merits of the communist sytem were very much alive at the time. Now they are only of historical interest, but I still think they are must reading for anyone who wants to understand the worst of one of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of mankind.

Highest recommendation.

This is a time and place that except for the courage, bravery and sacrifice of a few souls would still be unknown to the West today. One can fault Solzhenitsyn's monarchial views but his courage and stamina cannot be disputed.

He has given us a penetrating portrait of another time and another place - somewhere unimaginable to those of us accustomed to freedom. Remarkably, he has enfused it with a humanity that shines brighter than the frozen landscape or the continual cruelty. In the pages of this book (written and secreted out in parts) the inmates lose their anonymity and take on a life of their own as we find ourselves shivering, crying, rejoicing and even laughing with them. Tears in a Hades of Ice.

Solzhenitsyn is more than a national treasure, a historian or an author. He is the modern-day reflection of the ancient Jewish prophet, preaching to the unbelievers. The portraits of his beloved Russia reflect the greatness that he feels Russia is not only worth but due. This should be required reading for all high school students.