The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation *[PDF]
“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword Read more
Download Now
Why Must Read The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation?
The Gulag Archipelago is many things: a first hand account of life in the gulag, a systematic overview of the system, a psychoanalysis of the administrators and forced participants in this archipelago and much, much more. Obviously, it has historical importance as a factor in the fall of the Soviet state. But its greatness as literature is also due to its persuasive analysis of the Gulag as a cancer on the social bonds and body politic of the Russia of its day. Not a conventional believer by any means, Solzhenitsyn is able to see the erosion of civil society brought about the Gulag. The atmosphere of fear, the self-disgust from forced collaboration, the betrayals of the bonds of family and friendship—all of these are a cancer slowly invading and killing the healthy parts of society remaining from the days of Tsarism. Ultimately Solzhenitsyn discovers that invisible line running through every person whereby we choose the good or consent to evil. The Gulag is nothing but a systematization of this choice across a country. A perspicacious vision that informs much of the ills of today’s Russia. Looking forward to volume III.
Read Now