The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (Perennial Classics) [Paperback]

This is unquestionably the best non fiction book I have ever read. It is at once profound, intelligent, affecting, exquisitely readable (excepting some of the more factual chapters, perhaps), terrifying, uplifting and occaionally - unexpectedly - very humourous. Solzhenitsyn manages to convey the details of the most outrageous atrocities without ever losing a sense of what is good about the human race and without ever losing an acutely righteous anger about what is bad about it.

Personally I have spent the last two months since reading this book all but beating everyone I know into reading it; some books, after all, should be reccomended highly, but this book should be mandatory, a rite of passage for anyone who has any opinion on history or morality - hell, for anyone who has the ability to read.

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.

Recently i went into a large and well known bookstore in Glasgow because I wanted to buy this truly great book as a gift. The store was overrun by children and their parents who were buying the "new Harry Potter" When I asked an assisstant to find out if I could still buy this book in the original three volume edition she was unable to tell me. She had heard neither of The Gulag nor of Solzhenitsyn. She had to leave our conversation here as she had more Harry Potters' to attend to. Somehow this difficulty acted as a spur and made me more determined than ever to find the three volume set as a gift for my friend.... This truly great and historic book should be required reading. It is a matter of National Importance tha works like this are always available in print and always there when required. Totalatarianism has not gone away. It has changed it's clothes, hired some PR and now wears a little tasteful jewellery but it is still with us, still very much alive. The weight of Solzhenitsyns' experience and his extraordinary ability to wite seriously, in a way that is now qite uncommon in the west, makes these volumes vital literature and a compelling vision of a past coming to life again in Central Europe and elsewhere. One of the truly great artistic achievements of the 20th Century and one of the most powerful episodes of defiance and courage in the face of terror you will ever read. `it's true greatness, however, might lie in it's warmth and it's love for fellow prisoners. An essential life affirming testament to courage and decency.