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Product Description
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.
From the Back Cover
"To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age." W.L. Webb, Guardian
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.
"It helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated." Stephen Spender, London Magazine
"What gives the book its value is the sound it gives out; the harsh roar give out by a wise and experienced animal as a warning that the herd is in danger." Rebecca West, Sunday Telegraph
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Bearing in mind Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature principally for this book, this might help you draw your own conclusions about its merit. This is the abridged version of the full 3 volume book, abridged by an American academic with the author's consent and cooperation, in a conscious effort to increase its readership and alert the wider world of the tyrannical regime experienced by the people of the Soviet Union under Stalin and others. The fact that the book has been shortened makes for gaps and omissions that are fairly apparent to the reader and as a result the book does lose its way a little, and parts of the book towards the end I found fairly heavy going. However for those of us who don't read the full version this is perhaps the price that we pay.
Despite the abridgment, the book remains a weighty tome yet like other books by Solzhenitsyn remains surprisingly accessible. Furthermore it is a hugely significant historical document, bringing to light the system of prisons, transit and work camps of the Soviet Union, generally focusing on the 1930s-1950s period, though with some overlap at either end. The sheer scale of this cruel operation is almost unbelievable to the modern reader, partly because we live in an age in which this whole enterprise seems to have been swept under the carpet. Anyone interested in 20th century history will find this book a remarkable insight.
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