Gulag Archipelago Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The official, one-volume edition, authorized by Solzhenitsyn

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20^thCENTURY”—Time

An undisputed masterpiece of world literature, The Gulag Archipelago renders the four decades of terror and oppression into human terms. Drawing on his own experience before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918.

Through specific portraits of its victims, students will encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the welcome that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. They will also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. It is Solzhenitsyn’s genius that transmutes this horrific indictment into a literary miracle.

In the new introduction by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the abridger, instructs students:

Given the nature of the Soviet experiment, the political dimension of life is never far from Solzhenitsyn’s mind. But he always approaches politics in moral terms. Anyone, then, who views human reality primarily through the prism of politics will misread Gulag. . . .To read Gulag through a moral lens is to understand that government power can perpetrate all sorts of atrocities upon human beings, body and soul, but it can never fully succeed in quenching the human spirit. Yes, some persons will submit and will die spiritually. But others, like Ivan Denisovich, will endure and prevail. Despite all of the indignities inflicted upon them, their innate human dignity will remain intact. In this sense, totalitarianism must always fail.

The Gulag Archipelago’s scathing indictment of Communist tyranny and eloquent affirmation of the human spirit-will convince students that works of art can be a catalyst for change in the world.

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“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

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan, American Diplomat and Historian

“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