“Dedicated to ‘all those who did not live to tell their story, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ demonstrates a nadir of humanity with nearby unfathomable cruelty.” (Ibid.) “ The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Interpretation,” published 50 years ago this year, was “arguably the 20th century’s greatest piece of nonfiction prose.” ( Books and Masterpiece, “‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil”). In chapter and verse, torture chamber by torture chamber, Solzhenitsyn laid bare the detailed history of this monstrous creation. The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973 after being smuggled out of the Soviet Union, was a remarkable literary and historical achievement. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. His extraordinary writing included Cancer Ward (1966), In the First Circle (1968), and August 1914 (1971). Upon his release in 1954, he was able to continue his literary career under the reforms implemented by Nikita Khrushchev. After criticizing Stalin in a private letter, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to 8 years of hard labor in the Siberian concentration camps.ĭuring his imprisonment, he regained the Christian faith of his childhood, partly by observing the faith of Christians in the terrible conditions of the camps (he alludes to this in his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)). While his mother was devoutly Russian Orthodox, Solzhenitsyn gradually became an atheist socialist before serving as a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army during World War II. Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, was raised in poverty in the early years of the Soviet Union. This year, 2023, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary and historical masterpiece which described brilliantly the inhuman “archipelago” of horrific concentration camps established by Lenin in the wake of the creation of the Soviet Union in 1918 and expanded and refined under Stalin and his successors. | Getty Image/Keystone/Hulton Archive/ Emil Christensen
Exiled Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008, left) travels to Oslo in Norway by boat, 25th February 1974.
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