Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago At 50

I read the abridged version - finally - in prison after passing on reading the unabridged version during college. Sorry, it was something around 4 volumes in paperback; finances and time and inclination dictated against buying. I had a bad experience with Crime and Punishment in high school, and I pretty much avoided Russian writers until prison.

The New Criterion published Gary Saul Morson's The masterpiece of our time. I recited my history to show I do not have the knowledge to agree or disagree. The abridged version did open my eyes prison life is prison life, an unnatural existence.

What was it that made this book so effective? And what did Solzhenitsyn mean by calling it “literary,” even though everything in it was factual? To answer these questions is to grasp why Gulag towers over all other works of the Soviet period and, indeed, over all literature since the middle of the twentieth century.

Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been “repressive,” but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: “I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!” “The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.” Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.

***

Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn’s catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three long volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn, like Edward Gibbon, is a master of ironic narration. At times, the book is unexpectedly funny. Along with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it stands as one of the great satires of world literature. 

Such is the authoritarianism people have forgotten and seek still.

sch