‘Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today’ Anne Applebaum
A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grand masterpiece.
Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.
A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author’s wish and with his full co-operation.
‘He is one of the towering figures of the age as a writer, as moralist, as hero . . . in The Gulag Archipelago he has achieved the impossible’ Edward Crankshaw, Observer
A Terrible Hidden Country
If there were quiz questions about the subtitles of books, this – ‘An Experiment in Literary Investigation’ – might be among the trickier ones, offering as it does no hint of the book’s...
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