The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement (Perennial Classics) - Softcover

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061253804 ISBN 13: 9780061253805

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007

Synopsis

"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY" --Time

"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 Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, 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 truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims-this man, that woman, that child-we 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. Yet we also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. And Solzhenitsyn's genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.

"The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." --George F. Kennan

"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

About this title

Review:

"Its importance can hardly be exaggerated," said Doris Lessing. "It helped to bring down an empire." For those who doubt that literature can change the world, here is evidence to the contrary. Solzhenitsyn's scorching, brilliant, part-autobiographical expose of the dreary oppressiveness and institutionalised cruelty of the Soviet regime, really did contribute to the final collapse of the Union in 1989. It also exposed how, if Hitler had the deaths of well over 6 million on his hands, the figure for Stalin might be nearer 60 million. This is not only history-in-the-making, but also an absolutely compulsive read (especially in this 400-page version abridged from the 1800 pages of the three-volume original.) From the breathtaking opening page, when Solzhenitsyn depicts starving prisoners of the Kolyma gulags, discovering a deep-frozen, prehistoric salamander in an icy stream and devouring it on the spot, "with relish," he holds you rapt, like the Ancient Mariner, with his "skinny hand" and "glittering eye." You have no choice but to listen to him, especially when he derides those who say "It would not happen here". "Alas," he says, "all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth." One of the very few undeniable books of the century. --Christopher Hart

Review:

"Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century"--Time magazine

"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

"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

"The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times."--George F. Kennan

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0061253804
• ISBN 13: 9780061253805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528