Gulag Archipelago Volume 3, The: An Experiment in Literary Investigation: 03 (Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956)

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061253731 ISBN 13: 9780061253737

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013

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

Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

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

"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, 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

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

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

"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