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Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every pag

Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every page. Shalamov is the complete opposite, and his book is an inhumanly dispassionate sequence of vignettes of camp life. Some of the mental images stick with you for life, like the zek (camp inmate) who broke into the camp larder, barricaded the door from the inside, and feasted by gnawing on raw, frozen bacon. He was still smiling when they broke in, dragged him out, beat him and threw him into the isolation cells, because at least his belly was full...

foobiekr 8y ago
Gulag Archipelago looks daunting. It's an insane amount of material. Must one read all three volumes?
- kinsomo 8y ago
  I read a ~400 page abridged version, but I do feel I missed out.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    I've read the original three volume version, which I got from a library. I own the abridged. You do miss a lot, but you can still get a lot out of the single-volume version.
- romanhn 8y ago
  I listened to an unabridged audiobook version - 67 hours of laughingly bad, home-made narration in Russian. Even then, it was easily one of the most riveting books I have come across.
  - archagon 8y ago
    Was it this one, by chance? https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 I thought the reading was superb, even though the quality was a bit scratchy.
    - romanhn 8y ago
      No, it was the Ignatiy Lapkin version (linked from that page). That guy was something else.
- pvg 8y ago
  You don't have to. Big chunks of it can be difficult to follow without the historical context Solzhenitsyn assumes the reader has - that you'd have to get elsewhere. More importantly though, you don't really have to read it in order, you can poke around the ToC and find stuff that doesn't require knowledge of the details of the early show trials, etc. You can hop over to the chapter on arrests or escape attempts and see how it goes.
- jfk13 8y ago
  For a less intimidating introduction, you might like to try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
  - dragandj 8y ago
    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a good book, but nothing like the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich was officially supported by the USSR in a brief period after Stalin's death, as a book that talks about the imprisonment, but waters it down so much as to make it not-so-terrible. Gulag Archipelago is much more interesting, and also much more eye-opening.
- Fins 8y ago
  The problem with* Gulag* is that (in Russian) it is quite badly written, unlike Shalamov's stories which real literature even before editors got to them. History-wise, there are better sources, too.
  - archagon 8y ago
    Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. (I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.") It's true that there's some dry and boring material, but I can hardly blame the author for that: he's the last living source for so many of these stories. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, trying in vain to resurrect the final, fading memories of the countless missing people who touched his life—nameless and nearly faceless, probably buried in some unmarked grave—while waiting for the KGB to burst in any minute and destroy his decade of work. How much more painful must the process of editing be when the things you cut are fragments of human lives that might as well have never existed once they leave the page? Unfortunately, there's now a contingent of the Russian population that denounces Solzhenitsyn for reasons of pure nationalism. It makes me so sad when I see Solzhenitsyn mentioned in the Runet, because it's almost always extremely vitriolic...
- jpatokal 8y ago
  I found it quite accessible and have read it end to end twice. It's not a Russian heavy literature doorstop a la War & Peace, but an encyclopedic one-man survey of every aspect of the camps, roughly in chronological order: first the the history of labor camps in Russia, then the journey of a typical inmate (arrest, interrogation, trial, transit, arrival, life and death in the camps for prisoners and guards alike, freedom [1]), then the slow winding down of the system. [1] In some sense, at least; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
- dragandj 8y ago
  It's long, but very interesting. It's much better to read it whole, than some abridged version.
fractallyte 8y ago
The Gulag Archipelago is available here: https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes

foobiekr 8y ago

Gulag Archipelago looks daunting. It's an insane amount of material. Must one read all three volumes?

kinsomo 8y ago
I read a ~400 page abridged version, but I do feel I missed out.
- cwyers 8y ago
  I've read the original three volume version, which I got from a library. I own the abridged. You do miss a lot, but you can still get a lot out of the single-volume version.
romanhn 8y ago
I listened to an unabridged audiobook version - 67 hours of laughingly bad, home-made narration in Russian. Even then, it was easily one of the most riveting books I have come across.
- archagon 8y ago
  Was it this one, by chance? https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 I thought the reading was superb, even though the quality was a bit scratchy.
  - romanhn 8y ago
    No, it was the Ignatiy Lapkin version (linked from that page). That guy was something else.
pvg 8y ago
You don't have to. Big chunks of it can be difficult to follow without the historical context Solzhenitsyn assumes the reader has - that you'd have to get elsewhere. More importantly though, you don't really have to read it in order, you can poke around the ToC and find stuff that doesn't require knowledge of the details of the early show trials, etc. You can hop over to the chapter on arrests or escape attempts and see how it goes.
jfk13 8y ago
For a less intimidating introduction, you might like to try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
- dragandj 8y ago
  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a good book, but nothing like the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich was officially supported by the USSR in a brief period after Stalin's death, as a book that talks about the imprisonment, but waters it down so much as to make it not-so-terrible. Gulag Archipelago is much more interesting, and also much more eye-opening.
Fins 8y ago
The problem with* Gulag* is that (in Russian) it is quite badly written, unlike Shalamov's stories which real literature even before editors got to them. History-wise, there are better sources, too.
- archagon 8y ago
  Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. (I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.") It's true that there's some dry and boring material, but I can hardly blame the author for that: he's the last living source for so many of these stories. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, trying in vain to resurrect the final, fading memories of the countless missing people who touched his life—nameless and nearly faceless, probably buried in some unmarked grave—while waiting for the KGB to burst in any minute and destroy his decade of work. How much more painful must the process of editing be when the things you cut are fragments of human lives that might as well have never existed once they leave the page? Unfortunately, there's now a contingent of the Russian population that denounces Solzhenitsyn for reasons of pure nationalism. It makes me so sad when I see Solzhenitsyn mentioned in the Runet, because it's almost always extremely vitriolic...
jpatokal 8y ago
I found it quite accessible and have read it end to end twice. It's not a Russian heavy literature doorstop a la War & Peace, but an encyclopedic one-man survey of every aspect of the camps, roughly in chronological order: first the the history of labor camps in Russia, then the journey of a typical inmate (arrest, interrogation, trial, transit, arrival, life and death in the camps for prisoners and guards alike, freedom [1]), then the slow winding down of the system. [1] In some sense, at least; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
dragandj 8y ago
It's long, but very interesting. It's much better to read it whole, than some abridged version.

fractallyte 8y ago

The Gulag Archipelago is available here: https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes