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Well, "non-fiction." I'm not sure about his other writings, but Archipelago has been found in recent decades to contain many exaggerations and half-truths.
by slondr 6y ago
Well, "non-fiction." I'm not sure about his other writings, but Archipelago has been found in recent decades to contain many exaggerations and half-truths.
- tuckerpo 6y agoYes, but to my knowledge (for whatever my knowledge is worth on the subject), any stretching of the truth were a function of time, simply forgetting exact details. A non-trivial amount of of Solzhenitsyn's anecdotes in Gulag Archipelago were given to him verbally from other prisoners, so Solzhenitsyn's burden became remembering all of the nitty gritty on top of, y'know, literally living in a Soviet prison camp.
- alacombe 6y agoI knew the gulags were in fact holiday camps !
- Skjoldr3 6y agoTo be fair, Russia only gives very limited access to its state archives nowadays, and Gulag record-keeping was far from stellar. Imagine what it was like trying to uncover the truth back when KGB and the Iron Curtain still existed, from inside the system in which many monstrous and inhuman events had really happened. Exaggerations seemed true and truth seemed exaggerated.