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The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it - but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question, which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.

We have been happily born - or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way - down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all...

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow, which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.

Credit: Excerpted from Chapter 1 of The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II by Alesandr. I. Solzhenitsyn. English language translation copyright © 1973, 1974 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

Biography:

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk Russia and attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics. He also took correspondence courses in literature at the Moscow State University. Solzhenitsyn fought in the Second World War, and was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Joseph Stalin. He spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, followed by three years in enforced exile.

Rehabilitated in 1956, Solzhenitsyn began writing. His 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, based in part on his prison experiences, made him an instant celebrity. Yet censorship of cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened and after a publication of short stories in 1963, Solzhenitsyn was no longer officially published. He resorted to circulating his work in the form or samizdat ("self-published) literature or literature published illegally, in addition to publishing his work abroad.

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined to go to Stockholm to receive his prize because he was worried he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which documented the Soviet prison system, terrorism and secret police was first published in France in 1973 and soon after in English. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported to West Germany and deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Subsequently he settled in the United States. In 1991, Soviet Officials dropped charges of treason against him and Solzhenitsyn returned to live in Russia in May of 1994.

Bibliography:

November 1916, trans. By H.T. Willetts, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America, trans by Michael Nicholson and Alex Klirnoff, New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. by Harry Willets, 1980.

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney, New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Letter to the Soviet Leaders, trans. by Hilary Sternberg, New York: Index on Censorship in association with Harper and Row, 1974.

Cancer Ward, trans. by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, New York: Modern Library, 1969.

The Love-girl and the Innocent, trans by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

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