Book description
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast
canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of
informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist
anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival
lay not in hope but in despair.
The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors,
and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour
camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a
feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged
into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, in 1918.
He was brought up in Rostov, where he graduated in mathematics and
physics in 1941. After distinguished service with the Red Army in the
Second World War, he was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953 for making
unfavourable remarks about Josef Stalin. He was rehabilitated in 1956,
but in 1969 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union for
denouncing official censorship of his work. He was forcibly exiled
from the Soviet Union in 1974 and deported to West Germany. Later he
settled in America, but after Soviet officials finally dropped charges
against him in 1991, he returned to his homeland in 1994 and died in
August 2008, aged 89.
He has written many books, of which One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago are his
best known.
