Russian literary giant Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died Sunday August 3, 2008 at his home in Moscow at the age of 89. The anti-Soviet author achieved fame in 1962 with his debut novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and later won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. But Solzhenitsyn is best known for his account of Soviet labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago. The book eventually led to Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from Russia.
Here’s how it begins:
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.
You can read the full first volume online, right here.
[h/t TEV].
I would like to know the chapter and page in the Gulag Archipelago where the following quote is…
“During an arrest, you think since you aren’t guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We didn’t love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
You said I could read the full first volume “here” but I could only read first few pages of Chapter 1 and had to subscribe for $7.95 per month to continue reading Chapter 1.
where is the passage in which solzhenitsin calculates the weight in gold for which a zek’s life was wasted away in the mines?