The World of Gulag

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Volume I (parts I-II). Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row. 660 pp.

In his review of The Gulag Archipelago–by far the most effective American response to date–George Kennan called it “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” The intrepid Russian writer Lidya Chukovskaya spoke of Solzhenitsyn’s book as an “enormous event,” comparable in its repercussions to Stalin’s death. Roy Medvedev, a man who has serious philosophical and political disagreements with Solzhenitsyn, maintains that no one who has read The Gulag Archipelago can remain the same person he or she was before reading it. To approach such a momentous moral-political act primarily in literary terms may appear as fatuous as “reading the Bible for its prose.”...