Their testimonies are supplemented by information from official, samizdat, and even several Western publications. The main sources are his own experiences from 1945 to 1953 and those related to him by 227 other survivors. Solzhenitsyn's reconstruction of this secret "country" with the country is itself a heroic accomplishment under Soviet conditions. Gulag is the acronym of the central office that administered the penal camps.
The revolution of 1917 to 12 to 15 million (about half "politicals") at any one time by the 1940's.
Solzhenitsyn has recreated the history between 19 of "that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent-an almost invisible, almost imperceptible,Ĭountry inhabited by the zek people ".Archipelago refers to the far-flung system of forced labor camps run and augmented by the secret police and its institutions, whose prisoner population grew from small numbers after Nation can achieve spiritual and political renewal through "the great Russian tradition of penitence." As a chronicle of the holocaust, "The Gulag Archipelago" is an extraordinary achievement. He wants the whole truth of official criminality and civic acquiescence openly acknowledged and condemned so that the A survivor himself, Solzhenitsyn feelsĪ messianic obligation to "all those tortured and murdered," but even more to living and future generations. Solzhenitsyn's first purpose has been to document for the Soviet people, whose Government has acknowledged only part of the truth and almost none of the responsibility, the full dimensions of what happened. To the book, written in 1958-68 but authorized for Western publication only after the Soviet secret police seized a copy of the manuscript last August, is understandable. "The Gulag Archipelago" is a non-fictional account from and about the other great holocaust of our century-the imprisonment, brutalization and very often murder of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens by their own Government, mostlyĪleksandr Solzhenitsyn has called "The Gulag Archipelago" his "main" work, setting it above the major novels that won him the reputation of Russia's pre-eminent living writer and the 1970 Nobel Prize. The other is to explain the historical origins and causes of that experience. The holocaust, to sear it into the collective consciousness, so that it may never recur. Ost books about the experience of holocaust, especially those written by survivors, have two purposes. COHENĪn Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1-11.
0 kommentar(er)
