Observations on The “Gulag Achipelago” 1918-1956, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn – An Experiment in Literary Investigation

This blog post follows from an earlier post in this blog on March 21, 2013, titled “Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Courage of a Christian“ by Joseph Pierce (here) available on the website titled “The Imaginative Conservative”. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/

Following from that article is a quote from Pierce about the life experiences that shaped Solzhenistsyn, including his turning from socialism and his conversion to Christianity:

“In such a meretricious age the giant figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn emerges as a colossus of courage. Born in Russia in 1918, only months after the secular fundamentalists had swept to power in the Bolshevik Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was brainwashed by a state education system which taught him that socialism was just and that religion was the enemy of the people. Like most of his school friends, he enslaved himself to the zeitgeist, became an atheist and joined the communist party.”

Alexander Solzhenistsyn (source of picture: http://www.preaching.com/)

“Serving in the Soviet army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War he witnessed cold blooded murder and the raping of women and children as the Red Army took its “revenge” on the Germans. Disillusioned, he committed the indiscretion of criticizing the Soviet leader Josef Stalin and was imprisoned for eight years as a political dissident.”

“While in prison, he resolved to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. Shortly after his release, during a period of compulsory exile in Kazakhstan, he was diagnosed with a malignant cancer in its advanced stages and was not expected to live. In the face of what appeared to be impending death, he converted to Christianity and was astonished by what he considered to be a miraculous recovery.”

“Throughout the 1960s Solzhenitsyn published three novels exposing the secularist tyranny of the Soviet Union and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Following the publication in 1973 of his seminal work, The Gulag Archipelago, an exposé of the treatment of political dissidents in the Soviet prison system, he was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union, thereafter living the life of an exile in Switzerland and the United States. He finally returned to Russia in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet system.”

Solzhenistsyn spoke boldly against what Pearce calls the “secular fundamentalism” of modern progressive societies.  Following is a key quote from the article on this subject:

“In 1978, Solzhenitsyn caused great controversy when he criticized the secularism and hedonism of the West in his famous commencement address at Harvard University. Condemning the nations of the so-called free West for being morally bankrupt, he urged that it was time “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”“

“The emphasis on rights instead of responsibilities was leading to “the abyss of human decadence” and to the committing of “moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.” At the root of the modern malaise was the modern philosophy of “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy,” which declared the “autonomy of man from any higher authority above him.” Such a view “could also be called anthropocentrity, with man seen as the centre of all.””

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Starting from this introduction to who Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn was, here is a cover description from one of his great labors, the book titled “The Gulag Archigelago: 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation.”     Here is a description of this work as written on the bookflap.

“It is a question if any work of literature in our era other than The Divine Comedy is commensurate with The Gulag Archipelago in structure, scale, multiplicity of incident and characters, emotional range, variety of inflection and, above all, in the staggering magnitude of its underlying concept.

“In this masterpiece, the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony and sheer comedy, it combines history, autobiography, documentary, and political analysis as it examines it’s totality of Soviet apparatus of repression from it inception following the October Revolution of 1917.

“The ‘Archipelago’ of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s work is the network of secret police installations, camps, prisons, transit centers, communications facilities, transportation systems and espionage organizations which, in his view, honeycombs the length and breadth of the Soviet Union.

“Drawing on his own experience, materials from Soviet archives, cases collected during his eleven years of labor camps and exile, and the evidence of more than 200 fellow prisoners, Mr. Solzhenitsyn concludes that the secret police are the vital element of the Soviet regime, and have been ever since the founding by Lenin.

“Numerous studies of the Soviet system of control have been published in the West but until now nothing so complete, so carefully documented and assembled, and never has a literary giant devoted his gifts of narrative and characterization to the enterprise.  Solzhenitsyn has here created and peopled with brilliantly protrayed human beings a vast, overarching fresco of that state within as state which is the Gulag Archipelago.”

Thomas P. Whitney, the translator, has also translated both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, and is a leading authority on Russian culture and the Soviet Union.

The first edition of The Gulag Archipelago and this description were published copyright 1973, with English translation in 1974 by Harper-Row Publishers, Inc., New York, N.Y.

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Following is the dedication of this book by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it.

And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all,

for not having divined all of it.

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Author’s note: Going forward it is my hope to bring forth quotes from the book to help people understand the important themes and lessons for people in any country at any time of the evils that can happen when a secular humanist, atheistic Marxist governmental system comes into power.  Rather than valuing liberty and freedom of expression, these things are repressed for the sake of those at the reigns of power for their self preservation.  It is a cautionary lesson from those in our and any day and age and country.

By the way, I obtained this book from a walk in book sale from my local small town library, as I have several other books of great historical and spiritual value to me over the last few years – as the library was selling it to the public at cut rate prices rather than retaining it in their collection.  But that is another matter to discuss at a later time.