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Gulag Archipelago, Preface and notes

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (RZ Ambigram)
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 05:12 pm
First off, the original Russian title of the book is transliterated "Arkhipelag GULag", which has a catchy rhyme that is essentially impossible to translate into English.

(For the record, the translator of my edition is one Thomas P. Whitney. Translators get such low billing, I thought I should mention it.)

Second, the beginning of Solzhenitsyn's preface rather caught my attention:

( In 1949, some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature... )

And third, and final, the dedication.

I dedicate this
to all 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.
  • Current Mood: pensive
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The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 3

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (RZ Ambigram)
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 10:30 am
Chapter 3, 93-143. Solzhenitsyn continues his description of the system with "The Interrogation". I am still finding much of it hard to believe (though, as I think on it, the factors causing it seem to cohere entirely too well for my equanimity), but there were some anecdotal passages I found impressive, like the following hypothetical.

( Excerpt: a hypothetical anecdote about a possible interrogation )

You know, it occurred to me while copying that authors like David Weber who try to depict totalitarian regimes would have done well to have read this book. He in particular made a rather unimpressive regime in writing his story.
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The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 2

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Green RZ)
Friday, May 26th, 2006 08:45 am
Chapter 2, pgs. 24 to 92, down. With a clever eye for analogy, A. Solzhenitsyn titled this chapter (or rather, Thomas P. Whitney translated his title) "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System". It describes the constitutions of the many waves of arrests that fed the Russian jails, and some of the motivations behind them.

( Excerpts - cut for length )

Somehow, this chapter did not have the impact the first chapter did on me. Perhaps it is because it is so extreme that it begins to sound like propaganda, whether or not it is true. Also it may be because some aspects of it, like the story of the applause, have almost become jokes about despotic regimes.
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  • Current Music: Birdsong, outside the window
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The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 1

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Silhouette)
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 03:28 pm
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 3-4

This is a truly intense book. I saw a quote from it somewhere, then saw it at the comic book shop and picked it up. It speaks with a despair I have never seen since I read John le Carré's The Spy who Came in From the Cold. But this one's not fiction.

I've only read the first chapter, twenty-one pages out of six hundred twelve.
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