The author of The Gulag Archipelago has died.
He spent seven years in the Gulag, for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. There he began to write, and he never stopped. For a long time, practically everything he wrote was illegal; he and his courageous friends had to hide his work and smuggle it out to the West.
I remember reading vast amounts of The Gulag Archipelago while dismaying over the vast amounts I still had left to read. I never finished it, having only gotten through the first two volumes.
And I remember being annoyed at the translator. Solzhenitsyn had used the ironic label of “investigators” when referring to the government thugs who would crush your testicles under their boots. The humorless and misguided translator thought that the thugs seemed more like “interrogators,” so he changed it to that throughout the book.
[At least he did make a note of that change, so that readers could know that he’d done it. I do appreciate that. I just mentally switched the words back to their original form as I read.]
Anyway, I hope that wherever Solzhenitsyn is now, he’s beating the crap out of Stalin.
Why would you hope Solzhenitsyn would end up in the same place as Stalin? I know he tormented you by writing such a long, heavy tome, but that seems harsh.
I finished GA, and liked it, though a friend cheapened it a bit by condensing the whole thing into “he’s the angriest man in the world”, or something like that. I read something else by him that I liked better, but I can’t recall what. That non-parity junk strikes again.
You read the whole thing? Unabridged? Like, three volumes of 700 pages each (or something)? Wow. Well done.
As far as where they end up, the same place can be heaven or hell, depending on what you’re doing there.
I didn’t remember it being as long as all that—now you have me doubting. OK, I just checked it out from my library (the room next door), and my copy’s title page actually says “The Gulag Archipelago\n1918 – 1956\nAn Experiment in Literary Investigation\nI-III”. I’m guessing that means “no”. So there’s another two volumes, going forward from ’56? It’s like the Simpson’s episode where Homer climbs to what looks like the top of the mountain, only to find there’s a whole lot more above him. So more like “medium rare”.
I hope that, if there is life after death, he has let go of all that anger rather than seeking revenge. But I don’t run that show.
IIRC, all three cover the one time period. Stalin died around then, and that was the end of that.