The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956; An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II

New York: Harper & Row, 1973. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing thus. Paperback. Very good. xii, 660 pages. Illustrations. Translator's Notes. Glossary. Index. Vol. I ONLY. Describes escapes and attempted escapes from Stalin's camps, a disciplined, sustained resistance put down with tanks after forty days, and the forced removal and extermination of millions of peasants. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008) was a Russian writer. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union. While serving in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Stalin in a private letter. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released. He pursued writing about repression in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. After Khrushchev, the authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. He worked on further novels which were published in other countries including Cancer Ward, The First Circle, August 1914, and The Gulag Archipelago, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1990 his citizenship was restored, and later he returned to Russia. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non-fiction text which was written between 1958 and 1968 by the Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and it was translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labor camp system, through a narrative which was constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner. Following its publication, the book was initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia. With the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is his best-known and most popular work, at least in the West. Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Fritz Heeb of Zürich, to await publication; a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work. Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and perspectives about Gulag to be continued in the future, but he considered the book finished for his part. The royalties and sales income for the book were transferred to the Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund for aid to former camp prisoners. His fund, (The Russian Social Fund), which had to work in secret in its native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts of money towards helping former gulag prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s. Novelist Doris Lessing said that the book "brought down an empire", while author Michael Scammell described the book as a gesture that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state, calling its very legitimacy into question and demanding revolutionary change." About its impact, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: "Until the Gulag, the Communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda."[30] United States diplomat George F. Kennan said that the book was "the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.