Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Gulag Archipelago
Artistic research experience
Parts I–II
I dedicate
to all those who did not have enough life
tell about it.
and may they forgive me
that I didn't see everything
I didn't remember everything
didn't think of everything.
In the year 1949, my friends and I attacked a remarkable article in the journal Nature of the Academy of Sciences. It was written there in small letters that during excavations an underground lens of ice was somehow discovered on the Kolyma River - a frozen ancient stream, and in it - frozen representatives of the fossil (several tens of millennia ago) fauna. Whether fishes, whether these newts were kept so fresh, the learned correspondent testified, that those present, having split the ice, immediately ate them willingly.
The magazine must have surprised a few of its readers by how long fish meat can be preserved in ice. But few of them could heed the true heroic meaning of a careless note.
We understood right away. We saw the whole scene vividly to the smallest detail: how those present with fierce haste were breaking the ice; how, trampling on the high interests of ichthyology and pushing each other with their elbows, they beat off pieces of thousand-year-old meat, dragged it to the fire, thawed and sated.
We understood because we ourselves were one of those present, from that only mighty tribe on earth prisoners, which could only willingly eat a newt.
And Kolyma was - the largest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of this amazing country of the Gulag, geography torn into an archipelago, but mentally bound into a continent - an almost invisible, almost impalpable country, which was inhabited by the people of the prisoners.
This archipelago cut through and dotted with a patchwork of another, including, country, it crashed into its cities, hung over its streets - and yet others did not guess at all, very many heard something vaguely, only those who visited knew everything.
But, as if speechless on the islands of the Archipelago, they remained silent.
By an unexpected turn in our history, something, negligible, about this Archipelago came to light. But the same hands that screwed up our handcuffs now put out their palms conciliatoryly: “No need! .. No need to stir up the past! .. Whoever remembers the old, get out of his sight!” However, the proverb finishes: “And whoever forgets, two!”
Decades go by - and irrevocably lick the scars and ulcers of the past. Other islands during this time trembled, spread, the polar sea of oblivion splashes over them. And sometime in the next century, this archipelago, its air and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen into a lens of ice, will appear as an implausible newt.
I do not dare to write the history of the Archipelago: I did not get to read the documents. But will anyone ever get it? .. Those who do not want recall, it has already been (and will still be) enough time to destroy all documents clean.
My eleven years spent there, having learned not as a shame, not as a cursed dream, but almost loving that ugly world, and now, by a happy turn, having become the confidant of many later stories and letters - maybe I will be able to convey something bones and meat? - more, however, live meat, still, however, a live newt.
There are no fictitious persons or fictional events in this book.
People and places are called by their proper names.
If they are named by initials, then for personal reasons.
If they are not named at all, it is only because the human memory has not preserved the names - and everything was exactly like that.
This book would be too much for one person to write. In addition to everything that I took out of the Archipelago - my skin, memory, ear and eye, the material for this book was given to me in stories, memoirs and letters -
[list of 227 names].I do not express my personal gratitude to them here: this is our common friendly monument to all those who were tortured and killed.
From this list, I would like to single out those who put a lot of work into helping me, so that this thing was provided with bibliographic reference points from books of today's library collections or long removed and destroyed, so that finding a preserved copy required great perseverance; even more - those who helped hide this manuscript in a harsh moment, and then multiply it.
But the time has not come when I dare to name them.
The old Solovite Dmitri Petrovich Vitkovsky was supposed to be the editor of this book. However, the half-life spent there(his camp memoirs are called “Half a Life”), gave him premature paralysis. Already with the speech taken away, he was able to read only a few completed chapters and make sure that everything will be told .
And if freedom is not enlightened for a long time in our country, then the very reading and transmission of this book will be a great danger - so that I must also bow with gratitude to future readers - from those from the dead.
When I started this book in 1958, I was not aware of anyone's memoirs or works of fiction about the camps. Over the years of work until 1967, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and the memoirs of D. Vitkovsky, E. Ginzburg, O. Adamova-Sliozberg gradually became known to me, which I refer to in the course of the presentation as literary facts known to everyone (and so it will be or in the end).
Contrary to their intentions, contrary to their will, they gave invaluable material for this book, preserved many important facts, and even figures, and the very air that they breathed: Chekist M. I. Latsis (Ya. F. Sudrabs); N. V. Krylenko - the chief public prosecutor for many years; his heir A. Ya. Vyshinsky with his lawyers-accomplices, of which I. L. Averbakh cannot be overlooked.
Material for this book was also provided by thirty-six Soviet writers, headed by Maxim Gorky, the authors of the infamous book about the White Sea Canal, which for the first time in Russian literature glorified slave labor.
Witnesses of the archipelago
whose stories, letters, memoirs and corrections are used in the creation of this book
Alexandrova Maria Borisovna
Alekseev Ivan A.
Alekseev Ivan Nikolaevich
Anichkova Natalia Milievna
Babich Alexander Pavlovich
Bakst Mikhail Abramovich
Baranov Alexander Ivanovich
Baranovich Marina Kazimirovna
Bezrodny Vyacheslav
Belinkov Arkady Viktorovich
Bernshtam Mikhail Semyonovich
Bernstein Ans Fritsevich
Borisov Avenir Petrovich
Bratchikov Andrey Semyonovich
Breslavskaya Anna
Brodovsky M.I.
Bugaenko Natalya Ivanovna
"The Gulag Archipelago" is a documentary fiction novel by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, which tells about prison-type camps, on the territory of which the author had to spend 11 years of his life.
Rehabilitated, accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers, approved by Khrushchev himself, Solzhenitsyn did not renounce his plan - to create a true chronicle of the Gulag, based on letters, memoirs, stories of camp residents and his own sad experience of prisoner Shch-854.
The Gulag was written secretly for 10 years (from 1958 to 1968). When one of the copies of the novel fell into the hands of the KGB, the work had to be quickly published. In 1973, the first volume of the trilogy was published in Paris. In the same year, the Soviet government decided the fate of the author. They were afraid to send a Nobel laureate, a writer recognized by the world, to the camp. Andropov signed a decree depriving Solzhenitsyn of Soviet citizenship and his immediate expulsion from the country.
What kind of terrible story did the Soviet writer tell the world? He told only the truth.
GULAG, or the Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Detention, was notorious in the Soviet Union in the 30-50s of the twentieth century. His bloody glory still rattles with the echo of iron shackles in the ears of his descendants and is a dark spot in the history of our fatherland.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand about the Gulag. He spent 11 long years in the camps of this "wonderful" country, as the writer called it with bitter irony. “His eleven years spent there, having learned not as a shame, not as a damned dream, but almost falling in love with that ugly world, and now, in a happy turn, having become a confidant of many of his stories and letters ...”
In this book, composed of letters, memoirs, stories, there are no fictitious persons. All people and places are called by their names, some are indicated only by initials.
Solzhenitsyn calls the famous island of Kolyma the "pole of ferocity" of the Gulag. Most do not know anything about the wonderful Archipelago, some have only a vague idea of it, those who have been there know everything, but they are silent, as if being in the camps forever deprived them of the gift of speech. Only decades later, these cripples began to speak. They came out of their hiding places, sailed from across the ocean, got out of prison cells, rose from their graves to tell a terrible story called "Gulag".
How do you get to the Archipelago? Neither Sovtourist nor Intourist can buy a ticket there. If you want to manage the Archipelago, you can get a ticket to it after graduating from the NKVD college. If you want to protect the Archipelago, last-minute tours are offered by the domestic military registration and enlistment office. If you want to die in the Archipelago, do nothing. Wait. They will come for you.
All prisoners of the Gulag went through a mandatory procedure - arrest. The traditional type of arrest is night. A rough knock on the door, half-asleep members of the household and a bewildered defendant who had not yet reached his trousers. Everything happens quickly: “Neither the neighboring houses nor the city streets see how many were taken away overnight. Having frightened the closest neighbors, they are not an event for distant ones. It's like they didn't exist." And in the morning, along the very asphalt along which the doomed were led at night, with slogans and songs, an unsuspecting young Soviet tribe will pass.
Close acquaintance with the motherland
Solzhenitsyn did not recognize the paralyzing attraction of a night arrest; he was detained while serving at the front. In the morning he was the captain of a company, and in the evening he lay in a spitting stuffy punishment cell, in which three people could hardly fit. Solzhenitsyn was fourth.
The punishment cell became the first refuge of the condemned Solzhenitsyn. For 11 years, he happened to sit out in many cells. Here, for example, is a lousy-buggy prison in a bullpen without bunks, without ventilation, without heating. And here is a loner in the Arkhangelsk prison, where the windows are smeared with red red lead, so that only bloody light enters the cell. And here is a nice haven in Choibalsan - fourteen adults in six square places sit for months on a dirty floor and change legs on command, and a 20-watt light bulb hangs from the ceiling, which never goes out.
Each cell was followed by a new one, and there was no end to them, and there was no hope of liberation. They got into the Gulag according to the famous 58th article, which consisted of only four points, each of which condemned a person to 10, 15, 20 or 25 years. At the end of the term came exile or release. The latter was practiced extremely rarely - as a rule, the convict became a "repeater". And again began the chambers and the terms that lasted for decades.
Appeal? Court? Please! All cases fell under the so-called "extrajudicial execution" - a very convenient term coined by the Cheka. The courts have not been abolished. They still punished, executed, but extrajudicial reprisals went on separately. According to statistics compiled much later, in only twenty provinces of Russia, the Cheka shot 8,389 people, uncovered 412 counter-revolutionary organizations (author: "a fantastic figure, knowing our constant inability to organize"), arrested - 87 thousand people (author: this figure , from the modesty of the compiler of statistics, is considerably underestimated). And this is without the number of officially executed, declassified and convicted!
Among the inhabitants of the Gulag, there was a legend about the "paradise islands", where milk rivers flow, they feed their fill, lay gently, and work there is only mental. Prisoners of "special" professions are sent there. Alexander Isaevich was lucky to intuitively lie that he, they say, is a nuclear physicist. This unconfirmed legend saved his life and opened the way to "sharashki".
When did the camps appear? In the dark 30s? In the military 40s? The BBC told mankind a terrible truth - the camps already existed in 1921! "Is it really so early?" the public was amazed. Which of course you don't! In the 21st camps were already in full swing. Comrades Marx and Lenin argued that the old system, including the existing machine of coercion, must be broken down and a new one erected in its place. The prison is an integral part of this machine. So the camps existed from the first months after the glorious October Revolution.
Why did the camps appear? In this matter, everything is too simple to the point of banality. There is a huge young state that needs to get stronger in a short time without outside help. He needs: a) cheap labor (even better free); b) unpretentious labor force (forced, easily transportable, manageable and permanent). Where to draw the source of such power? - In my people.
What did they do in the camps? They worked, worked, worked… From dawn to dusk and every day. Work was for everyone. Even the armless were forced to trample the snow. Mines, brickwork, clearing peat bogs, but all prisoners know that the worst thing is logging. No wonder it was called "dry execution". First, the lumberjack prisoner needs to cut down the trunk, then cut off the branches, then drag the branches and burn them, then saw the trunk and lay the beams in stacks. And all this in chest-deep snow, in thin camp clothes (“if only the collars were sewn on!”). Summer working day - 13 hours, winter - a little less, excluding the road: 5 kilometers there - five back. A lumberjack has a short life - three weeks and you're gone.
Who was in the camps? The prison cells of the Gulag were cordially open to people of all ages, genders and nationalities. Without prejudice, children (“youngsters”), and women, and the elderly were accepted here, hundreds of fascists, Jews, spies were driven, and dispossessed peasants were brought in whole villages. Some were even born in the camps. The mother was taken out of prison during childbirth and breastfeeding. When the baby grew up a little (as a rule, they were limited to a month or two), the woman was sent back to the camp, and the child was sent to the orphanage.
We bring to your attention, which, due to its richness and sharp turns of fate, is very reminiscent of an exciting novel or story.
In his novel, he depicted the life of the patients of the Tashkent hospital, namely the cancer ward No. 13, the very name of which inspired despair and awe in many people.
Each prisoner has his own story, worthy of a whole book. Solzhenitsyn cites some of them on the last pages of the second volume of The Gulag. Here are the stories of 25-year-old teacher Anna Petrovna Skripnikova, simple hard worker Stepan Vasilievich Loshchilin, priest Father Pavel Florensky. There were hundreds of them, thousands, I can’t remember them all ...
During the heyday of the camps, they did not kill, the death penalty, executions and other methods of instant death were abolished as deliberately unprofitable. The country needed slaves! The GULAG was a gallows, only stretched out in the best camp traditions, so that before death the victim had time to suffer and work for the good of the fatherland.
Is it possible to escape from the camp? - Theoretically possible. Lattices, barbed wires and blank walls are not an obstacle for a person. Is it possible to escape from the camp forever? - Not. The fugitives were always returned. Sometimes they were stopped by a convoy, sometimes by the taiga, sometimes by kind people who received generous rewards for capturing especially dangerous criminals. But there were, Solzhenitsyn recalls, the so-called "convinced fugitives" who decided on a risky escape again and again. Georgy Pavlovich Tenno, for example, was remembered this way. After the next return, he was asked “Why are you running?” “Because of freedom,” the Tenno answered inspiredly, “A night in the taiga without shackles and guards is already freedom.”
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is one of the lucky few who managed to get out of the death camp. The first step towards salvation was the “sharashka”, then the exile, which seemed like a real paradise and allowed Solzhenitsyn to finally take up writing. After the exile came an unexpected release with further rehabilitation.
But as soon as the former inhabitant of the Gulag spoke, as soon as the "Archipelago" appeared in print, the good motherland immediately disowned its son, resoundingly lowered the iron curtain and put it out of the door of the hospitable Land of Soviets, where there were and are no political prisoners, where peace and justice, where thousands of the doomed do not howl behind barbed wire.
The appearance of the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago", which he himself called "the experience of artistic research", became an event not only in Soviet, but also in world literature. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And in the native country of the writer during this period, persecution, arrest and exile awaited, which lasted almost two decades.
Autobiographical basis of the work
A. Solzhenitsyn came from the Cossacks. His parents were highly educated people and became for the young man (his father died shortly before the birth of his son) the embodiment of the image of the Russian people, free and adamant.
The successful fate of the future writer - studying at Rostov University and MIFLI, being promoted to lieutenant and being awarded two orders for military merit at the front - changed dramatically in 1944, when he was arrested for criticizing the policies of Lenin and Stalin. The thoughts expressed in one of the letters turned into eight years of camps and three exiles. All this time, Solzhenitsyn worked, memorizing almost everything by heart. And even after returning from the Kazakh steppes in the 50s, he was afraid to write down poems, plays and prose, he believed that it was necessary "to keep them secret, and himself with them."
The author's first publication, which appeared in the journal Novy Mir in 1962, announced the emergence of a new "master of the word" who did not have "a drop of falsehood" (A. Tvardovsky). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich evoked numerous responses from those who, like the author, had gone through the horrors of the Stalinist camps and were ready to tell their compatriots about them. So the creative plan of Solzhenitsyn began to be realized.
The history of the creation of the work
The basis of the book was the personal experience of the writer and 227 (later the list increased to 257) prisoners like him, as well as surviving documentary evidence.
The publication of volume 1 of the book The Gulag Archipelago appeared in December 1973 in Paris. Then, at intervals of a year, the same YMCA-PRESS publishing house releases volumes 2 and 3 of the work. Five years later, in 1980, a twenty-volume collection of works by A. Solzhenitsyn appeared in Vermont. It also includes the work "The Gulag Archipelago" with additions by the author.
In the homeland of the writer began to publish only since 1989. And 1990 was declared the year of Solzhenitsyn in the then USSR, which emphasizes the significance of his personality and creative heritage for the country.
Genre of the work
Artistic and historical research. The definition itself indicates the realism of the events depicted. At the same time, this is the creation of a writer (not a historian, but a good connoisseur of it!), which allows for a subjective assessment of the events described. Solzhenitsyn was sometimes blamed for this, noting a certain grotesqueness of the narrative.
What is the Gulag Archipelago
The abbreviation originated from the abbreviated name of the Main Directorate of Camps that existed in the Soviet Union (it changed several times in the 20-40s), which is known today to almost every inhabitant of Russia. It was, in fact, an artificially created country, a kind of closed space. Like a huge monster, it grew and occupied more and more new territories. And the main labor force in it were political prisoners.
The Gulag Archipelago is a generalized story of the emergence, development and existence of a huge system of concentration camps created by the Soviet regime. Consistently, in one chapter after another, the author, relying on experiences, eyewitness accounts and documents, talks about who became a victim of Article 58, famous in Stalin's time.
In prisons and behind the barbed wire of the camps, there were no moral and aesthetic norms at all. Camp inmates (meaning the 58th, because against their background the life of "thieves" and real criminals was a paradise) in an instant turned into outcasts of society: murderers and bandits. Tormented by overwork from 12 hours a day, always cold and hungry, constantly humiliated and not fully understanding why they were “taken”, they tried not to lose their human appearance, thought and dreamed about something.
He also describes the endless reforms in the judicial and correctional system: either the abolition or return of torture and the death penalty, the constant increase in the terms and conditions of repeated arrests, the expansion of the circle of “traitors” to the motherland, which included even teenagers aged 12 years and over ... the entire USSR projects, such as the White Sea Canal, built on millions of bones from the victims of the existing system called the Gulag Archipelago.
It is impossible to list everything that falls into the field of view of the writer. This is the case when, in order to understand all the horrors that millions of people went through (according to the author, the victims of the Second World War - 20 million people, the number of peasants killed in camps or starved to death by 1932 - 21 million) you need to read and feel what what Solzhenitsyn writes about.
"Gulag Archipelago": reviews
It is clear that the reaction to the work was ambiguous and rather contradictory. So G.P. Yakunin, a well-known human rights activist and public figure, believed that with this work Solzhenitsyn was able to dispel "faith in a communist utopia" in Western countries. And V. Shalamov, who also passed through Solovki and initially had an interest in the writer's work, later called him a businessman, focused only on "personal successes."
Be that as it may, A. Solzhenitsyn (“The Gulag Archipelago” is not the only work of the author, but must be the most famous) made a significant contribution to debunking the myth of prosperity and a happy life in the Soviet Union.
“For years, with embarrassment in my heart, I refrained from printing this already finished book: the debt to the still living outweighed the debt to the dead. But now that the state security has taken this book anyway, I have no choice but to publish it immediately.
A. Solzhenitsyn September 1973» .
This is how the Gulag Archipelago begins. The book that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote “on the table” at almost 10 years old. The book, because of which he was expelled from his native country, and then he was given the State Prize for it. The book that was hunted by the KGB, and which for the first time was able to see the light of day abroad.
background
Beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Young Alexander Solzhenitsyn finds himself at the front and corresponds with his comrades. In one of these letters, the author spoke negatively about the "Godfather", by which Stalin was meant. Military censorship reports on the "rebel" and at the end of the winter of 1945 he is arrested. The war is over, the compatriots are celebrating, and Solzhenitsyn is still being interrogated. And they are sentenced to 8 years in labor camps, and at the end of them - to eternal exile.
Later, he will describe all the horrors of the camps in his works. For many years they will be distributed by samizdat - without the permission of the authorities.
Write letters in small handwriting
Solzhenitsyn's first publications in the Novy Mir magazine (in particular, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) caused a storm of responses. Readers wrote to the author about their lives and shared their experiences, including camp experiences. These letters from former prisoners did not pass by Alexander Isaevich: the "Gulag Archipelago" began with them.
Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's widow Natalya Dmitrievna at the presentation of the abridged edition of the book The Gulag Archipelago. Photo: RIA Novosti / Sergey Pyatakov
Solzhenitsyn dedicated his monumental work to them, the same victims of repressions as himself:
I dedicate
to all those who did not have enough life
tell about it.
And may they forgive me
that I didn't see everything
I didn't remember everything
didn't think of everything.
What is "GULAG"?
The action of the book takes place in the camps. Their network spread throughout the Union, so Solzhenitsyn calls it the Archipelago. Often the inhabitants of such camps were political prisoners. Alexander Isaevich himself survived the arrest, and each of his two hundred "co-authors".
Creativity of fans of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Photo: flickr.com / thierry ehrmann
The very word GULAG means the Main Directorate of Camps. In each such “island”, the convicts were considered a labor force. But even if a person survived in harsh conditions, in hunger, cold and hard labor, he still did not always go free.
Government is against!
The ruling elite perceived Solzhenitsyn as an enemy - not only did his works undermine the authority of the Soviet government and criticized the political foundations, they also became known in the West.
The following years were very difficult for Solzhenitsyn. It was no longer printed in his native country, the KGB confiscated the writer's archive, searched his friends' houses and took away the found manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn. It is amazing how, under such conditions, the author was able to finish and save the novel. In 1967, the work was completed, but it could not yet see the light in its homeland.
And in 1973, the KGB detained the writer's assistant and typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. During interrogation, she told where one of the manuscripts of the Gulag Archipelago was located. Returning home, the 70-year-old woman hanged herself.
Solzhenitsyn found out about the incident a couple of weeks later. And he did two decisive actions: he sent a letter to the leadership of the USSR, in which he called for abandoning the communist regime, and instructed to publish the novel in the West.
The KGB tried to stop the writer. Through his ex-wife, the committee offered him "barter": he does not publish his "GULAG" abroad, and in return his "Cancer Ward" is published in the Union. Solzhenitsyn did not negotiate, and in December of the same year the first volume of The Archipelago was published in Paris.
After the Gulag Archipelago
The Politburo condemned the release of the novel severely. In February, Alexander Isaevich was accused of treason, deprived of his citizenship and expelled from the country. And all Soviet libraries were ordered to confiscate and destroy any of Solzhenitsyn's books.
But the writer "annoyed" the authorities even more. With the royalties received from the publication, he founded the "Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families" - money was secretly transferred from there to political prisoners in the USSR.
The authorities began to change "anger to mercy" only with the beginning of perestroika. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was given back his citizenship. And they gave the State Prize of the RSFSR - for the same novel, for which almost 20 years ago they were expelled from the country. In the same year, the entire Gulag Archipelago was published for the first time at home.
Actress Anna Vartanyan at the reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books in honor of the writer's 95th birthday. year 2013. Photo: www.russianlook.com
Critics' claims: inaccurate figure and mention of Americans
Basically, the "Gulag Archipelago" was scolded for two things. Firstly, Solzhenitsyn's calculations on the number of repressed people could not be entirely correct. Secondly, many were “jarred” by such a moment in the novel:
“... on a hot night in Omsk, when we, steamed, sweaty meat, were kneaded and pushed into a funnel, we shouted to the guards from the depths: “Wait, you bastards! Truman will be on you! They will throw an atomic bomb on your head!”. And the guards were cowardly silent"
In this episode, some saw a call to the Americans to bomb the USSR. But Solzhenitsyn himself did not leave the Union until the very end and returned at the first opportunity.
It so happened that The Gulag Archipelago radically changed the whole life of its author. Because of him, Solzhenitsyn was expelled as a traitor. And then they called back, as if nothing had happened. But the writer fulfilled his civic duty - both to the living and to the dead.
"The Gulag Archipelago" in five quotes
About power:
This wolf tribe - where did it come from in our people? Is it not our root? not our blood? Ours. So that the white robes of the righteous do not have to be overwashed, let us each ask ourselves: if my life had turned out differently, would I not have become such an executioner? This is a terrible question if you answer it honestly.
About "readiness" for arrest:
We are enlightened and prepared from youth for our specialty; to the duties of a citizen; to military service; to take care of your body; to decent behavior; even to the understanding of the elegant (well, this is not very). But neither education, nor upbringing, nor experience in the least lead us to the greatest test of life: to arrest for nothing and to investigation for nothing.
About greed:
And the desire to cash in is their universal passion. How not to use such power and such lack of control for enrichment? Yes, it must be a saint! .. If it were given to us to find out the hidden driving force of individual arrests, we would be surprised to see that, with a general pattern of imprisoning, a private choice of whom to imprison, a personal lot, in three-quarters of cases depended on human self-interest and revenge and half of those cases - from the mercenary calculations of the local NKVD (and the prosecutor, of course, we will not separate them).
About Chekhov:
If Chekhov's intellectuals, who kept wondering what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years, were told that in forty years there would be a torture investigation in Russia, they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath of acids, torture him naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, to drive a ramrod heated on a primus stove into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genital parts with a boot, and in the form of the easiest - to torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end, all the heroes would go to the madhouse.
On the destruction of literature:
Oh, how much ideas and labors have gone into this building! a whole dead culture. Oh, soot, soot from the Lubyanka pipes!! It’s more offensive that our generation will consider our generation stupider, mediocre, dumber than it was! ..
In 3 volumes.
YMCA-Press, Paris, 1973. (Creation of the book: 1958-1968)
The name of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is one of the key names in Russian history of the 20th century. A man of amazing fate, outstanding courage and unique literary talent, he - alone - entered the battle with a totalitarian state and emerged victorious from it. The scale of the personality of this artist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1970, his moral authority in society is truly enormous.
"The Gulag Archipelago" is the most famous book by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. For the first time, this fundamental study on the repressions of the Stalin era was published in the early 70s. in the West, then in "samizdat" and only during the years of "perestroika" - in Russia, but to this day the topic has not lost its relevance, and the author's text - intransigence and passion. The documentary and artistic epic "The Gulag Archipelago" comprehensively examines the system of punishment introduced in our country under Soviet rule, when millions of innocent people were subjected to hard labor. The writer collected and summarized a huge amount of historical material, dispelling the myth of the "humanity" of Leninism. This devastating and well-reasoned critique of the Soviet system was a bombshell all over the world.
(In the USSR, for reading, storing, distributing (gave it to someone to read) the Gulag Archipelago, one could get up to eight years in prison.)
Volume 1
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Format: html/zip The size: 4 76 Kb
Volume 2
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Format: html/zip The size: 5 38 Kb
Volume 3
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See also:
Red wheel. Solzhenitsyn A.I.
Volume 1
Introduction
Part one. prison industry
Chapter 1. Arrest
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part two. perpetual motion
Chapter 1. Ships of the Archipelago
Chapter 2. Ports of the Archipelago
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Volume 2
Part three. Fighter-labor
Chapter 1
Chapter 2. The archipelago arises from the sea
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6. Fascists have been brought!
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part four. Soul and barbed wire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Volume 3
Part five. penal servitude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part seven. no Stalin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Afterword
And even after
1. One day of Ivan Denisovich.(doc/zip , 123 Kb)
2. Matherin's yard.(doc/zip , 45 Kb)
3. Don't live by lies.(doc/zip , 9 Kb)
solzhenitsyn.ru- December 11, 2008, in honor of 90th anniversary since the birth of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an official website dedicated to the writer's work has been opened.
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Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn Writer, publicist and historian, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. |
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| Art. lieutenant, 1943 | Zeck, 1946 | Special camp, 1953 |
Born December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in a peasant family after the death of his father (his father died in an accident six months before the birth of his son).
1924 - the family moves to Rostov-on-Don.
1936-1941 - after graduating from school, he studies at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University in Rostov-on-Don. Since 1939 studies in absentia at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History.
1941 - Solzhenitsyn is mobilized; after graduating from the officer school (end of 1942) - at the front.
1943-1945 - commanded an artillery battery. At the end of the war, he had the rank of captain, was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree and the Red Star.
1945 - arrested and sentenced to 8 years in labor camps (the reason was Solzhenitsyn's correspondence with his friend Nikolai Vitkevich, which contained criticism of Lenin and Stalin) "for anti-Soviet agitation and an attempt to create an anti-Soviet organization" (under article 58, paragraphs 10 and 11).
Impressions from the camp in New Jerusalem, then from the work of prisoners in Moscow (building a house near the Kaluga outpost) become the basis of the play "Republic of Labor" (originally titled "Deer and Shalashovka", 1954).
1947 - transferred as a mathematician to the Marfa "sharashka" - the research institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs-KGB, where he stayed until 1950. Later, this "sharashka" will be described in the novel "In the First Circle". Since 1950 in the Ekibastuz camp (the experience of "general work" is recreated in the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"); here he falls ill with cancer (the tumor was removed in February 1952). In the camps he works as a laborer, a bricklayer, and a foundry worker.
1953 - Solzhenitsyn at the "eternal exile settlement" in the village of Kok-Terek (Dzhambul region, Kazakhstan). Twice treated in Tashkent for cancer; on the day of discharge from the hospital, a story about a terrible illness was conceived - the future "Cancer Ward".
1956 - Solzhenitsyn is rehabilitated by the decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR, which makes it possible to return to Russia: he teaches in the Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the future story "Matryona Dvor".
1957 - Solzhenitsyn lives in Ryazan, teaches at school. All this time, secret writing work on the novel "In the First Circle" is going on, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe Gulag Archipelago is ripening.
1959 - the story “Sch-854 (One day of one convict)” was written in three weeks, which in 1961, through a friend from Marfinskaya sharashka, literary critic L.Z. Kopelev, was transferred to the Novy Mir magazine, where A.T. Tvardovsky met him . Directly from N.S. Khrushchev, Tvardovsky seeks permission to publish a story called “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (“New World”, 1962, No. 11), which brought world fame to the author.
The stories “Matryona Dvor” (originally titled “A Village Can’t Stand Without a Righteous Man”), “The Incident at the Krechetovka Station” (both Novy Mir, 1963, N 1), “For the Good of the Cause” (ibid., 1963, N 7) strengthen the glory of Solzhenitsyn. Letters from former prisoners and meetings with them (227 witnesses) contribute to the work on the Gulag Archipelago; spelled "Cancer Ward"; the idea of a book about the revolution is being updated (P17, the future of the Red Wheel); a censored edition of the novel "In the First Circle" (87 chapters) is being built. “One Day...” was nominated for the Lenin Prize, but Solzhenitsyn did not receive the prize, gradually a slander campaign began. The struggle with the writer intensifies after the fall of Khrushchev: in September 1965, the KGB seizes Solzhenitsyn's archive; the possibilities of publications are blocked, only the story "Zakhar-Kalita" ("New World", 1966, No. 1) can be printed; the triumphant discussion of Cancer Ward in the prose section of the Moscow branch of the Union of Writers does not bring the main result - the story is still banned.
1967 - Solzhenitsyn, in an open letter to the delegates of the Fourth Congress of Writers, demands the abolition of censorship.
1968 - completed "Archipelago ...". In the same year, "In the First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" were published abroad. The struggle with the writer's leadership continues, Solzhenitsyn is looking for opportunities to contact the West.
1969 - Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Writers' Union.
1970 - Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1973 - The KGB seizes a cache with the manuscript of "The Archipelago ...", after which Solzhenitsyn gives a signal about its publication in the YMCA-Press (Paris); The first volume is published at the end of December.
1974 - Solzhenitsyn was arrested, deprived of citizenship and deported to Germany.
Having lived briefly in Zurich, having received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm (December 1975) and making a trip to the USA (April 1976; speeches to trade unionists in Washington and New York and at a reception in the Senate), Solzhenitsyn with his family (wife of N.D. Solzhenitsyn , her mother E.F. Svetlova, three sons of the writer and the son of his wife from his first marriage) in October 1976 moved to an estate near the city of Cavendish (Vermont, USA). Published: his articles in the collection "From under the rocks" (1974), articles "In the Soviet Union", 1969 - 1974, "In the West", 1974 - 1980.
The epic “Red Wheel. Narrative in measured terms "(revised version of" August the Fourteenth ";" October the Sixteenth, both 1982; "March the Seventeenth", 1986-87; "April the Seventeenth", 1991).
1974 - Solzhenitsyn founded the "Russian Public Fund", transferring all the fees for the "Gulag Archipelago" to it.
1977 - founds the "All-Russian Memoir Library" and "Research of Recent Russian History".
1978-1988 - an 18-volume collection of his works is published in Paris.
1989 - the editor of Novy Mir, S.P. Zalygin, succeeds after a long struggle to print the Nobel Lecture, and then the chapters of the Archipelago ... selected by the author (Novy Mir, No. 7-11). Since 1990, Solzhenitsyn's prose has been widely published in his homeland.
1990 - Citizenship was returned to the writer by the Decree of the President of the USSR.
1991 - the book "A Calf Butted an Oak", essays on Soviet literary life, was written.
1994 - Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia. Having traveled the country from the Far East to Moscow, he is actively involved in public life. Still not allowing the possibility of cooperation with the communists, Solzhenitsyn resolutely condemns the reforms of President Boris N. Yeltsin, and constantly criticizes the authorities. (In September 1995, Solzhenitsyn's TV series was terminated on the ORT channel.) Upon his return, the writer is working on the book “A grain fell between two millstones. Essays on exile. Stories and lyrical miniatures ("Tiny") ("New World", 1995-97) are published.
