The official, one-volume edition, authorized by Solzhenitsyn
"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY" --Time
The Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece of world literature, the
searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged
volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne
Applebaum.
"It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the
political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century."
--David Remnick, The New Yorker
Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years
of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow
prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential
narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression,
the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its
creation by Lenin in 1918. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its
victims-this man, that woman, that child-we encounter the secret police
operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination
of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who
had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness astounding moral
courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a
few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and
degradation. And Solzhenitsyn's genius has transmuted this grisly
indictment into a literary miracle.
"The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime
ever leveled in modern times." --George F. Kennan
"Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. ... The Gulag Archipelago helped create
the world we live in today." --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
