The Gulag Archipelago

Yes I read the abridged version (okay, listened to it), which despite being supervised and blessed by Solzhenitsyn himself, seems sheepish about itself:

The usual first reaction to any act of abridgment is that it is a bad business, almost a desecration.

Nevertheless, all the acclaim is worth it and readers are unfairly daunted by the size of the tomes. It’s a stunning, shocking work. I almost regret listening to the abridged version because I could have easily spent 3x the time with the full-volume work. Alas, no audio version.

One reason it’s so enthralling is its unusual voice.

Every sentence is taut with outrage. He doesn’t scold, he guides you through each circle of hell. To maintain that force across three large volumes in long hand speaks to an almost unbelievable physical and physiological feat by Solzhenitsyn. It’s as though he were writing in a trance. If Milton was this great strange Anglo seer who blind-dictated Paradise Lost, so Solzhenitsyn disgorges the burdens of the Russian people crushed underfoot.

The only Soviet copy of his manuscript was arrested with its keeper, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. She was interrogated by the KGB and subsequently found hanged. Fortunately, the manuscript had been smuggled out to the West, leading to Solzhenitsyn’s exile from the Soviet Union. The monstrous leviathan spat out its prophet.

Solzhenitsyn’s outrage is parried by another strange tone… is it incredulity? As though he were hallucinating, reporting back from a nightmarish world he can scarcely believe. Everything is deranged. Hannah Arendt wrote that Nazi Germany’s supreme commandment was Thou Shalt Kill and the Soviet Union's was Thou Shalt Bear False Witness. Nazi logic was perverse but inexorable and led to more or less efficient mass murder.1 But the Soviet derangement was something ...