At the height of Stalin's postwar terror, Innokenty, a young diplomat and scion of a corrupt ruling class, discovers an earlier and more spiritual tradition than that adopted by the October Revolution, the beginning of a process which is Solzhenitsyn's basic theme: the individual's experience of acquiring an immortal soul. Unwisely but generously, Innokenty helps a friend in danger of arrest, only to be arrested himself and sent to a special prison. This, the archetype of the Gulag, is described with masterful psychological insight. There are no heroes and hardly any villains; oppressors are no less victims then the oppressed. In the great tradition of the Russian novel, The First Circle is both a brooding account of human nature and a scrupulously exact description of a historical period.

The First Circle

Literature & Fiction

SOLZHENITSYN, Aleksandr I.

Contemporary

Harper and Row

In the First Circle depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a research and development bureau made of GULAG inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks) are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following the Second World War. Unlike inhabitants of other gulag labor camps, the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoyed good working conditions; however, if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly shipped to Siberia.\nThe title is an allusion to Dante's first circle, or limbo of Hell in The Divine Comedy, wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other virtuous pagans, live in a walled green garden. They are unable to enter Heaven, as they were born before Christ, but enjoy a small space of relative freedom in the heart of Hell.

Whitney, Thomas P. [translator]

Harper&Row

Cancer Ward

Bantam]

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully.
Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, 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 the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.

The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Harper Perennial Modern Classics

NY 1974 Harper and Row. Translasted by H. Sternberg. Hardcover. 12mo., cloth. Fine in VG DJ.

Letter to the Soviet Leaders

Index on Censorship/Harper

Gulag II is both a powerful chronicle of brutal abuses and at the same time a testament to the tensile strength of the human spirit. The first volume of this work dealt with the arrests, interrogations, and transportaiotn of prisoners to the archipelago camps, a sort of state-within-a-state that stretched geographically from Leningrad to Komsomolsk..Volume Two is concerned with the daily life and death of the prisoners, among whom Solzheinitsyn spent eight years, having been arrested for writing letters critical of Stalin. Here the extended metaphor of the archipelago is joined by an image that informed Solzhenitsyn's novel The Cancer Ward. Evoking his own experience of cancer, he perceives the camps as a tumor that, in mestastasizing, infected the whole nation with its poison..Solzhenitsyn believes that the individual, armed with Truth and Right alone, can move tyrants, subvert power and alter the course of history.

The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV)

History

Russia

Perennial Library / Harper Perennial

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY” —Time
Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan “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, New Yorker “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

The Gulag Archipelago Three 1918-1956

Harper-perennial

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY” —Time
Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan “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 “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

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Reference

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY” —Time
Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan “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 “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

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

History & Criticism

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

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Books by SOLZHENITSYN, Aleksandr I.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SOLZHENITSYN, Aleksandr I.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The First Circle

The First Circle

Cancer Ward

The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956

Letter to the Soviet Leaders

The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV)

The Gulag Archipelago Three 1918-1956

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation