![]() Many knew fragments of the story, from the cousin who had been there or the neighbor’s nephew who worked in the police. In part, this was because The Gulag Archipelago, banned at home and published to great acclaim abroad, had the allure of the forbidden.īut the book’s appearance also marked the first time that anyone had tried to write a history of the Soviet concentration camps, using what information was then available, mostly the “reports, memoirs and letters by 227 witnesses,” whom Solzhenitsyn cites in his introduction. Although nearly three decades have passed since unbound, hand-typed samizdat manuscripts of the work began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, many can also still recall the emotions stirred by possessing the book, remembering who gave it to them, who else knew about it, whom they passed it on to next. ![]() ![]() To some Russians, the memory of a first encounter with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is as much a physical memory-the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night-as it is one of reading the revelatory text itself. ![]()
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