Description: Previously published: New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Brief description:
After serving as a decorated captain in the Red Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced in 1945 to eight years of hard labor for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his long short story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1970. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, just weeks after The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet penal system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont, where he wrote The Red Wheel. In 1994 he returned home to Moscow, where he died in 2008.
Review Quotes:
"Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century" - Time magazine
"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