A young lady, Desi-Rae Campbell, writes us:
“I want to share this video series that I did covering The Gulag Archipelago. Although reading the book is the best way to absorb the content, it is useful for people who both have and do not want to read the book or can't for various reasons. It also includes relevant imagery and footage. Here is the full playlist” below. We thought it worth sharing with readers of that epic work.
A new book thoughtfully illuminates the respective treatments of the Gulag in the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, even if the editors and contributors generally approach camp literature and testimony from a literary, moral, and philosophical perspective closer to Shalamov than Solzhenitsyn. Two essays stand out: Michael N. Nicholson's lucid and informative account of the genesis of both the Kolyma Tales and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and Luba Jurgenson's suggestive account of why Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov ended up not collaborating on The Gulag Archipelago.
Happy New Year, dear readers!
Young composer Austin Hamilton writes us: “Last year, I read The Gulag Archipelago and was so moved by his story that I dedicated part of my musical studies in my senior year of college to writing a symphony based off of the book. It was performed and recorded as a part of my senior recital. If nothing else, I'm writing to share my art in memory of Solzhenitsyn and the message he left us with.”
We are touched by Mr Hamilton’s sincerity and talent, and are pleased to share his video below, followed by his own program note.
00:00 Background
02:38 Movement I
10:12 Movement II
18:36 Movement III
The Symphony for the Zeki is written to remember and educate about the systems of gulags in the Soviet Union and their millions of prisoners, known as the zeki. Gulags were labor and death camps run by the government to imprison their own citizens, usually political prisoners. The inspiration for this symphony is rooted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, which recounts his own eleven years in labor camps and exile, along with stories from some two-hundred survivors. This book played a pivotal role in the downfall of the Soviet Union and shed light on what was behind the Iron Curtain. Each movement is titled after a chapter from the book.
Movement I: The History of Our Sewage Disposal System opens with La Internationale, which for many years was the Soviet national anthem, and is still used by many socialist and communist parties today. This movement depicts the waves of arrests, interrogations, and transfers of prisoners by train into the Gulag, never to see their families again. Many remember “the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door.” Many of those who were arrested were later tortured into giving forced confessions.
Movement II: The Archipelago Rises from the Sea describes the time spent within the Gulag. The prisoners experienced unimaginable working conditions, but somehow found the will to continue until the end of their sentence. Yet when prisoners were released, some would quickly pass away, having fought for so long. The prisoners were not the only victims of the Gulag—the torturers’ souls departed “downward from humanity” according to their grievous actions. And that underworld of Russian thieves held the credo: “you today; me tomorrow,” which was their constant reminder of how quickly things could change.
Movement III: The Ascent portrays the rise of the soul of the prisoner within the camp. Solzhenitsyn met Dr. Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld after an operation on his malignant tumor in the camp hospital. Dr. Kornfeld kept Solzhenitsyn company that night and recounted the story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Before departing, he left this final thought with Solzhenitsyn, which happened to be his final words as he was murdered the next morning: “I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.” It was this that allowed Solzhenitsyn to accept the atrocities in his life and ascend high above the suffering and pain that surrounded him in the physical world.
Over at American Thinker, E. M. Cadwaladr reads The Gulag Archipelago and worries about politics in today’s America as an end-all.
“In short, the grandest and most chilling similarity between Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union and today’s America is this: the needs of the political narrative reign supreme. Facts have been dethroned. In our old republic, policies were usually the result of compromises. They balanced, however imperfectly, the natural interests of a competing real persons. In a totalitarian state, the collective populace is simply forced into the mold required by the needs of the ideology itself. The idea justifies both means and ends. What happens to the individual matters — and in fact is worth mentioning — only if it happens to advance the progress of the narrative. Truth, as the postmodernists have openly told us, is what authorities say it is. In such a world, you and I are nothing at all.”
Daniel J. Mahoney’s second Solzhenitsyn book, The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, has now come out in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press. It is an insightful exploration of the philosophical, political, and moral themes in The Gulag Archipelago, The Red Wheel, and In the First Circle, among other works.
Over at Law and Liberty, Scott Yenor has another take on Solzhenitsyn’s great Archipelago chapter, “Our Muzzled Freedom”. (Attentive readers will recall that we mentioned another paraphrase of that chapter’s famous list a few weeks ago.
“In the style and language of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then, it is worth considering the attributes of America’s new, “muzzled freedom.”*”
Brad Birzer paraphrases the ten typical features of “free” life under Communism that Solzhenitsyn enumerates in The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, part IV, ch. 3, “Our Muzzled Freedom”. Instructive reading.
The new audiobook of the official abridged version of The Gulag Achipelago, read by the author’s son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, came out last summer in UK/Commonwealth countries, and is coming to the USA on 26th May 2020, available to download wherever audiobooks are sold.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Owen Matthews includes The Gulag Archipelago in his top-five list.
“How is it possible to put two strangers in a room—one an executioner, the other a prisoner—and not only persuade one to kill the other but convince both that this murder serves some higher purpose? During his eight years in the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn felt the full brunt of Stalin’s police state “on his own hide,” in the Russian phrase. His epic “Gulag Archipelago,” a “literary investigation” of the history of Stalin’s terror, is the most thoroughly researched, deeply felt work ever written on the subject. Yet in all its exhausting and exhaustive detail, from the exact dimensions of the tiny, blacked-out holding cages to the horrors of being transported across the 10 time zones of the U.S.S.R. to frozen hellholes in the Arctic, the central question remains: “Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?” Solzhenitsyn asks of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, decent Soviet men and women who were ready to justify and even participate in the massacre of their fellows. “Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.” Solzhenitsyn’s explanation is that “the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?” That has the ring of truth. Still it does not explain, as perhaps nothing can, the enormity of the mass delusion that was Stalinism—one that claimed up to 15 million lives through execution, man-made famine and forced labor.”
cover of new audiobook
Our friends at Vintage/Penguin have issued a brand-new audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago (abridged version), read by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. For the time being, it is only available in the UK/Commonwealth countries, but is scheduled to come to the US in 2020. (If you prefer paperback, go here. For the full 3-volume set, go here.) Here is an excerpt from Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s reading—from Part 1, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”.
“Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. No matter how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will not emit electrons. But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to glow, it does emit them. (The threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.) You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.
Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, without, perhaps, the possibility of return .”
Wednesday’s Times excerpts Jordan Peterson’s foreword to the new Vintage Classics edition of The Gulag Archipelago. Peterson also reads his entire foreword on video here.
“If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank Heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again.”
A beautiful new re-issue of the abridged Gulag Archipelago (authorized by Solzhenitsyn) is just out from Vintage Classics in the UK. This thoughtful new edition adds a profound foreword by Jordan B. Peterson that goes to the very heart of what this terrifying and uplifting book is all about, as well as a new glossary and index that will help readers orient themselves anew in Archipelago's rich material.
A reconsideration of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago that talks about its continuing relevance to Russia and the West, published yesterday at voegelinview. The piece's writer, Daniel J. Mahoney, is a Solzhenitsyn scholar who also serves as the Vice President of The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center.
“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives villainy its long-sought justification and gives the villain the necessary steadfastness and determination…
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions.”
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The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center supports explorations into the life and writings of the Nobel Laureate and Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
