Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #390811 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Its importance can hardly be exaggerated," said Doris Lessing. "It helped to bring down an empire." For those who doubt that literature can change the world, here is evidence to the contrary. Solzhenitsyn's scorching, brilliant, part-autobiographical expose of the dreary oppressiveness and institutionalised cruelty of the Soviet regime, really did contribute to the final collapse of the Union in 1989. It also exposed how, if Hitler had the deaths of well over 6 million on his hands, the figure for Stalin might be nearer 60 million. This is not only history-in-the-making, but also an absolutely compulsive read (especially in this 400-page version abridged from the 1800 pages of the three-volume original.) From the breathtaking opening page, when Solzhenitsyn depicts starving prisoners of the Kolyma gulags, discovering a deep-frozen, prehistoric salamander in an icy stream and devouring it on the spot, "with relish," he holds you rapt, like the Ancient Mariner, with his "skinny hand" and "glittering eye." You have no choice but to listen to him, especially when he derides those who say "It would not happen here". "Alas," he says, "all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth." One of the very few undeniable books of the century. --Christopher Hart

Customer Reviews

Sometimes there's just not enough stars
This is unquestionably the best non fiction book I have ever read. It is at once profound, intelligent, affecting, exquisitely readable (excepting some of the more factual chapters, perhaps), terrifying, uplifting and occaionally - unexpectedly - very humourous. Solzhenitsyn manages to convey the details of the most outrageous atrocities without ever losing a sense of what is good about the human race and without ever losing an acutely righteous anger about what is bad about it.

Personally I have spent the last two months since reading this book all but beating everyone I know into reading it; some books, after all, should be reccomended highly, but this book should be mandatory, a rite of passage for anyone who has any opinion on history or morality - hell, for anyone who has the ability to read.

Already we have begun to forget
Recently i went into a large and well known bookstore in Glasgow because I wanted to buy this truly great book as a gift. The store was overrun by children and their parents who were buying the "new Harry Potter" When I asked an assisstant to find out if I could still buy this book in the original three volume edition she was unable to tell me. She had heard neither of The Gulag nor of Solzhenitsyn. She had to leave our conversation here as she had more Harry Potters' to attend to. Somehow this difficulty acted as a spur and made me more determined than ever to find the three volume set as a gift for my friend.... This truly great and historic book should be required reading. It is a matter of National Importance tha works like this are always available in print and always there when required. Totalatarianism has not gone away. It has changed it's clothes, hired some PR and now wears a little tasteful jewellery but it is still with us, still very much alive. The weight of Solzhenitsyns' experience and his extraordinary ability to wite seriously, in a way that is now qite uncommon in the west, makes these volumes vital literature and a compelling vision of a past coming to life again in Central Europe and elsewhere. One of the truly great artistic achievements of the 20th Century and one of the most powerful episodes of defiance and courage in the face of terror you will ever read. `it's true greatness, however, might lie in it's warmth and it's love for fellow prisoners. An essential life affirming testament to courage and decency.

Solzehenitsyn's Opus on life under Stalinist oppression
Solzenhitsyn ensures that the reader feels the full weight of Stalin's Soviet Union bearing down; from the chilling to the farcical. On the surface it is the true story of Solzenitsyn's arrest and incarceration for his political beliefs, but through this is weaved a political and social history of the early 20th Century Soviet Union. He captures both the sweep of the nation's history and the stories of real people; the latter illustrated by vignettes passed on to him by other inmates.

This book is a must for anyone who wants to gain a first hand glimpse of the horrors of Stalinism.