Quotessence
Home / Books / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 2 quotes · 1974, Gulag, Soviet Russia

Filter quotes by topic

All1974GulagSoviet RussiaCommunismPrison LaborPrison LifeSoviet Union1975For Profit PrisonsHard LaborPrisonPrison CampsStalinismThe AscentThe Soul And Barbed Wire19331934193819451973

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV Quotes

“We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper, to pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago.”

PoetryProseRussian LiteratureStalinism1976Prison CampsProse Versus VerseThe Muses In Gulag
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
Create image

“All the values turn upside down with the years, and what was considered a privilege in the Special Purpose Camp of the twenties—to wear government-issue clothing—would become an annoyance in the Special Camp of the forties: there the privilege would be not to wear government-issue clothing, but to wear at least something of one's own, even just a cap. The reason here was not economic only but was a cry of the whole epoch: one decade saw as its ideal how to join in the common lot, and the other how to get away from it.”

CommunismStalinismPrison Life1974
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
Create image