Artistic features of the Gulag archipelago. "The Gulag Archipelago" (a monumental journalistic study of the repressive system)

"(1959). Then he named his future book “The Gulag Archipelago.” A possible outline of the presentation was drawn up, the principle of successive chapters was adopted on the prison system, on the investigation, trials, stages, forced labor camps, hard labor, exile and the mental changes of prisoners during the years of imprisonment. Some chapters were written at the same time, but the author postponed the work, realizing that the experience of his own and his camp friends was not enough to cover such a topic.

The secret history of the Gulag Archipelago. Documentary

Immediately after the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (“ New world", 1962, No. 11) the author was overwhelmed by a stream of hundreds of letters from former prisoners or from their surviving families, where heatedly, sometimes in detail and voluminously, personal stories and observations. During 1963-64, Solzhenitsyn processed letters and met with prisoners, listening to their stories. In the summer of 1964 in Estonia, he drew up a complete and final plan for the “Archipelago” in seven parts, and all the new supplementary materials went into this design.

In the fall of 1964, Solzhenitsyn began writing “The Archipelago” in Solotch near Ryazan; work continued until September 1965, when the KGB seized part of the author’s archive, and all the finished chapters and preparations for “The Archipelago” were immediately taken away by fellow prisoners to the safe “Shelter.” There, on an Estonian farm near Tartu, the writer secretly went to work for two winters in a row (1965-66 and 1966-67), so that by the spring of 1967 the first six Parts were written. In the winter of 1967-68, revisions continued; in May 1968, the final edition of the book was made and printed, which now had to await publication, planned by the author first for 1971, then for 1975. However, in August 1973, under tragic circumstances, State Security discovered an intermediate version of “Archipelago” in one of the storage facilities - and thus prompted its immediate publication.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1958-1967 in conditions when not only all official documents about the system remained strictly classified political repression and forced labor camps in the USSR since 1918, but he had to carefully hide the fact of many years of work on this topic.

“The Gulag Archipelago,” volume one, was published on December 28, 1973 in the oldest emigrant publishing house YMCA-PRESS, in Paris. The book opened with the words of the author (which were not reproduced in any subsequent edition):

“With a constriction in my heart, for years I refrained from printing this already finished book: my duty to the still living outweighed my duty to the dead. But now, when state security took this book anyway, I have no choice but to publish it immediately.

A. Solzhenitsyn

September 1973».

On February 12, 1974, a month and a half after the release of the first volume, A. I. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the USSR. In 1974, the YMCA-PRESS publishing house released the second volume, and in 1975 – the third.

The first edition of The Gulag Archipelago in Russian corresponded to the latest edition of 1968, supplemented by clarifications made by the author in 1969, 1972 and 1973. The text ended with two author's afterwords (from February 1967 and May 1968), explaining the history and circumstances of the creation of the book. Both in the preface and afterwords, the author thanked the witnesses who carried out their experience from the bowels of the Archipelago, as well as friends and assistants, but did not give their names due to the obvious danger for them: “ Full list those without whom this book would not have been written, revised, or preserved—the time has not yet come to entrust it to paper. They themselves know. I bow to them."

“The Gulag Archipelago” has been translated into European and Asian languages and published on all continents, in four dozen countries. A. I. Solzhenitsyn transferred the copyrights and royalties for all world publications to the “Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families,” which he founded in the first year of exile. Since then, the Foundation has helped many thousands of people inhabiting the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, and after the dissolution of the political Gulag continues to help former political prisoners.

Just as “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the early sixties in his homeland caused a flow of letters and personal stories, many of which became part of the fabric of “Archipelago,” so “Archipelago” itself gave rise to many new evidence; together with printed materials previously inaccessible to him, they prompted the author to make some additions and revisions.

The new edition was published in 1980, as part of the Collected Works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn (Collected works: In 20 volumes. Vermont; Paris: YMCA-PRESS. Vol. 5-7). The author added a third afterword (“And in another ten years,” 1979) and a detailed “Contents of the chapters.” The publication was supplied with two small dictionaries (“prison camp terms” and “Soviet abbreviations and expressions”).

When the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago” in the homeland became possible, it began with a reprint of the “Vermont” edition (M.: Sov. pis.; Novy mir, 1989) - and in the 1990s in Russia, all subsequent ten editions were printed according to the same text.

A significantly updated edition of The Gulag Archipelago was published in 2007 by the U-Faktoriya publishing house (Ekaterinburg). First published full list witnesses who provided material for this book. Initials revealed in text: replaced full names and surnames - wherever they were known to the author. Added some later notes. Footnotes have been streamlined and Soviet abbreviations in camp names have been brought into uniformity. Also, for the first time, the publication was accompanied by a name index of all persons mentioned in the “Archipelago” - both historical figures and ordinary prisoners. This voluminous work was carried out by N. G. Levitskaya and A. A. Shumilin with the participation of N. N. Safonov. Additional search for information and editing of the Index was undertaken by a historian, senior researcher at the Russian national library A. Ya. Razumov. Subsequent domestic publications reproduced the above.

The appearance of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago”, which he himself called “an experience artistic research", became an event not only in Soviet, but also in world literature. In 1970 he was awarded Nobel Prize. And in home country During this period, the writer faced persecution, arrest and exile, which lasted almost two decades.

Autobiographical basis of the work

A. Solzhenitsyn came from the Cossacks. His parents were highly educated people and became young man(the father died shortly before the birth of his son) the embodiment of the image of the Russian people, free and unyielding.

The successful fate of the future writer - studying at Rostov University and MIFLI, the rank of lieutenant and being awarded two orders for military merit at the front - changed dramatically in 1944, when he was arrested for criticizing the policies of Lenin and Stalin. The thoughts expressed in one of the letters resulted in eight years of camps and three years of exile. All this time, Solzhenitsyn worked, memorizing almost everything by heart. And even after returning from the Kazakh steppes in the 50s, he was afraid to write down poems, plays and prose; he believed that it was necessary to “keep them secret, and himself with them.”

The author’s first publication, which appeared in the magazine “New World” in 1962, announced the emergence of a new “master of words” who had “not a drop of falsehood” (A. Tvardovsky). “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” evoked numerous responses from those who, like the author, went through horrors Stalin's camps and was ready to tell his compatriots about them. So creative idea Solzhenitsyn began to come true.

History of the creation of the work

The basis of the book was personal experience writer and 227 (later the list increased to 257) prisoners like him, as well as surviving documentary evidence.

The publication of volume 1 of the book “The Gulag Archipelago” appeared in December 1973 in Paris. Then, at intervals of a year, the same publishing house YMCA-PRESS releases volumes 2 and 3 of the work. Five years later, in 1980, a twenty-volume collected works of A. Solzhenitsyn appeared in Vermont. It also includes the work “The Gulag Archipelago” with additions by the author.

The writer began to be published in his homeland only in 1989. And 1990 was declared the year of Solzhenitsyn in the then USSR, which emphasizes the significance of his personality and creative heritage for the country.

Genre of the work

Artistic historical research. The definition itself indicates the realism of the events depicted. At the same time, this is the creation of a writer (not a historian, but a good expert!), which allows for a subjective assessment of the events described. Solzhenitsyn was sometimes blamed for this, noting a certain grotesqueness of the narrative.

What is the Gulag Archipelago

The abbreviation arose from the abbreviated name of the Main Directorate of Camps that existed in the Soviet Union (it changed several times in the 20-40s), which is known today to almost every resident of Russia. It was, in fact, an artificially created country, a kind of closed space. Like a huge monster, it grew and occupied more and more new territories. And the main labor force in it were political prisoners.

"The Gulag Archipelago" is a generalized history of the emergence, development and existence of a huge system of concentration camps created by the Soviet regime. Consistently, in one chapter after another, the author, relying on his experiences, eyewitness accounts and documents, talks about who became the victim of Article 58, famous in Stalin’s times.

In the prisons and behind the barbed wire of the camps there were no moral or aesthetic standards whatsoever. The camp inmates (meaning the 58th, since against their background the life of “thieves” and real criminals was paradise) instantly turned into outcasts of society: murderers and bandits. Tormented by backbreaking work for 12 hours a day, always cold and hungry, constantly humiliated and not fully understanding why they were “taken”, they tried not to lose their human appearance, they thought and dreamed about something.

He also describes endless reforms in the judicial and correctional system: either the abolition or return of torture and death penalty, a constant increase in the terms and conditions of repeated arrests, an expansion of the circle of “traitors” to the homeland, which included even teenagers over the age of 12... Famous projects throughout the USSR are cited, such as the White Sea Canal, built on millions of bones of victims of the established system called the “GULAG Archipelago” .

It is impossible to list everything that comes into the writer’s field of vision. This is the case when, in order to understand all the horrors that millions of people went through (according to the author, the victims of the Second World War were 20 million people, the number of peasants exterminated in camps or died of hunger by 1932 was 21 million) it is necessary to read and feel what what Solzhenitsyn writes about.

"GULAG Archipelago": reviews

It is clear that the reaction to the work was ambiguous and quite contradictory. So G. P. Yakunin, a famous human rights activist and public figure, believed that with this work Solzhenitsyn was able to dispel “belief in a communist utopia” in Western countries. And V. Shalamov, who also passed through Solovki and was initially interested in the writer’s work, later called him a businessman focused only “on personal success.”

Be that as it may, A. Solzhenitsyn (“The Gulag Archipelago” is not the author’s only work, but must be the most famous) made a considerable contribution to debunking the myth of well-being and happy life in Soviet Union.

Only in May 1994, 20 years after his expulsion from Russia, did Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn return to his homeland. So what scared the then Soviet leadership in 1974? It seems to me that, first of all, the meaning of the seven lines at the beginning of “The Gulag Archipelago”: “In this book there are no fictitious persons, no fictitious events. People and places are named by them proper names. If they are named by initials, it is for personal reasons. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has not preserved names - but everything was exactly like that...” Was it necessary to fantasize, to invent something for a person who spent eleven years on the islands of this terrible archipelago? In February 1945, twenty-seven-year-old captain-artilleryman and order-bearer Sasha Solzhenitsyn was arrested due to censorship of criticism of Stalin in his letters and sentenced to eight years, of which he served almost a year during the investigation, three in a prison research institute (the one completed in Rostov came in handy -on-Don Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University) and spent four of the most difficult ones on general works in the political Special Security. Plus three years in exile in Kazakhstan, after which he was rehabilitated by a decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1957.

I read the first pages of “Archipelago...” from the chapter “Arrest” simply with curiosity: it was interesting to know how they “took” then, fifty extra years ago: “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested, there was a coffin in the room with his just deceased child. The lawyers threw the child out of the coffin: they looked there too.” Or here’s another: “Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, once got two tickets from the Comintern Grand Theatre, in the first rows. Investigator Kliegel courted her, and she invited him. They spent the whole performance very tenderly, and after that he took her... straight to the Lubyanka.”

There is still room for irony here. While preparing “Archipelago...” Solzhenitsyn became acquainted with the memories of someone who escaped during Patriotic War from the Archipelago to Mainland literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik, where there is an episode of his meeting in 1938 in Butyrki with the former prosecutor general of the country Krylenko. He sent tens of thousands to the Gulag, and now he himself finds himself under the bunk. And Solzhenitsyn ironizes: “I imagine very vividly (I climbed myself): the bunks there are so low that you can only crawl on your bellies along the dirty asphalt floor, but a beginner will not immediately adapt and crawls on all fours. He sticks his head in, but his protruding butt remains outside. I think it was especially difficult for the Supreme Prosecutor to adapt, and his not yet emaciated butt stuck out for a long time to the glory of Soviet justice. Sinful man, with gloating I imagine this stuck ass, and throughout the long description of these processes, he somehow calms me down.” And this image of Krylenko’s ass is etched into the memory, like the tight thighs of Napoleon from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

But the further narration makes my heart sink. Solzhenitsyn lists the simplest techniques that grind the will and personality of a prisoner without leaving traces on his body: “18. Forcing a defendant to kneel is not some kind of figuratively, but directly: on your knees and so that you don’t sit on your heels, but keep your back straight. In the investigator's office or in the corridor, you can make him stand like that for 12 hours, and 24, and 48... Who is good to stand like that? Already broken, already inclined to give up. It’s good to put women this way. Ivanov-Razumnik reports on a variant of this method: after putting young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the investigator urinated in his face! And what. Not taken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. This means that it works well on the proud too...”

The longest and most depressing part of the book is about the extermination camps. Especially the pages about women, politics, minors, repeaters, the camp world and places of especially strict imprisonment. That is why the thoughts of those who miraculously escaped from these places are so dear. It is amazing that even there, in prison, people were thinking about something, somehow reasoning. Let’s take the inherently surprising definition of the intelligentsia that Solzhenitsyn gives precisely in this part: “Over the years, I had to think about this word - intelligentsia. We all really like to consider ourselves one of them - but not everyone is... Everyone who does not work (and is afraid to work) with their hands began to be classified as the intelligentsia.” Solzhenitsyn continues: “... if we do not want to lose this concept, we should not exchange it. An intellectual is not determined by his professional affiliation or occupation. Good parenting And good family They also don’t necessarily raise an intellectual yet. An intellectual is one whose interests and will to the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not forced by external circumstances and even in spite of them. The intellectual is the one. whose thought is not imitative.”

In Solzhenitsyn's epic, one can also feel a glimmer of hope for some light in the leaden veil of clouds. After the war, when millions of Soviet people walked across Europe and looked at freedom and* democracy, this ray of light in dark kingdom The Gulag is already making its way to every stop. The writer met an unnamed Russian old woman at the Torbeevo station, when the prison car accidentally stopped at the station platform. “An old peasant woman stopped in front of our window with the frame down and through the window bars... for a long time, motionless, she looked at us, tightly squeezed on the top shelf. She looked with that eternal look with which our people always looked at the “unlucky ones.” Rare tears flowed down her cheeks. The gnarled one stood there and looked as if her son was lying between us. “You can’t look, mother,” the guard told her rudely. She didn't even move her head. And next to her stood a girl of about ten years old with white ribbons in her pigtails. She looked very sternly, even mournfully beyond her years, opening her eyes wide and wide and not blinking. She looked so hard that I think she photographed us forever. The train moved gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and earnestly, slowly crossed us.”

Finished reading the novel. And I believe, despite its oppressive tension, that as long as there are old women who believe in God and girls who remember everything, the new Gulag will not pass... And Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel will remain only beautiful literary monument to his victims.

It is difficult to name a more extensive work written in our time than Solzhenitsyn’s multi-volume epic “The Gulag Archipelago.” These are only at first glance his books about prisons and zones. On the contrary, his books are about everything and, above all, about people; You won’t find such a variety of characters anywhere. The variety of topics, geography, history, sociology and politics of his “Archipelago” is amazing! In essence, this is the history of our country, our state, shown from the “back door”, from an unusual perspective and in an unusual form.

Solzhenitsyn conceived a generalizing work about the camp world in the spring of 1958; The plan developed then was preserved basically until the end: chapters on the prison system and legislation, investigation, courts, “corrective labor” camps, convicts, exile and mental changes during the prison years. However, the work was interrupted, since there was clearly a lack of material - events, incidents, persons - based solely on the personal experience of the author and his friends.

Then, after writing “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a whole stream of letters poured in, thanks to which, during 1963-1964, the experience of 227 witnesses was selected, many of whom the writer met and talked with personally. From 1964 to 1968, three editions of the work were created, now consisting of 64 chapters in three volumes. In the winter of 1967-68, Solzhenitsyn recalls, “for December-February I made latest edition"Archipelago". Directly in the preface to the book itself, the author talks “about this amazing country“GULAG” - torn into an archipelago by geography, but shackled by psychology into a continent - an almost invisible, almost intangible country, which was inhabited by the people of prisoners. This striped archipelago cut and dotted another, including the country, it crashed into its cities, hung over its streets
- and yet others had no idea at all, many heard something vaguely, only those who had been there knew everything. But as if deprived of speech on the islands of the Archipelago, they remained silent..."

The first volume contains two parts: “The Prison Industry” and “Perpetual Motion.” It depicts the country's long and painful slide down the downward curve of terror. All the many years of activity of the all-pervading and eternally awake Organs were given strength by just one Article 58. It consisted of fourteen points.

From the first point we learn that any action aimed at weakening power is considered counter-revolutionary... With a broad interpretation, it turned out that refusal in the camp to go to work when you are hungry and exhausted is a weakening of power and entails execution. Point two speaks of an armed uprising in order to forcibly tear away any part of the Union of Republics. The third point is “contributing in any way to a foreign state,” etc. This article was enough to imprison millions of people.

It must be said that the operation (mass repression) of 1937 was not spontaneous, but planned, so that in the first half of this year, many prisons underwent refurbishment: beds were removed from cells, solid bunks, one-story, two-story, were built. Mostly they arrested party members with experience before 1924, party workers, employees of the Soviet administration, military command, scientists, and artists. The second stream was of workers and peasants.

During the war years, a big role was played by Stalin’s decree of “7.08”, the law according to which people were sentenced to prison for a spikelet of grain, for a cucumber, for two potatoes, for a spool of thread... - all for 10 years. It was believed that the personal confession of the accused was more important than any evidence and facts. To obtain a personal confession, investigators used physical and mental techniques.

But even during this dramatic and mournful narrative, when the reader’s soul gradually seems to glaze over at the sight of the suffering unfolding before it, there is also room for tragic irony. Solzhenitsyn meets with the literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik, who escaped to the West during the war, a memory of how in 1938 he ended up in Butyrki in the same cell with a former prosecutor, who worked a lot with a poisonous language on sending hundreds of his own kind to the Gulag - now forced to huddle with them under bunks. And the writer bursts out involuntarily: “I can imagine it very vividly (I climbed myself): the bunks there are so low that you can only crawl on your bellies along the dirty asphalt floor, but a beginner can’t get the hang of it right away and crawls on all fours. He will stick his head in, but his protruding butt will remain outside. I think it was especially difficult for the Supreme Prosecutor to adapt, and his not yet emaciated butt stuck out to the glory of Soviet justice.”

The second volume also has two parts: “Destructive Labor” and “Soul and Barbed Wire.” Of these, the part about “correctional” camps is the longest in the book (22 chapters) and the most depressingly hopeless, especially the pages about women, politicians, children, and the camp world in places of especially strict imprisonment. Here, at the bottom, in utter hell, human concepts and values that until now seemed unshakable are tested. Having passed through such a crucible, they become truly more valuable than gold:

Article 12 of the Criminal Code of 1926, which allows children from the age of 12 to be tried for theft, mutilation and murder, was the gateway to the Archipelago for minors. Solzhenitsyn gives the following figures: in 1927, 48 percent of all prisoners were between the ages of 16 and 24. This is almost half of the entire Archipelago in 1927 made up of youth, who October Revolution found between the ages of 6 and 14 years. They took for themselves all the most inhuman essence from this life and so quickly grew into camp life - not even in weeks, but in days! - as if they were not surprised by her, as if this life was not new to them at all, but was natural continuation yesterday's free life.

A glimmer of hope first appears, surprisingly, at the beginning of the third volume, in the history of the “special” political camps (part 5 - “Katorga”). Those who find themselves on the Archipelago after the war suddenly begin to clearly feel the air of freedom - not external freedom, to which the path is extremely far, but an integral and victorious internal will. Its herald is a silent Russian old woman, met by the writer at the quiet Torbeevo station, when their carriage stopped briefly at the platform: “The old peasant woman stopped near our window with the frame lowered and through the window bars and through the internal bars for a long time, motionless, looked at us, closely compressed on the top shelf. She looked with that eternal look with which our people have always looked at the “unfortunate”. Rare tears flowed down her cheeks. The gnarled one stood there and looked as if her son was lying between us. “You can’t look, mother,” the guard told her rudely. She didn't even move her head. The train moved gently - the old woman raised her black fingers and earnestly, slowly crossed us.”

The appearance of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago,” which he himself called “an experience in artistic research,” became an event not only in Soviet but also in world literature. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And in the writer’s native country during this period, persecution, arrest and exile awaited, which lasted almost two decades.

Autobiographical basis of the work

A. Solzhenitsyn came from the Cossacks. His parents were highly educated people and became for the young man (his father died shortly before the birth of his son) the embodiment of the image of the Russian people, free and unyielding.

The author’s first publication, which appeared in the magazine “New World” in 1962, announced the emergence of a new “master of words” who had “not a drop of falsehood” (A. Tvardovsky). “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” evoked numerous responses from those who, like the author, went through the horrors of Stalin’s camps and were ready to tell their compatriots about them. This is how Solzhenitsyn’s creative plan began to come true.

History of the creation of the work

The basis of the book was the personal experience of the writer and 227 (later the list increased to 257) prisoners like him, as well as surviving documentary evidence.

Genre of the work

What is the Gulag Archipelago

He also describes the endless reforms in the judicial correctional system: either the abolition or return of torture and the death penalty, the constant increase in the terms and conditions of repeated arrests, the expansion of the circle of “traitors” to the homeland, which included even teenagers aged 12 years... Famous the entire USSR projects, such as the White Sea Canal, built on millions of bones of victims of the established system called the “GULAG Archipelago”.

"GULAG Archipelago": reviews

Be that as it may, A. Solzhenitsyn (“The Gulag Archipelago” is not the author’s only work, but it must be the most famous) made a significant contribution to debunking the myth of prosperity and a happy life in the Soviet Union.