The Gulag Archipelago 1 - 1918-1956 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Fontana, Collins, 8th Impression 1982, cover worn and faded, some foxing especially towards back and front of book

Volume 1 of the gripping epic three volume masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. This is a key work unparalleled in Russian or any other national literature. Solzhenitryn has created it from his own experience of imprisonment and forced labour, and from that of numerous victims of Stalin's Terror and of Soviet prisons and labour camps. The result is a unique and startling national epic that presents the suppressed history of a vicious epoch and clearly documents the system that deformed or destroyed the lives of millions...