Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1 | 1973 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Buy |
| 2 | An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 2 | 1973 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Buy |
| 3 | An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3 | 1974 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Buy |
The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work of history and memoir documenting the Soviet Union’s vast system of forced labor camps. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it was first published in Paris in 1973 after the KGB seized a copy of the manuscript. The work spans three volumes, each subtitled “An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” covering the machinery of arrest and interrogation, life inside the camps, and the experience of exile and release.
Solzhenitsyn drew on his own eight years as a prisoner along with testimony, letters, and memoirs from over 200 other survivors. The result is part history, part autobiography, part oral history, and part polemic. Its publication in the West had an enormous political impact, and the Soviet government expelled Solzhenitsyn from the country in 1974, the year after the first volume appeared. The work remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century.