I found it quite accessible and have read it end to end twice. It's not a Russian heavy literature doorstop a la War & Peace, but an encyclopedic one-man survey of every aspect of the camps, roughly in chronological order: first the the history of labor camps in Russia, then the journey of a typical inmate (arrest, interrogation, trial, transit, arrival, life and death in the camps for prisoners and guards alike, freedom [1]), then the slow winding down of the system.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a good book, but nothing like the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich was officially supported by the USSR in a brief period after Stalin's death, as a book that talks about the imprisonment, but waters it down so much as to make it not-so-terrible. Gulag Archipelago is much more interesting, and also much more eye-opening.
The problem with* Gulag* is that (in Russian) it is quite badly written, unlike Shalamov's stories which real literature even before editors got to them. History-wise, there are better sources, too.
Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate
them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to
destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it
is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow
enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at
various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.
At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name
doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
(I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.")
It's true that there's some dry and boring material, but I can hardly blame the author for that: he's the last living source for so many of these stories. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, trying in vain to resurrect the final, fading memories of the countless missing people who touched his life—nameless and nearly faceless, probably buried in some unmarked grave—while waiting for the KGB to burst in any minute and destroy his decade of work. How much more painful must the process of editing be when the things you cut are fragments of human lives that might as well have never existed once they leave the page?
Unfortunately, there's now a contingent of the Russian population that denounces Solzhenitsyn for reasons of pure nationalism. It makes me so sad when I see Solzhenitsyn mentioned in the Runet, because it's almost always extremely vitriolic...
If Russian is not you native language I can see how it can seem to flow nicely. Unfortunately, if it is, Solzhenitsyn reads like a foreign language. Even words, let alone sentence structures, are very much not Russian. Words, really, he was just inventing on the fly and you have to guess what they could possibly mean.
Obviously, this is to a large degree a matter of taste, but I am far from the only Russian speaker finding Solzhenitsyn's language highly stilted and artificial. The English translation you're quoting is much better.
Interestingly, same is very often said about Vonnegut's translations into Russian.
I also don't think he's a bad writer or that his Russian is quite that strange (in Archipelago, specifically) but I'd be remiss not to mention his literary style has been had its share of critics, with Vladimir Voinovich putting in what is perhaps the top effort in the genre. On the off chance either of you have not run across it before (in which case, read the whole book) [Симыч here is the parody stand-in for Solzhenitsyn]:
For sure. Voynovich may not be quite as profound as Solzhenitsyn but his writings are actually pleasurable (IMO) to read. I've heard ерфе the real Karnavalov was not amused.
It's hard to imagine anyone mentioned there was particularly entertained.
'Invented words' is what made me think of it, I don't think it's much in evidence in GULAG but it definitely pop up in his fiction. In Voinovich's parodic telling, it's due to an excessive reliance on the 19th century 'Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary'. It's a perfectly pointed barb.
I think where GULAG succeeds is in exactly what he puts on the front page "an experiment in literary investigation". Everything from 'В круге первом' through 'Как нам обустроить Россию' and later gets progressively weirder and, well, to put it politely, not better.
I am a speaker of a Slavic language other than Russian, speak some russian, read Gulag Archipelago in English, and found it to flow wonderfully. OTOH, I never liked the style of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and most other Russian classics. So maybe Gulag is not up to Russian literary tradition, but for me that's a good thing :)
This is the one that I often think of - he wrote it about the response to the publication of Ivan Denisovich.
"если первая крохотная капля правды разорвалась как психологическая бомба - что же будет в нашей стране, когда Правда обрушится водопадами?
А -- обрушится, ведь не миновать."
I listened to an unabridged audiobook version - 67 hours of laughingly bad, home-made narration in Russian. Even then, it was easily one of the most riveting books I have come across.
You don't have to. Big chunks of it can be difficult to follow without the historical context Solzhenitsyn assumes the reader has - that you'd have to get elsewhere. More importantly though, you don't really have to read it in order, you can poke around the ToC and find stuff that doesn't require knowledge of the details of the early show trials, etc. You can hop over to the chapter on arrests or escape attempts and see how it goes.
I've read the original three volume version, which I got from a library. I own the abridged. You do miss a lot, but you can still get a lot out of the single-volume version.
