The Gulag Archipelago Sparknotes

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The following literary analysis is over “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” which was written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Who is a former Nobel Prize winner for literature. The book at least the abridged version is broken into several different parts, seven to be exact. The book starts with his arrest and the law of the Soviet Union, then he talks about the way the labor camps were basically created to break down a man and kill him. To begin the book Aleksandr was arrested for writing a letter to friends criticizing the government and mainly Stalin. Back in those days of the Soviet Union no one was allowed to talk bad about the government or they were arrested and convicted of the crime. Aleksandr talks about the …show more content…

He could have easily turned in other people, but instead decided not to turn others in and take the punishment of being sent to the work camps. “We [were] forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like…he could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends” (Solzhenitsyn 47). Shows how easy it was from him to turn himself in. His will to survive is another theme throughout the book by the way he lived and worked in the gulag and lived to tell about it. Most people did not live to tell their story just because of how hard the work was on their bodies and the amount of food they were given. They were loaded up on cattle cars or the Black Maria, which he states, “would eventually wear you down as a human” (166). It is just shocking that they allowed this to go one and not do anything about it especially after the Holocaust and all the issues Germany ran into with that. As a prisoner he would also have to behead people and skin people, which goes back into the nature of how crazy the work was for everybody in the camp

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