The Gulag Archipelago Two
Pocketbok. Fontana. 1976. 695 sidor.
Mycket gott skick. The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago left us in the antechamber of hell. In Gulag II Solzhenitsyn takes ut to the lower depths, the concentration camps where spent eight years as a prisoner after his arrest in 1945. With the publication of Gulag II, Solzhenitsyn's staggering achievement becomes more apparent: he has created an enduring and brilliant literary monument to the victims of one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity ever committed and the most complete account of the history, function and scope of the concentration camp system yet written... The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.
