The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV)

Gulag II is both a powerful chronicle of brutal abuses and at the same time a testament to the tensile strength of the human spirit. The first volume of this work dealt with the arrests, interrogations, and transportaiotn of prisoners to the archipelago camps, a sort of state-within-a-state that stretched geographically from Leningrad to Komsomolsk..Volume Two is concerned with the daily life and death of the prisoners, among whom Solzheinitsyn spent eight years, having been arrested for writing letters critical of Stalin. Here the extended metaphor of the archipelago is joined by an image that informed Solzhenitsyn's novel The Cancer Ward. Evoking his own experience of cancer, he perceives the camps as a tumor that, in mestastasizing, infected the whole nation with its poison..Solzhenitsyn believes that the individual, armed with Truth and Right alone, can move tyrants, subvert power and alter the course of history.