Fwd: A Book of the Century

[Zenon M. Feszczak]

London Telegraph
24 January 1998

Book of the Century

              Brian Aldiss makes his choice

              ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn says that he is speaking for
              "mute Russia". The phrase crops up in his great work,
              The Gulag Archipelago, published in Britain in three
              volumes between 1974 and 1978. Yet this "history and
              geography" of the Soviet Union's prison and forced
              labour camp system is addressed to a wider audience than
              mute Russia; it strikes at the heart and intellect of
              everyone.

              The opening of the book detains us like one of the great
              Russian novels:

              How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour
              by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course
              there, and trains thunder off to it - but all with nary
              a mark on them to tell of their destination.

              So we travel under the wing of Solzhenitsyn's metaphor
              to encompass that chain of camps scattered across the
              wildernesses of the Soviet Union, and meet the
              inhabitants.

              The author himself was a zek (prisoner) in the Kolyma
              camp, "the pole of ferocity". He brought away the
              material for his work, as he says, "on the skin of my
              back, and with my eyes and ears". Every word was forged
              by labour, exile, starvation.

              One of the most vivid and scathing chapters, "What the
              Archipelago Stands On", comes in the middle of the
              second volume. Here, in the forced labour camps, the
              principle of tukhta is introduced. The timber-fellers
              are set impossibly high production targets. So the boss
              credits his teams with fictitious cubic yards of wood
              cut, thus increasing the zeks' bread allowance. The
              log-rafters, who launch the timber down river, do not
              denounce this mistake. It helps their production figures
              to pass on the fictitious amount. The lumber yards
              downstream do the same, adding a little to the figure.

              Eventually, the Ministry of the Timber Industry makes
              serious use of these fictitiously inflated figures in
              their reports. Thus the entire GNP of the Soviet Empire
              becomes founded on a fiction. "They simply could not
              stand up against people's pressure to live."

              Gulag, though, is not merely an account of the lies and
              injustice on which the Soviet system was founded; it
              addresses the human condition. Solzhenitsyn is a
              moralist writing with savage irony. How do you survive
              uncorrupted in this world? Those who are free, living in
              cities, are also at risk.

              Gulag is a long and vivid meditation on the good and
              evil in men's hearts. We who live out our lives in
              better circumstances must still confront its relevance.
              There is no book like it in the world.