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About halfway through the Gulag Archipelago, anyone else give it a read? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by PugJesus@lemmy.world to c/books@lemmy.world

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As a memoir, I find it very fascinating, though many of the individual stories are the result of games of telephone and hardly reliable; same as all oral histories. And, of course, the numbers suggested are deeply outdated by the fall of the SovUnion and the opening of the Soviet archives.

The 'rubber-band' effect of disillusionment with a worldview is on full display, certainly, considering Solzhenitsyn's youthful Soviet ideology. His resulting Tsarist apologia is not frequent, but pops up just often enough to be discomfiting.

Anyone else read this and have thoughts?

https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes/The-Gulag-Archipelago__vol1__I-II__Solzhenitsyn/mode/2up

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[–] penquin@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have never even heard of it. I'm not from the west/Europe or whatever originally, so I don't know much about these events. Also, it always interests me to learn more about it. I'm going to look into this. Is it a long read?

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Very. About ~1800 pages or so in total. The author also wrote a novel inspired by his experiences which is MUCH shorter, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, if life in the gulags interests you, but not for 1800 pages worth. XD

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is that an actual book paper 1800 pages, or is it an ebook 1800 pages? Because of that number is the actual papers number, then that will be at least 5000 pages on an ebook. Which is not horrible per se, but it would be a very long read. Id say about a month or so

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm reading it online, but they appear to be just scanned print pages. It's ~1800 pages there. Split into three volumes.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

I see. I'm going to look into for real. Thank you for bringing that up