In plotting the artistic course of Alexander Solzhenitsyn the two texts which may be taken as datum points of particular importance are the first short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Writing previously on Ivan Denisovich I proposed an interpretative model which saw the book’s empirical and ‘valueless’ character as having twofold importance: it represented a clean break with previous official ‘illustrating literature’ and simultaneously reflected central characteristics of Soviet society atomised and depoliticised by the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This duality I saw as a threshold which could pave the way for a new and radical, analytic, Soviet literature and yet could also remain tied to an empirical and static reportage of phenomena subsumed under a structure of concepts constituted of abstract, superhistorical, and in the end desperately reactionary values. It is this latter possibility, the rehearsal of the terrible facts of Soviet history organised in the service of a retrogressive ideology, that is realised in The Gulag Archipelago.

The book appears to be a history of the repressive apparatus and of ‘that amazing country of Gulag’, but most editions of it (although not the English language version) are subtitled ‘An experiment in artistic investigation’ which has, as I shall show, a quite different and less authoritative epistemological status. It extensively and repetitively catalogues the entire repertoire of the Stalinist atrocities from the moment of arbitrary arrest, through the process of interrogation, mental and physical torture, to trial or extra-judicial sentencing; it recounts the intermediate stays in the transit prisons, the MVD internal prisons and the ‘boxes’ in which prisoners en route were kept at railway stations.