The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Language: English
Pages: 752
ISBN: 0061253723
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Volume 2 of the gripping epic masterpiece, The story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for Nearly a decade
Frommer's Moscow and St. Petersburg
A Geography of Russia and Its Neighbors (Texts in Regional Geography)
mercy.) • The. knight Ivan Pashkov said: "Thei Sovereign-Tsar is higher than Saint Athanasius.'^ And the sacristan of the Church of Saint Athanasius, Nezhdan, said: **Then why does the Tsar pray, to Athanasius?" This was in Holy Week and both were 4. Marx and Engels, op. cit.. Vol. 1, p. '233. drunk. Moscow delivered its verdict without prejudice: the boy-afs son must be flogged with' cudgels without mercy, and the sacristan flogged for the same reason.*^ At the very least everyone keeps his
unusual camp happening. The BUR could be the most ordinary kind of barracks, set apart and fenced off by barbed wire, with the prisoners in it being taken out daily to the hardest and most unpleasant work in the camp. It could also be a masonry prison inside the camp with a full prison system—^with beatings of prisoners summoned one by one to the jailers' quarters (a favorite method that didn't leave marks was to beat with a felt boot with a brick inside it); with bolts, bars, locks, and
for existence, and even more broadly: as the zek's soul. In a word, "Let me live as I wish, and you live as you wish"— that is what this precept means. A hard and cruel son of Gulag, under this precept, undertakes the obligation not to use his strength and drive out of empty curiosity. (But at the same time he frees himself of any kind of moral obligation: "Even if you are croaking right next to me, it's none of my affair." This is a cruel law, yet it is much more humane than the law of the
Leap Forward.") The whole book praises specificity the backwardness of the technology and the homemade workmanship. There were no cranes? So they will make their own—^wooden "derricks." And the only metal parts the "derricks" had were m places where there was friction—and these parts they cast themselves. "Our own industry at the canal," our authors gloat. And they themselves cast wheelbarrow wheels in thehr own homemade cupola furnace. The country required the canal so urgently and in such
your story carry a spoon with him, even though it is well known that .everything cooked in camp can easily be drunk down as a liquid by tipping up the bowl?*^ natives—they go about barefoot and almost naked. But as for our cursed Archipelago, it would have been quite impossible to picture it beneath the hot sun; it was eternally covered with snow and the blizzards eternally raged over it. And in addition to everything else it was necessary to clothe and to shoe all that horde of ten to fifteen