Stephen Spender
A PARALLEL WORLD
For someone who has not shared the experiences described ,
to
write
about this book! is an impertinence. Solzhenitsyn indicates that it was only
possible to write it through having himself been a prisoner. Even so it "could
never have been created by one person alone.
In
addition to what I myself was
able
to
take away from the Archipelago-on the skin of my back, and with my
eyes and ears-material for this book was given me by reports, memoirs, and
letters by 227 witnesses... ."
It
is a book about a parallel world of murder, torture, slavery, labor
camps, imprisonment under the most terrible conditions. The Gulag Ar–
chipelago is the Prison Industry inaugurated by the Bolsheviks under Lenin,
carried to unprecedented degrees of horror imposed with ruthless cynicism by
Stalin, and still continuing to this day.
As a writer of my generation there was a sense in which I always knew
that this terrible reality which
embodi~s
fundamental truth about con–
temporary history was happening throughout my lifetime. This parallel
world has been there,just beyond a wall on our side of which there have been
the freedom and the pleasures providing the conditions out of which we have
prod uced our work. Yet there has always been the feeling that because the
concentration camps of Stalin and Hitler existed, those inside them were
enduring the real truth about the history of our time and that their reality
trivialized ours. Given this reality of a parallel world of nightmare what right
did any poet or novelist have to write about the personal unhappiness of
people living comfortable lives? Rather, he should be writing about the hap–
piness of characters supposing themselves to be unhappy when they were not
in cells designed to hold five people but actually holding fifteen, or con–
demned to be interrogated for days on end during which they were not
1.
The Gulag Archipelago,
1918-1956:
An Experiment
in
Literary Investigation I-II.
By
Aleksandr
I.
Solzhenitsyn. Harper and Row. $12.50.
