/lit/ - Literature

I've read the first two (of three) unabridged volumes. If I had to do it again, I would have read an abridged version.

GA can come across as somewhat pedantic, but Solzhenitsyn had to drive home the scale and pervasiveness of the system, and it took a lot of anecdotes. Not to mention that the Western left had romantic views, to say the least of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks, and even the STALIN DID NOTHING WRONG crowd didn't exactly face the same approbrium as anyone who thought well of certain other European despots. Definitely a worthwhile read.

>>5521674
it's interesting but Gulag Archipelago is a polemic fiction first and a memoir second. He was a monarchist ideologue that was upset that his countrymen went to the trouble to try and reform him as opposed to just shoot him like the tsar would've done had it been his regime that Solzhenitsyn opposed. The archives revealed this quite succinctly.

>>5521674
Funny, I have a friend whose reading that right now. Derek if that's you . . .
The writing style is ridged. I know that. I read somewhere past the first half until I lost interest. But yea, definitely go for an abridged version if you can, trust me, it won't take long for his style to get old, unless you're into that . . .

he probably exaggerated there though, possibly involuntarily since the book is basically what he got from multiple anecdotal evidences, also his number estimations are completely unfounded

>>5523816
Hmm that's an interesting claim, never heard of that story of him. But regardless, it doesn't make his book anymore worse or better.

>>5523920
Not Derek but I believe I have the unabridged version. I have to double check but I don't know at the moment since I'm currently finishing up other books first. As for his style, I've read a variety of styles of writing and I think I'll get into this book fine.

>>5523816
Holy shit you marxist-leninist fucks are delusional.

>mfw you can vote yourself right into a gas chamber

>>5524696
Don't let the random anonymous radical leftard fool you.

>reading books about the SU written before it fell

Its an important book, historically, much like Conquests Lenin but its just lacking in so much more information that we have now. Large parts of it are simply wrong.

>>5525663
>>5525672
You probably read the book in high school and you probably had a very long special class session about how un-American the Soviet Union was and how it put 500 trillion innocent babushkas into the goolaags, but the archives were opened decades ago and we know Solzhenitsyn's account (including numbers of incarcerated, number of deaths, and conditions) is largely false.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/152330?uid=3739840&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104267749991

>>5525663
>>5525672

>>5525943
go to bed slavoj

>>5525943
>I know more about the history of Russia's population than thousands of professional historians who are all in agreement about Stalin's crimes

Fuck of you tankie shithead, the left will only have a chance of real socialism once we exorcise the USSR's ghost

>>5526135
argumentum ab auctoritate

>>5523816
>just shoot him like the tsar would've done had it been his regime that Solzhenitsyn opposed

ahahahahaha

See, this is why GA is still relevant.

>>5526135
Its not ok to blatantly lie about it though. The USSR was obviously not as bad as Americunts and other westerners think it was. Also, it only makes it worse when youre trying to bring back socialism but bourgois are screaming "FIVE BILLION DED! IT DUNT WORK! LOOK AT STAELIN!".