2023-12-28 19:22:50
The famous novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago appeared on December 28, 1973, 50 years ago to the day. Its diffusion in the West created a real upheaval in society which, thanks to it, became aware of the reality of the concentration camp system in the USSR.
2 volumes and 64 chapters long, this qualified work “literary investigation” by its author includes the testimonies of nearly 230 gulag prisoners as well as the author’s own experience. Here are 5 things to know about this cataclysmic novel.
► Written clandestinely
The Soviet context initially pushed the author to “write orally” his texts. Suspicious, the writer first takes the time to mentally compose then remember and recite his text. It was only from 1965 that Alexander Solzhenitsyn indulged in writing while maintaining the same concern for discretion.
He first took care to withdraw into the Estonian countryside and not to be followed there. He was also careful not to keep all of his manuscripts in the same place, going so far as to bury or even burn them. A villager helped him by making a double-bottomed box in which he could hide part of his writings.
The Soviet then took care to photograph his manuscripts and preserve them in the form of microfilms today preserved by Ymca-Press editions.
► A network of “Invisibles” allowed the secret broadcast
It was thanks to a network of “Invisibles” including Professor Yves Hamant that the book gradually spread in France and the USSR. The latter helped him write and then discreetly transport the manuscripts from the USSR to Paris. Initially, 50,000 copies of volume 1 were printed in secret. In December 1973, the first volume appeared in France and was a great success.
Hundreds of copies of this book “literary investigation” are stuffed into suitcases and sent towards the Soviet Union. These writings were first distributed in the USSR “undercover” thanks to a network made up of students and diplomats.
► The characters and testimonies are entirely inspired by real events
In all, 227 testimonies from prisoners and witnesses were recorded by the writer who died in 2008. The latter also colored the novel with his own testimony. “This book contains no invented characters or events. Men and places are designated by their real names. the author said.
► The author was arrested a month after the publication of the book in France
The publication of his work in France led to the birth of a violent smear campaign against Alexander Solzhenitsyn, accusing him of being a traitor in the Soviet Union.
In February 1974, a month after the publication of the book in France in L’Express, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is finally arrested by the KGB, the Soviet intelligence services. The author is stripped of his Russian nationality and deported to Switzerland. His exile lasted 20 years. The author eventually returned to his native lands in May 1994, at the end of the Gorbachev era.
► Its publication caused a real earthquake in the world
On the day of its official publication, the official Soviet press agency Tass reacted and indicated that this “Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Soviet political pamphlet was sent to the West as a New Year’s gift to the enemies of his homeland.”
Among French communists, the work’s reception was mixed. Some members of the French Communist Party (PCF) have put its scope into perspective, justifying that the “facts which [lui] served as its basis have long since been made public and condemned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself.
However, for many French specialists and historians, the publication and dissemination of this work led to the end of certain myths concerning the Soviet Union in the West, even within the PCF.
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