And, according to the author of the volume’s new Foreword, the first abridged edition sold “some 30 million copies” (p. Although some of my colleagues were (and are) unhappy with aspects of the abridgement, its availability allowed, at the very least, for students to begin to understand this very difficult topic. In 1985, Harvill, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, issued a onevolume abridged edition of The Gulag Archipelago, in order to expand readership in general, but also to enable teachers in secondary schools and universities to include the work in their reading lists. Although not the first book to “reveal” the Gulag, it was, beyond a doubt, the most literarily powerful, detailed, and morally outraged work on that cruel “archipelago” of the (mostly) Stalin-era forced labor camps and the individual and collective tragedies of the Stalin era. The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, became an instant classic when it first appeared in a Harper and Row three-volume English translation in the first half of the 1970s. Originally published in the October 2019 NewsNet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |