The Gulag Archipelago WDW 235 - Attila

This exhibit will examine Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The book itself started as a series of samizdats. A samizdat which, in Russian, translates as “self-publishing” is defined as “the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.” However, the literal definition of samizdat appears to undermine the cultural implications at play behind the formulations of samizdats. As Professor Ann Komaromi states, “the distribution of samizdat was the fact that it happened beyond the author’s control… [the] social significance in the case of samizdat should be understood in terms of distribution. For a text to have been samizdat, there should have been some kind of public resonance.”[1]Few would dispute the fact that The Gulag Archipelago has had a significant impact, both socially and politically in the Soviet Union as well as the Western World. Therefore, there must have been something special about its content which resonated with people cross-culturally. This exhibit will focus on the publication history of the book itself, the content of the book, as to why it may have resonated with people, and explore the insight of samizdats the role they played in the Soviet Union.