Volume 22, Number 18 · November 13, 1975
Disturbing, Fanatical, and Heroic
By Leonard Schapiro
The Gulag Archipelago Two 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Parts III-IV
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney
Harper & Row, 712 pp., $2.50 (paper)
'There are times, in my opinion, when one has to lower the tone, take the whip into one's hands not just to defend oneself, but in order to go into the attack in a much cruder manner'—so wrote Dostoevsky to Strakhov, over a hundred years ago, when embarking on The Possessed. I am not here concerned with the relative literary stature of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, though the comparison between the two writers is made from time to time. Nor am I concerned with comparing the monumental Gulag Archipelago, of which the second volume has now appeared in English translation, with The Possessed, by considering the relative achievement of each work in teaching us to realize the evil that men do to each other in the name of ideals, or obsessions, such as 'socialism' or 'revolution.'
Review, 6021 words
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