The Gulag Archipelago, a vast depiction of the Soviet concentration camp system, was written in secret. The thousands of letters and testimonies Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received after the publication of his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich served as the foundation for this work, which he described as a "literary investigation." These documents made him the bearer of the tragedy of an entire people. Secretly smuggled out of the USSR, this explosive text revealed the reality of the Soviet regime when it was published in the West in 1974.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian writer and dissident. He was arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1945, where he remained for eight years. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he is the author of a substantial body of work.