“The Gulag Archipelago”—a history of repression, camps, and prisons in the Soviet Union (GULag—Main Camp Administration). The book was completed in 1968.
“The Gulag Archipelago” is simultaneously a historical study with elements of a parody-like ethnographic sketch, and the author’s memoirs describing his camp experience, and an epic of suffering, and a martyrology—accounts of the martyrs of the Gulag. The narrative about Soviet concentration camps is oriented toward the Bible text: the creation of the Gulag is presented as a “turned inside out” creation of the world by God (an anti-world created by Satan). The seven books of “The Gulag Archipelago” are correlated with the seven seals of the Book of Revelation of the Apostle John, by which the Lord will judge people at the end of times.