The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On that March morning when they led the five of us into palatial Cell 53, they had just added a sixth prisoner to our group. He entered, it seemed, like a spirit, and his shoes made no noise against the floor. He entered and, not sure that he could stay on his feet, leaned against the door frame. The bulb had been turned off in the cell and the morning light was dim. However, the newcomer did not have his eyes wide open. He squinted, and he kept silent. The cloth of his military field jacket and trousers did not identify him as coming from the Soviet, or the German, or the Polish, or the English Army. The structure of his face was elongated. There was very little Russian in it. And he was painfully thin. And not only very thin but very tall. We spoke to him in Russian—and he kept silent. Susi addressed him in German—he still kept silent. Fastenko tried French and English—with the same result. Only gradually did a smile appear on his emaciated, yellow, half-dead face—the only such smile I had ever seen in my life. “Pee-eeple,” he uttered weakly, as if he were coming out of a faint, or as if he had been waiting all night long to be executed. And he reached out his weak, emaciated hand. It held a small bundle tied up in a rag. Our stoolie understood instantly what was in it, threw himself on it, grabbed it, and opened it up on the table. There was half a pound of light tobacco. He had instantly managed to roll himself a cigarette four times the size of an ordinary one. Thus, ...