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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Narokov (Marchenko) in his novel, Imaginary Values,8 a work much spoiled by the author’s self-assigned task of describing everything as though he were Dostoyevsky, of tearing at the reader’s heartstrings and trying to move him even more than Dostoyevsky, nevertheless in my opinion described the death cell and the scene of the execution itself very well. One cannot verify it, of course, but somehow one believes it.