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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There was a newcomer at the door: on the thin side, young, in a cheap blue suit and a dark-blue cap. He had nothing with him. He looked around in a state of confusion. “What’s the cell number?” he asked in alarm. “Fifty-three.” He shuddered a bit. “Are you from freedom?” we asked. “No!” He shook his head in a painful sort of way. “When were you arrested?” “Yesterday morning.” We roared. He had a very gentle, innocent sort of face, and his eyebrows were nearly white. “What for?” (It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an answer.) “Oh, I don’t know. . . . Nothing much.” That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his own case always seemed especially nothing much. “But anyway, what was it?” “Well, you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian people.” “Whaaat?” (None of us had ever run into that sort of “nothing much.”) “Are they going to shoot me?” His face grew longer. He kept pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off. “Well, no, probably not,” we reassured him. “They don’t shoot anyone nowadays. They give out tenners—every time the clock strikes.” “Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?” asked the Social Democrat, true to his class principles. “A worker.” Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly proclaimed to me: “You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that’s the mood of the working class!” He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was nowhere e...