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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The hall was lit only by a few kerosene lamps, and the semidarkness heightened the general confusion and fear. The crowd, finally convinced, not so much by the trial as by the carbines now leveled at it, pushed in a panic against the doors and windows. The wood cracked and broke; glass tinkled. Univer’s wife, in a dead faint, was almost trampled to death and was left lying beneath the chairs until morning. And there never was any applause.