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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As when a cinema projector starts slowing down, twenty-eight prerevolutionary male and female faces flicker past us in a film that’s fuzzy and askew. We didn’t notice their expressions! Were they frightened? Contemptuous? Proud? We don’t have their answers! Their last words are missing—because of “technical considerations.” But, making up for this lack, the accuser croons to us: “From beginning to end, it was self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed. The political instability and the interim nature of the intelligentsia . . . [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature] completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks.”65 I don’t know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the passion to save one’s life at any cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of the intelligentsia had still been maintained. . . . I don’t know.