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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As we dried ourselves off, Valentin said to me, reassuringly, intimately: “Well, all right. We are still young. We are going to live a long time yet. The main thing is not to make a misstep now. We are going to a camp—and we’ll not say one word to anyone, so they won’t plaster new terms on us. We will work honestly—and keep our mouths shut” And he really believed in his program, that naive little kernel of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones! He really had his hopes set on it. One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had lived through. But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?