Article 58

It may not appear natural, but the first day of an offensive through The Gulag Archipelago, in concert with my friend Ed, should find its velocity on a day marred with physical discomfort. I awoke racked with a sprained knee, a fever and an earache, all of which found purchase yesterday at work. A blustery day, but not terribly so. The pain and swelling of the joint was one for trepidation, especially in my vocation. That said, i awoke much later feeling congested but able and began reading.

 

I had first addressed this trilogy almost a decade ago and abandoned my effort after 70 or so pages. That thesis was challenged, if not overturned, by my reading today. If perfect memory is frozen, unapproachable in mnemonic recall, then the majority of lingering attributes within myself are but grimy slush. For years I had attributed that "absolute truth is privilege of those warm and well fed" to A Day In The Life of Ivan Densiovich, which I must have read just before my abortive turn with the Gulag, this was likely 1994 or 1995. I have since discovered that in my 4 or 5 subsequent readings of Denisovich that such statement is not within its covers. I rediscovered a paraphrase only today, in the third chapter, on p. 101.

 

The text overall begins impressively in style that speeds along, like an express through dense copses of statistics and Slavic names, maintaining not only velocity but integrity. We arrive initially at the encounter:

 

That's what the arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the presently into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. (4)

 

The chapter ends with muscular prose about Solzhenitsyn's own arrest. A quiet sense of naive hope, spent squatting in the snow and the steaming shit being momentarily forgotten as the real stench of prison air is suddenly upon the protagonist and the reader.

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