פרסומים

The Gulag Archipelago has been treated consistently as a conservative indictment of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. When subsumed into his later writings, this perception has reinforced amongst progressives an enduring portrait of Solzhenitsyn-the-man as a backward-looking anti-modernist and reactionary. I advocate a return to the text itself in isolation from Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, and in a manner more cognizant of the political practices latent in its prose. In its style and structure, certain specific techniques can be found where the search for formal methodology has left previous commentators on the Left disappointed. The place of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus in the history of political thought is here reassessed on the basis of its style, pointing to its potential contribution to critical theory and to its relevance for critical social analysis today.

October 2021: John Welsh is a researcher in politics and history at the University of Helsinki. This article is part of a research project into the “camp” as a recurrent political technology of social control, an agenda that attempts to bring memoir literature into a critically productive relation with both historical and contemporary problems of power, rationality, and social transformation. Recent and relevant work in this research can be found published in Contemporary Political Theory, Thesis Eleven, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Sociology, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, & Society, the European Journal of Social Theory, and forthcoming in Anthropological Theory.