Counting the Cost
From dawn to
dusk the correction and copying of the Gulag went forward; I
could scarcely keep the pages moving fast enough. Then the typewriter started
breaking down everyday, ... This was the most frightening moment of all: we had
the only original manuscript and all the typed copies of Gulag there
with us. If the KGB suddenly descended, the many-throated groan, the dying
whisper of millions, the unspoken testament of those who had perished, would
all be in their hands, and I would never be able to reconstruct it all, my
brain would never be capable of it again.
I could have
enjoyed myself so much, breathing the fresh air, resting, stretching my cramped
limbs, but my duty to the dead permitted no such self-indulgence. They are
dead. You are alive: do your duty. The world must know all about it.
They could
take my children hostage – posing as “gangsters,” of course. (They did not know that we [my wife and I] had
thought of this and made a superhuman decision: our children were no dearer to
us than the memory of the millions done to death, and nothing could make us
stop that book.)
Excerpt from The Oak and the Calf, 1975,
A. Solzhenitsyn, English translation, 1979, 1980 by Harper and Row Publishers.
The Oak and the Calf:
The Gulag Archipelago:
1 comment:
Thaank you for sharing
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