Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

[Rare Pocket-Size Edition on Cigarette Paper] Arkhipelag Gulag 1918-1956 [The Gulag Archipelago]

Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973. Item #1388

A rare pocket-sized first edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, published in three volumes (seven parts) on ultra-thin cigarette paper, designed for easy concealment and clandestine reading. This format reflects the book’s role as a critical anti-Soviet underground publication that had to be smuggled across borders.

Book I: Parts 1–2: 606, [2] pp., illustrated. Book II: Parts 3–4: 657, [6] pp., illustrated. Book III: Parts 5–7: 581, [4] pp., illustrated. 15 cm. Very well preserved set.

The first volume was published on December 28, 1973, by YMCA-Press in Paris, marking the first public release of the book that exposed the Soviet labor camp system. The opening lines of the first edition, later omitted from subsequent printings, read:

"With a heavy heart, I refrained for years from publishing this completed book: my duty to the living outweighed my duty to the dead. But now that state security has seized the manuscript, I have no choice but to publish it immediately."
— A. Solzhenitsyn, September 1973

Just six weeks after the book’s release, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and exiled from the USSR in February 1974. The second volume followed later that year, and the third was published in 1975, making this the complete first edition of one of the most important literary and political works of the 20th century.

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