In China’s Gulag
on August 10, 1995
Near the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn includes a chapter he calls “The Muses in Gulag.” Most of the chapter describes the absurdity and uselessness of the Communist Party’s Cultural and Educational Section, but he also briefly reflects on the relationship between life in the Soviet penal colonies and the near impossibility of creating prose literature about those same camps. As Solzhenitsyn puts it,
