Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” consists of three volumes. Although the work is divided into seven parts, standard editions group those parts into three volumes rather than publishing seven separate books.
The first volume contains Parts One and Two, which examine arrests, interrogation, imprisonment, and the legal and bureaucratic foundations of the Soviet camp system. The second contains Parts Three and Four, focusing on forced-labor camps and the prisoners’ inner lives. The third contains Parts Five, Six, and Seven, covering imprisonment, exile, and the later history of the system.
Solzhenitsyn wrote the work between 1958 and 1968. It combines his own experiences as a Gulag prisoner with testimony from other prisoners, letters, diaries, legal records, and interviews. The title compares the network of camps to an archipelago scattered across the Soviet Union.
The original Russian edition was published in Paris in 1973 by YMCA-Press. English and French translations followed in 1974. A common mistake is to answer seven because the text has seven parts; the quiz asks for the published volume count, which is three.