In this final volume of a towering work that is both literary masterpiece and a living memorial to the untold millions of Soviet martyrs, Solzhenitsyn's epic narrative moves to its astounding and unforeseen climax. We now see that this great cathedral of a book not only commemorates those massed victims but celebrates the unquenched spirit of resistance which flickered and then burst into flame even in Stalin's "special camps."

Of the Archipelago as a whole, LeMonde has said: "It is the epic of our times. An epic is always the creation of an entire people, written by the one person who has the creative power and the genius to become the spokesman for his nation. And in this work, we hear a people speaking through the impassioned, intrepid, ironic, furious, lyrical, brutal, and often tender voice of the narrator."