ABSTRACT

The year 1990, often known as Solzhenitsyn Year, since several of the main literary journals were then rushing to get out his remaining prose works in case the literary ‘thaw’was succeeded by a new ‘freeze’, marked the end of both glasnost and of the literary boom that had begun in 1986. The publication of most of the The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULag) in Novyi mir in 1989 meant that the official censorship system had finally been overcome, but it simultaneously signified the beginning of a new literary situation, wherein literature would have to exist in conditions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.