That's all there is to it! You are arrested!Īnd you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?" All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them.
We have been happily borne - or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way - down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?īut the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"Īnd this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.Īrrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest." The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.Īnd those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.Īrrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity? Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it - but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. An Experiment in Literary Investigation Chapter One Arrest
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