In this lecture, Peterson explores the dreadful socio-political consequences of the individual inauthentic life: the degeneration of society into nihilism or totalitarianism, often of the most murderous sort, employing as an example the work/death camps of the Soviet Union.
- The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 1 — Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson
(Jordan Peterson: Foreword to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition — Visual Presentation)
“The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet forced labor camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author’s own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973 and, thereafter, circulated in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal, Novy Mir, in 1989, in which a third of the work was published over three issues. GULag or Gulág is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps”, the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labour camp system, and by metonymy, the camp system itself.
“The original Russian title of the book is Arkhipelag GuLag, the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast “chain of islands”, known only to those who were fated to visit them. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published, and it has been included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading since 2009.” — Wikipedia, cited by Peterson
- The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2 — Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 3 — Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
