Just Because: 'The Gulag Archipelago'

This exceptional, iconic three-volume book by Russian writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (full title: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation) was published in the West in December 1973 and circulated underground in the Soviet Union until its publication there in 1989. It is based on eyewitness accounts and Solzhenitsyn's own experiences as a prisoner in a labor camp.

Chapter 1: Arrest

    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. 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. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.
    Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
    Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
    And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

    Arrest! 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?
    The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."
    But 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?"
    And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
    Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. ...