Finally! Andrea Gullotta has given scholars a comprehensive, meticulously-researched and detailed study of the fervid cultural life that took place on the archipelago of islands that has been by turns an important monastery complex, fortress, tsarist political prison, GULag and, as of 1992, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Located on the largest island (Bol΄shoi Sovetskii), Solovki—as it was commonly known—existed from 1923 to 1930 and, by comparison with its successors both in terms of its relative lack of severity and the richness of its literary and dramatic achievements, was indeed, as Gullotta's subtitle announces, “the Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps,” or arguably, of all subsequent GULags. The first of the SLON (Severnye Lageria Osobogo Naznacheniia), Solovki has been the subject of a variety of memoirs (including those of Dmitrii Likhachev and Olga Adamova-Sliozberg), as well as Vlast΄ Solovetskaia, a 1988 well-received documentary film by Marina Goldovskaya. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who called Solovki “the mother of all GULags,” devoted an entire chapter to the SLON in the second volume of Archipelag Gulag, as did Anne Applebaum in her GULAG: A History. Indeed, Solovki was the first and largest labor camp in the USSR in the 1920s (officially, GULags did not come into existence until 1930).

Gullota's study is distinctive—and important—because it is the only monograph to specifically address the numerous works of poetry and, to a lesser extent, prose, that were produced at Solovki during these years, as well as recounting the theatrical activities that also played an important role in prisoners’ (and prison administrators’) lives. At Solovki, the new Soviet government's policy exempted political prisoners from hard labor, so that unlike their criminal counterparts, the many intellectuals and others classified as “political prisoners” (SRs, Mensheviks, anarchists, former members of the White Guard) were largely allowed to set up printing presses and encouraged to write and publish in the camp newspaper weekly, Novye Solovki, and its literary magazine, Sovetskie Ostrova. Although both were subject to periodic suspensions until they were permanently shut down in 1930, the quantity and quality of literary texts published through these outlets in a relatively short period of time was impressive. There are many discursive gems in these pages of Gullota's assessments of SLON's various stakeholders and their priorities, for example his careful dissection of the aesthetic goals of the writers (many of them steeped in Silver Age or poputchik values and avant-garde strategems), versus the [re-]educational focus of the camp administrators, even as the latter occasionally showed remarkable tolerance toward their prisoners. Ever controversial, Maksim Gor΄kii's visit to Solovki in 1930 is examined from multiple perspectives, as is the often ambiguous behavior of the camp's director, Fedor Eikhmans.

Professor Gullotta has published many shorter works on the topic of Solovki, which is reflected in the breadth and depth of knowledge that he brings to this monograph. He is both a careful historian and an adept literary critic, and the book's chapters reflect that as he moves from camp and cultural history in Chapters 1–3, to close analyses of the many poems reproduced and translated in Chapter 4, to an assessment of SLON's legacy in Chapter 5. His analyses incorporate a plethora of insights from earlier European and Russian literary scholars, but he also brings many discerning readings to these mostly obscure texts that will be of use to future generations of scholars and students. Of no less importance is his highlighting of the biographies, both in the body of the book and in an appendix, of many important poets whose creativity would otherwise have gone unmarked, which provide vivid and often poignant life stories. To cite only one example: the tragic tale of the Iaroslavskiis—talented poet and devoted wife—is worthy of its own monograph (or even a Hollywood film).

While I disagree with some elements of Gullota's monograph (the two middle chapters are very long and detailed, in which he asserts toward the end that the GULag as a whole produced little literary experimentation, Shalamov being the clearest counterargument to this, 275), and while the English is at times awkward, it is not an exaggeration to say that his book will be the definitive study of the culture and literary output of Solovki for many years to come. With any justice, he will live to see many further scholarly spinoffs from this important and long-awaited work.