In the First Circle

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn burst on the literary scene in 1962 with his short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". It depicted an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary inmate in one of the Siberian labor-camps of the Soviet Gulag. Solzhenitsyn's next major novel was published in 1968 under the title "The First Circle". It was a depiction of life in a "sharashka", which stood at the other end of the spectrum of Gulag prisons. A "sharashka" was the slang name by which inmates referred to the research and development laboratories of the Soviet Gulag labor camp system. Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians sent to the Gulag were, if they were lucky, assigned to a sharashka to work on projects that might prove useful to Stalin in his quest for ironclad security and his war with capitalist imperialism. Compared to the Siberian labor-camp of Ivan Denisovich, a sharashka was cushy; to be sure, it too was part of the Gulag, and the Gulag was hell, but a sharashka was, in Dantean terms, "the first circle of hell".This 741-page novel covers four days (Dec. 24-27, 1949) in a sharashka in Moscow known as Marfino -- 300 prisoners and 50 guards. The novel begins with a Soviet diplomat making an anonymous phone call to the American embassy to alert it of Soviet espionage focused on the atomic bomb. The embassy's phones are bugged and the phone call is recorded, but the Soviet security service doesn't know who the caller was. So inmate engineers and scientists at the Marfino sharashka are assigned the task of identifying the traitor, as quickly as possible.In the novel, Solzhenitsyn adds considerable depth and detail to the portrayal of the life of zeks (Gulag inmates) furnished in "Ivan Denisovich". He also uses the book to deliver a scathing critique of the Soviet system -- its ideological absurdities, its bureaucratic infighting and inefficiencies, its dishonesty and hypocrisy, and its cruelty. To top it off, the novel contains a devastatingly mocking and chilling portrait of Josef Stalin (see Chapters 19-23). Solzhenitsyn realized that as originally written, the novel was far too critical of the Soviet Union for it to see the light of day (this was in the mid-60's), so he "self-censored" it, excising nine chapters altogether and revising, or softening, those details sure to be most offensive to Soviet sensibilities. That self-censored version was published in 1968 under the English title "The First Circle", but even as expurgated it was not deemed fit for publication within the Soviet Union (and, indeed, that expurgated version contributed to the decision to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union in 1974).This is the original, unexpurgated novel, in a form that Solzhenitsyn continued to tweak and revise. It has been brilliantly translated by Harry T. Willetts, who worked closely with Solzhenitsyn. Distinguishing it from the truncated version is the initial word "in" in the title. IN THE FIRST CIRCLE is the best Russian novel from the twentieth century that I have so far encountered in my ongoing survey of Russian literature in translation. It is a masterpiece.Though nominally covering only four days in late 1949, the novel contains the back stories of dozens of characters, stretching back to the days of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is superbly plotted. Its characterizations of about two dozen zeks (and their wives) are sensitive and endearing. In addition to the penetrating critique of the Soviet system and the detailed portrayal of the Gulag, the novel also contains many perceptive observations about human beings in general. It is rich in historical detail. And, in the best tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it is rich in its exploration of moral and philosophical matters.For the title to this review, I have appropriated lines relating to the diplomat who made the anonymous phone call to the American embassy that triggered the four days of the novel. Heretofore, he had conducted himself according to the law that "we are given only one life", and thus he married well, accumulated the nicest material objects available on his side of the Iron Curtain, and even travelled abroad. He is soon to be posted to New York as part of the Soviet Union's delegation to the United Nations. But he has a spiritual and moral crisis of sorts, as a result of which he becomes aware of another law -- "that we are given only one conscience, too." "A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience." That's just one of the moral/philosophical conundrums Solzhenitsyn explores in this great novel.

Totalitarianism. It’s not a concept that we are very familiar with; those of us who have been born free. The sludge of fear, every decision weighed not against what is good and just and right, but instead against what the ‘powers’ will think; the battle to deny self but not lose your spirit in the process – tiny acts of rebellion unidentifiable to the minders but nevertheless something that is your own, a fake accent or a carefully planned ‘accident’; not sabotage but just orchestrated carelessness when everything around is done with such care. Nothing to call your own, upon which to hang your personality. Boredom, total and omnipresent.There was a time in the 1960s and early 1970s when we thought the Russians were winning. They were beating us, or so it seemed. Space exploration and the amassing of armies; or at least that was the story that was sold. Of course we all know now that it was propaganda. But we cannot deny the outcomes – nuclear arsenals and rockets flying close to the moon and monumental buildings and epic underground subway stations. “How is it we finally defeated them?” is often the question posed by the experts.I have always had the opposite question, how in blazes did they make it as far as they did? Their ideology, their planning, their civilization should not have been able to put a man into space. It should not have been able to build a bomb, to invade and annex other countries. To challenge the west. Theirs is a creed of mediocrity unto death. And it’s not that they seized some developed nation; the “Empire of the Sun” controlling industrialized Japan and turning it into an elaborate war machine. They didn’t install Marxism through a worker revolt in the UK – but a peasant revolt in backward Tsarist Russia.And they took their rabble and whipped them up into the greatest challenge the United States experienced – lasting for 70 years. They shouldn’t have been able to do that. The project should have burned itself out in a matter of years, not lasted almost a century.All that to say, I’ve been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most famous (or certainly longest) novel “In the First Circle”. The first circle he is referring to is the first circle of hell, from Dante. It’s a mystery novel about a group of political prisoners who, because of their knowledge and education are taken from the gulag to a special set of prisons where they are put to work building the technological advancements of the regime. There the living conditions are moderately better; better food, better work, better sleeping, small pleasures such as reading. The book is good – if somewhat tedious, he certainly could have used an editor. But Russian novels are always a little long and sometimes too in the weeds – especially for an American audience.What is most fascinating to me is the portrayal of Stalin’s paranoid totalitarianism and how it played out in society. How they controlled the minds of their prisoner/citizens; how they not only got them to obey but to excel, to produce out of their slave labor incredible technological achievements. They did this through allowing their prisoners to compete – if only in that one special area of life, their work for ‘Mother Russia’. By denying them any sense of individuality or satisfaction in their lives – family, faith, wealth, leisure and the like – and giving them only one outlet for expressing their humanity, their productivity in their slave labor, the Soviet dictatorship figured out how to make them productive.This was hard for me to understand at first. Why didn’t they starve themselves, why didn’t they refuse to work – denying their captors their minds? But in the interactions of the prisoners on the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s novel I started to better understand how the soviet system functioned for so long. It’s a little ironic that the only way it was able to stabilize and advance was through competition – even the limited competition in the limited avenues available to the oppressed. But humanity does find a way, doesn’t it? Even in the harshest of circumstances, people seek to let their inner light shine through – a lesson that all despots learn sooner or later.Let us hope we’re done with totalitarianism – although I know that hope is probably empty. So too let us read and reread the works of Solzhenitsyn and Rand and Orwell and the other great novelists of freedom lest we forget what makes those regimes tick forward, and we lose our ability to fight them.

The "exciting" prospects offered by the blurb disappear after the first chapter. Then there's several hundred pages of no ongoing plot, too many Russian names (each character seems to have several, making it impossible to keep track) too many irrelevant meetings and conversations that add nothing to push on the narrative. And all with irritating American spelling and slang. It reminded me of an other deeply disappointing read from another Russian author: while Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" are brilliant and compelling, "The Idiot" is over-long, tedious, and has little or nothing to back up the blurb. You can be 800 pages in and still be wondering where the "murder" is! Here, the promise of the blurb just disappears within 20 pages. I read the original version of this many years ago - and it sort of made sense. This is absurdly long, self-indulgent, and, frankly, boring as hell.

Here is the novel as Solzhenitsyn intended it to be. The version we came to know in the West from the 1960s on was toned down, with its narrative and polemics changed in important respects, because Solzhenitsyn had been hoping to get it past the Soviet censor. The title of that version was translated as "The First Circle". Now we have the complete, uncensored version, with its proper title, "In The First Circle". Of his longer novels, this is his masterpiece - though personally I think "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", though much shorter, is a more powerful, concentrated piece of writing.

Very good paper quality. And the writing is brilliant. One of the best classics.

I knew Solzhenitsyn for the Gulag Archipelago, read that, and thought I'd read the magnum opus, but this is fascinating, emotional and opened me up to his wider work as an author. Incredible force.

I would have given 5 stars, but the book arrived poorly bound. A sort of "sawtooth" effect on the binding of blocks of the pages. Possibly meant to be like that to evoke the true Soviet era!