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In the First Circle
Notice: "In the First Circle" and "The First Circle": "In The First Circle" is 200pp longer; "The first circle" is a censored and abridged version.
The thrilling cold war masterwork by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, published in full for the first time
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949.The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.
First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.
The thrilling cold war masterwork by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, published in full for the first time
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949.The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.
First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.
742 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
443 books3,718 followersalso known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 229 reviews
July 28, 2024
Dark ages of the Soviet regime… Millions of the innocent citizens are imprisoned in labour camps… But even among prisoners there are those who are privileged ones… They all are incarcerated in the special scientific institution known among its inmates as sharashka…
And Dante put them in a special prison stronghold… So the sharashka is a carceral citadel for the imprisoned sages in the Soviet penitentiary hell…
Intellectual convicts below… And ignorant jailers above… Intrigues and scheming… And fear rules on the both sides… And above all them there is the one who is higher than God and eviller than the Devil – the leader of the people…
The entire nation turned into the empire of terror and deception…
Even in hell one endeavours to find a place in the sun.
“I’ve lived fifty-two years, recovered twice from fatal illnesses, been married twice to rather pretty women, fathered sons, been published in seven languages, received academic prizes, and never have I been so blissfully happy as today! What a place! To think that tomorrow I won’t be driven into icy water! I’ll get forty grams of butter! There’ll be black bread on the tables! Books aren’t forbidden! You can shave yourself! Guards don’t beat zeks! What a great day! What radiant heights! Maybe I’m dead? Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!”
“No, my dear sir, you are still in hell, only you’ve ascended to its highest and best circle – the first. You were asking what a sharashka is. You could say it was invented by Dante. He was at his wits’ end as to where to put the ancient sages.”
And Dante put them in a special prison stronghold… So the sharashka is a carceral citadel for the imprisoned sages in the Soviet penitentiary hell…
Intellectual convicts below… And ignorant jailers above… Intrigues and scheming… And fear rules on the both sides… And above all them there is the one who is higher than God and eviller than the Devil – the leader of the people…
On the ottoman lay a man whose likeness has been more often sculpted, painted in oils, watercolors, gouache, and sepia; limned in charcoal, chalk, and powdered brick; pieced together in a mosaic of road maker’s gravel, or seashells, or wheat grains, or soybeans; etched on ivory; grown in grass; woven into carpets; spelled out by planes flying in formation; recorded on film… than any other face ever has been in the three billion years since the earth’s crust was formed.
The entire nation turned into the empire of terror and deception…
“What was the Revolution against? Against privilege! What were ordinary Russians sick of? Privilege. Some wore rags and some wore sables; some trudged around on foot, others rode in carriages; some went off to the factory when the horn blew, while others fed their fat faces in restaurants. Am I right?”
“Of course.”
“Right. So why aren’t people repelled by privilege now, but hungry for it?”
Even in hell one endeavours to find a place in the sun.
July 28, 2024
It’s normal for a person with post traumatic stress disorder to get angry! But - be careful - for if you continue on that course it will Imperil Your Own Healing. Use your head: don't diss the wrong people.
DNF - though I'm going to do my darnedest to soldier on through it manfully, if my remaining time permits. Slowly.
As the accompanying Amazon bookblurb puts it, this is NOT the same novel I read and reviewed five years ago. It is much longer because it is now unexpurgated. So it is now more openly human-all-too-human!
So, having loved the expurgated version, I was badly disappointed. Why?
Because the book I read was, I thought, a masterpiece of understatement. I could easily SEE all the horrible abuses it did not reveal, because I am no spring chicken. I've seen it ALL over my 73 years.
I am a happily well-medicated and psychologically well-tempered veteran of bipolar disorder. I am also a Christian. And this unexpurgated version was written by a furiously angry (and justly so) veteran of Stalin's Gulag. One almost gets the irksome feeling that it was written by one of the Unclean Spirits Jesus healed.
Healing from rank injustices in your life is in no way an easy matter - it is in fact fiery agony - but with Faith it can be accomplished.
I pray the author achieved that healing before his passing.
Hidden within Marshal Stalin's feared, but hidden, monstrous Gulag was a nondescript, gated and walled community nestled safely outside the sprawling suburbs of Moscow. As it could have been a psychiatric establishment for the dangerously insane, the average visitor may have paid it no heed.
But this was in fact a place where INTELLECTUAL forced labour was grudgingly carried out.
Here, dissident writers, scientists and engineers paid for their "sins" through the nose. The zek (imprisoned) leaders of their inner clique keep up a brave front of zany banter and humanist incentives for the silent underdogs.
They almost make it all human. Almost. While concentrating on making a success of Stalin's dark, secret technological projects.
But their unsavoury wardens are in fact members of the Secret Police. And their covert actions and meetings are put under a sharp electron microscope of affectively Black Revelations.
It is not fun to read.
And the satire rankles by its embarrassing fury.
To be effective, satire must have its discreet, even humorous limits (as in Voltaire), but here the author has none.
So I am twisted in knots as I read this. The expurgated version by comparison is expertly well-edited and cleansed of toxic subjectivity.
Hell hath no fury like a wronged free spirit, as I myself found to my own eventual self-abasement. And the author was plainly wronged by corrupt statesmen.
In the excised version all such black passion is spent.
DON’T - read IN The First Circle, this one…
DO - read The First Circle - the FIRST and FAR BETTER translation. Because it wasn’t an Embarrassment, now come back to Haunt this monumental writer!
So, in closing, I can offer no better epitaph to this almost-failed work than that of W.B. Yeats on his own tombstone:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by!
DNF - though I'm going to do my darnedest to soldier on through it manfully, if my remaining time permits. Slowly.
As the accompanying Amazon bookblurb puts it, this is NOT the same novel I read and reviewed five years ago. It is much longer because it is now unexpurgated. So it is now more openly human-all-too-human!
So, having loved the expurgated version, I was badly disappointed. Why?
Because the book I read was, I thought, a masterpiece of understatement. I could easily SEE all the horrible abuses it did not reveal, because I am no spring chicken. I've seen it ALL over my 73 years.
I am a happily well-medicated and psychologically well-tempered veteran of bipolar disorder. I am also a Christian. And this unexpurgated version was written by a furiously angry (and justly so) veteran of Stalin's Gulag. One almost gets the irksome feeling that it was written by one of the Unclean Spirits Jesus healed.
Healing from rank injustices in your life is in no way an easy matter - it is in fact fiery agony - but with Faith it can be accomplished.
I pray the author achieved that healing before his passing.
Hidden within Marshal Stalin's feared, but hidden, monstrous Gulag was a nondescript, gated and walled community nestled safely outside the sprawling suburbs of Moscow. As it could have been a psychiatric establishment for the dangerously insane, the average visitor may have paid it no heed.
But this was in fact a place where INTELLECTUAL forced labour was grudgingly carried out.
Here, dissident writers, scientists and engineers paid for their "sins" through the nose. The zek (imprisoned) leaders of their inner clique keep up a brave front of zany banter and humanist incentives for the silent underdogs.
They almost make it all human. Almost. While concentrating on making a success of Stalin's dark, secret technological projects.
But their unsavoury wardens are in fact members of the Secret Police. And their covert actions and meetings are put under a sharp electron microscope of affectively Black Revelations.
It is not fun to read.
And the satire rankles by its embarrassing fury.
To be effective, satire must have its discreet, even humorous limits (as in Voltaire), but here the author has none.
So I am twisted in knots as I read this. The expurgated version by comparison is expertly well-edited and cleansed of toxic subjectivity.
Hell hath no fury like a wronged free spirit, as I myself found to my own eventual self-abasement. And the author was plainly wronged by corrupt statesmen.
In the excised version all such black passion is spent.
DON’T - read IN The First Circle, this one…
DO - read The First Circle - the FIRST and FAR BETTER translation. Because it wasn’t an Embarrassment, now come back to Haunt this monumental writer!
So, in closing, I can offer no better epitaph to this almost-failed work than that of W.B. Yeats on his own tombstone:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by!
June 3, 2020
If you don't read the biggest book in your house while your country's in lockdown, when will you? So it was that I finally came to read In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition. It's an unwieldy physical object: almost 750 pages of thick paper, with annoying deckled edges that make it really difficult to keep flipping back to the cast of characters – and what with there being 60 of them (and that's just the 'notable' ones), you will definitely need to consult the cast of characters.
In the First Circle was originally published as The First Circle in 1968, with nine chapters expurgated from the original manuscript; they are restored here. It's an epic, polyphonic story of life in the Soviet Union which unfolds across a few days in December 1949. It particularly (though by no means exclusively) focuses on the inmates of the Marfino sharashka in the suburbs of Moscow. 'Sharashka' was the common term for a type of 'special prison' which also operated as a research institute. Inmates, or zeks, were assigned to work on research projects for the state (the zeks in this novel are charged with finding a way to identify individuals from recordings of their voices). In return for this work, they received much better treatment than prisoners in labour camps. There are several references to a 'first circle' within the novel, but arguably the most significant is when one of the zeks tells a new arrival, referring to the sharashka: 'You are still in hell, only you've ascended to its highest and best circle—the first'.
This edition has been packaged to look like a Cold War thriller. The entire back cover is given over to a dramatic bit of dialogue which occurs in the first chapter, when diplomat Innokenty Volodin attempts to call the American Embassy to warn them that progress has been made on the development of a Soviet atomic bomb. This plot gives the novel the loosest sense of a throughline – it's Volodin's voice the zeks will ultimately try to decode – but is in no way its driving force. We spend a lot of time with the zeks, who are always having lengthy philosophical conversations, and regardless of their importance, no character is left without an extensive backstory. To give you an idea of the pace, a rendezvous agreed on page 68 is not resolved – or even mentioned again – until page 654. Fast-moving it is not.
I'm glad I read In the First Circle; for one thing, it's something of an education (Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Marfino sharashka, and as with much of his work, he wrote this novel based on his own experiences. And even having studied Russian history, I didn't really know anything about the sharashkas). But in being so sprawling, it lost me at times. I came to the end of it both a little exhausted and filled with admiration for Solzhenitsyn's writing.
TinyLetter
In the First Circle was originally published as The First Circle in 1968, with nine chapters expurgated from the original manuscript; they are restored here. It's an epic, polyphonic story of life in the Soviet Union which unfolds across a few days in December 1949. It particularly (though by no means exclusively) focuses on the inmates of the Marfino sharashka in the suburbs of Moscow. 'Sharashka' was the common term for a type of 'special prison' which also operated as a research institute. Inmates, or zeks, were assigned to work on research projects for the state (the zeks in this novel are charged with finding a way to identify individuals from recordings of their voices). In return for this work, they received much better treatment than prisoners in labour camps. There are several references to a 'first circle' within the novel, but arguably the most significant is when one of the zeks tells a new arrival, referring to the sharashka: 'You are still in hell, only you've ascended to its highest and best circle—the first'.
This edition has been packaged to look like a Cold War thriller. The entire back cover is given over to a dramatic bit of dialogue which occurs in the first chapter, when diplomat Innokenty Volodin attempts to call the American Embassy to warn them that progress has been made on the development of a Soviet atomic bomb. This plot gives the novel the loosest sense of a throughline – it's Volodin's voice the zeks will ultimately try to decode – but is in no way its driving force. We spend a lot of time with the zeks, who are always having lengthy philosophical conversations, and regardless of their importance, no character is left without an extensive backstory. To give you an idea of the pace, a rendezvous agreed on page 68 is not resolved – or even mentioned again – until page 654. Fast-moving it is not.
I'm glad I read In the First Circle; for one thing, it's something of an education (Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Marfino sharashka, and as with much of his work, he wrote this novel based on his own experiences. And even having studied Russian history, I didn't really know anything about the sharashkas). But in being so sprawling, it lost me at times. I came to the end of it both a little exhausted and filled with admiration for Solzhenitsyn's writing.
TinyLetter
May 18, 2023
This is not the first time I encounter the sad, Kafkian world of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for I have already accompanied Ivan Denisovich during one of his regular days in hell and I’ve taken a long, painful walk in the Gulag Archipelago. Only that the hell depicted there has been upgraded in the novel In the First Circle. Here, the mighty communist society, which couldn’t but acknowledge some zeks’ scientific skills has relocated them in the “sharashka”, the prison research institute that is, to be put to work at the development of a phone encryption device that could identify any voice on earth. Because they have food and cigarettes to discretion, some books and some space to walk, for a prisoner coming from Gulag it may seem paradise, but in reality they only reached the first circle of Inferno. A circle inside the last one, the rim of the funnel which is the Iron Curtain.
In the Foreword of the book, Edward E. Erickson recalls that In the First Circle was composed from 1955 to 1958, when the author was in his thirties, barely released from the Gulag and exiled in Kazakhstan, where he had found work as a schoolteacher. He tried to publish his manuscript for the first time in 1964, erasing nine chapters in order to pass the censorship, but because the KGB had confiscated the unshortened copy from a friend, the publishing was indefinitely delayed by the authorities. Finally, he sent the same censored version abroad, where it appeared in 1968 under the title The First Circle. Only ten years later the author will restore the original version and the preposition “in” will be added to the title to change the focus from the place to the people in it.
Erickson also observes that the novel illustrates Solzhenitsyn’s literary credo: to follow “the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. (…) Despite starting with actual people, events, and locations, Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag writings—the fiction and The Gulag Archipelago—succeeds in creating a literary world that is as distinctly his own as are the signature literary worlds created by such authors as Dostoevsky, Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner”.
Therefore, In the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in the “sharashka”, between 1947-1950, years compressed into four days – from December 24th to 27th 1949. The ninety-six chapters are narrated by many narrators (Stalin being one of them), offering a point of view that was called by the author himself polyphonic, since the characters take turns in telling their stories in which I would call a free indirect style.
Even though it is difficult to say which character dominates the story, five among them will stay with the reader long after finishing the book: Gleb Nerzhin – the author’s alter ego, who discovers people are many but few, since " “The People” did not mean all those who speak your language, nor yet the chosen few branded with the fiery mark of genius” but those who managed to “polish” their soul “so as to become a human being”; Lev Rubin – the inflexible Marxist who even in prison dreams of Civic temples in which solemn ceremonies be performed to “to raise the moral level of the population, high though it already was, and to enhance the significance of anniversaries and family occasions”; Dmitri Sologdin – the steadfast opponent of the Stalinist regime, who invented a cryptic language as a form of protest (for example, he calls the Revolution the “New Time of Troubles”); Innokenty Volodin – the high official gone bad from the point of view of the regime, who sees in the instruction “KEEP PERMANENTLY”, stamped on his prison file, “something mystical…, something that looked beyond the human race and the planet Earth”; and of course Joseph Stalin – “…the Father of the Peoples of East and West”, “the Leader of All Progressive Mankind”, “the Wise Leader”, “the Coryphaeus of Sciences”, etc., etc., etc., who, in an alchemical process not unlike Midas’s, “turned all that he touched to lead”.
Of course, Joseph Stalin’s personality menacingly shadows every twist of the narrative, sometimes appearing in all its sinister splendour, like a hideous, enormous wood idol everybody fears but fakes the love for:
Stalin’s grip is so forceful and definitive that there was never a victim known to have escaped it. Here is Professor Chelnov, former corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, former director of a mathematical institute, who goes from sharashka to sharashka to solve any urgent mathematical problem arisen. He had never been tried or convicted, so he would never be released. His guilt? “He had once called the Wise Father a slimy reptile, and for that was now spending his eighteenth year inside without having been sentenced and without hope.”
Here is Drysin, whose apartment had been coveted by some neighbours who denounced him for “anti-Soviet agitation,” in which he would have been engaged by listening to an illegal German radio which he didn’t in fact have but he might have, given that he was a radio engineer…. During the eight years of prison, his two children died and his wife became an old, despondent woman who wrote him desperate letters which were considered inappropriate by the major on duty, who strongly advised Drysin to send her “a cheerful reply”.
And here is Potapov, who in 1941 wasn’t let to join the army because he was building a power station, but when he heard that the other one, Dnieper Station had been blown up, he voluntarily went to repair it, even though it was situated in a war field. He was taken prisoner and endured the horrors of the labour camps, but when the Germans learned who he was, they brought him to the station and asked him to draw the diagram of the switch mechanism for the generator and he did so because the diagram had been already published, so it was not a secret anymore. Nevertheless, he will be condemned at ten years of prison for “betraying the secret of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station”, although he had refused to restore it for the Germans and had been sent back to the labour camp; moreover, when the Soviets assaulted Berlin in 1945, he, barely escaped from hell, had “mounted on a tank, wearing the same old cracked and wired-up spectacles, machine gun in hand” fighting with them till the end:
The end of the novel will highlight once again this farcical contrast between appearance and essence that was the main trait of the communist society (not only the Soviet one), in the image of an ambitious journalist, who had often seen, on the Moscow streets, trucks with the inscription “Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat” and who, not knowing they are used in fact to carry prisoners, sees an opportunity to praise the regime for the impeccable organization of the food supplies.
I cannot finish my review without two reminders. The first one, meant for us all, is that nothing escapes untarnished under a totalitarian regime, not even literature (or any other art), so any job related with it, say for example a librarian, is implicitly a lie, since “(y)ou have to trash good books and praise bad ones. You have to mislead undeveloped minds.”
Consequently, the description of the books to be found in “sharashka” library is not very different from the books to be found in any library of this sort of society:
The second reminder is mainly for the readers from ex-communist countries and it is closely related to Solzhenitsyn’s words to his countrymen when he was forced into exile: “Live Not by Lies!”. And to do so, every time you colour the past communist days with your lost youth nostalgia recalling them as beautiful, just read (and re-read) a Solzhenitsyn book.
In the Foreword of the book, Edward E. Erickson recalls that In the First Circle was composed from 1955 to 1958, when the author was in his thirties, barely released from the Gulag and exiled in Kazakhstan, where he had found work as a schoolteacher. He tried to publish his manuscript for the first time in 1964, erasing nine chapters in order to pass the censorship, but because the KGB had confiscated the unshortened copy from a friend, the publishing was indefinitely delayed by the authorities. Finally, he sent the same censored version abroad, where it appeared in 1968 under the title The First Circle. Only ten years later the author will restore the original version and the preposition “in” will be added to the title to change the focus from the place to the people in it.
Erickson also observes that the novel illustrates Solzhenitsyn’s literary credo: to follow “the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. (…) Despite starting with actual people, events, and locations, Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag writings—the fiction and The Gulag Archipelago—succeeds in creating a literary world that is as distinctly his own as are the signature literary worlds created by such authors as Dostoevsky, Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner”.
Therefore, In the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in the “sharashka”, between 1947-1950, years compressed into four days – from December 24th to 27th 1949. The ninety-six chapters are narrated by many narrators (Stalin being one of them), offering a point of view that was called by the author himself polyphonic, since the characters take turns in telling their stories in which I would call a free indirect style.
Even though it is difficult to say which character dominates the story, five among them will stay with the reader long after finishing the book: Gleb Nerzhin – the author’s alter ego, who discovers people are many but few, since " “The People” did not mean all those who speak your language, nor yet the chosen few branded with the fiery mark of genius” but those who managed to “polish” their soul “so as to become a human being”; Lev Rubin – the inflexible Marxist who even in prison dreams of Civic temples in which solemn ceremonies be performed to “to raise the moral level of the population, high though it already was, and to enhance the significance of anniversaries and family occasions”; Dmitri Sologdin – the steadfast opponent of the Stalinist regime, who invented a cryptic language as a form of protest (for example, he calls the Revolution the “New Time of Troubles”); Innokenty Volodin – the high official gone bad from the point of view of the regime, who sees in the instruction “KEEP PERMANENTLY”, stamped on his prison file, “something mystical…, something that looked beyond the human race and the planet Earth”; and of course Joseph Stalin – “…the Father of the Peoples of East and West”, “the Leader of All Progressive Mankind”, “the Wise Leader”, “the Coryphaeus of Sciences”, etc., etc., etc., who, in an alchemical process not unlike Midas’s, “turned all that he touched to lead”.
Of course, Joseph Stalin’s personality menacingly shadows every twist of the narrative, sometimes appearing in all its sinister splendour, like a hideous, enormous wood idol everybody fears but fakes the love for:
The man’s name was declaimed by all the newspapers of the terrestrial globe, mouthed by thousands of announcers in hundreds of languages, thundered by public speakers in their exordia and perorations, piped by the thin voices of Young Pioneers, intoned in prayers for his health by bishops. This man’s name burned on the parched lips of prisoners of war and the swollen gums of convicts. It had replaced the previous names of a multitude of cities and squares, streets and avenues, palaces, universities, schools, sanatoriums, mountain ranges, ship canals, factories, mines, state farms, collective farms, warships, icebreakers, fishing boats, cooperative cobblers’ shops, nurseries—and a group of Moscow journalists had even suggested renaming the Volga and the moon after him.
Stalin’s grip is so forceful and definitive that there was never a victim known to have escaped it. Here is Professor Chelnov, former corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, former director of a mathematical institute, who goes from sharashka to sharashka to solve any urgent mathematical problem arisen. He had never been tried or convicted, so he would never be released. His guilt? “He had once called the Wise Father a slimy reptile, and for that was now spending his eighteenth year inside without having been sentenced and without hope.”
Here is Drysin, whose apartment had been coveted by some neighbours who denounced him for “anti-Soviet agitation,” in which he would have been engaged by listening to an illegal German radio which he didn’t in fact have but he might have, given that he was a radio engineer…. During the eight years of prison, his two children died and his wife became an old, despondent woman who wrote him desperate letters which were considered inappropriate by the major on duty, who strongly advised Drysin to send her “a cheerful reply”.
And here is Potapov, who in 1941 wasn’t let to join the army because he was building a power station, but when he heard that the other one, Dnieper Station had been blown up, he voluntarily went to repair it, even though it was situated in a war field. He was taken prisoner and endured the horrors of the labour camps, but when the Germans learned who he was, they brought him to the station and asked him to draw the diagram of the switch mechanism for the generator and he did so because the diagram had been already published, so it was not a secret anymore. Nevertheless, he will be condemned at ten years of prison for “betraying the secret of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station”, although he had refused to restore it for the Germans and had been sent back to the labour camp; moreover, when the Soviets assaulted Berlin in 1945, he, barely escaped from hell, had “mounted on a tank, wearing the same old cracked and wired-up spectacles, machine gun in hand” fighting with them till the end:
The Soviet court did not include this in the charges against him and so gave him only ten years. Engineer Markushev, on the other hand, did sign such an undertaking and did go to work for the Germans, and the court sentenced him to ten years also. There you see Stalin’s hand! That purblind equation of friend and foe which made him unique in human history!
The end of the novel will highlight once again this farcical contrast between appearance and essence that was the main trait of the communist society (not only the Soviet one), in the image of an ambitious journalist, who had often seen, on the Moscow streets, trucks with the inscription “Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat” and who, not knowing they are used in fact to carry prisoners, sees an opportunity to praise the regime for the impeccable organization of the food supplies.
I cannot finish my review without two reminders. The first one, meant for us all, is that nothing escapes untarnished under a totalitarian regime, not even literature (or any other art), so any job related with it, say for example a librarian, is implicitly a lie, since “(y)ou have to trash good books and praise bad ones. You have to mislead undeveloped minds.”
Consequently, the description of the books to be found in “sharashka” library is not very different from the books to be found in any library of this sort of society:
The other books in the heap were “artistic literature”... One was a bestseller called Far from Moscow, which everybody outside was avidly reading. (…) It was about the use of convict labor on building sites. But the camps were not given their proper names; the builders were not called zeks; nothing was said about short rations or punishment cells. The zeks became Komsomols, well dressed, well shod, and bursting with enthusiasm. An experienced reader sensed immediately that the author knew, had seen, had touched the truth, that he might well have been an operations officer in a camp himself, but that he was a barefaced liar.
Another of the books was the Selected Works of the famous Galakhov. (…) Galakhov had written passable love stories but had long ago slipped into the approved manner, writing as though his readers were not normal people but imbeciles who could be kept happy with meretricious trash. Anything deeply troubling was missing from these books. Except for the war, their authors would have been left with nothing to write except hymns of praise. The war had given them access to feelings that all could understand. But even so they concocted unreal personal problems, like that of the Komsomol who derails munitions trains by the dozen behind enemy lines but agonizes day and night because he is not paying his dues and so may not be a genuine Komsomol. (…)
Another of the books on the locker was American Short Stories by progressive writers... (…) every story inevitably contained something very nasty about America. This poisonous collection, taken together, gave such a nightmarish picture of their country that you could only wonder why the Americans hadn’t all fled or hanged themselves long ago.
The second reminder is mainly for the readers from ex-communist countries and it is closely related to Solzhenitsyn’s words to his countrymen when he was forced into exile: “Live Not by Lies!”. And to do so, every time you colour the past communist days with your lost youth nostalgia recalling them as beautiful, just read (and re-read) a Solzhenitsyn book.
January 20, 2018
Read it some years ago and coming across it encouraged me to reread it which I'm doing at present. What a treat!
January 20, 2018
Review after my 1st reading:
Reading this in conjunction with Cancer Ward made it all the more emotional for me. It's like Cancer Ward is the conclusion to In the First Circle. In some ways, what is not spoken In the First Circle is completed in Cancer Ward. It's very interesting how Solzhenitsyn made these 2 books so compatible with each other. One is the cold, hard prison legal system and the other is what's left of humanity because of a cold, hard legal system. This becomes even more noticeable in the 2nd half of these 2 books and by the time the 'climax' or conclusion comes around, the endings of these books are inseparable.
I chose to read them together because Solzhenitsyn wrote them or began them at the same time. They were published in the same year or very close together. If you'd like a powerhouse experience, read them together but start one before the other so you can get your bearings on the huge cast of characters. (If you're a little familiar with Russian novels, or are familiar with dusty old books, it'll be easy to keep the world & characters of these 2 books separate.) Then begin the other book and get to know that world. I began Cancer Ward first, then In the First Circle.
With all that said, In the First Circle just by itself is an amazing read and one I plan to re-read many times in the future. Solzhenitsyn blends all aspects of humanity into a single narrative, what he can't contain in this book, naturally spills over into Cancer Ward and it's brilliant how he kept his themes together while letting them expand into each other.
The main theme of In the First Circle I think is community within a human made prison. Cancer Wards is community and looking within yourself while in naturally imposed prison.
Read one or both of these books, together or separate, they can each stand alone and reading either one before the other is alright too.
My Original Review:
Dear Mr. Solzhenitsyn,
Those were the best 38 pages I've ever read in my life. Truly. So with great sadness, I'll return this book, unread, to the library. I'm astounded that in 38 pages, I've been moved so deeply and so permanently. I'll never forget those words and I'll revisit this book at the end of the year, after I've read more Russian Lit and Western Classics.
I'm not breaking up with you, I just need to see other books first. I'm so not ready for this masterpiece. It needs to be savoured and I can only read it the 1st time once. I sincerely look forward to re-reading this book for many years in the future. Can there be such a thing as a book marriage? Or some kind of long-term bookish re-reading?
I'll invest in this very same translation at the end of the year. The Whitney translation, it'll be the purchase of the decade!
Edit: I bought the Uncensored Version, translated by Willetts.
Reading this in conjunction with Cancer Ward made it all the more emotional for me. It's like Cancer Ward is the conclusion to In the First Circle. In some ways, what is not spoken In the First Circle is completed in Cancer Ward. It's very interesting how Solzhenitsyn made these 2 books so compatible with each other. One is the cold, hard prison legal system and the other is what's left of humanity because of a cold, hard legal system. This becomes even more noticeable in the 2nd half of these 2 books and by the time the 'climax' or conclusion comes around, the endings of these books are inseparable.
I chose to read them together because Solzhenitsyn wrote them or began them at the same time. They were published in the same year or very close together. If you'd like a powerhouse experience, read them together but start one before the other so you can get your bearings on the huge cast of characters. (If you're a little familiar with Russian novels, or are familiar with dusty old books, it'll be easy to keep the world & characters of these 2 books separate.) Then begin the other book and get to know that world. I began Cancer Ward first, then In the First Circle.
With all that said, In the First Circle just by itself is an amazing read and one I plan to re-read many times in the future. Solzhenitsyn blends all aspects of humanity into a single narrative, what he can't contain in this book, naturally spills over into Cancer Ward and it's brilliant how he kept his themes together while letting them expand into each other.
The main theme of In the First Circle I think is community within a human made prison. Cancer Wards is community and looking within yourself while in naturally imposed prison.
Read one or both of these books, together or separate, they can each stand alone and reading either one before the other is alright too.
My Original Review:
Dear Mr. Solzhenitsyn,
Those were the best 38 pages I've ever read in my life. Truly. So with great sadness, I'll return this book, unread, to the library. I'm astounded that in 38 pages, I've been moved so deeply and so permanently. I'll never forget those words and I'll revisit this book at the end of the year, after I've read more Russian Lit and Western Classics.
I'm not breaking up with you, I just need to see other books first. I'm so not ready for this masterpiece. It needs to be savoured and I can only read it the 1st time once. I sincerely look forward to re-reading this book for many years in the future. Can there be such a thing as a book marriage? Or some kind of long-term bookish re-reading?
I'll invest in this very same translation at the end of the year. The Whitney translation, it'll be the purchase of the decade!
Edit: I bought the Uncensored Version, translated by Willetts.
June 1, 2011
Difficult to know where to begin with this one. If you don’t know who Solzhenitsyn is then I’ll provide a quick explanation. A Russian who fought in WWII, returned, and was promptly put into political prison. For 11 years. This is the guy who brought the word ‘gulag’ into the English lexicon through sneaking his writing out to the West. Hard to imagine, but nobody really knew what was going on behind the Iron Curtain before this man popped up.
That out of the way, The First Circle (Into… in Russian) is a work of fiction set over 3 days in a prison. It’s not as physically torturous as the labour camps were because it’s populated by former engineers and scientists working on various projects at the behest of Stalin.
However, don’t think for a minute that the prisoners got away with anything. The mental torture inflicted on every prisoner is as hideous as it is subtle – uncertainty.
Men taken at night without any warning; letters to and from families intercepted and destroyed; lights switched on in the middle of the night; meals not turning up; books taken away – Solzhenitsyn shows us how the human spirit can be crushed by taking away the smallest thing we take for granted. He shows how the prisoners’ identities are slowly sapped away and how, despite the walls and the barbed-wire fences and the lack of communication, this leaks into the prisoners’ families.
Never mind Orwell and his boot on the neck – in this case fascism is a man forced to sleep with his arms hanging outside of his blanket – an action that goes against every instinct in one’s body.
But like those other great Russian masters, Solzhenitsyn never sinks into immature black and white bad vs good. Oppressor and victim merge, and this is perhaps stretched to its fullest realisation when he goes on to get into Stalin’s head. How Solzhenitsyn must have toiled over this part of the book!
I have always found myself attracted to artistic expression that concerns itself with isolation, misery, and loneliness. Not because I feel that this is what life is about, but because I think that it’s among these feelings that what we truly are is exposed and can therefore be examined. As a result I have often found myself blinking tears away as I have read/listened/gazed at whatever is in front of me – but always in a fuzzy melancholic knowledge that it’s all a simulation. This is different. I had to steel myself before reading it, I had to be careful that I didn’t read it on the commute to work (because doing so would have resulted in me walking in and putting my fist through my monitor), and I had to have at least an hour of uninterrupted quiet in front of me. For days afterwards I had to fight the temptation to slap whatever bullshit my fellow commuters were subjecting themselves to out of their hands and shoving a copy of this book at them instead.
I have never read anything so menacing, so malicious and – most importantly – so real. The First Circle sometimes makes Dostoyevsky and Kafka look like simpering children – and the former was no stranger to prison and death sentences himself. This is the most affecting book I’ve ever read. The most sad and damming examination of humanity I’ve come across. But at the same time it’s as celebratory towards the human spirit as the end of Crime and Punishment is. It just has something more to it that’s only possible due to its subject matter – it also celebrates the triumph of freedom and warns how we should never lose sight of what this means to us.
That out of the way, The First Circle (Into… in Russian) is a work of fiction set over 3 days in a prison. It’s not as physically torturous as the labour camps were because it’s populated by former engineers and scientists working on various projects at the behest of Stalin.
However, don’t think for a minute that the prisoners got away with anything. The mental torture inflicted on every prisoner is as hideous as it is subtle – uncertainty.
Men taken at night without any warning; letters to and from families intercepted and destroyed; lights switched on in the middle of the night; meals not turning up; books taken away – Solzhenitsyn shows us how the human spirit can be crushed by taking away the smallest thing we take for granted. He shows how the prisoners’ identities are slowly sapped away and how, despite the walls and the barbed-wire fences and the lack of communication, this leaks into the prisoners’ families.
Never mind Orwell and his boot on the neck – in this case fascism is a man forced to sleep with his arms hanging outside of his blanket – an action that goes against every instinct in one’s body.
But like those other great Russian masters, Solzhenitsyn never sinks into immature black and white bad vs good. Oppressor and victim merge, and this is perhaps stretched to its fullest realisation when he goes on to get into Stalin’s head. How Solzhenitsyn must have toiled over this part of the book!
I have always found myself attracted to artistic expression that concerns itself with isolation, misery, and loneliness. Not because I feel that this is what life is about, but because I think that it’s among these feelings that what we truly are is exposed and can therefore be examined. As a result I have often found myself blinking tears away as I have read/listened/gazed at whatever is in front of me – but always in a fuzzy melancholic knowledge that it’s all a simulation. This is different. I had to steel myself before reading it, I had to be careful that I didn’t read it on the commute to work (because doing so would have resulted in me walking in and putting my fist through my monitor), and I had to have at least an hour of uninterrupted quiet in front of me. For days afterwards I had to fight the temptation to slap whatever bullshit my fellow commuters were subjecting themselves to out of their hands and shoving a copy of this book at them instead.
I have never read anything so menacing, so malicious and – most importantly – so real. The First Circle sometimes makes Dostoyevsky and Kafka look like simpering children – and the former was no stranger to prison and death sentences himself. This is the most affecting book I’ve ever read. The most sad and damming examination of humanity I’ve come across. But at the same time it’s as celebratory towards the human spirit as the end of Crime and Punishment is. It just has something more to it that’s only possible due to its subject matter – it also celebrates the triumph of freedom and warns how we should never lose sight of what this means to us.
February 18, 2023
Solzhenitsyn's First Circle is a work of history, which describes the strange and terrible forced intellectual labor system of Stalin, where Stalin compelled engineers and scientists to create technology to be used for war and espionage, and if they refused he sent them to forced physical labor. The title is from Dante's Inferno, where Dante describes 9 levels of hell, with the 9th level as the worst, and the 1st level as almost not hell. It is a book of history and story, and a study of ethics and how difficult it can be do do the right thing.
July 13, 2013
"The old seminary church (sharashka) was like an ark, with sides four bricks and a half, floating serenely and aimlessly through the black ocean of human destinies and human errors, leaving behind fading rivulets of light from its portholes...From here, from the ark forging confidently ahead through the darkness, the erratically meandering stream of accursed history was clearly visible---visible in its entirety, as though from an immense light, yet in detail, down to the last little pebble on the streambed, just as though they had plunged into its waves."The ravaging waves of the early 20th century rampaged with all its crushing weight upon Imperial Russia, clearing all the path in its wake as it destroys the historical past into a vacuum of desolate emptiness that robbed Russians with the true spirit of humanity.
This is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn′s searing view from atop his barb wired, non-floating Ark of Stone gripped in involuntary isolation and deprivation from where he depicts with visual realism, The First Circle of Hell in Russia that culminates under Stalin′s dehumanization.
THE COLLOQUIUM IN THE ARK OF STONE: The Sharashka and its Captive Russian Technical Intelligentsia
The whirlwind of change immediately swept across Russia as Communism became its magisterial stronghold especially reinforced with the iron fist of the Man of Steel himself, Stalin during his reign of terror, overhauling the landscape of Russia with the ferociousness of his ideological fanaticism, which Solzhenitsyn fiercely conveys of what Dostoevsky can only envision with the atrocious presence of the culpable man himself in the novel, casting his dark shadow over the barren land of spiritless people without a God. To which, Solzhenitsyn endeavors to bring out the grim realities of his time through his own eyes as though peering into a spy hole that opens up to an ideology indifferent to human compassion, providing a much larger perspective of a debilitating suppression that is completely against the innate freedom bestowed to any human being as he ironically shows as well the resilience of man even amid the strictest prohibition.
This resilience appears as a silent cry of a benumbed spirit that seems to be an unobtrusive thematic trait of the novel as it circumvents all the characters in conquering fear against the very terror brought by their own wasted lives from an unjust imprisonment of indefinite time, becoming their only hold to go through their deathlike lives amid the severe isolation of the non-floating Ark of Stone, a haven compared to the hellish pit of the Gulag that awaits them all.
The Precursory Sanctuary of the Sharashka
This haven of prison known as the sharashka referred to by Solzhenitsyn as The First Circle of Hell is a seeming prelude to the actual vortex of Satan′s Hell in the Gulag labor camps. It is in contrast, an old seminary church, which during the Tsarist regime used to be the vessel of the true Russian spirit in its conglomeration that represents the Orthodox Church. It is apparent that the decay of morality and the flamboyant display of injustice in the complete absence of compassion in retaining Stalin′s authoritarian control in Russia coincide with Solzhenitsyn′s poignant description of the degradation of the church that started to take place after the Fall of the Tsar, in which, three different churches appear separately in the silent background of his narrative that might easily go by unnoticed as the more blatant and violent alterations in conditions overshadow it, yet these churches, which represent the presence of God, either left in total ruins, or turn into prison/labor camps, are loud testament to the free reign of Stalin in accomplishing his evil schemes.
As this somehow exemplifies the essence of what Dostoevsky said, that "without God, everything is permissible."
This sharashka is kept in vigilant secrecy by the government, making it even more isolated from its isolation as it houses the so called "privileged" prisoners of the Stalinist regime, the engineers, technicians and whatnots, keeping them in check and in constant surveillance, not just in ensuring the suppression of their opposition, but most significantly, it also includes an adamant pressure to yield in complete submission the fruits of their scientific creations to the utilization of the state, displaying the very alarming danger of science going to the wrong hands of the wicked.
In Solzhenitysn′s florid words, this research and development center of scientific pursuits cum forced labor camp breathes alive in flesh and bones as it materializes before the compassionate eyes of the reader in its most detailed form as though walking behind the writer himself on the pavement, pointing his bony fingers to all the crevices and niches on the walls of the sharashka as he introduces the forlorn characters individually from a point of view of the most intimate as if listening to their stories and arguments while lying down on one of their double bed bunkers.
The Russian Technical Intelligentsia in Captivity
The novel opens with a precarious air of suspense in the midst of the tension of the Cold War as it begins with the treacherous call of Innokenty Volodin to the US Embassy, a Soviet diplomat living a privileged life, whose conscience has overtaken his loyalty to his government in lieu of the imminent danger he foresees against the whole of humanity in case the technology of the atomic bomb falls on the hands of Stalin.
The deciphering of his recorded voice retrieved by the Soviet secret police leads Solzhenitysn′s narrative to zoom in inside the secretly guarded isolated fortress of the sharashka , where the brilliant Russian engineers and technicians are kept in vigilance as the state squeezes their gut in the procurement of technological advancement for their cause against the whole of the Western world.
From this catalytic tone of the prose stimulated by the character of Volodin, it disintegrates into several voices once in the sharashka as the plot of the novel takes its long and meandering course, breaking the stream of the narrative into many passages of either widened, or narrowed pathways as it is subjugated into one complex ocean of a story maneuvered by Solzhenitysn′s fecundity of style.
There is no character that dominates the scene, or no specific protagonist for that matter arising to save the day, yet they represent thoughts and experiences richly flavored for argumentative style in profoundly drawing the white rose of the truth from Stalin′s black crab of lies. This is especially evident from the harangue expressed in vigorous fluidity, which nominally disrupts the narrative in between, depicting the inconsolable beliefs of the skeptic Gleb Nerzhin, the communist Lev Rubin and the designer with royal sympathies Dmitri Sologdin, whose presence somehow symbolically represent Solzhenitysn′s life as it comes in full circle of realization that somehow draws them all in a conscious thread of a collective experience, contributing each of their individual stories for the benefit of one universal theme---the insufferable uncertainties of the human lives under the Communist regime. ☾☯
December 24, 2021
In Dante's Inferno the first circle of hell (Limbo) was reserved for worthy individuals who, although unable to ascend to heaven due to being unbaptised and non Christian, Dante could not bring himself to imagine them condemned to an eternity of suffering in the fires of hell. As such, great men such as Socrates and Renaissance men would be allowed to remain in this 'First Circle'.
This is a book with a past.
Written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during a window of more relaxed censorship this novel about life in a special Russian prison. A place where mental and not manual labour was the price extracted from the prisoners. Those prisoners who were identified as having worth to the state could be shifted here, and, under threat of instant removal if they didn't prove their worth, they would work out their sentences. In The First Circle basic food was plentiful and there were no beatings and you didn't freeze to death. A positive paradise compared with a typical gulag but only in comparison with this. By any other light the life of a prisoner in the Sharashka was surely one of a man condemned to a Limbo Hell far less pleasant than the one imagined by Dante.
In his desire to see his great work in print Aleksandr Solzhenitysn accepted that even with a state who currently looked favourably on him, getting something like this past the soviet equivalent of the censorship board would be very difficult and so he took a hacksaw to it, cutting out and changing plot points and entire sections. Alas, all in vain; even the censored copy was rejected and it wasn't until it was smuggled out of Russia that this was first published in the cut down form of The First Circle. Many years later, once Solzhenitysn was living in the West he reinstated the original text and it was finally printed as he had always intended it to be under the title of In the First Circle.
It begins with a telephone call; a highly placed bureaucrat has sensitive information on a Russian attempt to steal some nuclear weapon technology and he wishes to prevent this happening, so, in desperation he places a call to the American embassy, warning them and initiating a three day manhunt by the Soviet top brass to discover his identity. Certain prisoners in the Sharashka who had been working on a project involving identifying voice patterns are enlisted into the hunt for this traitor.
In the course of the three days we learn about the lives of many of the men who are involved in this search, on whichever side of the prison wall, and also their families and their past history. Some are passionate patriots, who, even after suffering the most appalling injustices at the hands of the state, still believe in the greater good of the revolution and maintain that their sufferings don't matter, if, in the grand scheme of things, life has been improved for the majority of the people. Others, don't hold these views... The men in the Sharashka are all intelligent citizens who have seen a great deal in their lives and I found their debates far more interesting than I often find in books where the author has his characters expound for pages on their world views.
These conversations and the relationships between them and their loved ones who suffer, often more greatly still, outside of the prisons walls, are the real point of the book. The plot, such as it is, simply acts as a framework to weave all these people around. And there are a lot of them. At least I thought so, especially when they all seemed to have three different names and I would occasionally lose track of just who was who.
A great book. I'm looking forward to reading Cancer Ward at some point in the future. And perhaps The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956.
This is a book with a past.
Written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during a window of more relaxed censorship this novel about life in a special Russian prison. A place where mental and not manual labour was the price extracted from the prisoners. Those prisoners who were identified as having worth to the state could be shifted here, and, under threat of instant removal if they didn't prove their worth, they would work out their sentences. In The First Circle basic food was plentiful and there were no beatings and you didn't freeze to death. A positive paradise compared with a typical gulag but only in comparison with this. By any other light the life of a prisoner in the Sharashka was surely one of a man condemned to a Limbo Hell far less pleasant than the one imagined by Dante.
In his desire to see his great work in print Aleksandr Solzhenitysn accepted that even with a state who currently looked favourably on him, getting something like this past the soviet equivalent of the censorship board would be very difficult and so he took a hacksaw to it, cutting out and changing plot points and entire sections. Alas, all in vain; even the censored copy was rejected and it wasn't until it was smuggled out of Russia that this was first published in the cut down form of The First Circle. Many years later, once Solzhenitysn was living in the West he reinstated the original text and it was finally printed as he had always intended it to be under the title of In the First Circle.
It begins with a telephone call; a highly placed bureaucrat has sensitive information on a Russian attempt to steal some nuclear weapon technology and he wishes to prevent this happening, so, in desperation he places a call to the American embassy, warning them and initiating a three day manhunt by the Soviet top brass to discover his identity. Certain prisoners in the Sharashka who had been working on a project involving identifying voice patterns are enlisted into the hunt for this traitor.
In the course of the three days we learn about the lives of many of the men who are involved in this search, on whichever side of the prison wall, and also their families and their past history. Some are passionate patriots, who, even after suffering the most appalling injustices at the hands of the state, still believe in the greater good of the revolution and maintain that their sufferings don't matter, if, in the grand scheme of things, life has been improved for the majority of the people. Others, don't hold these views... The men in the Sharashka are all intelligent citizens who have seen a great deal in their lives and I found their debates far more interesting than I often find in books where the author has his characters expound for pages on their world views.
These conversations and the relationships between them and their loved ones who suffer, often more greatly still, outside of the prisons walls, are the real point of the book. The plot, such as it is, simply acts as a framework to weave all these people around. And there are a lot of them. At least I thought so, especially when they all seemed to have three different names and I would occasionally lose track of just who was who.
A great book. I'm looking forward to reading Cancer Ward at some point in the future. And perhaps The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956.
December 30, 2020
In the First Circle - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
بهذه الرواية الملحمية الطويلة أختم العام، وسولجينيتسن كاتب استثنائي.
بهذه الرواية الملحمية الطويلة أختم العام، وسولجينيتسن كاتب استثنائي.
March 11, 2011
This is an extraordinary book about life in the Soviet Union toward the end of Stalin's tyrannical reign. The book is focused primarily upon a prison where engineer prisoners are forced to create technologies for the regime to maintain or even expand their grip over the world. But there are lives of others outside the prison. It is difficult to summarize this book because of the expansive scope of Solzhenitsyn's narrative.
This is an excellent book--perhaps his best. It is worth reading this simply to understand the sort of people who ruled communist Russia. Here's a hint--they're the same sort of people who are trying to rule America.
This is an excellent book--perhaps his best. It is worth reading this simply to understand the sort of people who ruled communist Russia. Here's a hint--they're the same sort of people who are trying to rule America.
December 14, 2015
Moscow, Christmas Eve 1949; a man makes a phone call to the American embassy to warn them about the Soviet Atom Bomb project. This call was caught on tape and quickly disconnected by The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). A brilliant mathematician named Gleb Nerzhin, was taken as a sharashka (known as zeks) prisoner and ordered to help track down the mystery caller. The zeks know that they have it better than a “regular” gulag prisoners but they are faced with the moral dilemma; to aid a political system they oppose or be transferred to the deadly labour camps.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian author as well as a historian; he was also a critic of Soviet totalitarianism which found himself in prison much like Gleb Nerzhin. He was accused of anti-revolutionary propaganda under Russian SFSR Penal Code (Article 58 paragraph 10) which is a ‘catch-all’ criminal offence that could be used against anyone that might threaten the government. During the period of Stalinism, the crime of “propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet power” jumped from a six month prison sentence to seven years of imprisonment, with possible internal exile for two to five years. On 7 July 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for comments he made in private letters to a friend. After his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was then internally exiled for life at Kok-Terek, which is in the north-eastern region of Kazakhstan.
The First Circle was self-censored before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn even attempted to get it published in 1968. Originally the book was 96 chapters long but the censorship turned the novel into 87 chapters. Some changes included the man telling another doctor to share some new medicine with the French instead of warning the Americans about the atom bomb. All mention of the Roman Catholics and religion was also removed. It wasn’t till 2009 a new English translation (not sure of the details on the Russian editions) saw the book restored and uncensored; now with the title In The First Circle.
The title alone is fascinating and it allows the reader to pick up on the whole metaphor before starting the novel. Looking at Dante’s Inferno, it is easy to find that the first circle of hell is limbo. In the epic poem Virgil introduces Dante to people like Socrates, Plato, Homer, Horace and Ovid. The time between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is often referred to as the Harrowing of Hell, in which he descended into limbo and brought salvation to the righteous. However in Dante’s Inferno this meant that Christ saved people like Noah, Moses, Abraham and King David, but a lot of the intellectuals where left. This is metaphor for the penal institutions, making reference to all the intellectuals and political thinkers arrested under Stalin’s Russia.
This novel made me feel a lot smarter than I actually am, there is a lot of information within In The First Circle however Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented them in accessible way. Going into the book I knew a little about Solzhenitsyn’s life and the metaphor in the title was explained in the Goodreads synopsis. So I was able to witness how everything came together without doing any research. The book sometimes goes into Russian history; I was fascinated with everything I learnt.
I have read so many books set in Cold War Russia but I don’t think there have been many actually written by a Russian. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has lead an interesting life and I am keen to read more of his novels before attempting The Gulag Archipelago, his three volume book on the history of a gulag labour camp. If you have paid attention to my best of 2014 list you would have noticed that In The First Circle did make the list. This was a wonderful book that was both thrilling and educational, I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russian history, especially the Cold War era.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian author as well as a historian; he was also a critic of Soviet totalitarianism which found himself in prison much like Gleb Nerzhin. He was accused of anti-revolutionary propaganda under Russian SFSR Penal Code (Article 58 paragraph 10) which is a ‘catch-all’ criminal offence that could be used against anyone that might threaten the government. During the period of Stalinism, the crime of “propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet power” jumped from a six month prison sentence to seven years of imprisonment, with possible internal exile for two to five years. On 7 July 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for comments he made in private letters to a friend. After his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was then internally exiled for life at Kok-Terek, which is in the north-eastern region of Kazakhstan.
The First Circle was self-censored before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn even attempted to get it published in 1968. Originally the book was 96 chapters long but the censorship turned the novel into 87 chapters. Some changes included the man telling another doctor to share some new medicine with the French instead of warning the Americans about the atom bomb. All mention of the Roman Catholics and religion was also removed. It wasn’t till 2009 a new English translation (not sure of the details on the Russian editions) saw the book restored and uncensored; now with the title In The First Circle.
The title alone is fascinating and it allows the reader to pick up on the whole metaphor before starting the novel. Looking at Dante’s Inferno, it is easy to find that the first circle of hell is limbo. In the epic poem Virgil introduces Dante to people like Socrates, Plato, Homer, Horace and Ovid. The time between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is often referred to as the Harrowing of Hell, in which he descended into limbo and brought salvation to the righteous. However in Dante’s Inferno this meant that Christ saved people like Noah, Moses, Abraham and King David, but a lot of the intellectuals where left. This is metaphor for the penal institutions, making reference to all the intellectuals and political thinkers arrested under Stalin’s Russia.
This novel made me feel a lot smarter than I actually am, there is a lot of information within In The First Circle however Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented them in accessible way. Going into the book I knew a little about Solzhenitsyn’s life and the metaphor in the title was explained in the Goodreads synopsis. So I was able to witness how everything came together without doing any research. The book sometimes goes into Russian history; I was fascinated with everything I learnt.
I have read so many books set in Cold War Russia but I don’t think there have been many actually written by a Russian. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has lead an interesting life and I am keen to read more of his novels before attempting The Gulag Archipelago, his three volume book on the history of a gulag labour camp. If you have paid attention to my best of 2014 list you would have noticed that In The First Circle did make the list. This was a wonderful book that was both thrilling and educational, I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russian history, especially the Cold War era.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...
November 13, 2017
"Yes, what awaited them was the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at Oymyakon, the copper mines at Dzhezkazgan. What awaited them yet again was the pickax and the wheelbarrow, a starvation ration of half-baked bread, hospital, death. They could look forward to nothing but the worst.
Yet in their hearts they were at peace with themselves.
They were gripped by the fearlessness of people who have lost absolutely everything-such fearlessness is difficult to attain, but once attained, it endures."
This book. This book.
I. Have. No. Words.
Yet in their hearts they were at peace with themselves.
They were gripped by the fearlessness of people who have lost absolutely everything-such fearlessness is difficult to attain, but once attained, it endures."
This book. This book.
I. Have. No. Words.
January 8, 2021
It is unlikely that I will say anything about Solzhenitsyn that others have not so I will just ramble with my own thoughts in hopes that if my future self reads this I will be reminded of some of the good parts.
As with most impactful philosophy Solzhenitsyn's was forged (lame, overused word) by his own experiences. His personally, particular genre is humanity created via Russian prison camps. Both of his better known works One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 are also based in and on gulags. I read this one because it was on sale from Audible.
In the First Circle is fictional although largely autobiographical which made it that much more personal. The premise is a group of scientists being forced to work for their oppressors to further enable their ability to oppress. All sorts of easily graspable moral choices are presented such as the fact that none of them want to help communist Russia but the conditions in this sharaska are far better than if they refused or the oppression the necessary prisoners inflict on the transient ones.
More complex commentary about communism and Stalin are sprinkled throughout the book with the ultimate conclusion that if you take everything away, you now, no longer, have any control.
Similar to Ivan Denisovitch, the characters struggle to hold on to whatever dignity they deem to have left. There are reflections on how each prisoner has treated their families, how each one has stayed or not stayed true to their beliefs or how each one approaches basic human existence.
This book was long and although I am glad I read it and think that having read it, it gives more weight and understanding to Solzhenitsyn quotes, it was probably better read in the early 70s when debates about communism were fresher although his thoughts on human dignity and motivations will be insightful forever.
3.5 stars rounded down.
As with most impactful philosophy Solzhenitsyn's was forged (lame, overused word) by his own experiences. His personally, particular genre is humanity created via Russian prison camps. Both of his better known works One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 are also based in and on gulags. I read this one because it was on sale from Audible.
In the First Circle is fictional although largely autobiographical which made it that much more personal. The premise is a group of scientists being forced to work for their oppressors to further enable their ability to oppress. All sorts of easily graspable moral choices are presented such as the fact that none of them want to help communist Russia but the conditions in this sharaska are far better than if they refused or the oppression the necessary prisoners inflict on the transient ones.
More complex commentary about communism and Stalin are sprinkled throughout the book with the ultimate conclusion that if you take everything away, you now, no longer, have any control.
Similar to Ivan Denisovitch, the characters struggle to hold on to whatever dignity they deem to have left. There are reflections on how each prisoner has treated their families, how each one has stayed or not stayed true to their beliefs or how each one approaches basic human existence.
This book was long and although I am glad I read it and think that having read it, it gives more weight and understanding to Solzhenitsyn quotes, it was probably better read in the early 70s when debates about communism were fresher although his thoughts on human dignity and motivations will be insightful forever.
3.5 stars rounded down.
September 2, 2011
Impossibly good. Given that the plot of this huge book stretches only through three days or so, and not a huge amount actually happens in this time (it's not a thriller) it's still totally captivating.
Solzhenitsyn's strength is his characters. Despite having dozens of different points of view which alternate chapter to chapter, it's not difficult to keep them straight. The really remarkable thing is that you like all of them, despite their myriad of perspectives, philosophies, and dogmas. Or, if not actually like, you at least understand and sympathize. The changes in this edition from the original version are mind-blowing... it's worth rereading if you've only had the older one.
On the down side, it's Solzhenitsyn so it's mostly about life in a Soviet-era prison camp. Which by definition is a monotonous, bleak and depressing. While not as harsh as A Day In The Life, In the First Circle is in some ways more terrible. Also, Solzhenitsyn loves to let his characters soliloquize about philosophy, but he avoids being preachy- it's actually nuanced and interesting if a bit tiresome. It also can be funny, which I wasn't expecting. Overall more than worth the read.
Solzhenitsyn's strength is his characters. Despite having dozens of different points of view which alternate chapter to chapter, it's not difficult to keep them straight. The really remarkable thing is that you like all of them, despite their myriad of perspectives, philosophies, and dogmas. Or, if not actually like, you at least understand and sympathize. The changes in this edition from the original version are mind-blowing... it's worth rereading if you've only had the older one.
On the down side, it's Solzhenitsyn so it's mostly about life in a Soviet-era prison camp. Which by definition is a monotonous, bleak and depressing. While not as harsh as A Day In The Life, In the First Circle is in some ways more terrible. Also, Solzhenitsyn loves to let his characters soliloquize about philosophy, but he avoids being preachy- it's actually nuanced and interesting if a bit tiresome. It also can be funny, which I wasn't expecting. Overall more than worth the read.
June 11, 2019
Just one of the best books I have ever read. Highly recommend to read. Just outstanding!
January 12, 2024
Like a Russian Catch-22 but more snarling, less comedic. It goes from the lowest zeks to the highest Stalin, then widens the circle of focus so so much. So it’s a bit chaotic in its sprawl. But it examines the impact of the Soviet Union from many angles (arts, religion, industry, justice, etc). Every character is a mouthpiece and the dialogue can feel a bit like they’re using philosophical megaphones. So you likely won’t love the characters but maybe like me you’ll come to love the interplay of ideas and the very on-point middle fingers to Stalin throughout.
February 4, 2021
Probably the best novel I'll read in 2021. Everything was superb, a wealth of characters of incredible depth and complexity, humour, a glimpse into the USSR while constantly staying as readable and inviting as a good page turner.
March 23, 2012
Less a novel and more a complete education... Set in a 'special prison' in Moscow during the height of Stalin's paranoia, this is ostensibly a story about a group of incarcerated engineers working to create various surveillance technology during the Cold War. The plot, as such, while interesting, isn't really the best thing about the book. It's more of a stage upon which to explore the different personalities of the men in the prison, why they happen to find themselves in this, the most lenient part of the Gulag system (hence the title), their politics and individual stories, how the disappointments of the Revolution have turned them into cynics or made them hold ever tighter to their ideals. The weight of institutionalized paranoia is so bone-crushingly real in this book that even while that notion is a familiar one when you think of Soviet Russia, you still find yourself squirming, reminding yourself it's only semi-autobiographical, it is a novel after all.
Excellent prose, what must be especially brilliant translation, which leaps from philosophy to political science to word games to technical jargon, back and forth from many characters' points of view. There is a certain satisfaction I got when I'd pronounced names like Shchevronok aloud enough that I could read them without getting hung up; similarly I found myself marking lots of passages to go back and read again, for the same sense of satisfaction:
"No man's life proceeds at an even tenor through the years. There will always be a time when he realizes himself most fully, feels most deeply, makes the greatest impression on others--and on himself. All that happens afterward, however significant on the face of it, is most likely to be an abatement, the ebbing of that high tide. We never forget that time; we endlessly ring the changes on it. For some people it may even be their childhood, and they remain children all their lives. For others it is the time of first love, and it is they who have spread the myth that we love only once. There are those for whom the great time was when they were richest, most esteemed, most powerful; and they will still be mumbling without a tooth in their gums about their departed greatness. For Nerzhin the decisive period was prison. For Shchagov, life at the front."
Clearly a long time in development and consideration; Solzhenitsyn was in prisons for a dozen years or more and must have had plenty of time to make his ideas solid. This was a long slog, and at times I had a Russian history textbook, a Communism, Fascism, and Democracy anthology, an atlas, and Wikipedia all within easy reach to learn more or put things in context. That may sound like too much trouble for a novel, but I wish I could go grab another one just like this off the shelf and start it right now. The fabric of this world is so tightly woven that you emerge feeling grateful that you aren't actually a prisoner. First-rate.
Excellent prose, what must be especially brilliant translation, which leaps from philosophy to political science to word games to technical jargon, back and forth from many characters' points of view. There is a certain satisfaction I got when I'd pronounced names like Shchevronok aloud enough that I could read them without getting hung up; similarly I found myself marking lots of passages to go back and read again, for the same sense of satisfaction:
"No man's life proceeds at an even tenor through the years. There will always be a time when he realizes himself most fully, feels most deeply, makes the greatest impression on others--and on himself. All that happens afterward, however significant on the face of it, is most likely to be an abatement, the ebbing of that high tide. We never forget that time; we endlessly ring the changes on it. For some people it may even be their childhood, and they remain children all their lives. For others it is the time of first love, and it is they who have spread the myth that we love only once. There are those for whom the great time was when they were richest, most esteemed, most powerful; and they will still be mumbling without a tooth in their gums about their departed greatness. For Nerzhin the decisive period was prison. For Shchagov, life at the front."
Clearly a long time in development and consideration; Solzhenitsyn was in prisons for a dozen years or more and must have had plenty of time to make his ideas solid. This was a long slog, and at times I had a Russian history textbook, a Communism, Fascism, and Democracy anthology, an atlas, and Wikipedia all within easy reach to learn more or put things in context. That may sound like too much trouble for a novel, but I wish I could go grab another one just like this off the shelf and start it right now. The fabric of this world is so tightly woven that you emerge feeling grateful that you aren't actually a prisoner. First-rate.
July 27, 2011
A brilliant novel that leaves the readers heart trembling in fear and sadness for each character. Solzhenitsyn transports the reader into the world of the Gulag so fully that when the novel is done, one will hug one's family, eat something out of the fridge just because it's there, and cherish the freedom given them. Not only does Solzhenitsyn describe the Gulags, sharashkas (special prisons), and life in the Soviet Union more eloquently than is possible in non-fiction, he also thoroughly examines morality; from several political angles (Marxism, Socialism, Democracy) as well as a religious one, each of the zeks (prisoners) presents his case for the most moral society and leaves the reader with mixed thoughts. Solzhenitsyn's zeks reference Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Marcus Aurelius (albeit indirectly and without citation) in their discussions of politics and morality. All in all, a brilliant novel that I would recommend to anyone.
January 27, 2020
In the First Circle refers to the least drastic of Soviet work prisons where engineers and scientists and others might be incarcerated with the hope of them contributing to the state.
Visits were very limited and correspondence monitored and censored but there were not many complaints about the work, the food, the cold, or Stalin. Any of these might get one sent to Siberia particularly the last. I had some difficulty with the many characters and their names and the plot seemed secondary to the setting of 1949 Soviet Union.
Visits were very limited and correspondence monitored and censored but there were not many complaints about the work, the food, the cold, or Stalin. Any of these might get one sent to Siberia particularly the last. I had some difficulty with the many characters and their names and the plot seemed secondary to the setting of 1949 Soviet Union.
April 7, 2020
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 realised 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 characterisations 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.
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 realised 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 characterisations 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.
November 8, 2018
“Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.” (p. 439)
(Quotes below are taken out of context from the novel, so there are no real spoilers. Though if you are sensitive for anything resembling a spoiler, you may want to stay away)
I find it hard to specify my feelings about In the First Circle . That it is a master piece on many levels is undeniable. Nietzsche once said of himself that he philosophized with a hammer and that he was dynamite… well, Solzhenitsyn is certainly of the same ilk.
In this book he decimates justifications for the existence and the illusion of security or privilege of three kinds of "first circles":
1. The sharashka, the special prison where the zeks are treated better than in your hard labor Gulag camp.
2. Stalin's inner circle.
3. Nation-states.
Though the prisoners (zeks) are better treated at the sharashka, and no one really denies this, whatever comforts they enjoy isn't certain, is curtailed by soul crushing restrictions and injustice, and comes at a cost…
“If he don’t take a stand, who will? And who says we can’t manage it? Though we’ve never laid hands on them, we’ve weighed Sirius B and measured the kinetic energy of electrons; surely we can’t go wrong with society? But what are we doing instead? Making them a gift of jet engines! Rockets! Scrambled telephones! Maybe even the atomic bomb! Anything, just so long as we live comfortably. And – interestingly! What sort of elite are we if we can be bought so cheaply?” (p.600 )
As for Stalin's inner circle, Solzhenitsyn expertly captures the culture of fear and uncertainty which pervades, especially in the upper echelons of the Party. One cannot help, even as one despises, some of these characters, to be caught up in the tragedy of their situation as individuals.
"By now, of course, Abakumov realized that excess of seal had carried him too high for comfort, he would have been safer lower down. Stalin was always pleasant and affable when he talked to peripheral people. But you couldn't break out of the inner circle: there was no way back." (p. 131)
And as for nation states, this passage speaks volumes :
He looked at her with suffering eyes. Holding a broken stick like a pencil, he drew a circle on the damp ground. “You see this circle? That’s our country. That’s the first circle. Now here’s the second.” A circle with a larger diameter. “That is mankind at large. You would think that the first forms a part of the second, wouldn’t you? Not in the least! There are barriers of prejudice. Not to mention barbed wire and machine guns. To break through, physically or spiritually, is well-nigh impossible. Which means that mankind, as such, does not exist. There are only fatherslands, every’s fatherland alient to everyone else’s...” (314)
That said, one should be careful to suppose that anything spoken in the voices of these characters is really what Solzhenitsyn was thinking. Like other Russians before him, he is a master at creating polyphonic novels where multiple viewpoints are expressed with ardour and minimal bias. You can understand and feel convinced by a character who is your ideological opposite, even if you don't find yourself in agreement, as mentioned, you can still understand them as people. Solzhenitsyn, similarly to Dostoyevsky, has a penetrating in sight into the human psyche.
What is most striking in the novel, for me, is - and this is part of the author's own life - how the state machine and its ideology are perched so high and becomes so paranoid of its power that it, in turn, grows into a snake eating itself. Characters of this novel, like Solzhenitsyn himself were born into the Soviet Union. They were raised into the ideology. Few people could question it because there were no alternatives. But the hyper-reactivity, like sending people into labor camps under Article 58, created probably more - and dangerous - dissenters to regime. Dissenters which may otherwise not have existed. Thy are thine own worst enemy.
I love the contrast showed in these two quotes from the books, from two very different perspectives of the regime:
“And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks. You’ve never taken the trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it: universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position. What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making sacrifices for?” (167)
and...
“His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in the war for “anti-Soviet agitation,” denounced by neighbors who coveted his apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged in no such agitation – ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio – but he might have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had no such radio – but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio engineer...” (602)
They manage to catch the zeal of the ideology, of conviction, and the tragedy of its ultimate implementation. It serves well as a warning to future regimes, or rather the people ready to throw their hat in with political movements of various kinds.
More than anything to me, this novel is about philosophy and the many and varied discussions which take place throughout. I couldn't re-tell or quote them all here, because they are far too many, but I will recommend people who like philosophy or just like questions about what makes a just society, or a good life, or what is progress, to read it for themselves.
There's also a healthy warning which seems apt in the current climate in the West:
"The West was doomed just because it lived so well – and lacked the will to risk its life in defence of the good life. Eminent Western thinkers and statesment rationalized their irresolution, their eagerness to put off the battle, told themselves that the East was mending its ways, that it had noble ideals... Whatever did not fit in with this way of thinking was summarily dismissed as slander or as a temporary phenomenon." (580)
Things to consider, to think about.
Again, I must praise the polyphonic nature of the book. You'll meet zealots, you'll meet pessimists, you'll meet optimists... whose line of argumentation you prefer is ultimately up to you, but I cannot imagine that anyone will leave this book feeling unmoved. It's lenght can be daunting, and it may seem as if plots are unceremoniously dropped, but this is a beast worth tackling. For many, many reasons. Part of it is striking conversations…
“Back to the past?” Gerasimovich rapped out.
“If only I believed that there is any backward and forward in human history! It’s like an octopus, with neither back nor front. For me there’s no word so devoid of meaning as ‘progress’. What progress, Illarion Palych? Progress from what? To what? In those twenty-seven centuries, have people become better? Kinder? Or at least a bit happier? No, they’ve become worse, nastier, and unhappier! And all this thanks to beautiful ideas!”
“Well, we aren’t burning one another at the stake anymore.”
“Why bother with firewood when you’ve got gas chambers?” (671)
part is hauntingly beautiful writing:
Gleb, if someobdy told me right now there’s a plane on the way with an atomb bomb on board... (…) believe me, Gleb, I’d say, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’ve run out of patience’, and I’d say” - he looked up at the imaginary bomber - “I’d say, ‘Come on, then! Get on with it! Drop the thing!’” Spiridon’s face was contorted with fatigue and suffering. A single tear ran over the reddened rim of each unseeing eye. (511)
Read it, but take your time. It's worth it.
(Quotes below are taken out of context from the novel, so there are no real spoilers. Though if you are sensitive for anything resembling a spoiler, you may want to stay away)
I find it hard to specify my feelings about In the First Circle . That it is a master piece on many levels is undeniable. Nietzsche once said of himself that he philosophized with a hammer and that he was dynamite… well, Solzhenitsyn is certainly of the same ilk.
In this book he decimates justifications for the existence and the illusion of security or privilege of three kinds of "first circles":
1. The sharashka, the special prison where the zeks are treated better than in your hard labor Gulag camp.
2. Stalin's inner circle.
3. Nation-states.
Though the prisoners (zeks) are better treated at the sharashka, and no one really denies this, whatever comforts they enjoy isn't certain, is curtailed by soul crushing restrictions and injustice, and comes at a cost…
“If he don’t take a stand, who will? And who says we can’t manage it? Though we’ve never laid hands on them, we’ve weighed Sirius B and measured the kinetic energy of electrons; surely we can’t go wrong with society? But what are we doing instead? Making them a gift of jet engines! Rockets! Scrambled telephones! Maybe even the atomic bomb! Anything, just so long as we live comfortably. And – interestingly! What sort of elite are we if we can be bought so cheaply?” (p.600 )
As for Stalin's inner circle, Solzhenitsyn expertly captures the culture of fear and uncertainty which pervades, especially in the upper echelons of the Party. One cannot help, even as one despises, some of these characters, to be caught up in the tragedy of their situation as individuals.
"By now, of course, Abakumov realized that excess of seal had carried him too high for comfort, he would have been safer lower down. Stalin was always pleasant and affable when he talked to peripheral people. But you couldn't break out of the inner circle: there was no way back." (p. 131)
And as for nation states, this passage speaks volumes :
He looked at her with suffering eyes. Holding a broken stick like a pencil, he drew a circle on the damp ground. “You see this circle? That’s our country. That’s the first circle. Now here’s the second.” A circle with a larger diameter. “That is mankind at large. You would think that the first forms a part of the second, wouldn’t you? Not in the least! There are barriers of prejudice. Not to mention barbed wire and machine guns. To break through, physically or spiritually, is well-nigh impossible. Which means that mankind, as such, does not exist. There are only fatherslands, every’s fatherland alient to everyone else’s...” (314)
That said, one should be careful to suppose that anything spoken in the voices of these characters is really what Solzhenitsyn was thinking. Like other Russians before him, he is a master at creating polyphonic novels where multiple viewpoints are expressed with ardour and minimal bias. You can understand and feel convinced by a character who is your ideological opposite, even if you don't find yourself in agreement, as mentioned, you can still understand them as people. Solzhenitsyn, similarly to Dostoyevsky, has a penetrating in sight into the human psyche.
What is most striking in the novel, for me, is - and this is part of the author's own life - how the state machine and its ideology are perched so high and becomes so paranoid of its power that it, in turn, grows into a snake eating itself. Characters of this novel, like Solzhenitsyn himself were born into the Soviet Union. They were raised into the ideology. Few people could question it because there were no alternatives. But the hyper-reactivity, like sending people into labor camps under Article 58, created probably more - and dangerous - dissenters to regime. Dissenters which may otherwise not have existed. Thy are thine own worst enemy.
I love the contrast showed in these two quotes from the books, from two very different perspectives of the regime:
“And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks. You’ve never taken the trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it: universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position. What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making sacrifices for?” (167)
and...
“His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in the war for “anti-Soviet agitation,” denounced by neighbors who coveted his apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged in no such agitation – ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio – but he might have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had no such radio – but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio engineer...” (602)
They manage to catch the zeal of the ideology, of conviction, and the tragedy of its ultimate implementation. It serves well as a warning to future regimes, or rather the people ready to throw their hat in with political movements of various kinds.
More than anything to me, this novel is about philosophy and the many and varied discussions which take place throughout. I couldn't re-tell or quote them all here, because they are far too many, but I will recommend people who like philosophy or just like questions about what makes a just society, or a good life, or what is progress, to read it for themselves.
There's also a healthy warning which seems apt in the current climate in the West:
"The West was doomed just because it lived so well – and lacked the will to risk its life in defence of the good life. Eminent Western thinkers and statesment rationalized their irresolution, their eagerness to put off the battle, told themselves that the East was mending its ways, that it had noble ideals... Whatever did not fit in with this way of thinking was summarily dismissed as slander or as a temporary phenomenon." (580)
Things to consider, to think about.
Again, I must praise the polyphonic nature of the book. You'll meet zealots, you'll meet pessimists, you'll meet optimists... whose line of argumentation you prefer is ultimately up to you, but I cannot imagine that anyone will leave this book feeling unmoved. It's lenght can be daunting, and it may seem as if plots are unceremoniously dropped, but this is a beast worth tackling. For many, many reasons. Part of it is striking conversations…
“Back to the past?” Gerasimovich rapped out.
“If only I believed that there is any backward and forward in human history! It’s like an octopus, with neither back nor front. For me there’s no word so devoid of meaning as ‘progress’. What progress, Illarion Palych? Progress from what? To what? In those twenty-seven centuries, have people become better? Kinder? Or at least a bit happier? No, they’ve become worse, nastier, and unhappier! And all this thanks to beautiful ideas!”
“Well, we aren’t burning one another at the stake anymore.”
“Why bother with firewood when you’ve got gas chambers?” (671)
part is hauntingly beautiful writing:
Gleb, if someobdy told me right now there’s a plane on the way with an atomb bomb on board... (…) believe me, Gleb, I’d say, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’ve run out of patience’, and I’d say” - he looked up at the imaginary bomber - “I’d say, ‘Come on, then! Get on with it! Drop the thing!’” Spiridon’s face was contorted with fatigue and suffering. A single tear ran over the reddened rim of each unseeing eye. (511)
Read it, but take your time. It's worth it.
January 10, 2010
This is the first novel released after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's death in 2008. It includes a lot of strong political and philosophical statements about the Soviet Union, especially an indictment of the atomic bomb and the prison system in the old Soviet Union. This is a much stronger political statement than his earlier works, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.
In The First Circle refers to the first circle of hell where the virtuous pagans go in Dante's inferno. The setting is in a sharaska, a minimum security prison for engineers, intellectuals, and other political undesirables. Here the prisoners work 12 hours a day making things for the state like listening devices, torpedoes, and other things. It is a place on the edge where forbidden ideas can be explored.
The book mostly plods along telling the life of the prisoners, the guards, and the bureaucrats who created the prison. The story stretches outside of the prison to include the prisoners wives and lovers as well as the creators of the whole Soviet system.
Stalin is one of the main characters. Every few chapters the lead characters change. The author is trying to create a sweeping drama over the 740 pages of the novel. Stalin as a character is superbly frightening. He demonstrates fear, paranoia, and ambition at its fullest capacity. Solzhenitsyn is at his best in this novel when he is describing bureaucratic terror or black comedic irony.
There is a short story, The Buddha's Smile about Eleanor Roosevelt visiting a high security prison. It describes how the guards prepare the prisoners. The story is a reflection on how the Soviet system attempted to create a false picture of well being to the world. Every bit of the novel drips contradiction.
This contradiction is best reflected in the prisoners arguments with each other about ideas; communism, capitalism, imperialism, the church and other ideas are discussed freely inside where they cannot be discussed outside because of fear of going to prison. The prisoners also read novels that are a reflection on the novel. The Man In The Iron Mask, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are mentioned.
There is a definite sense of right and wrong throughout the novel. This is an example of Russian realism. There is clear good and evil. Added to this sense of evil is a spattering of mysticism. A prisoner is trying to the paint the castle of the holy grail, the mathematicians attempting to make a listening device are referred to as rosicrucians, and there is a sad visit to the remnants of a Russian orthodox church.
Most of In The First Circle is steady excellent craftsmanship. I wondered at points about the translation; whether the translator needed to pick better wording. However, at moments the writing becomes sublime espcially when the author is describing irony or bureaucratic terror. This novel reflects on the darkness in the human heart and the ability to live with the impossible. It is filled with deep intellectual thought and is slow going. If you want to read a complex novel in the traditional Russian style you will like this.
In The First Circle refers to the first circle of hell where the virtuous pagans go in Dante's inferno. The setting is in a sharaska, a minimum security prison for engineers, intellectuals, and other political undesirables. Here the prisoners work 12 hours a day making things for the state like listening devices, torpedoes, and other things. It is a place on the edge where forbidden ideas can be explored.
The book mostly plods along telling the life of the prisoners, the guards, and the bureaucrats who created the prison. The story stretches outside of the prison to include the prisoners wives and lovers as well as the creators of the whole Soviet system.
Stalin is one of the main characters. Every few chapters the lead characters change. The author is trying to create a sweeping drama over the 740 pages of the novel. Stalin as a character is superbly frightening. He demonstrates fear, paranoia, and ambition at its fullest capacity. Solzhenitsyn is at his best in this novel when he is describing bureaucratic terror or black comedic irony.
There is a short story, The Buddha's Smile about Eleanor Roosevelt visiting a high security prison. It describes how the guards prepare the prisoners. The story is a reflection on how the Soviet system attempted to create a false picture of well being to the world. Every bit of the novel drips contradiction.
This contradiction is best reflected in the prisoners arguments with each other about ideas; communism, capitalism, imperialism, the church and other ideas are discussed freely inside where they cannot be discussed outside because of fear of going to prison. The prisoners also read novels that are a reflection on the novel. The Man In The Iron Mask, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are mentioned.
There is a definite sense of right and wrong throughout the novel. This is an example of Russian realism. There is clear good and evil. Added to this sense of evil is a spattering of mysticism. A prisoner is trying to the paint the castle of the holy grail, the mathematicians attempting to make a listening device are referred to as rosicrucians, and there is a sad visit to the remnants of a Russian orthodox church.
Most of In The First Circle is steady excellent craftsmanship. I wondered at points about the translation; whether the translator needed to pick better wording. However, at moments the writing becomes sublime espcially when the author is describing irony or bureaucratic terror. This novel reflects on the darkness in the human heart and the ability to live with the impossible. It is filled with deep intellectual thought and is slow going. If you want to read a complex novel in the traditional Russian style you will like this.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 30, 2017
For a long time, I have not read anything even closely as brilliant. The book is intellectually immense - the concentration of interesting thoughts per line was transcendental. Through the dialogues of his characters, Solzhenitsyn looks at many philosophical questions still relevant today at very unusual, non-trivial, angles. The second thing that amazes is the absence of speculative alternations common for historical fiction as a literary genre. Being not only a novelist, but a very gifted historian, Solzhenitsyn made the plot authentic and chronologically precise. "In The First Circle" outlines a complicated space-time: intellectual elite of one of the Soviet prison camps of post-WWII Russia. Specific plot required specific delivery. Solzhenitsyn decided to create a dense composition - an interesting technical trick that dictated the rhythm of the story. Dozens of plot-lines constantly interchange, building, like pieces of a huge mosaic, the picture of the epoch: millions of broken lives, millions of choices between the system and the conscience. The author's personal perception of the regime often slips along with his very subtle satire. Particularly representative in this regard is the chapter describing Stalin's biography. The title "In the First Circle" was chosen, I think, brilliantly - in analogy to Dante's Nine Circles of Hell. We are shown only the first circle (of hell) - a relatively liberal version of a Soviet prison called Marphino. Marphino is not a fictional place - it is the real prison where Solzhenitsyn spent some period of his long-term imprisonment for the expansive criticism of Stalin's regime. Almost all of the characters were hence sketched from real ones, with protagonist Gleb Nerzhin representing Solzhenitsyn himself . This explains the shocking believability of Solzhenitsyn's detailed psychological portraits. In terms of its multicharacter-ism, the novel is comparable to Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". Final thing worth mentioning is the linguistic style. Epic in its scale, "In the First Circle" nevertheless differs from Russian lyric narrative style, which, I believe, ended with Pasternak's Dr Zhivago. Solzhenitsyn's language is less descriptive and more dynamic. I read he book in original, but I can imagine that it is hard to comprehend the novel in translation. Firstly, the book contains many specific slang words representative for the Soviet prison camps of the time. Secondly, the language is quite nuanced and sophisticated, which makes it difficult to translate without a particular degree of loss.
Needless to say, these anarchic essays were prohibited from being published in the USSR for a long time. Some chapters of the fifth edition were first published in 1965, while the full version of the book first appeared in Europe in 1968.
I think, even if "In the First Circle" would be Solzhenitsyn's only novel, his Nobel Prize in Literature would still be entirely deserved. And the book goes directly to my "favourites" shelf.
Needless to say, these anarchic essays were prohibited from being published in the USSR for a long time. Some chapters of the fifth edition were first published in 1965, while the full version of the book first appeared in Europe in 1968.
I think, even if "In the First Circle" would be Solzhenitsyn's only novel, his Nobel Prize in Literature would still be entirely deserved. And the book goes directly to my "favourites" shelf.
September 13, 2012
Reading this so soon after Brave New World and Ella Minnow Pea, it was hard to convince myself that this wasn't another dystopian view of the future that wasn't likely to happen. But this DID happen - people in twentieth century Russia WERE thrown in prison for no reason, and often they were kept there for 10-year sentence upon 10-year sentence without hope of appeal. Phone calls WERE monitored, analyzed, and reported. People WERE brainwashed to think of the collective rather than the individual, and they WERE looked on with suspicion for showing compassion or attachment to family and friends. Scholars DID lose their degrees or have to rewrite their thesis if they cited works or discoveries by non-Russians or Russians who, often for no real reason, were branded as traitors and treated as though they and their works/discoveries never existed. It seems so ridiculous to us now, but it happened. It happened to Solzhenitsyn himself.
If he hadn't explored this subject matter with a sense of irony and humour, it would have been very hard to read about it. As it was, though, I really enjoyed this book. I can see why he had to chop out entire subplots and character backstories to get it past the Russian censors at first, since he did not paint Stalin or life in Russia at the time in a positive light, but I'm glad he later had the entire thing published and that the uncensored version is the one I read. If anyone has only read the censored version, The First Circle, I highly recommend the uncensored In the First Circle so you can see what you missed. It has so much detail about how life really was for the Russians under Lenin and Stalin, which I think is something everyone should know, if only to hopefully prevent it from ever happening again. It was more than just lining up for bread and sharing a single apartment between multiple families - everything they did and said was monitored by those around them, and they could be carted off to Siberia at any moment without even knowing why. Or, if they were lucky, they might end up in a "special prison" like the one in this book, where they worked on top secret projects and therefore were granted a certain amount of rights and privileges - the "first circle of hell," so to speak, where it's the loss of freedom that's the punishment rather than pain and suffering. But even then, a stay in a "special prison" was only temporary, and you knew that once you'd worked on these top secret projects, it was doubtful that you would ever leave the prison system alive.
Excellent and very powerful book. Some of the images Solzhenitsyn painted so vividly, such as that of prisoners being packed into a meat truck to be shipped off to Siberia, won't soon leave my mind.
If he hadn't explored this subject matter with a sense of irony and humour, it would have been very hard to read about it. As it was, though, I really enjoyed this book. I can see why he had to chop out entire subplots and character backstories to get it past the Russian censors at first, since he did not paint Stalin or life in Russia at the time in a positive light, but I'm glad he later had the entire thing published and that the uncensored version is the one I read. If anyone has only read the censored version, The First Circle, I highly recommend the uncensored In the First Circle so you can see what you missed. It has so much detail about how life really was for the Russians under Lenin and Stalin, which I think is something everyone should know, if only to hopefully prevent it from ever happening again. It was more than just lining up for bread and sharing a single apartment between multiple families - everything they did and said was monitored by those around them, and they could be carted off to Siberia at any moment without even knowing why. Or, if they were lucky, they might end up in a "special prison" like the one in this book, where they worked on top secret projects and therefore were granted a certain amount of rights and privileges - the "first circle of hell," so to speak, where it's the loss of freedom that's the punishment rather than pain and suffering. But even then, a stay in a "special prison" was only temporary, and you knew that once you'd worked on these top secret projects, it was doubtful that you would ever leave the prison system alive.
Excellent and very powerful book. Some of the images Solzhenitsyn painted so vividly, such as that of prisoners being packed into a meat truck to be shipped off to Siberia, won't soon leave my mind.
April 9, 2012
I actually very rarely talk about masterpieces even though there is a certain inflation in these words these days. I am quite certain though that this is a masterpiece because of its existential depth, it's daringness of topic and it's sheer width of interesting and complex characters. How S. is able to hold all this in his mind is just incredible. The whole book is fantastic and there are some parts that stay with me stronger than other. The beginning is absolutely gripping and also Innokenty's visit to his mother's brother. Yet, the artistic highlight of the book is, to me, around page 600 when two of the characters are talking around in in circles in the exercise yard and they realize their own part in the system, despite being prisoners. At the same time S. is counting the laps they do and one really gets reminded that they are in fact in Dante's Inferno. This is so well written that I might put it on par with Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor (but maybe just a little rung below).
After having read both this book and the Gulag Archipelago there is absolutely no doubting that S. is one of the most important, if not the most important, authors in the 20th century. There is of course a troika with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante that I don't think any authors will be included to, but if authors like Jane Austen, Dostoyevski, Proust, Woolf and Joyce come behind that, then S. can quite confidently join them in my mind.
There is so much more I would like to say about the book, how it reveals the horror of life in Soviet, about the human condition and how it reveals the problems of morals in a totalitarian society. But I would rather want to sit down at talk to my friends about it, or maybe here. Anyway, a must read for anyone interested in reading the most influential and classic books of the last century!
After having read both this book and the Gulag Archipelago there is absolutely no doubting that S. is one of the most important, if not the most important, authors in the 20th century. There is of course a troika with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante that I don't think any authors will be included to, but if authors like Jane Austen, Dostoyevski, Proust, Woolf and Joyce come behind that, then S. can quite confidently join them in my mind.
There is so much more I would like to say about the book, how it reveals the horror of life in Soviet, about the human condition and how it reveals the problems of morals in a totalitarian society. But I would rather want to sit down at talk to my friends about it, or maybe here. Anyway, a must read for anyone interested in reading the most influential and classic books of the last century!
September 28, 2023
All I can say is "what a rewarding experience!" "In The First Circle" is such a powerful novel full of characters across the spectrum. Some smart, some dumb, some of higher authority and some brought low but all human on the inside in one way or another. In fact, there're so many characters it's hard to keep track of all of them and how they all differ, requiring more than one read. Solzhenitsyn masterfully portrays all of these characters from the lowly Spiridon to the all-powerful leader of Russia, Stalin himself. Because of Solzhenitsyn's own incarceration he's able to take the psychological dive into the prisons of the Soviet Union with reliable precision, revealing the true horror behind those gloomy walls... acceptance. I've never experienced a book that made me laugh (prisoner's interpretation of courts) and cry (Nerzhin's final goodbye to Spiridon) as much as this book did and I'm truly grateful for it. Thank you Solzhenitsyn for the experience. I hope you were able to pass knowing that your books would live as a testament to your strength and the strength of those men and women unfortunate enough to be trapped in the first circle and those beneath it. RIP
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