Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle

[silverseason]

My copy is a paperback with an English translation by Thomas P. Whitney, copyright 1968. Is anyone reading this in Russian?

I am 50 pages in (through Chapter 9) and find I am in the hands of a story-teller with a firm touch. He sets the problem in the first chapter with a frustrated attempt to use a public telephone to warn a possible victim of the system. We know instinctively that this is going to go wrong.

Then we jump in Chapter 2 into the sharashka, the special prison where scientists and technicians work on secret projects. Solzhenitsyn uses a whirl of dialog to develop the various characters. Already I am alert to the committed communist Rubin who says "What must be, must be. The state can't exist without a well-organized prison system." But is he sincere or ironic? In context, the statement can be read either way.

Nerzhin, the mathematician, is also interesting. My first impression is of someone who is relentlessly analytical, as he compares the prose - and intellectual styles - of Lenin and Stalin. Then another dimension appears in his interview with his old professor who want to recruit him for a cryptology project. The professor offers that if the work is successful Nerzhin will be forgiven and given his freedom. The response:

"You're beginning at the wrong end. Let them admit first that it's not right to put people in prison for their way of thinking, and then we will decide whether we will forgive them."

Building a long novel with many characters and story threads is a skill I admire. So far, this one is the equal of Dickens or Tolstoy or George Eliot.

 

[Robert]

Reading it in Russian? No, not I. I'm starting chapter 27.

I like the way the book starts. The first chapter give you a peak of the Soviet Union under Stalin in late 1949. In a word... fear. After that, we are taken to the Sharashka where meet the zeks and are slowly exposed to the oppression that the zeks and free soviets have to live with.

I was very interested in the few chapeters devoted to Stalin, showing him to be a bully and coward who will put to death a person at any level for a disagreement, and is afraid to walk out into the open.

Interesting too is the romance that has developed between Nerzhin and Prison Gurad Serafima Vitalyevna. Vinalyevna knows that Nerzhin is married, and she risks everything if she is caught having a relationship with a zek.

This is easily one of the most depressing novels I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

 

[Libra]

When I recieved the book I was like "oh no", long read. Now I am in the 7th chapter and it's really engaging with all the characters.

Like silverseason said , from the first chapter it got you feeling the anxiety of this man trying to decide "should he call and warn or not.

As for Serafima, these prisoners were "criminals to her" She was supposed to be watching them.But being with them day in day out she saw a different side of them, and slowly came to respect them.
We see sometimes how we judge people when they have different views from us and we don't give them a chance to "hear" them.

 

[oskylad]

I find it disturbing this book is no longer in print a mere 40 years after it was first published, and 38 years after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This was presaged in Chapter 23. Yakonov asks "how long did the church persecute people -- ten centuries?" Agniya responds: "I wasn't alive then. After all, I'm living now. I see what happens in my own lifetime."

So it is with the current generation. They have no knowledge of what happened in Stalinist Russia -- or even in the West with the McCarthy hearings and postwar paranoia. All they can identify with is what is happening in their own lifetime.

And like the Russians of 40 years ago, they don't even know that very well. Just as most Russians were able to live their lives day by day without thinking too much about the political prisons, so too most of us live our lives without thinking too much about the evil in our society. It is only those who experience evil firsthand that give it more than a glancing thought.

Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel speech claimed that literature would conquer falsehood. But can that occur if truth becomes unread and goes out of print?

 

[saliotthomas]

Well,i thought i could wiggle my way out of this one(not having very rejoicing memories of Sojzhenitsyn)but,miracle, i found a segond hand copy of the first circle this morning in Marrakech.Hard cover to for 10E.So i put down Hamilton and start it,hoping that 17 years might give my re-read a more cheerfull note.

 

[Robert]

I find it disturbing this book is no longer in print a mere 40 years after it was first published, and 38 years after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This was presaged in Chapter 23. Yakonov asks "how long did the church persecute people -- ten centuries?" Agniya responds: "I wasn't alive then. After all, I'm living now. I see what happens in my own lifetime."

So it is with the current generation. They have no knowledge of what happened in Stalinist Russia -- or even in the West with the McCarthy hearings and postwar paranoia. All they can identify with is what is happening in their own lifetime.

And like the Russians of 40 years ago, they don't even know that very well. Just as most Russians were able to live their lives day by day without thinking too much about the political prisons, so too most of us live our lives without thinking too much about the evil in our society. It is only those who experience evil firsthand that give it more than a glancing thought.

Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel speech claimed that literature would conquer falsehood. But can that occur if truth becomes unread and goes out of print?

Truth is relative. Each new generation of historians and writers will re-write history relative to their own rules and values.

 

[silverseason]

So i put down Hamilton and start it,hoping that 17 years might give my re-read a more cheerfull note.

I think some of the effectiveness of the book (so far) is that the zeks are not living in misery and squalor. It's not a luxury hotel, but they have enough to eat, don't have to work outdoors in the cold, and no one is beating them. Ahhhh, but they don't have their freedom. Since day-to-day survival is not a issue for them, they can really feel the misery that their lives are not their own to dispose of - perhaps like the "house slaves" in the South before emancipation. Their owners were sometimes quite put out that these servants were not grateful for their relatively comfortable lives.

I read this book the first time when it came out in English translation. What I remember from that reading is Solzhenitzyn's moral clarity and the splendid conversations of the zeks.

 

[Phlebas]

OK, 11pm on a Friday and I've just finished it - in my case it was translated into English by Max Hayward, Manya Harari and Michael Glenny and published by Harvill.

What a read, at 580 pages it's not a lightweight - found it very difficult to put down - I think having the events spread over only a couple of days seems to make the pace of the book incredibly fast.

 

[oskylad]

Truth is relative. Each new generation of historians and writers will re-write history relative to their own rules and values.

To say there is no truth is to say there are no lies - and there is no justice. Solzhenytsin didn't buy into that.

In an open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress in 1967, Solzhenytsin said "I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."

Historians and writers cannot re-write history. They only re-interpret history. History remains the same. Stalin's death camps do not become garden paradises by a simple stroke of the pen.

 

[oskylad]

This is easily one of the most depressing novels I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

Oddly, I have not found the book to be so depressing. As silverseason points out, the zeks were not living in misery and squalor. And, more importantly, they had meaningful work to do. Their lives still had purpose.

I would consider the most depressing book I have read to be Giants in the Earth, by O. E. Rolvaag. It tells the story of Norwegian immigrants facing the hardship of settlement on the Midwestern prairie, and ultimately succumbing to the dark wilderness of the land and the dark religion of the soul. It was written in Norwegian in 1925 and translated by the author into English in 1927.

Rolvaag lived in Northfield, Minnesota, just down the street from my Grandmother. She didn't think much of him.

 

[Robert]

To say there is no truth is to say there are no lies - and there is no justice. Solzhenytsin didn't buy into that.

In an open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress in 1967, Solzhenytsin said "I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."

Historians and writers cannot re-write history. They only re-interpret history. History remains the same. Stalin's death camps do not become garden paradises by a simple stroke of the pen.

Much of our human history is as much interpretation as fact. Destruction of one version of a story to preserve another version is not unusual. Perhaps future historians will find (or create) a reason to believe that Solzhenytsin's version of events are distorted.

 

[silverseason]

Truth? "What is truth asked jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer." In that essay Bacon goes on to explain the great attraction of lies.

I find a very moving truth in chapters 18-21 of The First Circle. Here, Stalin is introduced as a full character in the narrative. This is unusual and most writers would not attempt it. The closest to such use of a major historical figure in a fiction is perhaps Tolstoy's Napoleon in War and Peace. Tolstoy despises Napoleon so much that I considered the portrait of Napoleon as almost entirely a reflection of Tolstoy's attitude.

Solzehnitsyn's Stalin feels different. First, it is much more intimate. We see him walk, read, write - we are in his mind. Second, it is almost sympathetic. Here is a monster who lives entirely in the service of the lies he has created and which he must believe if he is also to believe he, or his reputation, has any future at all.

 

[Phlebas]

Here, Stalin is introduced as a full character in the narrative.

Yes, I read this with interest - I thought he had been introduced as a figure of, if not sympathy, at least of equality. For all his power and the fear he creates he is still a prisoner of his own health, mortality and paranoia.

 

[Phlebas]

The closest to such use of a major historical figure in a fiction is perhaps Tolstoy's Napoleon in War and Peace.

Was turning this over in my mind - surely you need to caveat the above note by saying that "unless the protagonist of the novel is the historic figure"

I can think of loads of books with major historical figures in them from Shakespeares Histories, to Robert Graves I Claudius and more recently Allan Massies Augustus, Robert Harris' Imperium.

I could also point out Napolean's cameo (along with Billy the Kid and Socrates) in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure - but that's pushing it.

 

[silverseason]

I can think of loads of books with major historical figures in them from Shakespeares Histories, to Robert Graves I Claudius and more recently Allan Massies Augustus, Robert Harris' Imperium.

You;re right. I forgot about Shakespeare. Also of course, historical novel reconstructions like I Claudius. What I must have had in mind was a more limited group: recent major historical figures whom some of us can remember, like Stalin. Not that we knew him personally, but his persona was part of our lives at one time. Comparable would be putting John F. Kennedy in a novel and getting his character just right.

 

[Robert]

Truth? "What is truth asked jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer." In that essay Bacon goes on to explain the great attraction of lies.

I find a very moving truth in chapters 18-21 of The First Circle. Here, Stalin is introduced as a full character in the narrative. This is unusual and most writers would not attempt it. The closest to such use of a major historical figure in a fiction is perhaps Tolstoy's Napoleon in War and Peace. Tolstoy despises Napoleon so much that I considered the portrait of Napoleon as almost entirely a reflection of Tolstoy's attitude.

Solzehnitsyn's Stalin feels different. First, it is much more intimate. We see him walk, read, write - we are in his mind. Second, it is almost sympathetic. Here is a monster who lives entirely in the service of the lies he has created and which he must believe if he is also to believe he, or his reputation, has any future at all.

I like that part, too. Stalin is in a prision of his own making. Like the prisioners, Stalin has to fear spys and someone plotting his death. He doesn't trust anyone and he feels most comfortable in a small room with thick walls. Even his guards are on the other side of locked doors.

 

[oskylad]

Solzehnitsyn's Stalin feels different. First, it is much more intimate. We see him walk, read, write - we are in his mind. Second, it is almost sympathetic. Here is a monster who lives entirely in the service of the lies he has created and which he must believe if he is also to believe he, or his reputation, has any future at all.

I found Solzhenytsin's portrayal of Stalin in Chapter 21 especially poignant:

"In general, Stalin noticed in himself a predisposition not only toward Orthodoxy but toward other elements and words associated with the old world -- that world from which he had come and which, as a matter of duty, he had been destroying for over forty years."

Marx claimed that religion is the opiate of the people. But Simone Weil was closer to the truth when she said: "It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the masses."

Like all revolutionaries, Stalin started out with a high moral purpose - to make the world a better place no matter what stands in the way. Over the course of his life, he personalized the revolution into his leadership. Now, near the end of his life, Stalin was aware that the revolution he had brought would not long outlive him.

"That was why he had to live to ninety -- because the battle was not yet finished, the building not completed, and there was no one to replace him. ... How could he leave humanity? In whose care? They'd make a mess of everything."

His world had closed in on himself. His only solution was to "have more monuments to himself constructed ... what might be called indoctrination through monuments. ... And then -- all right, he could die -- the Greatest of all the Great, without equal in the history of the earth".

But there was still the unanswered question: "And up there? Higher? He had no equals, of course, but if there, up there ..."

By raising this question for Stalin, Solzhenytsin was asking this question of himself -- and for all of us.

 

[oskylad]

... I thought [Stalin] had been introduced as a figure of, if not sympathy, at least of equality. For all his power and the fear he creates he is still a prisoner of his own health, mortality and paranoia.

For me, the key to understanding the novel was in Chapter 68, when Roitman asked the question: "Where should one begin to set the world aright? With others? Or with oneself?"

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenytsin said: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

Solzhenytsin wants to recognize there is good in all people, even in a man like Stalin. Stalin chose to set the world aright by changing others. Solzhenytsin asks us to start with setting the world aright by changing ourselves.

 

[Robert]

A good deal of the story reveals the similarities between life in the sharashka and life in the country in general. The conclusion that I’ve drawn is that the gulag system is a microcosm of Stalinist Russia.

 

[Phlebas]

A good deal of the story reveals the similarities between life in the sharashka and life in the country in general. The conclusion that I’ve drawn is that the gulag system is a microcosm of Stalinist Russia.

Good point - had missed this - I guess the Mavrino prison is probably a parallel with the luxusrious lifestyle to wicn Innokenty's family has become accustomered and the other prisons are the prisoner's family's homes. Also ties in with the circles of Dante's inferno.

On a separate note - does anyone else think Nerzin is a self portrait?