Tầng đầu địa ngục

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Hải Triều (Translator)

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn được giải văn chương Nobel năm 1970. Chính quyền cộng sản Nga ngăn cản không cho ông đi sang Thụy Điển để lãnh giải này. Tầng đầu địa ngục là tác phẩm dài nhất của ông. Tác phẩm này không được xuất bản ở trong nước Nga, tác giả của nó đã phải gửi bản thảo ra ngoại quốc để in. Tầng đầu địa ngục được dịch và ấn hành ở Hoa Kỳ dưới nhan đề The First Circle trong năm 1968. Trong khoảng thời gian năm năm trời nay, The First Circle là quyển tiểu thuyết được nhiều người đọc nhất thế giới.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Russia, Russian Literature, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novels

630 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1968

About the author

also 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...

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Intense and agonized personal struggle in the midst of a seemingly casual, but in reality cruel and bitter, long confinement.

The end of all personal liberties of any meaningful nature.

Loss of family and the end of all deep and meaningful relationships.

Endless, bortomless anger toward the faceless and nameless totalitarian wraiths that brought you to this place.

Welcome, friends, to the Lighter Side of the Gulag, the Sharaska - a place very dear to Comrade Stalin’s black and evil heart - because here, he puts gifted people to work for free!

THIS is the First Circle.

Remember the uppermost circle of Hell where Dante rather wistfully, and certainly mercifully, puts all the great writers of the Classical Age?

Well, this is the gloomy but barely-bearable hell which its inmates’ former fellow-traveller, but now tormenting arch-demon, Papa Joe, deems fit punishment for those Soviet intellectuals who unwisely think for themselves!

Remember, this was all back in the 1940‘s and 50’s, and ready made behaviour control mechanisms weren‘t yet widely available.

So no, it's really not that bad - no one can stop these guys from thinking aloud here (in studied whispers, of course!). Things like, all you louts are just another brick on the wall! Sotto voce... so the guards don’t overhear (though they usually do anyway).

But the wrongfully-imprisoned but wisecracking and fairly comfortable intellectuals who reside here, very much against their will, are like the denizens of Dante‘s first circle, and us postmoderns, “not unhappy” - to use the euphemism our long-suffering grandparents used to employ.

These inmates have their little tricks of evasion and their little jokes - in spite of their very real icy shivers of paranoia.

It’s a place of subtle but effective resistance, a defiant and sometimes even wildly humorous "NO!" to the repression and madness of the Soviet experiment.

A place, almost, of near-grace!

Near, I say, but never close enough. For these people are REAL human beings with warm hearts - so unlike Stalin and his brutal Party Bosses. Under whose iron heel they writhe in thwarted ingenuousness.

But grace nonetheless happens. It will ALWAYS come to folks with open hearts, like the inmates and this great writer possess. For without a hurt the heart is hollow. Grace happens to those who are open to ALL life throws at them - and bear it with a wincing smile.

Life isn’t lapidary. Its answers aren’t written on stone tablets. Life is FLUID.

And at least back then folks like these had Real Hearts, and Grace was still a viable solution to anguish. Now our hearts are buried under a Maze of disposable and interchangeable plastic and electronic idols. I expect the pandemic will help us see the folly of that approach.

So I just can’t say enough good things about this book.

Back in the Cold War, oddly enough, humanity still had a now-largely-forgotten warmth - that hadn’t yet been squeezed out of us by that Frankenstein’s monster, Behaviourism.

But this wonderful book speaks volumes about the then-optimistic hope - living in the soul of this Nobel laureate - for an end to repression in ANY form against our humanness, be it Nazi, Communist, or postmodernistically and coolly Electronic.

And if you read it, you’ll thank your lucky stars for the personal liberties and joys we STILL enjoy - no matter how much our Age of Anxiety, Cynicism and Disquiet has dampened or spoiled them!

And that thankfulness is in itself the beginnings of Grace.

And the way OUT of our own Sharaskas.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

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…

“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.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[Feliks · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is unfathomable in my mind why Alexandyr Solzhenitsyn is not more widely remarked upon as perhaps the premier novelist of his age. This is a writer against whom a Thomas Pynchon could be measured and even he might fall short. [As for Cormac McC-what? Chuck Pahluki-what? Please..!] But nevermind. The main point I wish to make in this review is this: any society, culture, or timeperiod is most accurately described by the recounting of its worst outrages. Just as with a single man--you assess him best by discovering what he hates--so it is too, with governments. It is their 'black marks' which are the most telling.

We come to know a people best, by learning how they treat their own. Every nation has its museums and treasures, its palaces--but these do not describe national character. Instead, look to the prisons if you wish to see the inner disposition of a culture revealed. This famous insight comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Solzhenitsyn, with his nonfiction juggernauts (vols I & II of 'Gulag Archipelago') is of course, simply towering in this realm. Scathing. There is no one who ever sounded to-the-bottom of a penal system deeper than did this author. But his talent was obviously not limited to documentary reporting. What this novel, 'First Circle' reveals to the first-time reader will be a major surprise, too.

For, not only did Solzhenitsyn write the most gripping true-to-life indictments to emerge from his culture; not only was he one of the most gifted historians since WWII--but with works like this, he dominates the sphere of Slavic fiction. It is one of the most penetrating modern novels yet written. Sustained power, force, and discipline are all on display, throughout. Sure, you might say that Solzhenitsyn is an "old-hand" at prison memoirs, going all the way back to, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch'. But--believe me--that was just him 'warming up'. 'First Circle' is a massive, in-depth, intellectual watershed. Solzhenitsyn takes everything he gathered up in 'Gulag Archipelago' and condenses it into literary form.

Ostensibly a story of falsely-incarcerated Russkie intellectuals all struggling against an inexorable and impervious prison regime--striving to hang on to their souls--while at the same time, unwilling to admit that they even possess souls...the plot itself is indescribable. It is a novel of imprisonment and solitude, after all; and one might criticize that 'nothing ever happens in it'.

But that's an impoverished and too-modern view of such a work as this. The topics and themes treated by 'First Circle', are boundless. Hope, despair, misery, ambition, abandonment. Everything that tortures man's spirit is to be found here.

Solzhenitsyn deals with the cosmic and the microscopic of individual human lives. Smooth, polished, confident, expert prose delivery...the man is completely-in-command-of-his-narrative. Razor-sharp in its vision and imagination.

This book is not in my 'top-ten-works-of-all-time' (world-lit), for nothing. And that's really saying something. To sum up my feelings on the matter: as far as I'm concerned, the name of Solzhenitsyn should be the pre-eminent name in Slavic culture; if not the very foremost name. Certainly in modern times, he stands alone. Doyesteovsky for the 1800s and Solzhenitsyn for the 1900s and that's all you should need.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an "easy" read like Solzhenitsyn's A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, but intellectually much more rewarding if you can plow through the hundreds of different characters and intersecting plotlines. A wonderfully intimate portrait of Soviet intellectual society from within the elit "First Circle" of the Soviet Gulag. A single five-paged chapter about the lonley hallway patrol of Nikita, the red-headed prison warden told me more about the human condition than most of what I have experienced in my own lifetime. Solzhenitsyn's philosophy, social commentary, and desire to convey the true experience of the camps draws out the writing at times, but a very rewarding book. Pretty much built my senior thesis off the fascinating paradox between physical and intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union....me and my Russian lit, what can I say?

[Stela · Rating 4 out of 5]

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:

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.

[Bettie · Rating 5 out of 5]

    
"And a great war
must be preceeded
by a great purge"
  

Description: Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, The First Circle is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician. At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, The First Circle is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly thirty years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-kc...







3* One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
... The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (Unrated for a reason)
3* Cancer Ward
CR The First Circle
3* Matryona's House And Other Stories
4* We Never Make Mistakes: Two Short Novels

[Georgia Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Airless. You read and know it's futile to hope. Still, you read. It goes on and on. Reminds me of when I first lived in Poland under the communists. There was no hope or sense of the future being better. But... and this is a big but..... there were parties and dancing and plenty of wine (not always good but it flowed).

Comparisons to Tolstoy are very misleading as regards The First Circle. Tolstoy gives us light at times. There's light from a moon, a ballroom, or even in a cavalry charge. Not, Solzhenitsyn. Inside or outside the Soviets' prison walls, there is nothing to ease the misery.

Once, when I made a trip back to the USA in the 1980's I asked a friend if there was anything I could bring back for him. "Some fresh air," he replied. Read The First Circle with an open window. And count your lucky stars when you're finished.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the First Circle is a 700+ page indictment of the Soviet penal system, especially as it pertains to political prisoners.  Told principally through biographies of--and conversations between--characters, the novel criticizes this institution from almost every conceivable angle.  Although there is virtually no plot, much of the narrative is truly interesting and profoundly sad.  But, the book is simply too long.  Once a writer has provided 50 different perspectives on why something is horrible, does the reader really need 25 more? 

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As an American who didn't do too much academic reading before opening CCLaP, there are of course numerous entire sections of the literary world that I could stand to learn a whole lot more about; take Russian literature for a good example, not just its beginnings with Pushkin and the like but also its heydey of the late 1800s and early 1900s (the time period of such famed authors as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov), all the way through to both the sanctioned and underground writers of the Soviet period of the 1920s through '80s. And that's why I was so excited to find out that last fall, Harper Perennial ended up putting out a brand-new edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1968 In The First Circle (originally known as simply The First Circle, one of the hundreds of details that have been put back in the book for this 2009 edition), because this gave me a good excuse to sit and finally read the thing; after all, Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important writers of the entire Soviet era, essentially the first intellectual to break the news to the Western world of what Stalin's prison camps (or gulags) were actually like, a fact which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1970 even as he was still a Soviet prisoner.

And the irony, of course, is that less than ten years before In The First Circle, he had been able to publish the first of this highly anti-Stalinst work in the actual Soviet Union itself -- namely, 1962's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is what first gained him an international following; and this was because of Nikita Khrushchev's campaign of de-Stalinization in that country then, which came as news to me when first studying this book, which gives you a good idea of just how much about Russian history I still have to learn. Even though that book went well, Solzhenitsyn knew that the original 96-chapter version of his much more expansive follow-up would never pass the muster of Soviet censors, which is why he voluntarily cut almost a dozen of those chapters from the original In The First Circle before submitting it, and radically changed a dozen more; then when he later became critical of Khrushchev himself and was once more sent back into the camps, it was this trimmed-down version that was snuck out of the country, and published in the West in 1968 to huge infamy. But like many former dissidents, Solzhenitsyn made peace with his homeland again after the fall of communism in the early '90s, moving back there in his old age and for the first time in his life going back comprehensively over his entire oeuvre; and apparently at the end of his life, he decided it was important to get the original 96-chapter version out finally to the public, the project he was working on all the way up to his death in 2008, just a year before the completely uncensored version came out.

For those who don't know, the book is a highly autobiographical look at a special kind of work camp that existed during the "Stalinist Purge," the period of the 1930s and '40s when that Modernist leader and World War Two overseer had several tens of millions of his fellow citizens imprisoned and/or killed in order to keep himself and his supporters in power; because with that many people in the camps, you could of course fill entire prisons with nothing but scientists and artists if you wanted to, which is exactly what Stalinist authorities did, called "sharashkas" and actually more like college dorms than traditional prisons, where intellectuals were treated decently and fed well in exchange for them continuing to work on various cultural and scientific projects, like the space program or nuclear weapons or Bond-style spy devices. This is where the title In The First Circle comes from, in fact, inspired by Dante's concept in The Inferno of there being nine circles of Hell, the first one not actually that terrible and designed for only light sinners; because when all was said and done, except for the lack of free movement, these sharashkas actually weren't all that bad, or at least compared to the nightmarish conditions of the Siberian hard-labor camps, where said intellectuals were shipped off to if refusing to voluntarily work on these state projects. That's a major theme of the book, the philosophical argument over which of these options is better -- to remain ideologically pure yet pay a high price for it, or to do what is simply going to be done by someone else anyway, and in the meanwhile living to fight another day.

And besides this, the thousand-page tome is also of course a highly detailed look at what daily Soviet life was like during the Stalinist years of the late '40s; and in fact that may be the biggest surprise about this manuscript, is that its details regarding the real Soviet Union in those years are so eerily similar to the speculative fancifulness of George Orwell's anti-Stalinist 1984 to not even be funny. Because let's not forget, Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 (which is how he came up with the title, by simply switching the last two numbers), while Solzhenitsyn's book is set just a year later, during Christmas week of 1949, retroactively backing up many of the most outrageous suppositions of Orwell's original, including the Soviet invention of a "Newspeak" type official new language, designed to be reductive so to literally remove from dictionaries the very words themselves that stood for subversive ideas, as well as the very real endeavor back then to officially erase the very existence of state enemies, including airbrushing them out of old photos and re-writing archived newspaper articles that once mentioned them. If nothing else, this might be the most important lasting legacy of In The First Circle, is that it dutifully chronicles many of the absurdly comedic yet horrifying things that took place during the Stalinist years, shows us just how right we in the West were to be terrified back then by the idea of a Stalinist planet, even if that did lead to some pretty horrible things on their own, like McCarthyism and book burnings.

But this isn't the only thing about In The First Circle to enjoy; there's also the inventive cyclical nature of its very structure, which like Richard Linklater's Slacker is told in a "vertical storytelling" style, where the different main characters of each chapter are introduced causally in the end paragraphs of the previous chapter. So in other words, one chapter might be about a prisoner in an electronics lab inside the camp, who at the end of the chapter has a conversation with the 21-year-old girl who's been hired to oversee them; the next chapter then might be about that girl now at home that evening, ending with her talking to her husband, a mid-level bureaucrat who works in the personal offices of Joseph Stalin, with the next chapter after that perhaps being about Stalin himself, one of the hundreds of both real and fictional people featured in this doorstop of a book. And then of course is the sly humor found throughout, the fascinating details about life inside one of these "intellectual prisons," the history lessons provided through the cynical discussions of the older "zeks," the ones old enough to remember the original 1917 communist revolution and who sit around endlessly debating what's gone wrong in the thirty years since, a big reason they're in the camps to begin with.

Now, just so we're on the same page, let me confess that there are problems as well with In The First Circle; for example, like so many other Russian novelists, Solzhenitsyn tends to be in love with the sound of his own voice, turning what could've been a truly mindblowing 400-page book into a merely important yet highly digressive thousand-page one. Despite its limitations, though, it's a highly rewarding book to actually make one's way through and eventually finish, and I applaud Harper for spending the time, energy and money needed to put out this restored version in the first place, when commercially speaking it is obviously only going to appeal to a small niche audience. This single book alone filled a huge chunk of that gaping hole in my life when it comes to Russian history and culture, and it comes highly recommended to those who are looking to fill such a similar hole in their own lives.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I work with speech understanding: making computers understand what people say. Oddly enough, this is the only novel I know which is centered around that technology. It's very credible, as one would expect from Solzhenitsyn.

I'm not sure how much of it is based on his own experiences. The main character, who's serving time in the Gulag, has technical skills. Because of this, he gets assigned to work on a speech recognition project. To be exact, it's not speech recognition per se; it's what we call speaker ID, identifying a person by the sound of their voice. This technology is now quite good, and many of the key ideas were developed at SRI International while I was there, though I wasn't involved in that particular project. The SRI techniques have been commercialized in the Nuance speech recognition platform, which I use all the time. At the time of The First Circle, however, the field was at a very early stage of development.

The team in Solzehenitsyn's book are given a specific task to solve. A compromising phone call has been recorded, and the authorities have narrowed it down to a handful of suspects. They need to determine who it was; not easy, since the person in question was trying to disguise his voice. The engineers work flat out to try and crack the problem. Needless to say, they don't feel too good about it, but what are they supposed to do? If they refuse, they'll be back in hell. Well, they're in hell now, but, as the title suggests, this is the most comfortable part of Stalin's Inferno. Here, they aren't swimming in boiling blood, or, more likely, stuck in the ice lower down. So they do their best, but in the end they're forced to admit defeat. They can eliminate most of the suspects, but they still have two names left, and the machines can't determine which one the recorded voice belongs to.

But their bosses are happy; they simply arrest both guys. After all, this is Stalin's Russia. It must be the grimmest and most profound shaggy dog story ever written.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it some years ago and coming across it encouraged me to reread it which I'm doing at present. What a treat!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child of the Cold War who spent many years studying our great potential superpower opponent, I found this book just as powerful now as I might have many years ago. The Soviets certainly knew how to efficiently destroy anyone with a sentence to the Gulag. The thought of fighting the Nazis from ‘41-45 only to wind up in the gulag for 10 or 25 years is just horrific to contemplate. This story takes place about 4.5 years after the WWII victory. Many of the “zeks” in the camp have been condemned for no reason other than spite (or envy):

…he was particularly timid these days in front of the authorities. More than anything he dreaded getting a second term. He had seen many prisoners get them during the war years.

Even the way he was first sentenced was absurd. He was imprisoned at the beginning of the war for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” the result of a denunciation cooked up by some neighbors who wanted his apartment and afterward got it. It became clear subsequently that he had not engaged in any such propaganda, though he could have, since he listened to the German radio. Then it turned out that he didn’t listen to the German radio, but he could have listened to it since he had a forbidden radio receiver at home. And when it appeared that he didn’t have any such radio receiver, it was still true that he could have had one since he was a radio engineer by profession. Also, following the denunciation, they found two radio tubes in a box in his apartment.

This story remains relevant today. This is the inevitable destination of socialism and way too many uneducated in the population believe socialism is the way to go. There are reports that China has its own version of the gulag with a very large population. Likely to grow as the Chinese implement their scheme to construct a social media rating for everyone in their country. Too low a score, off to the gulag? Just imagine how pervasive and oppressive the Soviet gulag system would be with the technology of today! Five Red Stars

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere in the Stone Reader documentary, likely its bonus features, a critic named The First Circle as the last novel of the 19th Century. The isolation of Soviet themes was likely exaggerated by the critic but the novel itself doesn't appear to reveal self-awareness: perhaps such would also be a violation of Article 58. I read this in tandem with my wife and what a glorious experience that was. As tragic as this tale of a neutered Hell of sorts remains, it begs so many questions about the nature of penal system in the Soviet Union. Cross-purposes appeared to proliferate with exposure to air. If Guilt was endemic why have them work, espeially around such sensitive areas of expertise? My naievety albeit bruised and riddled will likely cling for my life's extent. I still ponder motives.

[Biblio Curious · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

While it is overtly a story of talented engineers and technical types in a "special prison" in the Stalin era Soviet Union, it is an apt allegory of the workplaces in which many of us have, at times, found ourselves.

While typically Solzhenitsyn in style, it is appreciably less "dense" than many of his works. His character development, always very good, is his best ever.

Those in a technical profession will recognize the dilemma and attitudes of the prisoners, as well as the nature of some of the fellow technical types with whom you have worked.

You will also recognize other characters with whom you have worked in the prison functionaries and administrators. Some of these are sympathetic characters who face their own challenges in dealing with their situation in life and work. Others are the clueless and unreflective or even consciously malevolent beasts who have made your work life hell.

This is one of the 2 or 3 books that, on any given day, I might describe as my all-time favorite. I have re-read several times.

[Francesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

La saraska, il primo cerchio del sistema carcerario sovietico. Il luogo in cui sperare di finire, ma allo stesso tempo, il luogo dal quale pregare di non andarsene, visto che il più delle volte, se si usciva, si finiva al GULAG. Le giornate alla saraska sono oggettivamente noiose, si lavora anche 12 ore al giorno alla creazione di apparecchi elettrici per far progredire l'Unione avvicinandola all'occidente. Ma in realtà si costruivano apparecchi per usarli per spiare i nemici della Rivoluzione. C'era un problema, qualunque ritardo nella realizzazione di questi apparecchi era visto come un tentativo di sabotaggio, quindi chi era responsabile del guasto veniva accusato di essere un nemico della Rivoluzione e di conseguenza, spedito a calci in qualche GULAG in mezzo al nulla a spaccar pietre e a spalare neve. Differenza principale tra GULAG e Lager nazisti era che potenzialmente pure Molotov poteva diventare uno zek e finire in un GULAG, ma era impossibile se non nelle fantasie più fantasiose che Eichmann o Goering potessero passare per il camino. Il GULAG sovietico poggiava la sua esistenza sulla Katorga zarista, quindi si può dire che è un sistema durato 300 anni. invece il lager nazista è sorto sul momento è stato costruito nel momento stesso in cui serviva... Il Gulag invece sorgeva in strutture già esistenti.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the first circle of Hell represents Limbo, where non-Christians reside as they were born before Christ, therefore unbaptized. It's not their fault! But there are no free passes, so sowwy. So they were put in the first circle where they are so close to Heaven, but, derp, not close enough to get in. They have a smidge more freedom than the wieners in the circles below them, but they still can't get Heaven-status because it's all in who you know, and they don't know the right people because they went and were born too early, like a bunch of jag-offs.

(This is a highly simplified version of Hell. Don't go quoting me and stuff.)

In Solzhenitsyn's novel, his characters are prisoners in a special sort of prison, kindsa like Limbo. They are all engineers and nerdy sorts who got busted for stuff like talking on the phone and writing letters ("letters" are those things people used to write before e-mail, btw) about stuff Stalin didn't approve of whose skills benefit Papa Stalin in one way or another.

The story takes place in only three days, though you really wouldn't know it to read this book because a) it's almost 700 pages (and that's not even the uncensored version which was released in 2009), b) Solzhenitsyn includes so much back-story of every character that you don't realize aren't the main focus of the story as a whole, and c) did I mention it's almost 700 pages?

It took me a long time to read because Life, but also because for a long while I had trouble getting into the story. I normally enjoy everything I have read by Solzhenitsyn, but I couldn't help but compare this to his Cancer Ward, probably because I got them around the same time. I thought Cancer Ward was strong all the way through and I cared about the characters. I had difficulty empathizing with all the characters in The First Circle, or maybe because I knew the story spanned three actual days, I thought more should be happening at a quicker pace. I think an early complaint of mine to someone was that it didn't seem like a whole lot was happening, and I worried it would be an entire almost-700 pages of not a whole lot happening.

Stuff does happen, but it's a slowly unfolding story. It's worth it, if Russian novels about GULAGs are your schtick. This one is, like a lot (all?) books written by Solzhenitsyn, autobiographical. Has anyone ever written prison stories as powerfully as Solzhenitsyn?

Now that I am finished, I do wish I had gotten my paws on the uncensored version, because I am a glutton for punishment and now feel like reading the censored version was akin to reading an abridged version of something. Did I just cheat? I fail at reading Russian literature. It all came down to this moment.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge, multicharacter novel set in postwar Soviet Russia, 1949, when one would think the Russians would have got a break after winning the war, but there was a war that would not be over for another five decades, the war of the Soviet people to stay alive with a certain amount of human security and dignity. This takes place in three days, but it's a massive thing, yet it needs to be read in one big streak, not to get lost in its cast of thousands. It's too bad he's become so reactionary and 'anti-cosmpolitan' ie Great Russian nationalistic. But these works were fierce and real and spoke to the world. I need to reread it--this new translation includes all the camp slang and profanity. When I was learning Russian, back in the early middle ages, they had to assemble a little dictionary when Solzhenitsyn was first published in the west. Even Russian speakers had never seen this kind of profanity. it was called "the Little Book of Russian Profanity", it was small and green, stapled, and you fell out of your seat laughing.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[rmn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be one of the five best books written in the 20th century.

Solzhenitsyn is able to bring to life with unbelievable clarity and insight (unlike the review I am writing) a few days in a late 1940s Russian gulag located outside of Moscow which is a special prison for engineers. He follows multiple storylines involving the lives of the prisoners, their families, the prison guards and officials, and even the government (Joseph Stalin manages to make a too brief appearance). He also describes in great detail the prison system and the communist bureaucracy that ruled the country at the time.

If you’ve read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, I would say this is like that only on steroids or this is like that meets War and Peace (as it is phenomenally long, uses historical facts and figures, follows multiple characters, and is completely engrossing. The main difference would be that there isn’t much of a plot in The First Circle, though one kind of breaks out after about 150 pages, but it’s not clear that a consistent plot is all that necessary).

Solzhenitsyn excels as a writer in making every character so real and in portraying the nuances and details of Russian prison life (of course his time as a prisoner makes him superbly qualified to do that, but his writing is so concise, descriptive, and simple that he illuminates the Russian prison system like no one else can. Though a lot of credit has to go to the translation I am sure.).

Here’s the deal, if you like Russian literature, this is a 100% must read. If you liked One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch this is a 100% must read. If you haven’t read much Russian literature, start with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and if you like it, read this.

This isn’t the easiest book to get through but it is rewarding and it works as both a historical novel a novel on the human condition. So put down the Michael Crichton, put down the Jane Austen, and give this a chance.

[La lettrice controcorrente · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nel primo cerchio  di Aleksandr Solženicyn (Voland) è un romanzo corale ambientato in una sorta di prigione ai piedi di Mosca. E' il 1949 e questi sono i tre giorni di Natale. Sì, avete capito bene, più di 900 pagine per raccontare tre intere giornate. Ma non abbiate paura, non c'è una sola riga noiosa in questo romanzo.

Anche in questo caso, leggere il libro è stato più facile che raccontarlo. I personaggi sono tanti e hanno nomi complicati. Cambiamo spesso scena, vicende apparentemente lontanissime tra loro si susseguono senza un chiaro aggancio - almeno all'inizio, intanto noi piangiamo, ci indigniamo, soffriamo e... incredibilmente sorridiamo. Sì perché Nel primo cerchio siamo imprigionati insieme a scienziati, ingegneri, matematici e studiosi (persino un filologo che vi anticipo già, è il mio personaggio preferito) che vivono la loro avventura dantesca, siamo nel primo girone dell'inferno: e dall'inferno non si fa ritorno. Eppure la penna di Solzenicyn è graffiante, sarcastica... ironica e in alcuni passaggi non possiamo fare a meno di ridere di gusto, in altri il nostro sorriso si spegne nell'amarezza.
RECENSIONE COMPLETA SU: http://www.lalettricecontrocorrente.i...

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Moon Rose (M.R.) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"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. ☾☯

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sarah ~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the First Circle - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

بهذه الرواية الملحمية الطويلة أختم العام، وسولجينيتسن كاتب استثنائي.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

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/...