Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's private inferno
IN THE FIRST CIRCLE
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; translated by Harry T. Willetts Harper Perennial
Available at select National Book Store branches
When the great author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away in the summer of 2008, he left behind a bibliography of powerful masterpieces that rank him at the pinnacle of the Russian canon. Best remembered for his epic, three-volume magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, and his equally compelling novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich, Solzhenitsyn’s legacy no doubt draws its origins from the traumatic and probing experiences he endured in Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime.
His writing, deep-seated in a tradition infused with lofty questions about philosophy, religion, and society, no doubt echoes the hallmarks of giants like Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky while reexamining the state of the Russian soul during this period of crisis.
This latest reincarnation of his first novel, In the First Circle, calls for celebration among the author’s English-language readers: it not only presents this magnificent score in its unabridged entirety, but also dresses the text in a translation that faithfully captures the raw, unfiltered intentions Solzhenitsyn had originally envisioned. Written under exceptionally difficult circumstances (composed after an eight-year sentence in the Gulags, trailing his nearly fatal bout with cancer and his exile to Kazakhstan, and finally the United States), this novel’s manuscript saw completion in 1958, yet continued to collect dust even after the author had garnered sensational, worldwide acclaim with Ivan Desinovich.
Determined to have this novel reach the public eye, Solzhenitsyn revised the draft at least four times, excising nine chapters and re-tailoring characters and details to Soviet limitations before attempting to sieve it through the censors.
However, such is the fate of art in Stalinist Russia, as the press refused him the permission to have it printed. In 1968, Solzhenitsyn desperately pursued publication of this novel in the West, thus submitting this “ersatz, truncated” manuscript that generated a hasty and bowdlerized translation entitled The First Circle. Although that preceding version vividly portrayed the moral degeneracy of the Stalinist regime, even the author himself recognized that it rendered only a half-baked blueprint devoid of the subtleties, the depth, and the richness of character explored in his uncut and unspoiled masterpiece.
In the First Circle, a sprawling narrative set within a time frame of four days, is based largely on the period Solzhenitsyn spent in a Moscow prison facility that doubly served as a research institute, where technicians, professionals, and intellectuals are detained to assist in developing state security technology. The title, an allusion to the first circle of hell depicted in Dante’s Inferno, connotes the slightly more humane treatment these zeks (prisoners) receive, much like the guileless philosophers condemned, albeit laxly, for having never known divine grace. Formally known as the sharashka, this privileged branch of the gulag network was described by one character as “practically paradise,” an irony considering that its inhabitants are stripped of their dignity and their humanity.
At the beginning of the novel, the Russian diplomat Innokenty Volodin contacts the US Embassy to warn of an impending espionage operation in New York, where a Soviet spy plans to steal information about atomic bomb designs. To his misfortune, the call is intercepted by the Soviet secret police, thus sparking an investigation that sends ripples throughout the entire system — involving the whole gamut of engineers, technicians, politicians (Stalin comes off as a vain, morbid, and self-absorbed character, and Eleanor Roosevelt saunters in with quite the humorous cameo appearance), university students, communist lackeys, writers, and diplomats, all of whom live with shattered or improbable dreams in this strident, monotonous, and featureless Russia.
Back in the sharashkas, the zeks are charged into developing a device that identifies voices recorded from tapped phone conversations. The zeks who inhabit this “special prison,” while aware of their privileges relative to the more inhumanely treated members of the Gulag network, encounter a stark moral dilemma that urges them to question their motivations for aiding a system bound to acts of corruption and evil. Near the end of the story, a number of zeks, including the autobiographical hero Gleb Nerzhin, defect to their moral conscience, even if that entails suffering under the icy brutality of the Siberian gulags.
Though the Russia of Solzhenitsyn’s construct rings not with the tsarist decadence, the Westward-looking dandyisms, the filigreed troikas, or the luxuriant samovars of a bygone century, the author nonetheless paints his fractured people with pitch-perfect accuracy resonant with the ethos of the quintessential Russian character. In a throwback to tradition, the author interweaves his mammoth plot with a gallery of garrulous Russians discoursing on matters of the religious (“Christianity is the faith of the strong in spirit. We must have the courage to see the evil in the world and to root it out”), the political (“Socialism promises only equality and a full belly, and that only by means of coercion”), and the social (“Indifference, the organism’s last self-preservative reaction, has become our defining characteristic”), no doubt reminiscent of the heroes in those great 19th-century classics — incisive in their observations of the world, critical of the malaises incurred by higher earthly and spiritual forces, yet utterly sensitive to the plights of the human condition.
If anyone could be rightly called the inheritor of Tolstoy and Dostoevky’s greatness, that artist would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Readers certainly have much to unearth and discover in this marvelous re-release of what is arguably Solzhenitsyn’s finest work of fiction. This revelatory and authoritative edition owes its existence to the eminent Solzhenitsyn scholar and Calvin College professor emeritus Edward Ericson, who worked closely with the author’s family to recover the missing chapters and to tie up loose ends when its translator, Harry Willetts, died in 2005. Now, more than 50 years since the initial completion of the manuscript, this version finally rescues the novel from its “tortured textual history,” restoring not only the lost text and other previously reworked details, but shedding greater light too on the pronounced elements of Christian morality deeply embedded in Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre.
As the curtain closes at the end of the novel, a small group of zeks are shuffled into meat trucks bound for those forbidding labor camps. While there appears not the visible redemption or the resolve that greets these wounded characters at the end of their journey, this story provides instead a reaffirming answer against the evils of tyranny — that of an enduring “fearlessness” that remains undiminished and undefeated in the face of oppression. However bleak, In the First Circle is ultimately a moving tour de force, a great symphonic masterpiece that powerfully resonates with the moral strength, the goodness, and the resilience of our humanity.
