Impatient Idealist

Like many of Solzhenitsyn’s books, In the First Circle has a tortured publication history. It was first written in the 1950s, revised in vain hope of official Soviet publication in 1964, published in the West in 1968, and then republished for the first time in its full form in 2008, which is the version I read. So if you’ve read the book but this review sounds like it came out of an alternate universe, possibly you read the earlier version.

The biggest change was to the action that kicks off the novel. In the first published version, Volodin makes a telephone call to a doctor to warn him not to share information about an experimental drug with his Western colleagues, as the security apparatus would consider that a traitorous act. In the 2008 version, Volodin calls the US embassy to warn them that a Soviet spy is going to try to steal the secrets of the nuclear bomb.

In both versions, this telephone call kicks off a flurry of activity in a sharaksha - that is, a special secret prison where prisoners with scientific skills work on making inventions for the state. One of these inventions is a process for identifying the voice of a caller on an anonymous phone call, which has just jumped to number one priority for the security services.

In other hands, this premise might set off a suspenseful game of spy-vs-spy. In fact, the New York Times review quoted on the cover says the story is “filled with suspense,” which frankly makes me suspect that the reviewer read a synopsis rather than the book, which could not be less interested in suspense.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn uses this incident as a kaleidoscope to explore not only the world of the sharaksha, but all the many lives touched by the existence of this special prison: not just the prisoners themselves, but the guards, the guards’ supervisors, the entire security apparatus up to Stalin himself, not to mention the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife and her fellow grad students and the young man she’s been flirting with, even as Nerzhin flirts with one of the female state employees in the prison…

Ostensibly, the First Circle of the title is a reference to the sharaksha, Dante’s first circle of Hell where the virtuous pagans live: the nicest part of Hell, but still Hell. But in fact it seemed to me that this circle expanded to include the lives of everyone touched by the prison, perhaps everyone in the Soviet Union in 1950. A grad student struggling over whether to turn informer or risk having her thesis failed if she refuses. A minion of Stalin’s struggling to find a reply when Stalin puckishly suggests that if they bring the death penalty back, the minion might be the first to go! Stalin himself, miserable and alone, isolated by the terror he has created in everyone around him.

What will you do to make yourself comfortable? Who will you hurt to make your own life better? Solzhenitsyn is not an ascetic for asceticism’s sake - some of the most charming scenes in the book are little moments of comfort that the prisoners have managed to scrape out - but he is absolutely opposed to purchasing comfort, safety, or indeed even survival at the cost of someone else.

(Once Solzhenitsyn was exiled to America, Americans were apparently distressed by his disdain for American materialism, but we really should have seen it coming. We are after all a nation of people largely happy to treat “Well of course Amazon exploits its workers and undermines local businesses and is simply overall evil, but it’s so convenient” as a clinching moral argument in favor of shopping at Amazon.)

A note about how to read this book: I struggled for the first hundred pages or so because I was trying to keep track of all the characters. As Solzhenitsyn introduces a new batch of characters every five chapters or so, this swiftly becomes impossible, especially because he never stops doing this. You might expect that at some point he’d decide he’s assembled the whole cast, but no, right up till quite near the end he’s happy to hare off for two chapters to go on a digression (fascinating! Rich in psychological and philosophical detail!) about a character we’re never going to see again.

As you can imagine, trying to keep track of all these characters (each of whom has their own little cast of side characters) is very frustrating, and my reading experience became much more pleasant when I realized it was also unnecessary. Much better just to read the book like you’re floating down a river. The most important characters will bob up again and again, so you’ll come to know them quite well. Other characters may just be islands that you’ll float past, interesting in their own right of course, but it’s also fine if you can’t remember all the details about Yakonov and his ex-girlfriend who goes to church because the regime is anti-church, which all occurred decades ago so why are we having two chapters about it now? Well, because it’s another little chip of colored glass in our kaleidoscope, that’s why.

And if it turns out a character you thought was an island is actually a boat who keeps floating along, so you do need to know that name after all? Well, that’s why there’s a character index at the start of the book.

Solzhenitsyn is not the least interested in suspense, in plot. He’s interested in character, in exploring different viewpoints on how to live in the world, and in exploring different facets of that world until it feels like a real and breathing place. The book is nearly 750 pages, but in the end, I still wanted to keep on exploring.