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In the First Circle
In the First Circle Read online
IN THE
First Circle
A NOVEL
THE RESTORED TEXT
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Translated by Harry T. Willetts
Dedication
To my friends from the sharashka
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Cast of Characters
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 - Torpedo
Chapter 2 - A Miscue
Chapter 3 - Sharashka
Chapter 4 - A Protestant Christmas
Chapter 5 - Boogie-Woogie
Chapter 6 - A Peaceful Existence
Chapter 7 - A Woman’s Heart
Chapter 8 - “Oh, Moment, Stay!”
Chapter 9 - The Fifth Year in Harness
Chapter 10 - The Rosicrucians
Chapter 11 - The Enchanted Castle
Chapter 12 - Number Seven
Chapter 13 - He Should Have Lied
Chapter 14 - The Blue Light
Chapter 15 - A Girl! A Girl!
Chapter 16 - A Troika of Liars
Chapter 17 - Hot Water
Chapter 18 - “Oh, Wonder-Working Steed”
Chapter 19 - The Birthday Hero
Chapter 20 - A Study of a Great Life
Chapter 21 - Give Us Back the Death Penalty!
Chapter 22 - The Emperor of the Earth
Chapter 23 - Language as an Instrument of Production
Chapter 24 - The Abyss Beckons Again
Chapter 25 - The Church of Nikita the Martyr
Chapter 26 - Sawing Wood
Chapter 27 - A Bit of Methodology
Chapter 28 - The Junior Lieutenant’s Job
Chapter 29 - The Lieutenant Colonel’s Job
Chapter 30 - A Puzzled Robot
Chapter 31 - How to Darn Socks
Chapter 32 - On the Path to a Million
Chapter 33 - Penalty Marks
Chapter 34 - Voiceprints
Chapter 35 - Kissing Is Forbidden
Chapter 36 - Phonoscopy
Chapter 37 - The Silent Alarm
Chapter 38 - Be Unfaithful to Me!
Chapter 39 - Fine Words, Those, “To the Taiga!”
Chapter 40 - A Rendezvous
Chapter 41 - And Another One
Chapter 42 - And Among the Kids
Chapter 43 - A Woman Was Washing the Staircase
Chapter 44 - Out in the Open
Chapter 45 - The Running Dogs of Imperialism
Chapter 46 - The Castle of the Holy Grail
Chapter 47 - Top-Secret Conversation
Chapter 48 - The Double Agent
Chapter 49 - Life Is Not a Novel
Chapter 50 - The Old Maid
Chapter 51 - Fire and Hay
Chapter 52 - To the Resurrection of the Dead!
Chapter 53 - The Ark
Chapter 54 - Leisure Amusements
Chapter 55 - Prince Igor
Chapter 56 - Winding Up the Twentieth
Chapter 57 - Prisoners’ Petty Matters
Chapter 58 - A Banquet of Friends
Chapter 59 - The Buddha’s Smile
Chapter 60 - But We Are Given Only One Conscience, Too
Chapter 61 - The Uncle at Tver
Chapter 62 - Two Sons-in-Law
Chapter 63 - The Diehard
Chapter 64 - Entered Cities First
Chapter 65 - A Duel Not by the Rules
Chapter 66 - Going to the People
Chapter 67 - Spiridon
Chapter 68 - Spiridon’s Criterion
Chapter 69 - Behind a Closed Visor
Chapter 70 - Dotty
Chapter 71 - Let’s Agree That This Didn’t Happen
Chapter 72 - Civic Temples
Chapter 73 - A Circle of Wrongs
Chapter 74 - Monday Dawn
Chapter 75 - Four Nails
Chapter 76 - Favorite Profession
Chapter 77 - The Decision Taken
Chapter 78 - The Professional Party Secretary
Chapter 79 - The Decision Explained
Chapter 80 - One Hundred Forty-Seven Rubles
Chapter 81 - The Scientific Elite
Chapter 82 - Indoctrination in Optimism
Chapter 83 - The King of Stool Pigeons
Chapter 84 - As for Shooting . . .
Chapter 85 - Prince Kurbsky
Chapter 86 - No Fisher of Men
Chapter 87 - At the Fount of Science
Chapter 88 - The Leading Ideology
Chapter 89 - Little Quail
Chapter 90 - On the Back Stairway
Chapter 91 - Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
Chapter 92 - Keep Forever
Chapter 93 - Second Wind
Chapter 94 - Always Caught Off Guard
Chapter 95 - Farewell, Sharashka
Chapter 96 - Meat
About the Author
Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
IT HAS TAKEN a half century for English-language readers to receive the definitive text of the best novel by the man who may well be the most famous author of our times. Such is the fate of art created under a totalitarian regime. In a desperate attempt to get his literary artifact published at all, the author took it upon himself to sever some of its parts, a gruesome act of sacrifice. Yet the work’s artistic power was so great that even in its wounded condition it drew much praise. The authentic version of the novel traveled an extraordinarily rough road from composition to publication, and the dramatic story of the unkind cuts inflicted on it along the way deserves to be known in all its details. For the restored work’s appearance in the present volume is a major publishing event.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn initially composed In the First Circle from 1955 to 1958, when he was in his thirties. In 1968 an expurgated version titled The First Circle came out in many languages. The loss in English of the preposition In, doubtless through an innocent decision, subtly shifts the novel’s focus from people in a place to the place itself; the present version eliminates this distortion. Before the author died in 2008, four months short of his ninetieth birthday, he knew that the novel as he intended it was finally scheduled to appear in English a year thereafter. The years between 1958 and 2009 left plenty of time for the novel to endure a tortured textual history. Compared with the version previously available in English, the plot has been altered, depictions of some major characters have been substantially modified, new characters have been introduced, and many entirely excised chapters have been reinstated. For readers familiar with the previously available English version, In the First Circle will be a revelation.
Solzhenitsyn wrote the book under exceptionally difficult circumstances. In 1953, as he was about to emerge from the Gulag after eight years of incarceration, he contracted cancer, which brought him near death’s door in the months that followed. Consigned to “perpetual” internal exile in Kazakhstan after prison and camp, he found work as a village schoolteacher. In every spare moment he wrote. In the First Circle was his largest project, and he lavished great care on it. No sooner had he finished the first draft in 1958 than he put it through two revisions.
The drama of his life story took a quantum leap forward when in 1962, as a total unknown, he made his sensational entry onto the world’s stage with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a story about life in the Soviet prison camps. While that short work was under consideration by the prestigious Moscow journal Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn wrote a fourth draft of In the First Circle in 1962. One Day appeared with the imprimatur of no le
ss a personage than Premier Nikita Khrushchev and electrified readers in the Soviet Union and around the world.
Hoping to parlay one success into another, Solzhenitsyn decided to try to squeeze In the First Circle through the censors’ sieve. Yet, anticipating that its themes transgressed strict Soviet limits, he tempered his hopes with realism and in 1964 put the manuscript through a process of “lightening.” The pruned and politically toned-down result of this act of self-censorship was what he later called an “ersatz, truncated” version; the number of chapters dropped from ninety-six to eighty-seven. In an augury that Solzhenitsyn’s sacrificial pragmatism was doomed to fail, the KGB in 1965 broke into the apartment of a friend of his and made off with a copy of the novel, which then circulated among selected officials. Although Novy Mir had agreed to publish the novel in its eighty-seven-chapter form, higher authorities kept withholding their approval. (Fascinating insights into the Soviet regime’s hostility toward In the First Circle became available in 1995 when formerly secret government documents were published under the title The Solzhenitsyn Files.) Another major work of his, Cancer Ward, came closer to receiving the backing of the official Soviet Writers Union, but it, too, remained blocked. Solzhenitsyn’s window of opportunity had closed.
The 1960s established Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as a courageous hero. He checked with defiant resistance every move by the Soviet regime to stifle him, as if he were a chess master playing a game with life-and-death stakes. Meanwhile the Western press closely watched the unfolding struggle, and the free world rooted for him. In 1968, with official harassment relentlessly constricting his options, he took the desperate step of authorizing the publication in the West of the “lightened version” of In the First Circle, a copy of which he had been able to send out. The secretiveness required for this transmission from East to West meant that he lost control over the book and could not see it through press. Almost simultaneously Cancer Ward also appeared in the West, though without the author’s permission. And when he was expelled from the Writers Union in 1969, prominent Western writers signed letters of vociferous protest.
Both long novels, like the short One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich before them, were widely hailed as major literary achievements. The double-barreled evidence led one American scholar to declare, “No longer can there be the slightest question about his literary stature or doubt of its permanence.” Another established American critic called The First Circle “the greatest Russian novel of the last half of the century.” British critics joined the chorus, one describing it as “a majestic work of genius” and another judging it “arguably the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.” A handful of years later, when the Soviet authorities forced Solzhenitsyn into Western exile and he began to make speeches, political controversies would come to color, or discolor, assessments of his fiction, but the broadly appreciative opening round of reactions rested solidly on artistic criteria. In the meantime, unknown to anyone outside the tight-knit circle of helpers whom he later dubbed his “invisible allies,” he was holding in reserve a nearly finished blockbuster nonfiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, which was ready to be released when it would do the most good in his ongoing campaign against the ideological state—and which had the potential to become the checkmate move in his chess game with the regime.
Not until 1978, as Solzhenitsyn—by then living in Vermont—put together his first, twenty-volume Collected Works, did he return In the First Circle to its authentic form of ninety-six chapters, each of which was refined to take on an aesthetic unity of its own. In the version now reaching us, nine chapters are entirely new to English-language readers, and a dozen more are substantially altered. It is a testament to Solzhenitsyn’s artistic power that an unperfected version of In the First Circle not only received high praise from the start but retained a wide readership through four decades. He died secure in the conviction that the book he left to posterity was even better.
The English translator of the canonical text is Harry T. Willetts, renowned for combining fidelity to Solzhenitsyn’s rich, complex Russian with supple equivalents in English prose, and the only person Solzhenitsyn fully trusted to render his fiction in English. Willetts was pressing to finish his work right up to the time of his death at age eighty-two in 2005. The editing of the English text entailed filling in a few blanks left by Willetts, tying up loose ends, regularizing punctuation and other mechanical details, and replacing Briticisms with American diction and idiom.
“IN THE FIRST CIRCLE” fairly represents Solzhenitsyn’s theory of literature. He adheres closely to the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Rather than invent characters and strands of plot out of his imagination, he takes actual, verifiable events that transpired in places that can be located on maps, and his characters are based on real-life prototypes, a number of whom are known through historical sources. His process of transmuting reality into fiction entails imaginatively delving into the inner lives of the characters and reconstructing the motives behind their actions. 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.
Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to the Russian literary tradition is also revealed in his embracing a sense of continuity between literary art and the realm of moral values. Shunning the moral relativism that permeates modern thought, he unapologetically treats good and evil and the human soul as metaphysical realities. Instead of camouflaging the didactic impulse, he accepts the age-old definition of literature as delightful instruction. Like his great predecessors Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he allows his characters to engage in colloquies about big ideas. His literary theory is laid out most clearly, if briefly, in the opening section of his Nobel Lecture, in which he contrasts two kinds of artists. One kind starts with subjectivity and “imagines himself the creator of an autonomous spiritual world.” The other starts with the objective order and “recognizes above himself a higher power and joyfully works as a humble apprentice under God’s heaven,” accepting that “it was not he who created this world” and that “there can be no doubt about its foundations.”
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag-based fiction typically originates in autobiography. The works are populated largely by characters he knew, and he does not hesitate to use himself as a prototype. He typically presents one constricted place as the primary setting and concentrates the time of the action into a brief period. In the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in a prison research institute, the slang term for which is sharashka. It is located in a Moscow suburb named Marfino (slightly disguised as Mavrino in the eighty-seven-chapter version), specifically in a former seminary building that the Soviet authorities turned into a place of incarceration, a metamorphosis that has both historical and symbolic significance. The approximately three years Solzhenitsyn spent there, 1947–50, are compressed in the novel into four days, December 24–27, 1949, the symbolically charged period of Western Christmastide, which in that year followed the extravagant national celebrations of Stalin’s seventieth birthday on December 21. At times the focus switches to settings and characters located outside the sharashka; these shifts establish an inside-outside dialectic that impels readers to contemplate the integral relationship between the restrictive institutions of the penal system and the oppressive realities of the Soviet Union as a whole. Similarly the compressed time frame is supplemented by many episodes of flashback. The gallery of characters is huge, constituting a top-to-bottom cross section of Soviet society. Inside the Marfino institute are the zeks (slang for “prisoners”) plus their keepers and civilian employees. Among the numerous characters who reside outside the sharashka, many have either working or personal relationships with the zeks. Solzhenitsyn brings in such historical perso
nages as Stalin himself and his powerful Minister of State Security, Viktor Abakumov. Even Eleanor Roosevelt comes onstage for a hilarious cameo appearance (chapter 59).
The denizens of this sharashka are charged with the state project of developing a telephone encryption device designed to identify the voices of individuals whose telephone conversations are monitored by the state’s omnipresent recording system; they are forced to play the lead role in the detective story. To prop up the morale of these imprisoned scientists and technicians, the Gulag administration permits them amenities forbidden to run-of-the-mill zeks stuck in the conventional labor camps. The sharashka zeks enjoy adequate food, access to tobacco and books, space to walk, and time to talk, so that a prisoner newly arrived from the camps wonders if he has died and gone to heaven. But no, he is told, he has reached the “first circle” of hell, which in Dante’s Inferno spared virtuous pagans the active torments of hell’s lower circles. The Dantean title enables Solzhenitsyn to employ one of his favorite literary devices: understatement. The title character of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich experiences a long workday in forbiddingly cold weather as almost a good day. In the First Circle places zeks in the mildest precinct of the Gulag. Paradoxically readers vicariously experience Ivan Denisovich’s day as unbearable and the zeks’ loss of freedom as the essence of hell.