The First Circle [Import] [Paperback]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Fontana / Collins (1974)
• ISBN-10: 0006136389
• ISBN-13: 978-0006136385
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,442,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Prisoner's Dilemma, February 19, 2009

By 

J C E Hitchcock (Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The First Circle (Mass Market Paperback)

Like Solzhenitsyn's first literary work, the novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", his first full-length novel "The First Circle" is an autobiographical work based upon his experiences as a political prisoner of the Soviet regime. The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle of Hell in "The Divine Comedy", that being the circle reserved for virtuous pagans, especially the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, who because of their paganism were denied entry to Heaven but because of their virtue were not otherwise punished.

The novel is set in Mavrino, a place which can be considered part of the "First Circle" of the Soviet penal system. Mavrino, a former stately home now converted to a "sharashka", or special prison, is a very different place to the Gulag described in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". It is not situated in Siberia, or some other remote part of the country, but in the Moscow suburbs. The prisoners, who are mostly intellectuals, especially scientists, engineers or mathematicians, are adequately fed and enjoy good working conditions. They are put to work on technical projects of use to the Soviet military or to the MVD, the organisation which was later to become the KGB.

The novel is unusual in that there is no single main character. One of the prisoners, the mathematician Gleb Nerzhin, is said to be an autobiographical character, based upon Solzhenitsyn himself, but several other characters are given equal prominence. Instead, we are introduced to a wide cross-section of the prisoners, some of the guards, officials and free workers in the prison, as well as a few outsiders. What can be described as the main plot is set in motion when Innokenty Volodin, an official at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, makes a telephone call to a doctor friend, warning him not to give samples of a new drug to a French colleague as he fears that such an action could be construed as espionage by the authorities. Unfortunately for Volodin, the call has been recorded by the secret police and a copy of the recording is sent to Mavrino, where some of the prisoners are already working on a project to invent a system of "voiceprints" which will enable an individual to be infallibly identified from a recording of his voice.

The main action takes place over only three days (December 25th-27th 1949), but there are numerous flashbacks which Solzhenitsyn uses to fill in the background of his characters. We learn that few, if any, of the prisoners have committed serious crimes; most are either guilty of trivial offences or else have been framed by the authorities, normally under the notorious Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code which defined "counter-revolutionary activity" and which enabled Stalin to imprison as "enemies of the people" any opponents of the Communist system or of his rule. (Solzhenitsyn himself was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for some unflattering remarks he made about the "big boss" in a private letter which was intercepted by the military censors).

The main philosophical theme of the novel is the moral dilemma facing the prisoners. They are acutely aware that they are much better off than the prisoners in the "regular" Gulags, but some have moral scruples about working for the system that is responsible for their suffering, especially as many of the projects they are working on are designed to help the secret police track down and capture other dissidents. The book ends with several prisoners, including Nerzhin and the physicist Illarion Gerasimovich, being transferred to the much harsher regime of the labour camps after they refuse to cooperate with the authorities. Contrasting with their attitude is that of another prisoner, the philologist Lev Rubin who is a key worker on the "voiceprint" project. Despite his imprisonment Rubin remains a convinced Communist and supporter of the Soviet system, who carries out his work enthusiastically. It is his research that leads to the arrest not only of Volodin but also of his totally innocent colleague Shchevronok. (The "voiceprint" system is not as foolproof as Rubin had hoped, and he is forced to admit that he cannot be certain which of the two men made the fatal telephone call. To be on the safe side, therefore, the authorities arrest them both).

This does not necessarily mean that Rubin is the villain of the novel; indeed, he is said to be based on Solzhenitsyn's friend and fellow-dissident Lev Kopelev. On a personal level Rubin is intelligent, cultured and humane. Solzhenitsyn's quarrel is not with the man himself but rather with the ideology he represents and with the "end justifies the means" mentality which that ideology fosters. Rubin believes that anything that furthers the interests of the Party will also further the interests of mankind, so if the Party's interests require that men be murdered, tortured or unjustly imprisoned, then murder, torture and unjust imprisonment- even his own- are morally justified.

Indeed, there are remarkably few villains in the novel, apart from real-life individuals such as Stalin and his brutal Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov. (Stalin is briefly but memorably depicted as a paranoid and self-pitying megalomaniac). Although Mavrino has its fair share of brutal guards and venal stoolpigeons, Solzhenitsyn reveals a certain sympathy even for the officials in charge of the prison, such as the Head of Research Colonel Yakanov, confronted with the impossible demands of his superiors, who in turn are placed in an impossible position by the demands of the Party leaders. Even Abakumov lives in constant fear of Stalin.

During my youth in the 1970s and 1980s, Solzhenitsyn was a much talked-about author in the West, although (or perhaps because) his work was banned in Russia. He was hailed on the political Right, and also by some on the non-Communist Left, as one of the Soviet Union's most prominent dissidents. With the end of the Cold War, however, the position was reversed. Although his works could now be published in Russia, interest in him in the West began to wane; his conservative Russian nationalism, his adherence to the Orthodox faith, his support for President Putin and his trenchant criticisms of Western materialism made him an unlikely ally for many of those Westerners who had once feted him. Reading "The First Circle" for the first time made me wonder if we had in fact feted him for the wrong reasons, for transient political rather than artistic ones. Although he was indeed a strong critic of the Soviet system, he was more than that. Like others among his works, the book is a powerful testament to the power of the human spirit to meet hardship and oppression with stoicism and dignity.