In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, review

Life on the gilded edge of a precipice

‘Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.’

In the First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I first heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during my second term of university when a lecturer asked the room of a hundred politics students; “Who has read any Solzhenitsyn?” Silence. “Hm. Then who has heard of Solzhenitsyn?” He then asked, only to again be met by silence. Our lecturer thought this extraordinary. Solzhenitsyn was not only a Nobel Prize winner, but was also one of the most famous writers in the world only a few years before our generation had learned to read, with a recognition and reverence that transcended the literary and political spheres. On hearing this, as had become a habit in my undergraduate years, the more I learned, the more my ignorance seemed to grow.

I resolved there and then to address this and learn more about the heroic figure. That summer I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on a windy beach in Devon in one sitting. It was astounding. A compelling distillation of horror, recounting one day in an Arctic Gulag that the narrator actually considers to have been a fairly good day in the life of a Zek. It was an excellent introduction to Solzhenitsyn, and a book that doesn’t lose any of its power on re-reading.

Next up was an excellently abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago. Also read at a furious pace during a scorching hot summer week in 2018, this time while recovering from an operation. I couldn’t put it down. All while the most entertaining World Cup of my life was playing out in the background, aptly enough, hosted by Russia. I recognised some of the host cities by the gulag ‘islands’ that made up Stalin’s Archipelago of hidden state slavery in Solzhenitsyn’s testament. Finishing the book I was in no doubt that the Communist state of the USSR was the zenith of man’s inhumanity in the 20th century. I knew I had to read the unabridged version, but accepted that it may require a further lengthy convalescence to read the full 2,000+ pages.

Lockdown presented such an opportunity, thankfully without the illness, but it was to be another of Solzhenitsyn’s masterpieces of the gulag that I would use the time to pore over; In the First Circle. It is a point worth mentioning from the outset that the book’s publication has a story almost as compelling as the novel itself. A censored version of the book, The First Circle, was published in 1968 in both the Soviet Union and the West, during Krushchev’s period of ‘de-Stalinastion’ (incidentally, ‘The Butcher of Ukraine’ was also the ultimate arbiter that read and approved the publication One Day six years earlier). Despite being hurriedly expurgated by Solzhenitsyn himself to ensure publication in his native Russia, the lesser novel won critical acclaim and international praise on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The uncensored edition published in 2009 that English readers now have the opportunity to read reinstates the deleted five chapters and reinvigorates the characters and plot into the form that the author originally intended. I found it heartening to learn that Solzhenitsyn died knowing his novel would be published in full four months later.

In the First Circle is a cogent testament to the claim that Solzhenitsyn was in fact a 19th Century Russian author born in the 20th Century, as a work of literary, political and satiric genius. It has the profound depth of Dostoyevsky and the omniscient eye of Tolstoy, but with a distinct ‘Solzhenitsyn-ness’ that is as political as it is existential. This novel follows in the rich tradition of its author’s literary forebears in plumbing the human soul to its hidden depths and questioning exactly what it means to be alive.

The political lesson of Solzhenitsyn’s novel is an indictment of the Soviet Union’s essential absurdity. Unlike the meritocracy that communism masquerades as in theory, we see people in positions of power due to their fealty and relative stupidity — for no tyrant wants an inferior with a critical mind of their own — sinister principles which undermined the Soviet Union and led to the most atrocious inefficiencies which counted their costs in human lives. Millions of men (and they were mostly men) freezing or starving to death as they worked in the gulag labour camps in the Siberian wastes, where hope only extended as far as finding a little fish in your ration of watery soup. Then there were the luckiest of all Zeks: those living in relative splendour of the privileged Sharashka camps, ‘in the first circle’ of Dante’s Inferno, who we meet in this novel. These prisoners of fortune could live well in the Sharashka, but only in serving the ever greater expansion of state control over their fellow citizens and perhaps making themselves too useful to ever release.

Along with the absurdity, Solzhenitsyn conveys the irony of the USSR with the deft understatement necessary for any satire. Compared to the Zeks of a camp like Kolyma in the Arctic Circle where if the -40°C cold doesn’t kill you, the mercury you are mining for 14 hours a day will burn through your skin and infest your brain, prisoners of the Sharashka have it easy. They eat white bread, butter and meat. They can exercise, own books, attend political lectures, write letters and even occasionally receive visits from family. We compare their lives to those in positions of power, inside the camp and outside of it, and conclude with some disquiet that the Zeks of the Sharashka are in fact the most free citizens of the entire USSR. Even Stalin, whose paranoid mind we get a glimpse into for five tantalising chapters, is a prisoner of the system. Secure in his little set of rooms in the Kremlin, reading his own published work, musing on his own magnificence as he drinks from a locked decanter in a windowless room which only he can open; Stalin is crushed under his own thumb.

But the fortunate Zeks of the Sharashka, free as they are, live on a gilded edge of the precipice. They are well aware that at any time the capriciousness of the Soviet state could deliver them from their privileged first circle to the frozen centre of hell on earth like Kolyma. An Arctic wilderness where any stretch of time, if not simply the transport train there, was a death sentence for many.

In War and Peace Tolstoy wrote that only prisoners have souls, a notion held by many Zeks, and by Solzhenitsyn in particular. And beyond the political dimension of the book, there is a presence which takes up Tolstoy’s refrain and soars above the gulag and the Soviet Union, drawing power through the suffering of the individual in a collective system which sought to crush it. As the Solzhenitsyn wrote in Cancer Ward:

‘The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.’

Drawing on his experience of life in both the privileged first circle and the frozen wastes of the gulag, the author has all he needs to interrogate some of the deepest questions. How does one find meaning in life? How to live honestly in a deceitful world? What is love compared to power? Solzhenitsyn provides varied perspectives in answering these questions, and along with his skill as a writer, through the wonderful polyphonic medium that he employs, one feels as if he is reading an epic of the Soviet Union, written by Leo Tolstoy.