The First Circle
Jun. 14th, 2025 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherThe First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an account of a few days in the lives of prisoners in Stalinist Russia, in a "special prison" that houses scientists and engineers who have been set to work on technical projects for the government. (The title is a reference to Dante's Inferno, which divides Hell into circles of increasing severity; the special prisoners, who get better treatment than in the regular prisons and the labour camps, are in the most comfortable outermost circle, but they're still in Hell.)
It's a story about arbitrary cruelty and deprivation, but it's also a story about human connection and friendship and unexpected kindnesses. There are obstacles and also reasons to carry on despite the obstacles.
It's in the tradition of long Russian novels with large casts you need a score card to keep straight. The edition I read has a two-and-a-half page cast list at the front; it wasn't, in my experience, much help in telling the prisoners apart, since they were all listed as "[name]: prisoner at Mavrino", which didn't tell me anything I hadn't already managed on my own. All the personal details that actually served to distinguish them, like what they were in for and which ones held which beliefs and which was the one who was planning an escape attempt, were left for the reader to discover along the way. I think I had a fairly firm grip of who was who by the end, but there were probably connections I missed making while I was still sorting it out.
I found reading the book was an oddly - "relaxing" isn't the right word, but I didn't feel the need to worry about where the plot was going or how long it was going to take to get there. It's got the rhythm of prison life, where things happen when they happen and there's no reason to expect a big dramatic climax. It was clear from very early on that it wasn't going to end with everybody's problems solved, or a big heroic gesture that saves the day, so there was no reason to be impatient. (There was a point, about three-quarters of the way through, where I did start to wonder if we were going to get at least a medium-sized heroic gesture, but the moment passed.)
One of the parts of the novel I found most compelling was when the narrative stepped outside the prison for a few chapters to follow Nadya, the wife of one of the political prisoners, showing how she's isolated by not being able to tell anyone what's happened to her husband and facing tough decisions about her future. One of the prisoners remarks later in the story (I forget whether it's Nadya's husband who says it) that in a way the prisoners have it easier than their wives, because the prisoners can be fatalistic about what happens to them as they're carried along in the stream of prison life to a future outside their control, and they're surrounded by people in the same boat, while the wives have to struggle every day and have nobody to share it with. The denouement of Nadya's plot strand is typical of the kind of resolution that's on offer in the novel: none of her problems have actually gone away, and she still has an almost impossible decision to make, but at least she's made a friend she can talk to about it all.
I found out from Wikipedia, when I went to look after I'd finished reading, that my old second-hand copy of the novel isn't the complete version of the text, which wasn't published in English until 2009. The version that was available in English before then was an edited-down version that Solzhenitsyn made in an attempt to produce something the Soviet censors might allow to be published; the full version is nine chapters longer and some of the characters' motivations are different. (Reading the description of how the inciting incident goes down in the full version, I'm inclined to think that the edited version is more artistically satisfying, but that might just be because I read it first and in context.) And apparently in the full version one of the prisoners dies who doesn't in the edited down version, but none of the descriptions I've read mention who it was.
Some of the details of the technical projects - the boss who doesn't understand the technicalities and makes rash promises to the client about what can be achieved and how quickly, the project managers who regret that they never get to do any hands-on work any more, the workers who run the gamut from deeply interested in the work to spending as much time as possible sneakily working on their own personal projects instead - reminded me of some big technical projects I've worked on, or heard about from others... though at least I can say that I never had a client who could have had us all shot if we missed a deadline.
It's a story about arbitrary cruelty and deprivation, but it's also a story about human connection and friendship and unexpected kindnesses. There are obstacles and also reasons to carry on despite the obstacles.
It's in the tradition of long Russian novels with large casts you need a score card to keep straight. The edition I read has a two-and-a-half page cast list at the front; it wasn't, in my experience, much help in telling the prisoners apart, since they were all listed as "[name]: prisoner at Mavrino", which didn't tell me anything I hadn't already managed on my own. All the personal details that actually served to distinguish them, like what they were in for and which ones held which beliefs and which was the one who was planning an escape attempt, were left for the reader to discover along the way. I think I had a fairly firm grip of who was who by the end, but there were probably connections I missed making while I was still sorting it out.
I found reading the book was an oddly - "relaxing" isn't the right word, but I didn't feel the need to worry about where the plot was going or how long it was going to take to get there. It's got the rhythm of prison life, where things happen when they happen and there's no reason to expect a big dramatic climax. It was clear from very early on that it wasn't going to end with everybody's problems solved, or a big heroic gesture that saves the day, so there was no reason to be impatient. (There was a point, about three-quarters of the way through, where I did start to wonder if we were going to get at least a medium-sized heroic gesture, but the moment passed.)
One of the parts of the novel I found most compelling was when the narrative stepped outside the prison for a few chapters to follow Nadya, the wife of one of the political prisoners, showing how she's isolated by not being able to tell anyone what's happened to her husband and facing tough decisions about her future. One of the prisoners remarks later in the story (I forget whether it's Nadya's husband who says it) that in a way the prisoners have it easier than their wives, because the prisoners can be fatalistic about what happens to them as they're carried along in the stream of prison life to a future outside their control, and they're surrounded by people in the same boat, while the wives have to struggle every day and have nobody to share it with. The denouement of Nadya's plot strand is typical of the kind of resolution that's on offer in the novel: none of her problems have actually gone away, and she still has an almost impossible decision to make, but at least she's made a friend she can talk to about it all.
I found out from Wikipedia, when I went to look after I'd finished reading, that my old second-hand copy of the novel isn't the complete version of the text, which wasn't published in English until 2009. The version that was available in English before then was an edited-down version that Solzhenitsyn made in an attempt to produce something the Soviet censors might allow to be published; the full version is nine chapters longer and some of the characters' motivations are different. (Reading the description of how the inciting incident goes down in the full version, I'm inclined to think that the edited version is more artistically satisfying, but that might just be because I read it first and in context.) And apparently in the full version one of the prisoners dies who doesn't in the edited down version, but none of the descriptions I've read mention who it was.
Some of the details of the technical projects - the boss who doesn't understand the technicalities and makes rash promises to the client about what can be achieved and how quickly, the project managers who regret that they never get to do any hands-on work any more, the workers who run the gamut from deeply interested in the work to spending as much time as possible sneakily working on their own personal projects instead - reminded me of some big technical projects I've worked on, or heard about from others... though at least I can say that I never had a client who could have had us all shot if we missed a deadline.
