THE NARRATIVE POINT OF VIEW used in this novel is both sophisticated and, as will become clear, perfectly suited to the novelist’s purposes. Solzhenitsyn follows what he has called the “polyphonic” principle of novelistic construction. This is a method by which characters take their turns as the central character of a chapter or a series of chapters, and in each of these units the narrative is presented from the point of view and in the language of the given character. In each case the basic account retains the third-person format combined with the subjectivity that the first-person mode would normally feature. The technical term for this type of narrative is erlebte Rede, a German phrase that means “experienced speech,” sometimes rendered in English as “narrated monologue.” The “polyphonic” aspect simply points to the presence of many such individual viewpoints and voices. In principle, no single character dominates; whereas one character, Gleb Nerzhin, is identifiably the author’s alter ego, three others (Rubin, Volodin, Stalin) are on center stage for about as many pages. Polyphony has much in common with the method of drama, and the writing of plays occupied Solzhenitsyn in the years preceding the writing of this novel. Moreover polyphony is a highly effective technique for bringing out the fundamental worldview of each character. Sometimes the respective worldviews are refined through dialogical engagement, and sometimes they simply clash; either way the juxtaposition of competing worldviews is a vital function of the novel.
Although Solzhenitsyn’s self-inflicted cuts injured the novel, it would be understandable if readers of a well-received text that they did not know was truncated were to feel twinges of loss over certain deviations from the novel they cherished. One should not, of course, overstate the differences between the intended and doctored versions; after all, Solzhenitsyn was trying to get as much of his design as possible into print. Thus characters who are modified remain recognizably the same persons, and the detective-story plot retains its basic structure. The primary moral themes also survive intact, though politically sensitive subsidiary themes, such as whether the Soviet Union should have the atomic bomb and whether Stalin had served the tsarist secret police as a double agent, fell victim to the scalpel.
In no aspect of the novelist’s craft is the superiority of the uncut version on clearer display than in the treatment of character; indeed this novel is so thoroughly steeped in characterization that a discussion of its themes must be interwoven with an account of its cast. Of the five individuals who rise to the top level of importance—Gleb Nerzhin, Lev Rubin, Dmitri Sologdin, Innokenty Volodin, and Joseph Stalin—all of them, with the possible exception of Rubin, the unwavering Marxist, are richer, fuller characters in the uncensored text, and the two characters who are arguably the most important, Nerzhin and Volodin, undergo the type of change that distinguishes dynamic fictional characters from static ones.
As important as characterization is, however, plot is the fictional element that crystallizes at a stroke the contrast between the two versions. The instigating action in the opening chapter sets the terms for the episodes and thematic developments to come. In the eighty-seven-chapter version Volodin, an up-and-coming Soviet diplomat, makes a risky call from a public telephone to warn his well-placed family doctor against sharing with Western colleagues information about an experimental drug, because the paranoid Soviet authorities would consider such an act a betrayal of a state secret. The phones are disconnected, and the accompanying click signals to Volodin that the secret police were monitoring the call. The recorded phone call brings together the world of the sharashka and the circumambient Soviet setting, when the Marfino zeks are instructed to discover the identity of the audiotaped voice. Their investigative work succeeds, and Innokenty takes his first step toward the brutal world of the Gulag. The ninety-six-chapter version retains the recorded phone call, but everything else is different. Volodin places the call to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to warn of an impending espionage operation in New York at which a Soviet spy will pick up secrets about atomic bomb technology. (This episode, unlike the invented one about the family doctor, is taken from real life, as befits Solzhenitsyn’s penchant; the Soviet spy’s name is Georgy Koval.) It is no wonder that Solzhenitsyn softened Volodin’s overtly anti-Soviet act by turning it into a gesture of basic human decency. Official Moscow would never let an author tell the story of Koval the spy. Yet this softening lowers significantly the moral stakes involved in Volodin’s action. That diminution of the novel was the high price Solzhenitsyn felt compelled to pay in order to try to get the bulk of the book published.
In the opening chapter, faced with the moral dilemma of what to do about the stunning secret that has fallen into his possession, Innokenty Volodin asks himself, “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?” This rhetorical question implicitly establishes the ideal of “humanity,” which reverberates throughout the novel. Volodin the innocent answers the question with an action: He makes the phone call. And he changes his life. No character is more radically altered from one version of the novel to the other than Volodin. In the shortened form he is a jaded young member of the privileged Soviet elite. In the full form he is a young functionary in the state apparatus whose moral evolution leads him to commit treason against the regime of which he is a part. Readers are left to ponder, along with him, the ethics of betraying the worst sort of regime—or a modern variation on the long-standing theme of the legitimacy of tyrannicide.
Solzhenitsyn achieves Volodin’s transformation by restoring extended flashback sequences. Chapter 44, titled “In the Open,” traces a walking day trip by Volodin and his young sister-in-law Klara. The countryside they traverse comes to symbolize for Volodin the now-disfigured face of perennial, persevering Russia. He is deeply moved by the boundless and majestic vistas, tragically besmirched as they have become by abandoned villages and desecrated churches. Later, in another flashback (chapter 61), Volodin travels to visit his mother’s brother, Uncle Avenir, a character not present in the trimmed-down version. Volodin decides to make this trip after stumbling upon letters written by his now-dead mother. As a boy he was thrilled by tales of his absent father’s bold actions on the Bolshevik side of the Civil War, considering his mother weak by comparison. But her letters reveal that she was independent-minded and knowledgeably dedicated to traditional Russian culture. Volodin hopes his uncle can illuminate him further. Avenir, who leads a reclusive life in an out-of-the-way village, has managed to accumulate a huge collection of old newspapers documenting the flagrant Soviet lies about the actual course of events in twentieth-century Russia. The list of cover-ups and deliberate misrepresentations is utterly overwhelming, and Volodin is impressed by his uncle’s thought that a regime capable of such massive deception must not have access to the atom bomb. Volodin’s new insights propel him toward the previously unimaginable decision to make his fateful phone call.
Whereas Nerzhin remains recognizably the author’s alter ego, the uncut version demonstrates the considerable extent to which Volodin also stands in for the author. Volodin’s arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment mirror the author’s experiences so closely as almost to merge fact and fiction. As Nerzhin and Volodin confront the apparatus of the totalitarian state, they move through parallel stages of intellectual and moral development. Both characters are marked by an early phase of unthinking conformity with Soviet ideology. Both reinforce a love of country through their profound appreciation of its natural beauty. Both find their minds opened by suffering. Both move through a philosophical phase of skepticism, which in Volodin’s case centers on Epicurus’s thought and in Nerzhin’s case is akin to Socratic questioning rather than to a cynicism rooted in relativism. In Volodin, we glimpse the author before he became a zek; in Nerzhin, the author afterward.
The process of “lightening” the novel left Rubin, for all his intrinsic interest as a character, essentially unchanged. In sharp contrast, it short-circuited Sologdin’s characterization more than anyone else’s except Volodin’s. A brilliant engineer and powerful p
olemicist, Sologdin is Rubin’s main ideological adversary, and he relishes reciting the evils of the Soviet system. In the abbreviated version, however, his critique of collectivism tends to make him sound like an eccentric contrarian, whereas in the complete version his iconoclasm stems from his Christian convictions. As the zeks’ conversations proceed, Sologdin predicts that Nerzhin will move beyond his current skepticism and “will come to God”—by which he specifies that he means “a concrete Christian God,” along with the full accompaniment of classic Christian doctrines. Of the three argumentative friends at Marfino, Nerzhin is the most dynamic character. Numerous attributes of his—his birth date, education in mathematics, status as a married man, even physical appearance—faithfully mirror his literary creator. Solzhenitsyn’s three years at Marfino were crucial to his moral and spiritual development; and Dimitri Panin, the prototype of Sologdin, writes that Nerzhin conveys “an extraordinarily truthful and accurate picture” of Solzhenitsyn’s inner being, as well.
The world of In the First Circle is a radically inhuman world, whether one resides inside or outside the Gulag system. The ideal of “humanity” derived from Volodin’s early rhetorical question comes to function as the criterion for judging human quality in every character. The concept of humanity includes both normal human desires and the kind of simple decency that needs no theoretical explanation; it applies to quotidian and life-changing decisions alike. Positive characters either are drawn instinctively to this ideal or else, like Nerzhin, aspire to it consciously, while negative characters suppress it in themselves and wish to destroy it in others. The paradoxical presence of authentically humane instincts in the ideologically fixated Rubin is precisely what makes him such an interesting, often appealing, figure. Minor figures, too, are judged by the criterion of genuine humanity; they, too, are imbued with a moral seriousness that makes them intriguing and significant. What does it mean to be a human being? The novel’s central theme can be defined no more narrowly than that, though that definition also could be no broader than it is.
The pursuit of this ideal of true humanity finds its focal point in Nerzhin. For this thinking man, however, realizing his full humanity requires not only moral behavior but also the construction of a worldview supportive of such behavior, a comprehensive philosophy of life that takes into account the eternal questions of human nature, the nature of the universe, and the source of meaning. Solzhenitsyn entered adulthood as a loyal Communist, had his ideological faith shaken by prison, and retreated into skepticism for the time being. Chapter 47, which the author deleted because it wrestles with the question of whether it is morally acceptable for the Soviet state to have access to nuclear weaponry, contains a description of a key step in his alter ego’s philosophical odyssey: Nerzhin has definitively broken with his youthful Marxism. He now denies that justice is class based, asserting instead that justice is “the foundation of the universe” and that human beings are “born with a sense of justice in our souls.” Thus he begins to believe that an objective moral order is built into the universe and that there is an absolute distinction between justice and injustice, good and evil. This change of mind prepares him to try “going to the people” (in chapter 66), not with Marxist shibboleths in mind but in the spirit of the long-standing Russian idea that the folk wisdom of the peasantry provides a reliable moral compass. He is drawn to the humble janitor, Spiridon, whose homespun but rock-solid moral sense provides a welcome contrast to the abstract philosophizing of Nerzhin’s intellectual friends. When Nerzhin, after sufficient observation, concludes nevertheless that “the people” are not in all ways morally superior, he decides that his only route to becoming a fully actualized human being is to fashion his soul by thinking for himself. By virtue of his unrelenting search for a principled moral point of view, Nerzhin’s odyssey carries him beyond not only Marxism but also skepticism. His open-ended journey has brought him to the edge of religious belief. Evidence external to the text reveals that Solzhenitsyn himself did embrace in adulthood the religious belief in which he had been reared as a boy; but that destination of his spiritual odyssey lies beyond the Marfino years, and fidelity to the facts forbade his transferring it to Nerzhin.
One major character in the canonical version stands apart from all others, just as he did in real life: Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, alias Stalin, Man of Steel. The four consecutive chapters about him in the trimmed-down version grow to five (chapters 19–23), and the average length of each chapter increases. Augmenting historical information with artistic license, the author imagines the inner workings of the dictator’s mind, in the same way that he sought to characterize Lenin in eleven chapters scattered through the four volumes of his epic The Red Wheel. From one version to the other Solzhenitsyn’s Stalin does not change his mind about anything; rather, his mind is explored in greater detail. Stalin is measured by the same criterion of “humanity” that applies to all people, and by dint of a lifetime of antihuman actions, he fails the test utterly. Stalin is a creature of darkness, and readers will remember the indelible picture of his nocturnal lucubrations, which yield little satisfaction for himself and only torment for the millions under his control. Imagining himself the guardian of the abstract masses, he actually views “the people” as the principal impediment to his megalomaniacal fantasies. In Dantean terms he is as distant in spirit from the denizens of the first circle as possible; Solzhenitsyn places him in the pit of hell alongside Satan, where the greatest of malefactors are not consumed by fire but encased in ice, frozen in isolation, utterly immobilized. According to Christian tradition the greatest torment of hell is eternal separation from God, with all hope of divine fellowship abandoned. Djugashvili the onetime seminarian has turned himself into Stalin the ruler, but also the greatest victim, of the infernal empire. His only social relationships are those with his henchmen, little Stalins who have allowed him to shape them in his image and who carry out his diabolical will in the evanescent kingdom of hell on earth. Solzhenitsyn gained his worldwide fame by defiantly opposing the Soviet regime and undermining its legitimacy. The Dantean metaphors of In the First Circle cinch the indictment as only art can do.
Beyond the literary elements of setting, plot, theme, and especially character, language per se rises to the level of being a theme in its own right. Language is not only the medium of literature but also the most basic attribute of the human condition, traditionally understood as the sine qua non that distinguishes human beings from animals. It is profoundly symbolic that the inhuman state described in these pages is bent on suppressing, distorting, and perverting all aspects of language. Volodin’s warning phone call is cut off. Stalin commissions work on a device that will scramble speech. Everyone must constantly be on guard against potential informers who might be listening in on their talk. Harsh restrictions concerning what is allowed to be discussed during spouses’ prison meetings aim to reduce the conversation between man and wife to little more than an exchange of platitudes. Nerzhin and his wife, Nadya, must resort to hints and phonetic masking in an achingly inadequate attempt to communicate their complex feelings.
The state even requires prisoners to write optimistic lies to their loved ones. In fact, lies pervade all levels of the system, from the false reports presented to Stalin by his ministers to the gross misrepresentations of Soviet propaganda about history and such mundane things as the true contents of a truck conveying prisoners but labeled “Meat.” The same mendacity infuses the carnival of deception in which Mrs. Roosevelt and her entourage of Quaker matrons visit a prison cell that has been hurriedly beautified to look like a vacation resort with extravagant amenities. Thus, Solzhenitsyn’s last words to his fellow countrymen as he departed into exile were titled “Live Not by Lies!” And, in a real sense, the assault on language amounts to a recognition of its crucial importance, and Stalin accordingly labors to compose an essay on linguistics. The same acknowledgment of the centrality of language can be seen in Rubin’s attempts to buttress his Marxist faith by far-fetched
etymological comparisons, as well as in Sologdin’s equally eccentric project to purify Russian by inventing substitutes for foreign words. In contrast to these problematic undertakings, Nerzhin’s fact-based study of phonetics is presented as scientifically valid.
IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE, justice delayed need not be justice denied. The day of In the First Circle has come. The timing of its unveiling may be particularly propitious. This is the first work by Solzhenitsyn to go to press in English since he died. A major author’s death fosters reflection on his overall achievement. Long gone are the distractions of celebrity and controversy that once beclouded Solzhenitsyn. This is the perfect time for fresh eyes. This is also a time to wonder how well In the First Circle will hold up through the reckoning to come. Remembering that from antiquity a literary classic has been defined as a book still read a century after appearing, one might say that the approval since 1968 of a novel that had not yet been revealed in its whole glory has easily given it a forty-year head start toward fulfilling that definition. An intriguing intimation of the prospects for the canonical text in English translation comes from the Russian experience with the canonical text itself, which has undergone only minor touching up during its three decades of availability. In 2006 a Russian television network presented its versions of six classic Russian novels: Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and one more, the only one by a then-living author, Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle. That is fitting company for the novel to keep.
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