The First Circle | Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The First Circle | Alexander Solzhenitsyn | Harper & Row's de facto censorship

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The First Circle

	The First Circle Alexander Solzhenitsyn Bantam, 1981 average customer review:based on 21 reviews
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highly recommended

Much to identify with

What does a gulag for the learned elite have in common with an American corporation? Far too much. I read this book years ago, and wish that I could find my copy again. Every engineering education should commence with a reading and discussion of this most engaging book, alongside Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder covers the exterior of the engineering process in an American context of a specific time. Solzhenitsyn, though goes to the deep essential tension, of creativity commanded to flower, on a schedule, in the arid fields of rigid institutionalism.

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Harper & Row's de facto censorship

For the second time in the last fifteen years, Harper & Row (or HarperCollins now), which claims to own the world-wide publishing rights to The First Circle, has stopped printing this magnificent work. They did it once before in the mid-90's. When I protested to them that I could not find copies enough for my students in a Russian literature course, they shrugged me off. Happily, after letting the book languish for two years, they then licensed publishing rights to Northwestern University Press. But according to Northwestern University, Harper will not let them renew the license. Nor is Harper printing the novel. According to my latest phone call to them, they might-- "perhaps as early as winter, 2009." Ironic, is it not, that once censored in his own country, Solzhenitsyn now suffers the same fate because an American publisher, for reasons no one at Harper can explain, will not make it available to the reading public. I am hoping my students will be able to hunt down enough used copies to read it this spring, but . . . . Shame on Harper!

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beyond thought provoking

Solzhenitsyn's character development is always amazing but, this book went beyond anything I have ever experienced before. The story of Nerzhin and Nadya was especially moving and captivating. Volodin's story of the Lubyanka made me feel as though I was actually there within the cold, towering walls. It is incredible how Solzhenitsyn can bring his characters down to the deepest levels of dispair and yet provide a glimmer of hope and humanity. I have read a few of Solzhenitsyn's novels before, and this, my latest, was exceptional.

AN ALMOST GREAT BOOK

"The First Circle" is a deeep look into the hearts of people subject to near-absolute power. There is a quality of Kafka more than Tolstoy. The power is so distant. But then Solzhenitsyn takes himself and us into the mind of Stalin himself. This is the weakest part of the book. He makes sounds which he imagines to be Stalin's, as having Stalin think of going to Church- like Christians everywhere. One never feels inside Stalin. It seems almost a childlike view of the dictator. In many ways it is as one-sided, though not as propagandistic or overtly phony as the many "studies" of Hitler. "Ten years! That's no sentence. Thirty years."
One can see the horror of arbitrary power, but not look into the soul of its possessor. There is an immense suffering implied by the men driven away on the meat truck- the one who says they are leaving Hell and the other who says No! We are going there now. There is more reality in the suffering of a man who cares only for family. It is tempting to compare this book with "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo. I think Hugo's picture of victimhood is less realistic, more Romantic than Solzhenitsyn's. "The First Circle" is a book that ought to be read- that much I can honestly say--though I feel Solzhenitsyn bit off more than he could chew. It would have taken a Shakespeare to have told the story as powerfully, yet with more realism.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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