In The First Circle Bookclub!
From each according to his ability, to each according to what is available.
At the beginning of the essay in In The First Circle: A Novel (The Restored Text: The First Uncensored Edition)
After the cut, we’ll have a listing of the chapter titles (and the differences between the red and black versions, if any) and a handful of scenes, phrases, thoughts that stick out for me.
You, yes you! What did you think? What scenes, phrases, thoughts stuck out for you? (What did you think of Chapter Two, those of you who read the black version?)
(I’ll list the black chapters first, and the red chapter titles in parenthesis after, if there’s any change.)
- Torpedo (And Who Are You?)
- A Miscue (this chapter was not included in the expurgated version)
- Sharashka (Dante’s Idea)
- A Protestant Christmas
- Boogie-Woogie
- A Peaceful Existence
- A Woman’s Heart
- “Oh, Moment, Stay!”
- The Fifth Year in Harness
- The Rosicrucians
- The Enchanted Castle
- Number Seven
- He Should Have Lied
- The Blue Light
- A Girl! A Girl! (Every Man Needs a Girl!)
- A Troika of Liars (The Troika of Liars)
Little moments that stuck with me. In chapter one, we see where it gets its new title from when State Counselor Grade Two Innokenty Volodin changes how he imagines himself… no longer as a canoe to be sucked under the battleship that is the Great Lubyanka but a torpedo deliberately propelling towards it.
Chapter Two, if you’re reading the red version, is the chapter in which we watch the two poor schmoes in charge of listening to every single phone call that goes into the American Embassy. After a description of the doorways upon which “Authorized People Only” is emblazoned and the dull, lifeless hallways that are much less interesting than the sign promises, we see the schlubs in charge of listening to conversations about groceries intercept, and kinda mess up intercepting, Volodin’s phone call. The thing that grabbed me was that eavesdropper number one knew that eavesdropper number two had been told to keep an eye on him. How? Because he had been told to keep an eye on eavesdropper number two.
Chapter Three, Sharashka (Dante’s Idea), has the oldtimers meeting the fresh fish as they enter the camp the first time. Everybody wants to know what camps the new guys might have been transferred from and the exchange that made me chuckle was after a listing of names (Ozerlag, Luglag, Steplag, Kamyshlag), someone jokes about a frustrated poet in State Security who can’t write whole poems so just comes up with poetic names for new camps. This chapter is also the source of the (quite brilliant) line that opens this post.
Chapter Four, A Protestant Christmas, introduces us to Lev Rubin (a Jew and a Communist) who worked psyops against Germany and who found himself with a strange (indeed, illegal) affection for the people who he was once charged with converting to Communism… to the point where he spent Christmas Eve with them. My favorite understatement from this chapter is “Yet he could not convince them that in our complicated age socialist truth sometimes forces its way forward by a tortuous path. All he could do was select for them, as he did for History (and, without realizing it, for himself), only those current events that confirmed that the high road had been adequately predicted, ignoring those that seemed likely to divert it into a quagmire.”
Chapter Five, Boogie-Woogie, showed a lovely scene where people could feel free, even in prison… and could even complain about not being allowed to feel free, even in prison.
Chapter Six, A Peaceful Existence, introduces us to Gleb Nerzhin, yet another someone who was honest enough to end up in prison.
Chapter Seven, A Woman’s Heart, gives us Serafima Vitalievna, “free personnel”. Free people have the right to work eight hours a day… this is because their work adds no value. It is the prisoners, who have the right to work twelve, that actually ended up doing stuff. (I also loved the piece of information that said that professors who handed out low marks got upbraided for doing so… which resulted in students who didn’t have to study to graduate.) There’s a lovely bit of play between the idea that Serafima is seeing through the indoctrination that these prisoners are the worst of the dregs of society and how this is attributed to her just wanting a husband.
Chapter Eight, “Oh, Moment, Stay!”, has its title taken from the punchline of Faust. A book, it’s pointed out, everyone says is a work of genius but no one has ever read. “But I am in love—and I am happy! What do you say to that?” “What did you say?” “What can anybody say?”
Chapter Nine, The Fifth Year in Harness, is a brilliant exploration of the idea that, yep, you can be happy anywhere. “A prisoner five years between the shafts never hurries. He knows that what comes next can only be worse.”
Chapter Ten, The Rosicrucians, in this one, I was struck by the scene where two people who used to know each other happened to meet… but one was a prisoner. There was this strange dynamic where not only did they feel they had to pretend to have never met before, but they had this strange shrugging sensation between them as if they knew that it was perfectly capricious that one was a resident and one was just visiting.
Chapter Eleven, The Enchanted Castle, we meet one of the people that demonstrates how capricious the ordering actually is… a prisoner who got thrown in jail because Stalin (The Boss) was irritated by static when he was using the phone. The authorities found themselves wondering if they should have a trial for the person who was in charge of communications when Stalin yelled “who’s in charge of communications? Get rid of him!”
Chapter Twelve, Number Seven, there was a great little discussion about how nobody really knew, really, about much of anything when it came to what they were doing, so everybody agreed with each other and this consensus became what everyone knew. (As an aside, this chapter provides a *MAGNIFICENT* example of how to BS your way through an engineering talk.)
Chapter Thirteen, He Should Have Lied, we see one of the millions of little tragedies of this system. You can’t tell the truth to anybody. You can’t be friends with anybody. You can do stuff with them, but you have to lie about it first. (There’s also a bit of “The Past Is Another Country” going on with regards to the gender relations.)
Chapter Fourteen, The Blue Light, this is one of those lovely little chapters composed of little more than snippets of conversation, when it doesn’t matter who says what, where people bicker and discuss and philosophize and it reminds you that roommates are roommates. I was reminded of similar conversations in college.
Chapter Fifteen, A Girl! A Girl! (Every Man Needs a Girl!), has one of the great monologues in the book, given by Ruska (page 77, for the readers of the black; page 67, for readers of the red) the monologue on history… to be rebutted by Gleb with a simple affirmation of Truth. I think that Gleb’s little speech there comes straight from What Solzhenitsyn Really Thinks. Oh, and it ends with an absolute car wreck of a revelation. You spend the chapter feeling good and then encounter the conversation about who Ruska’s girl is. (Record scratching zurrrrrrurp) WHAT???
Chapter Sixteen, A Troika of Liars (The Troika of Liars), gives us insight into the crap that even the leaders have to put up with. The Zeks have it bad, but it’s a particular kind of bad. Management has a different kind of bad… but, hidden in the lies that everyone is throwing at each other, I recognized the good, old schedule slipping argument with the “why didn’t you give me a more accurate Level Of Effort estimate?” recrimination.
(For next week, we’re going to read Chapter 17, Hot Water (Chapter 16, No Hot Water for Tea) through Chapter 32, On the Path to a Million (Chapter 29, Soaring to the Ceiling). Chapter 23, Language as an Instrument for Production and Chapter 27, A Bit of Methodology are the two chapters that appear in the black version that don’t appear in the red.)
Anyway, what did you think? What did you like? What surprised you? What made you chuckle despite yourself?
One thing that keeps coming up over and over again is how reading this feels like reading some weird dystopian fiction… and then you’re dragged back into “nope, this is pretty much autobiography.”
The other thing that keeps coming up over and over again is “yeah, I’ve had that coversation… I’ve met that guy… I used to work for that guy…”Report
As I write, I’m about halfway through chapter 16 (A girl! A girl!). I’m struck by how many of the notable quotables you and I both found compelling:
That last one is poignant and calls to mind one of Chekhov’s short stories about a new prisoner sent to a work camp in Siberia, who tells his fellow prisoners about how beautiful and clever his girl back home is and how much he’s looking forward to seeing her again when he gets out and they all tell him to shut the hell up.
But really, I think these quotes, and the overall tone of the book, is an interesting inquiry into the nature of freedom. I guess it’s important to bear in mind that Solzhenitsyn hadn’t yet had a taste of western-style freedom when he wrote this, but the bit about whether the free peoples had chosen the right places of entertainment is remarkably insightful to that.
After all, the prisoners in the novel are aware that they’ve got it pretty good compared to what else is available. They get decent food. They get adequate amounts of time to sleep. And in many ways, they find ways to feel freer, in the sense of personal autonomy, than their captors. For most of them, it was exercising personal autonomy of criticizing Stalin and his government in some way or another that got them into the sharaska in the first place, and the sharaska didn’t change them at all.
Gleb Vikkkentievich Nerzhin seems to be the big hero, the “optimistic” figure of this sentiment. Nerzhin finds freedom and even ecstasy in intellectual engagement with his fellow well-educated prisoners, in the pages of a book, or other mental growth. I think all of us who regularly haunt the pages of LoOG can relate to that. He longs for his wife, cynically plays with Serafima’s emotions, shirks doing real work, and is just respectful enough of his superiors to stay out of real trouble but disrespectful enough of his superiors to feel autonomous. Nerzhin has seemingly found the point where he can defeat the sharaska rather than being defeated by it.
Rubin is a bit of the pessimist, though; I find myself wanting to see things from his perspective more. He finds himself having to relate to unreconstructed Nazis while clinging to his identity as a Jew; and he seems to have the task of trying to herd cats in the form of bridge the actions of the various scientists, all of whom are in an unspoken collaboration with the warden to demonstrate continual “progress” in creating a telephone scrambler for Stalin’s use despite no one having any true motivation to actually produce anything: science, the empirical pursuit of truth, subordinated into a system predicated upon the political use of lies and self-deception. The cognitive dissonance of these things over times seems to be cumulating in a weariness on him; I wonder if he will break.
The biggest loss they feel is that of the society of women. Odd that none of these men seem to have stuck up relationships with one another, whether physical or romantic, as I’m told from other works of fiction and graduates of American prison systems in honest moments; the book was published in 1953 and perhaps some things were too contrary to prevailing culture even for Solzhenitsyn.
I have to disagree with the notion that Serafima’s only real desire is for a husband — she wants love, to be sure, and she has self-doubt about her beauty and desirability. She fools herself into thinking that Nerzhin offers love, but she is also conscious that he is married and at least a part of her realizes this will not change. It seems to me, though, that she has ambitions for advancement in society, and fear of punishment. She’s conscious that her affair with Nerzhin is against the rules, and part of her enjoys pursing the forbidden fruit. A part of her has identified with the prisoners in asserting her own autonomy against the system her masters within it, and she takes a degree of pleasure from that. So I think she wants autonomy and love, not just to land herself a man.
To the extent that Nerzhin is Solzhenitsyn’s autobiographical avatar, I wonder how much of those impressions are Solzhenitsyn trying to justify having toyed with a real woman’s love that way himself as a young man. Prisoners do what they need to do in order to survive, but perhaps cruelty to another man, or mentally revising his definition of “freedom” to be something achievable within a prison, was easier for Solzhenitsyn to forgive himself than lying to a woman about love.Report
Thinking about homosexuality in the camps had me do some quick googling. Homosexuality is one of those things where you never know whether the person you’re flirting with isn’t really attempting to rat you out. Gay folks were allowed positions in the government under Lenin, but Stalin recriminalized homosexuality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_Russia
Lotta stuff in there. You read it and alternate between saying “how in the hell could this happen???” and “yeah, that’s pretty familiar even to me in the US in 2013.”Report
According to my husband, homosexuality was highly frowned on in the former Soviet Union. Gays were not treated well by the state or by their fellow citizens. Most anyone who was gay remained deep, deep within the closet for safety reasons.
He left in 1988, so things have likely changed a great deal since then. But given how sexist Russian culture still is, I don’t doubt that there’s still a whole lot of hostility toward gays as well.Report
There was another little moment that made me laugh… when he was discussing how the Germans unloaded bricks off the truck, they carried each one as if it were crystal and stacked them just so. When the Russians unloaded bricks off the truck, they just dumped them in a pile. If it broke all of them, then it broke all of them.
There was also a “the past is another country, also, Russia is another country” moment when he was trying to explain that Serafima wasn’t very attractive. He describes her face, her nose… and then how very skinny she was. I mean, male gaze aside, it was a little jarring to see those standards out there for us to read and then feel pity for Serafima… when, in our country, in our culture, there are people who kill themselves to achieve the trait of petite, slight, skinny.Report
The German vs. Russian meme that seems to run through bits of these chapters is very intriguing. The fact that German specialists are also in the camp as Zeks implies to me that these are people who where captured as part of regular warfare, but when it was discovered that they had useable skills, they were put in places that were useful to the Stalin. I had heard of Russians taking full factories and industries and moving them from Germany to Russia, and of keeping skilled Germans in what passed for POW camps, and this shows how (seemingly) casual they were about it.
My father used to tell a story about a German kid who ended up at his grade school after the war (my dad was born in ’42.) Apparently this boy showed up with his mother in the states with a GI step dad, real father having disappeared on the Eastern front. The boy was paired with my father as pops spoke German due to his grandmother. To make a long story short, the boys father shows up about 10 years after the war ended, having been in a Russian camp the whole time, unreported to any potential family.Report
One thing that is not pointed out enough is that the gulags were slave labor. That’s it. They nabbed people on the flimsiest of pretexts, plopped them down, then told them to start working 12 hours a day. Sure, they wrapped it up in all kinds of fancy language… but the guys who were working on the various devices in the camp that we’re reading about? Slave labor.Report
From my vague memories of the red version, the spy story of black chapters 1 and 2 is really jarring. (In the red version, according to Wkki, not only is chapter 2 missing, the phone call in chapter 1 isn;t about the atomic bomb.) It’ll be fascinating to see how it fits into the rest of the book.Report
(I keep both versions nearby just in case of something like this!)
In the red version, he’s calling a professor (not an embassy). Instead of an undersecretary of whatever, he talks to the professor’s wife. Instead of the nuclear bomb information, the professor is going to be giving some medicines to some Parisians.Report
Crickey, does this mean I’m going to have to reread the first fifteen (sixteen) when my black version gets here (yes, it probably does).Report
Eh. The version I first read was the Red version. That’s the book I fell in love with enough to recommend it to everybody.
Though I do find the Black version to be a joy.Report
If Fish is asking “What happens if I switch from Red to Black partway though?”, then the answer does, indeed, seem to be that there are significant inconsistencies.Report
That settles it, then. I’m starting over when the black gets here (got shipping notification today).Report
My impressions, so far, in no particular order.
1. I wondered several times how familiar Solzhenitsyn was with 1984 and other of Orwell’s works. The following quote reminds me of Orwell’s approach to language in 1984:
Language is not only the medium of literature but also the most basic aspect 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.
For Orwell–and it seems true for Solzhenitsyn as well–when you altered language, you altered the way in which people were able to think about things, particularly abstractions.
Another other passage that struck me as profoundly 1984 was this one:
Thought the wrong thoughts Pytor Tromfimovich. The Japanese have a law that a man can be put on trial for his unspoken thoughts.
That is, a person can be put on trial for thought crimes.
Finally, Gleb’s efforts to record his philosophy of history on paper are reminiscent of Winston’s attempts to keep a hidden diary. Both activities were strictly prohibited and, by insisting on writing things down, both men ran the risk of severe punishment:
They didn’t allow the smallest scrap of paper with writing on it to be taken out of the sharashka. And if anything was found when they frisked him in transit prison, he was bound to get a few extra years.
2. So much of the opening chapters is so very Russian, at least in my experience of Russian emigre culture. Most Russians I’ve met seem to share an affinity for the beneficial effects of suffering, so passages like the following rang true:
Both find their minds opened by suffering.
Etymologically the Russian word for happiness has unmistakable connotations of “transcience” and “insubstantiality.”
It is well known that poets are born of unhappiness and spiritual torment, and Mamurin’s torments were more agonizing than those of any other prisoner.
The happiness of continual victory, the happiness of desire triumphantly gratified, the happiness of total satisfaction. . . is suffering! It is the death of the soul; it is a sort of permanent moral dyspepsia.
Shorter Russian version–pain and suffering are good; anything else is suspect.
3. I was also struck by he extent to which lies pervaded the Soviet system at all levels, meaning that nobody believed anything anyone said, particularly any government source. From what I’ve read and from what The Russian has told me, this rings true. Nobody trusted official sources of information because experience disproved propaganda. To me, our own culture has pretty much reached the same point, where people cannot or will not trust information disseminated by the government, large corporations, or other major institutions. It’s been proven wrong too many times.
4. The book reinforces everything I’ve read or heard about spy culture in the Soviet Union, where everyone was watching everyone else, not just the KGB but also acquaintances and neighbors, undermining trust at all levels. The Russian has told me that finding someone you could trust and around whom you could be open was like finding gold. These friends became the equivalent of family and bonds between them were almost unbreakable. The Russian still has close contacts to the friends he made in Russia. He and his closest friend, who he met at 17, still talk on the phone several times a week. In the USSR, anyone who didn’t fit that category was met with skepticism–you never wanted to reveal anything that might be used against you and so you learned to put up a wall between yourself and all but the closest of intimates.
5. Overall, even though the book does qualify, in Jay’s terms, as “weird, dystopian fiction,” it’s eminently readable, much more so than The Master and Maguerite, which I’ve tried more than once to read and failed to make it past the first 100 pages.Report