Group Read, December 2016: The First Circle

Our December Group Read is The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This has already been subject to much discussion on the Nominations thread, but to summarise:

Solzhenitsyn wrote The First Circle in the late 1960s, but self-censored it to try to get it published in the USSR. He failed to get it published there, but in 1968 this edition with 87 chapters was published in English and was the only version available in English until 2009.

In 2009 he reinstated the censored chapters and made other changes. This version of the book with 96 chapters was published as In The First Circle in English.

The only major difference that is talked about in the reviews I've read is that in Chapter 1 there is a phone call which in the "censored" version is to a doctor to warn him about some drugs but in the "full" version is to the American Embassy to warn them about nuclear weapons. Presumably there is more to the additional 9 chapters than that, but there is little commentary on what else has been changed.

My version is the "censored" version (the price you pay for getting everything secondhand) but it is still 700 pages long and is the version that contributed to Solzhenitsyn getting the Nobel for Literature in 1970, so it can't be that bad a read!

Whichever version you are reading it should be fascinating to see how everyone reacts to this book and whether those with the 96 chapters react differently.

This is from the forward; details about differences between the two versions. I've left out anything which I think counts as a genuine spoiler although they didn't really have anything there which really gave away plot secrets seeing as it is the forward.

Compared with the version previously available in English, the plot has been altered, depictions of some major characters have been substantially modified, new characters have been introduced, and many entirely excised chapters have been reinstated.
..
One should not...overstate the differences between the intended and doctored versions... 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 the 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 lever 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, Narzhin 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... Volodin the innocent answers the question with action... No character is more radically altered from one version of the novel the other than Volodin...
...
Sologdin is Rubin's main ideological adversary, and the relishes reciting the evils ofthe 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.
...
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 from to five, and the average length of each chapter increases.

I'm devouring this - I haven't been able to put it down for long. I'm already about two thirds of the way through.

About 20 pages in I realized that I was reading a Prison Book, and historical prisons are a subject I intend to research. So now I have to read it with post-its at hand to mark significant passages. This is actually terrific because it means I can now read a novel and call it work!
I am going slowly but liking it very much. Such an odd environment, a scientific workplace as a prison. Very interesting.

Well I finished a couple of days ago :-) I'm not sure how far others are along in their reading so I haven't commented yet.

I absolutely loved it. There are so many characters (typically for a Russian novel) and lots of different threads of peoples lives all twisted around. I loved the section on Stalin, unfortunately badly cut in the censored version. The following of his career and the implication that he was in fact a stool pigeon with no loyalty to anyone other than himself. It reminded me very much of Mao: The Unknown Story where it showed Mao/Stalin as a duplicitous self server ready to go to any side which would offer him the best deal. Although Stalin is portrayed as a lot more intelligent than Mao was.

I'm so glad this was the selected group read otherwise it might have been ages before I got around to tracking it down!

I would recommend reading The Gulag Archipelago as well then.

>6 M1nks: my father made me read that when I was a teen-ager so that I would not become a communist! However, a re-read is probably in order.

That actually wasn't a bad idea! I've seen a few wide eyed idiots online raving about the wonders of socialism/communism/totalitarian regimes and it's always wonderful to see when the scales fall from their eyes. There is this great documentary about a group of people visiting North Korea and this one moron who starts off saying how he's always dreamt of visiting North Korea, that it's his spiritual home and that it's a workers paradise and anything negative that comes out is just evil western propaganda. Then, after a few days of traveling around he starts to see what is blindingly obvious to anyone who isn't totally brain dead and he gets quieter and quieter.

Then again, lots of other idiots never do get the chance to see first hand a 'workers paradise' and spout off the whole 'it's all western lies' crap without getting a serving of reality dished up to them. Honestly, sometimes I despair at how naive and stupid so many people are.

Anybody else reading? Minks spead through the whole thing and I am finding it very slow going. I'm still on Stalin and it's like reading a history book.

I started and then stalled. Not sure it's the book's fault though. This is a crazy month so my attention is elsewhere.

>9 annamorphic: I ordered the Dutch translation in a second hand store but when it arrived it turned out to be part one of two. I paid a lot for half a novel - rather frustrating, especially because I can't find the second half.
So I have to skip the Group Read unfortunately.

Oh that's terrible Simone, how infuriating! Can you return it?

>9 annamorphic: Next up on my TBR pile - I've been ploughing through Joseph and His Brothers all month but should be finished that early next week.

>12 M1nks: No because it is second hand, I can't return it. The owner promised to look out for the second part but I don't have high hopes.

>13 puckers: Not the right place, I know, but I am lokkig forward to your thoughts on Joseph. I would like to read it soon as well.

I think I'll be starting this next week?

>8 M1nks:

Thank god for the morons keeping neoliberal paradises safe! Wouldn't want any of that leftist nonsense about equality and justice to contaminate the chances for our ascension to billionaires, at any cost to the poor and the environment! All the Kool Aid is imbibed strictly by idiots of the other stripe! Bliss!

Funnily enough, in today's Guardian:

Unhappy Russians nostalgic for Soviet-style rule – study

Who'll be the first to tell those unhappy people they are morons and idiots? Perhaps we can find some virulently antisemitic, anti-libertarian, mystical reactionary shit's book to teach 'em what's what.

And guess what--it's not just idiotic and moronic Russians who are getting unhappy! Idiotic and moronic Britishers Brexited because they were unhappy. Idiotic and moronic Americans supported Trump because they are unhappy. Weird! Places least prone to the idiocy of communism falling prey to economic "unhappiness"!

Tons of other morons and idiots dreaming of fair redistribution of wealth to be found around the globe. You know why? Because capitalism produces them as efficiently as the obscenity of excessive profit and inequality.

the only difference between communism and capitalism is that, with the former, man exploits man, whereas with the latter, the reverse is the case.

I think your rebuttal is for an argument/belief I do not hold to.

However as a point about the environment it was the Eastern Bloc countries in Europe which abused their environment to far the greater extent. I'm sure it didn't need to be that way, it just always seemed to happen.

For the poor, well, as this guy saw traveling through the parts that were deemed acceptable for tourist eyes, his cherished beliefs in North Korea being a loving father who cared for every citizen and no one being in want lasted a couple of days?. Perhaps he even believed in the labour camps by the end of it.

For the rest of your post I don't follow your points well if you were trying to make them. I certainly think that in democracies at least people get the representatives they get off their butts and vote for (although that's often not 100% the case because of the deficiencies of the various voting systems), whether they be narcissistic billionaires or socialist leaning true believers. But for any country to have such deep divides of thought and virulent hatred is scary to see. I'm concerned anyway. The world is not so safe and our lives not so inviolable that another world war is unthinkable.

Pithy but I think kind of inaccurate.

For one thing Capitalism isn't an actual political system yet although in the States at least I sometimes think a case could be made for it 'Corporations are people too!'. It's an economic system. And, yes, you could also argue that so is communism if you want but hopefully we can agree on the fundamental difference.

For another, different countries apply different versions. Would China be a Communist capitalist state but also running a planned economic system (!) while Russia is now a Communist oligarchic dictatorship? God knows what North Korea is other than a huge mess... A God King dictatorship?

Western Europe has some Democratic socialist (or social democracies) countries, any of which I'm sure I would have been perfectly happy to be born into. Venezuela not so much.

Getting back to the actual point of this thread, in the novel one of the major themes of the novel is the difference between the ideal and the reality and a person's individual breaking point; that moment in their lives (if it ever comes) when what is happening in their country forces them to abandon their fantasy of a better world being created.

Some characters never had it and were always only self serving (the Stalin chapters being my favourites), others were less dedicated, one of the characters was a family man, to him State was always less important than his family although he served faithfully. For some no sacrifice is too great and even though he might be personally being unjustly crushed he thinks that the lot of the majority has been alleviated and that the suffering of a percentage doesn't matter.

Has anyone gotten far enough along to have an opinion or more thoughts?

>18 M1nks:

However as a point about the environment it was the Eastern Bloc countries in Europe which abused their environment to far the greater extent.

If only there were a reliable metric to tell us whether the Aral Sea catastrophe is worse than the Dust Bowl or the destruction of the rainforests and coral reefs or the garbage belt in the Pacific... Such sweeping statements are untrue--on the one hand, there are sites of enormous ecological damage in Eastern Europe (but not exclusively); on another, lack of resources actually forced a day to day "ecological" consciousness on people--nobody recycles like the poor--AND protected nature, frequently to a greater extent than anywhere in the developed West. Ironically, ecological problems in the East increased with the post-communist developments.

For most stunning overall example of how relative poverty and ecological conscience limits the depredations of enforced industrialisation, see Cuba. Want to see what the primeval European forest was like? Go to Poland, not France or Germany. Interested in a European prehistoric desert? There's a chunk of it remaining in Serbia, a haven of thousand+ endemic species. When the Berlin Wall fell, Albania was practically a nature reserve. I could go on--and in parallel with ecological catastrophes in the West. You may want to take a look at what was going on in North America through the 1950s-1970. The EPA didn't exist before the seventies; meanwhile, idiotic and moronic "workers' paradises" such as the Yugoslav republics had instituted legislation protecting the environment in 1945, and created nature conservation agencies the following year.

Currently pertinent, it's notable that it wasn't Mao's China that posed the worst ecological threat to the world, but this new one, with cars instead of bicycles, and extravagantly concentrated, hypertrophied manufacturing industries. And for that we have to thank the infinite greed of capitalism, not anybody's communism.

Apologies for this digression, but it's not a point I brought up, only something I couldn't leave unaddressed.

I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive.

>20 M1nks: The Stalin chapters! Fascinating and yet it was like reading a history book. Took me forever. Not exactly enjoyable, yet memorable.

Some of the most interesting books to come out of the 20th-century's grotesque errors are those by people who were complete believers and then realized how wrong they had been. Christa Wolf is a curious example in that she writes as a former Nazi who has become an equally fervent communist in East Germany. Some people just need an ideology about which to be passionate, but usually they are not also great writers.

>21 LolaWalser: Have to agree with you on this one -- capitalism unconstrained is an environmental nightmare. Many of its greatest successes have hinged on massive environmental destruction. The 20th-21st century equivalent of 16th-to 19th-century European economies prospering by massive exploitation of African and Latin American resources. (Yes, I read Memory of Fire this year!)

>23 annamorphic:

Christa Wolf is a curious example in that she writes as a former Nazi

Er, what? She was born in 1929. I'm not sure she can be accurately described as a "fervent" Communist either, at least based on what I've read of hers. I recommend her diaries for a fascinating reflection of the complexity of her position.

Again, I think you are addressing beliefs that I don't hold. I think blind arrogance and belief in the infallibility of ones world view to be a very wide spread human failing - that totally blinkered view that because you think one system is awful that another system, which profuses itself an enemy to it, must be a paragon of virtue and so either steadfastly reject any information which contradicts this view as propaganda or ignore its existence entirely. Lack of critical thinking of course applies to more than just political beliefs but it's mostly those that this book focuses on.

I think that the more extreme a country is in espousing a doctrine the worst it seems to be. Yugoslavia was a relatively benign form of communism from all I've read about it, which admittedly isn't very much. They were fortunate in their leader and also fortunate that he survived multiple assassination attempts (from Stalin). Compared to Stalin and Mao, Tito was a benevolent man filled with sugar and cream. It doesn't surprise me in the least that his regime didn't strip the country bare just as it doesn't surprise me that the States has the appalling environmental record it does.

Always be aware that you might be totally wrong and never take freedom for granted.

Christa Wolf? I haven't heard of her. However, if you don't think she is a particularly good writer but rather a person who writes about something she is passionate about, perhaps that is why.

Do you recommend I check her out? I do read a fair bit of history.

Some of the most interesting books to come out of the 20th-century's grotesque errors are those by people who were complete believers and then realized how wrong they had been.

I loved Wild Swans when I read it; is that the sort of book you mean? If you have any recommendations I'm all ears.

I've been wanting to read some North Korean defectors biographies as well. I've seen a lot of documentaries and other things which I've found online. They've been universally fascinating if rather heart breaking at times, especially those who left known families behind knowing that they would almost certainly be sent to the camps.

>24 LolaWalser:
>26 M1nks:
Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, one of the most brilliant books on the 1001 list IMHO, is a frankly autobiographical novel telling the story of her youth in a fervently Nazi household and as a member of the Nazi youth, and then the collapse of all of that at the end of WWII. The whole point of the book is that she, and all those around her, were completely behind Hitler until she was 16, which was old enough to be perfectly aware of what was happening. That is how she tells it, not my accusation.

A colleague of mine writes on Wolf and I was under the impression that she was a strong supporter of the E. German regime. But I'll look forward to reading her diaries!

>28 annamorphic:

While my anticlericalist side welcomed the opportunity to shout in the general direction of the Vatican "your Pope was a fucking Nazi" when Benedict whatsisnumber ruled in St. Peter's, and those who were older, like Günter Grass, might have eaten more humble pie, I genuinely think it's a tad harsh to characterise 15/16-year old members of Hitlerjugend as "Nazis" when they evidently outgrew and recovered from that position. I'm actually with Goldhagen in blaming the passive majority of Germans for the catastrophe almost as much as the Nazis. But it must be seen that there were many victims of the system on the German side too-- the children, the brainwashed youth especially. God knows I don't want to be judged by the stuff I held true and dear at sixteen (no, nothing positively Naziesque, but it did involve communing with nature, ploughing the soil and living off the fruits of the earth, and homosexuality, I thought, was essentially a sickness. Imagine my surprise...)

Wolf was a convinced socialist--nothing wrong with that--and she supported, albeit not uncritically, the DDR regime. There are lots of problems with that, but to be fair, this was clear to her too all her life.

"the garbage belt in the Pacific... Such sweeping statements are untrue"

Indeed. No "garbage belt" has ever been found despite media hype.

Finally got around to the monthly read - 10 chapters of the abridged version done - and I really enjoy it. Even though >2 M1nks: makes it pretty clear that the changes are substantial, this version seems like a great work of art in it self.

I'm amazed what Solzhenitsyn apparantly thought could be accepted by censorship.

It's a pretty smooth read so far, I just hope it continues.

I've also made a start. Haven't quite separated the large cast of characters in the "camp" but plenty of pages left for them to become individuals. I have therefore preferred so far the chapters involving Stalin in his bunker-like residence.

I had trouble with all of the characters as well. Every single one of them seems to go by about 4 names, or so it seemed to me!

welcome to Russian lit!

I did manage to track down the uncensored version; not sure why the ebook didn't appear in the catalog the first time I looked...

I am finding this hard to read. I do find it engaging, some chapters more than others, but inexplicably cannot read more than a few chapters at a time without falling asleep.

An aside for those of you who enjoy connections between 1001 list books... in chapter 27 one of the prisoners mentions sharing a cell with Count Esterhazy. The latter is the subject of Celestial Harmonies. This book, written by his son Peter Esterhazy, documents the fall of this aristocratic family in Hungary after the arrival of communism there.

A little anecdote about the Danish edition:

The translator, Samuel Rachlin, is one of the few people who positively owes his life to being deported to Siberia during Stalin's reign. How? His familiy is Jewish, his father from Lithuania and his mother from Denmark. Between the wars they lived in Lithuania where they managed a trading company.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact Lithuania was occupied by Soviet troops, which was bad, because the family was considered bourgeois and therefore enemies of the new state. In an attempt to wipe out the Lithuanian elite they and thousands of others were deported just weeks before the German invasion in 1941. Even though they were dumped off in the Siberian wilderness and suffered miserably, this was actually a lucky break. Practically all Lithuanian Jews, including all of the non-deported friends of the family, were killed by the nazis.

So, in an ironic twist it was only thanks to Stalin's unknowing help that Samuel was born in Provovsk in 1947 and able to translate Solzhenitsyn's unfavorable portrait of him 25 years later.

Neat! Thank you for that snippet of history.

>37 Henrik_Madsen: A fascinating bit of history that I did not know.

I'm over half way through this and am finally getting a sense of the novel's whole trajectory, how small it is and yet how large. I am only now realizing that the whole book will take place in, what, two or three days? Because as Solzhenitsyn weaves in thread after thread, the mental and physical lives of each character, you feel as if this is a huge saga -- but it's not. It's as constricted as a prison, and yet as vast as mental life in one.

It is supposedly three days but with so many characters sharing their life stories I felt like I lived lifetimes!

This thread?