First Circle

Excerpt: 'In the First Circle'











I well remember reading this book, and others, by Solzhenitsyn. I greatly liked this and Cancer Ward.

It has taken a half-century for English-language readers to receive the definitive text of "In the First Circle," the best novel by one of the greatest authors of our time. Such is the fate of art created under a totalitarian regime. But now it is finally available in the West as the author envisioned it. The English translator is Harry T. Willetts, renowned for combining fidelity to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's rich, complex Russian with supple equivalents in English prose and the only person Solzhenitsyn fully trusted to render his fiction into English.

Solzhenitsyn wrote the book under exceptionally difficult circumstances. In 1953, as he was about to emerge from eight years in the gulag, the Soviet prison-camp system, he was diagnosed with cancer. Consigned to internal exile in Kazakhstan, he found work as a schoolteacher but devoted every spare moment to writing. In 1958, he completed the first draft of "In the First Circle," a novel, set during Stalin's rule, about the effects of incarceration and forced labor on the minds and souls of innocent and intelligent men. He immediately put it through two revisions.

"In the First Circle" is the first work by Solzhenitsyn to go to press in English since he died last year at age 89. A major writer's death fosters reflection on his overall achievement, so this is the perfect time to reconsider the novel now that it is finally available to us as the author intended. A literary classic is defined as a book still read a century after appearing. On that basis one might say that the book has already had a 40-year head start on fulfilling that definition, given the acclaim with which the bowdlerized text has been received since its appearance in the West in 1968.

An intriguing intimation of the prospects for this version comes from the Russian experience with the canonical text. In 2006 a Russian television network presented serializations of classic Russian novels by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. Fifteen million viewers tuned in to each installment of "In the First Circle."