Rating: 
Summary: "trampled yearnings... soaring passion"
Review: This immense story amazingly spans only a few days in the lives of several people unduly imprisoned by Joseph Stalin's secret police. Unlike the senseless horror of the "gulag", The First Circle involves the incarceration of select and highly skilled prisoners in a relatively privileged Soviet prison which is really set up as a research laboratory where these skilled inmates are exploited for their expertise. Here, (after they've been arrested under any number of false pretenses) they are forced to invent and develop elaborate electronic devices which will help in the detection and arrest of any other "subversives". The main gadget that they are called upon to produce is a "phonoscopy"... a device that will be able to accurately identify a person by examining recorded conversation.Right from the opening tense chapters, Solzhenitsyn once again had me in his grip. For me, he is the master at capturing the foreboding sense of loss of freedom. It is palpable... in some ways, worse than outright murder... because you know that whatever happens to his characters, they are going to have to LIVE through it... they aren't even afforded the luxury of dying. At one point, he used the phrases "trampled yearnings" & "soaring passion" in one sentence and it stuck with me and I feel it summarizes what his characters face here in TFC. In ch.34 the protagonist, Gleb Nerzhin is musing with a fellow inmate on the hardships of imprisonment and he concludes that, of all his deprivations, by far the worst is the loss of freedom to be with his wife. She is allowed a visit once a year, and even then, he is not allowed to kiss her. Hearing this, his cellmate Gerasimovich concludes that "there is probably only one path to invulnerability... to kill within oneself ALL attachments and to renounce ALL desires." This book looks deeply into the process of passivity that creeps into and consumes the life of the imprisoned. Also, there are times when it reminds us of the resiliency of the human spirit in the midst of numbing regret and longing. (I am thinking of the unforgettable scene of Rubin following the guard toward the end of ch.67). There is a passage in ch.84 which I think wonderfully capsulizes what Solzhenitsyn is telling us here in TFC: "Unfortunately for people - and fortunately for their rulers - a human being is so constituted that as long as he lives there is always something more that can be taken away from him. Even a person imprisoned for life, deprived of movement, of the sky, of family, of property, can, for instance, be transferred to a damp punishment cell, deprived of hot food, beaten with clubs, and he will feel these petty extra punishments as intensely as his earlier downfall from the heights of freedom and affluence. To avoid these final torments, the prisoner follows obediently the humiliating and hateful prison regime, which slowly kills the human being within him." This is not a "happily-ever-after" book. We may be able to deny ourselves the luxury of exposure to Solzhenitsyn's themes, but one thing we cannot deny is the fact that his books are based upon things that actually happened in history. Because they did. And they do. Here is one of the finest writers of the 20th Century, and this is his masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: The First Circle
Review: What makes The First Circle such a great book (the best I've read by Solzhenitsyn) is how he reduces a political system and economic ideology to individual choices. It was a system built upon greed, jealousy, selfish pragmatism and fear, the vanity of Stalin, the petty rivalry between commanding officers, the desperate connivance of a prisoner who will turn against his fellow man in order to better his own lot. In other words, humanity. The consequences were also human: the loss of the prime years of a man's life, a life without the love of a woman, a father worrying about the fate of his young daughter thousands of miles away. Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of rendering the real world behind philosophy and ideology, the world the USSR lost sight of when they placed ends before means. In the end, what is perhaps most frightening is that the face of evil is so banal.
Rating:
Summary: The First Circle
Review: What makes The First Circle such a great book (the best I've read by Solzhenitsyn) is how he reduces a political system and economic ideology to individual choices. It was a system built upon greed, jealousy, selfish pragmatism and fear, the vanity of Stalin, the petty rivalry between commanding officers, the desperate connivance of a prisoner who will turn against his fellow man in order to better his own lot. In other words, humanity. The consequences were also human: the loss of the prime years of a man's life, a life without the love of a woman, a father worrying about the fate of his young daughter thousands of miles away. Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of rendering the real world behind philosophy and ideology, the world the USSR lost sight of when they placed ends before means. In the end, what is perhaps most frightening is that the face of evil is so banal.
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