Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This fall a flurry of competitive editions are coming out in Europe and the U.S., over Solzhenitsyn's bitter and repeated public protests and disavowals. One is his novel The First Circle, rushed into print by Harper & Row in a translation that is often unreadable and sometimes ludicrously inaccurate. It will also appear as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in November. In the original, The First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a scathing, ironic portrayal of life in Russia in 1948 and its concentric circles of hell expanding out from Stalin, who has never been made so frighteningly...
Gleb Nerzhin, in many ways a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself, makes an opposite choice to Rubin's. By refusing to work on a new bugging device, he condemns himself to Siberia. He is the character most conscious of the paradox that pervades the novel: that in Stalin's Russia only those in prison are truly free to be honest with one another. "When you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power ?he's free again...
...establishment liberal Alexander Tvardovsky. He took the manuscripts home to read in bed, tossed them one by one aside. Then he picked up Solzhenitsyn's novel and read ten lines. As he later told a friend, "Suddenly I felt that I couldn't read it like this. I had to do something appropriate to the occasion. So I got up. I put on my best black suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, a tie, and my good shoes. Then I sat at my desk and read a new classic." Tvardovsky sent the manuscript to Khrushchev...
...Silence. No other first novel has ever had such an exclusive private printing, or such an exclusive first audience. Khrushchev wanted to use the book as a weapon in his own power struggle with the hardliners, Mikhail Suslov and Frol Kozlov. By Khrushchev's order, the script was set in type and 20 copies were run off on the Swedish-built presses the Kremlin reserves for state documents. The copies were distributed to members of the Presidium. Then, at Khrushchev's summons, the Presidium met. The members sat at a long table, each with his copy of the novel...
...silence did not last. The top of the Soviet hierarchy erupted into controversy over Khrushchev's plan to publish the book, but at his direct authorization the novel appeared in the November issue of Novy Mir. The 95,000-copy press run sold out within days, as did the 100,000 copies in book form that quickly followed; by now, millions of Russians have read it, although it is no longer in bookstores and is gradually disappearing from library shelves...