Word: solzhenitsyn
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...echelons of Moscow; his fears alternate with moments of euphoric hope, counterpointing the luxurious world around him. Seized and taken to Lyubyanka, in three brilliant matter-of-fact chapters he begins to be stripped down to the inner core of his being. Thus begins the process by which, in Solzhenitsyn's moral order, the most perceptive prisoners have learned to be free...
Another major protagonist is Lev Rubin, the philologist who develops the voiceprinter. Though a prisoner, he is still a convinced Communist. With sympathy and remarkable subtlety, Solzhenitsyn makes clear the process of self-brainwashing by which such a man can sustain such a moral paradox?and can even convince himself that it is right and his duty to help trap Volodin and condemn him to the labor camps...
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...
...Alexander Ginzburg called them, that The First Circle is most harrowing. Solzhenitsyn writes of one of these camp complexes as "a kingdom bigger than France." Each camp bore a bucolic code name such as Lake Camp, Steppe Camp, Sandy Camp. "You'd think there must be some great, unknown poet in the secret police, a new Pushkin," writes Solzhenitsyn. "He's not quite up to a full-length poem, but he gives these wonderful poetic names to concentration camps." These passages obviously parallel Solzhenitsyn's own experiences; after his years in Mavrino, he was sent to such a camp...
...prisoners were not expected to survive. Yet Solzhenitsyn also knows, as he says in The First Circle, that "descriptions of prison life tend to overdo the horror of it. Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life?the only life you have?is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when...