Keep Forever.

 There is no escape in The First Circle. Set in the special prisons, sharashkas, of Stalin’s Soviet Union, a community of zeks, prisoners, and their guards live under a fragile social order. The zeks of Mavrino Prison are not deprived of physical comforts but made to endure sentences that have no end, indicted on terms that officials admit are irrefutable. The book follows a dense web of characters – zeks and the women who love them as well as bureaucrats of varying moral and bureaucratic stripe. Among the few major characters we follow is an elite bureaucrat who betrays his post in the opening pages of the book.

First Circle is said to be loosely based on the author’s own experience in forced labor. Denounced as politically deviant, Solzehenitsyn was sentenced to an eight-year term. Part of his sentence was carried out at a sharashka, where he encountered prisoners said to be like those inhabiting First Circle. In recent years, the book has gained new attention because of an edition, released by Harper Collins, that includes sections the author had omitted for political reasons. The bureaucrat we meet in the first pages of the book, for example, does not warn against the future poisoning of a foreigner in the uncensored edition (as he does in the version I read). Instead, he warns against an attack on the American embassy.

In December of last year, AD Miller wrote a piece in the Guardian about why modern authors love Russia. “...Russia is polarised is in morality: in the range of individual responses to its acute moral challenges. Good times are somehow better in Russia – something about the fact that they might abruptly end – and so are good people….” Miller goes on to caution against understanding this as likening the country to a “moral zoo” but perhaps “also a place [for writers and readers] to test their moral pride and presumptions…”

First Circle is a difficult read. Not only is the book dense with characters, motivations and conflicts, but it also evokes the kind of proving ground Miller describes. The book creates a psychic strain that transcends the particulars of Soviet-era oppression. Even when the zeks are able to enjoy personal freedoms, their freedoms and joys are tenuous. The zeks at Mavrino put their minds to work in creating spyware, some deliberately foiling their keepers’ political plans, while others strategize how to leverage their knowledge for release. As each character in the book resolves whether and how to submit to or resist their sentence, the reader experiences the constraints that force these decisions. Some characters find temporary escape through books and memories, others give themselves over to work, and still others try to outwit their captors in more physical ways. Solzhenitsyn writes, “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…can 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…To avoid these final torments, the prison follows obediently the humiliating an dhateful prison regime, which slowly kills the human being within him.”

What makes the story move are the characters who populate the book. The daily lives and decision-making processes of both zek and bureaucrat are conveyed fully, humanely. We experience the “slow death” of an imprisoned zek because of how his suffering is made relatable. When the major character Nerzhin sees children in the street and realizes that Stalin’s imprisonment has robbed him of the opportunity to have children, the devastation of how finally his life is changed is newly acute. Yet, the characters also live lightly. That is, life in the sharshka is upheld by informal rules that make room for mental, personal, freedom. And it is from this space that physical action is decided. As the main character Innokenty says, man has only one conscience. And the sober weight of that recognition anchors whatever moves within the story like tent stakes.

The end of the book concludes in the omnipresent third person, a viewer on the street, who watches what looks like a meat truck go by. The truck, seemingly innocuous, looking immaculate, carries within it the unseen political cargo of prisoners. That image has stayed with me, as does a sign that terrifies Innokenty. KEEP FOREVER, Innokenty reads, and he trembles because the words show him that what is done cannot be undone.