The First Circle
At the height of Stalin's postwar terror, Innokenty, a young diplomat and scion of a corrupt ruling class, discovers an earlier and more spiritual tradition than that adopted by the October Revolution, the beginning of a process which is Solzhenitsyn's basic theme: the individual's experience of acquiring an immortal soul. Unwisely but generously, Innokenty helps a friend in danger of arrest, only to be arrested himself and sent to a special prison. This, the archetype of the Gulag, is described with masterful psychological insight. There are no heroes and hardly any villains; oppressors are no less victims then the oppressed. In the great tradition of the Russian novel, The First Circle is both a brooding account of human nature and a scrupulously exact description of a historical period.
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What Hacker News says
- Did anyone ever read The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn? It is amazing: in a Stalin gulag in the 1950's USSR, a bunch of Soviet engineers / techies are tasked with creating a speech recognition system. They show fake progress in order to keep from being jailed in worse ways. It is autobiographical, so good, but I read it so long ago and it convinced me how hard speech recognition would be, maybe even impossible!
Highly recommended. I see there is a "new" (2009, I getting old) edition & translation - https://www.amazon.com/First-Circle-Aleksandr-I-Solzhenitsyn...
- I'm a fan of Solzhenitsyn as a writer. The First Circle justly won him the Nobel. But this speech has not aged well.
> For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it
The idea that Russia is a separate civilization with a great destiny is a cause of Russia's imperialism in Eastern Europe. That was true under the tsars, in the USSR, and it's true today.
Moreover, Solzhenitsyn's harping on the spiritual decay of the West brings to mind a modern post-liberal blogger. Solzhenitsyn was a contrarian, and this led to significant heroism, but it also prevented him from recognizing liberalism as a goal for Russia. And today, Putin's weird mix of far right larping, belief in Russia's special destiny, and throwback chauvinism could plausibly claim late-Solzhenitsyn as its progenitor.
- I've never really felt like Kafka seems to have and I read a lot, mostly novels. For what it's worth, I don't love Kafka's novels: I think he wanted them burned for a reason -- they're meandering failures. Very clever but they don't go anywhere. His short stories, though, are excellent.
Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby Dick, any Alice Munro. All well known "good books".
- So who is going to write the 5-year plans, who gets to set the goals, who will decide what gets produced where? GOSPlan [1] never managed to get this right, why do you think it would work this time?
History is there to be learned from. Planned economies do not work, they are inefficient and a breeding ground for corruption. Also, rest assured that there will be no wind turbines or solar farms around the dacha's of the party elite.
Read The GULAG Archipelago or The First Circle for some more insight in the dark side of your proposed "solution" and realise this has been tried - and failed, miserably and horribly - many times over.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/economic-planning/Economic-...
- > Take a beloved in the West author like Solzhenitsyn, whose "compassion" suddenly evaporates when Ukrainian question is raised.
Solzhenitsin is one of the best literary chroniclers of repressions in the Soviet Russia (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, In the First Circle), with the degree of earnestness and realism that approaches Tolstoy's. How does his compassion to Ukranians, or lack thereof, change that? Why do people want writers of fiction to be impeccable moral leaders?
- "The First Circle" by Solzhenitzyn is a great read. The caricature of Stalin in that book is absurd, I am not talking about that.
There is a historical character Abakumov [1], and in one of his reflections, (from my memory) he rues the fact that he was inducted into the inner circle of Stalin. One moment of displeasure, and he could be gone. And there is no way out of the inner circle other than perhaps, death.
A truly frightening, strangling, situation.
