Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, "In the First Circle"

 - Translated from Russian by Harry T. Willetts

 

Read from September 17^th to December 7^th 2018

My rating: 4/ 5 stars

 

This is not the first time I encounter the sad, Kafkian world of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for I have already accompanied Ivan Denisovich during one of his regular days and I’ve taken a long, painful walk in the Gulag Archipelago. Only that the hell depicted there has been upgraded in the novel In the First Circle. Here, the mighty communist society, which couldn’t but acknowledge some zeks’ scientific skills has relocated them in the “sharashka”, the prison research institute that is, to be put to work at the development of a phone encryption device that could identify any voice on earth. Because they have food and cigarettes to discretion, some books and some space to walk, for a prisoner coming from Gulag it may seem paradise, but in reality they only reached the first circle of Inferno. A circle inside the last one, the rim of the funnel which is the Iron Curtain. 

In the Foreword of the book, Edward E. Erickson recalls that In the First Circle was composed from 1955 to 1958, when the author was in his thirties, barely released from the Gulag and exiled in Kazakhstan, where he had found work as a schoolteacher. He tried to publish his manuscript for the first time in 1964, erasing nine chapters in order to pass the censorship, but because the KGB had confiscated the unshortened copy from a friend, the publishing was indefinitely delayed by the authorities. Finally, he sent the same censored version abroad, where it appeared in 1968 under the title The First Circle. Only ten years later the author will restore the original version and the preposition “in” will be added to the title to change the focus from the place to the people in it.

Erickson also observes that the novel illustrates Solzhenitsyn’s literary credo: to follow “the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. (…) Despite starting with actual people, events, and locations, Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag writings—the fiction and The Gulag Archipelago—succeeds in creating a literary world that is as distinctly his own as are the signature literary worlds created by such authors as Dostoevsky, Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner”. 

Svetlana Alexievich, "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History"

– e-book

Read from: August 23^rd to September 17^th, 2018

My rating: 

Chernaya molitva – черная молитва

It is said that Chernobyl area will remain radioactive for another 42,300 years. A scary number, in a way scarier than “forever” precisely because of its decisiveness. In the historical notes of her book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History, Svetlana Alexievich completes this information: today one of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated ground (2.1 million people, of whom 700 000 children), because from the 50 million Ci of radionuclides released into the atmosphere, 70% descended on Belarus contaminating 23% of its territory. Moreover, 

The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it.

Despite all this, people continue to go and visit or settle in this manmade hell, often with dire consequences. Svetlana Alexievich herself has got an immune deficiency now, maybe because of the three years spent in the area to interview people for her book, maybe because she is a Belarusian herself (and said once that ten of her fifteen childhood friends died of cancer), maybe because of both.

Ludmila Ulitskaya, "The Big Green Tent"

– e-book

Read from April 19^th to August 10^th 2017

My rating: 

The Guilt of the Innocent

“It’s a strange, inexplicable law that the most innocent people among us are the ones predisposed to the greatest sense of guilt.”

While looking up the Internet for possible meanings of the title of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel, I found this interesting information that, in the Qur’an, the martyrs are gathered in a big green tent at the shore of a river close to the door of Paradise, from which provisions are brought to them day and night. Therefore, they don’t enter Paradise but are fed by it.

I don’t know whether the author is familiar with this image, but her book convenes too, under the big tent of art this time, a world martyrized by one of the most oppressive regimes the world has known: the communism, the very regime that promised humanity Paradise on Earth. Injustice, betrayal, diverted and/ or stopped short destinies, broken wings are whirled down in the bottomless funnel of a society well-known for its dexterity in crushing citizens like bugs at the slightest sign of disobedience. A society that Ludmila Ulitskaya knew very well, since she was an active part of those who tried to oppose it then (just as she is a relentless of the Putin’s debatable democracy now). And it is this world of more or less mighty dissidents her book is about.