In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Nerzhin sighed.

  “You know, I don’t even mind acknowledging a Creator, some sort of Higher Reason in the universe. I’ll even say that I feel it to be so, if you want me to. But supposing I found out that there is no God, would I be any less moral?”

  “Undoubtedly!”

  “I don’t think so. And why do you have to insist, why do all of you always insist, that we must recognize not just God in some general sense but a concrete Christian God, plus the Trinity, plus the Immaculate Conception? Would my philosophical deism be the least bit shaken if I learn that not one of the Gospel miracles ever happened? Of course it wouldn’t!”

  Sologdin sternly raised a hand with an admonitory finger.

  “There’s no other way! If you begin to doubt a single dogma of the faith, a single word of the scriptures, all is lost! You are one of the godless!”

  His hand slashed the air as though it held a saber.

  “That’s what repels people! All or nothing! No compromises, no allowances made. But suppose I can’t accept it in toto? What can I be sure of? What can I rely on? I keep telling you—the one thing I know is that I know nothing.”

  Socrates’ apprentice took hold of the saw and offered the other handle to Sologdin.

  “Another time, then,” Sologdin agreed. “Let’s cut wood.”

  They had begun to feel the cold, and they sawed away briskly. Powdered brown bark sputtered from under the saw. The job had been done more skillfully with Spiridon at the other end of the saw, but after many mornings working together, the friends got along without recriminations. They sawed with the zeal and enjoyment of men whose work is not performed under duress or the lash of poverty.

  Sologdin, flushed scarlet, growled once, when they were about to cut their fourth log: “Just try not to snag the saw.”

  And after the fourth log was cut, Nerzhin muttered: “It was a knotty one, all right, that bastard.”

  Fragrant shavings, some white, some yellow, fell on the trousers and shoes of the sawyers at each swish of the saw. This rhythmical work soothed them and re-tuned their thoughts.

  Nerzhin had awakened in a bad mood, but now he was thinking that camp life had left him stunned only for the first year. Now that he had his second wind, he would not fight tooth and nail for a trusty’s job, he would not be afraid of general duties; now that he knew better what really mattered, he would join the morning work parade in his padded jacket, smirched with plaster or fuel oil, and slowly stick at it for the whole twelve-hour day, day in and day out for the five remaining years of his sentence: Five years wasn’t ten years; five years you could survive. You just had to keep reminding yourself that prison was not just a curse—it was also a blessing.

  These were his thoughts as he took alternate pulls at the saw. He could not possibly imagine that his partner, as he pulled the saw his way, thought of prison only as an unmitigated curse, from which he must sooner or later break free.

  Sologdin was thinking now about his great secret achievement of the past few months, which held the promise of freedom. He would learn the definitive verdict on his work after breakfast, and he knew in advance that it would be favorable. Sologdin swelled with pride at the thought that his brain, exhausted by so many years of interrogation, and then of hunger in the camps, starved for so many years of phosphorus, had still succeeded in mastering a major engineering problem! How often we notice it in men approaching their forties—that sudden uprush of vital forces! Especially if the surplus energy of the flesh is not expended in procreation but mysteriously transmuted into powerful thought.

  Chapter 27

  A Bit of Methodology

  MEANWHILE THEY SAWED AWAY. Their bodies grew hot; their faces glowed; their jackets had long ago been tossed onto the unsawed timber; freshly cut logs were piling up around the sawhorse. And still there was no ax.

  “Maybe that’s enough?” Nerzhin asked. “We’ll never chop all that.”

  Sologdin agreed. “Let’s have a rest.” The blade of the saw twanged as he put it aside.

  They whipped their caps off. Steam rose from Nerzhin’s mop and Sologdin’s thinning hair. They took deep breaths. The air seemed to search out the mustiest corners of their insides.

  “But if they send you off to a camp now,” Sologdin asked, “how will that affect your work on the New Time of Troubles?” (He meant the Revolution.)

  “How can it? I’m not exactly pampered here. Having a single line of it in my possession means risking the hole whether I’m there or here. I can’t get a permit to use the public library here anyway. I probably won’t be let into the archives as long as I live. As for clean paper, even in the taiga I can find birch bark or pine bark. And however often they frisk me, they can’t confiscate my real assets; the suffering I’ve gone through and watched others experience provides a wealth of historical insights. Don’t you agree?”

  “Splendid!” Sologdin answered heartily. “I can see you’re learning! So you’ve decided not to spend fifteen years reading all the books on the subject first?”

  “More or less, and anyway where would I get them?”

  “Let’s have no ‘more or less’!” Sologdin loudly admonished him. “Remember, the idea is the thing! A powerful initial idea determines the success of any activity. And the idea must be your own! An idea, like a living tree, bears fruit only if it develops naturally. Books, and other people’s opinions, are scissors; they can cut through the life of your idea. You have to begin by thinking it through for yourself. Only then should you check it against what you find in books.”

  Sologdin looked searchingly at his friend.

  “What about the thirty little red volumes—are you still going to read them from beginning to end?”

  “Yes! To understand Lenin is to understand half the truth about the Revolution. And where did he reveal himself more clearly than in his books? Besides, I can find them anywhere, in any public reading room.”

  Sologdin looked dark, put his cap on, and perched awkwardly on the sawhorse.

  “You are a madman. You’ll fill your head with nonsense. It’ll get you nowhere. It’s my duty to warn you.”

  Nerzhin also took his cap from the sawhorse and perched on the pile of logs.

  “Don’t let your profession down. Think like a mathematician. Apply the nodal points method. How is any unknown phenomenon investigated? How is any undrawn curve plotted? All at once or point by point?”

  “All right, all right!” Nerzhin didn’t like beating about the bush. “I see what you mean.”

  “So why not apply this to a . . . person from real life?” (Nerzhin mentally translated it into the “Language of Apparent Clarity”: a historical person.)

  “Get an overall view of Lenin’s life, spot the main breaks in gradualness, the sharp changes of direction, and read only what relates to them. How did he behave at those moments? And there you have the whole man. The rest you don’t need at all.”

  “So when I asked you what should be done with professional criminals, I was inadvertently applying the nodal points method to you?”

  An evasive grin narrowed Sologdin’s bright eyes. He thoughtfully draped his jacket over his shoulders and changed his position on the sawhorse but looked no more comfortable.

  “You have upset me, Gleb, my boy. You may have to leave here any day now. We will have to part. One of us will perish. Or both of us. Will we live to see the day when people can meet and talk openly? I would like to have time to share with you . . . at least some of the conclusions I have reached about ways of unifying the aim, the agent, and his work. They might be of use to you. Of course, my inarticulateness makes it very difficult for me; I’ll put it rather clumsily. . . .”

  That was typical of Sologdin! Before dazzling you with his ideas, he felt compelled to disparage himself.

  Nerzhin took over, to speed things up.

  “Don’t forget your poor memory! And the fact that you are ‘a vessel of error.’ ”

  “Quite so,” Sologdin con
firmed with a fleeting smile. “Well, then, knowing my own imperfection, I have spent many years in prison forging rules for myself that gird my will with a band of iron. These rules are a sort of general survey of ways of approaching work.”

  Methodology, thought Nerzhin, translating as usual from the Language of Ultimate Clarity. His shoulders were getting cold, and he, too, draped his jacket around himself.

  The light was growing stronger, and they could see that it would soon be time to leave the firewood and report for the morning roll call. In the distance, in front of the special prison’s staff building, they caught glimpses of the Marfino exercise yard under a canopy of magically whitened limes. Towering over the other strollers were the thin, upright figure of the fifty-year-old artist Kondrashov-Ivanov and the bent but also very lanky Merzhanov, once Stalin’s court architect but now forgotten. They also saw Lev Rubin, who had overslept, trying to break through to the woodpile. The guard barred his way because it was too late.

  “Look, there’s Lyovka with his beard in a tangle.”

  They both burst out laughing.

  “Well, then, would you like me to tell you one or two of the rules each morning?”

  “Go ahead. We can try it.”

  “Here’s an example: How should one behave in the face of difficulties?”

  “Not be downhearted?”

  “That’s not enough.”

  Sologdin gazed past Nerzhin and out beyond the prison zone at the low, thick underbrush, powdered with frost and faintly tinged with the uncertain pink light from the east. The sun was undecided whether to appear or not. Sologdin’s face, grave and lean, with its fair, curly beard and fair, clipped mustache, was somehow reminiscent of Alexander Nevsky.*

  “What should be our attitude to difficulties?” he said solemnly. “In the sphere of the unknown, we should regard difficulties as a hidden treasure! As a rule, the more difficult things are, the more they can help us. It is worth less if the difficulties arise from your struggle with yourself. But when they come from the increasing resistance of the object, it’s splendid!” (The rosy glow of dawn seemed to pass over Alexander Nevsky’s face, carrying with it the reflection of difficulties as beautiful as the sun.)

  “The most promising path for investigation is that on which the greatest external meets the smallest internal resistance. Setbacks must be regarded as showing the need for further application of effort and concentration of the will. If great exertions have already been made, setbacks are a still greater cause for rejoicing! They mean that our crowbar has struck the iron treasure chest! And overcoming increased difficulties is all the more valuable in that the agent grows in stature with each setback, grows in proportion to the difficulties he meets!”

  “Bravo! Well said!” Nerzhin called out from his log pile.

  “That doesn’t mean that we can never forgo further effort. Our crowbar may have struck a stone instead. Once convinced of that, or if your resources are insufficient, or in violently hostile surroundings, you may even abandon the goal itself. But it is important to examine your reasons meticulously!”

  “Now, there I’m not sure I’m with you,” Nerzhin said slowly. “What surroundings are more hostile than prison? Where could our resources be less adequate? But we go on doing what we must. To give up now might mean giving up forever.”

  Dawn tints had lingered on the shrubs until unbroken gray cloud extinguished them.

  Sologdin looked down absently at Nerzhin, as though withdrawing his eyes from a message graven on tablets of stone. Then he began to speak again, almost chanting:

  “Now hear the rule of the last few inches! The region of the final inches! What that means is immediately obvious in the Language of Utter Clarity. The work is nearly completed, the goal is almost attained, everything seems to have been mastered and finalized, but the quality of the thing is not quite right. Finishing touches are necessary, perhaps further research. At that moment of weariness, the temptation to abandon the work without perfecting it is particularly strong. Work in the sector of the last few inches is very, very complicated but also particularly valuable because it is carried out by the most perfect means! The rule for the last few inches amounts to just this: Do not give up work at this point! Do not put it off, or the agent’s current of thought will be diverted from the region of the last few inches! And do not begrudge time spent on it, knowing that the goal is not speedy completion but the achievement of perfection!”

  “Good, very good,” Nerzhin whispered.

  In a quite different voice, a sarcastic voice, Sologdin said:

  “What’s the idea, Junior Lieutenant? This isn’t like you. Why have you been so long with the ax? We won’t have time to chop the wood now.”

  The moonfaced junior lieutenant, Nadelashin, had been a sergeant major not so long ago. After his promotion to officer rank, the prisoners in the sharashka, who were quite fond of him, had taken to calling him “junior.”

  Mincing toward them, panting comically, he handed over the ax with a guilty smile and said eagerly:

  “No, please, Sologdin, please chop the wood! There’s none at all in the kitchen; there’s nothing to cook dinner with. You can’t imagine how much work I have without your making me more.”

  Nerzhin snorted. “Eh? What? Work? Junior Lieutenant! You really call what you do work?”

  The duty officer turned his moon face to Nerzhin. Knitting his brow, he recited from memory: “ ‘Work is the overcoming of resistance.’ When I walk around quickly, I’m overcoming air resistance, so I, too, work.” He tried to look impassive, but his face lit up in a smile when Sologdin and Nerzhin both roared with laughter in the frosty air. “Please, please chop the wood!”

  He turned and minced off toward the staff building, outside which at that very moment they caught a glimpse of the smart, overcoated figure of his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev.

  “Gleb, my boy,” said Sologdin in surprise. “Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Klimentiadis?” (That year there had been a lot in the newspapers about Greek detainees who sent telegrams from their cells to parliaments everywhere and to the UN describing the hardships they were suffering. In the sharashka, where prisoners could not always send as much as a postcard to their wives, let alone write to foreign parliaments, it had become the practice to change the name of prison officers so that they sounded Greek—Myshinopoulos, Klimentiadis, Shikinidi.)

  “What brings Klimentiadis here on a Sunday?”

  “Don’t you know? Six men are being taken to see family.”

  Nerzhin had heard about this earlier. Now his whole being, so full of light and joy while he was sawing wood, was suffused with bitterness again. It was nearly a year since he had been allowed a visit and eight months since he had put in an application, which had been neither approved nor rejected. One reason for this was that, not wanting his wife to lose her graduate student status, he had not given her address at the dormitory but instead asked for letters to be sent poste restante. The prison would not accept this. Because he was so intensely introspective, Nerzhin was free from envy. Neither the wages nor the rations of more deserving prisoners disturbed his peace of mind. But some people had visits every couple of months, while his vulnerable wife had pined and hovered outside the fortresslike walls of prisons, and the thought of this injustice was torture to him.

  Moreover, today was his birthday.

  “They are, are they?” Sologdin was just as bitterly envious. “They take the stoolies down there every month. And I will never see my Nina again. . . .”

  (Sologdin never used the words “until the end of my sentence” because he had reason to know that prison sentences do not necessarily have an end.)

  He watched Klimentiev stand talking to Nadelashin for a minute or two, then enter headquarters.

  He spoke suddenly and rapidly: “Gleb! Look, your wife knows mine. When you go in to see her, try to ask Nadya to look Nina up and tell her just three little things from me: He loves you! he worships you! he adores you!
”

  “You know they’ve refused me a visit; what’s gotten into you?” Nerzhin, taking careful aim to split a log clear in two, did not hide his annoyance.

  “Just take a look!”

  Nerzhin looked around. “Junior” was coming toward them and beckoning to him. Dropping the ax and brushing against the propped-up saw with his jacket so that it fell to the ground with a twang, Gleb ran like a little boy.

  Sologdin’s eyes followed them as Junior took Nerzhin into headquarters. Then he placed a log upright and swung at it with such bitter rage that he not only split it into two blocks but drove the ax into the ground.

  The ax was government property anyway.

  * * *

  * Alexander Nevsky: A thirteenth-century Russian prince greatly esteemed for his military leadership and diplomatic wisdom that preserved Northeast Russia from destruction by the Mongols. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Chapter 28

  The Junior Lieutenant’s Job

  WHEN HE HAD CITED his textbook definition of work, Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin had not been untruthful. He was on duty for only twelve hours every two days, but the work was exacting; it involved scurrying to and fro between floors, and it was extremely responsible.

  His spell of duty the previous night had proved more than usually bothersome. He had reported for duty at 9:00 p.m., checked off the prisoners, 281 of them, as all present, supervised their exit to their places of work for the evening, stationed sentries on the landing of the main staircase and in the headquarters hallway, mounted a patrol under the windows of the special prison, and was about to feed and billet the new arrivals when he was torn away by a summons from the operations officer, Major Myshin, who for some reason had not gone home.

  Nadelashin was an exceptional person not only among jailers (or “prison operatives,” as they were now called) but among his compatriots in general. In a country where the words for “vodka” and “water” look as much alike as the liquids themselves, Nadelashin never took a drop, even for a cold. In a country where every other person has an advanced degree in obscene language from the army or the camps, where the foulest words are used in the presence of children, not only by drunks (and by children themselves at play), not only by people fighting to get onto a bus at an out-of-town stop, but in intimate conversation between friends, Nadelashin was not only unskilled in obscenity, he did not even use words like “devil” and “scum.” He had just one little saying when he was angry—“A bull should toss you!”—and he usually said it under his breath.