In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  During the war there had been no oil for paints, and he had mixed his colors with rationed sunflower oil. He had to earn his ration cards, and they sent him to a chemical warfare division to paint portraits of women soldiers who obtained the best grades on military and political courses. Ten portraits were commissioned, but he chose just one of the ten best girls and wore her out with long sittings. Even so, his version of her was not at all what the top brass wanted to see, and Moscow 1941, as the picture was called, found no takers.

  Yet the essence of 1941 was in that portrait. A girl in an anti-gas suit. Her head was thrown back, and she stared wildly at something hideous, something unforgivable before her. But this was no weak, girlish figure! Hands trained for battle gripped the sling of her gas mask. The dark gray anti-gas suit, with its stiff creases and silvery glint where the light caught its folds, looked like a suit of armor. Nobility, cruelty, and vengefulness had come together and were engraved on the face of this determined Komsomol from Kaluga, this far-from-beautiful girl in whom Kondrashov-Ivanov had seen a Joan of Arc!

  It was, you might think, very much in the spirit of the wartime slogan “We shall not forget! We shall not forgive!” but it went too far; it showed something savage, uncontrollable. It was rejected and never exhibited. It stood for years in the artist’s little room, with its face to the wall, and went on standing there until he was arrested.

  Leonid Andreev’s son, Daniil, had written a novel and asked a couple of dozen friends to hear it. A Thursday salon, nineteenth-century style. That novel cost every member of the audience twenty-five years in a corrective labor camp. One of those who heard the seditious work was Kondrashov-Ivanov, great-grandson of the Decembrist Kondrashov, sentenced to twenty years for his part in the 1825 rising and remembered for the touching behavior of a French governess who loved him and followed him to Siberia.

  True, Kondrashov-Ivanov did not end up in a camp. As soon as he had signed the receipt for his sentence, he was taken to Marfino and put to work, painting a picture a month on Foma Guryanovich’s orders. In the past twelve months he had painted the pictures hanging there and others that had been removed. With fifty years behind him and twenty-five ahead, he had not lived but flitted effortlessly through that halcyon year, not knowing whether there would ever be such another. He did not notice what he was given to eat or to wear or how often his head was counted among all those others.

  He was, of course, deprived of opportunities to meet and talk to other artists. Or to look at their pictures. Or to find out from albums of reproductions filtering through customs what direction painting was taking in the West.

  Wherever it was going, it could have no influence on, no relevance to, the work of Kondrashov-Ivanov because, in the magic pentagram where all discoveries were made and all creation took place, all five angles were occupied once and for all: two by drawing and color, as only he could see them, two by universal good and universal evil, and the fifth by the artist himself.

  He could not return on his own two legs to the landscapes he had once seen or with his own hands reproduce the same still lifes, but he had begun to see them more clearly and in their true colors in cells half darkened by “muzzles,” and those he had never painted before he could paint now from memory.

  One of these still lifes, based on the four-by-five ratio of the Egyptian square—Kondrashov attached very great importance to the proportions of the sides—was hanging right then next to Mamurin’s window. Half of its surface was taken up by a brightly polished round copper tray standing up on edge. It was just an ordinary tray, but its effect was that of a hero’s blazing shield. By it stood a jug of some dark metal, beaten and burnished, probably meant to hold water, not wine. And on the wall behind them was draped a piece of golden yellow brocade (Kondrashov was particularly attracted by all shades of yellow just now) that could be seen as the mantle of the invisible. There was something in the combination of these three objects that inspired courage and forbade retreat.

  (The colonels had all refused this still life, insisting that the tray should be laid down flat and a cut melon or something of the sort placed on it.)

  Kondrashov worked on several pictures at once, leaving them and coming back to them from time to time. He had never brought a picture to the stage at which his craftsman’s eye could judge it perfect. He did not know for sure that there was such a stage. He always abandoned a picture when he no longer saw anything special in it, when his eye was so used to it that the changes he might make seemed more trivial at every return and he realized that he might be spoiling it rather than improving it.

  He turned it to the wall, covered it up. The picture was rejected, estranged from him. But when he surrendered it gratis to hang amid pomp and luxury, he looked at it with a fresh eye, and the pang of parting was mingled with delight. If nobody saw it again, he had still painted it!

  Nerzhin, all attention now, started inspecting Kondrashov’s last picture. A wintry brook occupied the main place in it. It was almost impossible to tell which way the brook was flowing. In fact, it was hardly flowing at all; a film of ice was beginning to form on its surface. There were brownish tints in the shallows, reflected from fallen leaves covering the bottom. The first snow lay in patches on both banks, and the grass in between was brown and withered. Two willows grew by the brook, wraithlike and misty, wet from the powdery snow melting into them. But the most important part of the picture was the background: a dense rampart of olive-black firs with a single helpless birch gleaming in the front rank. Its gentle yellow glow made the host of sentinel conifers, with their sharp pikes raised skyward, look denser and darker still. The sky was a motley scrabble, and the setting sun was muffled by ragged cloud, which it was too weak to pierce with a direct ray. The focal point of the picture was not this either. It was the chill water of the standing brook. It had fullness and depth. It was leaden yet translucent, and it looked very cold. It seemed to hold the balance between autumn and winter.

  This was the picture on which the painter was now intent.

  Artistic creation is subject to an inexorable law, which Kondrashov knew only too well. He had struggled against it but had ended by helplessly submitting. This law said that nothing he had done before had any value, none of it counted, none of it reflected credit on him. Only the picture on which he was working then and there was the summation of a lifetime’s experience, the zenith of his powers, the one and only touchstone of his talent!

  And he could see that it was not going to work!

  But none of his previous pictures had been “going to work” until, briefly, it did. Now past despair was forgotten; this was the first time he had ever seemed to be learning to paint properly. And still it wasn’t working; his whole life was a failure; he had never had any talent at all!

  That water, now—it looked liquid and cold and deep and still, but none of that meant anything if it did not convey the wisdom, the completeness, the serenity that Kondrashov could never find in his passionate self but recognized and revered in nature. Did his water convey that sublime serenity, or didn’t it? Miserably, hopelessly he struggled to decide. Did it, didn’t it. . . ?

  “Do you know, Ippolit Mikhailovich, you’ve more or less convinced me. These places of yours are Russia.”

  Kondrashov-Ivanov looked around sharply, “And not the Caucasus?”

  His spectacles sat as firmly on his nose as if they were welded to it.

  Though not the weightiest of his concerns, it had a certain importance. Many people were perplexed by Kondrashov’s landscapes, finding them Caucasian rather than Russian. Perhaps because they were too majestic, too awesome.

  “I feel sure such places can be found in Russia,” Nerzhin said still more positively.

  He rose from the stump and made the round of the landing inspecting Morning of an Unusual Day and other landscapes.

  The artist nodded excitedly. “Of course, of course! Can be found and have been found! I could take you there if we didn’t need an escort! The fact
is that the public is under the spell of Levitan! We are used to seeing the Russian landscape through Levitan’s eyes, not unpleasant in its humble way but monotonous, featureless. But if there’s nothing more to Russia, where did her self-burners come from? The mutinous streltsy? Peter the First? The Decembrists? The People’s Will Party?”

  “Uh-huh,” Nerzhin said approvingly. “You’re right there. But all the same, Ippolit Mikhailovich, I don’t understand your passion for hyperbole. That crippled oak, for instance. Why does it have to be on the brink of a precipice? I feel sure there’s an abyss down below—nothing less would satisfy you. And the sky isn’t just stormy; it looks like a sky that has never known the sun. And all the hurricanes that ever blew anywhere in the last two hundred years have passed this way, twisting the tree’s branches and struggling to claw it loose from the cliff. You’re a Shakespearean, of course; anything evil must be inordinately evil. But that’s ancient history. Statistically very few people find themselves in such situations. There’s no need to spell ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with capital letters.”

  “I can’t listen to such stuff!” The artist waved his long arms angrily. “Evil is ancient history, you say? Evil never really put in an appearance before our century. In Shakespeare’s time what passed for evildoing was sport for callow youths! We ought to spell Good and Evil not just with capitals but with letters five stories high, letters that flash like lighthouses! Let’s not split hairs! Statistically few! What about you and me and the rest of us here? And how many millions are there like us?”

  “Well, yes . . .” Nerzhin said, shaking his head doubtfully. “If we’re in a camp and we’re invited to sell whatever conscience we have left for two hundred grams of black bread. . . . But that has no resonance, so to speak; it somehow doesn’t show. . . .”

  Kondrashov-Ivanov stood up still straighter, rose to his full not inconsiderable height. He gazed at something higher still ahead of him, like Egmont led to execution. “Prison camp should never break a man’s spirit!”

  Nerzhin laughed wryly.

  “Shouldn’t, perhaps, but it does. You haven’t been in a camp yet, so you can’t judge. You don’t know how they crunch our fragile bones in the camps. It doesn’t matter what you’re like when you go in; you come out changed beyond recognition. As everybody knows, being determines consciousness.”

  “No, no, no!” Kondrashov-Ivanov spread his long arms, ready then and there to wrestle with the whole world. “No! No! No! That would be too degrading! If that were true, life wouldn’t be worthwhile! If it is so, tell me, why do lovers remain faithful to each other when they’re parted? ‘Being’ demands that they be unfaithful! And why do people in exactly the same circumstances, in the same camp even, behave so differently? Who can know for sure whether life molds man or the strong and noble human being molds life!”

  Nerzhin was quietly confident that his experience of life was worth more than the fantasies of this ageless idealist. But he could not help admiring his sentiments.

  “Every man is born with a sort of inner essence,” Kondrashov said. “It is, so to speak, the innermost core of the man, his essential self. No ‘being,’ nothing extraneous, can determine him. Moreover, every man carries within himself an image of perfection, which is never dimmed and which sometimes stands out with remarkable clarity! And reminds him of his chivalrous duty!”

  Nerzhin had by now returned to his seat on the log. He scratched the back of his head. “That’s another thing,” he said. “Why do you go in for all these knights and their knightly trappings? You seem to me to go too far, though Mitya Sologdin, of course, likes it. Your antiaircraft girl is a knight in armor; your copper tray is a shield. . . .”

  “What?” Kondrashov was amazed. “You don’t like it? I go too far, do I? Ha-ha-ha!” Operatic laughter echoed in the hollow stairwell like thunder in a mountain gorge. As though about to ride him down, he thrust out an arm toward Nerzhin, and his pointing finger was the head of his leveled lance.

  “Who was it who expelled the knights from our lives? Lovers of money and trade. Lovers of orgies and feasting! What is it our age most lacks? Party members? No, sir, it lacks knights! In the days of chivalry, there were no concentration camps! No gas chambers!”

  Suddenly he was silent. In a single movement he alighted softly from his steed and sank into a squatting position beside his visitor. His glasses flashed as he asked in a whisper: “Would you like me to show you something?”

  Arguments with artists always end that way.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Kondrashov, still stooping, shuffled off into a corner, pulled out a small canvas on a stretcher, and brought it over, keeping the gray obverse side toward Nerzhin.

  “You know who Parsifal was?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Wasn’t he connected with Lohengrin?”

  “His father. The guardian of the Holy Grail. I try to visualize that precise moment. The moment any man may experience, when he first catches sight of the image of perfection. . . .”

  Kondrashov closed his eyes and drew in his lips. He had to prepare himself, too.

  Nerzhin wondered why what he was about to see was so small.

  The artist raised his eyelids.

  “It’s only a sketch. A sketch for the most important picture in my life. I will probably never paint it. It’s the moment when Parsifal first caught sight of the . . . castle of the Holy . . . Grail!”

  The picture was twice as high as it was wide. It showed a wedge-shaped crevice between two converging mountain precipices. On each of them, to the right and to the left, the trees on the fringe of a dense, primeval forest edged into the picture. Creeping bracken and ugly shrubs clung to the very edges and even the perpendicular walls of the two cliffs. High on the cliff to the left a light gray horse had emerged from the forest carrying a rider in a helmet and a scarlet cloak. The horse was not afraid of the abyss. Its hoof was raised ready, in obedience to the rider’s will, either to back away or to cross the abyss; it had the strength to leap as though winged.

  The rider himself had no eyes for the abyss before his horse. He was staring, in rapt amazement, into the depths of the picture, where an orange-gold radiance suffused the whole expanse of the sky above, emanating perhaps from the sun, perhaps from a still purer source concealed by the castle. Stepped and turreted, growing out of the stepped mountain and visible also from below through the cleft between the cliffs, between the trees and the ferns, rising to a needle point in mid-heaven at the top of the picture, hazy and indistinct, as if spun from shifting cloud, yet discernible in all the details of its unearthly perfection, ringed in a blue-gray aureole by the invisible supersun, stood the castle of the Holy Grail.

  Chapter 47

  Top-Secret Conversation

  THE BELL FOR THE DINNER BREAK could be heard in every nook and cranny of the ex-seminary, and its ringing reached even Kondrashov’s remote landing.

  Nerzhin hurried out into the open.

  The exercise yard was not spacious, but Nerzhin liked to make a path of his own, away from the others. As in his cell, it was three paces forward, three paces back, but if he was alone that was enough. In this way he derived from the exercise period a few blissful moments of solitude and readjustment.

  Hiding his civilian suit under the long tails of his indestructible artillery overcoat (not taking your suit off in time was a serious breach of discipline, and he could be turned away from the exercise area, but it would be a pity to waste walking time by going to change), Nerzhin took brisk steps to get there and occupy the short path he had beaten between one lime tree and the next, on the very edge of the permitted zone, near the fence beyond which stood the bishop’s shiplike house.

  He did not want to dissipate his thoughts in idle conversation.

  Snowflakes fluttered, so sparse and weightless that it could hardly be said to be snowing, though they did not melt on the ground. Nerzhin began walking, head in the air, looking up at the sky, not where he was going. His body was
invigorated by deep drafts of air, and his soul fused with the peace of the sky, overcast and snow-laden though it was.

  But somebody called his name. He looked around. Another shabby officer’s overcoat and a winter cap (he, too, had been arrested at the front in winter): Rubin, half concealed by the trunk of a lime. Rubin felt embarrassed, felt that he was treating his friend and messmate badly; Nerzhin would be prolonging, in his own mind, the meeting with his wife, and Rubin had to interrupt him at that sacred moment. He showed his embarrassment by extending no more than half of his beard from behind the tree.

  “Gleb, old friend! If I’m barging in at the wrong moment, just tell me and I’ll disappear. But I do very much want a word with you.”

  Nerzhin looked at Rubin’s gently imploring eyes, at the white branches of the lime trees, and at Rubin again. However long he went on pacing that lonely path, he could enjoy no more the mingled joy and sorrow in his heart. It was already cooling.

  Life went on.

  “That’s okay, Lev. What is it?”

  Rubin emerged and joined him on his path. Gleb gathered from his solemn unsmiling look that something important had happened. It would have been impossible to tempt Rubin more sorely than by burdening him with an earthshaking secret and forbidding him to share it with any of his closest friends! If the American imperialists kidnapped him from the sharashka that moment and started chopping him into little pieces, he would never reveal his top-secret assignment! But to be the only zek in the sharashka in possession of such a tremendous secret and not tell even Nerzhin, that called for a superhuman effort!

  Telling Gleb was the same as telling no one. He would not pass it on. Anyway, it was only natural to confide in him, since he alone was au courant with the classification of voices and could understand how difficult and how important the task was. Besides, it was a matter of urgency to reach an understanding with him while there was time. Later on, there would be a frantic hurry; there would be no tearing yourself away from the tapes, things would become more and more complicated. . . . Lev had to have an assistant.