“I’m not a bit sorry I’ve left the place, men,” Khorobrov said. “What sort of life do you have in a special prison? You can’t walk along a hallway without bumping into some Siromakha. One in every five there is a snitch. If you fart in the bathroom, the godfather hears about it right away; we’ve had no Sundays for two years, the bastards. And a twelve-hour working day. You swap your brains for twenty grams of butter. They banned letters to and from home—damn and blast them! Just work, work, work. It’s hell on earth!”
Khorobrov fell silent, overcome with indignation.
Nerzhin’s voice rose in reply above the sound of the engine, which was quieter now that they were driving along the asphalt highway.
“No, Ilya Terentich, that isn’t hell. That is not hell! Hell is where we’re going. We’re going back to hell. The special prison is the highest, the best, the first circle of hell. It’s practically paradise.”
He left it at that—no need to say more. They all knew, of course, that something incomparably worse than the special prison awaited them. They knew that, from the camp, Marfino would be remembered as a golden dream. But for the present, to keep their spirits up, and to feel that they had done the right thing, they had to curse the special prison, so that no one would feel any lingering regret or reproach himself with a rash act.
“When war breaks out, they’ll kill off the zeks in special prisons with poisoned bread, like the Hitlerites did, because they know too much.”
“Well, that’s what I keep telling you,” Khorobrov exclaimed. “Bread and water is better than cake and woe.”
As their ears grew accustomed to the noise of the engine, the zeks fell silent.
Yes, what awaited them was the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at Oymyakon, the copper mines at Dzhezkazgan. What awaited them yet again was the pickax and the wheelbarrow, a starvation ration of half-baked bread, hospital, death. They could look forward to nothing but the worst.
Yet in their hearts they were at peace with themselves.
They were gripped by the fearlessness of people who have lost absolutely everything—such fearlessness is difficult to attain, but once attained, it endures.
SWINGING THE COMPRESSED mass of bodies to and fro, the gaily painted orange-and-blue truck swished along the city streets, passed one of the stations, and pulled up at a crossing. A dark red car was held up by traffic lights at the same road junction. It belonged to the Moscow correspondent of the newspaper Libération, who was on his way to a hockey match in the Dynamo stadium. The correspondent read the words on the side of the truck:
Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat
He had made a mental note of several such trucks seen in various parts of Moscow that day. He took out a notebook and jotted down in dark red ink:
“Every now and then, one encounters on the streets of Moscow food delivery trucks, spick-and-span and impeccably hygienic. There can be no doubt that the capital’s food supplies are extremely well organized.”
About the Author
ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, on December 11, 1918. He earned a degree in mathematics and physics from Rostov University and studied literature through a correspondence course from the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature. A captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He was sentenced to eight years of incarceration, to be followed by “perpetual” internal exile, but was cleared of all charges in 1957 as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Khrushchev himself authorized. The writer’s increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974. For eighteen years of his exile, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia, thus fulfilling his longstanding prediction. He died in his home in Moscow on August 3, 2008.
Solzhenitsyn’s major works include the novels In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, the memoirs The Oak and the Calf and Invisible Allies, the massive cycle of historical novels with the series title The Red Wheel, and the monumental history of the Soviet prison system The Gulag Archipelago, which Time magazine named the Best Nonfiction Work of the Twentieth Century. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Fiction
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963)
Cancer Ward (1968)
Stories and Prose Poems (1971)
August 1914 (The Red Wheel: Knot I) (1972)
November 1916 (The Red Wheel:Knot II) (1999)
Nonfiction
Nobel Lecture (1972)
Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1974)
From Under the Rubble (1975)
Warning to the West (1976)
A World Split Apart (1978)
The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (1980)
The Mortal Danger (1980)
Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1991)
Invisible Allies (1995)
“The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century (1995)
Poetry
Prussian Nights: A Poem (1977)
Drama
The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play (1969)
Candle in the Wind (1973)
Prisoners: A Tragedy (1983)
Victory Celebrations: A Comedy in Four Acts (1983)
Credits
COVER DESIGN BY MILAN BOZIC
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © PHOTOPIPS/SHUTTERSTOCK IMAGES
Copyright
IN THE FIRST CIRCLE. Copyright © 2009 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Designed by Joy O’Meara
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–2008.
[V kruge pervom. English]
In the first circle : a novel / Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ; translated by Harry T. Willetts.— 1st Harper Perennial ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-147901-4
1. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1936–1953—Fiction. 3. Political persecution—Soviet Union—Fiction. I. Willetts, H. T. II. Title.
PG3488.O4V23 2009
891.73'44—dc22
2008039336
* * *
09 10 11 12 13 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780062194886
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