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A review by tittypete
In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4.0
So during the cold war, the USSR had these special prisons for scientists and smart people. See, Stalin was in the habit of having everyone who could think for themselves thrown into prison. But … if they were gonna ‘win’ against the west, they still needed to innovate and invent stuff to keep up. So they put these smart people in these special cushy prisons where they made them work on government projects. They had decent food and could talk to each other and read books. They had access to smokes and got visits. There were lady civilians that worked with the prisoners and that would make them horny. Some books were permissible. Laundry, shoes, heat and lighting. The works. The title of the book refers to Dante’s first circle of hell. It’s nice-ish but it’s still hell. At least it’s not a Siberian labor camp.
The story starts with a Soviet diplomat making a phone call to the US embassy trying to tell them that the USSR is making plans to get the atom bomb. Then we cut to the special prison where the scientist prisoners are tasked with coming up with a phone-computer-translator thing that will help identify the aforementioned diplomat so they can put him in jail. So that’s the set up and from there it gets real Russian-novel-y. Lots of conversations about the times. Philosophical, talmudic discussions about what it means to be a prisoner, a socialist, an enemy of the state. There’s a lot of them. And for the most part they are charmingly written and interesting enough. But this book is long. Russian lit box handsomely checked. It feels like Ivan Denisovich blown out into 800 pages of Gulag Archipelago and shaded as a deep dive into the softer side of prison slave labor. Fun stuff. Russia never disappoints when it comes to culturally entrenched misery.
The story starts with a Soviet diplomat making a phone call to the US embassy trying to tell them that the USSR is making plans to get the atom bomb. Then we cut to the special prison where the scientist prisoners are tasked with coming up with a phone-computer-translator thing that will help identify the aforementioned diplomat so they can put him in jail. So that’s the set up and from there it gets real Russian-novel-y. Lots of conversations about the times. Philosophical, talmudic discussions about what it means to be a prisoner, a socialist, an enemy of the state. There’s a lot of them. And for the most part they are charmingly written and interesting enough. But this book is long. Russian lit box handsomely checked. It feels like Ivan Denisovich blown out into 800 pages of Gulag Archipelago and shaded as a deep dive into the softer side of prison slave labor. Fun stuff. Russia never disappoints when it comes to culturally entrenched misery.