The First Circle

"I’ve been thinking a lot about Stalin in the last year or two because I am slowly moving to writing a book about Stalin. I hesitate to call it a biography of Stalin because I don’t think that’s possible, but about his tyranny and how it worked. So I’ve read a lot of books and novels about the Stalin era and I think this book gets to the heart of the phenomenon better than any other I’ve read. Stalin himself only appears in four chapters, about a quarter of the way in. Then he disappears and doesn’t appear again. That in itself is quite masterful. Although you know that everything that happens in the book stems from Stalin, he isn’t mentioned. It’s how I would conceive of Stalin as a political personage. The tyranny rests on his not being present, on people responding, under duress, to pressures of various sorts, taking actions and fulfilling decisions to keep a system going. They’re tied together by these invisible threads that do lead to Stalin but no one’s aware of that in a direct sense. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The First Circle , as you say, is a reference to Dante, but there’s also a sense in which you will never get to Stalin because when you get into the first circle, there’s another circle and another. What this book helped me to do is think of Stalin as a cross between Big Brother and the Wizard of Oz. His presence is everywhere, but he’s nowhere and doesn’t really show himself very much. And, actually, in those four chapters, the real Stalin is this rather pathetic, elderly man with yellow teeth who doesn’t wash. He’s just insignificant, somehow. He doesn’t command respect or authority from his persona. He commands authority because of the system he’s at the center of. There’s a bit in the book I just thought was amazing and so true for what we’re experiencing now with Trumpism etc. It’s at the beginning of the chapter, “The Emperor of the Earth” which is one of the chapters told through Stalin’s own consciousness. He writes, “Stalin had a passing acquaintance with an uncomplicated version of world history, and he knew that given time people will forgive all bad things, indeed forget them, or remember them as good. Whole nations behaved like Queen Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III: Their wrath was short-lived, their will infirm, their memory weak, and they would always be glad to give themselves to the victor.” It says it all. The Gulag is a very microcosmic, intensive form of Stalinism and other writers—like Shalamov for example—have described the Gulag in a way that is unforgettable. But as a broad canvas, albeit set in a very privileged part of the Gulag, of how this Nineteen Eighty-Four world works, The First Circle does more than any other book to get us there. It is funny and the ending is brilliant. There is an authorial voice here, for sure. It’s slightly didactic, but then Solzhenitsyn is slightly didactic. He has a philosophy, but I don’t mind that. I don’t share it, but it’s fine. He is basically a Slavophile, Christian, Russian nationalist. In The First Circle it’s not as pronounced as it becomes in his later years, but you can see that he feels that the only antidote to Sovietism or Stalinism is something spiritual or based on Christian principles. I don’t mind that because you need something to contrast with Stalinism. If you don’t have a world philosophy and try to get to the essence of Stalinism—which is what I think this book is trying to do—then it becomes too fluid. Think of the other big books on the Stalin period, like Grossman’s Life and Fate , for example. That has a much more explicit moral infrastructure. I find it off-putting and I’m not a big fan of that book, but you have to have a clear set of principles against which to tease out the meanings you as a writer are concerned about with this phenomenon."