Volume 11, Number 11 · December 19, 1968
Hell on Earth
By V.S. Pritchett
The First Circle
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney
Harper & Row, 580 pp., $10.00
The Cancer Ward David Burg, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February)
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Rebecca Frank
Dial, 616 pp., $8.50 (another translation of The Cancer Ward, by Lord Bethell and
When you ask your favorite Soviet Cultural Attaché why such-and-such a novelist is suppressed in Russia, the beaming answer is that he is not suppressed; he is just not published. He is known only at the typescript-and-galley-proof stage to people in literary circles. This is the situation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Apart from one or two stories and the publication—by Khrushchev's permission—of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the magazine Novy Mir he is unknown to Soviet readers in book form. It is easy to see why The Cancer Ward and The First Circle will never do now that the Soviet line is being re-Stalinized. The last named is minutely informative about the methods of the Police State and, in one farcical chapter, makes great fun of anti-American propaganda. The deeper reason lies in the coarseness of the political mind and its chronic fear of literature: the politicals confuse literature with journalism and advertising copy. Solzhenitsyn has his journalistic side, but he is aware of its inadequacy and in The First Circle he strives to get beyond sweating at a case in detail, and when he succeeds, he is very impressive. He understands what is wrong with Soviet literature. In this novel an enormously successful writer—perhaps he is what the political prisoners of the book call 'the Alexei non-Tolstoi'—is talking after dinner with a diplomat, who says:
Review, 3453 words
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