Translated material
The unprecedented happens
Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle” was published in the “Literary Monuments” series
This has never happened before. Not only all the many years of experience, but also the very idea of “Literary Monuments” rejects the possibility of publishing works by living authors in this series. But Solzhenitsyn’s literary destiny is so incredible, his place in the history of literature (and simply in history) is so significant, and the passage of time is so rapid that a blatant “violation of the rules” turns out to be (let’s say acceptable) absolutely necessary. Although incredible.Solzhenitsyn spoke in detail about the unnatural fate of an “underground writer” in his book “The Calf Butted an Oak Tree.” Every honest reader of “essays on literary life” is doomed to experience a real shock: the struggle to which the life of the author of “In the First Circle,” “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “Cancer Ward,” “Archipelago...”, seemed to boil down. should not have allowed these (and other works written during the Soviet years) to appear in the form that we take for granted. I’m not talking now about civic courage, moral height and strength of thought - about absolute devotion to the work of writing, about that complete subordination of oneself to the art of words, without which artistic perfection is impossible. Solzhenitsyn once decided to be a writer in spite of everything - and he achieved his goal. In every thing that he - sooner or later - considered completed, and therefore, in principle, intended to meet the reader. (Another thing is that this meeting, as a rule, was postponed - for reasons beyond the control of the author.)
The volume of Literary Monuments allows you to see how Solzhenitsyn worked. Of course, the creative history of each Solzhenitsyn’s work is worthy of the close attention of researchers and the healthy interest of “ordinary” readers, but still the case of the novel “In the First Circle” is special. And because this is the first completed prose of Solzhenitsyn, a writer who truly found himself precisely on this path (and not in poetry and drama). It was here that the two main tendencies of Solzhenitsyn as a narrator were revealed, the intense “confrontation” of which largely determines his poetics: an orientation toward conciseness (the action spans three days), implying the “symbolism” of the events described, and an orientation toward inclusiveness (an abundance of characters, a complex interweaving of numerous plot lines that only seem “autonomous”, but in the end turn out to be “rhymed”, and therefore capture the integrity of existence that eludes the ordinary view.) And because the fate of the novel was especially difficult, as the author’s preface reminds: “written - 1955 --1958
distorted -- 1964
restored - 1968".
The story of what lies behind these three short lines is the subject of the accompanying article “The Fate of the Author and the Fate of the Novel” and extensive comments, the main content of which is: “1) the most significant variants of the early editions...2) identification of autobiographical motives in the image main character - Gleb Nerzhin; 3) the connection of this hero with a series of autobiographical images of the pre- and post-novel era; 4) common motifs with other works of Solzhenitsyn; 5) recording the author’s incidental comments... in the process of working on the first author’s edition of the complete, “atomic” version of the novel...” For a researcher, textual criticism, biography and poetics (which is discussed a lot in the article) are equally important - such a unity of interests (which seems to be necessary for any philologist) does not occur often. And even more rarely is it combined with a deeply personal attitude towards the “object of research”, which is palpable in every paragraph of the article and notes of Mira Gennadievna Petrova, whose creative collaboration with Solzhenitsyn began forty years ago - in the fall of 1966.
This is what is written about Mira Gennadievna in “The Invisibles” (the fifth addition to “The Calf..."): “...she was so talented at perceiving literature that she replaced 10-20 other readers for me at once - an invaluable quality for the underground writer: every new chapter or page was enough to check on it alone. In general, the writer, so busy with concealment, concealment, subordinate to the external mechanical requirements of conspiracy and its strict deadlines, is in danger of not observing the leisurely aesthetic contemplation of proportions and details in what he has done. This is exactly what Mira often reminded me of. That’s why she occupied such a special position - apart from all my conspiracy: she preserved for me a separate reserved territory, where I was not a conspirator, but a pure writer <...> She was also my interlocutor checking: before her - no with whom, and after it only with my wife Alya, did I talk about the work in the very course of it, and sometimes even before the first construction. This is a fragile conversation, it can break the whole plan if the interlocutor is not you, a split-off, but an alien. This conversation was not conducted in real space, but in en-dimensional literary space, it was not driven by time (as everything in my life was driven), it did not sometimes require paper and pencil to write down, it was a slow rearrangement and testing of the fundamentals - methods and structures in different comparison beams. In such conversations, many false paths are clarified and can be avoided.”
The continuation of those conversations was the lifetime academic publication of the novel “In the First Circle.” I think that no one except Mira Gennadievna Petrova (a text critic and editor in one person!) would have ever succeeded in this task (or better yet, a miracle).