In the First Circle

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

As a good young conservative, I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle at some point in the late 60's/early 70's. As it turns out, that was a version that Solzhenitsyn himself censored in hopes that it could get published in the Soviet Union. That didn't happen, but it did make it out to the West. But it wasn't the story he really wanted to tell.

This slightly-retitled version is the restored original, with some revisions. I was prompted to buy it when it was selected by Russ Roberts for the EconTalk Book Club. And, although this wasn't part of my decision, we also just celebrated the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth. Due to that, there's been a lot of other recent web content relevant to the book and its author. See, for example:

The book is set in the final few days of 1949, mostly around the inhabitants Marfino sharashka, a special prison on the outskirts of Moscow where technically-skilled prisoners are imported from the far reaches of Gulag Archipelago to work on projects for the state. It's relatively endurable, but it is the "First Circle" of Hell (see Dante), where the prisoners ("zeks") are always under the explicit threat of being returned to the Gulag if they fail to cooperate.

Most notably: in the first chapter, a disillusioned diplomat, Volodin, has been informed of an upcoming transfer of US atomic bomb secrets to a Soviet agent. He doesn't want to see that technology in the hands of Stalin, so he makes a desperate call from a public phone booth to the US embassy in Moscow. Unfortunately, the call is being monitored, taped, and nearly immediately terminated by Soviet security.

So the technical problem is dumped on the zeks of Marfino: here's the tape, here are the suspects, can you match up the voice to the guy we should arrest?

Well, we kind of know how things turned out: the Soviets got the A-bomb (although they already tested it by the timeframe of the book). And the world got a lot more dangerous.

The novel is told from a number of perspectives: Volodin's, the zeks', the families, and even Joe Stalin's. (You will not be shocked, I hope: Solzhenitsyn's take on Stalin is devastatingly bleak.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the book contains a lot more humor than I remembered. It's very dark, bitter, sarcastic humor, but nonetheless. There's an episode where Eleanor Roosevelt is duped by a Potemkin-village prison; another where a van transporting prisoners off to the Gulag, disguised as a food delivery truck, fools a rosy-eyed reporter for Libération, a fellow-travelling French newspaper.

Here's a description of how one hapless prisoner, Ivan Feofanovich Dyrsin, wound up at the sharashka:

His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in the war for "anti-Soviet agitation," denounced by neighbors who coveted his apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged in no such agitation—ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio—but he might have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had no such radio—but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio engineer, and information received led to the discovery of a box containing two valves [vacuum tubes] in his apartment

It's not an easy book to read: 741 very dense pages, dozens of characters. And there's the normal problem with Russian literature: each character has a variety of patronymic names, good luck keeping them straight. (There's a cast of characters at the beginning of this edition, and you might want to bookmark it.)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:53 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2018-12-21

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

  • At Quillette, Allen Farrington writes what sounds as if it could be the kickoff for a young adult book series: PewDiePie's Battle for the Soul of the Internet.

    This is a story about the question of who holds power over what we can say, hear, watch and read on the internet—an increasingly urgent issue that many ordinary people have cause to think about every day. And yet the protagonist in this story, the man whose fate symbolizes the future of social media and the corporate web that controls it, is unknown to the vast majority of educated readers.

    That man is PewDiePie, a Swedish comedian whose real name is Felix Kjellberg. With 77-million subscribers, he has the most popular YouTube channel in the world. Within YouTube’s video subculture, he is regarded as a true celebrity—a sort of Joe Rogan, Kanye West and Ben Shapiro all rolled into one. As of this writing, PewDiePie is closing in on 20-billion total views—roughly equivalent to three views for every human on the planet.

    I don't watch PewDiePie (or YouTube much at all), but Allen describes how a combination of Vox and YouTube is trying to crush him. But there's a further interesting point:

    Here, I am getting into an argument that is made better elsewhere—specifically, that this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web. Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube. Were HTTP sufficiently robust to handle two-way links, there might not be a need for Google. Were there a public protocol for identity, Facebook might be extraneous. And were there a public protocol for value exchange, there would be no need for content that is almost exclusively monetized by advertising—a development that has ushered in a risk-averse ad-driven corporate culture with its attendant censorship and house politics.

    Bring on what people are calling the "Great Decentralization"!


  • David Harsany updates us: The State Of Colorado Is Still Trying To Destroy Jack Phillips.

    In 2016, I wrote about Colorado’s crusade to destroy Jack Phillips’ business over a thought crime. The state’s Civil Rights Commission had bored into Phillips’ soul and established that his refusal to create a specialty cake for a same-sex couple was driven by his personal animosity towards gay customers rather than his Christian faith.

    Unelected officials began fining Phillips in an effort to put him out of business for being a Christian. I wrote about the case numerous times, and every time I was assured that his actions had nothing to do with “religious liberty” — a term almost always placed within quotation marks to intimate that it was a bogus concern. I was assured that it was constitutionally acceptable for a gay couple to force a man to create art that undermined his faith. I was assured the case against him would be a slam dunk for Colorado

    Try to find the uncivil behavior in this case.


  • And Veronique de Rugy points out, regrettably, that we're still on the road to fiscal insanity: A Deficit-Happy Government May Lead to a Debt-Driven Financial Crisis.

    There are milestones you celebrate: a kid's first step, a round-numbered birthday, a marriage anniversary. And then there are the milestones you dread: Reaching $22 trillion in national debt is one of them. We're slated to reach that number next month, yet nobody seems to care.

    The $22 trillion figure we'll soon hit is the total of $16 trillion in public debt (what the government owes to domestic and foreign investors) and $5.8 trillion in intra-governmental debt (the money it owes to other government accounts like Social Security). No matter how you look at it, it's by far the highest level of debt Uncle Sam has accumulated in peacetime. It's also shocking, considering the economy is growing faster than it has for a while. Even worse, there's no end of that red ink in sight.

    I am sad for my kids, who'll have to live with the repercussions of this irresponsibility, and a little ashamed that it's (mostly) my generation that decided to kick the fiscal can down the road.


  • The Christmas season doesn't seem to have put Kristen Schaal in a good mood, judging from her Tweet.

    But that did get me thinking whether the obvious next step in entertainment industry awokeness might be gaining popularity. Alas, all I could find was a Fortune article from March, written by Lilly J. Goren: Commentary: Oscars Should Combine Best Actor Best Actress Categories.

    In the midst of an interestingly reflective period within the entertainment industry—especially given the current #MeToo and Times Up movements—many have wondered if—and how—Hollywood organizations like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will respond. Ahead of the Oscars, it’s worth noting that there is one way to bridge the gender divide that continues to be at the root of the industry’s many issues: eliminating the Best Actor/Actress/Supporting Actor/Actress categories.

    Lilly is a professor of political science at Carroll University. So I assume this is not a joke. She notes that the Grammys got rid of their segregated-by-sex award categories a few years back. (But the Country Music Association Awards still have them.)

    Don't even get me started on athletic competitions.


  • There's a new Clint Eastwood movie out, The Mule, and I happened to watch this IMDB intervew with him and the other actors. May I suggest you watch it till the end, when Mr. Eastwood does an uncanny impression of… well, watch it.

    Did you laugh out loud? I did.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:53 AM EDT