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This fall a flurry of competitive editions are coming out in Europe and the U.S., over Solzhenitsyn's bitter and repeated public protests and disavowals. One is his novel The First Circle, rushed into print by Harper & Row in a translation that is often unreadable and sometimes ludicrously inaccurate. It will also appear as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in November. In the original, The First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a scathing, ironic portrayal of life in Russia in 1948 and its concentric circles of hell expanding out from Stalin, who has never been made so frighteningly real. Next month, Collins of London is bringing out a far better translation of The First Circle .† The second novel is Cancer Ward, based on the author's own struggle with cancer. It employs the familiar device of the hospital as microcosm of a sick world. Versions are being published in Britain by the Bodley Head and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Dial Press. The appearance of these works is a literary event of the first magnitude—and inevitably a major political event as well.
Solzhenitsyn's role in the consciousness—and conscience—of Russia began with One Day, which was published in 1962 on Khrushchev's order, for political reasons of his own. The book quickly took on an independent life. In cutting away the barbed wire of myth, in piercing the silence around the Stalin era, the book opened up the first frank discussion not only of the Soviet past but its present and future.
Essentially, Freedom. That book, and all of Solzhenitsyn's life and work, place him at the passionate focal point of the major issue that inflames dissent and frightens the men in the Kremlin today. The issue is Stalinism, the "past that is clawing to pieces our present days," as Soviet Writer Lydia Chukovskaya expressed it in a letter which circulated underground earlier this year.
Russia's present masters do not rule like Stalin; the camps of which Solzhenitsyn writes are mostly gone. But more and more Russians are beginning to realize that these men did share complicity in Stalin's crimes. And thousands of ordinary Russians were touched by guilt, because they let friends, neighbors, and members of their own families be taken away in the night without protesting. Could anything have been done to stop Stalin's police? Probably not.
But there is the larger, guilt-laden problem of explaining to oneself how this could have happened in a revolutionary state created to end, in theory, the inhumanity of man to man. For this Russia, Solzhenitsyn's novels are both painful and healing. They expose every layer of Stalinist repression. And they are addressed, above all, to Russia and her people. Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms. Those who have not been through the agonies of the camps, the shocks of alternating liberalization and repression can scarcely pass judgment. This is why Solzhenitsyn did not want his work published abroad, lest it be abused for political purposes. But