World: THE WRITER AS RUSSIA'S CONSCIENCE

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Alexander Ginzburg called them, that The First Circle is most harrowing. Solzhenitsyn writes of one of these camp complexes as "a kingdom bigger than France." Each camp bore a bucolic code name such as Lake Camp, Steppe Camp, Sandy Camp. "You'd think there must be some great, unknown poet in the secret police, a new Pushkin," writes Solzhenitsyn. "He's not quite up to a full-length poem, but he gives these wonderful poetic names to concentration camps." These passages obviously parallel Solzhenitsyn's own experiences; after his years in Mavrino, he was sent to such a camp in Kazakhstan, part of a complex called Karlag, which was indeed as large as France. So many prisoners were in the camps that it was widely fantasied among them that no free men were left outside.

The prisoners were not expected to survive. Yet Solzhenitsyn also knows, as he says in The First Circle, that "descriptions of prison life tend to overdo the horror of it. Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life—the only life you have—is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when they take you to the bathhouse."

Solzhenitsyn's account of the fate of prisoners' wives is the most sorrowing part of The First Circle. His cool realism is suffused with a rush of personal grief as he describes Gleb Ner-zhin's Nadya: waiting outside prisons for a glimpse of her husband, allowed rare letters and rarer visits, herself persecuted whenever her relationship to a prisoner is discovered—and, finally, driven to divorce in self-defense. (Solzhenitsyn's own wife, Natalya, divorced him at his urging while he was in prison. She remarried and bore two children, but after his release she divorced her second husband and rejoined him in his Siberian exile.) The book's anger never falters, but there is control as well: Solzhenitsyn sees these characters with a cold and merciless clarity that lets each one burn in his own flame.

There is also some wild black humor, notably one episode that is a bitter comment on the outside world's long gullibility about Soviet Russia. Two prisoners invent a fantasy about a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Moscow's Butyrki Prison, just after the war. Inmates are washed in "Lilac Fairy" soap, offered wigs to cover their shaved heads. Their cells are temporarily transformed into elegant salons with foreign magazines on their coffee tables. When Mrs. Roosevelt picks out at random a man and asks what he is being punished for, the prison governor replies that he was a Gestapo agent who burned down a Russian village, raped Russian girls and murdered innumerable Russian babies. "Wasn't he sentenced to be hanged?" exclaims Eleanor. "No," is the straight-faced reply. "We hope to reform him."

To Banish Kapitalizm. Solzhenitsyn is a rare master of the Russian language —not the debased, impenetrably formula-ridden Russian produced by two decades of Stalinist newspapers, schoolbooks and speeches, but the rich mother Russian that calls on all the ancient, all the regional, and all the poetic