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I finally finished In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a semi-autobiographical novel set in a sharashka prison in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1940s. (I started this in mid-December, so it took... 5-6 months? I did completely neglect it for 1-2 of those months, but hey, I finished it.) The title comes from the first circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno, because like the dead in Limbo, the imprisoned engineers and researchers at the "special" prison, where they're put to work developing technology for the government, are relatively privileged compared to those suffering in "normal" labor camps, but they're still in prison/hell.
It was interesting to learn that one of the characters was, basically, Solzhenitsyn's self-insert, because he writes equally vividly from the perspective of so many different characters— prisoners and prison guards; high-ranking Soviet officials (including, at one point, Stalin) and low-level cogs in the bureaucratic machine; students and artists. (Seriously, so many different characters; in one way, this book worked well with my stretched-out "backburner reading" approach, since it jumped around so much between chapters, delving deep into the perspectives of one or two characters before shifting focus entirely, but it was very hard to keep all the characters straight and I definitely had more than a few wait, who's this guy again? moments.)
It's a vividly grim novel; the parts that left the deepest impression, for me, was the way that Solzhenitsyn writes with cutting irony of the bureaucratic cruelty of the Soviet prison system and the hypocrisy of those who fully bought in/worked to uphold it, but also - conversely - the just people-ness of it all, from the moments of normalcy, connection, and even levity shared by the sharashka prisoners, to how the most dramatic moments were all driven by, like, relatively insignificant, spontaneous actions?? A heretofore passive diplomat throws his life away on a perhaps futile attempt to warn the U.S. embassy about a spy after its nuclear secrets; a prisoner about to be transferred to a "normal" gulag confronts a prison official for the return of a book seized as contraband, that he won't be able to take with him anyway.
It was interesting to learn that one of the characters was, basically, Solzhenitsyn's self-insert, because he writes equally vividly from the perspective of so many different characters— prisoners and prison guards; high-ranking Soviet officials (including, at one point, Stalin) and low-level cogs in the bureaucratic machine; students and artists. (Seriously, so many different characters; in one way, this book worked well with my stretched-out "backburner reading" approach, since it jumped around so much between chapters, delving deep into the perspectives of one or two characters before shifting focus entirely, but it was very hard to keep all the characters straight and I definitely had more than a few wait, who's this guy again? moments.)
It's a vividly grim novel; the parts that left the deepest impression, for me, was the way that Solzhenitsyn writes with cutting irony of the bureaucratic cruelty of the Soviet prison system and the hypocrisy of those who fully bought in/worked to uphold it, but also - conversely - the just people-ness of it all, from the moments of normalcy, connection, and even levity shared by the sharashka prisoners, to how the most dramatic moments were all driven by, like, relatively insignificant, spontaneous actions?? A heretofore passive diplomat throws his life away on a perhaps futile attempt to warn the U.S. embassy about a spy after its nuclear secrets; a prisoner about to be transferred to a "normal" gulag confronts a prison official for the return of a book seized as contraband, that he won't be able to take with him anyway.
