In the First Circle (A. Solzhenitsyn)

Detail of the cover of “In the First Circle” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Titolo: 
V kruge pervom [In the First Circle]

Author: Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Year: 1968

Publisher: Mondadori

Place: Milan

Description:
When in July 1968 Arnoldo Mondadori published Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Nel primo cerchio (In the First Circle) (cf. Solženicyn 1968a), the author was already known to Italian readers for his Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič (One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich) (cf. Solženicyn 1963) and Divisione Cancro (Cancer ward) (cf. Anonimo 1968), published anonymously by Il Saggiatore only a few months earlier. By the mid-1960s, Solzhenitsyn’s favour in his home country had diminished due to his constant denunciation of the repressive Soviet regime and the Gulag system, and his works were banned, making their publication in the USSR impossible.
The subject of the novel (V kruge pervom in the original title), refers to the author’s experience of imprisonment in special prison number 16 (Marfino’s Sharashka), on the outskirts of Moscow. Here, scientists and technicians, detained for political offences, worked on projects of national importance, in less harsh living conditions than in ordinary Soviet detention camps, as the title which refers to Dante’s limbo suggests.
The composition of the novel, which was begun in 1955, at the time of Solzhenitsyn’s confinement in Kok Terek (Kazakhstan), was subsequently subjected to a series of revisions until the seventh and final version was completed in 1968 with 98 chapters. The fifth revision made some structural (reduction to 87 chapters) and thematic changes to the original version, replacing nuclear secrets by the betrayal of a doctor. This version, although approved by Tvardovskii (at the time editor-in-chief of “Novyi Mir”), did not pass the censorship block: in 1965 it was seized by the KGB together with the writer’s archive and circulated in the USSR in samizdat. The sixth version, also of 87 chapters, was smuggled abroad by the author via clandestine channels.
Rights to the work in the West were held by the American Harper & Row, which signed agreements with other literary agencies and foreign publishers. In Italy, the agreement holders were the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (ALI) and the publisher Mondadori. After the seizure of his archive in 1965 and the beginning of the defamatory campaign against him, Solzhenitsyn’s no longer had any control over tamizdat editions, nor could he be sure of their authenticity.  On the whole he expressed negative views about the quality of the works printed before his exile.
After acquiring exclusive rights for Italy from Harper & Row, Mondadori requested an opinion on the book from Pietro Zveteremich, who then translated it in great secrecy within a short time. After the publication of the Russian text, printed in June in Zurich by agreement with the American publisher, a ‘pilot’ chapter was published in July in the magazine “Epoca” (cf. Solženicyn 1968b) at the same time as the entire novel was released, in over 14,000 hard copies, followed by 13 editions in six years (cf. Garetto, Mazzucchelli 2019). The novel was in the list of the five best-selling books of the week for three months from 1 August to 31 October 1968, at times in first place (ranking compiled by Agenzia Ansa, “La Fiera Letteraria” 1968), but it was not given much space in the Italian press, although many national periodicals often reported on Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet writers.
One of the first reviews was by Guido Piovene in “La Stampa” on 20 July 1968, which defined the protest presented in the pages of Nel primo cerchio as ‘different’ from that presented in other literature of the time, because it was rooted in an ancient morality meaning that in Solzhenitsyn’s work horror does not affect the soul and “opposition finds its place, not so much in the pride of one’s rights, as in a patient religiosity” (Piovene 1968: 3). “L’Espresso”, while recommending reading the work and defining the author as “the greatest living Soviet novelist, as well as the most hampered and by far the most courageous”, criticized Solzhenitsyn for failing to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Stalinist tyranny and the repression of millions of Russians (Milano 1968: 19). The weekly “La Fiera Letteraria” reported the novel’s publication and recommended it, but the following review, without expressing any opinion on its literary value, underlined the novel’s lack of incisiveness about the course of Russian history and the opinions of Western communists (cf. Carpendras 1968: 32). Luigi Baldacci, writing in “Epoca”, warned readers and critics against underestimating the novel, describing it as a “literary work of a high level, essential within the framework of Soviet production, and certainly important in the broader context of twentieth-century Europe” (Baldacci 1968: 85).
The final version of the novel, edited by the author, was published in the second volume of his Complete Works (YMCA Press 1978) with a note in which Solzhenitsyn specified that this was the first edition of the final text, which had never been published in volume form or circulated in samizdat (cf. Solzhenitsyn 1978: 6). A series of editions in Russia and various Western countries followed, while in Italy the first complete translation was only published in December 2018 (cf. Solženicyn 2018).

Elda Garetto, Sara Mazzucchelli
[30th June 2021]

Bibliography

• Anonimo, Divisione Cancro, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1968.
• Baldacci L., Ancora Solgenitsyn e l’ultimo racconto di Bigiaretti, “Epoca”, 4th August (1968): 85.
• Carpendras, Il primo cerchio, “La Fiera Letteraria”, 1st August (1968): 32.
• Carpendras, Le veglie di Mosca, “La Fiera Letteraria”, 19th October (1968): 32.
• Garetto E. – Mazzucchelli S., Le prime edizioni italiane di Solženicyn nei documenti degli archivi editoriali, in M. Calusio – V. Noseda (eds.), Aspetti della fortuna di Aleksandr Solženicyn in Occidente, in fascicolo speciale de “L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria”, 3 (2019): 191-232.
• Milano P., E senza speme vivemo in desio, “L’Espresso”, 28th July (1968): 19.
• Piovene G., La fede negli uomini ispira un grande romanzo sui “Lager”, “La Stampa”, 20th July (1968): 3.
• Solženicyn A., Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič, Einaudi, Torino 1963; Garzanti, Milano 1963.
• Solženicyn A., Il primo cerchio, it. transl. Zveteremich P., Mondadori, Milano 1968a.
• Solženicyn A., Addio all’amore, “Epoca”, 14th July (1968b): 78-84.
• Solzhenitsyn A., Sobranie sochinenii, Vermont – Paris 1978. T. 2.
• Solženicyn A., Il primo cerchio, it. transl. Silvestri D., Voland, Roma 2018.
• I più venduti della settimana, “La Fiera Letteraria”, 1st August – 31st October (1968): 30-31.