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As the article he was working on at the time of his death attests (see
“Fugitives from the Family,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta, December 11, 2008), he
was particularly concerned about the estrangement of contemporary Russians from
the millennium-old spiritual patrimony of the nation, a patrimony that had
bequeathed to them faith in God, “a free, rich, and vivid language,” and
“traditions of home and business life.”

diptych.

This self-described “polyphonic” novel is above all dialogical: As in a Platonic
dialogue or a ­Dostoevskian novel, there is no absolutely controlling or
simply authoritative authorial voice. It is characterized by a complex narrative
structure that combines the third-person point of view with the subjectivity
that belongs to a first-person narrative. Different characters take turns as the
focus of a chapter or series of chapters in the book. Solzhenitsyn’s novelistic
polyphony respects the variety of perspectives and voices while inviting readers
to join in the search for truth.

metanoia

Here, with the full force of his art, Solzhenitsyn chronicles the “existential”
recovery of those elemental moral experiences that give evidence of the moral
law and that give the lie to every ideological denial of the soul’s connection
to goodness and truth and its responsibility before them.

authorial alter ego

Uncle Avenir’s spirited wisdom is contrasted with Epicurus’ “stupid” thought
that “our feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the highest criteria
of good and evil.” The ancient philosopher’s refined, apolitical hedonism, his
carefully calibrated weighing of pleasures and pain, can provide no principled
ground for refusing the tyrant’s claim that his pleasure is good. “Stalin, for
instance, enjoyed killing people—so that, for him, was ‘good’?” Those “who are
imprisoned for the truth get no satisfaction from it—so is that evil?”

“Good and evil were now distinct entities, visibly separated by that light gray
door, those olive green walls, and that first night in prison.” This was the
decisive metanoia, the discovery of a moral universe, of the real divide between
good and evil. Volodin eloquently articulates the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s mature
moral vision.

“justice is the cornerstone, the foundation of the universe! . . . We are born
with a sense of justice in our souls; we can’t and don’t want to live without
it!”

He emphatically repudiates the modern ideology of progress, since it conflates
moral and technical progress and turns a blind eye to the human capacity for
evil, a capacity made worse by “beautiful” modern ideas. There is no “backward
and forward in human history,” Nerzhin tells Gerasimovich. Rather, history is
“like an octopus, with neither back nor front.”

Solzhenitsyn’s mature thought is best described as a philosophical Christianity
that never loses sight of the philosophical metanoia, as described in both
Volodin and Nerzhin’s transformations in the full version of In the First
Circle.

For fifty years or more, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s life and art bore witness to
his confident belief, so eloquently expressed in his Nobel Prize lecture, that
art could “defeat the Lie,” that “one word of truth” could finally “outweigh the
whole world.” With the publication of the restored version of In the First
Circle, we have an opportunity to rise to Solzhenitsyn’s challenge and
again to take him seriously as an artist and thinker of the first rank.