For a country to have a great writer is like having another Government. The man who says this is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat in Solzhenitsyn╒s new novel. But it is more than the voice of a character. It is the challenge which, more than any others, Russian writers have put to our civilisation.
The First Circle is a major work: more important and more convincing than the version of the first part of Cancer Ward which was published a few weeks ago. One way of stressing its difference is to say that Cancer Ward could be read as, in a weak sense literature; a particular imaginative world. In The First Circle, the hard inner meaning of the challenge is clear: a refusal to recognise frontiers between the imaginative and the real; an insistence on the authority of a particular and contemporary truth which will of course shock Governments ╤ it is meant to shock them ╤ but which also, unless it is put in a special glass case called Soviet or anti-Soviet writing, shocks, or ought to shock our own assumptions about literature.
There may be hypocrites around who can damn Hochhuth and praise Solzhenitsyn, or who have an idiom for reducing Solzhenitsyn to a creative or imaginative protest against an arbitrary political power. Things like that get said, in bad faith or under pressure. But having another Government means what it says: another source of information and values; another centre of decision and truth.
The courage of Solzhenitsyn is that The First Circle is not, like his earlier novels, an isolated world. Its method is not to draw a line around an area of human suffering, but to make connections, from this instance to that, until a whole system is described.
This is the literary importance of The First Circle; an original method in the novel, which goes flat against most of our critical assumptions. It moves from character to character, in what looks at first like a string of beads, a series of cases. It tackles what we call external reality and internal reality in a single dimension, and another way of making the same point is to say that in describing successive individuals, apparently casually linked, it succeeds in describing a system and a society.
That the connections are arbitrary, at first only a restless shifting from this person to that, is in the end the meaning: a series of arbitrary connections which compose an arbitrary reality: a Government which operates by seeing men in this restless, serial way, and which is then necessarily opposed by the substantial relations of real men which, while literature stays with them, are always and everywhere another Government.
What can be called, in abstraction, the plot moves through this way of seeing reality. A special prison for scientists finds a way of identifying human voices on the telephone which is used to catch and condemn the diplomat who tried to warn his family doctor. This work on the human voice, on detecting it, understanding it, scrambling it, is done by men who need also to speak, to describe their common condition. But what happens in the novel is also a kind of scrambling, in which a human society (that connected community which is the ordinary form of the realist novel) is fragmented into pieces of sound which can be understood only when they are put together again in a particular way; when the series is surpassed and its connections made clear.
The First Circle is as different as anything could be from what is known in the West as experimental literature. It is a novel in the great realistic tradition, which has transformed itself to express an altered reality. It is mercilessly accurate on the last years of Stalin (of whom it includes an extraordinary serial glimpse) but perhaps its lasting importance is that it represents a new way of writing about a contemporary reality which, like the challenge itself, crosses and annihilates frontiers.
