Notes from the Basement

Two Soviet-era literary giants went head-to-head on Russian television and battled to a draw. The miniseries based on Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle drew about the same number of viewers as The Golden Calf, based on a work by the humorists Ilf and Petrov. However, both were beaten handily by Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which ran a while back.

It seems history has overtaken Solzhenitsyn. He was the calf who butted an oak (see the title of his nonfiction account Бодался теленок с дубом), but it turned out the tree was rotten and went down too easily.

As Igor Mitin wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta,* after noting that В круге первом was begun in 1955, was distributed in a “distorted” version in 1964, and found its final form in 1968:

One needs to know these dates in order to realize that the novel was conceived and written at a time when the Soviet system and the Soviet state seemed absolutely powerful and unshakeable. As the director of the film, Gleb Panfilov, admitted, when he read the novel for the first time he thought it might be possible to transfer it to the screen in 300 years, perhaps … That is, in dealing with such an invincible and hopeless hulk, it was possible in one’s unmasking hatred to not match its power and reach, not think of the consequences, since it would take a hundred years for them to appear.

But life, as usual, delivered a surprise to all the prophets, and now we live in completely different times. The Soviet totalitarian machine, created and fine-tuned by Stalin, has been ancient history for some time now. And this invariably alters and corrects the way we now perceive both the book and film.

Here’s just one citation from the novel:

“And so I’m sick of both Ostrovsky and Gorky because I’m sick of how they expose the power of capital, family oppression, the old marrying the young. I’m sick of these battles with ghosts. Fifty years have gone by, a hundred, and we’re still flapping our arms, still exposing what’s long gone. And as for what actually exists—you won’t see any plays about that.”

The mole of history roars continuously. And now the power of capital is no longer the distant past but the harsh present, and Solzhenitsyn himself speaks of it with dread and pain. So how do we now assess the behavior of Innokenty Volodin, who decided to try and impede the development of the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union? That is, impede the creation of the parity in the world that helped preserve peace for years and years? Today we know very well what the self-confident and self-satisfied superpower America has turned into—bombing Serbia, occupying Afghanistan, making war in Iraq …

Likewise, you won’t surprise us nowadays with the standard, caricatured protrayal of Stalin and his henchmen, the details of zek life and manners that pounded at our brains and our imagination when we read the novel for the first time. Today, when every film has heroes that talk like they’ve been in prison [когда у нас что ни фильм, то зона, когда все герои только и делают, что «ботают по фене»*], the stuff has lost its effect.

So the film’s creators and, especially, the director faced some serious dangers: to be gripped by what is widely known, has been said many times. But Panfilov being Panfilov, he knows that no ideology, trend, tendentiousness, no details of the time can save you without great artistry. Only art is capable of breaking the circle of problems of that time and expose what is necessary and important in them for those living today.

And only then will the contemporary audience understand that what they’re seeing is not a battle with ghosts, not the exposure of what disappeared long ago, but of that which is. The first installments of The First Circle lead one to hope that this is the case.

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*Broken links replaced 2007.07.30. Links broken again as of 2018.05.25—cannot track down Mitin’s review at LitGazeta.