Review of In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sharpens the vast world of his Gulag Archipelago into the story of one vile aspect of a horrible system. The title refers to the First Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: the outer ring of damnation where virtuous pagans reside. They are spared the flames and the grotesque punishments of deeper circles, but they are still in eternal Hell—and there is no hope of leaving it. Solzhenitsyn takes that metaphor shows it is the reality of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system, showing how intellectual prisoners, though treated better than the starving multitudes in labor camps, still inhabit an eternal inferno.

The First Circle as Metaphor

The sharashka—the special prison where engineers, linguists, and scientists work for the Soviet state—stands in for Dante’s First Circle. The inmates are granted privileges: they have beds, books, and food, and they are spared the freezing forests and death quotas of Kolyma or Vorkuta. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this is still Hell. They cannot see their families, their lives are suspended indefinitely, and they are harnessed to serve the same tyrannical system that destroyed them.

Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor is glaringly accurate when prisoners face the prospect of being transferred out of the sharashka into the “real” Gulag. Instead of relief, they feel terror—but also a strange certainty. In the harsher camps, stripped of privileges, there is no illusion: one knows beyond doubt that he is in Hell. In the First Circle, by contrast, the comforts deceive; they risk lulling the prisoner into thinking survival is enough. Solzhenitsyn exposes the cruelty of a system that even in its “mercies” is an instrument of damnation.

Humor and Torment

The inmates of the first circle can be very funny. Solzhenitsyn does not present unrelieved misery; he shows how men, even in bondage, share laughter as a means of survival. The dialogues among prisoners sparkle with irony and wit. They mock the absurdities of bureaucrats, trade jokes about Stalinist slogans, and puncture the pomposity of the officials who guard them. The gallows humor is often bitter, but it underscores how the human spirit resists even in chains.

At the same time, the novel is suffused with torment. The small humiliations—the inability to visit a wife, the forced participation in projects that strengthen the secret police, the betrayal of colleagues—create a steady rhythm of despair. Solzhenitsyn captures not only physical imprisonment but also moral torment. Many prisoners wrestle with the temptation to collaborate, to use their talents to build the machinery of repression. The novel insists that the Gulag was not just a site of suffering but also a test of conscience, where the stakes were one’s soul as much as one’s body.

The Portrait of Stalin’s Soviet Union

Beyond the prison walls, Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of Soviet life under Stalin. The novel opens with an NKVD officer wrestling with whether to denounce a diplomat who confided doubts about the regime. That single act of conscience—or cowardice—carries life-or-death consequences. The arbitrariness of power, the climate of fear, and the suffocating surveillance of everyday life are all laid bare. The state is shown not as a distant apparatus but as an intimate presence in every household, every phone call, every whisper among friends.

What makes In the First Circle throb with pain is that it reveals how a society can normalize terror. Families live under the constant threat of arrest; neighbors inform on one another; bureaucrats follow orders without question. The prison is only the most visible symbol of a larger cage enclosing the entire nation. Solzhenitsyn’s mastery is in showing the continuum of oppression—from the First Circle to the labor camps to the ordinary citizen’s apartment block—each a cog in Stalin’s vast machinery of repression and death.

The End of Illusion

The novel’s conclusion brings the metaphor full circle. When some of the First Circle prisoners are slated to leave the sharashka, they realize with bitter clarity what awaits them: the true Gulag. Their dread is mingled with certainty. They will no longer be cushioned by privileges; they will no longer risk mistaking survival for freedom. In the harsher camps, the truth of Hell will be undeniable. Solzhenitsyn drives home the paradox: the First Circle is in some ways the best place in Hell, but because it is still Hell, its false mercies are the cruelest torment of all.

In the First Circle is a novel of moral witness. Solzhenitsyn fuses humor and torment, narrative sweep and personal testimony, to create a vision of Stalin’s Soviet Union as an infernal landscape. The metaphor of the First Circle resonates because it captures the essential cruelty of the regime: even its kindnesses were poisoned, even its privileges a form of damnation. To read this novel is to descend into Hell—but with eyes opened by a writer who refused to let truth be extinguished.

In the end, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that there is no such thing as a humane Hell. The First Circle may offer bread, books, and laughter, but it is still eternal confinement, a parody of life under a system that devoured its own people. That is why In the First Circle is a clear, sad, and piercing indictment of totalitarianism. Like his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this novel illustrates what Gulag Archipelago documents.

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I read this novel shortly after re-reading Purgatorio by Dante.  In this second book of the Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil is sent back to the First Circle of Hell without a word, after guiding Dante through Hell and up Mount Purgatory.  It is a cruel fate and a betrayal. 

 

Virgil Got Eternally Screwed: Review of Dante’s Purgatorio (Mark Musa Translation)

Dante’s Purgatorio, in contrast with the fire and fury of Inferno and Roman splendor of Paradiso, is the canticle of hope. It is the most human of the three canticles because the tormented souls know there is an end to their torment—which makes the fate of Virgil  in this canticle all the more terrible. 

Dante ascends Mount Purgatory in the company of Virgil, who guided him from the “dark wood” through the depths of Hell. Together, they climb terraces where the souls purge themselves of sin in anticipation of paradise. The climb is steady, less terrifying than Hell, less ecstatic than Heaven, full of longing, humility, and hope. The heart of the poem is not just Dante’s journey toward God but his relationship with his guide—a relationship that ends in silence, with Virgil dismissed back to Hell without acknowledgment.

The Human Shape of Purgatory

Mark Musa’s translation emphasizes the beauty and clarity of Dante’s verse. Musa avoids archaic heaviness, letting Dante’s voice speak in measured English in blank verse. (Of the seven translations I have read, I prefer Musa’s translation for the entire Commedia, but slightly prefer Robert Pinsky’s Inferno. Rhymed translations like those of Dorothy Sayers and John Ciardi distract me from the flow of the narrative.) 

Souls on the mountain describe their sufferings with startling candor, often asking Dante to carry news of them back to the living world. Unlike in Hell, there is no pride in sin here. As Dante says, “Here let death’s sting be turned to joyful laughter” (Purgatorio II.75). Musa captures this tone of penitential optimism: the souls are burdened, but they know their suffering has an end.

The mountain’s structure reinforces the idea of progress. Whereas Hell spirals down into eternal stasis, Purgatory rises toward transformation. The climb itself is strenuous; Dante frequently struggles, needing Virgil’s guidance. Yet with each terrace, the air grows lighter. Musa’s English renders Dante’s sense of relief as he nears the summit, reminding us that this is a place of preparation, not damnation.

Virgil the Guide

From the beginning of Inferno, Virgil represents reason, human wisdom, and the legacy of classical civilization. Dante reveres him as “my master and my author” (Inferno I.85). In Musa’s translation, Dante’s words retain both awe and filial devotion. Virgil leads Dante with patience and authority, even when Dante falters in fear or fatigue. By the time they reach the top of Mount Purgatory, Virgil is more than a guide—he is a companion, almost a father figure. Their bond is the emotional thread of the first two canticles.

That makes Virgil’s fate all the more cruel. He has shepherded Dante from the bottomless pit of Hell to the threshold of Paradise, only to be dismissed at the decisive moment. As a virtuous pagan, Virgil is barred from Heaven; his lot is Limbo, where “there was no weeping here, except for sighs” (Inferno IV.25). He cannot share in the beatific vision. His role is to lead Dante to Beatrice, and once that role is complete, he vanishes. 

The Silent Dismissal in Canto 30

The climax of this dismissal comes in Purgatorio XXX, when Beatrice appears in a procession of dazzling radiance. Dante, overcome, instinctively turns to Virgil for reassurance:

“I turned to the left with the confidence  

of a little child running to his mama  

when he is frightened or distressed,  

to say to Virgil: ‘Not a single drop  

of blood remains in me that does not tremble;  

I recognize the signs of the old flame.’  

But Virgil had left us deprived of himself,  

Virgil, sweetest father, Virgil, to whom  

I gave myself for my salvation.  

And not all that our ancient mother lost  

could keep my cheeks, though washed by dew,  

from darkening again with tears.” (Purgatorio XXX.43–51, Musa)

This is one of the most devastating moments in Dante’s entire poem. After more than sixty cantos together, Virgil disappears “without a word,” sent back to his eternal confinement. Dante is left weeping, not only because Beatrice overwhelms him but because the companion he relied upon is gone forever. Musa’s phrasing—“Virgil, sweetest father”—emphasizes the intimacy of their bond, even as it underscores the finality of the loss.

What is striking is the lack of comment from Dante himself. The poet offers no reflection, no complaint against God’s justice. Virgil simply vanishes. This silence is its own commentary. Dante’s grief is immediate and human, but the narrative moves on. In the divine order, reason must yield to grace, and Virgil must yield to Beatrice. Yet for the reader, the abrupt dismissal of so faithful a guide feels both heartbreaking and unjust.

Musa’s translation avoids ornate flourishes that might soften the blow. He lets the loss to strike the reader with the same suddenness it strikes Dante. Musa also provides helpful notes that clarify Virgil’s status—honored, indispensable, but excluded from salvation. For modern readers, who sympathize with Virgil as the great poet of Rome, this exclusion is a profound tragedy. (I read Dante with a group of young soldiers at Camp Adder in Iraq. They were angry at Dante for betraying his “Battle Buddy” just as they reached the peak of Mount Purgatory.)  

In the world Dante created, human reason, represented by Virgil, can guide us far, but it cannot bring us to God. Only divine grace, embodied by Beatrice, can do that. This moment lingers long after Dante moves on into Paradise. Virgil is the shadow haunting the poem’s final third, a reminder of what even the noblest human achievement cannot attain in the world of Medieval Catholic belief. The Divine Comedy is the theology of Aquinas in verse. 

As Dante steps into eternity, Virgil returns to his sighs in Limbo. The hope of all the penitents in Purgatorio is inseparable from the bitterness which is Virgil’s fate. 

Eternal Hell is deeply embedded in western culture seeming to be the mirror of eternal Heaven.  Two years ago I read and re-read That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Eternal Salvation, in which the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart asserts that there is no eternal Hell. He overturns the theology of Aquinas and shows the mistakes that led Augustine to put eternal Hell in Christian doctrine and through his influence into western thought.