Political Disputes in the Structure of A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of socio-political discussions in A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”. The “playwriting” of dialogues and polylogues on political topics has received an original compositional embodiment here and is based on the mobile, acutely conflicting interaction of various speech flows. Political disputes acquire a moral and philosophical dimension in the work, push the interlocutors to historical assessments and prophecies about the future social structure. Episodes of situational mass disputes are combined with individualized, lengthy and conceptually rich discussions, which often have their own compositional preliminaries and “afterwords”. The article examines in detail the substantive and rhetorical aspects of conversations and clashes involving Rubin, Nerzhin, Sologdin, Gerasimovich, pays attention to uncle Avenir’s political strategies, internal disputes, the evolution of Volodin’s social views, the positions of Galakhov, Radovich, Clara Makarygina. Paradoxically, it is the prisoners’ disputes that show in the novel the highest level of moral, intellectual, and political freedom, unthinkable for the social climate of the Stalinist decades. In the structure of the novel, explicit political battles and hidden, forcibly suppressed social differences form a holistic, branched macro-plot in which, despite the pressure of the totalitarian system, individual and collective social reflection continues to pulsate.