I’ve heard about Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle many times over the past few years, and finally (tho not sure why) got around to adding it to my Libby queue.
This is one of those long Russian books where I really struggled with the names and feel like I might have got a lot more out of reading it than listening to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Notes and quotes…
13725 “As I see it,” the little fellow went on, “a scientist ought to know all about politics, including the politicians’ secret plans; in fact, he ought to feel sure that someday he’ll take control of policy himself. Either that or he should treat it as an impenetrable fog, a black hole, and make no political judgments, take a purely ethical view instead and ask himself, ‘Can I entrust such undeserving, indeed such utterly worthless, people with control over the forces of nature?’ Those who say ‘America is a threat to us’ have one foot in the quagmire already; that’s a childish misconception, not a scientific judgment.”
“Yes, but what will they be thinking on the other side of the ocean?” the giant asked doubtfully. “And what are we to make of the new American president?”
“I don’t know; maybe it’s the same over there. Maybe there’s nobody to. . . . We scientists can’t get together in an international forum and reach an understanding. But our intellectual superiority to all the politicians in the world makes it possible for every one of us, even in jail, even in solitary, to find a correct common solution and act accordingly.”
Full circle.
“Yes.”
Another circle.
“You may be right.”
Quarter circle.
“Let’s continue this colloquium in the lunch break tomorrow. Let’s see, your name is Illarion. . . .”
“Pavlovich.”
Another incomplete circle—a horseshoe.
“Another thing . . . concerning Russia. Somebody told me today about a painting called Vanishing Russia. Do you know about it?”
“No.”
“Well, it hasn’t been painted yet. And maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps it’s just a title, an idea. In Old Russia there were conservatives, reformers, statesmen; now there are none. In Old Russia there were priests, preachers, bogus holy men in rich households, heretics, schismatics; now there are none. In Old Russia there were writers, philosophers, historians, sociologists, economists; now there are none. And of course there were Revolutionaries, conspirators, bomb throwers, rebels; they, too, are no more. There were artisans wearing headbands, and there were tillers of the soil with beards down to their waists, peasants in troikas, daredevil Cossack horsemen, hoboes roaming free . . . none of them left, none at all! The shaggy black paw raked them all in during the first dozen years. . . . But while the plague raged, living water still filtered through . . . and its source was ourselves, the scientific elite. Yes, engineers and scientists were arrested and shot, but fewer of us than of other groups. Because any mountebank can churn out ideological drivel for them, but physics obeys only the voice of its master. We studied nature, whereas our brothers studied society. We’re still around; our brothers are no more. So who inherits the unfulfilled destiny of the elite in the humanities? Perhaps we do? If we don’t take a hand, who will? And who says we can’t manage it? Though we’ve never laid hands on them, we’ve weighed Sirius B and measured the kinetic energy of electrons; surely we can’t go wrong with society? But what are we doing instead? Making them a gift of jet engines! Rockets! Scrambler telephones! Maybe even the atomic bomb! Anything, just so long as we live comfortably. And—interestingly! What sort of elite are we if we can be bought so cheaply?”
Bobynin sighed like a blacksmith’s bellows.
- Read In the First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn