Book News
Full-length Solzhenitsyn novel due in English
An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a highly praised and controversial novel, published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.
” ‘The First Circle’ is one of the most important novels of the 20th century, and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory,” Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial said recently. It will be released in 2009.
The novel, completed in 1964 and banned by Soviet officials even after Solzhenitsyn cut nine chapters, is set in a gulag where scientists and scholars have been sent for alleged subversion against the Stalinist regime.
A shortened, 580-page version of “The First Circle” came out in English in 1969 — the text had mysteriously been leaked out of the Soviet Union — despite objections by the author, who believed his work was being exploited for profit, and by scholars who feared that the book’s release could jeopardize his safety.
According to Perennial editor Peter Hubbard, Solzhenitsyn approved a new English text a few years ago and commissioned his favorite translator, who had worked on the author’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” But the translator died before finishing the translation, delaying its release. The Associated Press
First Lines
The Silver Bear by Derek Haas
The last day of the cruelest month, and appropriately it rains. Not the spring rain of new life and rebirth, not for me. Death. In my life, always death. I am young; if you saw me on the street, you might think “what a nice, clean-cut young man. I’ll bet he works in advertising or perhaps a nice accounting firm. I’ll be he’s married and is just starting a family. I’ll bet his parents raised him well.” But you would be wrong. I am old in a thousand ways. I have seen things and done things that would make you rush instinctively to your child’s bedroom and hug him tight to your chest, breathing quick in short bursts like a misfiring engine, and repeat over and over, “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
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