This sounded a tad heavy and I didn't feel like reading. But I had a window of time to digest, so I read it anyway. This is 'Narrow Escape', an excerpt from 'Love the Revolution', an unfinished autobiographical novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1948 while imprisoned in the Soviet gulag system's Marfino sharashka (a prison research laboratory).
The Russian text was published in 1999. The English translation done by Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson is slated to be released later this year. This English excerpt is published in The New Yorker on September 27, 2026.
In 1941, protagonist 23-year-old Gleb Nerzhin is living life under the stark realities of Communisim, the start of the German-Soviet war, insufficient food and jobs, and bread queues. He has no idea what's going to hit him or what's coming. I can only imagine that the young people of that time would grow up really fast, and be disillusioned. When war and conflict hit society, then there can be change and civil movements.
All Gleb wanted was his share of the bread. He didn't join the others pushing and shoving. He stuck to his place in the front of the queue, waiting quietly against the wall. However, he was picked on by the policeman, hauled back to the station and charged with "inciting panic". And apparently, in this era, this could mean spending ten years in the camps.
He attended a dinner party with his wife Nadya, at his good friend from school, Ella Dovner's home. Ella's father is someone in the Russian leadership. He is Dr Dovner, someone with a remarkable skill at combining the functions of doctor, medical administrator, and devoted Communist. He is also Lieutanant-Colonel Dovner. He learnt what happened to Gleb. He picked up the phone and called the chief of the precinct that Gleb was detained at. Dr Dovner easily requested for the hearing scheduled for the day after tomorrow to be canceled, and the entire case to be dropped. Just like that.
And Gleb looked at Lieutenant Colonel Dovner in wonder: the feelings this man aroused were strangely ambivalent. From every theoretical point of view, Dovner was transforming the Soviet system, which had been conceived as something of perfect, crystalline purity. Yet whenever Gleb saw Dovner’s broad smiling face, his quick gaze, expressing not exactly a lofty intellect but a sharp, vigorous, and commodious mind, he could imagine all those disarming, mutually advantageous deals, which always benefitted specific individuals, not so much in terms of enrichment but, rather, in terms of evasion, exemption, dodging responsibility, and Gleb wondered why Dovner, rather than seeming a reprehensible character, could still appear so likable.
“Well? . . . You’ve found it? And the hearing’s already set for the day after tomorrow? Just drop the case, then, all right? So long, then. . . . Yes, yes, we’ll fix it.”
Dovner gently replaced the receiver.
“D’you understand?”
No! Right to the very end, Gleb had not truly understood or sensed the danger he’d been in. Those sensible decrees against panic-mongers that he’d so recently welcomed could not affect him, after all! It had so easily passed him by, as if nothing had ever happened: the gigantic wheel had rolled by, almost squashing him to a pulp—yet Gleb could not even grasp that the wheel existed and that it was in motion.
Gleb didn't understand how he would be charged for a major crime when he did nothing. This young mana didn't understand how the system worked. I can't call him innocent. He's very naive.
Are these works relevant to us? Yes. We live in a society, well, Singapore, in which is career and life suicide if we so much so as protest in the streets. We could be one person holding a placard, and if we had written something political, or even an emoji or a sunflower or a watermelon, that could be counted as an 'illegal assembly'. This is not even just a slap on the wrist, it's punitive fines and jail-time.
I dislike people talking about civil activism as if it's something great and altruistic. It cuts both ways. How do we work within the laws if you intend to protest the laws themselves. Democracy and free speech as some demand it, don't quite exist here. However, we aren't exactly oppressed. When you urge activism in Singapore, it's not about rocking the boat. You're urging actions that lead to potential or eventual jail. If you support that, and be ready to sort out bailor duties and finances for all that you're advocating, then sure. It's not a path for everyone, and it's not the road to get on for a sense of community or to be at the forefront of change. There, I said it.
I see some acquaintances and friends sit on their comfy couch and criticize fellow Singaporeans for being apathetic and not supporting certain causes. Stop being so self-righteous. Are you saying that it's okay for these people to go to jail? Don't be an idiot. You get out there then. It's not about getting out of your comfort zone and having an opinion — it's about the destruction of your career and easy life with wifi as you know it, and a long road of angst. This is not what I want.
In a conversation with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Deborah Treisman at the journal asked if his father regretted anything.
“Narrow Escape” is, in a sense, a loss-of-innocence story: this twenty-three-year-old believes that he can prevail by being reasonable—which is no longer a reasonable belief. Do you think that your father, six years older than Gleb, incarcerated, and soon to be sent into very difficult conditions, was looking back regretfully at his own mistakes?
It’s more that Gleb’s blindness to the ruthless truths of the Soviet experience sets up the predictable actual outcome in my father’s life: he’d only just missed being “squashed to a pulp” by the revolutionary wheel—but hadn’t understood, hadn’t taken notice, hadn’t adjusted. Inevitable, then, that his continued naïveté—in the form of barely veiled criticism of Stalin in correspondence subject to censorship review, as all correspondence in the U.S.S.R. was—should result in his arrest and conviction under that catchall of thoughtcrime, Article 58.
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