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Cover of The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The First Circle

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  • 618 pages · about 10 hours
  • First published 1968
  • 57 editions
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1 About this book

In the First Circle (Russian: В круге первом, romanized: V kruge pervom; also published as The First Circle) is a novel by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, released in 1968. A more complete version of the book was published in English in 2009.

The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a research and development bureau made of Gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks) are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following the Second World War. Unlike inhabitants of other Gulag labor camps, the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoyed good working conditions; however, if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly shipped to Siberia.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • Political fiction
  • Politics and government
  • Political persecution
  • Political
  • Soviet union
  • Prison Life in Fiction
  • PRO Gotham Book Mart
  • Prisons

2 About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1918–2008

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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