The First Circle

[14], 674 pages. Translator's Note. Characters. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008) was a Russian writer. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist, and embraced Marxism-Leninism. While serving in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He pursued writing novels about repression in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev, the authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. He worked on further novels which were published in other countries including Cancer Ward, The First Circle, August 1914, and The Gulag Archipelago, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1990 his citizenship was restored, and later he returned to Russia. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". In the First Circle (also published as The First Circle) is a novel by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, released in 1968. 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. The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle, or limbo of Hell in The Divine Comedy, wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other virtuous pagans, live in a walled green garden. They are unable to enter Heaven, as they were born before Christ, but enjoy a small space of relative freedom in the heart of Hell. Innokentii Volodin, a diplomat, makes a telephone call to an old family doctor (Dobrumov) he feels obliged by conscience to make, even though he knows he could be arrested. His call is taped and the NKVD seek to identify who has made the call. The sharashka prisoners, or zeks, work on technical projects to assist state security agencies and generally pander to Stalin's increasing paranoia. While most are aware of how much better off they are than "regular" gulag prisoners (some of them having come from gulags themselves), some are also conscious of the overwhelming moral dilemma of working to aid a system that is the cause of so much suffering. As Lev Rubin is given the task of identifying the voice in the recorded phone call, he examines printed spectrographs of the voice and compares them with recordings of Volodin and four other suspects. He narrows it down to Volodin and one other suspect, both of whom are arrested. By the end of the book, several zeks, including Gleb Nerzhin, the autobiographical hero, choose to stop co-operating, even though their choice means being sent to much harsher camps. Volodin, initially crushed by the ordeal of his arrest, begins to find encouragement at the end of his first night in prison. The book also briefly depicts several Soviet leaders of the period, including Stalin himself, who is depicted as. …