In the First Circle

In the First Circle, novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, titled in RussianV kruge pervom. The original manuscript, reflecting Solzhenitsyn’s own imprisonment, was 96 chapters long when completed in 1958, but, hoping to avoid censorship, the author deleted 9 chapters. Though the modified version was accepted for publication by the Soviet literary journal Novy mir, it was not published until 1968, and then only in the West, in English, as The First Circle. A decade later the complete novel, with the deleted chapters restored, was published in Russian in the United States, but it was not published in the author’s homeland until 1990. Only in 2009 was it published in English, as In the First Circle.

Referring to the schema of Dante’s Inferno, the title In the First Circle reflects the relatively privileged status of the inmates, including the protagonist Gleb Nerzhin, of a special Soviet prison. This prison is a research laboratory in which prisoners are required to invent despicable gadgets (such as a device that identifies even disguised voices over the telephone) in the service of their captors, Joseph Stalin’s secret police. Solzhenitsyn portrayed the men in the prison camp as distinctive individuals and the aged Stalin as paranoid and vicious. Heroism is criminal in the secret police’s perverse hierarchy of values, and cruelty and betrayal are rewarded.