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In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition (Paperback)






Authors Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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Product Description
Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.
In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece.

The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.

Product Details
# Paperback: 784 pages
# Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 13, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0061479012
# ISBN-13: 978-0061479014
# Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
# Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds

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Review In the First Circle


First Circle is a marriage of style and substance made in heaven, or at least, the highest circle of hell.

I don't know if this was the conscious intent of the author or not, the book reminds us of the unity of Western civilization. Aside from mentions of Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Pushkin, and Lermontov, (which, I might add, also describes the company Solzhenitsyn belongs in, with honor), the book is honeycombed with references to the great thinkers and artists of European civilization -- from the ancient Greeks and the Gospels, to Dante, the Holy Grail, Bach and Beethoven.

Primarily, no doubt this is a reflection of the fact that the prisoners in the "sharashkas," the top-secret scientific work camps, were educated men, unlike, say, the hero of his shorter novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The final and greatest thread that unifies this work is the idea of achieving humanity, of becoming what a person ought to be, of heroism. The prisoners are poets, eccentric, and philosophers (though there are also scoundrels, and everyone is tempted that way), beaten down by life and the forces of disolution within, trying to preserve their souls, or civilization, from the barbarians who are their masters.

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