The thrilling Cold War masterwork by the Nobel Prize-winning author of
The Gulag Archipelago, published in full for the first time
"Solzhenitsyn's best novel. ... A great and important book, whose
qualities are finally fully available to English-speaking readers."
--Washington Post
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949.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.
First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is
Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. 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. 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.
