In the First Circle: A Novel (The Restored Text)

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, H. T. Willetts

Overview

A major literary event 50 years in the making:In the First Circle is the first complete English translation of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “best novel” (Washington Post). With an introduction by Edward Erickson, this work by the author of The Gulag Archipelago is the story of a brilliant mathematician who finds himself locked in a Moscow prison filled with the country’s brightest minds and must decide whether to aid Stalin’s repressive state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061479014
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Pages:	741
Sales rank:	43,448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.

Editorial Reviews

Solzhenitsyn’s Cold War masterpiece ... a new radically retranslated edition, which is greatly expanded.

London Times

The new edition of Solzhenitsyn’s epic novel, In the First Circle captures better than any other work of fiction the quintessence of communist rule at its Stalinist peak: all-pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal. ... The longer text is deeper and darker.

The Economist

The appearance of this new version of Solzhenitsyn’s best novel is an exciting literary event. This is a great and important book, whose qualities are finally fully available to English readers. A fifth longer than the original, it is a vastly better novel.

Washington Post