The First Circle

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THE FIRST CIRCLE Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn The First Circle of Dante's Hell-where the souls of the pre-Christian philosophers are doomed to exist throughout eternity-stands in this növel as a metaphor for certain penal institutions of Stalin's Russia. These were scientific research centers, operating within special prisons and staffed by political prisoners -physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, technicians. They were luxurious in comparison with other prisons and the hard-labor camps of the far north -from which many of their inmates were drawn, to which many would return: the prisoners were fed enough to ensure their effectiveness; they slept between sheets. But their prison terms were long, their contacts with the world of freedom minimai, and an administrator's whim was enough to ship them to the lower circles of Hell. Much of the action of The First Circle takes place in one such research center on the outskirts of Moscow, during the four days from December 24... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE FIRST CIRCLE Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn The First Circle of Dante's Hell-where the souls of the pre-Christian philosophers are doomed to exist throughout eternity-stands in this növel as a metaphor for certain penal institutions of Stalin's Russia. These were scientific research centers, operating within special prisons and staffed by political prisoners -physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, technicians. They were luxurious in comparison with other prisons and the hard-labor camps of the far north -from which many of their inmates were drawn, to which many would return: the prisoners were fed enough to ensure their effectiveness; they slept between sheets. But their prison terms were long, their contacts with the world of freedom minimai, and an administrator's whim was enough to ship them to the lower circles of Hell. Much of the action of The First Circle takes place in one such research center on the outskirts of Moscow, during the four days from December 24 through 27, 1949. It ranges from there to the apartments and streets of Moscow . . . to a university dormitory . . . to the offices of awesome men with absolute power over the lives of others, who are themselves the terror-ridden chattels of one man. It enters even his small, fortified, windowless workroom. There the 70-year-old Stalin plans a new purge, a new assassination, greater monuments to himself. . . . The hero of The First Circle is the (Continued on back flap) Trademark of Book-of.the-Month Club, Inc. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. and in Canada Vissza