В круге первом

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is a world-famous Russian writer, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, participant in the Great Patriotic War. “In the First Circle” tells about the plight of prisoners of a special prison near Moscow - the so-called “sharashka”, where the author himself was imprisoned from 1948-1949.

First of all, this is a folk novel. Moreover, “In the First Circle” makes you look at Solzhenitsyn’s entire work with a new look, and it becomes clear that he, his books, his very personality are the people’s response to what happened in the country during the years of Stalin’s tyranny... There is not even a shadow of despair in the book . On the contrary, it is imbued with the triumph of humanity and hope.

Veniamin Kaverin

Solzhenitsyn’s book “In the First Circle” is distinguished by its grandiose scope, high intensity of many force fields, several dimensions: prosaic-narrative, political-historical, cultural-historical, social, its vaulted galleries diverge in different directions, diverse intersecting, it rises among the novels like a Gothic cathedral...

Heinrich Bell