Alexander Solzhenitsyn THE FIRST CIRCLE

Alexander Solzhenitsyn THE FIRST CIRCLE 9th Impression 1971 Fontana Modern Novels Paperback Winner of the Nobel Prize 1970 700 story pages No missing or torn pages & no inscriptions in the main reading body. Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, The First Circle is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician. At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, The First Circle is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly sixty years ago.