The First Circle

The novel unfolds over three days in December 1949, in Moscow. Its central figure is Gleb Nerzhin, a gifted mathematician now thirty-one, who has already lived through the fighting on the German front and then through a run of Soviet prisons and labor camps. Around him gathers a large cast of roughly a dozen inmates, each sharply drawn, from the building's janitor to a troubled Marxist thinker who was responsible for designing the Dnieper dam. Solzhenitsyn also follows the ruling elite and the officials beneath them, who are torn between loyalty and doubt, along with the women tied to these men, some living in misery and others in comfort.