About this title: The first circle of Dante's hell--where the souls of pre-Christian philosophers are doomed to exist throughout eternity--stands in this novel as a metaphor for certain penal institutions of Stalin's Russia. "An astounding piece of political journalism as well as a literary work of art".--New York Times Book Review.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: [1st ed. ]
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1968
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. xiii, 580 p. 25 cm. Translation of V kruge pervom. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Edition: [1st ed. ]
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1968
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. xiii, 580 p. 25 cm. Translation of V kruge pervom. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Edition: [1st ed. ]
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1968
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. xiii, 580 p. 25 cm. Translation of V kruge pervom. Previous Owner's Inscription. read more
Edition: 12th printing.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books, New York
Date Published: 1968
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Owner-name, covers 'rubbed', w/edge-wear, creasing, pp 'tanned', NO stains, tears, writing, in tight book. xiii, 674 p. 18 cm. Translation of V kruge pervom. read more
Edition: Book Club Edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1968
Description: Good in fair dust jacket. Square & solid. Significant water damage to back cover, spine, 1 inch of front cover. DJ adhered to back cover. Corners bumped. Lt. rub wear to bottom edges. DJ badly water stained & with many edge tears & chips. Interior... Text in English, Russian. xiii, 580 p. 25 cm. Translation of V kruge pervom. read more
"I've read The First Circle several times, along with Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn was a powerful writer, who experienced much of what his characters experienced, primarily life in the gulag. Solzhenitsyn's characters suffer, but at the end they find redemption."
"This book was an amazingly well written book (at least the translation that I read). Solzhenitsyn takes you into one of the Soviet labor camps shortly after World War II - but this is a skilled labor camp just outside of Moscow and taken care of because of the important work that they do. This makes for a very different life compared to the typical Gulag hard-labor camps (which he described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
Through exploring the lives of different prisoners (zeks) at the camp, Solzhenitsyn highlights many of the atrocities of the penal system that Stalin put in place after the war - with soldiers returning from Germany accused of collaborating with the Germans, French, etc for spying, selling or giving Soviet state secrets away, etc - almost making a witch-hunt out of it, as you never know which friends/neighbors would rat you out.
He explores how this tore families apart - as the prisoners were not there to help out with the family and the wives of the prisoners were discriminated against and could not get jobs.
The dialog is great and the imagery is masterful. I really enjoyed this book."
"I work with speech understanding: making computers understand what people say. Oddly enough, this is the only novel I know which is centered around that technology. It's very credible, as one would expect from Solzhenitsyn.
I'm not sure how much of it is based on his own experiences. The main character, who's serving time in the Gulag, has technical skills. Because of this, he gets assigned to work on a speech recognition project. To be exact, it's not speech recognition per se; it's what we call speaker ID, identifying a person by the sound of their voice. This technology is now quite good, and many of the key ideas were developed at SRI International while I was there, though I wasn't involved in that particular project. The SRI techniques have been commercialized in the Nuance speech recognition platform, which I use all the time. At the time of The First Circle, however, the field was at a very early stage of development.
The team in Solzehenitsyn's book are given a specific task to solve. A compromising phone call has been recorded, and the authorities have narrowed it down to a handful of suspects. They need to determine who it was; not easy, since the person in question was trying to disguise his voice. The engineers work flat out to try and crack the problem. Needless to say, they don't feel too good about it, but what are they supposed to do? If they refuse, they'll be back in hell. Well, they're in hell now, but, as the title suggests, this is the most comfortable part of Stalin's Inferno. Here, they aren't swimming in boiling blood, or, more likely, stuck in the ice lower down. So they do their best, but in the end they're forced to admit defeat. They can eliminate most of the suspects, but they still have two names left, and the machines can't determine which one the recorded voice belongs to.
But their bosses are happy; they simply arrest both guys. After all, this is Stalin's Russia. It must be the grimmest and most profound shaggy dog story ever written."
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