About the Author

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.

Reviews

"Solzhenitsyn's best novel." - Washington Post, on the 1968 edition
"A classic. . . . When comparisons of Solzhenitsyn are made with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, this is not hyperbole. . . . Astounding. . . . A literary work of art." - New York Times Book Review, on the 1968 edition
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn changed the course of history. . . the epochal power of Solzhenitsyn's work is due not solely to the extent and quantity of his revelations but also to its artistic quality--to the fact that he wrote it with style, and created a work to stand alongside the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky." - The New Yorker
"Tolstoyan in its in sweep, it is among the greatest Russian novels." - Wall Street Journal
"The appearance in English of this new version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's best novel is an exciting literary event. . . . A great and important book, whose qualities are finally fully available to English-speaking readers." - Washington Post
"The publication by HarperCollins of In the First Circle (the book's original title) in a restored ninety-six-chapter version, is therefore a publishing event of the first order. . . . With the publication of the restored version of In the First Circle, we have an opportunity to rise to Solzhenitsyn's challenge and again to take him seriously as an artist and thinker of the first rank." - Daniel J. Mahoney, First Things magazine
"The new edition of Solzhenitsyn's epic novel, In the First Circle captures better than any other work of fiction the quintessence of communist rule at its Stalinist peak: all-pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal. . . . The longer text is deeper and darker." - The Economist
"Solzhenitsyn's Cold War masterpiece. . . a new radically retranslated edition, which is greatly expanded." - London Times
"The most important political novelist of the twentieth century." - David Remnick, The New Yorker