The First Circle
В круге первом
A great book. First published AD 1968, written in Russian
In the First Circle is a novel by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, released in 1968. A more complete version of the book was published in English in 2009.
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Where it is set
- Moscow
Russia
The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a research and development bureau made of Gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. Source: Wikipedia, reviewed
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What it draws on
The Divine ComedyGreat book
Dante Alighieri, AD 1320*
The title is Dante's: the first circle of Hell, Limbo, where the virtuous pagans live without torment but without hope. Solzhenitsyn's scientists in a Moscow prison laboratory are its inmates: privileged, fed, and still in Hell.
Source: Wikipedia, In the First Circle
“The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle, or limbo of Hell in The Divine Comedy, wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other virtuous pagans, live in a walled green garden.” Read it there
