In the first circle. Solzhenitsyn A.I.

The novel “The First”, on which the author worked from 1955 to 1958, banned in the USSR and first published in the West, and later recognized by the classics of Russian literature of the twentieth century and the basis of the remarkable television series G. Panfilov, was written for Autobiographical material.

The name of the novel is an allegorical comparison of sharashka with hell from Dante's Divine Comedy.

The central place in the narrative is occupied by the ideological dispute of the heroes of the novel. All of them went through the war and the Gulag. At the same time, one of them remained a convinced communist. The other, Nerzhin, is confident in the viciousness of the very foundation of the communist system. In the past, its ardent supporter himself, he survived the complete collapse of his beliefs. The conscious moral choice of Gleb Zwezhin, who preferred the paradoxical freedom of the prison stage to the doubtful happiness of Sharashka - the leitmotif of the novel.