A review by bobbo49
The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.0

If not for the Russian names and the utter grimness of the story, I'd give five stars to this magnificent descent into Dante's First Circle of Hell, presented in the vision of a scientific work camp to which the primary narrator and his fellows are sentenced in the post-World War II Soviet Union. Brilliant philosophical insights and literary references are interspersed with Solzhenitsyn's first-hand knowledge of the Gulags; the depths to which men can fall, and the clarity of vision offered by the loss of illusion and hope, are nowhere better described. A hard read, because it is so real and true.