Time of action December 24-27, 1949.
The life path of the hero of the book, Gleb Nerzhin (Evgeny Mironov), a mathematician who decided to plunge into the nightmare of the Gulag again, but not change his conscience, was written off by Solzhenitsyn from his own. It is this - the choice of an incredibly painful, but worthy path - that makes the novel surprisingly attractive and, to a certain extent, optimistic. "In the First Circle" is a book about the victory of a strong spirit over totalitarianism, which seeks to trample on the individual in all possible ways - physical cruelty and moral humiliation.
The action of the novel takes place a little over three years before the death of the "father of the peoples" Joseph Stalin.
