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Solzhenitsyn believes that his mathematics saved him: he was next sent to Mavrino, a prison research institute outside Moscow. Mavrino is the setting of The First Circle. The title comes from Dante's Inferno, where the first circle of hell is peopled by the great men of antiquity—Homer, Socrates, Plato—who, too valuable to be thrown into the pit, were consigned to limbo. Mavrino is an institute carrying out KGB research projects, and as a prison it is bearable. There is meat. There is some comfort. There are even women. Yet this is still slave labor of the mind, and transfer to the labor camps can happen at the whim of an "administrative decision."
Into four days at Mavrino a dozen parallel lives are laid. The characters are borne along on the conveyor belts of terror. They are tormented by problems of conscience, and by the knowledge that if they make the morally right choice—to support a friend, to oppose a foolish order—they will be crushed in the machinery.
Innokenti Volodin, an effete young Russian diplomat, phones a warning to a friend, is tracked down by the secret police with the aid of a "voiceprinter" devised at the prison's laboratories.
Aware that the police may be after him, he moves through the upper echelons of Moscow; his fears alternate with moments of euphoric hope, counterpointing the luxurious world around him. Seized and taken to Lyubyanka, in three brilliant matter-of-fact chapters he begins to be stripped down to the inner core of his being. Thus begins the process by which, in Solzhenitsyn's moral order, the most perceptive prisoners have learned to be free men.
The descriptions are chilling: "It was there, on the steps of the last flight of stairs, that Innokenti noticed how deeply the steps were worn. He had never seen anything like it in his life before.
From the edges to the center they were worn down in oval concavities to half their thickness. He shuddered. How many feet must have trodden them in 30 years, how many footsteps must have scraped over them to wear out the stone to such a depth! Of every two who had passed that way one had been a warder, the other—a prisoner."
Another major protagonist is Lev Rubin, the philologist who develops the voiceprinter. Though a prisoner, he is still a convinced Communist. With sympathy and remarkable subtlety, Solzhenitsyn makes clear the process of self-brainwashing by which such a man can sustain such a moral paradox—and can even convince himself that it is right and his duty to help trap Volodin and condemn him to the labor camps.
Gleb Nerzhin, in many ways a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself, makes an opposite choice to Rubin's. By refusing to work on a new bugging device, he condemns himself to Siberia. He is the character most conscious of the paradox that pervades the novel: that in Stalin's Russia only those in prison are truly free to be honest with one another. "When you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power —he's free again."
The prison themes that were presented with piercing simplicity in One Day here return with a sweep that the author himself has described as polyphonic. It is in its references to the labor camps, "the Auschwitzes without ovens" as Dissenter