Word: prisons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
...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...
...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
...prisoners were not expected to survive. Yet Solzhenitsyn also knows, as he says in The First Circle, that "descriptions of prison life tend to overdo the horror of it. Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life?the only life you have?is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when...