By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Michael Guybon. “*The First Circle asks to be compared to Dostoevsky. Solzhenitsyn is in the great story-telling tradition. When he introduces a character, he fills in the complete background. His portrait of a Soviet prosecutor and his family circle is unforgettable. So are chapters devoted to the brooding Stalin. A future generation of Russians will be able to come to terms with their history through books like Dr. Zhivago and The First Circle.'“ David Pryce-Jones, Financial Times.

London Collins. Fontana Books. 1970. 680P.

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

From the jacket: Cancer Ward, which has been compared to the master­piece of another Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain,examines the relationships of a group of people in a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Through their stories, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has created a vivid portrait of life in the So­viet Union. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In 1945, while a captain in the Soviet Army, he was arrested—for criticiz­ing Stalin in a letter to a friend—and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent exile. In exile, he became a patient in a cancer ward, and later re­covered. Although he was allowed to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union in 1969. When the KGB discovered the manuscript of The Gulag Archi­pelago, it became imperative for Solzhenitsyn to have the book published in the West. The authorities retaliated in 1974 by exiling him from the Soviet Union. He settled in the United States in 1976 and now lives in Vermont.

NY. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1968. 630p.