In the First Circle

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he was a mathematician. “In the First Circle” is a beautifully written novel set in a terrible place: a research and development laboratory of the Soviet Gulag labor camp system in 1949. Despite the tyranny, brutality, and hypocrisy of the communist regime, Solzhenitsyn depicts the imprisoned scientists as resilient people, passionate for their research, capable of friendship and love. The book analyzes very actual aspects about scientific discoveries and ethics, specially in the context of privacy rights.