The First Circle
by Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn · first published 1969
43% recommend57% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Set in a Stalin-era prison research lab where engineers work on speech recognition, the novel explores friendship, Marxism, faith and moral compromise, with a realistic portrayal of Soviet repression.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Solzhenitsyn’s In The First Circle is also important for people in the tech industry to read. The book takes place in a Sharashka, a prison-within-the-prison-system for talented engineers who get (marginally) better food and conditions…
on “Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)” ↗The idea that Solzhenitsyn is a reactionary doesn't hold up when you read his books. The First Circle is a deep exploration of so many things. Friendship, Stalinism, Marx, Marxist Dialectic, Christianity, Catholicism, Jews, and so on. No one comes out of it clean and Solzhenitsyn doesn't think he has…
Have you read “In the first circle”? Great read, and they made a mini series out of it that I believe Solzhenitsyn himself narrates.
on “The Root from Issyk-Kul Revisited” ↗The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) LOTR Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) The Odyssey (Homer) The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams) -- Alright, not literature! But come on, it's Dilbert :)
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗Something for the long holiday evenings: Robert C. Ruark - Something of Value Frisco Hitt - A Coffin Full of Dreams Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn - The First Circle
on “Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?” ↗And if anyone decides to read this, please make sure you read In The First Circle, not The First Circle. The latter is the "first" publication, which Solzhenitsyn abridged and modified, because he did not think that the true work would make it past the Soviet minders. In The First…
on “Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)” ↗I'm a fan of Solzhenitsyn as a writer. The First Circle justly won him the Nobel. But this speech has not aged well. > For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its…
on “A World Split Apart (1978)” ↗Did anyone ever read The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn? It is amazing: in a Stalin gulag in the 1950's USSR, a bunch of Soviet engineers / techies are tasked with creating a speech recognition system. They show fake progress in order to keep…
on “Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB” ↗…evaporates when Ukrainian question is raised. Solzhenitsin is one of the best literary chroniclers of repressions in the Soviet Russia (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, In the First Circle), with the degree of earnestness and realism that approaches Tolstoy's. How does his compassion to Ukranians, or lack thereof, change that? Why do people want writers of fiction to be impeccable moral…
on “Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky” ↗"The First Circle" by Solzhenitzyn is a great read. The caricature of Stalin in that book is absurd, I am not talking about that. There is a historical character Abakumov [1], and in one of his reflections, (from my memory)…
on “A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books” ↗…they are inefficient and a breeding ground for corruption. Also, rest assured that there will be no wind turbines or solar farms around the dacha's of the party elite. Read The GULAG Archipelago or The First Circle for some more insight in the dark side of your proposed "solution" and realise this has been tried - and failed, miserably and horribly - many times over. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/economic-planning/Economic-...
on “Enhanced Rock Weathering for CO2 Removal [video]” ↗…them burned for a reason -- they're meandering failures. Very clever but they don't go anywhere. His short stories, though, are excellent. Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby…
on “Ask HN: What book bit, stung and shook you deeply?” ↗…straightforward or simple: compare to slave labor in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, etc, where some of it was used in industrial-type activities, and even R&D, as described by Solzhenitsyn in In The First Circle; however, you could describe these as solutions for war-time economy, and not sustainable.)
on “Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop” ↗…mind loses touch with that realm. And not to mind how much time you spend on it, because the aim is not to finish the job quickly, but to reach perfection. From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book "In the First Circle".
on “Why the last 20% of work takes the same amount of time as the first 80%” ↗Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him... Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR…