V kruge pervom - Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isaevich

The novel "In the circle of the first", on which the author worked from 1955 to 1958, banned in the USSR and first published in the West, and later recognized as a classic of Russian literature of the 20th century and based on the wonderful eponymous television series G. Panfilov, is written on autobiographical material.
The title of the novel is an allegorical comparison of the shuffling with the hell from Dante's Divine Comedy.
Central to the narrative is the ideological dispute between the characters of the novel. All of them went through the war and the Gulag. At the same time, one of them remained a convinced communist. Another, Nerzhin, is convinced of the depravity of the very foundation of the communist system. In the past, he himself was an ardent supporter of it, he had experienced a complete collapse of his beliefs. The conscious moral choice of Gleb Nerzhin, who preferred the dubious happiness of the shuffling paradoxical freedom of the prison stage, is the leitmotif of the novel.