Characters
- Rostislav (Ruska) Vadimich Doronin: A zek mechanic, 23. Loves Klara, daughter of the prosecutor Makarygin. An informer himself, albeit a reluctant one, is beaten and sent away for helping fellow inmates find out who the other informers are.
- Klara Petrovna Makarygina: Makarygin's youngest daughter, works in the vacuum laboratory and falls in love with Ruska.
- Gleb Vikentyevich Nerzhin: A zek mathematician, age 31. An autobiographical character. He is offered a position in a cryptography group, and refuses, even knowing this means he will be sent away from the sharashka.
- Nadya Ilinichna Nerzhina: Gleb's wife. Waited for eight years and became a student in Moscow because of him (Marfino is not far from Moscow) but is considering divorce because remaining married to a prisoner blocks her continuing studies or finding a job.
- Valentin Martinevich Pryanchikov: A zek engineer and head of the acoustic laboratory, "Walentulya" is not taken seriously and behaves like a child, despite the fact that he is as old as Nerzhin.
- Lev Grigoryevich Rubin: A zek philologist and teacher, 36, a Communist from youth, but nevertheless always ready for a good joke, even about socialism. Rubin is based on Solzhenitsyn's friend Lev Kopelev. He gets a position in a new group; his first task is to identify the man who called the American embassy.
- Dmitri Aleksandrovich Sologdin: A zek designer, 36, a survivor of the northern camps now serving his second term. Sologdin is based on Solzhenitsyn's friend Dimitrii Mikhailovich Panin, who later wrote a book entitled "The Notebooks of Sologdin". He works on a cryptographic machine in secret, but is found out and has to develop his invention so as not to get sent back.
- Innokentii Artemyevich Volodin: A Ministry official whose phone call at the beginning of the book functions as a catalyst for much of the later action in the sharashka and eventually leads to his arrest.
Read more about this topic: The First Circle
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
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—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)