The First Circle - Characters

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.