The First Circle of Dante's Hell -- where the souls of teh pre-Christian philosophers are doomed to exist throughout eternity--stands in this novel as a netaphor for certain penal institutions of Stalin's Russian. These were scientific research centers, operating within special prisons and staffed by polictical prisoners - physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, technicians. They were luxurious in comparison with othe prisons and the hard-labor camps of the far north--from which many of their inmates were drawn, to which many would return: the prisoners were fed enough to ensure their effectiveness; they slept between sheets. But their prison terms wer long, their contracts with the world of freedom minimal, and an administration's whim was enough to ship them to the lower circles of Hell

Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney

This novel covers four days (Dec. 24-27, 1949) in a sharashka in Moscow known as Marfino -- 300 prisoners and 50 guards. The novel begins with a Soviet diplomat making an anonymous phone call to the American embassy to alert it of Soviet espionage focused on the atomic bomb. The embassy's phones are bugged and the phone call is recorded, but the Soviet security service doesn't know who the caller was. So inmate engineers and scientists at the Marfino sharashka are assigned the task of identifying the traitor, as quickly as possible. The book is a masterpiece of literature.

Enjoy! for Allergic to A Release Challenge 2023 --title