Oh great. I read "The First Circle" many years ago, picked it up again and re-read a few weeks back, and now there's word that a new, vastly improved, edition is out :
Also by 1968 Solzhenitsyn had returned the novel to its authentic form, following as well his lifelong pattern of tinkering with the text. As he explains in the "Author's Note" to the new edition, "By the by, while restoring the novel there were parts that I refined: after all, I was forty then, but am fifty now." The full version comprises 96 chapters, rather than the 87 of the version previously available in English. For readers of the earlier version, "In the First Circle" will be a revelation. In the complete text the excised chapters are reinstated, other chapters are modified, major characters are substantially enriched, new characters appear, the plot is sharply altered, and themes are deepened. Also restored is the preposition "In" of the original title, shifting the focus back from a place to the people in that place. Not until 1978, by which time Solzhenitsyn was living in his Vermont exile after having been expelled from his homeland four years earlier, did he allow the complete novel to be published in Russian.
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