The Broken Circle

The main storyline is connected with solving a technical problem: a collective of a tire factory fights for a new, progressive technology. But the industrial side of the conflict is only the foundation for the unfolding events. Step by step, the narration captures the reader with a sharp, dramatic struggle of beliefs, characters, and human passions—unexpected moves and turns.

“Broken Circle” is a work that is sharply contemporary, one could even say topical. But this topicality isn’t superficial and fleeting—it runs much deeper, into the very essence of the novel’s conflicts and characters. And above all—in the main character, the factory director Bryantsev.

People like Aleksey Bryantsev were produced by our time, which opens unprecedented room for bold experiments, searches, and creative initiative. In the image of Bryantsev, these possibilities unfold brightly and diversely. He is an integral, principled man, uncompromising toward any stagnation, formalism, and bourgeois complacency. He is capable, for the sake of the cause, of sacrificing his own interests and well-being. Bryantsev’s courage is based on exact engineering knowledge and calculation, on a firm certainty that he is right, and—most importantly—on a deep faith in the collective, in the people he himself raised.

The figure of a new kind of leader—someone with genuinely state-minded thinking, a true communist—stands fully revealed in the novel. Bryantsev’s image is a great success of the writer.

There is yet another important hero in “Broken Circle.” It is the collective of an active public institution at the plant: the workers-researchers. With living, believable authenticity, the author recreates the atmosphere of tireless searching and the beating of creative thought. Through the images of the most vivid representatives of the collective—workers Kristich, Kayola, Zavarykin, and the engineer-inventor Tselin—the theme of labor-as-creativity, labor marked by bright signs of the communist future, develops and deepens.