Russia's President Vladimir Putin visits Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his house in Troitse-Lykovo on the outskirts of Moscow, in this June 12, 2007, file photo. (RIA Novosti, Presidential Press Service, Mikhail Klimentyev/Associated Press)

A complete and uncensored version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle will be published for the first time in English.

The fifth novel by the Russian writer who spent eight years in a Soviet prison camp and 20 years in exile, the work first appeared in 1968 in English.

It follows the lives of inmates of a gulag near Moscow, all scientists and intellectuals who agree to work for the regime in return for better conditions than they'd face on a Siberian gulag.

The title, The First Circle, refers to Dante's first circle of hell. Solzhenitsyn portrays political figures, including Stalin, amid a variety of plots involving the prisoners, some of whom rebel against working to further an oppressive regime.

Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release the full edition of The First Circle in 2009, it announced Tuesday.

"The First Circle is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory," Carrie Kania, senior vice-president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said in a statement.

The 1968 version had been leaked out of the Soviet Union against Solzhenitsyn's wishes.

It was based on a version he had attempted to have published in the U.S.S.R. Solzhenitsyn cut nine chapters from the novel, but still it was banned by Soviet officials.

The 580-page English-language version of the book was published to great acclaim in the Cold War era.

Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

He is considered one of the most important writers of the Soviet era, in part because he showed the gulags to the world.

He was exiled in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. The full edition of The First Circle has been published in Russia, but there was a delay in translating it into English.

Harry T. Willetts, Solzhenitsyn's favourite translator, had completed a translation, but died in 2005 before it could be published. Solzhenitsyn, now 89, has been working with the publisher to refine the final version.

A 1991 Canadian television miniseries based on the novel and starring Victor Garber and Christopher Plummer earned a Gemini Award for best photographer and was nominated for best miniseries.

The story also has been turned into a miniseries in Russia.

With files from the Associated Press