Book 2 of March 1917, first published in English by Notre Dame Press three years ago, has been released today in paperback. See a short video introducing the book here. To catch up on The Red Wheel from the beginning, read August 1914, October 1916, Book 1 of March 1917, then this Book 2 of March 1917. Book 3 is here, and Book 4 is due out in autumn 2024.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; illustration by Seth
The eminent New York Review of Books features a major piece, in its current issue, by the always-insightful Gary Saul Morson, a splendid reflection on the Red Wheel and the misunderstandings that proliferated around Solzhenitsyn during his Western exile—the years of Between Two Millstones.
Read the full piece here.
“Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life’s fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated in Rebuilding Russia,
political activity is by no means the principal mode of human life…. The more energetic the political activity in a country, the greater is the loss to spiritual life. Politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies. Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul.”
The University of Notre Dame Press has announced the launch of a new interactive map of the Red Wheel, pairing especially well with Node 3 (March 1917). The map brings the story to life, allowing the reader to explore the historical landmarks and visualize the Revolution like never before. With this map, readers can view important locations from the books both as they appeared during the Revolution and how they look today with both English and Russian descriptions. Tour Mikhail Nikolaevich's palace and learn the history of Cubat's restaurant during an exploration of 1917 Petrograd and modern-day St. Petersburg.
Interact with the map at redwheelmap.org.
Building on his valuable overview of those volumes of The Red Wheel published in English as of January 2021 (i.e., through March 1917, Book 2), the estimable Robert D. Kaplan continues to engage with the argument and action of Solzhenitsyn’s great work on the Russian Revolution now that Book 3 of March 1917 is out.
“But did it have to happen as it happened? Solzhenitsyn does not say it, but if the royal family had not been executed — and if a quasi-constitutional monarchy had been established — the twentieth century would have been far less bloody. Instead, the abdication and subsequent arrest of Nicholas II and his family led to a vacuum of authority. The worse the anarchy, the worse the solution. Meanwhile, Lenin, brooding in his Zurich exile, had his mind fixed on the mistakes of the Paris Commune (the insurrection that followed France’s defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870-71). As Solzhenitsyn inhabits the thoughts of Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution-yet-to-come condemns all displays of weakness and humanity. We must seize the banks. We must not be magnanimous. Don’t save people in order to re-educate them; conduct cellar executions instead: “The proletariat had to be taught pitiless mass methods!”
And so it happened thus. As each new book in the series appears in translation, Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel is emerging as the ultimate monument to the perils of illusion and disorder.”
Lee Congdon has a fine review of March 1917, Book 3 in the latest issue of National Review.
“But perhaps resistance would have been futile. Not so, according to Solzhenitsyn. The revolutionaries were largely untrained and poorly armed. Because of the relative calm then existing at the front, up to a million soldiers would have been available to retake Petrograd. Thirty thousand would have been more than enough, but the Supreme Command thought only of surrender. “It was a panopticum of weak and incapable men.” Those words reflect Solzhenitsyn’s view that history is radically contingent; nothing is inevitable. The revolution resulted from the action (or inaction) of men and women who could have chosen different paths.
Solzhenitsyn’s highly critical account of the March Revolution is of a piece with his hostile attitude toward all revolutions. He was not opposed to change; quite the contrary. He believed strongly and wrote often that czarist Russia had been in need of a reform program of the kind advanced by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Had that great leader not been assassinated in 1911, and had the czar not decided for war, Russia would almost certainly have been spared the revolution to come. In the fall of 1993, Solzhenitsyn gave an address in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne commemorating the bicentennial of the counterrevolutionary Vendée Uprising. He told those gathered that he would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. France, he said, had a Thermidorian reaction that overthrew Robespierre, but the revolution in Russia “was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.” Those words, and Solzhenitsyn’s riveting account of the March Revolution, should give Americans pause.”
Francis P. Sempa reviews the newly released March-3 in the Asian Review of Books.
“When historians and writers of historical fiction look back on events and developments they can sometimes portray them with more understanding and order than they deserve. The best historians and novelists—and Solzhenitsyn was first and foremost a novelist—narrate history through the eyes and ears of the participants who don’t know the outcome of the events they are observing and participating in. In March 1917, Solzhenitsyn presents events through the characters’ perspectives and perceptions at the time, not in hindsight or years afterward, lending authenticity to his narrative by putting us in the room (so to speak) with the statesmen, officers, soldiers and citizens who experienced the chaos of war and revolution.”
Marissa Moss reviews March 1917, Book 3 at the New York Journal of Books.
“This kind of writing shows Solzhenitsyn’s impressive novelistic skills at creating characters, including those based on real people. This mix of styles makes for gripping reading, placing us in the midst of this whirlwind of confusion. Revolutions aren’t simple and there isn’t a single person in charge. By revealing the history through a range of different characters’ experiences, the events feel personal, many small “nodes” converging into a momentous wave.”
The first review of the newly-published March 1917, Book 3 (“March-3”) is already out! A comprehensive piece by Dan Mahoney, summing up all the key action and situation. The book is available now, both as hardcover and as e-book, wherever books are sold, including on the publisher’s website and on Amazon.
“The reader once again finds himself or herself in medias res, caught up in dramatic revolutionary events which have now spread out from Petrograd the capital to the whole of the Russian empire. Russian “society,” as it had called itself for more than a half century to distinguish itself from an allegedly repellent Tsarist state order, is at once hypnotized and inebriated by a revolutionary spirit that sees no good in the passing order, confuses freedom with the absence of all hierarchy, authority, and order, and that above all sees no enemies to the Left. If wild and reckless street scenes dominated the first two books of March 1917, the revolutionary self-enslavement of civil society is the dominant note in the third book which covers the days from March 16th to March 22nd, 1917, although the streets do remain restless and chaotic. What Freud called “the reality principle” is almost nowhere to be found in the consciousness of the principal actors under discussion. Revolutionary inebriation abounds.
”
The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 3 is available today for the first time in English from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.
The action of Book 3 (out of four) is set during March 16–22, 1917. In Book 3, the Romanov dynasty ends and the revolution starts to roll out from Petrograd toward Moscow and the Russian provinces. The dethroned Emperor Nikolai II makes his farewell to the Army and is kept under guard with his family. In Petrograd, the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies continue to exercise power in parallel. The war hero Lavr Kornilov is appointed military chief of Petrograd. But the Soviet’s “Order No. 1” reaches every soldier, undermining the officer corps and shaking the Army to its foundations. Many officers, including the head of the Baltic Fleet, the progressive Admiral Nepenin, are murdered. Black Sea Fleet Admiral Kolchak holds the revolution at bay; meanwhile, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the emperor’s uncle, makes his way to military headquarters, naïvely thinking he will be allowed to take the Supreme Command.
We remind Solzhenitsyn readers of the overall sequence of the 10-volume Red Wheel:
Node I: August 1914, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node II: November 1916, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node III: March 1917, Book 1 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 2 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 3 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 4 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 1 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 2 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
To inform readers about Solzhenitsyn’s system of “Nodes”, and also to explain the definitive term “Node” (instead of the older “Knot”), here is a portion of the Publisher’s Note that accompanies each of the Notre Dame volumes:
The English translations by H.T. Willetts of August 1914 and November 1916, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989 and 1999, respectively, appeared as Knot I and Knot II. The present translation, in accordance with the wishes of the Solzhenitsyn estate, has chosen the term “Node” as more faithful to the author’s intent. Both terms refer, as in mathematics, to discrete points on a continuous line. In a 1983 interview with Bernard Pivot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described his narrative concept as follows: “The Red Wheel is the narrative of revolution in Russia, its movement through the whirlwind of revolution. This is an immense scope of material, and . . . it would be impossible to describe this many events and this many characters over such a lengthy stretch of time. That is why I have chosen the method of nodal points, or Nodes. I select short segments of time, of two or three weeks’ duration, where the most vivid events unfold, or else where the decisive causes of future events are formed. And I describe in detail only these short segments. These are the Nodes. Through these nodal points I convey the general vector, the overall shape of this complex curve.”
Concluding today, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s about-to-be-released , The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 3, translated by Marian Schwartz, available Friday, for the first time in English, from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold. (For Tuesday’s excerpt, go here. For yesterday’s, here.) Today’s selection—the closing chapter of Book 3—shows Emperor Nikolai II, just hours after his careless abdication on March 15, 1917, preoccupied with the health of his children rather than the fate of his abandoned people. He is roused by his Empress just enough to be force-paraded in front of a “Soviet” commissar whose overt malice portends the ruin to come.
Click here to read the full chapter at National Review.
“Starker yet were his snake eyes, they burned with hatred. The commissar’s face twisted, and he was shaking feverishly.
In front of this vivid appearance of malice, the Emperor stopped, woke up—and felt it. On his face, puffy with weariness, the meaning became apparent—as did his exhaustion.
He swayed a little from foot to foot. He jerked one shoulder. And was about to turn and go—but couldn’t, out of politeness, not nod to the group in parting.
He nodded.
And walked away, his step unsteady—but rather than go very far forward, in the direction he had been heading, he went back to from whence he had come.”
Beginning yesterday, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s about-to-be-released , The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 3, translated by Marian Schwartz, available Friday, for the first time in English, from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold. (For yesterday’s excerpt, go here.) Today’s selection depicts the first meeting, on March 17, 1917, of the helpless Council of Ministers of the new Provisional Government headed by sundry liberals and socialists. In a matter of hours, they heedlessly sweep away much of the state and police apparatus of a vast empire while Prime Minister Georgi Lvov, a soft and ineffectual left-liberal, muses about how a truly free society shouldn’t need hierarchy or authority.
Click here to read the full chapter at National Review.
“They all realized they had to begin with major issues of principle and then everything else would come clear. But not in a single head, dusted with the fuss, patchiness, and jerkiness of these past few days, did a single issue become clear—not even how to formulate it. Besides, today was just the first night they’d slept, and they weren’t over their exhaustion.
Surely there must have been something, though. Oh, there was.
They sat around the big table, stretching significance over their faces.
Yes, apparently there was a big question, much bigger? The Constituent Assembly!
Specifically: in which building would we convene it?”
Beginning today, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s about-to-be-released , The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 3, translated by Marian Schwartz, available Friday, for the first time in English, from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold. Today’s selection presents a riveting account of the arrest of Admiral Adrian Nepenin, a progressive admiral who had welcomed the February Revolution that led to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, but who now finds himself the victim of an insurrection by revolutionary sailors. All military authority has broken down even as Russia is still a belligerent in the First World War. In a subsequent chapter, Nepenin will be cruelly murdered.
Click here to read the full chapter at National Review.
“Nepenin sat in total shock. Up until the day before yesterday, only the Emperor could have removed him. But now the Emperor had removed himself. Nepenin couldn’t immediately picture to whom the Commander of the Baltic Fleet now reported. There was no such thing as reporting to the government or even the Minister of the Navy. The new government didn’t even have a Minister of the Navy. Guchkov held both positions. Guchkov was generally of like mind with all the Young Turks, but there was no way right now to verify and support like-mindedness by telegraph.
But something had to be decided.
What could be decided, though, if the Emperor Paul I, where everything had begun yesterday, had already sent a wireless message to all ships to carry out only Maksimov’s orders and not Nepenin’s?
The Emperor Paul had a “central committee of ships’ deputies.”
No, Nepenin could not surrender his power—this was now the competence of . . . the Provisional Government?
But how could he prevent it?
No matter what Nepenin thought, he no longer had the authority.
”
Here below is the webcast of the March-3 book launch that took place this past Thursday, 7th October, with panelists Daniel Mahoney, Marian Schwartz, and Stepan Solzhenitsyn, moderated by Kennan Institute director Matthew Rojansky, discussing the new book.
This Thursday, 7th October, at 2pm New York (7pm London, 9pm Moscow), watch the live webcast with panelists Daniel Mahoney, Marian Schwartz, and Stepan Solzhenitsyn discussing the new book. Send your questions by email to kennan@wilsoncenter.org, or tweet @KennanInstitute.
Prolific translator Marian Schwartz talks about translating Russian literature, and notably March 1917, into English.
Marian Schwartz, translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Red Wheel: March 1917"
“Schwartz describes her commitment to translating Russian writers and the importance of their publication in the United States, “I came of age during the Cold War gripped by the injustice and brutality of the Soviet Union. In the dark 1970s, no author had a bigger impact on the West’s perception of that reality than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, beginning with his soul-shattering novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and culminating in 1974 with the publication in English of his monumental The Gulag Archipelago. Both those books hit me hard just as I was learning Russian and falling in love with one of the world’s great literatures, many of whose writers had suffered and were then suffering a hideous fate. In graduate school, I began thinking about translation. I felt a natural impulse to share this important and beautiful writing with my fellow English speakers.””
Learn more about the forthcoming English publication of March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3, due out for the first time in English, translated by Marian Schwartz, 15 October from University of Notre Dame Press.
March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Available October 15, 2021, wherever books are sold. Published by University of Notre Dame Press at undpress.nd.edu
David Schaefer has an interesting piece at Law and Liberty on parallels between the Russia of 1917 and today’s America, with collateral reference to Solzhenitsyn's March 1917.
“A majority tyranny, as the American Founders foresaw, is no less threatening, over the long run, to civic harmony and the security of individual rights than the despotism of an irresponsible tsar or oligarchy.”
An illuminating recapitulation, in February’s New Criterion, of The Red Wheel volumes which have appeared to date in English, from the eminent scholar Robert D. Kaplan. Full text here.
“For in this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history. Just listen to Solzhenitsyn’s timeless words:
”For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.”
Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all the polished and oh-so-civilized intelligentsia, who see the radical Left as composed of a purer and distilled archetype of their own values, and only awake from their dreams when it is too late. For, as it is said, people who have lost faith in God believe in nothing, and they will therefore believe in anything. Richard Bernstein, a former book critic for The New York Times, in referring to campus multiculturalism, calls this larger phenomenon “the dictatorship of virtue,” something that took firm root in twentieth-century totalitarianism, in which the perfect race or system becomes the absolute destroyer of everything good. In this way Solzhenitsyn’s story is a timeless one, aptly suited for our own age.”
Francis Sempa reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, at the New York Journal of Books.
“Joseph Pearce, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, notes that Solzhenitsyn had “kindred spirits” in the West, including G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. S. Eliot. During an interview in 1998 with Pearce, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for these writers and remarked that both Russia and the West suffer from “a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion.” He called this a “mistake . . . of the Enlightenment era.”
Other essays in the book show Russian cultural influences among African American writers such as Alain Locke in the 1920s, and later Richard Wright; the great southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, who wrote powerfully about good and evil, sin and suffering; and American social activists Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both of whom, however, succumbed to the fruitless search for an earthly paradise.
Far too many Western intellectuals thought that the earthly paradise could be found in Soviet Russia and other communist states. “At the very essence of a utopia,” writes Eugene Vodolazkin, “is the idea of progressive movement toward a not-yet-achieved perfection.” History shows that when perfection is not reached, “[t]here comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.””
Over at the Big Other, the Canadian novelist Jeff Bursey offers a substantive review of BTM-2, including its treatment of The Red Wheel.
“The pages spent discussing The Red Wheel’s aesthetics and objectives, as well as the labour behind it, are likely to be identifiable and fascinating to many writers. Always present is the struggle to shape the immense number of ideas, real-life personages, and incidents into a cogent narrative while resisting demands from the outside world:
_________________________________________
Fortunately, fate has decreed that, while following my basic inclination, I also have to remain silent; to take The Red Wheel on further. These many years of silence, of inaction, of less action—even if I’d tried I couldn’t have planned it better. It’s also the best position tactically, given the current distribution of forces: for I am almost alone, but my adversaries are legion.
I’ve plunged into The Red Wheel and I’m up to my ears in it: all my time is filled with it, except when I sleep (and even at night I’m woken by ideas, which I note down). I stay up late reading the old men’s memoirs and am already nearing the end of a complete read-through of what they’ve sent. Over their many pages, the writing sometimes shaky, scratchy now, my heart gives a lurch: what spirit, in someone approaching eighty—some of them ninety—years of age, unbroken by sixty years of humiliation and poverty in emigration—and that after their excruciating defeat in the Civil War. Real warrior heroes! And how much priceless material is preserved in their memories, how many episodes they’ve given me, bits and pieces for the “fragments” chapters—without them, where would I have found this? It would all have vanished without trace.
When I had, in the first draft, assembled the material and made sure I had what was needed for the vast mass of the four-volume March—that is, of the February Revolution itself—I went backwards, to August and October, to fine-tune them into their definitive form. This was also no minor task, for over the last four or so years of rummaging through archives and memoirs, how many new depths I’d encountered in the weave of events, and many places demanded more and more work—changing and rewriting. And yes, I do understand that I am overloading the Wheel with detailed historical material—but it is that very material that’s needed for categorical proof; and I’d never taken a vow of fidelity to the novel form.
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The steadfastness required to finish a novel is often stated but not so often expressed in a way that makes you feel the effort required or that’s as encouraging for one’s own resolve. Reading this volume on that topic one sees, even more than in the first volume, how this series of novels is about ensuring that history is not left to moulder or to be forgotten. I won’t say The Red Wheel is an essential work, as nothing is unless a reader deems it so; but it is essential for me.”
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The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center supports explorations into the life and writings of the Nobel Laureate and Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
