Marissa Moss reviews March-3

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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.”
— Marissa Moss

Six days that sealed Russia’s fate

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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.
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— Daniel J. Mahoney

Published Today: March 1917, Book 3

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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.”

Produced for Inspection

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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.”
— March 1917, Book 3, Chapter 531

A New Government at Sea

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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?”
— March 1917, Book 3, Chapter 432

The Progressive Admiral

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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.
”
— March 1917, Book 3, Chapter 415

Solzhenitsyn in new Roger Kimball anthology

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Roger Kimball—man of letters extraordinaire—has published The Critical Temper, an anthology of the finest writing to appear in the New Criterion over its first 40 years. Included is the marvelous excerpt from Chapter 1 of Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones, Book 1, depicting the Swiss half-canton Appenzell and its ancient voting rituals that Solzhenitsyn witnessed just before his first journey to North America in April 1975.

Hear Roger Kimball discuss the anthology below, and scroll further down for a quote from Solzhenitsyn’s memoir.

“So no, this was definitely not the least bit like back home. Having unanimously re-elected their beloved Landamann, entrusting him with the formation of the kind of government he wanted, they immediately rejected all his major proposals. And now he is to govern! I had never seen or heard of such a democracy, and was filled with respect (especially after Landamann Broger’s speech). This is the kind of democracy we could do with. (Were not perhaps our medieval town assemblies—the veche—very much like these?)
The Swiss Confederation, established in 1291, is in fact now the oldest democracy in the world. It did not spring from the ideas of the Enlightenment, but directly from the ancient forms of communal life. The rich, industrial, crowded cantons, however, have lost all this, conforming to Europe for many years now (and have adopted everything European from miniskirts to sexual poses plastiques). But in Appenzell, on the other hand, much has been kept as of old.
How great is the diversity of the Earth, and how many unknown, unseen possibilities it offers us! There is so much for us to think about for a Russia of the future—if we are only given the chance to think.”
— Between Two Millstones, Chapter 1

SOLZHENITSYN: EXILE IN AMERICA

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In the Summer 2021 issue of Modern Age, Emina Melonic offers an especially thoughtful and discerning review of Between Two Millstones, Book 2 (BTM-2).

“Solzhenitsyn’s life in America was attended by sorrow and fatigue but also by displays of great strength. He appears in this volume as a man afraid of running out of time to make a contribution to Russia’s rebirth. He has immense gratitude for small corners of Vermont, but his soul aches because he knows that he “had to get to Russia in time to die there.” This memoir exemplifies the difficult question of belonging. Without slipping into clichés, Solzhenitsyn challenges both émigré and American alike to seek the truth, not only of one’s own existence, but also that of a nation.”
— Emina Melonic