Society Review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1

In the December issue of Society (subscription required), Will Morrisey offers a thoughtful, thorough, and elegant review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1.

“By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists threw at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.

Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” Awriter’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.””

— Will Morrisey

Natalia Solzhenitsyn interview with Le Figaro

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, has given a wide-ranging interview to Le Figaro (subscription required) on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She addresses questions about historical memory, justice, and possible paths forward for Russia and the West. Here is one exchange:

“- On his return, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wanted to face the past, to open the archives. Why?

- He wanted to inform the younger generations, because he knew that otherwise they would forget as the witnesses disappeared. Fortunately, many people in Russia today are trying to erect monuments to the victims of repression in the provinces. Some suffer as the historian Yuri Dmitriev in Karelia, who finds himself in prison for his fight. I speak a lot publicly to support it. In his case, it was the local FSB intelligence services that sued him in court [on false accusations—editor’s note] because they were furious that the memorial he defends has become a highly frequented place of pilgrimage, with 20,000 people who go there every year. And the top-level FSB does nothing, not wanting to go against its own structures.”

— Natalia Solzhenitsyn

Dan Mahoney review of March 1917, Book 2

The first review of March 1917, Book 2 is out—from Daniel J. Mahoney, writing in the December issue of the New Criterion (subscription required), under the headline ACCELERATING TO OBLIVION. Here is a powerful excerpt:

“Book 2 ends with art of a very high order. In chapter 349, Guchkov and Shulgin visit Tsar Nikolai II in the royal train car which has been circling the capital for three days. The Emperor is without an adequate sense of the extent of the collapse that has taken part in St. Petersburg and its environs. All Nikolai can think of is returning to his beloved Alix, the Empress of Russia, and his sick children. He is incapable of thinking politically or acting like a statesman who is obliged to preserve civilized order against the revolutionary deluge. Unbeknown to Guchkov and Shulgin, Nikolai has already been persuaded by his aide-de-camp Ruzsky to sign an abdication. But Nikolai waffles. He refuses to abandon the heir, suffering as the boy is from hemophilia, and to leave him to elements the Emperor cannot trust. In a chapter that is quietly suspenseful, and riveting in its own way, we see the shock of all concerned when Nikolai modifies the abdication to include himself and his son, thus turning the throne over to his brother Mikhail. But he has not consulted with Mikhail and thus has no idea if he will indeed accept the throne (he does not). Once more, the last Russian Tsar puts family—and personal concerns—above his political responsibilities. And in chapter 353, we see “The Emperor Alone” after his abdication, at peace (of sorts), but still hoping for a miracle or divine intervention to make everything right. Passive as always, he never understood that Providence works, at least in part, in cooperation with human virtue and free will. His passivity ended up dooming an empire and paved the way for seventy years of inhuman and absolutely unprecedented totalitarianism.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney

March 1917, Book 2 published today

The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 2 is available today for the first time in English from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

With this volume we arrive at “the revolution at last" with an utterly passive and inconsequential Tsar, feckless liberals and socialists in the new Provisional Government (who see no enemies to the Left), disciplined totalitarian socialists with their eyes on the prize, and revolutionary mobs, drunk with the spirit of revolution and destruction. “The Red Wheel” is beginning to arrive at its destination… And there is some superb writing on Solzhenitsyn's part: expertly drawn streets scenes or fragments that capture the collective nihilism of the revolutionary crowds, and a remarkable chapter on the abdication of Tsar Nikolai—not to mention the devastating portrait of the vain Kerensky, and many others. The book covers three dramatic and consequential days, March 13-15, 1917.

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 (forthcoming—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.”