March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series

University of Notre Dame Press, 2019

Foreword INDIES 2019 Silver Winner for History

2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Long-listed for the Read Russia Prize for Twentieth-Century Literature

The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus about the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes— August 1914 and November 1916—focus on Russia’s crises and recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin’s reforms, and how the surge of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War I.

March 1917—the third node—tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of events. The action of book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 8–12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs. Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition, horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children. Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into question.

PRAISE FOR THE TRANSLATION

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume historical novel about the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, is divided into four “nodes,” each a lengthy account of a short span of time. March 1917, the third node, is in turn divided into four volumes, the second of which is the book under review, translated into English for the first time. Combining nonfictional historical argument with novelistic accounts of the principal historical actors and a few fictional characters, March 1917 covers a mere three days of unrest and revolution, March 13–15, 1917, at the end of which Tsar Nicholas II abdicates, ending the Romanov dynasty in Russia. Marian Schwartz’s splendid translation captures the prose’s powerful pace and conveys, as few translators could, the author’s subtle use of tone. ...” Gary Saul Morson, The American Scholar

“Marian Schwartz’s translation hews faithfully to the original. It renders Solzhenitsyn’s signature neologisms, archaisms, dialecticisms, grammatical complexities, and syntactical inversions into careful English prose, while retaining the idiosyncratic authorial diction and conveying the wicked delight he takes in lampooning the historically clueless, irresponsible, and immoral.” — Richard Tempest, National Review

“. . . Solzhenitsyn captures the chaos of the time, when a centuries-old order fell and the factions that would fight to replace it were still forming. Though Book 2 features myriad characters and is only one volume of a four-volume book (and even then only part of a much larger sequential novel), the story it tells isn’t a complete narrative. Still, this entry in the master work is satisfying as both an engrossing patchwork of lives and a snapshot of a moment when the people didn’t yet know what was coming.” — Jeff Fleischer, The Foreword

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