March 1917 The Red Wheel: Node III Book 3 (University of Notre Dame Press), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Solzhenitsyn - The Red Wheel March 1917

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn undertook one of the most ambitious literary projects of the late 20th century, a mammoth multi-volume historical fiction on the fall of the Russian Empire. Working from exile in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn poured over the archives, reading newspapers and diaries as well as memoirs and histories, seeking a narrative amidst the actions of hundreds of characters (real and imagined) spread from 1914 through 1917.

March 1917 The Red Wheel: Node III Book 3 arrives as part of Notre Dame Press’ effort to present the enormous stack of work Solzhenitsyn left unpublished in English after his death in 2008. The sprawling novel is intensely focused on the confused weeks that followed the Czar’s abdication and finds an army of characters acting from selfishness, belief, pragmatism and uncertainty. Solzhenitsyn paints the Czar as have many historians: stubborn in his irresolution, wedded to an unsustainable past. And although Solzhenitsyn’s take on the Russian Revolution is entirely at odds with the version familiar from Sergei Eisenstein’s film October 1917, there is at least one overlap: Solzhenitsyn and Eisenstein both portray the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, as callow yet grandiose in self-esteem.

Unlike Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which embodies historical events through the full verisimilitude of its characters, March 1917 is a book of messages, much like Tolstoy’s later writings. Rather than a cycle of novels, Solzhenitsyn might have been wiser to emulate the approach of his classic The Gulag Archipelago, his “experiment in literary investigation” that reconstructed a lost history through amassing and analyzing the evidence. With The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn lost the general public, but the ongoing series remains fascinating for students of Russia.