The Red Wheel, April 1917: Node IV, Book 1 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Clare Kitson

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The Red Wheel, April 1917: Node IV, Book 1 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Clare Kitson

Only in fiction can some of the deeper patterns of history and human nature be wholly expressed. Journalism and conventional histories are hard-pressed to encompass certain levels of experience. That’s probably among the reasons Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chose to tell the massive story of the Russian Empire’s collapse into revolution and Bolshevism as a series of hefty novels, beginning with August 1914 (published in 1984) and inching toward posthumous conclusion with the first installment of The Red Wheel, April 1917.

Solzhenitsyn was a fiction writer to start, but gained world attention, a Nobel Prize for Literature and deportation from his homeland for The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Several years later in Vermont exile, he began collecting documents and pouring over archives, working the tragedy of Russia from 1914-17 into a series of novels. The work of publishing and translating them into English continues 17 years since the author’s death with what will be the second to last volume in the series.

The dense complexity is striking as characters, real and composite, personify the passage of history—not as Marx’s vast impersonal forces but as people in their moment. A multitude of events are crammed into the massive novel’s timeframe, April 11-May 5, 1917, as they were in real life. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t try to simplify the situation and its many actors into an easy narrative.

Although the publisher’s note promises that the “nodes” of Solzhenitsyn’s epic “can be read consecutively or independently,” jumping in without an extensive understanding of Russian history will be daunting. April 1917 is not the place to start with Solzhenitsyn, whose work has often been misrepresented by critics stung by his critique of soulless materialism in both its capitalist and communist varieties, but will reward longtime readers with his perspective on the inevitable failure of revolutions to produce utopia.

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