November 1916: 2 (The red wheel) - Hardcover

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224052551 ISBN 13: 9780224052559

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly unmarked by seismic events - in the author's words it 'encapsulated the stagnant and oppresive atmosphere of the months immediately preceding the Revolution' - but beneath the surface, society, from the Tsar's bizarre and troubled court to the peasants, workers, and ill-led soldiers in the trenches, seethed fiercely. As no other could, Solzhenitsyn makes us experience the whole bubbling cauldron. In Petrograd, the windows of luxury shops are still brightly lit; the Duma stormily debates the monarchy, the course of war, and clashing paths to reform; the workers in the huge and miserable munitions factories veer increasingly toward sedition. At the front, all is stalemate except for sudden death's capricious visits, while in the countryside sullen anxiety among hard-pressed farmers is rapidly replacing patriotism. In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle. With masterly and moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical and fictional protagonists, the author unforgettably paints a vivid and sweeping panorama of Imperial Russia at war on the eve of revolution.

About this title

Review

"A superb blend of fact and fiction written in a racy, original style." --John Keep, The Times Literary Supplement

"Solzhenitsyn's tremendous gifts as a novelist shine in his creation of characters and his depiction of war on the front line." --The New Yorker

"Solzhenitsyn achives something exceedingly rare among novelists dealing with history . . . He gets a sense of the past not as something to be understood in the light of the present, but as a teeming womb of incalculablility and possibility." --John Bayley, The New York Book Review

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In 1945, while captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp; he spent another three years in internal exile. Although he was allowed to publish the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in 1962, by 1969 he was ejected from the Writers Union. The publication in the West of others of his novels and, in particular, of the Gulag Archipelago brought retaliation from the authorities, and in 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of Soviet citizenship, and forcibly expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1976, he settled in Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived until 1994, when he returned to Russia after the fall of Communism. He lives in Moscow.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0224052551
• ISBN 13: 9780224052559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1040