March 1917

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marian Schwartz

Description

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work March 1917, Node III, Book 1, of The Red Wheel.

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.

The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for each work aims to narrate the story of an era in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same way as Homer’s Iliad became the representative account of the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization, these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern world.

Over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, another life awaited Veronya and Fanya. Left behind was the dozing Tsarist city they detested—and here they had stepped foot into a city of revolution! What this revolution looked like and what this revolution constituted was still not clear. They had never seen one! Still hanging on building walls and fences were the same proclamations by Commander Khabalov with calls for order and with threats—but only his notices. Nowhere were his bristling hordes. There was no guard at the other end of the Nikolaevsky Bridge, or the embankment, or Annunci - ation Square—no police guards anywhere and only rare patrols, whereas the freely scurrying public, with their motley, concerned, joyous faces, included a greater number of soldiers without formation or command and many who had been recovering in hospitals and were now talking excitedly and waving their bandages.
But there was no rally per se, no red flag—so the young women chose to turn toward the center, closer to events. Before them, though, a little to the right, they saw thick clouds of smoke, and they were told that the Lithuanian Fortress was burning and the prison was being liberated. Hurrah! That’s where the girls ran—to liberate the women’s prison!
Before they could get there, though, in front of the Potseluev Bridge on the Moika, they encountered a procession of already liberated women prisoners—a file of twenty or thirty, all wearing prisoner gowns and shoes— and they walked that way down the snowy street, and even though there was not a hard frost—my God!—they had to be clothed somewhere, fed and warmed! Veronya and Fanya rushed toward the file greatly agitated and confused. So how are you? What’s happening? Women, comrades, how can we help you? But the prisoners either had not awoken from their release or had already answered enough on their way. They didn’t even turn their heads but dragged along apathetically, single file, no one answering anything, and only one telling them crudely where they could go.
As if struck, Veronya and Fanya froze, shied away, and let the entire file pass. The fact that they were dressed too nicely had probably offended the prisoners.
Now they felt self-conscious about going to the prison. And they were dissuaded from going to the center by amiable passersby with revolutionary joy on their face: the regime rules there and you should go to the worker and army districts instead. So the young women headed over the Fontanka.
Their expectations were vindicated. Soon they began to hear gunfire: a few adolescents ran past them, firing shiny new black pistols in the air and immediately reloading them from their pockets as they went, something they’d picked up somewhere!
Soon they did see a rally. A student with an officer’s saber strapped on climbed onto a firm mound of snow and spoke very well about freedom, although it was impossible to determine his party orientation—maybe ours, but maybe SR. Listening to him were a few dozen quite random people— wounded soldiers, lower middle-class people, one official. The young women could have stayed and spoken as well, and maybe debated with the student, but now that they had abandoned their own island and duty anyway, they wanted to see more, to take it in and move!
So on they went, on they went.
There was a little scene by a building: a pale man in civilian dress with white hands pressed to his chest was standing there and opposite him was a cluster of about a dozen people of various sorts. Someone shouted, “Let’s take him, comrades!” But a lady asked, “But will you take him to the State Duma?” “We know where we’ll take him!” they shouted at her. While they were talking, the pale man dashed through a gateway, into a courtyard. And the entire bunch went after him, shouting. A shot rang out and the lady on the sidewalk explained to the young women that this was a young policeman who had changed clothes and who lived on their courtyard.
The young women cringed: this was the first death they’d come close to seeing.
Right then there were shouts:
“Ah, the jig’s up! Filthy coppers, black hundreds!”
They walked on. Across the Fontanka it was even livelier. There was another rally—from an unharnessed horse-cart, and with several speakers now. But the young women didn’t stop. They knew perfectly well what was being said here, and they wanted to see and even act.
Here was joy! People were carrying bolts of red bunting out of a dry goods store, and clearly they hadn’t bought it. Straight from the threshold they threw the bolts at the public so that they flew over their heads and came unwound, and then fell on someone’s shoulders or on the pavement. Everyone ran for the bunting and tore at it as if it were more precious than bread. Some carried entire pieces farther on to pass out while the rest ripped it up right there, and someone even took pins from the dry goods store.
How was it the young women hadn’t had that idea before? Now they made large rosettes for their chest and coat. Some made bows, some ribbons. But Fanechka also tore off a long wide ribbon and pinned it slantwise across her shoulder, the way Tsarist dignitaries wore their insignia. Funny!
Some took it for banners, some made red cockades for their caps, and some snatched a scrap and fastened it to a soldier’s bayonet—and he liked that and carried it like that, and everyone shouted loudly.
From that spot, from the passing out of red fabric, when they themselves and all the people around them became colorful, and no one chased the red or came down on them with whips, it was as if everything around them had begun to sing and change with great joy.

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Political
• Modern
• Historical
• HISTORY
• USSR
• United States of America
• Dólar
• Saint Petersburg
• Literature
• Communism
• Modern history
• Russian Revolution
• Cold War
• General officer
• The Gulag Archipelago
• Soviet Union
• House of Romanov
• Politics
• Nobel Prize
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• General
• Révolution russe
• États-Unis
• Guerre froide
• Communisme
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• US
• Soviet
• Fiction
• Saint-Pétersbourg
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268102685
• Langue: English

Extrait

ADVANCE PRAISE
for
March 1917
The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1
“ The Red Wheel , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic of World War I and the Russian Revolution, belongs to the Russian tradition of vast, densely plotted novels of love and war set during a time of social upheaval. An extended act of author-to-nation communication, this multivolume saga poses the question, “Where did we go wrong?” and answers it in human and political terms, but with a mystical twist that is unlike anything else in Solzhenitsyn. Like The Gulag Archipelago , The Red Wheel subjects the nation’s past to forensic investigation and moral review. The epic is an intricately formatted synthesis of fiction, documents, and analysis. Scenes of life and death in the trenches, palace intrigue, political conspiracies, street riots, and families in harmony or conflict are interspersed with cinematic Screens, newspaper clippings, archival documents, and learned essays on a variety of historical topics. March 1917 , the epic’s third “Node” or novel, shows the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) as the beginning of a great national unraveling from which all subsequent catastrophes necessarily followed: Russia’s Year Zero. There are dozens of plots with dozens of historical and fictional, public and private personalities from every social class and cultural stratum under the setting sun of the Russian Empire. The Tsar and his family, courtiers, ministers, parliamentarians, conspirators, military men of every rank, businessmen and beggars, intellectuals and ignoramuses, workers and peasants, criminals and terrorists, Realists and Modernists, priests and atheists, ascetics and libertines, lovers and haters, they are all here, to shape or to witness history. Among the historical figures are Tsar Nicholas II, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, and the future head of the Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kerensky. This translation beautifully conveys the distinctive flavor of Solzhenitsyn’s prose, with its preternatural concreteness of description, moments of surreal estrangement, and meticulous detailing of the nuances of human relationships in the shadow of encroaching chaos. The novel’s reliable, unreliable, and even mendacious character voices, its streams-of-consciousness, and its experimental flourishes possess the same vividness and freshness as they do in Russian. Think Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago , with Dostoyevsky’s Demons thrown in for good measure.”
—Richard Tempest, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“There is no doubt that The Red Wheel is one of the masterpieces of world literature, made all the more precious by its relevance to the tragic era through which contemporary history has passed. Moreover, the impulse of revolutionary and apocalyptic violence associated with the age of ideology has still not ebbed. We remain confronted by the fragility of historical existence, in which it is possible for whole societies to choose death rather than life.”
—David Walsh, Catholic University of America

“Scholars may debate whether Russian culture is an integral part of Christian civilization or whether it should be allocated its own separate place. The five thousand pages of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel comprise one of those pyramids of the spirit (the other being The Gulag Archipelago ) that makes living Russian civilization stand out from other large-scale cultural constructs that shape the literary landscape. In his insistence on conveying to his ‘brothers in reason’ his vision of the inexorable Russian catastrophe of the twentieth century, the author frequently abandons the narrative form to address the reader directly, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck mid-text. His grandiose picture of this catastrophe and the cultural continent that perished in it is not confined to the pages of the book; making sense of it requires additional time—including historical time. Unfortunately, this time is incomparable to the length of one man’s life.”
—Alexander Voronel, Tel-Aviv University
“As the great Solzhenitsyn scholar Georges Nivat has written, Solzhenitsyn is the author of two great ‘literary cathedrals,’ The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel . The first is the definitive exposé of ideological despotism and all of its murderous works. The Red Wheel is the definitive account of how the forces of revolutionary nihilism came to triumph in the first place. It is a sprawling and fascinating mix of philosophical and moral discernment, literary inventiveness, and historical insight that sometimes strains the novelistic form, but is also one of the great works of moral and political instruction of the twentieth century.”
—Daniel J. Mahoney, co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader:
New and Essential Writings
“In his ambitious multivolume work The Red Wheel ( Krasnoye Koleso ), Solzhenitsyn strove to give a partly historical and partly literary picture of the revolutionary year 1917. Several of these volumes have been translated into English, but the present volume appears in English for the first time. The translation is very well done and ought to give the reader a better understanding of the highly complex events that shook Russia exactly a century ago.”
—Richard Pipes, emeritus, Harvard University
THE RED WHEEL
A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time
NODE I
August 1914 (Books 1–2)
NODE II
November 1916 (Books 1–2)
NODE III
March 1917 (Books 1–4)
NODE IV
April 1917 (Books 1–2)
The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series
The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series showcases the contributions and continuing inspiration of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and historian. The series makes available works of Solzhenitsyn, including previously untranslated works, and aims to provide the leading platform for exploring the many facets of his enduring legacy. In his novels, essays, memoirs, and speeches, Solzhenitsyn revealed the devastating core of totalitarianism and warned against political, economic, and cultural dangers to the human spirit. In addition to publishing his work, this new series features thoughtful writers and commentators who draw inspiration from Solzhenitsyn’s abiding care for Christianity and the West, and for the best of the Russian tradition. Through contributions in politics, literature, philosophy, and the arts, these writers follow Solzhenitsyn’s trail in a world filled with new pitfalls and new possibilities for human freedom and human dignity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

MARCH 1917
THE RED WHEEL / NODE III
(8 March–31 March)
BOOK 1
Translated by Marian Schwartz
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
English Language Edition copyright © University of Notre Dame
Translated from book 1 of books 1–4:
“Maрт 1917” (I)
© A. I. Solzhenitsyn, 1986, 2008
“Maрт 1917” (II)
© A. I. Solzhenitsyn, 1986, 2008
“Maрт 1917” (III)
© A. I. Solzhenitsyn, 1986, 2008
“Maрт 1917” (IV)
© A. I. Solzhenitsyn, 1986, 2008
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–2008, author. |
Schwartz, Marian, 1951–translator.
Title: March 1917 : The Red Wheel, node III (8 March/31 March), book 1 /
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ; translated by Marian Schwartz.
Other titles: Krasnoe koleso. Mart semnadtsatogo. Kniga 1. English |
Red Wheel, node III (8 March/31 March), book 1
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006656| ISBN 9780268102654 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 0268102651 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-268-10267-8 (web pdf) | ISBN 978-0-268-10268-5 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Russia—History—February Revolution, 1917—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PG3488.O4 K67613 2017 | DDC 891.73/44—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006656
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Publisher’s Note
March 1917 (consisting of books 1–4) is the centerpiece of The Red Wheel , Aleksandr Solzhenitysn’s multivolume historical novel on the roots and outbreak of the Russian Revolution, which he divided into four “nodes.” March 1917 is the third node.
The first node, August 1914 , leads up to the disastrous defeat of the Russians by the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg in World War I. The second node, November 1916 , offers a panorama of Russia on the eve of revolution. August 1914 and November 1916 focus on Russia’s crises, revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin’s reforms, and the souring of patriotism as Russia bled in the world war.
March 1917 tells the story of the beginning of the revolution in Petrograd, as riots go unchecked, units of the army mutiny, and both the state and the numerous opposition leaders are incapable of controlling events. The present volume, book 1 of March 1917 , is set during March 8–12. It will be followed by English translations of the next three books of March 1917 , describing events through March 31, and the two books of April 1917 .
The nodes of The Red Wheel can be read consecutively or independently. All blend fictional chara