Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 covers three days of the February Revolution when the nation unraveled, leading to the Bolshevik takeover eight months later.
The Red Wheel is Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution. The action of Book 2 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 13–15, 1917, the Russian Revolution’s turbulent second week. This new, paperback edition of the sweeping, historical novel is a must-read for Solzhenitsyn’s many fans.
“Of all his novels so far, this one feels the most immediate, the most current. The freneticism, violence, confusion, and disorientation of Russians in Petrograd from March 15 through March 17 of 1917 can also be seen in minds and actions of Chinese in Hong Kong, right now. . . . No one surpasses Solzhenitsyn in conveying a sense of what it feels to live at and near the center of this kind of vortex.”
—Law and Liberty
“This third installment of The Red Wheel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s narrative of the events leading to the Russian Revolution, is remarkable in its complexity. The novel presents a polyphonic kaleidoscope of people, places, and events, some real, some fictitious.”
—Society Journal
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago, published to worldwide acclaim in 1973, further unmasked communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970 and was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including Cancer Ward, In the First Circle, The Oak and the Calf, and Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
Marian Schwartz is a prizewinning translator of Russian literature. She is the principal translator of the works of Nina Berberova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, and others.
Learn More:
- Watch our book trailer.
- Read our press release here.
- Listen to The Wilson Center’s discussion of March 1917 in relation to The Red Wheel as a whole with professor Daniel Mahoney.
- Winner of the Foreword Reviews’ INDIES Book of the Year Award, History
- Winner of the A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
- Winner of the Read Russia Book Prize, Long-list
March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 is part of The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series.