This October, the University of Notre Dame Press will publish March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. For a limited time, we are giving away advance copies! Enter to win by filling out the form at the bottom of this post. This offer expires September 6th and is open to U.S. residents only.
Can’t wait to start reading? Reviewers, bookstore employees, librarians, and other members of the book industry can request a digital review copy through Edelweiss. We encourage you to leave a review if you enjoyed the book.
“[A] magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present.”
—VoegelinView
One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form of a historical novel. March 1917—the third node—chronicles the mayhem, day by day, of the Russian Revolution. Book 4 presents, for the first time in English, the conclusion of this four-volume revolutionary saga.
The action of Book 4 is set during March 23–31, 1917 and portrays a cast of thousands in motion and agitation as every stratum of Russian society—the army on the front lines, the countryside, the Volga merchants, the Don Cossacks, the Orthodox Church—is racked by their confusing new reality. Soldiers fraternize across trenches with the enemy, the Provisional Government finds itself unable to govern, and the Soviets are divided on whether to topple this new government in turn. During the chaos, in Switzerland, Lenin quietly dictates his own terms to the German General Staff, setting the stage for his return to Russia.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and the two-volume Between Two Millstones memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018 and 2020).
Marian Schwartz is a prizewinning translator of classic and contemporary Russian literature, including works by Leo Tolstoy, Nina Berberova, Olga Slavnikova, and Leonid Yuzefovich.
“This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate’s life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution.”
—The New Criterion