May 12, 2022 35What Solzhenitsyn Understood
Gary Saul Morson
March 1917:
The Red Wheel /Node III
(8 March–31 March): Book 3
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
translated from the Russian
by Marian Schwartz.
University of Notre Dame Press,
684 pp., $42.00Between Two Millstones :
Book 2, Exile in America,
1978–1994
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
translated from the Russian
by Clare Kitson
and Melanie Moore,
and with a foreword by
Daniel J. Mahoney.
University of Notre Dame Press,
559 pp., $39.00For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no
l it er a r y for m wa s ever s u f fi c ient ly
capacious. Three gargantuan
works dominated his creative
life. The Gulag Archipelago: An
Experiment in Literary Investi-
gation, on which his reputation
mainly rests, chronicles in three
volumes the history of Soviet
forced labor camps. It earned
him the Nobel Prize in Liter-
ature in 1970 and forced exile
from the Soviet Union in 1974,
the first official expulsion since
Leon Trotsky had been deported
to Turkey in 1929. Solzheni-
tsyn himself regarded The Red
Wheel, a series of novels about
the Russian Revolution, as his major
contribution to literature. These novels
posed a question: Why and how did the
unprecedented horror described in The
Gulag Archipelago occur? The answers
Solzhenitsyn arrived at shaped his third
great project, four volumes of memoirs.
The Red Wheel is divided into four
“nodes,”^1 some of which contain more
than one volume; each node focuses
on a specific short period encapsulat-
ing important events that led to the ca-
tastrophe of Bolshevik rule. The first
two nodes, August 1914 and November
1916 , superb works that overflow the
conventional form of historical novels,
are followed by four long volumes de-
voted to the third node, March 1917,
which recounts events from March 8 to
March 31, 1917. The final node, April
1917 , still untranslated, encompasses
two more volumes. The third volume
of March 1917, now available in an ex-
ceptionally fine rendition by Marian
Schwartz, is especially riveting. It makes
a splendid companion to the last volume
of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the recently
translated second part of Between Two
Millstones, which casts the Gorbachev
years as an eerie repeat of 1917.
Taken together, the two volumes
of Between Two Millstones describe
Solzhenitsyn’s life from the time he
was expelled from the USSR until his
return in 1994. (After considering sev-eral places in Europe and North Amer-
ica, he eventually settled in Cavendish,
Vermont, which reminded him of Rus-
sia and which afforded the isolation
needed to work on The Red Wheel.)
The title Between Two Millstones refers
primarily to the surprising hostility to,
and absurd mischaracterization of, his
views that the author faced in the West.
The same intellectual and press circles
that had celebrated his courage when
he was in the USSR now often became
relentless critics because, Solzhenitsyn
explains, he did not share conventional
American left-leaning ideas but in-
stead held positions that did not fit ex-
isting Western categories. He therefore
found himself caught between Soviet
and Western “millstones,” both vilify-
ing him and attributing to him excori-
ating opinions he did not hold.
Solzhenitsyn identified in West-
ern intellectual circles the same smug
narrow- mindedness that he had discov-
ered in liberal Russian intellectuals be-
fore the revolution. The core moment
in these volumes occurs when, as Sol-
zhenitsyn writes,a leading [Canadian] television
commentator lectured me that I
presumed to judge the experience of
the world from the viewpoint of my
own limited Soviet and prison- camp
experience. Indeed, how true! Life
and death, imprisonment and hun-
ger, the cultivation of the soul de-
spite the captivity of the body: how
very limited that is compared to
the bright world of political parties,
yesterday’s numbers on the stock
exchange, amusements without end,
and exotic foreign travel!Solzhenitsyn had himself once cel-
ebrated the Russian liberals and
socialists who ran the Provisional Gov-
ernment overthrown by the Bolsheviks,
but Western archives—and perhaps
his encounters with Westerners—led
him to an entirely different view. The
members of the Provisional Govern-
ment and their supporters were so in-
competent, self-satisfied, and willing to
suppress any insufficiently progressive
opinion that tyranny was bound to tri-
umph. Solzhenitsyn detected the same
mindset among liberal Russian reform-
ers in the 1990s and feared another de-
scent into authoritarian rule.There were two Russian revolutions
in 1917. In February (March by pres-
ent reckoning) Tsar Nicholas II, one of
the most foolish people ever to occupy
a throne, abdicated. Mob violence,
greeted by the educated with the naive
ecstasy of “February fever,” unleashed
the chaos that allowed the Bolsheviks
to seize power in October (now Novem-
ber). Unlike the tsar or the Provisional
Government that succeeded him, Le-
nin’s party did not hesitate to use ex-
treme violence. The infamous Cheka
(secret police, ancestor of the NKVD,
OGPU, and KGB) was in operation be-
fore 1917 was over. The weaklings of
the Duma proved as strategically inept
as Lenin was brilliant.
Not all intellectuals allowed the ex-
citement of revolution to blind them.
In the recently translated volume of
the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s in-
terviews with the critic Victor Duvakin
in 1973, Bakhtin recalled his reaction
to the February revolution. Since itwas still dangerous to express
such views, he asked Duvakin
not to record them, but Duvakin
published Bakhtin’s comments
anyway:BAKHTIN: I’ll tell you this,
but there’s no need to record
it...DUVAKIN: We can erase it
later.... Or we don’t have to
transcribe it, if you prefer.BAKHTIN: I did not welcome
the February Revolution. I
thought, or I should say in my
circle we believed that it’ll all
certainly end very badly. We
knew well, by the way, the
leaders...of the February
Revolution.... We were of the
opinion that all those intellec-
tuals were utterly incompetent
to govern, they were incompe-
tent to defend the February
Revolution.... So, inevitably,
the extreme left, the Bolshe-
viks would take over.^2The wisest fictional charac-
ters of March 1917 appreciate
what is really going on: during a
world war, with German armies
advancing rapidly into Russian
territory, revolutionaries were
calling on soldiers to murder
their officers. Mobs looted and
killed as work came to a stand-
still. Such a power vacuum invited the
most ruthless organized group to seize
power. Solzhenitsyn imagines Lenin
thinking, “There was a void in Peters-
burg... that was suckingly waiting, call-
ing for—his force.”
Anarchy, starvation, and invasion
loom, but the word “revolution” blinds
most intellectuals. “Revolution! There
was, after all, something attractive
and inviting in that sound,” they think.
“Revolution! The music of the mo-
ment!” “Universal brotherhood was
now coming!” Instead of seeing reality,
these intellectuals imagine themselves
strutting on the stage of History. “How
could you not light up at the thought
that you were taking part in Russia’s
moments of greatness!” the third vol-
ume of March 1917 begins. “This mo-
ment—dreamed of, longed for, by so
many generations of the Russian in-
telligentsia... here it had come.” Al-
most everyone views events through
a haze of romanticized parallels with
the French Revolution. We must seize
our Bastille, they feel, but what is it?
Play “The Marseillaise”! Ludicrously,
Mikhail Rodzyanko, the president of
the Duma, decides that the revolution
has gone far enough, and now must
stop. But what is to stop it?The novel’s fictional heroine, the his-
torian Olda Andozerskaya, recognizesAleksandr Solzhenitsyn; illustration by Seth(^1) The Russian word was previously
rendered as “knot” in H.T. Willetts’s
translations of August 1914 and Octo-
ber 1916 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1989 and 1999). Both mathematical
terms refer to a point on a continuous
line.
(^2) Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Inter-
views, 1973, edited by Slav N. Gratchev
and Margarita Marinova, and trans-
lated by Margarita Marinova (Bucknell
University Press, 2019), pp. 106.
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