The Russian Nobelist’s major work, back in print for the centenary of World War I and the Russian RevolutionIn his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written “a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history” (Nina Krushcheva, The Nation). The assassination of the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him Russia’s last hope for reform perished. August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each volume concentrates on a critical moment or “knot” in the history of the Russian Revolution.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as a decorated commander in the Red Army during World War II before he was arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, where he drew inspiration for his controversial novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and died in Moscow in 2008.