Russian Roulette

Give the people what they want, said the publishers of the nineteenth century. What the people wanted was more of the same. The novel cycle was born in 1814 when the success of Waverley bound Walter Scott to the wheel of replication. So began also the historical novel. The roots of the form can, like the religious politics of Waverley’s Jacobites, be traced back to the previous century, and further back if you are a true believer, but the novel cycle and the historical novel are modern in supply and demand. They were demanded by a mass readership with time and income to dispose. They were supplied through the legal-technical foundations of the publishing industry (copy­right law, cheap printing, distribution through libraries and railroads). Above all, and especially at what Thomas Carlyle called the cash nexus, these twin forms rested on the recognition that everyone—readers, writers, publishers, railroad drivers—lived in what was now called “society” and the expectation that this prodigiously evolving collective effort might be reflected by one man with a pot of ink and, if you were Balzac, a barrel of coffee.

Scott followed the market, knocking out twenty-six Waverley novels between 1814 and 1831, and James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales followed Scott from 1827 to 1841, but it was Balzac who, having started in the demand-driven manner of Scott and Fenimore Cooper, realized it made more sense to plan the supply. The Comédie humaine has ninety-one finished stories, novels, and essays, though Balzac, had he but time and caffeine, planned to inflict even greater severities on his public. The plan expanded with the work; like Henry James’s introductions to his Complete Tales series, Balzac’s “Avant-propos” (Foreword) of 1842 is a statement of retrospective intent. Balzac’s ambition to do for modern, post-revolutionary France what Dante had done for the Middle Ages required this kind of formal self-awareness. While the English were too busy becoming modern to give it much thought, the French were pioneering the study of society; the term “sociology” was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838.

None of the subsequent entrants matched the Balzac marathon, but all of them adopted Balzac’s conscious focus on society and his self-conscious definition of the author as a social “secretary,” a historian of moeurs (manners). Manners maketh class. The novel cycle after Balzac, like European society after the revolution of 1789, is a tableau of class conflict. The little society of the Faubourg in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is besieged by the upheavals of the great society beyond and below. The British comedy is always more social than divine or human, but a similar tension tests the little worlds of the Anthonys, Trollope and Powell. Trollope produced six Barsetshire chronicles in an imaginary version of the West Country and then six Pallisers in the land of illusion now known as the “Westminster bubble.” The solid dozen volumes of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time occur in the overlaps of a social Venn diagram comprising the upper Bohemia, the middling hacks, and the lesser aristocracy. The publication of Powell’s final volume marks the end of his class order and the terminus ad quem for the novel cycle as an art form in English. The rest was violence, in detective novels or the futuristic fantasy dress of science fiction; or children’s literature, which these days is read by the kind of unfinished adult who prefers to enter the realm of imagination as though wearing a mental diaper. The Harry Potter novels mark the regression of English into the nursery. Proust would have understood it, but not excused it.

All this makes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel cycle an epic out of time. Solzhenitsyn began collecting material and notes for a novel series describing the end of imperial Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union in 1936, when Stalin was holding his show trials and the roman-fleuve was still au courant. In a diary entry in 1960, Solzhenitsyn imagined a novel in as many as twenty-five parts, each “bound up with a nodal, revealing moment—either of history or a character’s fate,” the whole cohering into a granular reconstruction of the events surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1917, the catastrophe that, Solzhenitsyn believed, made possible all the other catastrophes of the twentieth century.

When he began writing the first “node” of his cycle, August 1914, in 1969, Solzhenitsyn intended to follow the story to 1922, the year in which the Bolshevik regime, having won the civil war, solidified its rule and formed the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn halted the cycle with April 1917 after twenty years of labor. By 1989, the Soviet Union was on its deathbed, Solzhenitsyn was suffering from angina, and his readers were losing interest. The complete—which is to say, incomplete—Red Wheel has ten volumes in the original Russian. The “whirlwind of revolution” is slowed into four nodes, each covering two or three critical weeks, and each narrated through hundreds of fragmentary chapters and dozens of real and fictional characters.

In English, The Red Wheel is the only major novel cycle to exist despite the supply and demand of the publishing industry. Its translation is being completed through an anonymous private grant to the University of Notre Dame Press. The two-volume August 1914 starts the avalanche with the Russian defeat by the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg. The two-volume November 1916 pauses to take in the panorama of Russia on the verge of revolution before the wheel of fate lurches forward in the February Revolution. The Russian epic being out of time, pre-revolutionary Russia used the Julian calendar and post-1918 Russia adopted the Gregorian, so the February Revolution is related in March 1917, whose four volumes are now available in Marian Schwartz’s lively and clear English translation.

Food riots and strikes lead to more riots, military rebellion, and the collapse of order at Petrograd. The imperial government is overthrown by the Duma (the parliament). Czar Nicholas II abdicates and the “fantastical, unattainable moment” that revolutionaries had dreamed of and died for becomes real. The Duma’s leaders cobble together a Provisional Government, led by the liberal landowner Prince Georgy Lvov. The Provisional Government fails to govern wisely (it refuses to stop the war against Germany) or effectively, because it depends for support on the workers and soldiers of the Petrograd Soviet, who are themselves the instruments of their unelected leaders. The Bolsheviks have yet to secure a foothold in the Soviet’s leadership. Lenin is still exiled in Switzerland. The end of the revolution’s beginning, and the beginning of the end for Russia, will come in the final two volumes in April 1917, when the Germans will send Lenin on a sealed train from Zürich to the Finland Station in Petrograd. But the February Revolution has already set the next turn of the wheel in motion. The first of April 1917’s volumes will appear in translation in late 2025.

The latest volume in English, Book 4 of March 1917, is set between Friday, March 23 and Saturday, March 31, 1917. Pavel Ivanovich Varsonofiev, a fictional philosopher and “stargazer,” wakes from a dream in which his wife has sent him a telegram but the text is “erased.” The future is unwritten and uncertain, the revolution both fated and contingent. He walks through “the puddles of grainy snow” in the streets of Petrograd and passes a cinema converted into a prison for ex-policemen. The course of the revolution, he reflects, has been “more vulgar and more mysterious than he had thought.” He remembers that at the beginning of the war, he was drinking beer with two students in the beer hall beneath the cinema and told them that no one could know what was going to happen: “He could not fail to be amazed again and again, how many times, at the universal and mysterious connection between things.”

As Vera Figner the lifelong revolutionary returns to Petrograd from Siberia, the rival revolutionary groups seem to merge around the goal of accelerating the revolution and “abandon their tried and true banners.” Alexander Kerensky, the new Minister of Justice, strolls through the crowd with “a hero’s ease.” His admirers see a “concentrated intelligence to his face,” but Kerensky will make many foolish decisions, and will eventually be overthrown by Lenin. The Provisional Government calls for the people to unite against the Germans and abolishes the death penalty. Emotions of “holy ecstasy” are reported at a rally at the Moscow Art Theater, but grain is running short. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, tries to arrange for the czar and his family to be exiled to Britain, but it is “all a matter of slippery opinions and assumptions” and the government is being “squeezed by the Soviet.”

Each of these episodes is discrete yet related. They cannot, Solzhenitsyn shows, be comprehended by reason as they unfold, only apprehended in hindsight. General Guchkov the sensible soldier keeps his head and organizes the defense against the Germans in the name of the new society, but he is “stunned” to learn that a terrorist group intends to kill him when he rallies the troops at Riga. “Was the insane terror really capable of turning against them, against the new government, against the revolution itself?” he asks himself. “This was a monstrous twisting of minds.”

As the wheel turns faster, the widening gyre of revolution spreads into the provinces, and each order creates further disorder. After the czar’s abdication, Father Mikhail the priest is “horrified” by the Holy Synod’s praise of the Provisional Government’s “strength, fortitude, and wisdom,” but he reads it aloud to his flock regardless. The peasant women weep as they drift away from the church. “We can’t go on without a Tsar,” one says. The officers in the army used to swear allegiance to “the Supreme power” but now must swear “an oath to a government, to ministers who came and went.” The new oath is akin to “a sham prop for a centuries-old building in subsidence.” The ministers allow the Soviet to abolish saluting, and the hierarchy of military life dissolves. Civilian order is already upended:

The floor polishers carried off all the silverware from the apartment of State Duma Deputy Rodchiev and the gold things from his daughter’s room. Hot on their heels, the daughter rushed to the militia and called them thieves. She was threatened with punishment for slander.

“At one time, he too had thought that if only they could establish a republic, a liberated state system—and—and what?” Varsonofiev asks himself earlier in March 1917. “What could the daily political fever change for the better in the true life of men? What kind of principles could it offer that would bring us out of our emotional sufferings, our emotional evil? Was the essence of our life really political?”

In a tiny room in Zürich, Lenin tries to extract a pattern from the reports in Western newspapers, instructs the Bolsheviks to prepare to form a “popular militia drawn from the entire population,” and negotiates with the Germans for his return to Russia along with forty other Bolsheviks. While “pathetic bourgeois minds” look at the events “swirling like surface eddies in water,” Lenin thinks, the “main events were passing by silently near the bottom like big fat dark fish.” Varsonofiev cannot see the future, but Lenin can see what is to be done. If the wheel of history is a juggernaut, everyone must be crushed. It must be done, and it can be done, because everything has become political. The people will get what they want.

Tolstoy started to write a history of the Napoleonic invasion but found that he was writing a novel. Solzhenitsyn started a novel about the origins of the Russian Revolution, but it became a work of history. In his philosophical epilogue to War and Peace, Tolstoy dismisses the notion that history is made by individuals. In The Red Wheel, individuals shape the fates of their family and nation. They cannot know, however, whether their assumptions are accurate or understand the significance of their actions. Granting each character an internal monologue on his or her own terms, Solzhenitsyn builds a fragmentary, discordant chorus of partial insight. The effect is somewhere between history and fiction, in which every little world is demolished by the great world of ideology.

“Everything was going magnificently and could continue to do so at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Varsonofiev tells himself after he has reorganized the ministry, though he finds that the “ponderous, dull-witted, and impudent” deputies of the Soviet are somewhat burdensome. H. G. Wells sends a telegram from London: “The news of the giant stride from autocracy to republic-democracy has astounded Western Europe. . . . Russia is the herald of the world Federation of Republics.” Varsonofiev dreams that he is in the crowded Stock Exchange. A little boy enters, his face “marvelously glowing” as if he “wants to tell everyone extraordinary good news.” He walks to the middle of the room, and raises his hand. Varsonofiev realizes that “the boy is Christ and he’s holding a bomb!”—and wakes up, “gripped by the horror of this imminent cosmic explosion.”

When Gorky asked Lenin to spare a historian’s life, Lenin replied, “The revolution needs no historian.” Again out of joint with his times, Solzhenitsyn was influenced by the collage technique of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. Newspaper excerpts, military orders, screenplays, and biographies of real figures augment the fictional voices. Solzhenitsyn is everywhere and nowhere, like the spirit of the revolution or the God it replaces. Society, humanity massed in politics, becomes the author of its own destruction. The czar is out of touch, his ministers are incompetent, the military and the church follow orders they do not believe in, the liberals are sentimentalists, and Kerensky is less intelligent than he looks. Only the Bolsheviks know what they are doing, because they understand that one great stride leads to another.