The Revolution at Last: Accelerating to Oblivion in Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917

Russian Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is the author of two great “literary cathedrals,” The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, the latter of which is an account of Russia’s path to revolution and totalitarianism in the years culminating in 1917. In the third volume of The Red Wheel entitled March 1917, the story arrives at “the revolution at last.” Professor Daniel Mahoney discussed March 1917 in relation to The Red Wheel as a whole – that is August 1914, November 1916, the four books of March 1917, and the two books of April 1917. The just published English-language version of March 1917, book 2, a work of both literature and dramatic history, chronicles the fateful days of March 13-15, which led to the collapse of the autocracy and the origins of the Russian Revolution.