Wheel of fate
The epic continues: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's great cycle of the russian revolution

Author: By Alexis Klimoff

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C1

Section: Books

As he worked on ``War and Peace'' in the 1860s, Leo Tolstoy became convinced that the conventional wisdom of his day concerning Russia's role in resisting Napoleon was woefully inadequate. He discovered, as he put it, not only that the real story was virtually unknown but that ``whatever was known and had been written [about the events] stands in utter contradiction to the facts.''

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's ``Red Wheel'' cycle, in which ``November 1916'' is the second installment (``August 1914'' was the first), is shaped by an even more radically negative stance, in this case directed against the standard Soviet account of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution. Against obstacles that Tolstoy never had to confront, Solzhenitsyn has sought to reconstruct a historical record riddled with the willful omissions and deliberate falsifications that were designed to buttress the Soviet paradigm of the allegedly inevitable historical movement toward the ultimate triumph of 1917.

It is noteworthy that Solzhenitsyn's project was at the same time a repudiation of the writer's own early beliefs. For what is now ``The Red Wheel'' was first conceived by the young Solzhenitsyn, then an enthusiastic Marxist, as a historical validation of the standard Bolshevik mythology. It was the subsequent series of shocks -- World War II, arrest, and imprisonment -- that opened Solzhenitsyn's eyes to the reality behind the Soviet facade, thereby reorienting the goal of the project fundamentally and forever.

``The Red Wheel,'' overall, is subtitled ``A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time,'' and by this the writer means to draw attention to the method he has adopted. Instead of a continuous chronicle of events leading up to 1917 (and beyond, in the original intention), he has chosen to present detailed accounts of relatively brief periods, each of which, in his understanding, exhibits the social and political circumstances with particular clarity. The text dealing with each of these intervals is called a ``knot,'' an unusual term harking back to mathematics and physics and suggesting a point of concentration, focus, and significant connection.

``November 1916'' is Knot II in this scheme. (Most of ``August 1914,'' Knot I, dealt with the catastrophic defeat of Russian forces at the beginning of World War I, in the process highlighting the manifest weaknesses of the ancient regime.) As in ``August 1914,'' much of the narrative in ``November 1916'' is woven around Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev, a fictional character who functions as a witness to the events and attitudes prevalent at the time. Other sections of the book deal with historical figures without reference to Vorotyntsev; this includes the czar and his family, Lenin, and many other political actors of the day.

But such a method, in itself characteristic of the historical novel, proves incapable of absorbing the prodigious amount of material that Solzhenitsyn wishes to present, and the writer repeatedly digresses from the fictional mode to include densely written excursuses on historical circumstances that he considers crucial to an understanding of the political state of affairs, such as a detailed account of the workings of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, compressed transcripts of important sessions of the Duma, and so on. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the unconventional nature of these additions and cites the following justification in the ``Author's Note'' that accompanies his text:

``The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion, that I have felt compelled, for the sake of my younger compatriots, to include more historical matter in this second knot than might be expected in a work of literature.''

The ``educational'' purpose envisaged by the author could not have been more clearly enunciated. But one must immediately add that Solzhenitsyn is being much too modest in speaking of enlightening only his ``younger compatriots.'' For there surely cannot be many readers of any age, historians specializing in early 20th-century Russian history excepted, who could be assumed to know much, if anything, about such significant historical characters as the proponent of local self-government, Dmitri Shipov, the prominent Kadet politician Andrei Shingarev, or the mysterious revolutionary Parvus. Together with dozens of others, these individuals make their appearance in contexts that leave no doubt that Solzhenitsyn intends to present the real, i.e., historically authentic, version of events.

At this point it is important to stress that the Russian literary tradition to which Solzhenitsyn belongs does not equate art exclusively with fiction, as tends to be the case in the Western conception of literary propriety. In the Russian context, literary craftsmanship is not rigidly tied to invention, and the writer's skill is fully demonstrated in the process of selecting, shaping, and presenting the data of reality within a coherent and esthetically compelling structure. As Solzhenitsyn said in a 1982 interview, he perceives ``no task higher than serving reality, that is, recreating a reality trampled, destroyed, and maligned in our country.''

From the writer's perspective, then, the artistic goal in ``November 1916'' was to organize the disparate material into a kind of ``bouquet'' with a recognizable common theme or central metaphor. Solzhenitsyn's solution was to juxtapose the unresolved political and social tensions of the time with the equally inconclusive and oppressive marital crises and painful amorous entanglements that consitute a major part of the fictional parts of the novel. Vorotyntsev had come to Petrograd with the purpose of discussing a coup against the czar with Aleksandr Guchkov, a powerful politician frustrated by Nicholas II's ineffectual policies, but he is deflected from his purpose and virtually immobilized by an unforeseen adulterous liaison that brings chaos into his married life.

This theme is echoed in the painfully self-destructive relationship between the writer Fyodor Kovynev and his former student Zina, and is obviously not unrelated to the unhealthy dominance that the empress exerts over her compliant husband.

In terms of style, ``November 1916'' exhibits the characteristic features and literary devices familiar from Solzhenitsyn's earlier work, particularly the polyphonic technique whereby individual characters are given the opportunity to carry the narrative point of view in the sections of the text where they are the principal actors. Thus apart from the sections presented through Vorotyntsev's eyes, we have chapters given from the perspective of the empress, of Lenin, and so on. There are also examples where the perspective shifts back and forth between two individuals within a single chapter, as in the masterly depiction of the conversation between Vorotyntsev and Kovynev who meet by chance as fellow passengers on a train. H.T. Willetts's excellent translation renders the effect marvelously well.

Considering ``November 1916'' as a whole, readers will immediately recognize the frustration that is perhaps the primary sentiment experienced by Vorotyntsev. For Solzhenitsyn has allowed him to be the witness of attitudes and events that are contributing to Russia's ominous approach to the precipice of revolution. But as a fictional character superimposed on a real historical situation (which Solzhenitsyn is scrupulously careful to preserve), Vorotyntsev is necessarily incapable of effecting any real change. Though he is not explicitly armed with the historical hindsight of the writer, Vorotyntsev is nevertheless the direct bearer of the author's distress, if not despair, at the events described. The tension between what did happen and what might not have happened energizes the whole narrative and gives it its tragic coloration.