November 1916 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

November 1916 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly unmarked by seismic events - in the author's words it 'encapsulated the stagnant and oppresive atmosphere of the months immediately preceding the Revolution' - but beneath the surface, society, from the Tsar's bizarre and troubled court to the peasants, workers, and ill-led soldiers in the trenches, seethed fiercely. As no other could, Solzhenitsyn makes us experience the whole bubbling cauldron. In Petrograd, the windows of luxury shops are still brightly lit; the Duma stormily debates the monarchy, the course of war, and clashing paths to reform; the workers in the huge and miserable munitions factories veer increasingly toward sedition. At the front, all is stalemate except for sudden death's capricious visits, while in the countryside sullen anxiety among hard-pressed farmers is rapidly replacing patriotism. In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle. With masterly and moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical and fictional protagonists, the author unforgettably paints a vivid and sweeping panorama of Imperial Russia at war on the eve of revolution.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In 1945, while captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp; he spent another three years in internal exile. Although he was allowed to publish the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in 1962, by 1969 he was ejected from the Writers Union. The publication in the West of others of his novels and, in particular, of the Gulag Archipelago brought retaliation from the authorities, and in 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of Soviet citizenship, and forcibly expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1976, he settled in Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived until 1994, when he returned to Russia after the fall of Communism. He lives in Moscow.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780224052559
ISBN 10	0224052551
Title	November 1916
Author	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Series	The Red Wheel
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	1999-04-22
Number of pages	1040
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable