''The Red Wheel'' (russian: link=no, Красное колесо, ''Krasnoye koleso'') is a cycle of novels by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repress ...

, retelling and exploring the passing of

Imperial Russia The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended th ...

and the birth-pangs of the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

. Part 1, ''August 1914'' narrates the disastrous opening of

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

from a Russian perspective. Solzhenitsyn says he conceived the idea in 1938, then in 1945 gathered notes for Part 1 in the weeks when he led a

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

unit into the same

Eastern Prussia East Prussia ; german: Ostpreißen, label=Low Prussian; pl, Prusy Wschodnie; lt, Rytų Prūsija was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 1871 ...

region where much of the novel takes place, but not until early 1969 did he start writing the novel. ''August 1914'' was finished in late 1970 and submitted for publication to Soviet printing houses, but turned down after he insisted on capitalizing of the word "God". Instead, it appeared abroad, at

YMCA Press YMCA-Press is a publishing house originally established by the YMCA and located in Paris, also known as Librairie des Editeurs Réunis (bookstore) or Centre culturel Alexandre Soljenitsyne (cultural centre). It has published many great Russian au ...

in Paris, without Solzhenitsyn's knowledge (though he gave his approval as soon as the news reached him). When Solzhenitsyn was banished and stripped of his citizenship in 1974, his wife and other associates brought his manuscripts and archive out of the

to the West, and he continued working on the novel in exile. A few chapters were published by the Russian exile church journal ''Vestnik'' in Paris in 1978-79, but it was not until 1984 that the work began to appear again in bookshops. In this year an expanded edition of ''August 1914'' was published by YMCA Press, with additional sections on the revolution of 1905 and the assassination of the Czar's minister

Pyotr Stolypin Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin ( rus, Пётр Арка́дьевич Столы́пин, p=pʲɵtr ɐrˈkadʲjɪvʲɪtɕ stɐˈlɨpʲɪn; – ) was a Russian politician and statesman. He served as the third prime minister and the interior minist ...

in 1911. A new translation of ''March 1917'' appeared in 2017. The cycle currently has appeared as: *'' August 1914'', 1971, expanded 1984 *'' November 1916'', 2 volumes, 1985 *''March 1917'', 4 volumes, 1989, 2017 *''April 1917'', ca 1991 (not yet translated into English) The plan in 1970 was to continue up until at least 1922, the point when the Soviet Union formally came into being and when

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...

had to give up his grip on power due to illness. The progress of the work beyond 1917 was no doubt also intended to make it complement the research into the roots of the Soviet labour camp system carried out in ''

The Gulag Archipelago ''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr So ...

'', and it is reasonably clear that Solzhenitsyn also would have brought up other instances of the repression during the civil war, for example a

peasants' revolt The Peasants' Revolt, also named Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black ...

Tambov Tambov (, ; rus, Тамбов, p=tɐmˈbof) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Tambov Oblast, Central Federal District, central Russia, at the confluence of the Tsna River (Moksha basin), Tsna and ...

in 1921; this is indicated by a list of locations on which the author asked for help with historical settings, pictures and so on (given in the expanded edition of ''August 1914'' in 1984). A grant from an anonymous donor is enabling the epic cycle of novels to be published in English for the first time.

References

Novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Historical novels by series Novels set during World War I Novels set in the Russian Revolution Epic novels {{WWI-novel-stub