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For those who may not know, I went to graduate school for Russian language and literature and taught Russian Language at Ohio State for a number of years. I spent considerable time keeping up with what was current in Soviet lit in the days before the fall of the Soviet Union.
I would hope that younger folks have some idea of how important Soviet dissidents were in those days to us in the West. A number of them wrote stories, novels and plays. Some of them were quite poor writers, but we still read them anyway for their criticism of Soviet life. A few like the poet Joseph Brodsky and prose author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (both winning Nobel Prizes) were quite talented. (My grad school girlfriend made a successful career out of analyzing Brodsky. I didn't quite get that far in academia!)
I wasn't so interested in poetry, but I did follow Solzhenitsyn's writing career. He was best known for his works about the shocking depth and breadth of the Stalinist Gulag system. During the days of Nikita Khrushchev he was able to publish some of his work in the USSR. When the reactionary Leonid Brezhnev took power, all that ended. But there were channels open for writers to get their work to the West during Khrushchev's days that the Soviet government had trouble closing. So we in the West often had a better idea of what quality Soviet literature looked like than most Soviet citizens.
Eventually the Soviet government threw Solzhenitsyn out of their country. Suddenly presented with seemingly endless resources on Russian history unavailable in Soviet Russia, Solzhenitsyn's literary career went off in a very different direction. He spent about a decade and a half on research before he began to write again. Just a few years after November 1916 was published, the Soviet Union was gone and he was able to return to Russia and do more research there.
What was he researching? It was what was to be his master work that he'd begun before being forced to leave Russia. This sounds glorious in theory, but knowing a little about the history of Russian literature it sounded very ominous.
There is almost a tradition of great Russian writers deciding they can write a single multi-volume story, that will expose everything wrong with Russian society and show the way to correct it. Gogol's Dead Souls is a hilarious spoof about Russia of the 1840's. He never got around to writing the second two volumes that were supposed to turn serious and cure all of Russia's ills. Fyodor Dostoevsky had similar goals with a trilogy beginning with Brothers Karamazov that would point to Russia's spiritual salvation. He, too, got through the first novel and didn't live to write the rest. So when I learned that Solzhenitsyn was working hard on a multi-section 'master work' The Red Wheel, I was more dismayed than eager to learn more.
The first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic is August 1914, and like Dead Souls and Brothers Karamazov I'd say is worthy to be called a master piece. I bought it as soon as I could get my hands on it in the early 1970s, read it immediately, and loved it.
The second volume November 1916 didn't come out till 1985. Knowing then it was a second volume of something grandiose that Solzhenitsyn had committed to that he probably could never finish, I was not eager to find it, but I did buy it when I happened to see it in paperback a few years later. Unlike the first volume, though I had the book in my hands, I was reluctant to plunge into to its 1000 pages and kept putting it off. I didn't begin reading it till the first of this year. I was right to be a little suspicious of it.
First off, I can't call the book a novel. For a novel you'd expect a story, a definable beginning, a middle and an end that resolves something. November 1916 has none of those things. Nor is the book a collection of short stories related in theme and time, like Lermontov's Hero of Our Times and Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches. It's what I have to call a collection of open ended vignettes about what Russia was like that month. Is it perhaps a 1000 page slice of a much longer single novel? I don't know and no one will ever know because, surprise surprise, Solzhenitsyn died at least two sections before we think he was going to end The Red Wheel. Oh and by the way, he did finish three more sections, one of which hasn't even been translated into English, and the third section over all is around twice the size of the second which I just read. Remember that the longest single acknowledged novel anywhere is Les Miserables which would be short compared to a completed The Red Wheel if that was indeed intended to be one novel.
The work November 1916 has massive problems from its shear size. Many people find Tolstoy's War and Peace hard to follow with its myriad of characters. November 1916 has at least twice as many characters and none of them are followed as consistently or are as thoroughly fleshed out as at least a half dozen characters in War and Peace!
Another problem is that more than a few chapters in November 1916 begin with internal monologues (a different character each time) and the readers have no idea whose head they are in for pages and pages. First, you get clues from nicknames of the character, and eventually it's revealed. I don't know about anyone else, but I hated it.
I don't know the current academic opinion about the The Red Wheel, but at least they have to admit it's nothing like anything ever written before it!
Is what I just read a massive bad book or just a massive book with problems? I can't say. There are definite flashes of brilliant story telling and writing. But a lot of it is dry political history and predictable reactions from characters with next to no depth. Unless I personally knew a specialist in the history of Russian society on the eve of the overthrow of the Tsar (no, not the eve of the Communist Revolution, yet!), I can't think of a type of person I could recommend the book to. I can't believe today's Russian lit majors would be required to read it, and I somewhat pity the Solzhenitsyn specialists who have to go on and read more of the remainder of the Red Wheel as we have it.
I would hope that younger folks have some idea of how important Soviet dissidents were in those days to us in the West. A number of them wrote stories, novels and plays. Some of them were quite poor writers, but we still read them anyway for their criticism of Soviet life. A few like the poet Joseph Brodsky and prose author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (both winning Nobel Prizes) were quite talented. (My grad school girlfriend made a successful career out of analyzing Brodsky. I didn't quite get that far in academia!)
I wasn't so interested in poetry, but I did follow Solzhenitsyn's writing career. He was best known for his works about the shocking depth and breadth of the Stalinist Gulag system. During the days of Nikita Khrushchev he was able to publish some of his work in the USSR. When the reactionary Leonid Brezhnev took power, all that ended. But there were channels open for writers to get their work to the West during Khrushchev's days that the Soviet government had trouble closing. So we in the West often had a better idea of what quality Soviet literature looked like than most Soviet citizens.
Eventually the Soviet government threw Solzhenitsyn out of their country. Suddenly presented with seemingly endless resources on Russian history unavailable in Soviet Russia, Solzhenitsyn's literary career went off in a very different direction. He spent about a decade and a half on research before he began to write again. Just a few years after November 1916 was published, the Soviet Union was gone and he was able to return to Russia and do more research there.
What was he researching? It was what was to be his master work that he'd begun before being forced to leave Russia. This sounds glorious in theory, but knowing a little about the history of Russian literature it sounded very ominous.
There is almost a tradition of great Russian writers deciding they can write a single multi-volume story, that will expose everything wrong with Russian society and show the way to correct it. Gogol's Dead Souls is a hilarious spoof about Russia of the 1840's. He never got around to writing the second two volumes that were supposed to turn serious and cure all of Russia's ills. Fyodor Dostoevsky had similar goals with a trilogy beginning with Brothers Karamazov that would point to Russia's spiritual salvation. He, too, got through the first novel and didn't live to write the rest. So when I learned that Solzhenitsyn was working hard on a multi-section 'master work' The Red Wheel, I was more dismayed than eager to learn more.
The first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic is August 1914, and like Dead Souls and Brothers Karamazov I'd say is worthy to be called a master piece. I bought it as soon as I could get my hands on it in the early 1970s, read it immediately, and loved it.
The second volume November 1916 didn't come out till 1985. Knowing then it was a second volume of something grandiose that Solzhenitsyn had committed to that he probably could never finish, I was not eager to find it, but I did buy it when I happened to see it in paperback a few years later. Unlike the first volume, though I had the book in my hands, I was reluctant to plunge into to its 1000 pages and kept putting it off. I didn't begin reading it till the first of this year. I was right to be a little suspicious of it.
First off, I can't call the book a novel. For a novel you'd expect a story, a definable beginning, a middle and an end that resolves something. November 1916 has none of those things. Nor is the book a collection of short stories related in theme and time, like Lermontov's Hero of Our Times and Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches. It's what I have to call a collection of open ended vignettes about what Russia was like that month. Is it perhaps a 1000 page slice of a much longer single novel? I don't know and no one will ever know because, surprise surprise, Solzhenitsyn died at least two sections before we think he was going to end The Red Wheel. Oh and by the way, he did finish three more sections, one of which hasn't even been translated into English, and the third section over all is around twice the size of the second which I just read. Remember that the longest single acknowledged novel anywhere is Les Miserables which would be short compared to a completed The Red Wheel if that was indeed intended to be one novel.
The work November 1916 has massive problems from its shear size. Many people find Tolstoy's War and Peace hard to follow with its myriad of characters. November 1916 has at least twice as many characters and none of them are followed as consistently or are as thoroughly fleshed out as at least a half dozen characters in War and Peace!
Another problem is that more than a few chapters in November 1916 begin with internal monologues (a different character each time) and the readers have no idea whose head they are in for pages and pages. First, you get clues from nicknames of the character, and eventually it's revealed. I don't know about anyone else, but I hated it.
I don't know the current academic opinion about the The Red Wheel, but at least they have to admit it's nothing like anything ever written before it!
Is what I just read a massive bad book or just a massive book with problems? I can't say. There are definite flashes of brilliant story telling and writing. But a lot of it is dry political history and predictable reactions from characters with next to no depth. Unless I personally knew a specialist in the history of Russian society on the eve of the overthrow of the Tsar (no, not the eve of the Communist Revolution, yet!), I can't think of a type of person I could recommend the book to. I can't believe today's Russian lit majors would be required to read it, and I somewhat pity the Solzhenitsyn specialists who have to go on and read more of the remainder of the Red Wheel as we have it.