By Montague Kobbé
montaguekobbe.com
The second instalment of Solzhenitsyn's unfinished cycle of novels about the demise of Tsarist Russia starts with a peculiar Author's Note, almost an apology or at the very least a justification, in which he describes his decision to place the novel at a particular juncture (between October 27 and November 17, 1916) that "contains relatively few events of historical importance" as a strategy to convey to the reader the stagnant and oppressive atmosphere that prevailed in Russia in the months immediately prior to the revolution.
Paradoxically, the same note opens with a word of warning about the vast amount of historical matter included in the novel – far more than you would expect in a traditional work of literature. Right there, in the first of a thousand pages, before the actual novel has started, you have the two forces that inform this overwhelming work, pulling in opposite directions and at times compromising beyond repair the coherence of the whole.
November 1916 is the second book, or "knot" as Solzhenitsyn describes it, of The Red Wheel cycle, which comprises August 1914 (discussed in the January 27 issue of the WEEKender), March 1917 and April 1917 (yet to be translated into English). Both the first and second knots bring together a number of literary styles and genres into individual books which can stand on their own, even if they gain infinitely from being read as a whole. November 1916 still follows the travails of Colonel Vorotyntsev, whose ill-advised outburst of honesty at the end of August 1914 has undermined his progress through the army ranks. But while Vorotyntsev had been at the thick of the action in the Eastern Front in 1914, the central issues concerning his character in November 1916 are personal, as he seeks (and fails) to leave his mark in the political wrangling that takes place behind the scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow, only to end up immersed in an intense extra-marital relation that creates deep intellectual and moral conflicts in Solzhenitsyn's alter ego as well as those around him.
The move from the action-packed front in August 1914 to Vorotyntsev's emotional landscape is indicative of Solzhenitsyn's intentions for the work at large, for November 1916 is not so much concerned with details of the war (though over the course of a thousand pages there is plenty of room for that too) as it is with the state of affairs of the so-called home front. That is the main reason why the author has chosen to set his novel during a period of relative calm in terms of the war itself – a period in which it was rather the tension created by internal strife which threatened Russia most. In this respect, Solzhenitsyn focuses on three main aspects.
The first one is the agrarian question, which naturally involves the production, distribution and purchase of food in the country but which serves as an introduction to the greater struggle of town versus village in Russia. With the peasantry holding the country's grain and the government moving to control the price of foodstuff, the faceoff between the two becomes inevitable. A strong political undertow runs through this issue, as Russia's peasantry still suffered the legacy of serfdom, nominally abolished less than 50 years before. While rural Russia had contributed as many as 11 million soldiers to the army, the village was still in a strong position in 1916, for it held the provisions that would feed the country. But a combination of extreme incompetence as well as avarice led to a breakdown in the traditional system of harvesting and distributing the grain, which in turn translated into scarcity. Solzhenitsyn describes with great lucidity the processes that lead to regulated systems, the black market, hyper-inflation, and ultimately an economic crisis that weighed heavier on the townsfolk than any of the tragic stories of war in the trenches.
The second matter of critical importance to November 1916 is the Jewish question, perhaps the most high-profile aspect of a wider issue of internal immigration arrived from Russia's western borders. With the Russian army conceding vast expanses of land in what is described as "the great 1915 retreat", Germany had been able to claim hundreds of miles, taking Warsaw, threatening Minsk, and forcing the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people. All of the territory lost was part of the Pale of Settlement to which Russia had confined for many generations its Jewish population, which like the peasantry (and the serfs before them) didn't enjoy full citizen rights. Once the country's six million Jews were given license to move to cities, misgivings and prejudice flourished among Russians – but, Solzhenitsyn asks through his characters, is it reasonable to expect the Jewish community to fight wholeheartedly for Russia when Russia has never fully recognized them as one of its own?
And yet, November 1916 is above all concerned with the impossibly complex political game that governed Russia at the time and that eventually led to its demise. Bulky chapters of historical context provide a detailed analysis of the origins of the Progressive Bloc and the Kadet movement, which would be pivotal in the triumph of the Bolsheviks, going back as far as the 1905 revolution and the war with Japan. Solzhenitsyn provides transcripts of secret meetings as well as parliamentary sessions, and he goes deep into the psyche of several key figures such as Guchkov and Shlyapnikov, but the text most vividly comes to life in the extensive sections that deal with Lenin's exile in Switzerland between 1908 ("the year of loneliness") and 1916. Solzhenitsyn paints a harrowing picture of a determined, headstrong, manipulative and obsessive intellectual bent on destroying the establishment at all costs – but only so long as he sits at the top of the ensuing new world order. Indeed, Lenin's character emerges in November 1916 very much as the polar opposite of the effete and weak-willed Tsar Nicholas II, making it all the more obvious to the reader how and why the former came to gain the upper hand.
By the time the second knot of The Red Wheel was published, in 1984, Solzhenitsyn was 66 years old and had been living in the United States for a decade. He'd been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, the same year he'd published August 1914, though he had been unable to attend the ceremony for fear he wouldn't be allowed back into the USSR. His fears proved well-founded when he was expelled four years later. Exile enabled Solzhenitsyn to express himself more freely, and a revised and vastly extended version of August 1914 was published in 1981.
Considering the enormous amount of material he had to consult and the dilated hatching period involved in the production of both these books, he must have been aware that what he described as "the chief artistic design of my life" would remain unfinished, especially given his intention to encompass both the war with Germany and the civil war in which Russia was engulfed from the beginning of the revolution in 1917 until the official creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. This endows Solzhenitsyn's enterprise with a heroic dimension that complements the epic scale of each of the books. November 1916 is not a traditional novel, and while it is an immensely informative one, it would be hard to describe it as an enjoyable read. But the subject matter tackled by Solzhenitsyn in The Red Wheel isn't really the stuff of your everyday novel, and he's deeply aware of it. Consequently, he set out to erect an original, if tremendously challenging, narrative genre to express the complexity of the events depicted and to mirror the hardship of those who went through them. In all likelihood that is too great a task to accomplish in full – and yet, November 1916 is still a remarkable piece of work.
