The Red Wheel. P. 4

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Red Wheel (Russian: ???????? ???????, Krásnoye kolesó) is a cycle of novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, retelling and exploring the passing of Imperial Russia and the birth-pangs of the Soviet Union. Though Solzhenitsyn says he conceived the idea in 1938 and gathered notes for Part 1, August 1914 (which is about the disastrous opening of World War I from a Russian perspective) in the weeks when he led a Red Army unit into Eastern Prussia, the location of much of that part, in 1945, it was only in early 1969 that he actually sat down to write this historical novel. August 1914 was finished in late 1970, submitted for publication to Soviet printing houses, but turned down. Instead, it appeared abroad, at YMCA Press 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 Soviet Union 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 wasn't until 1984 that the work began to appear again in bookshops. In this year a revised and expanded edition of August 1914 was published, again by YMCA Press, also including sections on the revolution of 1905 and the assassination of the Czar's minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911.© A.Solzhenitsyn; ©&? IE Vorobev V.A.; ©&? Publishing House Soyuz