“From childhood I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution,” writes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. In 1937, at the age of eighteen, Solzhenitsyn began work on “a big novel,” modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, spanning the years 1914 to 1917. He spent months in the libraries of Rostov researching the opening campaign of World War I. The main character of the original August 1914 (which was never published) was, like the author, an idealistic Marxist, and the novel itself was intended to show, in the words of Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, “the complete triumph of the Revolution on a global scale.” By the time Solzhenitsyn returned to the novel an eventful thirty years later (after war, prison camps, cancer, exile), he had abandoned Marxism, and the main character was promptly transformed into an idealistic Tolstoyan cum Russian patriot. This version of August 1914 appeared in English in 1972. Solzhenitsyn returned to the novel yet again in the late 1970s, conducting research at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and expanding the novel to nearly twice its original length. The (presumably) final version has at last been rendered into English by Harry T. Willetts.

August 1914 is an historical and imaginative reconstruction of the opening weeks of World War Iand of the events that led up to it. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the war left Russia “spiritually wrecked” and ripe for revolution. Though Lenin appears in only one chapter (new to