Word: solzhenitsyns
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...ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN...
These very real events are not merely the background of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's already much puffed (and huffed at) new novel. In an occasionally quite tedious way, the battle is the book. Understandably so. August 1914 is the first of a many-volumed effort by Solzhenitsyn to re-create modern Russian history in truthful fiction. Tannenberg was a decisive battle from which the Czarist regime and the Russian war effort never recovered. But there are moments when the reader, plugging along with the hungry troops or trying to feel the requisite rage at the chicanery of the book...
Truthful Witness. At the beginning, to be sure, Solzhenitsyn sets out a number of narrative seedlings that he clearly expects to nourish to fuller life in future volumes. Among the best minor characters are a rich, rough, self-made landowner named Tomchak and his studious daughter (who may be drawn from the author's mother and grandfather). Solzhenitsyn's principal literary creation (and expository device) is a staff colonel named Verotyntsev, who has license to follow the battle to frontline trenches as an observer and sometimes as tactical hero. Verotyntsev has fictional possibilities. He combines a kind...
Even at the book's close, when Novelist Solzhenitsyn might have been expected to weave the threads of personal narrative back together again, it is Historian Solzhenitsyn who has the last word. In a showdown scene that strains credulity but stirs historic perspective, the young colonel risks his career to confront the Russian General Staff with its lies and follies. He even predicts that if they do not face these facts, defeat in the war will surely follow...
...Solzhenitsyn is a controversial world figure, sadly, inevitably praised and blamed for reasons that have more to do with politics than literature. Cancer Ward, The First Circle, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ring with a high purpose that goes far beyond the exposure of Stalinist terror. Though August 1914 departs for the first time from the author's own immediate personal experience, it continues the work begun in earlier books. Solzhenitsyn is attempting nothing less than to restore to the Russian people a whole segment of personal experience never truthfully written about or discussed, as well...