Word: tannenberg
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AUGUST 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Russia's defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg during World War I. Badly translated but monumental...
...HOUR PERIOD Alexander Vasilich Samsonov, commanding general of a disintegrating Russian Army, has a vision of an angel of death coming to carry him off, seriously appeals to God for divine intervention on the Russian side in the battle of the Tannenberg Forest, and fails to remember the name of one of his subordinate generals. Like other subjects of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, the general smoothly slips out of the 20th century and falls into an almost insane incompetence...
August 1914 traces in painful detail the stupidity causing the collapse of the Russian Second Army in East Prussia at the beginning of the First World War. Historically, the battle in the Tannenberg Forest was the first of a long series of military catastrophes which led to Russia's defeat in the war, set the stage for the Bolshevik revolution and has had reverberating consequences down to the present time Solzhenitsyn portrays the event in light of these consequences, and adopts a panoramic view that may seem reminiscent of Tolstoy but which is unusual in World War I fiction...
...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's archvillain General Zhilinski, longs for a series...
...book he carries on a kind of running discourse about history, asserting-in contrast to Tolstoy -that though men do not know the purpose of life, individual acts of common sense, honesty and courage may change the course of history. Out of the dark past, in the terrain around Tannenberg, he produces examples...