August 1914

IN ONE 24-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.

The plot of a panoramic historical novel is fixed. Having selected an event, the sequence of actions involved can only be slightly bent in the interest of artistic validity, and under the circumstances Solzhenitsyn's task is to develop viable characters and invest the chaotic activities in which he deals with some meaning.

Unfortunately most of his characters remain two dimensional. They are incapable of enlisting sympathy and are not credible though they do function admirably as vessels that can be filled with ideology or a historical lesson. Even his major figures caught up in the central action of the book--Samsonos simultaneously a commander in chief and a lamb vorotyntey a graduate of the General Staff College and representative of modern patriotic man or Arsenn Blagocharvov but not embittered competency in the tanks--are symbols rather than individuals.

This failure to clearly portray individuals becomes extraordinary in light of a principal philosophical stance expressed by Solzhenitsyn. He argues that individuals especially through their personal incompetence have a personal force on history that Tolstoy excludes in War and Peace He makes this assertion in a direct comment to the reader, dropping any particular distance that an author might want to keep for the action of his novel, and contradicts Tolstoy by name in a short expository essay sitting roughly in the middle of the narrative.

Though it extends to over 600 pages, the book is incomplete. It is only the first fascicle of a multi-volume work the first knot on the tapestry genesis of the Soviet state. Conceivably some of the characters will assume a more complex form as more volumes are produced, and presumably some of the characters that made minor appearances in this volume will in the future play more prominent roles.

As the scheme of his work progresses Solzhenitsyn will take up subjects somewhat closer in time and considerably more controversies to his contemporary government. August 1914 defects the old regime at war, and its portrait of ineffectual corruption is relatively innocuous. But the most prominent themes that run through the first installment are an intense Russian (rather than Soviet) patriotism and regard for Orthodoxy. Solzhenitsyn is today called a Christian and he respects that Revolutionary Russian Orthodox believer to a degree unusual in the Soviet Union. One reason that the work has not been published in his own country in his refusal to adhere to the censors' convention of a lower case "g" god.

The attitude that Solzhenitsyn will take later in the work toward the Bolshevik revolution is an intriguing subject for speculation. Not too much in August 1914indicates that it will be favorable. The one Bolshevik personality who makes an appearance is not shown in a flattering light. At several points he makes disparaging remarks on the feasibility of instituting a perfect social order, and several conversations in the book that serve only to carry a philosophical point indicate that to Solzhenitsym attempts in that direction are dangerously foolish. Alternatives are tentatively presented, as he toys with the idea of a technocracy and makes the historically accurate assertion that early in the 20th century the Russian Empire was making rapid industrial progress. But he does not develop the themes or implications.

So, in what may or may not be an abysmal translation, without chapter 22 ("omitted at the author's request"), and only as the first part of an extended work the world has an English language version of August 1914.

As a novel by the man who is the undisputed living master of Russian literature it is not a masterpiece. But it may look better in context if Solzhenitsyn ever finishes the work that he has planned since his early youth.