Description:
A major literary event: available for the first time in an English language edition, an early autobiographical novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago--"among the greatest Russian writers" (Wall Street Journal)--which chronicles his service and Soviet Russia's ordeals during World War II.
Composed primarily in 1948 while he was imprisoned within the Soviet gulag system's Marfino sharashka, Love the Revolution is an unfinished autobiographical novel that is a snapshot of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's life during World War II.
On a Sunday morning in June 1941, Gleb Nerzhin, a young man with a deep faith in Marxism who is eager to serve the revolution, arrives in Moscow to enroll in a prestigious institute for the study of philosophy, literature, and history. But world events will transform the course of his life, for this is the very day that Hitler launches his attack on the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn originally envisioned Love the Revolution to be an account of his entire military career. Though unfinished, it is an incredible story of conflict, deprivation, and turmoil which illuminates how a true believer's faith in the Soviet system--his love of the revolution--begins to disintegrate in the face of reality. This earliest of the famed dissident's known prose works stands as an impressive literary achievement and as a harrowing reminder of the chaos and precariousness of wartime Russia.
Brief description:
After serving as a decorated captain in the Red Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced in 1945 to eight years of hard labor for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his long short story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1970. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, just weeks after The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet penal system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont, where he wrote The Red Wheel. In 1994 he returned home to Moscow, where he died in 2008.
Review Quotes:
"Among the greatest Russian writers." - Wall Street Journal