Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and Between Two Millstones.

Clare Kitson is a Russian literary translator. She is co-translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2.

"I thoroughly enjoyed this book...both Solzhenitsyn and Kitson, the translator, bring life and eagerness to what could too easily become a dry rendering of history. Instead, it feels alive and vibrant, and has woken my historical interest further." --San Francisco Book Review

"Solzhenitsyn doesn't try to simplify the situation and its many actors into an easy narrative. . . . April 1917 . . . will reward longtime readers with his perspective on the inevitable failure of revolutions to produce utopia." --Shepherd Express

"The Red Wheel and The Gulag Archipelago have been called Solzhenitsyn's two 'cathedrals.' You cannot fully understand the horrors of communism and the history of the 20th century without reading them." --New York Journal of Books

"[A] magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present." --VoegelinView

"If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago presented a mindset-changing view of the history of the USSR, the historical novels that make up his epopee The Red Wheel are a counterweight to the heroics of the October Revolution." --The Russian Review

"Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life's fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that." --The New York Review of Books

"Having spent countless hours in the archives, Solzhenitsyn traced the sequence of events, day by day and sometimes hour by hour, with meticulous accuracy. Then what makes this book a work of literature? . . . Solzhenitsyn used his skill as a novelist primarily by relating events from the perspective of one or another historical character. . . . Along with the character's voice, we hear the author's often ironic commentary, and so register two points of view at once." --Law & Liberty

"With the publication of the first book of April 1917, we have arrived at the fourth and final 'node' of Solzhenitsyn's literary and historical masterwork The Red Wheel. . . . The writing is lively and vivid, and the author conveys vital moral and political truths through the narrative itself. . . . Solzhenitsyn's sympathies are clearly with the forces of 'resistance, and decency.'" --The New Criterion

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press

Pub date: 2025-11-01

Length: 624 pages