August 1914

The word pictures he has created of the rolling plains of battle, the lumbering armies, life in the military, are some of the greatest ever painted. One is transported back to that date when backward, religiously zealous, serf-like Russia meets the modern age. The story of the first vision of the industrial West by the illiterate Russian soldier - and the impact it makes on them - was breathtaking.

The story switches from one vista to another, battlefield to palace, and finally from the Romanovs to Lenin as the march of history continues steadily and inexorably onward. Even knowing the awful outcome does not decrease the pleasure of the story. At the end, you have come only so far and are ready for the next in the series, NOVEMBER 1916. I like the method in which he has chosen to write history - the selection of specific periods of time which he considered to have had the greatest impact on the modern Soviet state.


I really liked it. . . A Great Book   August 14, 2003
 36 out of 39 found this review helpful

August 1914
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I remember when my son was little. He would bring me August 1914 and ask me to read it to him. There were no pictures in this book, but he knew that it was a book that I loved. So we would lie on his bed and as I opened the book and read to him about a world he could only discover in a book. Solzhenitsyn is one of my hero?s, a moral voice speaking against the tyranny of Soviet repression. This book about the battle of Tennenberg in August 1914 is not only a brilliant historical novel, but also a critique of the forces that lead to the October Revolution in Russia. Let?s talk about the story, before we continue the review.

The story is about the entrance of Imperial Russia into World War I. War is declared and Russia in its hurry to honor its commitments to France, invades Prussia. Its army under the leadership of General Samsonov is unprepared for war and Russia suffers a humiliating defeat as the army is surrounded and destroyed. The story is told through the eyes of a Colonel Vorotyntsey who alone sees the coming disaster and vainly tries to avert it.

It is a story of an Army that did not understand modern warfare. Samsonov, a cavalry officer, is used to sitting on his horse and viewing the battlefield; this battlefield, however, stretches for hundreds of miles. Communication is non-existent; supplies are scarce. The Germans, however, understood the new technology and were able to listen in on all the Russian communications. Samsonov makes one blunder after another; he is out classed and doesnt know what to do. With his army collapsing around him, he is lost. Lost in a forest, he ends his life with a bullet as he and his staff are attempting to escape the encirclement.

It is a wonderfully written book. One can hear the hoof beats of the charging cavalry, see the sabers glistening in the sun, sense the terror of the soldiers huddle in their trenches as thousands of shells fall around them and smell the cordite as it drifts across the fields. But Solzhenitsyn?s purpose is more than giving us a history of a battle fought long ago, we wants to expose the corruption of a Czarist Russia that lead to an even greater corruption of the Soviet System. This is a novel about truth and the attempt to conceal it. The old Czarist regime and the Soviet one that followed could only survive by the suppression and the corruption of the truth. No wonder that this book was banned in the Soviet Union.

It is a great book; I have read it at least a half dozen times over the years.


Best Left in the Dustbin of History   July 7, 2003
 9 out of 35 found this review helpful

I first read August 1914 nearly a decade ago, and I must have enjoyed it as I spent the next ten years looking for a reasonably priced edition of the next book. Having finally found one, I decided to re-read August 1914. I have no idea what I could possibly have liked about it the first time through.

Solzhenitsyn tries too desperately to write his own War and Peace and fails miserably. Where Tolstoy truly breathes life into his characters, Solzhenitsyn creates cardboard cutouts that lack depth and ring false at every turn. Where Tolstoy kept his historical lectures separate from the narrative, Solzhenitsyn puts his in the mouths of the characters, creating incredibly obtuse dialogues that make one want to throw the book down. Perhaps realizing that the readers are not likely to releate to the characters, Solzhenitsyn tells how character A (whom we apparently are supposed to like) really likes character B (whom up until now we haven't cared for at all), so now, therefore, we must like him, too. Characters, like Russian general Samsonov, who might have had some subtle nuances get stamped with "good" or "evil", completely destroying any chance for the reader to form his own impressions. Partly this occurs because Solzhenitsyn, as he did in his earler works, is pursuing his own agenda and is unable or unwilling to provide a dispassioned viewpoint (one need only skim through Lenin in Zurich, originally part of August 1914).

Once the Battle of Tannenberg gets underway the situation improves, but it is a long, long painful slog until that point and it is not worth it.

Do not misunderstand me; Solzhenitsyn will remain a part of my libary for the Gulag Archipelago and his semi-autobiographical fiction. But the Red Wheel series will not be rolling in my house anymore. Rereading August 1914, I kept recalling Vladimir Voinovich's caricature of Solzhenitsyn in Moscow 2042 - a writer utterly convinced he alone can save Russia by riding in on a white horse. That's the Solzhenitsyn we see in August 1914. Avoid this one.


Communism has much to answer for   March 6, 2003
 6 out of 32 found this review helpful

Alexander Solzhenitsyn may have won the Nobel Prize, but I think the people in Stockholm would have been within their rights to ask for their money back with this one. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and Gulag are great books, but the other works are just dreadful and this book is no exception. Characters are wooden, plots are contrived. The person who does not read Russian is fortunate since this book is even worse in its native language. Mr. Willetts deserves all manner of praise not only for completing this work, but for also managing to read it not just once, but for many times.

This book is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to construct the Russian history novel. In the hands of a master like Tolstoy, this becomes War and Peace, perhaps the greatest work in all Russian literature, in Solzhenitsyn's hands this is the result.

When I first read this work, I am not sure I knew quite what to expect since it is a departure from Solzhenitsyn's usual subject matter, the crimes of the Soviet state. One would be prepared to forgive those old gray men in the Kremlin much if they had successfully banned this particular book and prevented it from ever being published.

Solzhenitsyn's intent is to create a work which shows how communism came to power and he uses the beginning of the first world war as a jumping off point. This is an excellent start, but really by the first 50 pages no one really cares and the story remains flat and uninteresting for the duration. It does say something that Solzhenitsyn has taken one of the most interesting eras in human history and made it dull and boring.


Heartbreaking account of the end of Imperial Russia   December 11, 2001
 11 out of 11 found this review helpful

Though the translation suffers a little, this novel of the last golden days of Imperial Russia and the frenzied destruction of the "old order" by the Bolsheviks remains one of my favorites. Although Solzhenitsyn wasn't born until 1918, it's as if he were strolling alongside Gorky and Tomchak and the other personalities that feature into his tale during that awful time.