Readers in the Anglophone world are far behind the French, Germans, and Russians in being able to confront Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s massive and magisterial The Red Wheel on its own terms. The centerpiece of that work is March 1917 (made up of four volumes), if one uses the nomenclature of the Gregorian rather than Julian calendars (Russians typically refer to the February and October revolutions of 1917, rather than March and November which are the standard usages in the West). The augmented August 1914 centered around the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg at the beginning of World War I, and had a cycle of chapters looking back on the Russian statesman Pyotr Stolypin’s noble and tough-minded efforts to save Russia from both stagnation and revolution. November 1916 followed with a panoramic account of Russia on the eve of revolution. These “nodes” (the author’s distinctive term for investigations of “discrete periods of time” that paved the way for Red October) were published in English in 1989 and 1999, respectively. The translator of those two nodes was the incomparable Harry T. Willetts. Solzhenitsyn believed, quite rightly, that Willetts was able to convey his prose in English exactly the way the Russian writer might have conveyed things if he wrote in English.

Willetts was a true master, but he worked very slowly and eventually had to turn his attention to completing the translation of the original ninety-six-chapter version of In the First Circle, finally published in 2009 (the eighty-seven-chapter version