Nearly sixteen years after its publication in Russian and more than a decade after it appeared in a French translation, the second “knot” of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume epic on the events leading up to the revolutionary cataclysm of 1917, has at last appeared in English. Though the work as a whole remains unknown in this country, a consensus has developed, in sharp contrast to its enthusiastic critical reception in France, that The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s great literary and intellectual endeavor of the last thirty years, is a failure, and a failure of monumental proportions.

Many critics are thus predisposed to pronounce it dead on arrival, following the lead of Solzhenitsyn’s most recent biographer, D. M. Thomas, and the even more authoritative Michael Scammell, whose ostensibly balanced 1984 biography played a critical role in undermining Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in elite, liberal, and academic circles in the United States.[1] In Invisible Allies (1995), Solzhenitsyn himself dates his breach with the secular Russian intelligentsia to the publication (of the first version) of August 1914 in the West in 1972; at a stroke the heroic, anti-Stalinist Nobel Laureate became suspiciously conservative and was ridiculed for patriotic and Christian sentiments unbecoming a genuinely modern thinker and artist. While neither the original 1972 version of August 1914 nor the augmented version (published in English translation in 1989) was as critically well received as Solzhenitsyn’s classic novels of the 1960’s—The First Circle and Cancer Ward—the coup de grâce for