Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

November 1916: A Novel

The Red Wheel II

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Translated from the Russian by H. T. Willetts

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

opens in a new window
opens in a new window November 1916: A Novel Download image

ISBN10: 0374534705
ISBN13: 9780374534707

Trade Paperback

1040 Pages

$30.00

CA$39.99

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

In time for the centenary of the beginning of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobelist's major work

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly quiet—the proverbial calm before the storm—but beneath the placid surface, society seethed fiercely.
In Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then known, luxury-store windows are still brightly lit; the Duma debates the monarchy, the course of war, and clashing paths to reform; the workers in the miserable munitions factories veer toward sedition.
At the front, all is stalemate, while in the countryside sullen anxiety among hard-pressed farmers is rapidly replacing patriotism.
In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle.
With masterly and moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical and fictional protagonists, Solzhenitsyn unforgettably transports us to that time and place—the last of pre-Soviet Russia.
November 1916
is the second volume in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multipart work, The Red Wheel. This volume concentrates on a historical turning point, or "knot," as the wheel rolls inexorably toward revolution.

Reviews

Praise for November 1916: A Novel

"A superb blend of fact and fiction written in a racy, original style." —John Keep, The Times Literary Supplement

"Solzhenitsyn's tremendous gifts as a novelist shine in his creation of characters and his depiction of war on the front line." —The New Yorker

"Solzhenitsyn achives something exceedingly rare among novelists dealing with history . . . He gets a sense of the past not as something to be understood in the light of the present, but as a teeming womb of incalculablility and possibility." —John Bayley, The New York Book Review

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Translated from the Russian by H. T. Willetts

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as a decorated commander in the Red Army during World War II before he was arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, where he drew inspiration for his controversial novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and died in Moscow in 2008.