August 1914

622 pp. 8vo. Translated by Michael Glenny. Original red cloth hardcover binding with gold lettering, maps on endpapers, portrait of author by Karl W. Stuecklen on dust jacket rear. "In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform." "August 1914 transports us to the battlefield at Tannenberg in the early months of World War I. Each command of the generals brings the hapless Russian army closer to humiliating defeat by the Germans, a critical loss that hastens the Bolshevik Revolution. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn depicts a turning point in Russian history with brilliant clarity. He offers unforgettable portraits of Nicholas II and Lenin, and shows us the individual characters--army colonels and peasant soldiers, politicians and bourgeois wives--whose quotidian actions are gathered into the inexorable movement of history." "Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. In 1994, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature."