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Title: August 1914 by Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0-374-10682-7 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) Pub. Date: 01 January, 1989 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $200.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Hello from the world
Comment: For lovers of Russian literature and history buffs, this is a terrific book! If you're not a fan of this genre, however, it's going to be ONE TOUGH READ. Solzhenitsyn throws in characters with machine-gun rapidity as well as hundreds of local historical references that will be lost on many folks simply eager to find out about a bit about one of the greatest writers of the century.
That having been said, this one is a winner. Rich description, lovely prose and Solzhenitsyn's obvious love for his homeland are woven into a terrific work that offers deep insights into the Russian view this tumultuous period in their history. For my money, the portion of the book dealing the desperate Russian army and their misguided leaders is Solzhenitsyn at his finest: brutally accurate and never lacking in a deeper understanding of the flawed human beings that made up the events.
This is a must read, but don't make it your first foray into Russian literature or Solzhenitsyn. Try a shorter, less complex work first and then move to this if you like the genre.
Rating: 5
Summary: Inexorable flow of events
Comment: This is a momentous work - quite unlike FIRST CIRCLE or the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. Solzhenitsyn cannot himself from centering on people. Despite the epic events depicted, the start of WW1, the Battle of Tannenburg, the meeting of cultures, in the end this is a book of individuals, great and small.
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.
Rating: 5
Summary: I really liked it. . . A Great Book
Comment: 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.
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Title: November 1916: The Red Wheel/Knot II by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, H. T. Willetts ISBN: 0374223149 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0060007761 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 22 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0374511993 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Thomas P. Whitney ISBN: 0810115905 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.05 |
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Title: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0451527097 Publisher: Signet Book Pub. Date: 01 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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