Love the Revolution

A major literary event: available for the first time in an English language edition, an early autobiographical novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, which chronicles his service and Soviet Russia's ordeals during World War II.

Composed primarily in 1948 while he was imprisoned within the Soviet gulag system's Marfino sharashka, Love the Revolution is an unfinished autobiographical novel that is a snapshot of Aleksandr Solzheniitsyn's life during World War II.

On a Sunday morning in June 1941, Gleb Nerzhin, a young man with a deep faith in Marxism who is eager to serve the revolution, arrives in Moscow to enroll in a prestigious institute for the study of history, philosophy, and literature. But world events will transform the course of his life, for this is the very day that Hitler launches his attack on the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn originally envisioned Love the Revolution to be an account of his entire military career. Though unfinished, it is an incredible story of conflict, deprivation, and turmoil which illuminates how a true believer's faith in the Soviet system–his love of the revolution–begins to dissolve amid the hardships of war. This earliest of the famed dissident's known prose works stands as an impressive literary achievement and as a harrowing reminder of the chaos and precariousness of wartime Russia.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN'S GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece … helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum

'It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century' New Yorker

'To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age' Guardian

'He is one of the towering figures of the age as a writer, as moralist, as hero … in The Gulag Archipelago he has achieved the impossible' Observer

About the author

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.