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—“among the greatest Russian writers (Wall Street Journal)—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.