ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN: The Red Wheel, Method of Nodes

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN ON HIS METHOD OF NODES

At various times throughout the evolution of his concept of the Red Wheel and its possible structure, Solzhenitsyn explained his struggle to find the best solution for this daunting task. In the first excerpt below, from his diary, the author is still searching for ways forward. In the second, he is well on his way toward defining his answer. And by the third, he is able to formulate his method with final precision.


Structural principles of my historical novel.


1. An attempt to capture a major period of time through a more or less complete narrative would lead to flabbiness and pomposity. And taking into account my love for a narrative of continuous action, I should construct as follows : Parts (15? 20? 25?), separated from each other by any kind of intervals. Each part is bound up with a nodal, revealing moment—either of history or of a character's fate. Then within each part the action is continuous, and chapters bear no titles. (The Parts may be titled according to month and year.)


- from the “R-17” Diary, 1960


Q. So there will not be a main protagonist?


A. Definitely not! And this follows one of my principles, that it is not possible for one person, his views, his attitude to the situation, to convey the course and meaning of events. There is only one possible solution here, a solution I fell upon some time ago: one must not convey sequentially the entire flow of history, it will be far too long, and unsuitable for reading. I decided instead to concentrate, to create NODES, in other words again to apply the density method. Along this curve of history—curve in the mathematical sense—there are critical points, in mathematics they are called "special points". So these nodal points—Nodes—I serve them up in high density, i.e. as ten or twenty days of uninterrupted narrative. I locate these points mainly where the course of events is internally determined—not necessarily external events, but internal, those where history turns or decides. And so these ten, twenty days I describe in great detail and density, then a gap between Nodes, and then the next Node. That is how this idea of Nodes took shape.


- from interview with Nikita Struve, 1976


Q. Your major new work August 1914 has just appeared in French. But beyond this title we also see on the cover the words “Red Wheel" and "Node I". Can you explain to us what they signify?


A. The Red Wheel is the narrative of revolution in Russia, its movement through the whirlwind of revolution. This is an immense scope of material, and when taking into account that it stretches out over years (for the narrative begins in 1914 and continues basically all the way to 1922), it would be impossible to describe this many events and this many characters over such a lengthy stretch of time. That is why I have chosen the method of nodal points, or Nodes. I select short segments of time, of two or three weeks' duration, where the most vivid events unfold, or else where the decisive causes of future events are formed. And I describe in detail only these short segments. These are the Nodes. Through these nodal points I convey the general vector, the overall shape of this complex curve. So August 1914 is the first of these Nodes.


- from interview with Bernard Pivot, 1983


ADDITIONAL RESOURCES


The Red Wheel


Node I: August 1914


Node II: November 1916


Nodes III and IV: March 1917, April 1917




Read more: www.solzhenitsyncenter.org


The Red Wheel 


The Red Wheel (Russian: Кра́сное колесо́, Krásnoye kolesó) is a cycle of novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, retelling and exploring the passing of Imperial Russiaand the birth-pangs of the Soviet Union. 

Though Solzhenitsyn says he conceived the idea in 1938 and gathered notes for Part 1, August 1914 (which is about the disastrous opening of World War I from a Russian perspective) in the weeks when he led a Red Army unit into Eastern Prussia, the location of much of that part, in 1945, it was only in early 1969 that he actually sat down to write this historical novel. 

August 1914 was finished in late 1970, submitted for publication to Soviet printing houses, but turned down. Instead, it appeared abroad, at YMCA Press in Paris, without Solzhenitsyn's knowledge (though he gave his approval as soon as the news reached him).

When Solzhenitsyn was banished and stripped of his citizenship in 1974, his wife and other associates brought his manuscripts and archive out of the Soviet Union to the West, and he continued working on the novel in exile. 

A few chapters were published by the Russian exile church journal Vestnik in Paris in 1978-79, but it wasn't until 1984 that the work began to appear again in bookshops. 

In this year a revised and expanded edition of August 1914 was published, again by YMCA Press, also including sections on the revolution of 1905 and the assassination of the Czar's minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911.

Read more: en.wikipedia.org