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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and the two-volume Between Two Millstones memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018 and 2020). Marian Schwartz is a prizewinning translator of classic and contemporary Russian literature, including works by Leo Tolstoy, Nina Berberova, Olga Slavnikova, and Leonid Yuzefovich.

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"In The Red Wheel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn produced a masterpiece and proved himself a worthy companion of Dostoevsky and rival of Tolstoy." -Law and Liberty "Contrary to Tolstoy in War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn means to demonstrate that, at the decisive 'nodal' moments of history, the action or inaction of a single individual may have a decisive impact on the course of events." -National Review "If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago presented a mindset-changing view of the history of the USSR, the historical novels that make up his epopee The Red Wheel are a counterweight to the heroics of the October Revolution." -Russian Review "[A] magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present." -VoegelinView "This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate's life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution." -The New Criterion "A work that combines deep civic and spiritual wisdom, literary art of high quality, and dramatic history that informs and instructs, The Red Wheel deserves a readership that is receptive to its enduring lessons. With the publication of the whole of March 1917, those lessons are much easier to discern." -Law & Liberty "Solzhenitsyn crafts 655 brief chapters in which diverse actors, unaware of what others are doing, blindly shape events. . . . [His] novel allows us to glimpse those deeper meanings and elusive powers." -Wall Street Journal