In 1972 an English version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 appeared. It is the first node (then called a “knot”) of a sequential novel with the overall title The Red Wheel. In 1989 an expanded and freshly translated edition came out in English, but it took until 1999 for the second volume, November 1916, to be published. Since then other books by Solzhenitsyn have reached English readers, most recently Apricot Jam: And Other Stories(2011), but we have had to wait until now to start reading the first book of four comprising March 1917, which will be followed by the two books that make up April 1917, thus bringing this mega-novel to a close. The books share common approaches—fictional characters mingling with historical figures, the use of actual telegrams, transcripts of State Duma debates, and newspaper accounts (when applicable, as newspapers weren’t always published), and an impressionistic screenplay treatment of mob movements—and the attempt to recapture for a wide audience (but foremost, one suspects, for Solzhenitsyn’s countrymen) the multitudinous events that culminated in the Revolution. Yet there is never one definitive story, one perspective, or one inevitable outcome.
The realms of Emperor Nikolai II and his wife Alexandra (also known as Alix and Sunny), the Duma politicians, the government, the revolutionaries, the soldiers, and the citizens, share in a profound absence of knowledge about what will occur next.
more here.