Books: Witness to Yesterday

AUGUST 1914

by ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

Translated by MICHAEL GLENNY

622 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

$10.

When the 1914 war with Germany broke out, Czarist Russia was unprepared. Yet she instantly sent two armies into East Prussia. Both were ill-equipped, underfed and hampered from headquarters by more than the usual complement of careerist nitwits, blockheaded aristocrats and plain cowards familiar in the literature of military debacle. In the resulting battle, the Russian Second Army, lumbering westward in the vicinity of Tannenberg, was enveloped by the Germans. More than 90,000 prisoners were taken. In a few days, despite great courage shown by many Russian regiments and officers, the Second Army ceased to exist. Its brave but confused commander, General Alexander Samsonov, committed suicide. The Russian General Staff quickly covered its own criminal idiocy by blaming him entirely for the defeat.

These very real events are not merely the background of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's already much puffed (and huffed at) new novel. In an occasionally quite tedious way, the battle is the book. Understandably so. August 1914 is the first of a many-volumed effort by Solzhenitsyn to re-create modern Russian history in truthful fiction. Tannenberg was a decisive battle from which the Czarist regime and the Russian war effort never recovered. But there are moments when the reader, plugging along with the hungry troops or trying to feel the requisite rage at the chicanery of the book's archvillain General Zhilinski, longs for a series of those day-by-day position maps that help make sense of nonfictional accounts of war.

Truthful Witness. At the beginning, to be sure, Solzhenitsyn sets out a number of narrative seedlings that he clearly expects to nourish to fuller life in future volumes. Among the best minor characters are a rich, rough, self-made landowner named Tomchak and his studious daughter (who may be drawn from the author's mother and grandfather). Solzhenitsyn's principal literary creation (and expository device) is a staff colonel named Verotyntsev, who has license to follow the battle to frontline trenches as an observer and sometimes as tactical hero. Verotyntsev has fictional possibilities. He combines a kind of detached professional elegance that suggests Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in Tolstoy's War and Peace with that passion for bearing truthful witness at all costs that has been the center of Solzhenitsyn's own career as a writer. In August 1914, though, Verotyntsev is too busy carrying messages around the battlefield (and from the author to the reader) to seem entirely human.

Even at the book's close, when Novelist Solzhenitsyn might have been expected to weave the threads of personal narrative back together again, it is Historian Solzhenitsyn who has the last word. In a showdown scene that strains credulity but stirs historic perspective, the young colonel risks his career to confront the Russian General Staff with its lies and follies. He even predicts that if they do not face these facts, defeat in the war will surely follow.