Marian Schwartz, a distinguished translator, has rendered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 into English in its entirety for the first time. A few chapters from this two-volume work had been previously published in English as part of the compilation Lenin in Zurich (translated by H.T. Willets, 1976); her translation of these chapters differs only minimally from this earlier version. March 1917 poses the same challenges that all other volumes from The Red Wheel series do: Solzhenitsyn's endeavors to emulate turn of the century Russia and his attempts at polyphony and intermediality in the form of loose film descriptions greatly complicate a fluid translation. Notre Dame Press was careful to use different font types and sizes to distinguish these changes, as opposed to some other publishers of this work. Schwartz has accomplished a translation that found a balance between readability and precision.

Schwartz's translation makes Solzhenitsyn more straightforward by occasionally dropping the façade of antiquated language, for instance when she translates the more archaic “OTVIAZHIS,’ KHUDAIA ZHIS΄!” simply as “BAD LIFE, GET OUT!” (625). To be sure, alternative choices of words sometimes change their nuance, for example, when she translates “the Friend” (Drug) as “our Friend” in Empress Alix's (Aleksandra Fedorovna) interior monologue about Grigorii Rasputin (75); or when “Faraony!” becomes “Filthy coppers!” instead of just “Pharaohs!” (453)—but these interpretations are not untrue to the spirit of the text.

March 1917 is part of Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel, a book series in which he conveys why he views not only the October Revolution, but also its predecessor from February 1917 as disasters for Russia. He does this through elaborate descriptions of selected days and weeks between 1914 and 1917. Although these works are novels, he often chooses not only fictitious characters but also historical figures as his narrators. March 1917, as other novels in this series, is introduced as the product of “extensive research in archives” and offering “accurate biographical data” (v). This sets the bar too high for what actually follows: a novel in which Solzhenitsyn speaks from multiple perspectives, but offers essentially the same viewpoint. In a work of literature an overbearing authorial voice is considered an aesthetic fault, in a work of history it makes it seem propagandistic, an epithet historian James Hulse used to describe Lenin in Zurich (Russian Review, 36, no. 2, 1977, 225). But is it convincing? John Bayley remarked about November 1916 that Solzhenitsyn is interested in human beings “more as social phenomena than as unique and individual creatures” (New York Times, February 7, 1999). The same can be said about March 1917, a book that maps out Solzhenitsyn's well-known priorities in great detail. This novel is not history, but fiction inspired by history lacking in believable characters, as its overwhelming cast of characters is cut out of an ideologically homogenous cloth. As Dmitry Shlapentokh recently wrote, in this book liberals are either “naïve or idiotic” and “did not understand that the monarchy was the only institution that prevented Russia from disintegration and anarchy” “or even the importance of strong government in Russia” (“Historical Narrative and Emotional Paradigms: The Case of Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel and His Other Works,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2016, 195). Solzhenitsyn inverts the role of victims and perpetrators by transforming the historical riots for bread in early March that would eventually spark the revolution into joyful crowds protesting for bread “gaily” chanting, singing, “laughing,” abusing policemen, and “having fun” (82). The tsar is described as a good-natured man whose “forgiveness” knows no end (76), leading him to eventually abdicate after this chirpy rumpus. Skepticism for democracy's representative power and the repetition of the stereotype that Jews allegedly control the world's banks (29, 147) are motifs that might have existed back in 1917, but they are also familiar from Solzhenitsyn's other fiction and non-fiction (Elisa Kriza, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War lcon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist?, 2014, 204–35).

The “Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series” claims that “Solzhenitsyn's abiding care for Christianity and the West” and his “warning” against “political, economic, and cultural dangers to the human spirit” (ii) motivated them to print this translation. These words are so vague they could mean anything, but if anyone reads March 1917 and the rest of The Red Wheel, the type of Christianity and the type of country Solzhenitsyn promotes becomes clear. And this vision resembles the Russian Empire more than the free country many Russians—and other citizens—in the twenty-first century long for.