Solzhenitsyn’s New Novel

August 1914, the first installment of Solzhenitsyn’s broadly conceived historical trilogy, thus far has had a mixed reception. The publication of the Russian text of the novel in Paris has provided an occasion for another virulent Soviet campaign against its author. Literaturnaya Gazeta has featured hostile articles by Finnish writer Martti Larni and by an obscure Polish journalist, Jerzy Romanowski, who managed to detect in Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg an insidious tendency to extol the “German militarists.” These attacks by foreign nonentities were duly followed by irate letters from a standard assortment of native nonreaders.

Less predictably, the respons...