Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, Chapters 75
This is the incredible denouement of August 1914, where Vorotynstev attends a meeting in which the hierarchy of the Russian military exempts themselves from responsibility for the debacle at Tannenberg and assigns sole responsibility on General Samsonov. IT makes a repeat performance of this debacle more and more likely.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, Chapters 43-57
This video focuses more on the attempts of various Russians to deal with encirclement–General Samsonov kills himself, while Vorotynstev, the fictional hero, seeks a way out of himself and for his country.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, Chapters 33-41
This video discusses the closing of the circle, as the Germans come to surround the Russians at the battle and what that closing means for Solzhenitsyn.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, Chapters 23-28
This video covers the battle in a micro-level, with the hopes of showing that the narrative thread of the battle illuminates Solz’s larger theme about the collapse of the Russian feudal regime. It is rich with maps to show that Solz is a genuine artist in how he depicts the collapse of the Russian military […]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, Chapter 22
Analysis of Lenin as a politician and theorist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, Chapters 1-9
This video provides an account of the first part of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, where he discusses the problems with Russian education caused by Tolstoy’s philosophy and Western-style progressivism.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Introduction to August 1914
This is a brief introduction to the work of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, a work on the Russian diaster at Tannenberg at the outset of World War I. This is one in a series of videos on this novel of philosophic history. This video situations the novel within Solz’s larger corpus and discusses the multiple editions […]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Problem of Modernity
This video situates Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 within a framework where we can analyze his evaluation of modernity. This is a second preparatory video for reading his novel, August 1914.