Lenin in Zurich

In his new book, Lenin in Zurich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduces the central character of his projected multi-volume account of Russian revolutionary history - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. With incomparable knowledge of the events and people, Solzhenitsyn explores and clarifies the crucial years 1914-17 and draws a compelling psychological portrait of the man who was the architect of the Revolution. Lenin in Zurich chronicles Lenin's frustrating exile in Switzerland, from his arrest in Cracow and subsequent flight to Zurich at the outbreak of World War I to his departure for Russia in 1917 in a sealed train protected by the German government, years in which Lenin stood alone, without support from the deeply divided European socialist movement and isolated from his fellow revolutionaries. Solzhenitsyn examines the private man as well as the familiar public figure, concentrating on facets of Lenin's personality and behavior that have been glossed over in most books about him: his disillusionment and dejection over the future of the Bolshevik cause, his love for lnessa Armand, his preoccupation with the difficulties of subsidizing the activities of his party, and, most important, his secret safe-passage and financial arrangements with the Germans. The Lenin that emerges is not the distant, omniscient leader and theoretician but a man of human proportions with human needs, weaknesses, and concerns. Solzhenitsyn has set himself the task of establishing the truth of Russia's early revolutionary years and of probing the character of the man who had such an indelible impact on his country's fate. Lenin in Zurich fulfills the challenge of this task, reaffirming once again Solzhenitsyn's remarkable vision and his vital place in world literature.